Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  It was not long before Chessy Bogart made his appearance at one of our sessions at Suzy’s. He looked very much as he had in Charlottesville, dark-complexioned, neatly groomed, but stouter, and with a voice that was almost a bark. His attitude towards me was familiar, almost aggressive.

  “I suppose in your world, Alida, no husband dares show himself north of Canal Street before six. Chip will suppose I have gone quite to the dogs when he hears that I’m sometimes home in the middle of the day. Except, of course, that the dogs are just where he probably assumes I am.”

  Chessy, I learned, practiced law without any of the usual overhead. He had a few regular clients whom he advised about tax shelters, using any spare desk in their offices, and he took an occasional gamble with one of his own projects. Apparently he made enough to keep him and Suzy comfortable in their apartment, with a balance over for the purchase of an occasional picture. In the summer they visited friends or went to a seaside hotel. They had one son, who was twenty and who had gone to live in San Francisco. They did not speak of him.

  If Chessy came in before we had finished, Suzy would let him take her hand. He was an expert player, much better than any of us, but his manners were vile.

  “What should I have led?” I asked once, when he exploded over my opening.

  “Any of the other twelve cards in your silly little hand!”

  However, we took his abuse in good part. I think we liked having a man at our meetings, and his playing was bold and exciting. He tended to address most of his side remarks to me. Obviously he still hated Chip, and it gave him some satisfaction to be on friendly, sassy terms with me and to subject me to abuse about “self-righteous, small-town tycoons.” I could not make out what sort of marriage he and Suzy had, but Dolly told me once in the taxi going home that they had twice been separated and on the brink of divorce.

  It was in this period, during a winter visit to Saint Luke’s School, that I learned something more definite about my own spouse’s extramarital life.

  Dana and I had always been close, perhaps too close. In the natural family balance it had obviously been Chip’s role to make up to Eleanor for the growing distance between mother and daughter; the four of us should then have constituted two couples with greater possibilities of mutual understanding. But Chip had elected instead to compete with me for Dana, with the result that Eleanor got too little, and Dana too much, of both parents’ attention. For all the boy’s congeniality with me, for all our shared love of theater and art, for all our common appetite for laughter and gossip, Dana had a rather cringing admiration for his father, punctured by almost hysterical fits of shrill defiance. To tell the truth, I preferred the latter, for there was something of the spaniel waiting coyly to be stroked and patted in Dana’s way of looking at his father when he wanted to be praised. Something effeminate.

  By which I do not mean homosexual, though Dana sometimes seemed to invite this inference. His blond, willowy good looks, his damp gray eyes, his emphatic stresses of speech, plus the presence of a strong father and a possessive mother, un doubtedly led many of our friends to suppose the boy a classic case of inversion. But he was, and still is, much attracted to girls. I have even suspected that he uses the feminine aspect of his personality as a way of creeping close to them before they realize his true intent. Not that I object! One child is quite enough to have contributed to that other world. I mention the doubts that Dana aroused only because I believe he aroused them in Chip, which may have been why the latter so forcefully opposed Dana’s going to college in England. The three of us had a rather violent dinner at the Parents’ House.

  “If I’m going to specialize in English Romantic poetry, Dad,” Dana argued, “wouldn’t I do better to go where it was written? Can you think of anything more appropriate than to spend a vacation hiking in the lake country or visiting the British Museum to view a Grecian urn?”

  “I can send you to Camden, New Jersey, if you want to read Walt Whitman.”

  “But, Dad, Whitman didn’t write about Camden. He wrote about America. I’d have to travel from coast to coast!”

  “I’d be glad to stake you to that. The point is, Dana, you need to be more Americanized, not less. Look, I’ll send you to Oxford after you’ve graduated from an American college. Any one you please. Any one you can get into, that is. Is that fair?”

  “No!” Dana was suddenly shrill. “Because when you were young, you had your own money and could thumb your nose at your old man! I can’t. Is that fair?”

  “Well, I guess I learned something from my father’s errors.”

  “You mean you planned to keep me a beggar? I thought as much. Mummie, are you going to stand by and let him do this? Won’t you take my side?”

  “Darling, what good would it do you? I don’t pay the bills. Besides, you know your father’s not going to change his mind. Don’t you recognize that expression of his by now?”

  “So! Mrs. Pilate calls for a bowl to wash her lily-white hands in!”

  Chip had to fly to San Francisco to a conference of charitable trustees early the next morning, and Dana and I took a walk before chapel. Tight-lipped and sultry-eyed, he told me about the ballerina his father was supposed to be keeping.

  “You’ve turned yourself into a carpet, Ma. And I suppose carpets can’t complain when they get trod on.”

  I returned to New York, feeling more numb and useless than ever. And it was on the following Tuesday, while Chip was still away, that, arriving at Suzy’s at three o’clock, I was met by Chessy at the front door.

  “Suzy’s been called to Greenwich. Her mother’s had some sort of a seizure. She may be gone several days.”

  “I’m so sorry. I hope it’s not serious. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Is there ever?”

  “Then I’ll take myself off.”

