Jailbird (14 page)

“When he was down here,” said Lawes, “Mr. Leen told me this was going to happen. It was the catfood company he wanted—not
The New York Times.”

The two lawyers got into the backseat of the limousine. They weren’t subdued at all. They were laughing about the guard who looked like the President of the United States. “I felt like saying to him,” said one, “‘Mr. President, why don’t you just pardon him right here and
now? He’s suffered enough, and he could get in some good golf this afternoon.’”

One of them tried on the false beard, and the other one said he looked like Karl Marx. And so on. They were incurious about me. Cleveland Lawes told them that I had been visiting my son. They asked me what my son was in for and I said, “Mail fraud.” That was the end of the conversation.

So off we went to Atlanta. There was a curious object stuck by means of a suction cup to the glove compartment in front of me, I remember. Coming out of the cup and aimed at my breastbone was what looked like about a foot of green garden hose. At the end of the shaft was a white plastic wheel the size of a dinner plate. Once we got going, the wheel began to hypnotize me, bobbing up and down when we went over bumps, swaying this way and then that way as we went around curves.

So I asked about it. It was a toy steering wheel, it turned out. Lawes had a seven-year-old son he sometimes took with him on trips. The little boy could pretend to be steering the limousine with the plastic wheel. There had been no such toy when my own son was little. Then again, he wouldn’t have enjoyed it much. Even at seven, young Walter hated to go anywhere with his mother and me.

I said it was a clever toy.

Lawes said it could be an exciting one, too, especially if the person with the real steering wheel was drunk and having close shaves with oncoming trucks and sideswiping parked cars and so on. He said that the President of the
United States ought to be given a wheel like that at his inauguration, to remind him and everybody else that all he could do was pretend to steer.

He let me off at the airport.

The planes to New York City were all overbooked, it turned out. I did not get out of Atlanta until five o’clock that afternoon. That was all right with me. I skipped lunch, having no appetite. I found a paperback book in a toilet stall, so I read that for a while. It was about a man who, through ruthlessness, became the head of a big international conglomerate. Women were crazy about him. He treated them like dirt, but they just came back for more. His son was a drug addict and his daughter was a nymphomaniac.

My reading was interrupted once by a Frenchman who spoke to me in French and pointed to my left lapel. I thought at first that I had set myself on fire again, even though I didn’t smoke anymore. Then I realized that I was still wearing the narrow red ribbon that identified me as a
chevalier
in the French Légion d’honneur. Pathetically enough, I had worn it all through my trial, and all the way to prison, too.

I told him in English that it had come with the suit, which I had bought secondhand, and that I had no idea what it was supposed to represent.

He became very icy,
“Permettez-moi, monsieur,”
he said, and he deftly plucked the ribbon from my lapel as though it had been an insect there.

“Merci,”
I said, and I returned to my book.

When there was at last an airplane seat for me, my
name was broadcast over the public-address system several times: “Mr. Walter F. Starbuck, Mr. Walter F. Starbuck …”It had been such a notorious name at one time; but I could not now catch sight of anyone who seemed to recognize it, who raised his or her eyebrows in lewd surmise.

Two and a half hours later I was on the island of Manhattan, wearing my trenchcoat to keep out the evening chill. The sun was down. I was staring at an animated display in the window of a store that sold nothing but toy trains.

It was not as though I had no place to go. I was close to where I was going. I had written ahead. I had reserved a room without bath or television for a week, paying in advance—in the once-fashionable Hotel Arapahoe, now a catch-as-catch-can lazaret and bagnio one minute from Times Square.

I
HAD BEEN
to the Arapahoe once before—in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. Fire had yet to be domesticated. Albert Einstein had predicted the invention of the wheel, but was unable to describe its probable shape and uses in the language of ordinary women and men. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer, was President. The sale of alcoholic beverages was against the law, and I was a Harvard freshman.

I was operating under instructions from my mentor, Alexander Hamilton McCone. He told me in a letter that I was to duplicate a folly he himself had committed when a freshman, which was to take a pretty girl to the Harvard-Columbia football game in New York, and then to spend a month’s allowance on a lobster dinner for two, with oysters and caviar and all that, in the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe. We were to go dancing afterward. “You must wear your tuxedo,” he said. “You must tip like a drunken sailor.” Diamond Jim Brady, he told me, had once eaten four dozen oysters, four lobsters, four chickens, four squabs, four T-bone steaks, four pork chops, and four lamb chops there—on a bet. Lillian Russell had looked on.

Mr. McCone may have been drunk when he wrote that letter. “All work and no play,” he wrote, “makes Jack a dull boy.”

And the girl I took there, the twin sister of my roommate, would become one of the four women I would ever truly love. The first was my mother. The last was my wife.

Sarah Wyatt was the girl’s name. She was all of eighteen, and so was I. She was attending a very easy two-year college for rich girls in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which was Pine Manor. Her family lived in Prides Crossing, north of Boston—toward Gloucester. While we were in New York City together she would be staying with her maternal grandmother, a stockbroker’s widow, in a queerly irrelevant enclave of dead-end streets and vest-pocket parks and Elizabethan apartment-hotels called “Tudor City”—near the East River, and actually bridging Forty-second Street. As luck will have it, my son now lives in Tudor City. So do Mr. and Mrs. Leland Clewes.

