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

more that he really was a good deal like me, one difference being that his problems were more obvious and could be blamed mostly on being Jewish.
    So what do you intend to do about finding out? I asked.
    Nothing, he said. Everything. I am going to remake myself in the image I carry inside me.
    What that image might be and how it fit with Poland and the scars the war had left were a mystery. My attempts to probe, whether out of curiosity or compassion, got me only so far. The previous day when, having screwed up my courage, I asked him to tell me something about how he and his parents had survived the war was a good example. He had stared at me and said quietly, A nice lady hid my mother and me. A nice man hid my father.

IV
    H ENRY’S
non serviam
did not stand in the way of more conventional attempts at transformation. His principal mentor and accomplice was Archie. Archie’s disgust with the efforts of his mother’s tailor in Panama City endured unabated, as did his conviction that they gave him the “Don Ramón look.” All I need, he said, is a pencil-line mustache. A solution to Archie’s and Henry’s sartorial problems emerged when Archie discovered Keezer’s, a Cambridge establishment rich in university tradition, located in the town-and-gown no-man’s-land between Prescott Street and Central Square. One could buy there on the cheap, among many other props required for an undergraduate’s social ascension, well-cut secondhand tweeds, dinner jackets, and morning coats, often in fine condition. The Keezer brothers’ main suppliers were widows of newly deceased faculty members and alumni. A customer was welcome to trade in his own clothes, which is what Archie did with the Panamanian tailor’s creations. Whatever his view of their cut, the quality was so high that at the end of the transaction Archie owed Keezer’s nothing. It was his plan that Henry engage in the same sort of exchange; his clothes, although off the rack, were also of good quality. Unexpectedly, Henry balked.
    I can’t, he said. When I go home, my mother will expect me to wear the clothes she bought for me. I’ll never hear the end of it if I tell her they’ve been sold.
    They were at an impasse; without a substantial trade-in credit, Henry couldn’t pay for what Archie had picked out for him. Unwilling to accept defeat, he made Henry a loan, not a large sum, to be repaid over the balance of the school year. They invited me to the final fitting, Keezer’s being expert at even the most improbable alterations. Archie had done well. If clothes made the man, Henry now could pass for an undergraduate who had been to one of the right schools and knew how to dress.
    The loan was a sign that Archie was going through one of his flush periods. They didn’t last long, but while they did, a good deal of cash was spent at the liquor store on Mount Auburn Street and at Henri IV, a French restaurant on Winthrop Street in vogue among the faculty and more affluent students as well as parents of undergraduates in Cambridge for the weekend. Archie was fond of rituals. One that he adopted that fall was having lunch on Saturdays at the Henri IV with Clara, a Wellesley freshman from San Salvador with whom he could use his excellent Spanish. It was also where he occasionally entertained a girl from a college in Back Bay known for courses in home economics and students with better bodies than brains. Getting her back to her dormitory by ten or eleven in the evening, the hour by which, depending on the day of the week, she had to be signed in, was easier than getting Clara back to Wellesley. He explained to Henry and me that Clara was very Catholic and brought up in the cult of virginity, so the likelihood of getting beyond what he had already attained—when they kissed she let him put his hand under her Pringle sweater and unhook her bra—was discouragingly small. For instance, Clara refused to go into his bedroom, whether or not Henry and I were around,