Institute (12 page)

But before I could get out my wallet, Mr. Garrett came over. He wrapped Teddy in his arms and said very loudly: “Take it easy, Teddy. Calm down, relax. College Park is right on my way. As soon as we’re through here, I’ll run you home.” He led her to one of the folding chairs, sat her down, and then went over to Hortense whose hand he picked up and patted, but she slapped him away. Then she jumped up and went out with that quick, boiling-hot walk a woman breaks into when she’s really mad. She went through the lobby and out the front door.

I wasn’t the first guy to get caught in the middle of by two women blowing their tops, but I felt like holy hell anyway. Mr. Garrett played it cool—adjusting the mikes, inspecting the food, conferring with the bartender, and joking with the girls. I sat on the table, watching him, trying to figure out where I stood, if anywhere. It was frightening, but I made myself own up to it, that here in just a few seconds, the whole ship had been blown out of the water. Mr. Garrett must know the truth now, whereas before he could only
guess.
How was he going to play it? And
was
he going to play it? But when he called me over, all he said was: “Lloyd, we’d better be getting ready.” Which meant that he wasn’t going to play it; he was just going to ignore it. I suppose for the moment it eased my mind, yet deep down inside, it left me more nervous than ever, because I didn’t know
where
I stood. How
can
you ignore something like that? But if he could, I had to.

As I passed Teddy, I asked her: “Would you take charge of the press stuff? See that each reporter gets a release from every pile?”

“Okay, Dr. Palmer. I’m sorry.”

“Why didn’t you bring a stink bomb?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Don’t bang at Teddy.”

It was Mr. Garrett, who had come over to give her a pat. “We all make mistakes,” he said, “especially when provoked.”

That seemed to end the subject.

It didn’t end Hortense, though. Pretty soon the reporters came, fifteen or twenty of them. Some I knew, at least by sight, and some I didn’t, though on about half of them, I had done some background study. The two Washington papers sent men, and so did the
New York Times,
the
Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Women’s Wear,
and the Associated Press.’ But the
Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun,
and
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
sent women, and for some reason, they took us over the jumps. The show got off to a lefthanded start when one of them pressed Mr. Garrett as to where Hortense was and why she wasn’t there. “If the Institute is named for her, this show must be in her honor. What’s become of her?”

But he didn’t get excited. He answered: “She
was
here a moment ago, as a matter of fact; but then she changed her mind and left. My wife doesn’t like cameras. They make her break out in a rash.”

“Mr. Garrett,” the woman said, “I know Mrs. Garrett quite well, and I’ve never noticed any allergy to cameras on her part. I would say she’s not only photogenic but photogenerous.”

“Then that’s what you would say.”

By this time three or four men were in front of us, sitting, standing, and kneeling, their cameras to their eyes, taking pictures of him. Instead of smiling, though, all he did was look peeved. There are times when a stuck-out jaw is the one thing that wins the ball game, but a press conference isn’t one of them. The woman smelled something peculiar about it, and she meant to get some answers. Suddenly she turned to me. “Mr. Palmer,” she began.

“Dr.
Palmer,” Mr. Garrett corrected her.

“Dr. Palmer, in my paper’s bio morgue I find eight envelopes on you, all in connection with football, but none that mentions biography. May I ask why you were picked to direct this institute?”

“Mr. Garrett picked me. Ask him.”

“Mr. Garrett?”

“I picked him because he knows more about biography than anyone else,” Mr. Garrett said. “He knows so much that it makes my head swim.”

“Do you have a degree in biography?” she said to me.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have you taken courses in biography?”

“There are no courses in biography.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She was obviously caught by surprise. Some of the other reporters suddenly began writing furiously.

“There is no course in biography, or
discipline,
as they call it, in any American university that I know of,” I said, “in spite of the fact that biography is the one literary field that Americans excel in. It was partly to fill this lacuna that I persuaded Mr. Garrett to endow the Hortense Garrett Institute of Biography.”

“She
persuaded him, you mean.”

“I know what I mean, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve seen a lot of her, then?”

“Naturally. It was necessary in setting up the Institute.”

“At her apartment, we would assume?”

