The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “What on earth is Sylvester up to?” Mr. Griscam grumbled. “Can’t he let me enjoy a game of backgammon? Do you play?” I confessed I did not. “What is it, Brian? You look as guilty as if you’d smashed my best Lowestoft.”

  “It’s not what I have smashed. It’s what I may be going to. I came to New York to ask your help, and here I am meddling already in your family affairs.” I paused uncomfortably. “Sylvester asked me to talk to you about this girl he wants to marry.”

  Mr. Griscam’s expression became impatient. “The Wave? Fine. I’m not stopping him.”

  “No, sir, but it seems he needs a divorce from his second wife.”

  “Why doesn’t he get it, then? I shan’t stand in his way. I never could abide Estelle.”

  “But it’s the settlement he wants.”

  “Let me ask you something, Brian.” Mr. Griscam’s tone was very sharp. “If you were a father in my position, would you allow a substantial block of capital to go out of the family to a woman whom your own son describes as a bitch?”

  But his very sharpness gave me the spirit I needed. “Yes, sir, I would. If my son’s happiness depended on it.”

  “His happiness! Even if his happiness depended on a third marriage? How many times would you make it possible for him to marry? You, a minister of God?”

  “Three times, sir.”

  He paused and laughed dryly. “A good answer. But I tell you, I won’t do it. No, I won’t, Brian. You probably think a father will always weaken, but not I. As I feel at the moment, the only way of having a satisfactory son is to adopt one fully grown, like the Romans!”

  “Do you stop to consider that you may be sending him to other sources?”

  “What other sources?” he demanded contemptuously, and then as, staring at me with a narrowing fixity, he took in my continued silence and gravity, he slowly reddened. “The trust!” he suddenly shouted. “Emmaline’s trust! I knew it! That’s what he’s after, is it?” When I continued silent he seized me by the wrist and shook my arm. “Is it?”

  “Mrs. Griscam needs money for her cause . . .”

  “Oh, the crook!” He let me go abruptly and hurried out of the room. When I followed him to the parlor, I found the whole family in a state of great agitation. Sylvester had jumped to his feet, and his mother was very pale. Amy, watching her livid father, gave a low whistle.

  “Hey, there, take it easy, old man. Do you want to have a stroke?”

  Mr. Griscam ignored her as he faced his wife. “Emmaline, is it true? Is it your trust he’s after?”

  “I believe, David, that is a matter that concerns only Sylvester and myself,” Mrs. Griscam retorted firmly. “Isn’t that so, Sylvester?”

  “Most assuredly.” But Sylvester’s grey cheeks and shifting eyes belied the confidence of his words.

  “It concerns the head of the family, I think,” his father said furiously. “Even in today’s matriarchy I suppose a husband has something to say when his wife proposes to dump her money in the river!”

  “Oh, Father,” Amy protested, “must we talk business even on Sunday?”

  “If you will let me speak, Amy, I think I can guarantee that even you won’t regret it. Some years ago your mother and I agreed to make Sylvester the trustee of her trust. It was a delicate position as the trustee has power to give her principal. However, your brother in those days seemed the exemplification of all my hopes and theories. But love has come to erode the standards of that stern fiduciary.” Here he looked with a scowl at Sylvester who continued to stare stubbornly at the Aubusson carpet. “In short, my dear Amy, your loving brother, finding that his sainted mother wants money for her cause, has made a deal with her. He will invade the trust for God, if God will divvy up with Venus.”

  “You mean, Sylvester,” Amy called harshly across the room, “that you’re going to blow Mother’s money so you can marry that little Wave of yours?”

  “She’s no longer a Wave, Amy,” he retorted bitingly. “If you’d read the papers, you’d know the war was over. But at least she served her nation while it was on.”

  “I’m sure you’d rather have me call her a Wave than what I’m really thinking!”

  “Amy, my dear!” cautioned her mother. “Your father has not explained things fully. The money coming out of my trust will be divided three ways. One part will go to me, one to Sylvester and one to you.”

  “What’s so terrible about that, then, Father?” Amy demanded immediately. “Why shouldn’t Sylvester have his share so long as I get mine?”

