Gay Place (38 page)

The Governor puffed on the cigar. Neil sat looking down at the pile of morning papers. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I just got out of the habit.”

“Well don’t you have any contempt for Edwards? You just can’t —”

“That’s it,” Neil said. “I don’t feel much of anything about Edwards. It’s like he’s been talking about someone else all this time.”

The Governor came close. “Then you ought not to feel that way. You ought to despise him … You know he’s the one?”

“The one who what? What’re you talking about?”

“He’s the one, goddammit. He’s been after you for seven years. He’s the one I warned you about in 1950. That’s what’s behind those statements in the paper. He thinks he scared you off once, and now he figures on doing it again …”

“You mean it was
him
? He’s the —”

“Exactly … So what do you plan to do about it?”

“I …”

The phone’s ringing saved him from having to force some tortured confession of helplessness across his lips. He did not know what he proposed to do about anything. He’d already lost his navigator, and now, after long months of studying the stars and the tides and the great ocean currents — with all the facts and figures in his head, the accumulated wisdom, the distress signals — he was piloting a rudderless ship. What the hell
did
he propose to do? Fenstemaker was right. There was only one —

“Yes,” the Governor was saying, “… tell them I’ll be there in a minute. The conference room is a good place. Order them some coffee from downstairs …”

He put the phone down and looked at Neil. “I’ve got to talk to some people …”

“I have to leave anyhow,” Neil said.

“I’d like for you to stay,” the Governor said. “I’d like you to meet ’em when I’m finished. They’re money people. Career contributors, you might say. I’m going in there right now and make a pitch for Neil Christiansen. If they’re sold, I’d like to bring them in here to meet you. If you’re not going to think for yourself, I’ll think for you until you tell me otherwise. These people in there — they got no convictions to speak of. They carry their politics in their vest pocket. They just want to go with a winner. I’m going in there now and threaten them with every kind of horror if they don’t back my candidate. They know I mean it too. I think I can tap the bloody mother lode if I handle it right. They’ll probably put some money on Edwards just to be on the safe side, but I want them to take a look at you. And I want
you,
for my
own
sake if not yours … So at least try to
look
like a winner. Get mad … Get goddam mad!”

The Governor turned and strode out of the room before Neil could object. He sat sipping coffee. So that was how. Get mad. Get goddam good and mad and look like a winner. He stood and stretched himself so that he could see three quarters of his face in the big mirror. He tried to affect the look of a winner, but the image that gaped back at him merely exuded a kind of vast, benign self-deprecation. The dime store Jesus, he thought: Gandhi with a twang. Gray flannel loincloth and button-down lip.

And so it was Edwards …

It was curious he had never even thought to ask. The Governor only told him there was someone, the Enemy, lurking outside, faceless and impersonal. But that was exactly the point: It hadn’t mattered who it was. He’d never even looked outside to see.

Seven years before — such a melancholy time. All of them, they were all enemies; every man a Hawkshaw, every king suspect. Our national malaise. Some few — the pathologists like Arthur Fenstemaker — had seen it coming, but there had scarcely been time to flee the plague, much less sound a warning or stem the virulence in any noticeable degree. “It’s the year of the locust,” Fenstemaker told him. “These things come and go, like the business cycle. You got to know when to buy and sell. Dump all your holdings — that stuff’s out of fashion for a time. It’s your brother, don’t you see? They’re going after him, but it’s really you — and these people believe in blood guilt …”

Seven years now he had been trying to tell himself it had all been done for John Tom. Was he still not quite convinced? Why else? A man looks after his own. And there
had
been sacrifices — he was still in debt to the bank for the bookstore. It was a long time between campaigns, seven years between, such a time as to cause him to lose sight of whatever vision it was that sustained him. So what the hell if he did come back again to fight another day? He had only Arthur Fenstemaker to thank for that. Washed up until Arthur arrived with a direct commission and an oxygen tank. That was all irrelevant. He had done the thing for John Tom — pulled him off the faculty at the college and set him up in a business of his own. It had been perfect. Who could give a damn if a bookstore proprietor talked a heresy to students?

