Some Faces in the Crowd (35 page)

Mead saw the look in their eyes, for he was a student of looks and eyes, but he didn’t care. It was late and he was lonely. Bending his tall, unathletic body to the table, he slid into the booth. His dark, heavy-lidded eyes twitched behind their thick lenses as he observed his youthful, not yet twitching companions. His long, nervous fingers reached out for things with which to occupy themselves, arranging the water glass, a fork and several matches into various designs.

“Have a drink, Mead?” Sheridan said, trying to keep the scholastic awe out of his voice.

“Thanks,” said Mead. “Maybe one. A nightcap.”

Sheridan beckoned the waiter and caught Peters’ eye again. To such a man we owe a debt, he signaled. Even two drinks and twenty minutes’ conversation is not too much.

“Can you imagine?” said Mead. “They don’t even know who Firdausi is. Can you imagine living in a town fifteen years where they never even heard of Firdausi?”

“You mean Joe Firdausi, the agent?” Peters said. They were writing a farce comedy at the moment and keyed for wit.

“An agent they would have known,” Mead said. “Up at Vonn’s party, I’m talking about, playing
Who Am I?
So I take Firdausi, you know, the Persian epic poet, and everybody screams it shouldn’t count because he’s too obscure.”

Mead drank the straight Scotch the waiter brought him without asking, and it was only when he tried to raise the glass to his lips that Sheridan and Peters saw how drunk he was.

“‘Obscure!,’ I told them,” Mead continued, “‘So obscure the encyclopedia gives him a full page, that’s how obscure!’ So then Birdie Slocum, that noted historical scholar, says, ‘I never heard of such a man.’ So I told Birdie, ‘That’s because his name has never been in the
Hollywood Reporter.’”

“Did you really tell her that?” Sheridan asked.

Birdie Slocum was the wife of Mead’s producer. Mead twirled the empty whiskey glass idly. The young men looked at each other guiltily. They knew his reputation for post-facto courage.

“I don’t know how to play that game in this town,” Mead said. “If you pick Churchill or Eisenhower they get sore because they think you’re insulting their intelligence. And if you pick anything tougher than that, they think you’re trying to show off.”

Peters and Sheridan said nothing. They were afraid Mead was going to ask them if they knew who Firdausi was. “Have another?” Sheridan urged.

“Well, all right,” said Mead. “But this
is
the nightcap. Firdausi. The greatest poet in the history of Persia. The author of
The Book of Kings.
Even the savage tribesmen in the hills recite Firdausi.”

The waiter brought Mead his drink and he raised it in toast. “To Firdausi,” he said, “whom Birdie Slocum will never know.”

“And last week it was Tilly,” Mead was saying into his empty glass. “And Vonn wouldn’t count him either. Can you beat that, a German and he never heard of Tilly? Tilly, the Catholic general. The Thirty Years’ War. It’s like an American not knowing Washington.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his red eyes irritably. “And the week before that, Vico, the Italian philosopher. And before that, Timothy Dwight.”

Mead studied the two young men with pensive amusement. His face looked as if it had been drawn on an egg, the narrowing side down, the forehead broad and bulbous.

“Fifteen years in a town that never heard of Firdausi or Tilly or Vico or Dwight,” said Mead.

“Have another one,” Sheridan said.

“But this really has to be the nightcap,” Mead said. “I’ve got a conference with Slocum at ten.”

After the third nightcap, Mead said, “When I was your age, at least I used to stand for something. I was a Socialist. I voted for Debs. Now I haven’t got enough freedom of speech to talk back to Birdie Slocum.”

The young men were ready to call it a night, but neither would make a move. After all it wasn’t every day in the week that they could sit down with Elliot Mead, former historical scholar, now thirty-five hundred a week.

The waiter yawned and turned off as many lights as he could with ostentatious discretion. The old writer and the two young ones sat there in the empty bar.

“Don’t make so much noise turning off those lights,” Mead reprimanded. “Remember, there are people here trying to sleep.”

The waiter laughed joylessly and Sheridan and Peters looked at each other in mutual acknowledgment of Mead’s reputation for repeatable quips.

Mead smiled with them. He was not going to keep that ten o’clock date in the morning. He was going to sit up with these boys, impress them with his wit and knowledge, get good and drunk, and have his secretary call the studio to say he was sick.

“I know what let’s do,” Mead suggested. “Let’s play one quick game. I am somebody whose name begins with C. Now, who am I?”

“Are you a brilliant French economist of the mercantile period?” Sheridan began, reaching back into freshman history.

“No,” Mead said, smiling, warming to the game, “I am not Jean Baptiste Colbert. …”

O
NE AFTERNOON, EARLY LAST
fall, we were back at the far end of our property having a meeting in our underground clubhouse. My brother Davy and I had dug it out that past summer and covered it over with pine branches and tar paper. We were just climbing out of our secret tunnel when along came Mr. Jeliffe on horseback, riding his side of the fence. Mr. Jeliffe is very rich and has a mustache and a big red face and a house that’s about ten times as big as ours.

People around where we live don’t put on much dog; they just do their writing or their painting, stuff like that, and mess around in their gardens and go for long walks across the fields. The simple life, that’s what we always hear them calling it. Well, Mr. Jeliffe, he leads the simple life in a pretty rich kind of a way. I mean he rides to the hounds and gives hunt breakfasts and big deals like that. It’s sort of funny in a way because when he first came out here only two or three years ago he couldn’t even ride a horse. He still flops around on his
buhwhosis
but nobody laughs at him to his face because he’s so rich. He cornered the market on copper or cotton or something like that when the army needed it real bad to win the war and Dad says that’s about the only way to get rich any more. You’d think that having all that money would make a fella nicer, that he’d sort of relax and smile at everybody and just enjoy his money. But not Mr. Jeliffe. Mr. Jeliffe is—even if Dad says he wishes we wouldn’t use the word—a jerk.

