Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  “And just what is it that you expect me to do?”

  “I hoped you would take care of breaking it to the press.”

  “There will be no need of that. By noon everyone will know.”

  “Shouldn’t I have a statement ready?”

  “What for? To try to explain it to the Benedicts?”

  “Oh, you know their name.” I had not mentioned it, simply referring to Chip as a new friend.

  “Do you think I don’t know that you met Charles Benedict last summer and went sailing with him? There are no secrets on our northern island.”

  “Or on this one either, apparently.”

  “Let me ask you just one thing. I believe that our former association justifies it.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Has Benedict committed himself?”

  “To marrying me? In no way.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. Do you know that he is the heir of the Benedict Company and the very apple of his parents’ eyes?”

  “I have surmised it.”

  “And have you any idea what Mr. and Mrs. Benedict are like?”

  “I understand they are virtuous folk. Very high-minded. No doubt they will disapprove of me.”

  “Alida, they will fight you tooth and nail!” Gus was very grave now. “They will use every weapon in their arsenal, and they have plenty. For God’s sake, don’t give up Jonathan before you’re sure of Benedict. You may have been a famous debutante, but think of your family and the fragility of your position. One false step, and the world will have it in for you!”

  “But don’t you see, Gus, that this may be my one chance for decency? To do it this way? Before anyone’s committed?”

  Gus gave me a long look. Then he nodded.

  “I’ll see what I can do about the press. I’m afraid it won’t be much.”

  It wasn’t. The publicity that accompanied my “broken troth,” as the headlines called it, exceeded my worst expectations. But on the whole I was not displeased. It was a kind of punishment, perhaps a merited one. The papers did not pick up Chip’s trail, for even in his fury Jonathan did not wish to be shamed by such an exposure, but they picked up everything else, including the ugly fact that Mummie and Daddy had received large loans from Jonathan, which they now refused to pay back, claiming that they had been gifts. It appeared that there might be litigation. I could imagine the long faces at the Benedict breakfast table when they learned that this was their darling’s new girl!

  But would he continue to be interested? Would the sordid row be Veblenesque enough for him? If I loved Chip before, it may be imagined how I adored him when I heard his firm, calm voice on the telephone.

  “I want you to come to Benedict for lunch on Sunday, Alida.” It was not until we were engaged that he used even such mild terms as “my dear” or “dearest.” “It’s high time you met my parents.”

  “What must they think of all this!”

  “I guess that’s got to be their problem. I know what I think. I don’t give a damn about the papers! There’s a train that gets in at 12:05. If you can make it, I’ll meet you.”

  Oh, that lunch! In that expensive, antiseptic dining room with the blue walls, the primitives, the Duncan Phyfe chairs! We were eight; I suppose the Benedicts couldn’t face me alone. The others, I believe, were neighbors. Chip’s only ally, unless he was a parental spy, was his former roommate, Lars Alversen. I gathered that the family disapproved of Chessy. Why not? Look at the trouble he had caused!

  Mr. Benedict, on whose right I was placed, was very gentle, very polite. He couldn’t have been rude to Lady Macbeth; it wasn’t in his nature. But his homely wife, with whom I had exchanged a few remarks about the weather—or, rather, to whom I had addressed a few such remarks before the meal—could hardly bring herself to speak to me or to anyone else. She kept glancing at me with eyes full of apprehension and almost undisguised dismay. She could no more have pretended that she was giving a pleasant lunch party than had she just been told that her son was stricken with a fatal disease. I almost felt sorry for her.

  But I decided that nothing I said was going to be right. Talk fell upon the usual crisis in Europe. The Benedicts were solidly opposed to Neville Chamberlain and ready to take up arms with England against Hitler. So I proclaimed myself an isolationist and expressed the opinion that Europe was none of our business. When the conversation was abruptly changed, I threw caution, even discretion, to the wind. I became pro-New Deal, pro-high taxation, pro-labor; I think I even managed to come out for companionate marriage! Mrs. Benedict’s anguished eyes drove me to it. I wanted to cost Chip something!