“If you would disconnect your assumer and stop telling me what I mean, we’d get along a lot better.” That got a laugh, and I added: “I’ve never been to Mrs. Garrett’s apartment. We’ve met for lunch and once or twice for dinner.”

“How about your apartment?”

Well, how about my apartment? How much homework had this woman done before today? Hortense was practically living at my apartment. Had she been seen even once coming or going from there?

I had to take a chance. “She has never been there.”

“But
I
have!” Teddy chimed in.

“That’s right,” I said. “She’s my weakness now.”

“And mine, too,” Mr. Garrett said.

“I’m Dr. Palmer’s packhorse,” she explained, “because I’m as strong as a bull. I also do back handsprings.”

She did a back handspring in the space between the folding chairs and the door. There was a stampede by those with cameras to get a shot of her doing it. But as she straightened up, she shied off.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she called; “not so fast with them pop-ups. You take a picture of me, I must have my patches showing. It’s my sorority rule. Okay, on my face, if you want it—but the patches have to be in.”

“Darling,” said the woman who had been badgering me, “one earthshaking gadget has not been invented yet—one permitting the camera to take your front end, where your face is positioned, and your hind end, where your patches are, at one and the same time. Do—”

“Aw? Then earth, stand by to get shook.”

She turned to the table, moved piles of stuff to one side, then climbed on and did a hand stand, facing the cameras. But, of course, that put her shapely bottom just above her face.

“Okay,” she said calmly, “shoot!”

They shot.

She hopped down, telling them: “That’ll be fifty cents, please. Four bits from one and all.”

Nobody moved to pay her. “Well, there’s their trouble right there,” she announced with an airy wave of her hand. “The media, I’m talking about. They’re mean, they’re chincy, they’re cheap. Making cracks about a wife right in front of her husband, and on top of that, not paying the human packhorse who’s posing for her picture. I do a handstand and what do I get? Nothing!”

“Teddy.”

“Yes, Mr. Garrett?”

“Have a Kennedy half-dollar.”

“You mean, shut up?”

“I’m too polite to say it.”

“O.K.”

She was quite meek about it. She pulled his face down and kissed him. They seemed to get on very well.

When Mr. Garrett had returned to his chair and Teddy was tucked away at the end of the table, the same woman reporter resumed with me.

“Dr. Palmer,” she asked, “have you actually written a biography?”

“It so happens that I haven’t.”

“Aw!” Teddy yelped once more. “Dr. Palmer, why don’t you tell her? Why do you let her run over you?” Then to the reporter: “You’re damn right, he’s written a biography—William Shakespeare’s! He wrote his dissertation on Shakespeare for the Ph.D. he has. He gave us a free copy—some of us, anyway—in his English poetry class, and it’s wonderful to read! All about the sonnets! And the Dark Woman; he
indemnifies
her! It’s like a detective story, only real.”

That doesn’t sound like much of a time bomb, but it caused me more trouble than any other thing that happened that day. I had intentionally not mentioned Shakespeare, because that’s one thing you learn: Lay off him. Don’t bring up the subject unless, for some reason like teaching a poetry class, you have to. Because you’re just opening a can of worms. There’s an expert on every block who knows more about it than God, all ready to show you up, and no matter how sharp your research is or how silly the previous research, you’ll get a drumming out of town that will make the Lion and the Unicorn sound like a moment of silence.

I ignored Teddy, but Mr. Garrett called her name. When she answered, he said it this time: “Shut up.”

“Yes sir.”

“Who was the Dark Woman?” another reporter asked.

“For that,” I told him, “send three dollars and fifty cents, plus postage, to the Lord Baltimore Press and ask them to send you
Shakespeare and the Sonnets, A New Look at an Old Subject,
by Lloyd Palmer.

“Who’s the outstanding American biographer?” asked one of the women reporters, at last bringing the discussion back to the reason for our being there. And on that, I decided to talk.

