Read Online Matters of Honor by Louis Begley - Free Book Online
Authors: Louis Begley
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Suspense, Psychological, Psychological fiction, Historical, Jewish, Friendship, Nineteen fifties, Antisemitism, Jewish college students
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his credit, he made no serious attempt to wheedle her into coming back.
I was a less frequent guest than Henry at parties given by Archie’s friends. If they were on a Friday, which was the norm, my Boston Symphony subscription was a cast-iron reason for not attending. Probably I would have stayed away in any event. The talk bored me. I hadn’t a doubt that it bored Henry too; however, Archie’s friends were a species he wanted to understand, just as he wanted to learn how to hold his liquor, smoke cigars, play poker and bridge, and acquire the other skills that Archie thought were required of a gentleman. But neither those pursuits, nor any of the other ways of wasting time that Henry discovered on his own, seemed to interfere with other, more arduous aspects of his self-transformation. Perhaps the two were more complementary than I understood.
Just before Christmas vacation, Henry told me that he would major in the classics. He gave his parents the news once he got home. The weeklong row that followed didn’t surprise him. They wanted him to plant his feet firmly in the American middle class. Becoming a doctor would assure that, but they were willing to settle for the law, since he absolutely refused to study medicine or even go through the motions of taking the required college biology and chemistry courses. His crazy idea of throwing away all his advantages, full college scholarship included, on the literature of two dead languages and a future limited by the meager salary he could expect from teaching—assuming a Jew could get a job teaching classics at a university—was a bad joke, an insult to them. I must admit that I too had been taken aback by his choice. He expected to excel in all circumstances, that much was clear, but if he made this choice he would be competing against undergraduates who had learned their Latin, and in many cases Greek as well, at boarding schools that took great pride in teaching those subjects. They had been taught in the same manner, and often by the same people, as members of Harvard’s classics department. I thought that the odds against Henry would be long. Don’t worry, he told me, my Latin is pretty good. I asked whether this was learning acquired at his Brooklyn high school. Not at all, he said, over there I was busy learning English. Then where? I asked. In Krakow, he answered impatiently, in Krakow. I shook my head and suggested he didn’t know what he was getting into. In reply he said that catching up would require little more than memorization. Besides he had good German, itself still useful for classicists. During the same conversation he mentioned having noticed that the grander Latinos had a way of switching from English to French instead of Spanish when they spoke to each other. Obviously, learning French well was also a sound investment. A fiercely accelerated French-language course was offered in the spring semester; Henry signed up.
One aspect of the row with his parents about Latin and Greek bothered Henry; he thought he had been unfair. They thought that concentrating in the classics would preclude his going to law school after college, and he had done nothing to set them straight. He waited until the last day of vacation to tell them how the system worked. I was paying them back, he said. Why couldn’t they leave me alone just once, or, even better, accept that this was a decision I should make? It would have been such a nice change! In return for the last-minute explanation, and a promise that he wasn’t burning his bridges and would keep an open mind about the law, he extracted a price: their agreement to send him to Grenoble for the summer. He had heard good things about the university’s French-language program.
In this and many other things he was way ahead of me. I hadn’t even begun to think of the summer.
V
H ENRY MADE NO MOVE to take out the girls who came to parties given by Archie’s friends, although he got on with them just fine. He’d
I was a less frequent guest than Henry at parties given by Archie’s friends. If they were on a Friday, which was the norm, my Boston Symphony subscription was a cast-iron reason for not attending. Probably I would have stayed away in any event. The talk bored me. I hadn’t a doubt that it bored Henry too; however, Archie’s friends were a species he wanted to understand, just as he wanted to learn how to hold his liquor, smoke cigars, play poker and bridge, and acquire the other skills that Archie thought were required of a gentleman. But neither those pursuits, nor any of the other ways of wasting time that Henry discovered on his own, seemed to interfere with other, more arduous aspects of his self-transformation. Perhaps the two were more complementary than I understood.
Just before Christmas vacation, Henry told me that he would major in the classics. He gave his parents the news once he got home. The weeklong row that followed didn’t surprise him. They wanted him to plant his feet firmly in the American middle class. Becoming a doctor would assure that, but they were willing to settle for the law, since he absolutely refused to study medicine or even go through the motions of taking the required college biology and chemistry courses. His crazy idea of throwing away all his advantages, full college scholarship included, on the literature of two dead languages and a future limited by the meager salary he could expect from teaching—assuming a Jew could get a job teaching classics at a university—was a bad joke, an insult to them. I must admit that I too had been taken aback by his choice. He expected to excel in all circumstances, that much was clear, but if he made this choice he would be competing against undergraduates who had learned their Latin, and in many cases Greek as well, at boarding schools that took great pride in teaching those subjects. They had been taught in the same manner, and often by the same people, as members of Harvard’s classics department. I thought that the odds against Henry would be long. Don’t worry, he told me, my Latin is pretty good. I asked whether this was learning acquired at his Brooklyn high school. Not at all, he said, over there I was busy learning English. Then where? I asked. In Krakow, he answered impatiently, in Krakow. I shook my head and suggested he didn’t know what he was getting into. In reply he said that catching up would require little more than memorization. Besides he had good German, itself still useful for classicists. During the same conversation he mentioned having noticed that the grander Latinos had a way of switching from English to French instead of Spanish when they spoke to each other. Obviously, learning French well was also a sound investment. A fiercely accelerated French-language course was offered in the spring semester; Henry signed up.
One aspect of the row with his parents about Latin and Greek bothered Henry; he thought he had been unfair. They thought that concentrating in the classics would preclude his going to law school after college, and he had done nothing to set them straight. He waited until the last day of vacation to tell them how the system worked. I was paying them back, he said. Why couldn’t they leave me alone just once, or, even better, accept that this was a decision I should make? It would have been such a nice change! In return for the last-minute explanation, and a promise that he wasn’t burning his bridges and would keep an open mind about the law, he extracted a price: their agreement to send him to Grenoble for the summer. He had heard good things about the university’s French-language program.
In this and many other things he was way ahead of me. I hadn’t even begun to think of the summer.
V
H ENRY MADE NO MOVE to take out the girls who came to parties given by Archie’s friends, although he got on with them just fine. He’d
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