  After lunch Chip retired to his father’s study, where I was sure his mother would join them. Lars, whom I had at first rather liked, walked with me in the garden. It was early spring.

  “Why do you want them to dislike you quite so much?” he asked.

  “Isn’t it only kind? They’re going to, anyway. Now they have an excuse.”

  “I suppose with Mrs. Benedict you may be right.” He laughed, and I was surprised at the heartiness of the sound. Lars had a delicacy of appearance that his spirits denied. “The American ma and her son’s girl friend—yes, it’s almost hopeless. But Mr. Benedict could be won over. Oh, yes, he could! And look you, he is not the typical American dad. He rules the roost up here.”

  “He doesn’t rule Chip.”

  “Except by indirection. Chip has changed a lot in the past six months. I think you may be just what he needs.”

  “Thank you! And what about me? What do I need? I suppose we needn’t go into that. It’s too obvious, isn’t it? A penniless, rather phony debutante with a shabby family who made the headlines in every evening paper when she failed to nail Jonathan Askew!”

  “Ah, but you had nailed him. And you gave him up.”

  “Let him go, rather. Opened the door of his cage, poor fellow, let him fly away. And why did I do even that good deed? Out of the kindness of my heart? Never! Because I had my eye on something even richer!”

  “Alida, you belie yourself. I could see that all during lunch. You’re obviously in love with Chip.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Well, not to his family. No doubt they still regard you as a designing woman. But I know you’re just what Chip needs. And I haven’t said he’s what you need because I doubt that you need anything. I’ve followed your career in the papers. Originally it was because Chessy Bogart talked so much about you. But then I became fascinated on my own. I deduced (a) that you have a strong character and (b) that you believe in nothing.”

  I stopped to stare at him. “Is that why Chip needs me? Because he hasn’t a strong character? And believes in too many things?”

  Lars laughed. “No, no. He has a very strong character. And he believes passionately in Chip Benedict. He needs you because you will give him the air of being a successful rebel.”

  “Which he isn’t?”

  “Not in the least. The only people Chip wishes to defeat in hewing his way to the top of the family company and then of the world are his parents themselves.”

  Had I gone through what I had gone through to have this little man pull everything to pieces? “I see your game, Alversen! At least Mrs. Benedict is direct. Why in God’s name are women supposed to be subtle? But you! You want to get rid of me by persuading me that I’m too good for Chip!”

  He simply laughed again, even louder than before. It was a remarkably cheerful laugh. “You are in love with him, aren’t you? Well, he’s all yours. And now we’d better go back. There he is on the terrace. And I believe he’s actually glowering at me!”

  Chip insisted on driving me back to New York. His countenance was grim; he must have had a first-class row with his parents. He had come, he told me in a voice that admitted of no dispute, to an important decision. He and I must marry as soon as possible, privately, without our parents and without a reception. Chessy would be his only witness; he hoped that I would have as few as possible.


  “Only Gus,” I heard myself say, and I added, “Gus Leighton,” when he seemed not to recognize the name.

  Then I suppose it must have struck him that he had never formally asked me to be his wife. “You will marry me?” he asked, looking away from the wheel at me.

  “Of course I will!” I exclaimed hurriedly, for he was driving much too fast. “Now watch the road, please. Won’t your parents cut you off without a cent?”

  “They can’t. I have my own money.”

  There were no problems! And suddenly my heart was so full of happiness that I thought I shouldn’t be able to contain it. I needed a vent through which some of it could escape; I searched my mind, now as fluffy as a baby’s crib, for the silliest thing I could say.

  “Where shall we live? Do I move into your rooms at Berkeley?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not allowed. No matter how accommodating Chessy may be. No, we’ll take a flat off campus. And next year we’ll get a house in Charlottesville. I’m going to Virginia Law School.”

  “Oh, that’s all decided?”

  “Yes. Whether or not I go into the company, law will always be useful.”

  I remembered what Lars had said, but what did I care now? “I suppose I can go to the movies on Thursday and Saturday nights.”

  “Why so, dearest?”