“The list is so long,” I told her, “you’d be helpless to pick out one name. For my money, James Parton’s
Life of Andrew Jackson
has had a greater effect on biographical writing than anything else I know of. He got away from the literary style of Prescott, Parkman, Sparks, and the other early writers and introduced the simple, easy, intimate, colloquial way of writing that later writers followed, such as H. H. Bancroft, Sandburg, Leech, Tuchman,
The New Yorker
“Profile” writers, and a host of others. You have to remember, when you’re talking about American biographers, that the roster runs into the thousands. Then there are the wholesale biographers—Sparks with his
Library of American Biography;
Bancroft, with his
Chronicles of Builders;
Marquis with his
Who’s Who in America,
and Sammons and Martindell who followed Marquis as publishers; and very importantly, Adolph Ochs, of the
New York Times,
who bore the expense of the
Dictionary of American Biography,
that prodigious trove of biographical information in twenty volumes. We should also honor Dumas Malone, the Jefferson scholar and dean of our biographers. But let us never overlook the
first
American biographer, Mason Lock Weems, whose preposterous
Life of George Washington,
the one with the cherry tree in it, went through seventy-one editions and is kept in print by the Belknap Press of Harvard University.”

“He can talk all night if you have all night,” Garrett said. “Personally, I’ve heard enough. Are we finished? Is there anything else you want to know?”

There didn’t seem to be, so he signaled to the girls who began serving refreshments and cocktails. Then he called: “Come on, Teddy, we have to be running along.”

“I want something to eat.”

The girl with the tray of canapes wrapped some in a paper napkin and tucked them in Teddy’s bag. But she still wouldn’t go. She was rubbing her thumb with her finger at me, meaning
pay me.
Garrett said: “I’ll take care of her, Lloyd.” Then he smacked her on the patches, saying: “Get going!”

A
T LAST THE NIGHTMARE
of an afternoon came to an end and I was left alone with my pamphlets and a boy the head bellhop had lent me, who helped gather the stuff together, pack it into the suitcases, and carry it to the car. I drove to the Royal Arms where Irene gave me dinner, and then on home. I went in the front way to pick up any messages, but there hadn’t been any. Then, when I opened the apartment door I caught the smell of perfume. I set the suitcases down, closed the door, and went to the living room. There in the dark, on one of the sofas, was Hortense, her eyes black and big as saucers.

“Well!” I said. “Hello. Didn’t expect you so soon.”

She jumped up, raced to the door, yanked it open, and peered out into the hall. “Where is she?” she snarled.

“Where is who?”

“That girl. That floozy.”

“If you mean Teddy, your husband took her home—or at least, I hope he did. That’s what he said he was going to do. She’s a sweet girl who wants to get laid.”

“And you laid her, didn’t you?”

“So happens, I didn’t.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Yes, I do, and I’ll prove it.”

“You mean you’ll make her tell me, and that will—”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

I took hold of her, lifted her, and carried her into the bedroom. When I had dumped her on the bed, I started taking her clothes off. Her dress, the one she’d had on at the hotel, was no problem, but the pantyhose were. She kept fighting me off when I tried to peel them down. I’d spank her on the tail and in between make a grab for the pantyhose, and at last I had them off. Then I raped her, if you can call it that when you get full cooperation. When it was over I said: “Okay, that proves it, I think. Even a studhorse has only one of them in him per day. If Teddy had got it, I couldn’t have given it to you.”

She didn’t answer. Then, after a moment, she asked: “Lloyd, what do we do now? That crazy girl spilled it.”

“You spilled it, Hortense.”

“I was furious. I could smell her on your clothes.”

“And what you spilled can’t be poured back in the bottle. As you’ve said so often, ‘He may be many things, but he’s not dumb.’ ”

“What did he say after I left?”

“He said, We’d better be getting ready’ ”

“That was all?”

“Yeah, that was all.”

We talked about it awhile, then the phone rang. It was Mr. Garrett. After asking if anything had happened after he left that he should know about and after I had said no, he said: “Lloyd, I finally persuaded Teddy that if you had a blonde reason for making her wait downstairs, that reason wasn’t my wife. So that source of gossip is under control—or so I hope. But what I don’t understand is why you brought her in the first place. My wife, I assume, is no vainer than the next woman. Just the same, women hate it when other women muscle in on their act, whether romance is involved or not, especially pretty ones like Teddy who do handstands for the cameras. Didn’t you have any more sense?”