Matters of Honor by Louis Begley Page A

and Henry showed an instinctive grasp of the lore of American old money. Had Mrs. White learned about the checks that Archie received—irregularly but sometimes in substantial amounts—she would have thought herself proved right. In fact, she was mistaken; the money wasn’t old, and its source wasn’t a family trust. According to Archie, it flowed from his mother’s various unglamorous little businesses, most recently the importation and resale of primitive art and antiquities. Nor was Archie related in any demonstrable way to the grand and wealthy Palmers of Chicago. His middle name was humble: Peters. However, he liked the impression produced by his surname and the enhancing Roman numeral and made no effort to dispel it. Faced with a question on the order of “Is Mrs. Potter Palmer your aunt or cousin?” Archie would laugh and say she was neither. No harm was done. People to whom such things mattered, even undergraduates, were too knowledgeable to take it for granted that someone called Morgan must be connected to the banking house, or that there is only one kind of Rockefeller.
    At the same time, Archie did exert himself to make clear to undergraduates he considered useful that, although in a sense he came from nowhere, he should be regarded as their social equal. He simply acted on the English principle that a man may be born a gentleman and remain one even if his material circumstances are depressingly modest and he lacks powerful friends. The latter was certainly Archie’s case. Unlike the men he wanted to emulate, he had no friends at college with whom he had been to grammar and prep school, there had been no shared vacations in Northeast Harbor or Tucson, and no one knew his mother and father. From his point of view, that was an unfortunate consequence of his father’s army career, one that he could and must correct. Accordingly, he believed that as a matter of right he should be asked, at the beginning of our sophomore year, to join one of the final clubs whose quaint buildings on Mount Auburn Street and its vicinity he had inventoried. He wanted to wear a club tie—the right tie, not all clubs being equal. Among the rewards would be getting his name on the lists compiled by social secretaries, which assured one of invitations to coming-out parties, cotillions, and assemblies. Later, it would be entry into the old-boy network and first-class passage to posh Wall Street firms. Though a romantic, Archie was clear-eyed about practical matters: he didn’t shoot for the moon. There were two or three clubs that he realized were simply out of the question however hard he tried. They were also out of reach for all but a few whose fathers, grandfathers, and uncles hadn’t been members. The less grand but still respectable clubs, however, should not shun him. The trick was how to make that understood. The usual route, reminding relatives and upperclassmen with whom you had been at school that you were a freshman and implicitly available, was not open to him. No one outside the British Isles had heard of his boarding school in Scotland, and it probably wasn’t a household name even there. The military academy in Ohio to which he was sent after his father’s posting to the Canal Zone was also obscure. Archie had to fend for himself. Very astutely, he decided to make the most of two of his special skills. In Scotland, he had learned to play rugby—rather effectively, for someone of his slight build. Joining the rugby club, which existed at the fringe of university sports, threw him in with English and Canadian undergraduates and business school students, a number of whom were long on cosmopolitan polish and money. Archie’s other trump card was his near-native Spanish. He liked to use it and did well ferreting out events likely to be attended by Latin American students at the college and at neighboring institutions. In the 1950s, a Latino who had been sent to a New England college or, better yet, boarding school