Matters of Honor by Louis Begley

although, if we weren’t there, being on the sofa in the living room was acceptable. It followed that we stayed clear of the dormitory until the end of parietal hours when Archie brought her over on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. She was also willing to park with Archie, after dark, on quiet Cambridge or Wellesley streets, or along the Charles. The only problem was that Archie didn’t yet own a car. He could borrow one occasionally, but these loans couldn’t be arranged often enough to satisfy him or, perhaps, even Clara, and so hardly accelerated his progress. Jeanie, the girl from the junior college across the river, was also Catholic, and Irish to boot, which lowered her in Archie’s esteem. Disrespect does away with many a barrier to conquest—in addition to acting as an aphrodisiac. On the afternoon of Jeanie’s second visit to our rooms—no suggestion was made that Henry and I withdraw to the Lamont while Archie and Jeanie were behind the closed door of his bedroom—they emerged holding hands, with only a minute or two to spare before girls had to be signed out. I’ve separated the boy from the man, Jeanie announced. Archie signaled assent and hustled her out. Being sensitive to manners and diction, he may have felt embarrassed by the form not to say the simple fact of her declaration, which Henry later told me he had found unbearably sexy. Before long, however, Jeanie’s availability—she thought nothing of coming to Harvard Square by subway, and never insisted that Archie take her back to Beacon Street even late in the evening—trumped the Salvadorean’s well-bred elegance and charm. Archie took to calling Clara only at hours when he knew she wouldn’t be in her dormitory, for instance when she had a class. He would leave a message that he had telephoned. Nothing more. Then he stopped calling her altogether. This tactic confused Clara. She took telephone messages seriously, thought they should be returned, and began calling our room to ask what was wrong. Archie never picked up the receiver; his instinct for avoiding calls he didn’t want to answer was nearly infallible.
    Most often, Clara spoke to me. Sometime after Christmas, she invited me to a record dance at Wellesley. She said she was used to being treated gently, and I was gentle. To jump ahead in time, in the spring of that year, Archie became the owner of a four-door black Nash, the most important feature of which was the fold-down front seat that made a fairly comfortable bed. I borrowed the Nash to take Clara to the Wellesley prom. We were leaving when she whispered that she wouldn’t have to sign in at her dormitory by midnight, as the rules required even on that very important occasion. She had told the housemother that she was staying over with a friend in Newton, and had produced the necessary letter from the friend’s parents confirming the invitation. We can be out as late as you like, she said. Then she stuck her tongue in my ear. We drove over to the lake and parked, and I put down the car seat. A little later, she wiggled out of her long strapless pink taffeta dress telling me that otherwise it would be ruined. Before dawn, overcoming my panic, she brought us to a simulacrum of mutual fulfillment. It was, she assured me, without damage to her hymen. That summer, she married the eldest son of a coffee-growing family whose plantation abutted the property of her parents. Through the university administration, she got hold of my home address and sent me an invitation to the wedding mass. Naturally, she did not return to Wellesley, and I was relieved of the need to face future relations.

    T HE TRANSFORMATION that Archie was undergoing during our freshman year didn’t involve only clothes. He wanted to live up to his Roman numeral, with all its connotations for a connoisseur of American society. Mrs. White was on the right track when she supposed that a young man called Archibald P. Palmer III was likely to have rich parents; both she