Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  “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.”

  Chip decided not to go back to his office that afternoon, and he sought to underline the importance of his resolution by failing to call Violet and by making his way to the zoo, where nobody in the Department would have dreamed of seeking him. He visited the sleeping lions; he followed the plunging of the ever-restless seals; he fed the sparrows and pigeons; and he watched the two bald eagles flap endlessly back and forth between the perches at either end of their massive aviary. It seemed to him that these huge birds expressed the dilemma of the times. What could they do but fly helplessly to and fro between the moral cause and the practical horror, encaged in the limitations of the soul? Our national emblem might dream of an azure sky under which it could endlessly and magnificently soar. But there was no way it could break through those bars.

  He must have stayed by the aviary for half an hour. Then he shrugged and strode away. What did he feel as he unloaded a conscience that was older than half a century? Relief? If this was failure, he would make the most of it.

  Half past five found him at his mother’s. She was having tea by herself and was enchanted by the unexpected visit. Looking at her seated before the silver tea tray, and viewing the orange sunset light in the garden window behind her, he felt again the serenity that he had experienced the first time Violet had come to his house. The room was prettier than one might have expected from one of Matilda’s austerity. There were handsome, chaste Empire things, a mirror surmounted by two small golden swans and three of his father’s finest Fitzhugh Lane seascapes. Alone and old, his mother seemed to have come to terms with a long-repressed aesthetic side of her nature. He relished again the feeling that no one knew where he was, that he and his mother were strange allies, surrounded by the debris of shorn fetishes.

  But now she dispelled this. “Violet called. She wondered whether I had heard from you. She said you hadn’t been at the office since before lunch.”

  He said nothing.

  “Aren’t you going to call her?”

  “Must I?”

  “But she was worried, darling.”

  “She doesn’t own me, Ma.”

  “Very well, dear.”

  He got up to take the cup she now handed him. “Isn’t it a rather peculiar role for you to be playing? The spo
nsor of adultery? What would your father have said?”

  “My father would have used just those terms. He would have scolded me properly. But I think that by seventy-five one should be able to make up one’s own mind, don’t you?”

  He smiled at the quick flash in her eyes. “Oh, 7 do, yes. I was only wondering what had changed you.”

  “You really wish to know?”

  “I wish very much to know!”

  “Then I’ll tell you.” Matilda put down her cup. “I’ve had many failures in my life. I failed with your sister Flossie. She’s unhappy and goes to a ridiculous guru, who makes things worse. But I’m helpless in the matter, and I accept my helplessness. I failed with Margaret. She has made a life for herself with her advertising agency, but she has not married, and now I fear she never will. Had I supported her in either of her relationships with the only two men she ever cared about, she might have married, and happily. But no, I disapproved of her having affairs and would have nothing to do with it. Elaine has been happy, it’s true, but she has made her own happiness. I can claim no credit for that. But my greatest failure, my child, has been with you.”

  “Oh, no, Ma. No.”

  “Oh, yes. From the very beginning, I could see that you were struggling with yourself, and I was always afraid that you were struggling with something bad in yourself. That was the puritan in me. A struggle had to be like that huge George Barnard statue they used to have in the main hall of the Metropolitan and that now, I think, is in the cellar. It represents the two natures of man, one good and one evil, wrestling with each other. What I couldn’t see, and what my poor father could never see, was that a child might be simply struggling to be himself—to let his real self, like a caged bird, go free. I had always to be hurrying in with moral reinforcements to help the ‘good’ side of your nature in the wrestling bout. I threw in my father and his school and Bulldog at Yale and the family business—oh, everything I could get my hands on—to keep you on the straight and narrow. And when Alida frustrated my plans and got you, I went on as if the whore of Babylon had won out! Poor dear Alida, who was really much more ‘got’ by you.”

  “Much. But you let her come over to you.”

  “Oh, yes. I made her an ally. And I thought I had won at last—or really that you had won—when you settled in Benedict.”

  “And then I pulled that to pieces. You must have felt that the evil figure in the Barnard group had at last pinned the good one’s shoulders to the mat!”

  “I might have, had it not been for your father. He had always foreseen something like that. He told me once: ‘You and Chip have a lot in common. You’re both puritans without a god.’”

  In the silence he stared. “Have you no god, Ma?”

  “Do you know, I’ve hardly ever stopped to think of that?”

  “Then Father was right. We have much in common. Why couldn’t he have helped us more?”

  “Because that wasn’t his way. He had a horror of interfering in people’s lives. His own father, you see, had been a great meddler. So he believed that all he could do was love—and keep his hands off.”

  Chip shook his head. “It wasn’t enough.”

  “No, it wasn’t. But it’s too late to alter that. What it’s not too late to alter is me. That’s why I came to Washington. I was determined to do something for you if it was humanly possible.”

  “I thought you wanted to save my marriage.”

  “I was resolved to have no preset ideas, to focus on your happiness alone. I promised myself that I would leave all moral questions to you. That I should be concerned only with what you wanted. Oh, I was going to be a grinning madame, if necessary, before the doors of pleasure!”

  The picture of Matilda, gaunt and skinny, yet with eyes so full of fire, in such a role provoked him to uncontrollable mirth. He let out a little yelp of laughter.

