Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss Page A

relief at the reappearance of the little devil with the prodding pitchfork; once he knew where he was, he didn’t have to keep looking around for him. It might almost be a game to see whether this imp, whose function it presumably was to know his victim’s secrets, would discover what none of Chip’s friends had found out: that he paid a monthly visit to an expensive private brothel maintained by a group of businessmen in a brownstone on West Seventieth Street in Manhattan.
    Chip had been introduced to this “club” by an older first cousin, Peter Duvinock, a nephew of his father and the son of the critical aunt who had spoken so sneeringly of Chip’s mother’s “great match.” Peter, who bitterly resented that Uncle Elihu had found him too slow for the family business and had placed him in the Wall Street bank that handled the Benedict trusts, had conceived of the idea of revenging himself by corrupting the family’s Galahad. He had been taken aback, however, by Chip’s ripeness for debauchery. His younger and richer cousin had promptly become a regular customer of the establishment and had demonstrated his gratitude by offering to help his initiator with the very stiff dues. Peter had to concede that his mother’s beautiful nephew was a lot less naive than he appeared and treated him thereafter with a noticeable increase of respect.
    Chip was never tempted to boast of these visits, as would have so many of his contemporaries at Yale. He knew that his need of the girls with whom he had intercourse was a deeper thing in his psyche than in his classmates’. If he kept it from all but the equally damned Peter, might he not create a dichotomy in his life in which at least one aspect, the Yale aspect, the home aspect, would be saved? As the girls on West Seventieth Street were part of his Venusberg, he could dissociate them entirely from love. Love was the great hall in
Tannhäuser
and Elizabeth’s prayer; he would never make the mistake of wronging that august presence with a scandalous song. Even when one of the girls at the bar of the brownstone, intrigued by a customer so much younger and more shapely than the broad-bellied brokers, would whisper in his ear that she was available without charge on her day off, he would respond only with a smile and a joke about union rules. He wanted to pay.
    Not that it was always so easy to find the money. West Seventieth Street was indeed for the rich. Chip received a large allowance from his father, more than that of even the richest undergraduate from New York, but it was part of Elihu Benedict’s parental policy to teach his son to handle obligations as well as privileges by hooking on to the bestowed income the duty to support some poor relations, of whom, as the family fortune was not old, there were a goodly number.
    â€œYou are at liberty to blow your income on fast cars and racehorses,” Elihu would tell his son with that amiable smile which belied the implied suspicion. “But if you do, Cousin Cora and Cousin Louise may have to go into a state home. Who knows? Maybe they’d be just as happy there. But
I
am certainly not going to pay their mortgage.”
    Chip, of course, was fairly confident that his father would pay the old girls’ mortgage if he defaulted, but it was unthinkable that he should ever do so. He found, however, that with a large income, regularly paid, it was not difficult to borrow, and he thrust into the future the ultimate solution of paying for both the demands of his body and the upkeep of his old maid cousins.
    As junior year drew to a close, Chip began to think more about the future. He had lived so long and so intensely amid the emotional trauma of the present that he had tended to leave the future to itself. Besides, had it not been arranged for him? He knew that his father expected him to go to law school and then practice for a time in the Wall Street firm that represented the