Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss

as to what this act had been. They concluded that it must have been a prank that his natural grief for the old man had blown out of all proportion.

7. CHIP
    C HIP AT Y ALE began to believe that it might be possible to become the master of his own destiny. In the larger view of life that emancipation from boarding school opened to him, he was able at last to fit his parents into his background in such a way as not wholly to obliterate it. He even thought that he was learning to understand them, and with this prospect there came a kind of compassion. After all, they certainly meant well, at least according to their own lights, and if they were unable to see the beauty in all the pleasures of life, the beauty in what they called sin, it might be sage to remember that they, too, had had parents.
    The great thing for him to accept, as he now saw it, was himself. His heart, his mind, his body, composed the donnee of his life. If these should not be adequate for the role of Charles Benedict as Elihu and Matilda conceived it, then that might simply be too bad. If people found him attractive, if people wanted to fuss over him, where was the harm? They were probably making a mistake, but that was their lookout. “Chip loves Chip; that is, ‘I am I,’ ” he paraphrased Richard III. Was he good? Was he bad? He had first to find out
what
he was. Free will, if it existed at all, would have to wait.
    He declined to confine himself to his classmates at Saint Luke’s and those of its long-time athletic rival, Chelton; these were too cliquish for his taste; and he found the men from Hotchkiss, Andover and Choate more interested in the college as a whole than in the common denominator of their own social backgrounds. It was perfectly true, as he pointed out to his roommate, Lars Alversen, that their group was entirely prep school, but so long as it included the men who ran the
News,
the Political Union and the fraternities, might it not be an adequate cross section? Would it not be artificial to go about canvassing men from high schools or on scholarships? Or would it? Chip was not sure. He still worried about being a snob.
    Lars cited the man across the hall who, in his determination to know every member of their class, had posted a list on his wall and checked off each name as he met its owner. Lars, leery of anything in excess, dubbed him an egregious ass.
    â€œBut don’t those people get results?” Chip asked earnestly. “Can you really accomplish anything in life if you’re not willing to make a bit of an ass of yourself?”
    Yale, at any rate, kept filling his life with pleasant things. He was on the
News',
he sang with the Wiffenpoofs; he rode on the Berkeley crew; he joined Zeta Xi; and his grades promised him Phi Beta Kappa. He was majoring in English, which everybody seemed to agree was the best preparation for law, and he enjoyed Chauncey Tinker’s emotional disquisitions on the British Romantic poets and Johnny Berdan’s more trenchant analysis of Pope. His friends confidently predicted that in the spring of junior year he would be tapped for Bulldog, the most coveted of the senior societies.
    There was one member of his class, however, whose company he never sought. Chessy Bogart and he nodded to each other when they passed on campus or met in class, but that was all. Chessy, since Saint Luke’s, had turned into something of an intellectual as well as a dandy; he was an editor of the
Lit
and wore black suits that fitted him too tightly. He let it be known that a maternal uncle had made a shady fortune in the Argentine and, being childless, had conceived the fancy of taking the dentist’s son under his wing. Chessy had boldness and wit; he knew how and when to make up to people. He never thrust himself on Chip, but neither did he avoid him. There was always a touch of derision, a bit of a sneer, in his casual greeting.
    Chip did not resent this. There was even a small, bizarre