  Mr. Griscam turned impatiently from her to his son. “Have you considered, Sylvester, that I may take you to court for looting your trust?”

  “What’s the use, Dad?” Sylvester, still nervous but with the resolve of desperation, folded his hands on his stomach and peered down at them. “If you go to court, you’ll lose. You drew that trust deed yourself, and you know my discretion is absolute.”

  “Sylvester!” his father exhorted him suddenly. “Leave your mother’s trust alone. I’ll give you the money you need!”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. It’s too late. I’ve given Mother my word.”

  Mr. Griscam looked from one to the other of his family helplessly. “Emmaline,” he appealed to his wife, “tell me you won’t give all that money to your ridiculous organization.”

  “I shall do as I am called to do, David.”

  “If you’d earned it yourself, if you’d saved it, if you’d even so much as watered it and let it grow as I have, you might have some right to fling it away. But how can you justify taking money that your father made and that I salvaged and increased, money that you’ve never lifted a finger about, and leave it away from your posterity?”

  “If I give it to God,” she answered in her stately tone, “God will give it back to them in his own way.”

  Her husband raised his hands to his temples with a moan of despair. “You ought to be committed!”

  Mrs. Griscam and the children exchanged glances.

  “I wonder if Mother’s the one who should be committed,” Amy murmured.

  “David, dear, do take it easy.”

  “Oh, go away, all of you, please go!” Mr. Griscam groaned, leaning forward, his face covered with his hands. “Throw away your money, do anything you like. Nothing ever makes a dent on you. You take everything for granted. That I should spend a lifetime nursing you all, making you rich, why of course. Why not? What else am I good for? Nothing will teach you anything but starvation, and then it will be too late. May the god of money treat you as you have treated me!”

  It was a highly embarrassing scene, and when the others had silently left the room I remained alone with my host. It was now that my real job began.

  That afternoon Mr. Griscam and I went to Central Park and slowly circled the Reservoir. It was a cold, damp melancholy day, very much like his mood, and even the sea gulls on the ice in the middle of the water seemed to huddle together. The oblong of distant buildings which surrounded us and the circle whose circumference we were traversing seemed to reduce the great city under the starkness of a pale winter sky to two of the simplest geometric forms and Mr. Griscam’s life to the simplest of failures.

  The burden of his monologue was disillusionment. It seemed to him now, he related, that he had lived for no use, that every person whose life he had thought to have influenced would have done as well without him, that all of his supposed good deeds had been hidden from others, not by what he had proudly regarded as his diplomatic camouflage but by their own innate unimportance. The money that he had made and saved, who wanted it, except for foolish purposes? The clients and relatives whose bad tempers and destructive tendencies he had controlled, the school whose headmaster and board he had kept in harmony, the lawsuits he had settled, even the crisis in Panamanian-American relations that he had smoothed over, what did it all add up to but the fact that he had stood between his fellow beings and the dogfights for which they spoiled? Who cared for the peacemaker, the conservator? To spen
d, to throw away, to fight, to avenge—wasn’t that what they called living? “Well, they’ll get enough living one of these days,” he concluded bitterly. “They’ll all be blown up in a nuclear war, and good enough for them.”

  For the first time I found myself really liking Mr. Griscam. His mood of self-pity was more genuine than the old role of the vigilant fiduciary. As soon as he turned petulantly on life for what it had done to David Griscam, as soon as he had allowed the gates of his self-sufficiency to be forced, one’s compassion could at last come in.

  “I had a son, Jules, who died many years ago,” he continued. “You’ve heard of him at Justin. He left a bad enough name there. Poor Jules was one of those tragic souls who make a mess of everything they touch, who bring unhappiness to everyone they meet. And yet he is still talked of with fascination by his friends. Almost with admiration. Why is it, Brian? Why is the world that way?”

  At just that moment I had my inspiration. The idea and its articulation were almost simultaneous. “Why have you never put up a memorial for Jules in Justin Martyr?”

  “Don’t you know what he did there?”

  “Of course I know. But it was so long ago. Time harmonizes the most disparate things. You and Jules and Dr. Prescott are all parts of the essential legend of the school. Why should only the happy boys be memorialized? Why not the failures, too? If I were you, I would build a library there and name it after him?”

