Matters of Honor Read Online Free PDF Page B

outrage. He helped himself to another cup of tea and then asked: Did your parents object when you said you wanted to go away to college?
    I said they had no practical choice. Even if I had chosen one of the two colleges that were closer to Lenox, I would have still been going away.
    He nodded. That was pretty much what Archie had told him about his own case, except that Archie’s situation was special anyway, since the Palmers lived on an army base and might be obliged to move from wherever they were on very short notice. By the way, he added, the reason my parents take it so hard is that they think I wanted to come to this place mainly to get away from them. For instance, if I had gone to Columbia, which is in the city and has a very good reputation, I could have lived at home. Even if I had lived in a dormitory, I could have taken the subway home every weekend. They’d have had me tethered. With Harvard, there is no way I can be in Brooklyn every weekend. Ergo, I’ve rejected them and must atone. But for what and how? That’s not a question I have put, but I know what they want: obedience. Obedience in every other respect. That’s what torture by the telephone is about, not to mention the rest of the stuff that you don’t even know.
    I couldn’t help telling Henry that he was describing a Hollywood cliché. The only son packs his bags and heads for State U, four hundred miles away. The girl next door has hysterics; the mother weeps but tries hard to be brave; the father makes a stern face and secretly wipes away a tear. Then the kid becomes the captain of the football team. After graduation he marries the girl, all the fraternity brothers show up at the wedding, and everybody lives happily ever after.
    Your story, I said, is just a variation on the basic plot, except that you can’t throw a long pass. Any kind of pass!
    Sure, Henry answered, that’s very funny, but we aren’t an American family with an American sense of humor. I can tell you that no matter how often my mother goes to the movies and laughs at clichés like that, she will never accept that any such thing should happen to her. Not after everything she’s been through, everything she has seen, everything she has lost. Those nice women in the movies have other children and family—parents, sisters, and brothers—and friends, old friends, to talk to and spend time with. Or they have jobs. My mother hasn’t got any of that. Except for my father and me, they’ve all been killed. She says she doesn’t have a job because she has no skills. Nobody had ever expected her to work so she never learned to do anything. I don’t really believe that. If she really wanted she could be learning how to do something useful right now, but that would mean risking failure, and that’s a risk she will not take. My father does work hard all day, and he isn’t the most cheerful man in the world. The result is that I’m my mother’s only hobby. I’m also one of the better subjects for their quarrels: It’s your fault he is like that, no it’s yours, he learned it from you, no, it’s all those years he spent with you, no, sorry, he’s the portrait of your father, and on and on. Certainly, they can fight over me even if I am in Cambridge, but why put on a show with no audience? Besides which, when I also lose my temper, the brawl becomes a world championship event.
    He lost me when he added, Please don’t misunderstand me. They love me, and I love them.
    I managed not to smile and told him I was certain he did.
    There was another lengthy silence. When he spoke again he said, Look, leaving home, isn’t that a metaphor for leaving the God of your fathers? My mother has latched on to the great metaphorical sense of my act. Brilliant, isn’t it? Even she knows that there is a limit to how long they can beat me over the head just for going away to the best college in the country, so she has put my abandonment of my parents on a loftier plane. My father has joined