Honorable Men (29 page)

One Saturday night, when they were having a drink at Chip's before going out to dinner, Alida called from New York to inform him that she had just been talking to Dana on the trans Atlantic telephone. Had Chip sent him any money?

“None,” he retorted, amused by Violet's intently listening countenance. “Nor will I until he comes home and signs up for the draft.”

“How typical of you! Of course I'll have to give it to him.”

“Do as you see fit. I don't begrudge him the money. But as a government officer I must decline to support a draft dodger.”

“He's not dodging anything, Chip. He's taking a moral stand against an illegal war.”

“It's a question of terminology.”

“Eleanor's in San Francisco. She addressed a rally on Monday of three thousand people.”

“I always thought she'd make her mark.”

There was a silence, after which Alida's voice rose almost to a scream. “You snotty bastard, I'm leaving you! I meant to, months ago—I was going to write you a note—and then I lost my nerve. Well, I shan't lose it again. I'm leaving you, I tell you!”

“You'd better talk to Lars about that.”

“I shan't talk to Lars! I'm going to retain Chessy Bogart.”

Chip felt his throat clotted with instant rage. “If you do that, you'll regret it for the rest of your life.”

“You're afraid of him because he knows what you're up to. Well, you'll see!”

“Alida, you've been drinking. Call me in the morning when you're sober.”

“I'll never call you again as long as I live!”

Chip hung up and turned to Violet. “She says she's leaving me.”

“You mean she knows?”

“Knows what?”

“Oh, Chip,
what}
About you and me? Or have you been such a philanderer that it no longer matters to her?”

“I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your mouth, young lady. No, she doesn't know a thing about you and me.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because she'd have flung it in my face if she had. Alida's a very direct woman.”

“Well, I'm glad anyway I'm not the cause! Do you think she'll divorce you?”

“Do you hope she will?”

“Of course I hope she will!”

“So that I'll be free to marry you?”

“Oh, my God!
Would
you?”

“Don't you think twenty-two years is rather a gap in our ages"

“Oh, that doesn't matter when the man's as rich as you are.”

Chip laughed in delighted surprise. How could she so consistently hit the right note? “So that's what you've been all along? A gold digger?”

“Well, you can hardly blame a girl who's never even seen a gold piece. Anyway, I put my cards on the table.”

“Oh, that was just your subtlety.”

But poor Violet couldn't keep up the game, after all, even though she could see how much he enjoyed it. There were sudden tears in her eyes. “I couldn't fool you if I tried, and you know it. I'm too much your woman. It's obscene! You should have seen Mummie's face when I told her about it.”

“You told her? My God, when?”

“Last Sunday, when I went up there. She must have sensed that something was going on, because she was nosy, which isn't like her. So I told her, yes, I was living with a married man, old enough to be my father, who had no intention of ever marrying me, and that I planned to go right on that way! I was going to be like Irene Dunne in
Bac\ Street,
following John Boles discreetly when he went abroad on important missions, always in the background, always hidden from the public and family. And when he died at last, and his scornful children came to pay me off, they'd be appalled to find me a broken old hag, dying of grief!”

“I remember that movie. Margaret Sullavan did a remake of it.”

“With Charles Boyer. I must have seen it four times. I always imagined it would be my life, and I didn't care!”

“Your mother must have been horrified.”

“Oh, she was. She said I'd made myself cheap, that you'd never respect me. She said that if you ever did get your freedom, you wouldn't marry me. And maybe you won't. Why should you? But I'm warning you, Charles Benedict, if you ask me, I'll accept. I'll be your mistress or your wife. Or neither. It's all up to you!”

“I can't figure you out, Violet. You may be the frankest, most honest woman who ever breathed...”

“Or else a ‘super subtle Venetian'!” she finished for him with a shout of laughter. “You see, I even know when you're going to quote Shakespeare!”

W
HEN IT BECAME KNOWN
that Alida would not return to Washington and that a separation, and possibly a divorce, between her and Chip was imminent, Matilda Benedict, to the astonishment of her offspring, made a great decision. She announced that she was leasing a house in Georgetown for a year.

“It seems to me that everyone is deserting Chip,” she told her protesting daughters. “I intend to hoist my flag at his very doorstep!”

But when Chip telephoned to convince her that he was perfectly all right alone and that he worked so hard as to leave little time for family visitations, she was less embattled.

“Don't think your old ma is coming down to try to muscle in on your life,” she assured him. “Nothing could be further from my purpose. I'm bored with myself and bored with Benedict. I need a change of air and maybe one or two new friends, and if you can drop in for a drink once or twice a month, that is quite all that I shall require.”

And indeed she seemed determined to be good to her word. She redecorated the living room of the charming little Greek Revival house that she had rented and renewed her friendships with some retired diplomatic couples living in the neighborhood. She never called Chip, but waited for him to call her, and when he dined with her, which he found himself doing, quite of his own accord, at least once a week, her conversation was cheerful and interesting. He found her particularly sympathetic about the war, which she regarded as a tangled mess but one from which the nation could not retreat with honor.

One night she asked him: “Why don't you bring your secretary here for dinner? I hear she's a wonderful girl.”

“Who's been gossiping about me?”

“Nobody's been gossiping about you. Alma Rand mentioned Miss Crane. She said her son-in-law described her as your girl Friday and one of the best workers in the Department.”

“Well, he ought to know. Jim and I work together daily. Sure, I'll ask Violet to dinner. Only don't get any ideas.”

“What ideas should I have? Surely Alida doesn't expect the handsome husband she's left to live like a monk!”

Chip looked at his parent with astonishment. “Don't tell me the sexual revolution has hit your generation, Ma! I hadn't thought it had reached mine yet.”

