Gay Place (40 page)

“Haven’t we met before?”

“Well now Senator I certainly know who
you
are, but no — I don’t think we’ve ever —”

“In the Legislature? About 1949?”

“No … No, I never had the privilege of serving. Made a couple of tries just after the war, but there was a sudden buildup of industry in my district, and the labor boys moved in and organized against me and — well you don’t want to hear about
that
… I’d like you to meet some of the others at the table here.”

The head table guests were strung out the width of the ballroom; they were just now taking their seats. Waiters deposited hot dishes in front of them — creamed something in a pastry shell — and there was organ music coming from behind a veiled stage at the other end of the hall. The song was “Tico Tico.”

Neil shook hands with the guests at the table. Toward the end, the pretty little girl from yesterday’s airplane flight smiled at him.

“Hi!” she said. “See? I was so impressed I made Daddy bring me along …”

“I’m delighted,” Neil said. He turned to the girl’s father. “Your daughter is beautiful and intelligent — but awfully difficult to put up with when she has a deck of cards. She nearly skinned us alive …”

“Where’s Stanley?” the girl said. Her father sat there smiling and nodding.

“He should be along soon,” Neil said. He waved goodbye to his flying companion and followed the master of ceremonies toward the lectern. He sat next to the wife of an old State Supreme Court justice; she sipped her glass of Scotch whiskey and ignored the plate of food. People he knew only slightly or not at all came by to lean across the table and speak to him. He must have talked with at least fifty of them and drunk three glasses of water during this period. When he had finally picked his way to the bottom of the soggy pastry shell, he leaned back and smoked a cigarette, staring at the crowd of perfect strangers. Then, miraculously, a familiar face floated in front of him. Andrea’s father reached across and gripped his hand.

“How are you, Neil? Goddammit boy you’re lookin’ fine.”

“Yes sir, I’m fine. It’s wonderful to see you. How’ve you been?”

“Fine … Fine. Proud as hell of you. Saw in the paper you were talkin’ here today and I caught a plane to come over and watch.”

“Fine … That’s wonderful,” Neil said. He wondered if his mind was slipping, if his brain had ossified. Would he plunge into this speech mumbling
Fine, fine, wunnerful and fine?
Yes, I’m fine, ladies and gentlemen, really fine, and … well, swell, I really am, and wonderful, even, and it’s —

“Have you seen Andrea?” he asked the old man.

“No … I’ll call out there later. Brought some Easter baskets for the girls their grandmother forgot to mail. But I came to see you, boy. All of us are proud …”

“Really? What have I done?” He smiled down at the old man. They had got along well enough together through the years, but this sudden enthusiasm was entirely new to their relationship.

“Hell! I dunno. I’m just proud of you … Maybe it’s that sonofabitch Edwards — excuse me, miss, I’m — it’s the way he’s talkin’, I guess.”

The Justice’s wife nodded sweetly and began to demolish her strawberry parfait.

“It’s just politics,” Neil said. “He’s been saying the same thing for years.”

“But not about
you,
by God. I want to see you give that fellow a lickin’.”

“I might not run,” Neil said. “I just might forget about it.”

“You
can’t,
boy, you know that. Not after what he’s said about you, you can’t.”

“Well …”

“Where’s that committee?”

“What committee?”

“The one the Governor announced. Christiansen for Senate. Who’s in charge?”

“Well. There’s no committee. Not really. It’s just something Fenstemaker dreamed up. It doesn’t even exist.”

“Well it will. Here —
you
take this, then.”

The old man handed the check across to him. Neil stared at it for a moment. Then he pushed it back at the old man who stood a few feet off now, as though to retreat if necessary.

“You can’t afford this, and I can’t accept. I never have, and I can’t begin now.” He stared at the black-inked figures on the slip of paper. His father-in-law was giving him $5000.

“The hell I can’t. You can’t stop me. I got a
right,
boy, you know that. One way or another, I’ll do it, so you might as well accept it yourself.”

Neil smiled at the old man for a moment, his hand covering the check. “All right. But if there’s no campaign, I’m tearing it up.”

