Matters of Honor (6 page)

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 back one of them into a corner of a room packed with undergraduates in full cry to have what he called a quiet talk. Tête-à-tête he could be dazzling. He listened carefully to what was said to him or at least gave that impression. He was less good in groups, especially groups of men. His timidity was one reason—he compensated for it by what I called his Penthesilea-meets-son-of-Peleus preciousness—and his utter ignorance of sports was another. He had never been to a baseball game. Archie had dragged him to a couple of football games at Soldiers’ Field and tried to explain to him the basics. Henry could discourse on books with great brio, and that is what he presumably talked about with those girls. However, the girls who came to these parties, even if they liked books, intimidated him by their provocative, hard-edged manners and staccato wit, and by their trick of creating an illusion of physical intimacy, of almost being in your arms, an illusion they could dispel as quickly as it had been created. Instead, he had dates with Radcliffe girls Archie called Henry’s dogs: sincere and nice girls too fat or too skinny, with legs bowed or shaped like a Percheron’s. He made no mystery of why. You can ask them out at the last minute, he explained, you don’t have to huff and puff for the privilege of feeling them up, and the risk of rejection is minimal. It was all true, but I thought he was selling himself short. Although he certainly didn’t fit the
Stover at Yale
stereotype, he was handsome, and it wasn’t his conversation alone that made him fleetingly attractive to the girls at parties given by Archie’s friends. I preached the lesson of self-confidence to Henry over and over. He would hear me out very politely. Once, exasperated, I asked whether this was another manifestation of the Jewish problem and, if it was, did he tell the dogs that he was a Jew. Cool as a cucumber, he replied that of course it was, it was all about being Jewish. As to what he told the dogs, he said there was no general rule: it depended on what he was doing with them. I was puzzled. This seemed a departure from his policy neither to deny Jewism nor proclaim it unbidden. Did he kiss or fondle them without saying that he was a Jew, but inform them if something more was in the offing? I said to myself that he surely told them, and right away was shocked by my own attitude. Did it imply that being Jewish was like having untreated gonorrhea?

Sometime before Thanksgiving Henry told me he thought he had found Penthesilea in his humanities course. The cavernous space of Sanders barely held the crowd drawn by lectures of the visiting professor, a well-known and controversial litterateur. So far, Henry had studied the girl only from a distance, but, if it was indeed Penthesilea, he knew her more prosaic name: Margot Hornung. Another girl called Sue, next to whom he usually sat, had told him all about her. They had attended the same girls’ school in the city. Henry thought Sue liked him. Yes, she’s a dog, he admitted. Sue and he talked before and after class, passed notes to each other, and went for tea and English muffins at Hayes-Bickford. He had never met a bigger gossip. I was curious to hear the tales she told, but Henry said there wasn’t any point until I had confirmed the identification. He proposed that I come to Sanders for that purpose the next day. It was a silly idea: we had each had the same opportunity to study her looks. Finally, I gave in, in part because I was curious about the visiting professor. We got to Sanders early, and there were still some empty seats up front, but Henry pulled me along to one of the back rows. When I protested, he said that I’d be able to hear perfectly well. Anyway, that was where Sue sat, and she was saving our places. She turned out to be a pleasant-looking blond who showed braces over tiny yellow teeth when she smiled. Henry sat down between us. The hall was filling up, and I had begun to wonder whether the girl would appear, when Henry poked me and pointed to the door nearest the podium. There she is, he whispered. There was no question about it; it was Penthesilea of green stockings, now in navy-blue socks and penny loafers. I gave him the thumbs-up sign.

I had to go to another class after the lecture and said goodbye to Henry and Sue as soon as we left Sanders. But Henry and I met for lunch at the Union. With her identity confirmed, I thought he would have finally spoken to Margot. He seemed startled at the idea and told me that he certainly hadn’t. His plan was to continue to lie low. In fact, he had already gotten Sue to promise never to mention to Margot his name or his interest in her. It was my turn to be surprised. I asked how this squared with wanting to declare his undying love from the moment he first saw Margot.

