Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

“And the water looks so lovely. Don’t tell me you mind our going in together this way. Isn’t it the most natural thing in the world?”
    The dreadful little girls immediately sized up the situation. They started to jump up and down, crying out that Chip was a sissy who was afraid to be seen naked.
    â€œBe quiet, girls!” their mother chided them. She was already unbuttoning her blouse. But when she turned to Chip, he saw the concern in her eyes. She had at once recognized his shame and repulsion and was visibly upset. It was something bad in her son, something dangerous, something that had to be coped with at once.
    â€œLook at me, Chip. I’m as bony and skinny as an old nag, but I’m healthy, thank God, and that’s what counts.”
    At this she unhooked her brassiere, and Chip was aghast at the sudden glimpse of her breasts, as long and skinny and dangling as a pair of old stockings. Suppressing a cry of anguish only by slapping a hand over his mouth, he turned to rush away and collided with his father, who grabbed him.
    â€œChip, it’s only natural!” he heard his mother wail.
    â€œIt’s not! It’s unholy!” he shrieked, struggling in his father’s grasp. “It’s wicked and horrible!” And he bit his father’s hand so savagely that the latter released his hold with a cry of pain, and Chip bounded away into the woods.
    An hour later, lunchless and hungry, he joined his family, silently waiting in the launch. Not a word was said by anyone on the trip back to Camden, but Chip knew that his sisters exulted at his meteoric fall from parental grace.
    His conduct had been too shocking for further discussion, but his father the next day asked him very gently whether he would be willing to have a little chat with their summer doctor, a friendly old codger much admired by the Camden summer folk. Chip, knowing now that he might as well be hanged for a sheep, curtly refused. But to his relief and astonishment, there were no repercussions. His father, at least, knew when to lay off. And apparently he had been able to control his spouse.
    In August the family went, as usual, to France and Italy, where Mr. Benedict visited and consulted with the principal glass manufacturers of those countries. That summer they stayed with one who had a chateau near Albi, and Matilda, who was a devoted sightseer, but who liked to see her monuments “in use,” even if it happened to be a Roman Catholic use, took Chip to a service at the great fortress cathedral where the crusade against the Albigenses had been preached. She did not believe that a service in Latin could corrupt a youth, and besides, was not the choir famed for its beautiful singing?
    Chip, seated with his mother beneath the marble pulpit, agreed that the choir, unseen behind the vast screen, was indeed fine, but when the Dies Irae was chanted, he could think only of all those men, women and children savagely butchered for believing that the world had been created by the devil. Who else would have made it? Looking about, he noted grimly that everything in the church celebrated the wrath and mercilessness of the avenging deity. The pulpit itself was supported by two marble slaves whose writhing torsos put him in mind of the parolee servants at home. The latter, it was true, bore their burdens with happy smiles, but might not their bodies under white coats and aprons be as strained as those of the slaves? The choir screen behind which the angelic voices rang out was covered by a vast mural showing in gorgeous detail the sufferings of the losers at the Day of Judgment. The whole cathedral sang the glory of a power that was not any truer than the heresy that it had so cruelly suppressed; simply mightier. Chip’s father had seen the trenches during the Great War on a Red Cross mission, and he had told Chip that
that
was hell. And yet Elihu insisted, as did Matilda, that the words in the creed “He