“There’ll be a campaign,” the old man said. “There’d better damned be. You and I never agreed much on politics — not even half the time I expect — but I’m with you a hundred and fifty goddam per cent in this little deal. You’re my kin, and I’m just not going to stand around scratchin’ myself while somebody cusses my own people … I’ll see you later, boy.”

The old man turned and headed back toward his table. The former All-American with the Silver Star lapel pin was standing at the lectern, making his preliminary remarks. Neil folded the check and slipped it into his wallet. He thought about the overdraft at the bank; the payments at the bookstore. He looked out over the crowd. Who were all these people — all these enthusiasts? In another time Owen Edwards might have had them gnashing their teeth, wailing, enraged, coming after him and John Tom like a deputized lynch mob. How was it Edwards was suddenly out of fashion and his own young face just as suddenly in? Old Fenstemaker said it was like the business cycle — sometimes you bought and occasionally you had to get out from under to save your margin. They were not for him now — these vigilantes — but they could be if he studied the market and pushed the merchandise on the television. He sang under his breath, unconscious of the words: “I said a prayer and played the juke … box …”

“What did you say, Senator?”

“I … was … remembering a part of my speech.”

The Justice’s wife smiled at him. The ceiling was cloudy with smoke, and he caught a glimpse of Stanley and Elsie heading toward a patch of vacant seats that had been pulled in between him and the luncheon tables. Stanley waved, and the dark girl stared and faintly smiled.

“… our attractive and able United States Senator …”

There was a burst of applause, filling the chamber, and Neil could see the former All-American gazing at him earnestly, smiling, extending his arm, palm turned out, like a variety show announcer. He got to his feet, suddenly tired, mumbling to himself — fine, really fine, and well … swell — staring out at the audience which had risen simultaneously, nearly in the same motion with him. He stood at the lectern, adjusting horn-rimmed glasses, pushing them flat up against the bridge of his nose. He held a speech in each hand, looking out and smiling back at the crowd, and when he fixed his stare on Stanley the younger man merely made a shrugging motion, cocking his head and extending his lower lip for just an instant. Neil clipped both speeches to the lectern and began …

“I was going to talk to you about Positive Steps in Foreign Policy, and I still might — that’s the title of the speech I’ve got in front of me here, and Lord knows I’d be in trouble with my newspaper friends who’ve already filed their early leads if I didn’t follow the prepared text …”

Pause … faint laughter … a stirring in the seats … leatherette padding coming to terms with five hundred distressed recta. He looked down at the empty pastry shells and his slowly dissolving parfait. The absurd thought came to him that, instead of drinking water, he might stand there speaking for half an hour while spooning out periodic mouthfuls of strawberry parfait.

“I keep thinking I’m not really qualified to speak on anything so exalted as foreign policy, though. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to Foreign Relations in the Senate, but up to now at least there hasn’t been much give and take. I’m the Very Junior Senator, and I haven’t given half as much as I’ve taken. I like the Senate. It’s a nice place full of good and occasionally extraordinary men struggling with a hopeless and possibly unattainable noble ideal. The fact that the ideal
might
be impossible to realize doesn’t undignify the effort. The nobility exists in our conscious efforts to be decent men, to somehow transcend centuries of hopelessness and bad thinking and arrive at some approach to blessedness. That’s really all I can say to you today, because politics — and the language of politics — is at best an ambiguity … I think it was George Orwell who said … Hell, I don’t
think
it was Orwell — I know it was Orwell — I just looked it up this morning … It was Orwell who used to rail against the language of politics. He was a socialist in England, and I’ll now have to file the customary disclaimer about
that
…
But
…
anyhow,
George Orwell had this to say: ‘Political language — and with variations this is true of
all
political parties, from conservatives to anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful … murder respectable … and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind …’ ”

There was a sudden release of tension in the ballroom. Laughter rippled along the press row and the head table and gathered force, moving toward the other end of the chamber. Had they really understood? Or had their minds been lumbering along behind what he was saying, stumbling over his half-coherent phrases as boulders strewn behind him on the trail. Did they grasp that last line only because it seemed vaguely reminiscent of some ancient vaudeville gag? No matter. He told a story he’d heard from Arthur Fenstemaker years ago.