It doesn’t, he fired back. I told you the stars weren’t aligned. It was a dumb thing to think and a dumb thing to say, but at least I was smart enough not to do anything of the sort. I don’t want to be humiliated.

Archie and Henry hadn’t yet reequipped themselves at Keezer’s. When Henry confirmed my hunch that his wardrobe was a problem, I let him feel my exasperation. Had he not yet realized that so far no one had rejected him because of the way he was dressed?

How would you know? he replied. Disdain is something you feel in your bones. I know what I feel in mine.

After a pause he said, The immediate problem is whether I should stop seeing Sue. She’s very affectionate and nice, but Margot and she live in the same dorm, they spend their time with the same girls. I want to avoid complications. I think I have to drop her—very gently.

I made no comment.

We finished lunch and walked back to the dormitory. On the way he started to tell me what he had learned about Margot. The gist of it was that her parents were rich and elegant enough to be featured regularly in fashion magazines. They were said to know everyone who was famous and important. This made them the subject of a good deal of talk among the other girls at the school and their parents. The details were interesting. Margot’s father had been an important banker in Amsterdam before the war. Most people seemed to know he was a Jew. However, the mother was a real American; that is to say she wasn’t Jewish. According to school lore, Mr. Hornung had “bought” her when she was a cabaret singer performing at the Pierre, and Margot was born five months later. Both events were café society news in the New York tabloids even though Mr. Hornung had taken his bride and child back to Holland. He was no fool. Already in 1938, he began transferring his capital and his collections to New York. Then, in June 1939, the family, accompanied by the English nanny who was still with the Hornungs, tranquilly sailed to New York aboard a Cunarder and were reunited with the money and the art. They moved into their present apartment on Park Avenue in time for Margot to go to school that fall. According to Sue, the apartment was like the Frick Collection. Mr. Hornung made a second fortune on Wall Street, which may be the reason they hadn’t moved back to Amsterdam.

I sensed it, Henry said, as soon as I saw the mother, I sensed what kind of people they are. None of them would give me the time of day, no matter how I was dressed. I’ll have to make Margot my long-term project. In the meantime, I’ll stay away. Don’t want to screw it up.

I agreed that the mother was glamorous. But was that a reason for a Radcliffe freshman—a Jewish or half-Jewish one at that—to refuse to go out with a Jewish undergraduate she had already tried to pick up? Just because her parents were loaded and knew Picasso and the Windsors?

Henry said, You can’t really be that stupid.

I didn’t take offense, but our conversation was over. Henry had to go to the library to read a book that was on reserve. However, we returned to the subject of the Hornungs that evening and in the days that followed. As we talked, I learned, in bits and pieces, the war story that Archie had wanted to hear. Henry spoke reluctantly, and I believe that if his mind had not been fixed on Margot he wouldn’t have said so much.

Apparently, Henry’s father had not been really rich before the war; he had been merely very well-to-do, on the scale of successful Jewish businessmen in Poland, one that, Henry stressed, was different from the scale valid in Holland or elsewhere in Western Europe. Poland was a poor country, he insisted; “rich” or “well-to-do” there wasn’t the same as for instance in London. The family business was the export of foodstuffs, especially Polish hams, which were a major producer of revenue for the country, and arts and crafts and decorators’ wares like kilims. There were also investments in real estate in Krakow, where they lived. Mr. White had obtained a law degree and was about to begin the obligatory lawyer’s apprenticeship when his father died. As the only son, he had to take over the business. His choice of bride was conventional in the extreme. He married the daughter of the leading Jewish lawyer, also very well-to-do, and received a handsome dowry, including an apartment building on a good street within the walls of the old city. She had finished her own university studies, in Polish literature, and, when Mr. White sought her hand, was planning to obtain the higher degree required for teaching in state secondary schools. That project came to nothing, in part because eleven months after the marriage Henry was born. Running my father’s household took up all her time, said Henry, even though she had a staff of four or five. The new family like the parents was too well placed, too respectable, and too Polish in speech and habit to have suffered in daily life from the campaign of insults and indignities directed at Jews beginning with the coming to power, after Marshal Pilsudski died, of a right-wing nationalistic and anti-Semitic regime. That had to wait for the arrival of the Germans.