“Yours! You're a mere child.”

“A child of fifty-one.”

Amused by his mother's new liberality, he invited Violet to dine there on Saturday. But she seemed terrified.

“Oh, Chip, did you make her?”

“It was entirely her idea, not mine.”

“What do you suppose she wants of me?”

“She knows that you and I work together. She'd like to meet you; that's all.”

Matilda handled her guest with the greatest ease and kindness, and the evening passed agreeably for all three, except for a somber discussion at the end of a reported massacre of Vietnamese peasants by trigger-happy Americans seeking out the Vietcong.

“I'm sure it will turn out to be much exaggerated,” Matilda said.

“I'm afraid not, Ma. I've seen the reports. I don't know what devil gets into our boys.”

“Do you suppose it's drugs?”

“One would almost like to think so. Anything rather than they could do it in cold blood.”

When he took Violet home later, she wouldn't let him come up. “I'm sorry, darling, but it doesn't seem right. After dining with your mother.”

“I never heard anything so prudish! You'll make me sorry I took you there.”

“Oh, it's only for tonight, I promise! You see, when she took me upstairs before we left, she asked me to lunch tomorrow. Just the two of us. She wants to get to know me better. It was so darling of her, and I'd hate to think that I'd done anything she'd disapprove of in the meanwhile.”

“How do you know she'd disapprove?”

“Oh, Chip!”

“Seriously, don't you think a woman her age can grow with the times?”

“Not that fast. Oh, darling, it's just for tonight. Forgive me! And there's something else, too. Are you sure you're really in the mood?”

“What makes you think I'm not?”

“That terrible slaughter. It's been on your mind all day.”

“That's pretty sharp of you,” he admitted. “It hasn't been on yours?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because there's nothing on my mind but you!”

Driving home, he reflected on her acuity. He had not realized that he had so obviously betrayed the horror he had felt over the massacre. He had seen corpses on his visit to Vietnam, and the sight of them had simply aroused his ire against the merciless killers from the north. How, he had asked himself, could it be worth any man's while to do that to another man in the cause of a doctrine that would only plunge the world into uniform gray dullness? How could men kill and maim other men for that? But now it was our men who had done this, and done it for what? Not even to spread dullness. For kicks?

On Monday he lunched at the Pentagon with Gerald Hastings, disgusted by his desk job in navy personnel. But Gerry was sixty-two; he could not very well expect a sea command. As he listened to Chip's complaints about the massacre, sitting at a corner table in the officers' dining room, his glum stare was that of a teacher who wonders whether he will ever come to an end of student intransigence.

“What earthly difference does it make, Chip? Has there ever been a time when there weren't men like that? What can you expect when you have to use conscription to raise an army?”

“So that's all it is? A question of reserves as opposed to regulars?”

“That's all it ever was. Do you remember, on the Normandy beach, when that German prisoner spat on one of our dead?”

Chip was startled. He had not thought of the episode in years. He saw now, in the early morning light, the ragged gray line of German prisoners waiting to board the LST through its gaping bow doors, like ancient offerings to the Minotaur, and the stretchers on the beach in which the American corpses had been laid, borne back from the fighting area. “They shot him, didn't they? But he had outraged them!”

“Was it any less a war atrocity? Do you shoot a man for one expectoration?”

“But surely, Gerry, there's a difference between a coldblooded slaughter of civilians and the shooting, almost in the heat of battle, of an insolent foe?”

“A difference in degree, of course. No difference in principle. And I thought principle was what you cared about. My point is that no regular officer would have been guilty of either the massacre or the assassination. Those are things that happen in modern war when you have to use civilians. They are unfortunate irrelevancies.”

“But that's just what I'm questioning. It seems to me that they're more likely to happen in a war that doesn't have the moral support of the public. I'm afraid the innate evil in war can corrupt even the bravest soldiers unless it is controlled by some kind of moral fervor. We had that moral fervor in our other wars. Once it's missing, there's nothing to redeem the bloodshed.”

“My dear Chip, you're talking twaddle. The moral fervor you speak of is a mere coincidence, depending on whether or not the public happen to agree with their government as to a particular war. If the war is a bad one, like a war of aggrandizement, no amount of moral fervor can justify it. Did German public enthusiasm justify the invasion of Poland? Of course not. Only a moral
cause
can justify a war. And no cause has ever been more moral than in this one, where we're fighting for no conceivable material gain. Haven't you said so yourself?”

“But that is not how most people see it.”

“How many French peasants understood what Joan of Arc was up to? We're facing a world threat, Chip. How can you, of all people, be so concerned with radical dissidents on the drug-soaked campuses of Academe?”

“When you put it that way,” Chip answered, shivering at the sudden bleak wind in his heart, “I begin to see that that is just the way I
have
been seeing it.”

“Your trouble, my friend, is that you can never keep your mind on the main point. You are distracted by things that don't basically matter. It was the same way, if it's not too painful to remind you, with your glass company. Instead of keeping your mind on the essential point of saving the family business from a gang of pirates, you allowed yourself to be put off by the way one or two pirates were being roughed up. That's no way to fight a war, Chip.”

“Tell me, Gerry, would you use nuclear force, if necessary, to win in Vietnam?”

“Without hesitation.”

“Regardless of consequences?”

“The consequences are matters to be taken into consideration by the men who seek to enslave the world. You have heard cynical young people say they'd rather be red than dead. Well, I wouldn't!”

“That's all very well for you, but don't you hesitate to make that decision for them?”

“Not at all. Because I think being red
is
being dead. Besides, my policy would involve no such holocaust. The Soviets don't want to blow up the world any more than we do.”

“You hope!”

“Well, there's always a risk in any policy. To my mind the greatest risk of all is to lose a war.”