  “No, stay.” He opened the door wide and stood aside to let me pass. “I telephoned Amanda and Dolly, as Suzy asked me to. I didn’t telephone you.”

  I made no move. “Did Suzy ask you not to?”

  “No, that was my decision. I wanted to see you alone.”

  This disappointed me. Surely he could have taken a little more trouble about a seduction that was to be his obvious revenge on Chip. But then, surprisingly, he continued: “I thought you needed a bridge lesson. Rather badly, in fact. Don’t worry. I make no charge.”

  And that is precisely how we spent the whole long afternoon and early evening. Chessy had never been more lucid. He analyzed hand after hand, and it seemed to me that my mind embraced a whole new dimension of the game. If he was a great player, he was a still greater teacher.

  That we should go out for dinner together afterwards seemed the most natural thing in the world. I supposed that the evening would end with a proposition, but I was perfectly willing to reserve my decision about that until the time came. Certainly I did not find Chessy romantic, but he was busy and masterful, and it was not unpleasant to feel myself competently handled. And I’m afraid there was something titillating to me in his loathing of Chip. Chessy had behaved so far like a gentleman; surely I could behave like a lady. And so long as we both maintained these roles, did it, at this point in my life, very much matter what else happened?

  We dined at a sawdusty steak house where they served very large, very dry Martinis. It was not long before the subject turned to Chip and the Benedicts. Chessy’s curiosity about my life in the factory town seemed to last the whole meal. He was very funny and sarcastic about my in-laws and what he called the Benedict “mystique.” Only towards the end of our meal did he move to a pronouncement of judgment.

  “What in your opinion, Alida, is really wrong with your lord and master? For something’s got to be wrong with a guy who blew up the family fort after he’d filled his pockets.”

  I debated this. “May it not be simply that he’s too much of an idealist?”

  Chessy had a stare of deadly effect. He could keep his large, dark, unblinking eyes fixed on one for minutes at a tim
e, his lips half-open, as if in wonderment at one’s constantly renewed naïveté.

  “Chip an idealist?” he repeated. “Surely you can’t have been brainwashed to that extent. Was he an idealist back at Saint Luke’s when he denied me to his grandfather?”

  “But you had no right to implicate him!”

  “I was only trying to save another boy’s skin. It wouldn’t have hurt him to tell the truth. And then we’d all three of us have been cleared.”

  “Chip says you never understood his grandfather. You’d have all three been expelled. So what good would it have done you?”

  “The good that it does a man to see his friend stand up and tell the truth.”

  “Even if that truth would have killed Mr. B?”

  Again Chessy let me have the full benefit of that stare. “If you really believe that, Alida, then you have been brainwashed. Mr. B, as you call him, had a singularly sharp nose for the dirty things that boys do with one another. It makes one wonder about his own schooldays. Oh, he would have thundered about it, all right. He would have roared and shouted. But in the end he would have raised those disingenuously innocent eyes piously to the heavens and cried, ‘Lord, thy will be done!’ Hypocrisy, as usual, would have won the day.”

  “We must agree to disagree about that.”

  “How smug can a woman be?” he demanded angrily. “Did you know the late headmaster of Saint Luke’s School?”

  “No.”

  “And have you ever heard anything about him except from his beloved daughter and grandson?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I know you were not burdened with the disadvantages of a college education, but no doubt you know the meaning of the word ‘hagiography’?”

  “Yes. Even without four years of football games and whiskey.”

  “Then you should have learned that the Benedicts are adept in the fabrication of halos. It is a trade, indeed, to which they seem to have apprenticed you. You will graduate with honors when you have fashioned one for Chip.”

  “Oh, come, Chessy. I know Chip has his faults, but…”

  “Faults!” Chessy raised both hands. “You don’t say the devil has faults.”

  “Now you’re being absurd.”

  “Let us consider that.” Again that stare! But now I looked away from him impatiently. “I submit in all sobriety,” he continued in his most gravelly tone, “that your husband has dedicated his lost soul to the destruction of his fellow man.”

  “Must you go on so?”

  “And his fellow woman! Do you not care to be warned, my dear? By one who knows? By one who learned the hard way?” His stare hardened into a glare.

  “All right,” I said, cowed. “Go ahead.”

  “Primo!” He held up a solemn forefinger. “The destruction of Chessy Bogart. Initiated at Saint Luke’s School and completed at the University of Virginia. When Chip at Yale recognized that his victim was only scotched, not killed, he had to devise a further strategy. It took him three years, but it worked. Oh, brilliantly!”

  “You seem to forget that I know about that. If you were so innocent, you could have gone to the Honor Court.”

  “Ah, but that was precisely the brilliance of his scheme!” Chessy struck the table with his fist so hard that people looked around. He ignored them. “Before the Honor Court, with a shining witness like Chip against me, my innocence was not sure to prevail. It would have been foolhardy of me not to take the safer alternative that Lucifer offered. But what he knew was that my leaving law school on the lame excuse of a healthy mother’s heart would raise questions that would never quite be settled. Small wonder that my law career has been less than distinguished.”

  “It seems to me rather far-fetched to blame that on one incident.”