  Mr. Griscam gave me a quick look. “You’re pretty free with other people’s money, young man. It must be Sylvester’s influence. Have you the smallest conception of what a library would cost these days?”

  The biting cold suddenly pierced my coat, and I took a few quick steps in advance of him, hugging myself and breathing hard. I think the idea that now irradiated my mind must have chilled me as much as the weather. It was a brilliant idea, perhaps even an inspired one, but I was not used to such things, and I trembled. Had it been heresy to think of Mrs. Griscam as a fanatic? Might she not have been called to give away her money? And might not her husband be similarly called? Why should Justin Martyr which had provided the only home for his unhappy boyhood, which had been the lifelong outlet for his emotional needs, not give him the consolation that he needed in his old age? Oh, how it came to me!

  “What does it matter how much it costs?” I asked in an ultimate burst of courage, turning back to him. “Haven’t you just been telling me that nobody wants your money except for foolish purposes? Haven’t your family already got more than they need? Why shouldn’t you take some of the fortune that you’ve earned by your own sweat and toil and spend it on the things you care about? Why should you build just a library? Why not a new infirmary, too? They need one.”

  “Whoa, there, young man! Who do you think you’re talking to? A Rockefeller?”

  “Yes! At least to me you are. Is it so terrible to suggest that you spend your own money in your own lifetime on your own projects? I know one’s not supposed to talk to rich men about their fortunes—or even to describe them to their faces as rich—but you have confided in me and I care about you. I want to help!”

  Mr. Griscam stood still. We were facing west, and he was staring intently at the great yellow towers of the Beresford that rose into the bare sky with the heavy placidity of an Aztec temple. His breath, I noticed, was short. “I can see why people like you, Brian,” he said at last. “You speak straight to the heart. Go on, young man, go on.”

  In the excited dialogue that followed, his spirits seemed to soar. It must have been true that Justin Martyr supplied the fuel to his being, the very blood to his veins, for his color returned and with it his normal confidence. I even suspected that I had stumbled upon—or been guided to—a project that he had long kept buried in his own mind, but that he had hardly dared mention even to himself. Oh, of course, he had given things to the school before, a window, a fountain, a dormitory wing, but not on this scale. As he talked on, I had a dazzling vision of the gleaming glass edifice that might be the Jules Griscam Library and of the sober grey one that might be the Infirmary. When we had completed our tour of the Reservoir, he paused again to look over the grey water. His dark mood was completely gone.

  “No, I’m not just an old man yet, Brian. Not yet for a bit. And think of what a glorious moment to announce a big grant. On the diamond anniversary dinner!” He pinned my arm under his as we walked forward in the rapidly chilling air of the darkening afternoon. “It will be a good substitute, will it not, for the naughty speech that poor old Frank is plotting? My God, will it not!”

  22

  Brian’s Journal

  APRIL 1, 1946. The great diamond jubilee has exploded and gone, and I sit, so to speak, in a litter or paper hats and cigar butts and reach for my pen to describe its high events.

  I have entered nothing since Christmas, for it has been a dull winter term, and Dr. Prescott has been in Florida for most of it. He came back only two weeks before the jubilee, and when I went over to call on him I found there was still constraint between us. He was very critical about everything, even the news of Mr. Griscam’s proposed grant.

  “But surely,” I protested, “it’s a princely gesture for a man to offer a new library and a new infirmary at one swoop.”

  “Princely?” he grumbled. “Why do you call it princely? Princes don’t make gifts. David Griscam has always tried to turn Justin Martyr into a thing of his own. He couldn’t do it by policy, so now he’s trying to do it by bricks and mortar, that’s all.”

  I thought this was pretty grudging, but I said nothing. The only thing that worried me about the Griscam gift was that it threatened to rob Dr. Prescott of some of the glory of a jubilee which I felt should be exclusively his. But, of course, I should not have worried about anyone stealing a show from Dr. Prescott. When the great anniversary came and the graduates descended upon the school at the beginning of the spring vacation, filling up the empty dormitories and giving to the place a comic atmosphere of middle-aged men, cigars in mouth and flasks in pockets, playing at schoolboys, the whole occasion, without its having been in the least so planned, moved about the short, broad-shouldered, plodding figure of the ex-headmaster. He seemed the constant center of revolving circles, a piece of cork helpless on the surface of an eddying stream. For the tide of the jubilee was a rough one for the staid school; it swamped it and covered it with an affection as violent as it was ultimately undiscriminating. Justin over that weekend began to seem to me like Paris occupied by German soldiers. Could the City of Light survive it?

