Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

combination of challenge and trepidation, if he was “playing with himself.” He hadn’t been. That time. The chauffeur’s boy did, he knew; also two friends at school; but even if they were damned for it, their punishment wouldn’t hurt as much as his. Why? They weren’t Chip Benedict.
    He had always to be sure not to disappoint Daddy, whose patient demeanor and mild twinkle were supposed to conceal the tenderest of sensibilities. And he had to remember that a lifetime of filial devotion could never repay Mummie for her limitless capacity for caring. And he must set an example for the kid sisters and be democratic with the boys in the Benedict public school and, when he went off to the private academy in Massachusetts that Mummie’s wonderful old father headed, he would have to be sure not to learn snobbish ways. Beyond that, beyond even Yale—far away, but the time would come; it always did—he would have to grow up and help Daddy with the company, though this was never said, because he had to pretend that he was perfectly free to be anything he wanted, except (with a chuckle) a bootlegger.
    And all the while scarlet thoughts, putrid fantasies, and no love. No real love for anyone, except perhaps for Nanny, now remorselessly relegated to the sisters (boys weren’t supposed to need nannies) and maybe just a little for Grandpa Berwind, who came to visit in Maine summers. Why were they always prating about love? Did they suspect one hadn’t any in one’s heart? Did they really have so much themselves? Sometimes he imagined that God cared only about “seeming,” that this might be Chip’s real function, that so long as he managed to look a part, he might be the part, that the appearance of worship, or at least of a decorous submission, was all the dusky deity required.
    Chip was treated differently from his sisters by Daddy—he was taken on fishing trips and even on business excursions when Elihu Benedict visited other glassworks—but these privileges were burdened with the sense of how much more would be expected of an only son than of a mere gaggle of younger daughters. Elihu was a kind and patient father, and he knew how to listen to his children, but it struck Chip that he was always listening
for
something; that he was always in the process of tapping gently but firmly upon one’s surface in the perennial hope, amounting by no means to a conviction, that he would ultimately find a hollow into which some of the paternal genius might be profitably poured.
    This feeling was particularly vivid one June evening in Chip’s fifteenth year when he and his father were sitting alone by the campfire in front of their cabin in the Canadian woods, looking out over the quiet moonlit lake. Elihu had twice used the expression “people like us,” and his son was emboldened by the unaccustomed intimacy of their situation to ask “Daddy, what are people like us?”
    â€œI suppose it’s a foolish expression, really. What I think I mean is people who have been born with certain privileges and are therefore bound to contribute more than the average to their fellow men.”
    â€œBut I don’t contribute anything.”
    â€œGive yourself time, for Pete’s sake! You’re only a boy.”
    Chip considered this. “I suppose you and Mummie contribute all kinds of things.”
    â€œWell, we could always do more, that’s for sure. But we make a stab at it.”
    â€œBy having all those convicts in the house?”
    Elihu glanced at him. Was he making sure that Chip was serious? “We try to give them a chance. Most people refuse to employ them. But if they can say they’ve worked for the Benedicts and produce a good reference, it helps. Do they worry you, Chip? I always check to be sure they’re not violent types.”
    â€œNo, no, it’s not that at all. I wouldn’t dream of being afraid of them.