Matters of Honor Read Online Free PDF Page A

efforts to be girlish—so different from my mother’s—and by her assumption that we were allies in the struggle to keep her son’s affections. She flirted with me, and before long we became telephone friends. She would ask about my parents and my studies, sometimes extending her inquiries to include Archie, with whom her contacts were rare, since he was seldom in the room when she telephoned, and, when he happened to be there, hardly ever picked up the receiver. He claimed that he was bad at taking messages. His own parents, like mine, never called, and he preferred to have his other calls filtered by me. Sometimes Mrs. White threw in a little compliment. For instance, she would say that it was wonderful how I was at my desk all the time, doing my homework. She addressed me as Mr. Roommate, and, although I begged her to call me Sam, she stuck to it.
    I wondered what Henry thought of the bare trickle of communication between his roommates and their respective parents. That he had noticed how different our habits were from his was certain; just as he had warned me, he noticed everything. But did he disapprove? Did he take it as a sign that our parents took little interest in us, or that we were callously neglecting our filial duties? I didn’t expect any overt disapproval; he was too polite for that. The subject came up, however, one evening, after a movie. He asked point-blank whether I called my parents at hours when he wasn’t in the room, or from a pay phone. Otherwise, it would seem that my parents and I were hardly ever in touch. The same question had occurred to him about Archie and his parents. The complications of my home life were what they were, and I wasn’t about to explain them to Henry. Instead I told him a half-truth. I said it was probably a matter of habit. I had been sent to boarding school at thirteen, and my parents and I had gotten used to my being away from home. They didn’t worry about me.
    He interjected: I’ve never been away from my mother, not until I came here.
    I said, My deal is different from yours, that’s all. I do call home, but only if something important comes up.
    But that means that you’ve lost touch with your parents.
    I replied that I did write to them from time to time, and that my mother wrote to me fairly often with Berkshire news. Henry acknowledged having seen the lavender envelopes addressed in my mother’s schoolgirl script, with her return address invariably appearing in the upper-left-hand corner. And I do telephone, I continued, I called her on her birthday only last week.
    He returned to relations among parents and sons abruptly the next day, saying that he was obliged to write twice a week and call every two days. I confessed that his mother had already told me about the calls. But it was as though he had not heard me.
    If I don’t make that call or write that letter, he continued, she makes scenes. She yells at me and yells at my father, because she claims that he isn’t strict enough with me. Then he gets pains in his chest and tells her she is driving him to his grave, and she calls to let me have it for making my father sick and breaking up their marriage. The angina is the worst part. I don’t want to be responsible for a heart attack. So I write and call, whether or not I feel like it, and whether or not I have anything to say.
    Those are difficult conversations, he added after a pause. They’re enough to make you hate the telephone.
    As an embarrassed auditor of many of them, I couldn’t disagree. In a burst of frankness, I told him that sometimes they sounded like quarrels. Henry didn’t take offense; he laughed.
    All the same, he said, I have to do it. Wondering whether there might be a two-way flow of anxiety in the White family, I asked whether he worried about his parents when he was late making one of those calls.
    No, he replied, I don’t, although perhaps I should, because of my father. It’s really my mother who’s a problem. My father