Matters of Honor by Louis Begley

company, especially if a Jew was present—unless, like old Gummy, you were telling jokes about Weisberg, Goldberg, and the like. In that respect it was not unlike “homosexual,” or some of the less antiseptic variants in use at Harvard: queer, fairy, queen, pervert, faggot, fruit, and pederast. Nevertheless, I was certain that Henry had told Archie he was a Jew or else had otherwise brought it out into the open. I was far from sure that they had ever spoken about the war. One reason would have been Archie’s dislike of what he called heavy conversations. His first instinct when he saw one coming was to run or hide. When that was impractical, he would assume an expression of great seriousness, cock his right ear as if not to miss a word, and, in a couple of minutes, bring the audience to a close by some more or less British injunction to buck up coupled with an offer to have another serious chat very soon. A brisk slap on the back or a squeeze of the arm just above the elbow might follow. It wasn’t that Archie lacked compassion; on the contrary, I believe that he shrank from hearing other people’s troubles because they affected him so very acutely. Very little by way of verbal communication was needed for Archie to take measure of anyone. I was sure that after two months of living with Henry at close quarters he doubtless knew all he wanted to know about him; the mechanics of the White family’s survival and immigration to Brooklyn would have fallen into the category of matters better left alone. He would have heard Henry out if that had been what Henry wanted, but he wouldn’t inquire. I had not forgotten that it was he, not I, who first realized that Henry was a Jew, and a Jew who didn’t much care to be recognized as such. The interest he expressed hearing Henry’s story someday had been, I now understood, nothing more than a polite formula. I had also moved toward the view that Archie’s take on Henry’s Jewism was fundamentally correct: the stuff about always being ready to admit that he was Jewish, if someone asked, and to volunteer the information in appropriate cases added up to little more than the determination not to be caught in a humiliating lie.
    Occasionally I thought that I should tell Henry the best policy would be to make clear that he was a Jew as soon as he saw the question coming. I never did. Everything concerning Jews—a subject to which I had devoted little thought before—was too complicated, and Henry’s responses were unpredictable. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I was no good at predicting. For instance, not long after he told me that he was Jewish, I asked whether he had seen
Gentleman’s Agreement.
He nodded. When I asked what he had thought of it, he said that he had liked Gregory Peck and his clothes, the fine apartments, the house in Connecticut, and the restaurants. I replied there was a lot more to the film than the props. The message it sent was important. He shook his head and said, It’s a bottle of aspirin for you and others like you. I protested again. His answer was that Gregory Peck is a Boy Scout on a camping trip. The business of his pretending to be a Jew was like sleeping out in the woods and getting bitten by mosquitoes. On Sunday evening he gets to go home to a hot shower and pancakes with maple syrup. It’s Gregory Peck’s friend, the John Garfield character, he continued, who has to go on being a Jew and dealing with Jew haters. What’s that like? If you want to know what it’s really like to be a Jew, let Shylock tell you. Listen to him while he spews out his rancor and hatred. That, Henry said, is a genuine statement of the Jewish condition. Let Shylock tell you.
    By the way, he added, did you happen to notice that there is no mention in the movie about the murder of however many million Jews in Europe? Five? Six? Seven? Shouldn’t that have come up one way or another? For instance, when one of the rednecks calls the John Garfield