  Mr. Griscam asked me to lunch with him at the inn in New Paisley on his arrival and drove me back to the school afterwards. As his car turned in the school gates and started up the drive that wound around the campus, we saw Dr. Prescott coming across the grass followed by a crowd of some thirty graduates. He seemed to be leading them on an inspection tour of recent improvements, but the group conveyed a distinct sense of hilarity, and I was put in mind of the celebrating procession that traditionally followed a victory over Chelton, when the whole school would parade around the campus, following the headmaster in a chair strapped to two poles and borne on the shoulders of eight prefects, stopping to cheer each object or person encountered: the Schoolhouse, the aged oak tree, a master’s wife, the fives courts, a dump truck.

  Mr. Griscam told his chauffeur to stop, and we got out of the car as the group approached. For just a moment I had the irrational feeling that Mr. Griscam was a threatened symbol of authority about to take his chances with an unruly mob. Dr. Prescott had never struck me before as a revolutionary, but now he might have been a wily old Danton, ready, for the mere excitement of the gesture, to consign the chairman of the board and his limousine to the fury of his followers. Was it my imagination that made me wonder, as he came closer, if he had cast a mocking glance through the open door of the car at the tumbled fur rug upon the floor?

  “David, my boy!” he exclaimed, clasping Mr. Griscam’s hand. “Now that you’re here the jubilee can begin! It’s a superb th
ing you’re doing. The gesture of a Medici prince.” Was that dry eye upon me? I could not tell. “I trust your family will not be impoverished by this unexampled generosity?”

  “Oh, no, Frank. In these days, you know, taxes are everything. They’ll hardly feel it.”

  “Pray don’t tell me about taxes,” Dr. Prescott protested warmly. “Everything gets so twisted up that there’s danger the very concept of gratitude may be lost. I want to be grateful. I want to be grateful to David Griscam for his princeliness to his school.”

  Certainly nobody could turn on the charm better than the old man when he wanted to.

  That night the dinner was informal, with only one brief speech of welcome from Duncan Moore, and afterwards we all watched a movie of school activities in the assembly hall. When this was over, I accompanied Dr. Prescott to Mr. Griscam’s suite at the Parents’ House for a drink with some of the trustees. Mr. Griscam had asked me to this little party at lunch and had told me that he had a particular reason for wanting me to be present. He had a fire going, for it was a cold spring night, and a silver tray with an assortment of whiskeys and liqueurs. After ninety minutes of boys on the screen it was a cheerful sight.

  The group was small and, I assumed, carefully selected, for Mr. Griscam always had a purpose for the things he did. Besides our host, there were only three trustees. I knew them all fairly well, for they were frequent visitors to the school. There was Sam Storey, president of Boston City Investors’ Trust, a round red shrewd cotton-haired financier, whose mammoth, puffy build contained somewhere the muscular embryo that had made him one of Harvard’s greatest quarterbacks. There was Gavin Glenway, like Mr. Griscam a New York attorney, the senior partner of a great corporation law firm, a dry, caustic, brilliant man, as gaunt as Storey was stout, with all the biting conservatism of a representative of industry and the high temper of a litigator. And finally there was Ira Hitt, a younger man, in his early forties, who had been a scholarship boy at Justin and who had made a fortune during the war, the type of new speculator, dry, bone-headed, sharp-eyed, prematurely balding, with a remarkably strong personality for one of such thin shoulders and unprepossessing appearance. They were all good drinkers, and they had all started early in the festive atmosphere of the day. Dr. Prescott himself had had a few cocktails in the long period before dinner. He was by no means a regular drinker, but he had a great capacity, whenever he chose to use it. The only effect of liquor was to make him at once gentler and more sardonic.