  It was the first time he had called me that, and my heart seemed to lose a beat. “Well, don’t you have your Bulldog sessions?”

  “I’m going to resign from Bulldog.”

  “Chip! Has anyone ever?”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “You don’t have to do it for me, you know.”

  “I’m doing it for myself.”

  It had started to rain, and I shivered a bit as I closed my window. I wondered whether I had not discovered the real cause for his break with his parents.

  10. ALIDA

  THE FIRST three years of my married life constituted a kind of Nirvana. After Yale, when we moved to Charlottesville, we had a charming little red brick house, octagon-shaped and supposed by a persistent few to be the handiwork of Jefferson, with a view over the rolling lawn of a country club towards the Blue Ridge range. I had a black couple who did everything that had to be done, including most of the care of little Ellie, born nine months after our wedding. Chip drove the five miles to law school in his Lincoln Continental, leaving me a scarlet Ford coupé to run about the countryside as I chose. In the immediate neighborhood there resided some dozen other “Yankee” couples, all affluent, amiable and handsome, the husbands, like Chip, law students, and the wives, like me, young mothers and idle housewives. It made a pleasant center for a social life that expanded easily to take in occasional faculty members from the university and the owners, some Virginians, of the local estates and horse farms.

  The war started in Europe, but it seemed very far away. When I rode, occasionally with one of the other wives but more often alone, I reveled in the long blue vistas and the rich red clay. At home I read novels and poetry to my heart’s content and purported to justify my romantic escapism by writing an occasional sonnet, fussing idly for whole mornings over a single rhyme. At night Chip worked in his study at home, unless he had to use the law library, but he tried to keep regular hours and usually quit by ten or eleven, in time for a Scotch with me before bed, and Saturday nights were sacred to the dinner parties that we either gave or attended. The life, for the men at least, was a curious combination of revelry and industry. Chip’s friends had certainly not overtaxed themselves at college, but in law school they tended to be more serious. Chip himself was almost a grind.

  Young women today will wonder why I did not do more: take courses or work for a cause. But I thought I had everything a woman could want: a handsome husband who rarely lost his temper and made regular love, a healthy infant, plenty of money and friends. Indeed, there were times when my good luck almost frightened me. It was as if some beneficent fairy godmother had waved her wand and removed at a clap my tiresome parents, my clinging fiancé, my ludicrous social career, and changed the scene to this romantic university, where youth and beauty seemed to gambol before the white paint, red brick and shimmering greens of Mr. Jefferson’s inspired vision.

  I had no feeling that I owed myself a career. Being Chip’s wife, it seemed to me, was going to be quite enough. And I could always write, couldn’t I? Chip was ambitious, organized, efficient. He did not confine himself socially to the New Yorkers and Philadelphians in his class; he made a point of meeting everyone. He was duly elected to the Law Review, and in the spring of his second year elevated to editor-in-chief. He ultimately became a member of the Honor Court, the Raven Society and the Order of the Coif; in short, he developed into a personage on campus. In an afterlife that would presumably follow the pattern of his academic one, he would need a social partner, and I was perfectly content to be that. In Charlottesville he merely expected me to be charming to his friends, which I was, and to run the house smoothly, which I essentially did, though I left most of that to the couple. Only in this latter area did Chip, who had a housekeeper’s eye, occasionally criticize me. Yet even here he was mild enough.

  So what was wrong? For my readers will have flared by now that something was wrong. Was it only the Eve in me that could not resist the temptation to find fault with Eden? Was I looking about for an apple to bite? Sometimes I feared that my experience would be that of Psyche, who, forbidden to view the lover who gave her such nightly bliss, was abandoned by the most beautiful of the gods when curiosity at last won out and she lit her lamp. I needed no lamp, obviously, to see my husband’s body; the parallel, if one existed, had to be his soul. What sort of a man had I married? But surely I knew. He was direct, forceful, coordinated, scrupulously fair, political in that he liked to manipulate people, high-minded, a bit impersonal, perhaps even a touch hard. There! I had brought out the word at last. But was I being fair? Didn’t he listen conscientiously to every problem I brought to him when he was not abstracted by a legal one? Didn’t he gratify my every desire and need? Didn’t he include me in all the things he did? Did he ever look at another woman? Ah, but did he mind if anyone looked at me? There was the time I told him of the pass a drunken Law Review editor had made at me at a party, and he had merely laughed! Obviously there was not a bone of jealousy in Chip’s make-up. But could love exist without jealousy?