Krakow became the seat of the German government of Poland, and there was no delay in requiring Jews to wear the yellow star, or in the establishment of the ghetto in the old Jewish quarter called Kazimierz. Before that happened, however, his mother’s parents fled to Zakopane, in the Tatry Mountains, where it had been their custom to spend the summer months, always at the same hotel. The owner had agreed to hide them. Henry’s parents never found out exactly where or how they were hidden; the general idea had been that they would be out of sight and earshot—therefore out of danger—in a cottage outside Zakopane belonging to that man. Did he eventually tire of harboring Jews? Did he sell them to the Polish police or directly to the Gestapo? Did a neighbor denounce them? None of his father’s inquiries after the war elicited answers he could trust. He did hear that a Jewish couple that could well have been his in-laws was taken to the Gestapo building in Zakopane before Christmas of 1942 never to be seen again. The hotel keeper himself died in 1943, apparently of pneumonia; his family had moved away. The father found it troubling that the man should have died of a natural cause; it suggested treachery on his part. If he had been denounced for harboring Jews, in all probability he would have been shot.

The road to safety followed by Henry’s parents was similar, but it did not end in disaster. His mother’s old Latin teacher at the
gimnazjum
—he explained that this was Polish high school—one Pani Maria, a remarkable woman who during her youth had been involved in the Polish socialist independence movement, spontaneously offered to take Henry and his mother into her house on the outskirts of Krakow and hide them until the end of the war, which she didn’t doubt would end in Germany’s defeat. No less impressive than her courage and generosity were Pani Maria’s scholarship and literary attainments. She was the author of the best Polish translation of Horace’s Odes and Epodes. What she proposed seemed practical: she was widowed, living alone, with no relatives near Krakow. There was no need to fear the interference or indiscretion of visitors, and the house had a room that had always been shuttered. She would block it off. Pani Maria thought that if they were very careful the thing could be done. But she would not agree to take in Mr. White as well. She freely admitted that her decision was not rational. Quite simply, she believed that her nerves couldn’t bear the presence of a second adult in that room behind a concealed door. Henry’s parents didn’t think they could get her to go back on that position. It was better to find another hiding place for Mr. White. He had a manager who had worked in his firm for many years, with whom he had always had excellent relations. The man hesitated, his wife had to be convinced, but finally he agreed to take in Mr. White. Mr. White didn’t wait to be asked: as soon as the man said yes, he signed over to him the ownership of the firm, the buildings he and Mrs. White owned, and every other asset to which title could be transferred. The manager said, Don’t worry, if we survive, we will sort this out fairly. They shook hands on it. The real difference between the hiding places was that Mr. White had to live in the cellar. The manager had small children as well as the wife; it was impossible to stop strangers from coming into the house.

Anyway, Henry said, we did make it through the war, and when the Russians chased the Germans out of Krakow, we staggered into the street like people who had been trapped in a mine. Out of all our family we alone had survived.

I was shaken by the story, and by the manner in which he told it: matter-of-fact and somehow dismissive.

What happened next? I asked.

When? After the war? We lived in Krakow for a while, in our old apartment, which had been taken over by Germans who had left in a hurry. It wasn’t necessary to evict any Poles, and the Germans had left our furniture in place. The man who saved my father’s life agreed to give him enough money to live on and to back him in some deals on the black market. They split the profits. It was a good arrangement. After a while, my father was doing so well that he was sorry to leave the business. Pani Maria—I loved her more than anybody—died of the flu followed by pneumonia. Then the summer was over and it was time for me to enter the
gimnazjum.
All I knew was Polish literature that I read with my mother, and Polish composition, and the Latin and German that I did with Pani Maria. I crammed and passed. There was a chance to buy some kind of visa that allowed us to get out of Poland and into Belgium. My father jumped at it. From Belgium we went to New York. There was one thing my father hadn’t signed over. That was the firm’s bank account at the Morgan Bank in New York, and, by reason of some prewar Polish tax requirements, it was in his own name. So we had a little money, after all, and in the end we were able to settle in Brooklyn.