  “Call me an old fool!” she cried indignantly. “Call me anything you like! But admit I’m on my boy’s side at last. You don’t have to love Violet just because the poor girl’s obviously dippy about you. You don’t have to love anybody! But you do have to recognize that whatever you do—divorce Alida, make up with Alida, marry Violet, give up Violet, prosecute the war or resign from the government—I am backing you to the hilt!”

  He went over to put his arms around her skinny shoulders and to hug her. It amused him that even in the throes of her obviously sincere passion, she still did not quite like this. “What makes you think I might resign my office?”

  “Violet said so.”

  “Did she? Maybe she knows me better than I know myself.”

  “Any woman in love does. Why don’t you call her, Chip? She was so worried!”

  “Shall I ask her to dinner here? Have you enough for three?”

  “Oh, plenty! But wouldn’t you rather take her out? Of course you would. You don’t want me.”

  “Ah, but I do!” And the vision of the three of them in that room, sitting by the fire that he would presently light—for it was getting chilly—drinking the cocktail that he would presently mix, was suddenly very agreeable. “I think what I want right now is to see Violet here, in this room, with you.”

  As he walked to the narrow front hall where the telephone was, he felt a tightness around his heart that was both uncomfortable and oddly pleasant. So that’s what it’s like, he whispered to himself in surprise. That’s what it is like to be free. Free of one’s self. To exist, or at least for a while, anyway, not to live. Not to live, at any rate, as he’d always been living.

  Violet was still at the office. For all her discipline, she couldn’t restrain a little cry of delight. “Oh, you’re all right!”

  “Of course I’m all right. Mother wants you to come for dinner. Right away.”

  “Give me twenty minutes!”

  The evening developed just as he had wanted it. Both women seemed to sense that he had no desire to talk, that he sought for once to be inert, passive, to listen to any chatter they cared to exchange. His mother was at her very best, marvelously funny about the life of the only daughter of a widowed minister in a New England boys’ school. She told stories of Saint Luke’s that he had never heard before. And Violet, warming to the older woman, enchanted at being so accepted, was amusing about her own mother’s fears of the perils of dancing school and subscription balls for subdebutantes. At first there had been a slight constraint in their exchange, as if they were conscious of putting on a kind of performance for him, but this wore off as they became sincerely interested in each other’s background, and he had no objection to the possibility of an alliance between them, even if, like all female alliances, it had some degree of exclusivity.

  In his relaxed mood, a drink in hand, he had an easy sense of numbness, as if he had survived some great catastrophe, but only as an incapacitated observer, propped up, so to speak, in a wheelchair in a sanitarium, listening to the prattle of these two, who represented, in some curious fashion, all that had survived. Yet that all was somehow going to be enough; that was his odd conviction. The terrible fires that had raged all his life, spitting and crackling within him, outside him, had gone out at last, and the black ugly smoke of hate had been blown away until it was only a small cloud on the horizon. All he had to do now was to accept their love. Was that going to be, like everything else, impossible?

  Very likely, but at least he could try. Or better yet, he could learn to stop trying.

  “Chip,” his mother said severely, “I don’t think you should have another drink. I’m sure Violet agrees with me. You’ve had three since dinner.”

  “Very well, Ma, I shan’t have another. But suppose I mix one for you and Violet? I think you both deserve it!”

  22. ALIDA

  IT WAS Chip’s sister Flossie who told me about Violet Crane. She had hated Chip ever since the row over the glass museum, and I could almost hear the smacking of her lips across the telephone wire.

  “Mother’s actually sponsoring the whole thing!” Flossie went on indignant
ly. “It’s revolting. I suppose the kindest thing you can say about her is that she’s senile.”

  “Does Chip want to marry this girl?”

  “She’s no older than Ellie. But you know what kind of fool there’s no fool like. All I can do is warn you, Alida, to get hold of every penny you can of Chip’s money before Miss Gold Digger gets her hot little hands on it. Do you know how her type uses the marital deduction argument? They purr and cuddle up and whisper: ‘Darling, oo don’t want oos money to go to Uncle Sam, do oo? So leave it all to poor little me and pay no hahwid taxes. Don’t worry about oos children; /’ll take care of them.’ In a pig’s eye, she will! For a pig is what she is.”

  “Have you met her, Flossie?”

  “For what do you take me? Of course I haven’t met the slut. Have you got a lawyer, my dear? A sharp, fighting lawyer? You’re sure as hell going to need one.”

  “I haven’t as yet. I was thinking of Chessy Bogart. I told Chip, but he got furious.”

  “Well, who cares? Bogart’s my man! Unless you can find one who’ll make Chip even madder.”

  “I don’t want to make him too mad.”

  “Why ever not?”

  But I never did retain Chessy. Before I had made up my mind to call him—and I had a good many doubts about doing so—I had a call from Lars. He said that Chip had told him that I was threatening legal proceedings, and he begged me to let him see me before I did anything. I could hardly refuse such an old friend, and that very afternoon he presented himself in my library. He was very grave and declined the drink I offered him.

  “Chip tells me you’re planning to retain Chessy Bogart. I hope you haven’t done so yet.”

  “Won’t you represent Chip?”

  “I don’t see how I can. Having known you both so well and so long.”

  “Oh, come, Lars, you know your first loyalty is to Chip. Admit it. I’m not going to take it personally.”

  “I don’t know just what my first loyalty amounts to. Certainly I am devoted to Chip. But Karen and I are also both devoted to you, too, and, what is more, extremely concerned about you. The only way that I could properly represent Chip would be if I represented you as well.”