  Or was I just another nervous female, with too much time on her hands, moaning like an unmilked cow for true love?

  No, no, it had to be more than that. I never complained to Chip that we were not truly intimate, because I was afraid that I might only reveal to him—and to myself—a gap that he was incapable of bridging. I allowed him to dominate me, because I had no idea what I should do with myself if he didn’t. My real worry was more likely that Chip had deliberately selected me as just the companion he believed he needed for the particular role in life he had chosen to play. I might have been measured, so to speak, beside a list of specifications and found to fit. I had had to have looks and health and intelligence; I had had at least to “seem” a great sexual catch; and I had had to represent a dramatic and decisive break with his own domestic past. But what would happen to me if the drama with Chip’s chosen role were to be changed? What if some new script required a different leading lady? The mere idea was anguish to me, for my whole life was possessed now by this strange, unyielding man against whom I had no complaints except in fantasy.

  And for what was he so industriously preparing himself? Did he want to be a great lawyer, a great glass manufacturer, a judge, a governor, a President? He never specified. When I asked him, he would simply shrug and say, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” Yet he was certainly not bent on fulfilling the aspirations of his parents, whom he had more or less rejected, or obeying the dictates of God, from whom he seemed also to have turned. Chip, like myself, had no religion, but unlike me I think he had had. He had swept the lares and penates from his household shelf and was intent
on standing on his own feet. Today I suppose one would call him an existentialist.

  Which did not for a minute mean that he was amoral. He was, on the contrary, most scrupulous in all daily matters of right and wrong. He was truthful to the point of being sometimes rather blunt and, in my opinion, overconscientious in cases of personal obligation. He would be highly critical, for example, if I kept a library book overdue or neglected to correct the smallest error in my favor in a bill or bank balance. Whatever the image in his mind of the man he wished to become, it was certainly that of a totally honest one.

  All of which observations settled gradually in my mind but were fully in place by the fourth year of our marriage and the final one of Chip’s law school course. In the fall of that year Gus Leighton paid us a visit that was to have a significant bearing on my relations with Chip’s family, and, indirectly, on my relations with Chip himself.

  The breach caused by our having married without either his parents’ blessing or their presence had been closed—at least formally. Mr. and Mrs. Benedict had come twice to Charlottesville in our first two years there, but they had stayed at the Farmington Country Club. On each occasion we had feted them with a dinner party that had helped to spare my motherin-law and me the embarrassment of any pretended intimacy. And in each of the two intervening summers we had spent one weekend at the family home in Maine. But that was all. Chip spoke of his parents as little as possible and seemed perfectly content to live apart from them. Mr. Benedict accepted the situation with the ease of one who counts on time to take care of everything, and his wife, who was obviously miserable about it, could still not bring herself to be more than decently civil to me. As for the three girls, they were enchanted to forget the past in favor of a new available base close to a men’s college, and they visited us rather more than I wanted. Yet they were pleasant enough and pretty enough, if not very brainy. Chip seemed to have a monopoly on the family intellect.

  Gus Leighton had known Chip’s mother since his schooldays at Saint Luke’s. He had been a passionate admirer of Mr. B, then only the chaplain, and had met Mrs. Benedict on one of her weekend visits to her father. Gus as a boy had apparently bubbled over with Christian fervor, a not unusual first chapter to a maturity of polished worldliness, and in his youthful enthusiasm for the chaplain he had won the friendship of the latter’s formidable but very filial daughter. I could understand how even the severe Mrs. Benedict might have yielded to Gus’s sincere gushing. As a matter of fact, it is not uncommon for doughty, moralistic older women to be pushovers for younger, glibber, effervescent males. It may be the attraction of opposites.