Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss Page B

family company. Ultimately he would be president of the company, unless he chose to remain in the law, putting in a brother-in-law as president (if one of his sisters married the right man) and moving himself up to chairman of the board. Surely it behooved him now to consider whether this was what he really wanted. And if he were to discover that he did want it—as well he might—should he not do something first to convince himself that he was not simply drifting into it? That he was Chip as well as Charles Benedict?
    Lars Alversen also had doubts as to his own future, and they had long talks at night over many beers in the study that connected their two bedrooms with windows open to the clamor of College Street below.
    Lars was not a large and brawny Norseman, as his name might have suggested, but was rather on the diminutive side, with features of a remarkable delicacy and with long, soft, brown hair. His skin was very pale, his cheekbones high, his nose short yet Roman, and his eyes, the color of his hair, bespoke humor and sympathy. For all the fineness of his constitution, there was yet a distinct masculinity to the whole, as if some ancestral Norse warrior had not been left altogether in the past, but would reappear on occasion in his descendant’s half-humorous aggressiveness and oddly braying laugh. Lars had considerable charm, of which he appeared to be half-ashamed. He alternated between the pose of being one of the crowd and that of holding himself above it and, finally, he would laugh at both attitudes.
    The son of a rich, self-made Boston importer, he had gone to Andover, like many of the leaders of the class, and it was he who had been primarily responsible for detaching Chip from his Saint Luke’s group and launching him into the heart of undergraduate affairs. It had taken Chip a little while to figure out his new friend’s inconsistencies. Lars would pretend to be a feckless epicurean at afternoon tea at the Elizabethan Club and then stay up all night working at the
News.
It was generally recognized in their group that Chip and Lars’s friendship was special.
    â€œYou know what they’re saying, don’t you?” Lars put it to Chip one night. “That you’re going to be the last man tapped for Bulldog.”
    It was the custom at Yale for the members of the junior class on Tap Day to assemble in the center of the Branford College quadrangle and wait silently until members of the six senior societies, approaching their candidates from behind, would strike them smartly on the shoulder and cry, “Go to your room!” The tappee, glancing around to be sure that he had been bid by a society that he wanted, unless, like most, he was delighted to be tapped for any of the six, would then take off on the double, followed closely by his tapper. In his room he presumably would be sworn into the secret rites of the society behind the windowless walls of which he would spend every Thursday and Saturday evening of his senior year, in the company of the fourteen other members. As Bulldog was the most esteemed of these societies, the last man it tapped was generally conceded to be the foremost man of the class.
    â€œDon’t you get sick of all the chatter?” Chip asked impatiently. “Who’ll get what? Who’ll turn down what, hoping for what? It’s all deals and counterdeals. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to be in any of them without you. Shall we hold out for Keys?”
    â€œBut your old man would expire if you turned down Bulldog!”
    â€œMaybe that’s a risk I’ll have to take.”
    â€œOf course, it’s easier for me, with a father who didn’t even go to college. All I have to do is tell him that Keys is better than Bulldog, and he’ll swallow it whole. And Mummie doesn’t know if they’re football teams or New Haven bars.”
    Chip had a vision of life as a kind of fluid pudding, with a mother as inane as