“I could talk to you about Positive Steps in Foreign Policy, but the question sticks in my mind — what steps? What policy? There was this schoolteacher who came into a little country town looking for a job and was interviewed by the superintendent. The superintendent told him, yes, the town needed a teacher, but they ought to clear up a few things first. There had been a good deal of discussion in the town about whether the world was round or perfectly flat — it had developed into a real debate, a controversy. Nearly everyone in the town was concerned and had formed an opinion about this question. So the superintendent wanted to know — how did the young man teach it? Did he teach it round or did he teach it flat?

“The young man thought a moment and replied: ‘I can teach it either way you want,’ he said …”

There was laughter again, and then applause, and Neil waited until just before it subsided before continuing:

“How do you want
me
to teach it?” He looked out and smiled at them. “The truth is, I can’t teach it
any
way, because I just don’t know …” He rambled on into the body of both speeches, picking paragraphs from each. He would be driving the newsmen out of their minds, but he had at least used most of the key applause lines in the text Stanley had distributed to them earlier in the day. He did not stop to ask himself whether he was ruined at this point. He might or might not be — it didn’t particularly seem to matter.

“… the reservoir of great ideas left over from the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations has been just about pumped dry …”

There was no response to this. All those registered Democrats out there were Republicans at heart, and he continued …

“… We need both new ideas and old boldness. But our goals can’t be achieved by one idea or even by one policy — or a multiplicity of ideas and policies produced by the singleminded purpose of one Administration …”

Now there was applause. Old Stanley, he thought. He plays it like the fiddle; beats upon them as a Chinese gong. He knew that line would have to be recovered — he tossed it off, got it back, and more. My resurrector of rash statements.

“… Our policies have been motivated by sheer reaction, and, as a result, we are inclined to forget just what has been the basis — the moral basis —
of
our policy. We say we send technicians to India because we want to halt the spread of Communism … We say we endorse exchange students because we wish to
spread
our ideas … I think we are ascribing ignoble motives to noble deeds. I think we ought first of all to change not our policies — but our attitudes. It’s about time for us to proceed on the assumption we do things
not
because they are expedient but because they are right. If we send food to India, we ought to do it because people are hungry and we have a surplus … Have we got so befogged in the language of politics — national and international — that we can’t even sensibly articulate our own good intentions when we have them? …”

He was finished in less than half an hour. He sat down amid sustained applause. He sat there, trying to force some kind of expression of engaging solemnity onto his face, wondering, for no reason that he could determine at that moment, about Andrea and what she and the girls had done all the day. The applause continued, and he stood, smiling, thinking about whether Stanley had noted the number of times he was interrupted by laughter or applause. He was supposed to keep count and pass the information along to reporters.

The master of ceremonies was speaking again, bubbling on about Neil’s speech, introducing guests who had arrived late at the head table. A question period ensued; the questions were put to Neil from the audience through the master of ceremonies; Neil got to his feet only to reply. They were harmless and well-meaning queries for the most part. He parried a series of questions about oil imports — flabby responses strongly phrased — and he joked with a University student and several delegates who asked him to comment on Owen Edwards’ charges of the night before.

“He and I actually have a kind of rapport established,” Neil said. “He doesn’t think I ought to be in the Senate, and I would regard his election to that body as a disaster of monumental proportions …”

“He’s just announced,” someone called out. “He filed over at the Capitol an hour ago …”

There was a general shifting of limbs and chairs and a murmuring response, and Neil could not clearly hear the next question. It came from the back of the ballroom, and the master of ceremonies asked that it be repeated. The air-conditioning was at full strength and most of the women had wraps pulled round their bare shoulders, but Neil was suddenly conscious of perspiration soaking through the back of his coat. The man with the question at the back of the ballroom was making his way through the maze of chairs and tables. He paused after negotiating half the distance. This time Neil heard both the question from the floor and the gasp of astonishment blurted out simultaneously by the Justice’s wife sitting next to him. Neil had just got a spoonful of the melted dessert into his mouth.