Then Neil had gone
out
of business for a time.

“It’s like this,” he had told John Tom, trying to remember how old Fenstemaker had phrased it. “We’re facing a bad year. Got to get out from under. Sell before our margin’s wiped out. One more campaign and I might be plowed under.

“It’s like this,” he went on, reversing reality in deference to his brother’s feelings, “they come after me, they’re liable to bring you down, too. Teaching in a state college is no place to hide during a political purge. I can take care of myself — I got the law practice. Now you … You interested in a bookstore? I just bought us … you … you and me and Andrea — however you want it — I just bought a bookstore.”

“I can’t run a bookstore,” John Tom had said. “Not even a coffee house. All I can do is paint. I’m not even very good
teaching
people how to paint.”

“You don’t have to
do
anything … Just give ’em a book and take their money. The place is right off the campus. You can’t add and subtract, I’ll get you an accountant. All you got to do is play it straight — wear baggy trousers and hang your paintings around and maybe even grow a beard. Give ’em the crap artist routine. They won’t care about your politics …”

“For Chrissake, I don’t
have
any politics. What’s all this —”

“
I’ve got politics then.
All over me. And you might lose your job.”

“So what?”

“Everything! Me. I care. You understand? Look — I’ve already signed the papers … Come down and see the place. Another month and it’s mid-semester. You can give notice today.”

Suddenly Neil knew he could not face Arthur’s friends. He looked round the big room, blinded by the mirrors and the morning sunlight streaming in through those enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. He wondered if it would ever cloud over and whether one’s feet would swell after sprinting across those thick carpets and down the marble halls …

He paused at the receptionist’s desk.

“Would you tell the Governor I had to run. I’ve got an appointment at ten-thirty … I’ll check back with him later in the day.”

“I’ll do that, Senator. Have a nice Easter.”

“Same to you. Nice weekend.”

It may cloud over but the lady’s feet will swell, he told himself. He was perspiring through the blue suit, and he wondered if he would have to return home to change before the luncheon. The hell with it. He punched on the air-conditioning in the car and drove slowly through the Capitol grounds, circling round the old building several times. Then he turned out into the avenue and headed toward the campus again. What
had
been his motives? Covering his own flank or looking after little brother? And what was it those Hawkshaws had on John Tom? He had never even thought to ask, never known it was Edwards until that morning. John Tom hadn’t any politics, not really. He wondered what it was they planned to spill on him, what spleen and feces squeezed from some half-finished lecture note on modern art. He could hear his brother now … “The top’s hunky-dory but the bottom’s rotten, young ladies and gentlemen. Picasso and Rivera knew that — Rivera knew it from firsthand experience … But what they don’t know is that Communism’s just an inversion of the system. Place the bottom on the top and a great leavening action permeates the whole. Evolution slips on a banana peel but continues onward, as it must, until that day when absolute zero grips the universe, making quiescent all things for all time …”

Once he had heard John Tom in serious discussion with Andrea’s father. At least he had looked serious, giving no indication of having tongue firmly planted against cheek. “It’s Truman’s war,” he was telling the fiercely agreeing old man, “but MacArthur will have the boys home by Christmas …”

Old John Tom. In that plague season of pursuer and pursued, foul breath in the face and the rending of flesh, traducer and traduced. Who was to guess at motives? Who could speculate on what passes through the backsides of the brain? He had lived to fight another day but serious doubts befogged him now as to whether it had been worth it and who it was he was prepared to fight. Lost that vision, he was thinking; John Tom took it with him when he left. Were there no more possibilities for individual moral achievement? Or was it just unintelligible human savagery. He knew, then, where the sleek dark car was taking him, filling his head with a glimpse of meaning and manufactured ice-cold air.

