Matters of Honor by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online Page A

prudence. We lost everything in the war, and they don’t want me to crash. They’re always worried about money, even now that my father is doing well in business. I understand that. The other part is the fear that if I fly high and remain up there in the higher sphere, that too will tempt me to leave them. So, the other big issue about you and Archie is whether you’re rich. If you are, maybe I shouldn’t be spending so much time with you, and maybe you shouldn’t be my best friends. You might give me big ideas and teach me bad habits. I’ve told them that I don’t think an army colonel makes as much as my father, and that you don’t strike me as rich, though I’m only guessing. Just the same, you might as well know it: in White family shorthand the two of you are Henry’s rich Gentile friends.
    Stop, I said. I can tell you right now that my parents aren’t rich though they certainly wish they were.
    He examined me with an air I took to be skeptical. My mother wouldn’t necessarily believe you. By the way, she thinks you’re very polite in a standoffish Gentile way. Lukewarm, she calls it.
    I didn’t know what to say or whether I should say anything. Henry had gotten very flushed and was staring at me. Finding the silence uncomfortable, I told him that I liked my conversations with his mother.
    Bullshit, he replied. How could you?
    I got up from my armchair and went to the toilet. When I returned he said, Forgive me, I am sorry I got so worked up. Let me try to explain. The current refrain is why don’t I seek out my own kind instead of hanging out with you and Archie and God knows what other high-society Gentiles. For instance, there are some nice services in Boston I could go to on Friday evenings. One of my father’s big customers has a son at Tufts who attends. Go meet him, stay for dinner, and get to know nice Jewish girls. I say to my parents that I’ve never gone to Friday services in my life before, and I don’t see why I should start now, in Boston. You should understand that I don’t think for one minute that my father believes in God. On the other hand with his angina he doesn’t want to say he doesn’t and take chances on what happens after he’s dead. Also, both he and my mother are one hundred percent conventional. Some of my father’s customers go to a synagogue not far from us. So he goes too, on High Holidays, and he and my mother fast on Yom Kippur. To be more precise, they pretend to each other that they’re fasting. I’ve had to go to the synagogue with my father. Each of those expeditions was humiliating. There I was, not because I believed but because I had been dragged. I wouldn’t mind so much if my parents were religious. But my mother, who makes the most fuss, has no religion, unless you accept as a religion the myth about how it was before the war when we were a family of good Jews. I have no memories of our having been good Jews at home in Krakow. Perhaps the war has crowded them out. It doesn’t matter: as I keep telling them, if they had wanted me to be observant, they would have had to be sincerely religious and observant themselves and have provided me with that Jewish home she’s always carrying on about. They aren’t and they didn’t: I’m being badgered to go through the motions of a ritual I don’t believe in. I’ll leave that sort of stuff to the Grand Inquisitor.
    The mention of the Karamazovs, whose appearances in his conversation were frequent, cracked me up. All right, he said, what I really mean, and what I tell them when I’m really worked up, is that I can’t seek out my own kind because I don’t know who they are. Maybe there are no such people. I’m not sure that I’m like anybody else. I won’t pretend that I am.
    For a moment I pondered the possibility that he was trying to say he might be queer. I didn’t think he was—not just because he was so obviously attracted to girls. I just didn’t think so. At the same time I was reminded once