The Faithfull and Obedient Servants

Savile Row is a Pleasant Georgianstreet in London's West End, distinguished by the brass plates beside its austerely elegant doorways. The names on the brass plates belong to tailors, some of whom have their premises blocks away but keep one room on Savile Row because that address has, like Rolls Royce on a car radiator, an aura of ageless prestige, impeccable taste, and bottomless wealth. My battle with Savile Row began half a decade ago, after my junior year at Harvard, and it cheered me tremendously until my final disgrace.

I came to the tailors I'll call S. Falconer's Sons equipped with the required two letters of reference from old customers, but dressed in the student – tourist costume of the day: battered rainhat, plastic raincoat, wrinkled seersucker coat, and army-surplus khaki pants. It may have been this costume which brought a face to the other side of the plate glass window I was contemplating. On the window there were seven royal seals; lions and unicorns gamboled rampant amid symphonic declarations of Ich Dien and Dieu et mon Droit. The face appeared between two of these seals – her late majesty the queen, honi soit qui mal y pense, 1887, and H. M. Alphonso of Spain, 1926 – and watched with some distaste as I strolled up the stairs to check the brass plate that read S. Falconer's Sons, Tailors and Breeches Makers. Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish hurried to the door, as if to explain quickly that this was not the American Express Company.

"Yes?" he said.

"Thought I'd get a suit," I replied.

Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish looked at my clothes and reached for my reference letters. We stood in the doorway while he read them, his long neck swivelling in owlish jerks across each line and turning frictionless against his stiff wing collar.

"Well," he said finally, "a friend of Mr. Lansdowne. And of Mr. Attwood. Mr. Lansdowne had a very nice suit indeed. Come in, please."

We entered a dark, panelled room suggestive of old port and mellow cigars. Several bolts of cloth lounged under a pair of stag's heads; each of the heads bore a metal date-tag and an unpronouncable Scottish name. At one end of the room there was a full-length portrait of Edward VII, presumably a patron saint. At the other end, a young woman perched on a three-legged stool, writing at a desk. The fountain pen in her hand seemed an anachronism. Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish introduced me to her, as he did to other members of the staff in the cutting and fitting rooms. Everyone inquired after the health of my referees. Then we returned to the main room, and Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish asked what sort of a suit I wanted.

"A gray flannel, kind of," I suggested. "If you think that's okay."

"I see," said Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish. "Something suitable for diplomatic receptions in the late afternoon, and yet correct for informal wear in the evening."

I said that was just what I had in mind. We selected a dark tweed and recorded the measurements, and then (Continued on page 21) Obadient Servants (Continued from page 9)Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish brought out a large book for me to sign.

"The last gentleman was one of your compatriots. Had three very nice suits made, Mr. Pierson did," he said. Mr. Pierson had not written his address, but merely Chmn of Board, TWA. I signed under Mr. Pierson, giving my address as Dunster House, my Harvard dormitory.

"Only three names?" asked Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish. I stared at the three inadequate names and then sheepishly dredged up a fourth which had lain undisturbed for years on my birth certificate. Mr. Bentinck-Cavandish wrote it in with a flourish.

"George Jerome Waldo Goodman," he said. "Much better. I'm sure we're going to get along famously. And, Mr. Goodman, if you desire theatre tickets or train schedules or similar assistance, please call upon us – all our young gentlemen do," He ushered me to the door, glanced at my plastic raincoat, and added, "if you require a coat, we usually send our young gentlemen down to Burberry."

During subsequent fittings, I began to learn what was required of one of Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish's young gentlemen. The young gentleman, after frolicking the afternoon in Oscar Wilde banter, sallied forth to the theatre, because Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish always asked what he had been to see. He took trains, usually to Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, because Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish always bemoaned the deteriorating service on the Great Western Railway. Once, when I noticed several sets of heavy gloves, I learned that the young gentleman occasionally gardened.

"I thought," I asked, "that they live in London and go to the theatre."

"Our young gentlemen," said Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish, "live in London and in the country."

The young gentleman also rode (riding whips), exercised his pack of hounds (boots, walking stick, dog collars), got his haircuts by appointment, and never went around bareheaded.

"If you require a hat," Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish suggested reproachfully, "I will have a few words with Herbert Johnson, the hatter, and he will make you one very quickly."

Even though Mr. Johnson did not make me a hat, I began to feel like Cinderella dressing for the ball, and it was with some regret that I informed Mr. Bentinck– Cavendish I was leaving for Scotland.

"Ah, Scotland," he said. "Deer-stalking or salmon? The 3:12 is a good train, you'll find. Many of our young gentlemen take it."