T
HE BOOKSTORE WAS LIKE
a sanctuary, cool and funereal in a second-story loft on the main street just off the campus. Only an hour remained before the luncheon, and he wondered if it would be possible to cancel that engagement also: beg off everything and begin the morning in this gloomy, vaulted chamber, free from disorderly notions, content in the muted chaos of all those endless volumes. There was music coming from somewhere, behind the stacks, an album of Vaughn Williams played on John Tom’s old record machine. At first he had thought the place was empty, but then two college girls rounded one of the bookcases, glanced at him briefly, and moved past toward the hall … “I lost his black star sapphire ring in the ladies’ room at the Club De Pesca,” one of them was saying. “We spent all night exploring the sewers of Acapulco …”

Then they were gone and only the music remained. He stood for a moment, listening, touching the brown volumes, before heading into John Tom’s office.

It was just as he remembered. The same photographs, paintings, clippings, rolltop desk, file cabinet. The place was not so littered as before, but all of John Tom was there — the music and the record machine, the favorite English paperbacks and an old locker-room banner from his football-playing days: “It’s Not the Size of the Boy in the Fight but the Size of the Fight in the Boy.” There was what John Tom called his memorabilia — a life-sized model of the Arrow Collar Man, a pair of high-topped women’s shoes, a poster advertising a steamboat race, and a large, elaborately colored cut-glass light fixture in the shape of a butterfly. It was all there — as if the proprietor had only stepped out for a moment and forgotten to pull the door behind him.

More than a year before, Neil had closed and locked the rolltop desk, taking the key with him. In a moment he had the desk open again and was sorting through the papers. He was looking for the letter that had been sent to him by the magazine correspondent, the one telling about the personal effects being shipped home and enclosing those last notes. He had only uncovered the blurb about pictorial journalism and the few unpublished sketches John Tom had done prior to the revolution. Then he found the notes. He sat down to read them again …

Havana teems with gun-carrying police and, from above, lacks the cleancut geometric landscape you come to know over the North American continent … Panama at midnight was steamy, with pretty round-faced girls selling the national drink … Guayaquil was banana trees and glaring lights, and it was too dark to see anything from the makeshift hut they had for an air terminal … Lima gave us all a scare because we had to let down through ground fog, all the while making sure not to hit the Andes, and then there was the flight next morning in the blinding sunlight, up into the mountains, around and across them and over the little volcano pools of water to La Paz. After that we thought we’d never get airborne because the air was so thin, and in Santa Cruz there were children selling devil’s faces next to the dirt runway … Asunción, we are told, is the only capital in the world without a water or sewage system … Thank God no one runs around saying, “Do you like it here? Whattaya think of us?”

… At long last, Buenos Aires and the twentieth century, complete with modern plumbing, European styles … and Perón. First thing we saw at the air terminal
—
portraits of Juan and Evita and the usual slogan about being in the land of
Justicialismo,
National Doctrine,
Peronismo,
Anti
-Oligarcismo,
and so on … The correspondent at the American Bar said it was like Germany around 1939. The uniforms are right out of the SS, and they’ve got the goosestep down perfectly. But then another says it’s more like Rome the same year … But who the
h
ell cares? Maybe it will be like covering a war in any event …

… They burned the Socialist newspaper building and the Jockey Club and two thirds of the churches in the city … A beating of a priest and unimaginably brutal street murders …

There’s something altogether different about these people … Imagine Omar Bradley leading a revolution of U. S. Army garrisons on the White House because he disagreed with Eisenhower! It’s the regular way of doing things here
…

Neil sorted through the notes. There was another newspaper article he had not seen before — one more description of how John Tom had wandered deep into the city where much of the rioting was going on and how he had been brought down by a single bullet and pulled to safety by one of the other correspondents who, later on, had gone back again to get the sketchbook. Neil had his own notion of John Tom shuffling through the center of town, wondering what the hell he was doing there and thinking about Chick Webb and Alban Berg on the phonograph and pictures by Thomas Hart Benton; sitting down suddenly, clumsy and foolish looking, propped on a curbstone and holding his big stomach in pain and wondering about the regular way of doing things.