Small world.

Tudor City was quite new, but already bankrupt and nearly empty when I arrived by taxicab—to take my Sarah to the Hotel Arapahoe in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. I was wearing a tuxedo made to my measure by the finest tailor in Cleveland. I had a silver cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case, both gifts from Mr. McCone. I had forty dollars in my billfold. I could have bought the whole state of Arkansas for forty dollars cash in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one.

We come to the matter of physical size again: Sarah
Wyatt was three inches taller than me. She did not mind. She was so far from minding that, when I fetched her in Tudor City, she was wearing high heels with her evening dress.

A stronger proof that she was indifferent to our disparity in size: In seven years Sarah Wyatt would agree to marry me.

She wasn’t quite ready when I arrived, so I had to talk to her grandmother, Mrs. Sutton, for a while. Sarah had warned me at the football game that afternoon that I must not mention suicide to Mrs. Sutton—because Mr. Sutton had jumped out of his office window in Wall Street after the stock market crashed in Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine.

“It is a nice place you have here, Mrs. Sutton,” I said.

“You’re the only person who thinks so,” she said. “It’s crowded. Everything that goes on in the kitchen you can smell out here.”

It was only a two-bedroom apartment. She had certainly come down in the world. Sarah said she used to have a horse farm in Connecticut and a house on Fifth Avenue, and on and on.

The walls of the little entrance hall were covered with blue ribbons from horse shows before the Crash. “I see you have won a lot of blue ribbons,” I said.

“No,” she said, “it was the horse that won those.”

We were seated on folding chairs at a card table in the middle of the living room. There were no easy chairs, no couch. But the room was so jammed with breakfronts and
escritoires and armoires and highboys and lowboys and Welsh dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks and so on, that I could not guess where the windows were. It turned out that she also stockpiled servants, all very old. A uniformed maid had let me in, and then exited sideways into a narrow fissure between two imposing examples of cabinetwork.

Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in “the electric” that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.

Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.

“I suppose this all looks very temporary to you,” Mrs. Sutton said to me.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“It’s quite permanent,” she said. “I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
escritoires and armoires and highboys and lowboys and Welsh dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks and so on, that I could not guess where the windows were. It turned out that she also stockpiled servants, all very old. A uniformed maid had let me in, and then exited sideways into a narrow fissure between two imposing examples of cabinetwork.

Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in “the electric” that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.

Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.

“I suppose this all looks very temporary to you,” Mrs. Sutton said to me.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“It’s quite permanent,” she said. “I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Men in tuxedos as beautifully made as yours is should never call anyone but the Queen of England ‘ma’am,’” she said.

“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

“You are only a child, of course,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Tell me again how you are related to the McCones,” she said.

I had never told anyone that I was related to the McCones. There was another lie I had told frequently, however—a lie, like everything else about me, devised by Mr. McCone. He said it would be perfectly acceptable, even fashionable, to admit that my father was penniless, but it would not do to have a household servant for a father.

The lie went like this, and I told it to Mrs. Sutton: “My father works for Mr. McCone as curator of his art collection. He also advises Mr. McCone on what to buy.”

“A cultivated man,” she said.

“He studied art in Europe,” I said. “He is no businessman.”

“A dreamer,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “If it weren’t for Mr. McCone, I could not afford to go to Harvard.”

“‘Starbuck—’ “she mused. “I believe that’s an old Nantucket name.”

I was ready for that one, too. “Yes,” I said, “but my great-grandfather left Nantucket for the Gold Rush and never returned. I must go to Nantucket sometime and look at the old records, to see where we fit in.”

“A California family,” she said.

“Nomads, really,” I said. “California, yes—but Oregon, too, and Wyoming, and Canada, and Europe. But they were always bookish people—teachers and so on.”

I was pure phlogiston, an imaginary element of long ago.

“Descended from whaling captains,” she said.

“I imagine,” I said. I was not at all uncomfortable with the lies.

“And from Vikings before that,” she said. I shrugged.

She had decided to like me a lot—and would continue to do so until the end. As Sarah would tell me, Mrs. Sutton often referred to me as her little Viking. She would not live long enough to see Sarah agree to marry me and then to jilt me. She died in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-seven or so—penniless in an apartment furnished with little more than a card table, two folding chairs, and her bed. She had sold off all her treasures in order to support herself and her old servants, who would have had no place to go and nothing to eat without her. She survived them all. The maid, who was Tillie, was the last of them to die. Two weeks after Tillie died, so did Mrs. Sutton depart from this world.

Back there in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, while I was waiting for Sarah to complete her toilette, Mrs. Sutton told me that Mr. McCone’s father, the founder of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, built the biggest house where she spent her girlhood summers—in Bar Harbor, Maine.
When it was finished, he gave a grand ball with four orchestras, and nobody came.

“It seemed very beautiful and noble to snub him like that,” she said. “I remember how happy I was the next day. I can’t help wondering now if we weren’t just a little insane. I don’t mean that we were insane to miss a wonderful party or to hurt the feelings of Daniel McCone. Daniel McCone was a perfectly ghastly man. What was insane was the way we all imagined that God was watching, and simply adoring us, guaranteeing us all seats at His right hand for having snubbed Daniel McCone.”