  “One! Have I not told you, woman, there were two?” His middle finger joined the index in his again raised right hand. “But now let us pass Chessy. Chip was merely sharpening his teeth on me. Let us proceed to his major crimes. Surely even one as mesmerized as yourself can recognize the fiendish success of his campaign against his parents. What timing! It was sheer genius. First, the poor old darlings are subjected to a series of calculated rebuffs. They are made to admit that their lovely boy owes them nothing, for it is after he has essentially broken with them that he becomes a successful law student and a war hero. And then, when they have been weakened and humiliated, what does he do? He forgives them, opens his arms and returns to the home town to become everything they’ve dreamed of. And then, when they have given him all—Glamis, Cawdor, the crown itself—he quietly lowers the drawbridge to the enemy and escapes to New York, his pockets crammed with gold. Small wonder it killed the old man. I was only surprised it didn’t kill them both.”

  A horrid little scratch of suspicion in the pit of my stomach made me twist. “But Chip had his reasons for that. There was some sort of legal ethics question involved.”

  “With Chip ethics are always involved. Ethics come out of his ears. Ethics, my poor deluded girl, are his stockin-trade. Which brings me to his next victim.”

  “No, please, Chessy. I’ve heard enough.”

  “You don’t want to hear what he did to Alida Struthers?” I could only stare at him now, as if he were a mesmerist. “Alida was a brilliant, beautiful girl who had everything but a purpose in life. Such a person is very difficult to destroy, because she has nothing she really cares about that one can take away. But that need not trouble the devil. Give her a purpose so that one can smash it! And is that not precisely what your loving husband did? Moved you to Benedict, put a scepter in your hands and then—when you had learned to enjoy wielding it and were a bit too old to acquire another—he tore it from your grasp!”

  “Oh!” I closed my eyes in pain. “Oh, Chessy, don’t!”

  “But he’s not through with you yet. He may have his little ballet dancer, but that’s not it. He probably knows that you know that she’s not important to him. For who is? Lucky for her, anyway, for if she were important to him, he’d find a way to blight her career. No, Chip knows where you’ve been playing bridge and who with.”

  “Why not? I’ve made no secret of it.”

  “But he sees what will be your ultimate humiliation!” Chessy’s stare seemed to extend itself now into a beam of light, and he brought out his next sentence with a rasping laugh. “To be screwed by Chessy Bogart!”

  I stared back, like one hypnotized. I realized with a shock that I must have been thinking about this for weeks. “You mean we have no choice?”

  “That’s it. No choice. Two victims of Satan Benedict!”

  He paid the check and we went back to his apartment without further discussion. It was the only night of adultery in my married life. I say night, rather than act, because we performed the act furiously no less than three times. I had no love for Chessy, and he certainly had none for me, but there was a tense, desperate satisfaction in what we did. I found him too concentrated, too busy, a bit ridiculous, really, and I’m sure he found me bossy in trying to take the lead. But I spent the whole night there, and when I left, after a cup of coffee in the morning, he did not seem the least put out that I told him that the experience must have no sequel.

  “We did what we had to do,” he observed gravely. “Will you tell Chip?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, just so long as you don’t tell Suzy!”

  It was a number of weeks before I did tell Chip. He gave me a long, cool stare and then shrugged.

  “Well, I can’t say I haven’t deserved it.”

  He didn’t care! So once again he cut me down.

  19. ALIDA

  ONE RESULT of my telling Chip about the episode with Chessy was the total discontinuance of our sexual relations. He made no comment on this, nor did I; he simply thereafter spent the nights in a cot in his dressing room. I do not know why he felt himself entitled to any sense of outrage, or, for that matter, whether he did so. He had always, so far as I could make out, been devoid of the le
ast sense of jealousy. It was more probable that he considered that I had been contaminated by the touch of the loathed Chessy and was now too unclean for him. I was certainly not going to protest, as I did not wish to give him the least impression that I objected. Our marriage had deteriorated to the lowest point where it could still endure.

  The war in Vietnam was now raging hotly and the protest was nationwide. Dana, who had just graduated from Yale, had postponed any idea of working until he decided what to do about the draft. His number was imminent, and he was threatening to leave the country. He and his father had had a furious row about this, in which Chip had used the word “treason,” and now Dana refused to come home, spending his time visiting friends of like persuasion, and, I fear, on drugs. Eleanor had given up her job in Legal Aid to work full time for an antiwar group. She came to the apartment one night when Chip was away to suggest that I should work in her office. I demurred.

  “Why not, Mother? You’re against the war, aren’t you?”

  “Why do you assume that? Your father certainly isn’t.”

  “Oh, it’s been clear for quite a while that Daddy’s being for something is almost enough for you to be against it. Anyway, it’s high time you stopped being an old-fashioned female chattel and started thinking for yourself. Come out of the doll’s house, Ma! You might even enjoy it.”

  Eleanor was not a lovable girl. She had the wide face and small features of my mother (her opposite, however, in every other conceivable respect), and she was putting on a good deal of weight. She did nothing about her messy brown hair, dressed plainly and spoke in a voice of seemingly permanent exasperation.