I explained that unhappily I was leaving Britain from Prestwick Airport, Scotland, and that I would motor. (I hitchhiked up the Great North Road that afternoon.) I paid the bill and we arranged to send the suit to the airport. Three days later I paced at Prestwick's departure counter until the last possible minute, but the suit never arrived. I wrote from Boston and demanded its whereabouts, receiving, two weeks later, the first of Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish's many communications, on stationery with the seven royal seals – three kings, two Princes of Wales, one queen, and one duke.

Your aircraft, he charged, departed before our suit arrived. The garment you ordered has now returned to the premises, and we request instruction as to its disposal. We beg to remain, dear Sir, Your most faithfull and obedient servants, S. Falconer's Sons

For a moment I wondered whether only Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish's American young gentlemen got the benefit of the seals and the extra 1 in faithful. I asked for the suit again, and received, when it came, a bill for two pounds sixpence shipping charges, a bill I contested since the responsibility for getting the suit to the plane, I felt, rested with the senders., Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish sent two more bills. On the first, he addressed me as Waldo Goodman Esq., and deftly switched the D of Dunster into an M; on the second, he inserted a hyphen quietly between the names he liked best. That hypen so slyly provided gave me a whole new identity. By the time he began to write letters, Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish had dropped both the Esquire and the House. My first day as Waldo-Goodman of Munster was a rainy Saturday in late fall; I remember spinning the combination on the mailbox and pulling out a baronial estate, the Palladian manor of Munster, A Georgian avenue of oak stretching from its fountain to the gatehouse, where a redcoated huntsman waited, calling "hounds, gentlemen, please."

Undoubtedly, wrote Mr. Bentinck– Cavendish, you have been busy with the Season and have overlooked our Notice. Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish was right; I was busy with the Season; the Duke of Dartmouth had just departed, leaving a sleeping bag and an empty gin bottle, and Viscount Princeton was due any moment with his whole pack. The Season at old Munster was a hectic thing.

In the months following, Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish sent not only Notices for two pounds six, but family news designed to keep all his young gentlemen in touch. Sometimes it was the Visit of a Representative, a missionary with a tape measure braving the plains of provincial America to spread sartorial grace among youths only potentially gentlemen. Occasionally there were the milestones of birth and death within the House of Falconer. ("It is with very deep regret that we have to advise you that Mr. Pulworthy has been taken ill, has been admitted to hospital, and has died.") Always with a servile wave of his plume, Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish begged to remain my most faithfull and obedient servant, each time reminding me that I was no ordinary citizen subject to everyday crises; I was Waldo-Goodman of Munster, serene, hyphenated; playgoer, hound-walker, rider of the 3:12. The letters and bills cheered me long after I left the original Munster (death duties and Socialist government) and to keep them coming I wrote a little note to Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish every six months or so. I wrote from an Italian villa open to the public that I had lost old Munster House, but that his communications would be forwarded. Once I crossed the city of Paris to get some stationery from the Ritz Hotel, so that Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish might know I was still one of his young gentlemen staying where he would approve, in spite of my fallen fortunes. Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish wearied but held up his end.

Apparently, he wrote, you have been Travelling and have not received our Notices.

With that, he provided the way for another year's correspondence. Waldo-Goodman of Munster was Travelling, and the bills just never caught up. (Munster House was being converted to a bicycle factory and they were very sloppy about forwarding mail.) Friends of mine, impressed by the correspondence, entered the game. Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish received a letter headed Thirty-Eighth Parallel Hunt Club, posted from Yongdongpo. Waldo-Goodman of Munster had passed through for the fall shooting; now this Notice had arrived, but he was gone – should they send it on? A diplomatic courier sent Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish a postcard from Moscow. He had seen Waldo-Goodman of Munster outside St. Basil's, "still, as ever," he wrote, "in pursuit of truth." Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish continued to send his large, florid, ever-welcome bills, each with its seven royal seals and the proud inscription "Tailors and Breeches Makers, Savile Row," to Munster, with the request, in labored handwriting on the envelope, that it be sent on.

As the reports filtered in I realized suddenly that the game was up. Within the space of a week, Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish received letters from Hong Kong (Fleet Post Office), Arusha, Tanganyika, and Snow Bank, Labrador. Waldo-Goodman of Munster had passed through each, just three days ahead of the Notice which pursued him up and down the globe. With considerable misgiving I wrote out a check for $5.67; it is not every day that a man cuts loose the servants who have been faithfull so long.

The reply was swift and stunning. There was something strange about the very envelope that carried it, and I read it nervously. The paper was thinner and smaller; it said, much too simply, "Rec'd £2.0.6". The lions and rampant unicorns had fled; the strains of Dieu et mon Droit died out. No one begged to continue to serve. I could hear the whispers along the stuffed-leather clubrooms of St. James' Square: "You've heard? Waldo-Goodman of Munster. Sacked. Drummed out of his father's regiment." Mr. Bentinck-Cavendish had dealt with disrespect and insubordination. Then I looked again at the envelope, in sudden terror.

He had taken away my hyphen.