Free Matters of Honor by Louis Begley Page B

beyond the point of obtuseness—that nothing he had told me should be a barrier between him and Margot. The war robbed you and your parents of lots of things, I said, and you have suffered a lot. The Hornungs should understand that better than anyone.
    True enough, he allowed, in the abstract. But practically speaking, none of this is about what we were before the war, or what happened during the war. It’s about what we are now. We have become a different species. What is my father’s business? He has a little factory in East Brooklyn making curtains, upholstery, and stuff like that. He invests in little rental buildings. He learned some English before the war. You’ve heard him on the telephone. My mother is just the same. You can only get so far from where you start. Our starting line is in East Brooklyn. Have you ever been there? I don’t recommend it. Until last year, we lived in an apartment there that was a real hole. Two small bedrooms—no bigger than my room here—a dark ugly living room, and an ugly kitchen. With a nice view of the air shaft. Now we have a big house that’s all right, in Flatbush, a quiet part of Brooklyn full of orderly middle-class Jews. My parents’ friends are like us. They’re all former this or former that. What distinguishes most of them from us is that they got here before the war and so didn’t have to hide in a cellar or behind someone’s armoire. Some have more money than my father, some in fact have a lot, but what does it all add up to in relation to people like the Hornungs? Zero. You made a face when I said Margot’s family and my parents are different species. All right: I give up that metaphor. Have another one. Right now Margot and Margot’s parents are way up at the top of a tree. We’re way down at the roots. But that’s the one tree I will learn to climb. Otherwise, there is no point in my being here.
    I wish I could say that after that exchange I stopped debating with him. But I didn’t. I explained how where you lived and how much money you made were much less important than who you really were, inside. That, I said, was the difference between America and Europe. As I pontificated I was dimly aware that I was making an argument that I could not have sustained if the subject had been my own situation. Certainly, my parents were, on the scale of the Berkshires, of a very good family, and at the time I had more respect for Lenox and Stockbridge gentry than experience has shown they deserved. Therefore, except for the small issue of my not being my parents’ biological child, it shouldn’t matter that their reputation was stained and that their spendthrift ways and those of their parents before them had ensured that they would be dismally poor in comparison with my father’s very rich first cousin and employer. That cousin with his spotless name and all the good a good name brings. Yes, there was the all-important country club to which his family and mine both belonged, where we came into frequent, uneasy contact. The cousins, however, belonged to other clubs, to which my parents couldn’t aspire, and lived altogether differently. Could anyone in his right mind in Berkshire County consider my father and my father’s cousin social equals? I knew that the answer was no, but the answer hurt. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, to be judged on my own merit and also get all the help I could get from my name, even though it was a name that, for all the legal adoption procedures, I couldn’t convince myself was legitimately my own. All the same, in Berkshire County and, perhaps, beyond, it was nicer to be called Standish than Nowak or Mahoney.
    In the end, it made no difference what I said. Henry laughed and laughed.

VI
    I NOW REALIZE that all three of us—Henry, Archie, and I—used the word “Jew” with restraint, holding it gingerly with two fingers far away from the body, as though it gave off a bad smell. It was an embarrassing word to utter in polite