Like the time he caught us in his orchard eating a few of his apples. Dad says it doesn’t pay to spray our orchard so our apples are all wormy. That’s why, once in a while, we have to go over and try some of Mr. Jeliffe’s apples. They’re Mackintosh, and I guess all the worms must have come over to our place because they sure don’t mess around with Mr. Jeliffe’s apples. Well, this time Mr. Jeliffe caught us—red-apple-handed, says Dave, who’s ten years old and still likes to pun. He reined in his horse and looked bigger than God and he said, “Boys, I don’t think it’s a very good idea for you to be over here. I raise Dobermans and they’d sooner bite you than look at you and I wouldn’t be responsible for your safety.”

See what we mean? He didn’t come right out and tell us to get the H off his property or he’d sick the dogs on us. He made it sound like he was trying to do us a favor by getting us out of his lousy old orchard without those Dobermans eating us up. Lousy is another word Dad doesn’t like us to use; in fact he fines us a nickel every time he hears it, only there are some words that are bad words but there just aren’t any good words that mean the same thing. Like the jerky way Mr. Jeliffe went about ordering us out of his orchard.

Well, anyway, we were just climbing out of our clubhouse, which is a swell hideaway nearly four feet deep and just big enough for the three members of our club, when there sits Mr. Jeliffe on his big white horse Captain, making like he’s Teddy Roosevelt or something.

“Howdy, boys,” he says. He’s getting pretty Western since he’s been riding around on that horse. He’s about to ride on and then he remembers something and leans his horse around.

“Say, Steve, that ram of yours—does he have any horns?”

Davy and I looked at each other and shook our heads. “Not that we ever noticed, why?”

“Well, maybe I was imagining things but seems to me when I was riding along your meadow fence the other day, I thought I saw a white ram with a beautiful set of horns, trotting right along with the ewes. Of course I was about a hundred yards away, so …”

“Sure, maybe it just looked like it, an optical delusion or something.” I looked at Davy and we were both embarrassed because everyone knew Mr. Jeliffe liked his whiskey—that’s the way Mom says it—and from what I hear you can see some pretty strange sights when too much whiskey gets inside of you.

“I’ll admit it was only for a second I saw him and then he saw me and took off pronto. But still, I was pretty sure …” He broke off and suddenly guffawed for no good reason. “Maybe it was one of Schofield’s rams got in with your flock. Well, I was just wondering—you don’t think it could’ve been a white deer, do you? The head of a ten-point white buck would look pretty nice over the mantle-piece in my study.”

He dug his heels into the big belly of his horse and rode off. Davy put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers at him. A
white
deer, and over
his
mantlepiecel. In the first place every autumn since we were little kids someone has told us about someone else who’s pretty sure he’s seen a white deer. But I am almost twelve years old now and I had never seen one and I had still to meet anybody who had honest and truly seen one with his own eyes.

And in the second place, if that thousand-to-one shot came in and there really-truly was a white deer wandering around our place, what would his head be doing over Mr. Jeliffe’s mantelpiece? He was in our meadow with our sheep, wasn’t he? If there was such a thing as a white deer, and if he was anybody’s white deer, he was ours, wasn’t he? Mr. Jeliffe just better keep his greedy old hands off him. Even if our white deer didn’t exist, we didn’t like Mr. Jeliffe even thinking about him.

We spread more pine branches over the tar-paper roof and filled the tunnel up so nobody would know we had a clubhouse there at all and then we ambled over to the lower pasture where there was an old dead apple tree that had been our first clubhouse when Davy was still going to nursery school. Our initials were carved in that tree, and the secret sign of our club, and we still used the ladder to the tree-house to climb up once in a while to see if any enemy was approaching. Well, this time as soon as we got to the tree we noticed something funny. Where the carving had been, the trunk was almost bare and there were slash-marks all up and down this one side, as if—we looked at each other and wondered—as if the horns of some animal had been slicing at it to sharpen his points. Plenty of times we had seen bulls do that, and rams—but we didn’t have any bulls and our ram Hector had only those two little hard bulges where his horns ought to be. And yet these slashed-off places on the tree were fresh as anything.

Well, naturally we knew better than to pay attention to anything Mr. Jeliffe had to say, but just to make double-sure we kept checking on the flock. We watched them come in every evening and quite a few times we even went out after supper and walked up as far as the pine woods that run along the west line of our place and the Jeliffes’. But we didn’t see any white deer. In fact we had just about given up and decided that Mr. Jeliffe was talking through his hat, as usual, when we happened to be picking up some groceries for Mom at the country store. Billy, whose pop runs the store, is a big kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and a pretty good friend of ours. He lets us go with him when he sets out his muskrat traps and he lets us play with his hunting dogs and once in a while he even takes us along when he goes gunning. Billy was an Eagle Scout and he pitches on the school baseball team and when he says something you can bet it’s true. Well, anyway, while Billy is picking out some oranges for us, he says, “Say, you fellers haven’t got a new ram up at your place, have you?”

Davy and I looked at each other. This was getting mysterious and kind of exciting. “Uh-uh. Why, Billy?”

“Well, when I was setting up traps last night, I thought I saw a ram in your meadow, with great big horns.”

“Billy, could it’ve been a deer—a white buck?”

“Well, it ain’t exactly impossible. They do turn up every now and again. My old man saw one around here when I was a kid, maybe ten or twelve years ago.”

That white deer—how can I explain it?—he was our white deer. Whether he was for real, or just a fragment of our imagination, like Dad says sometimes, he belonged to us. We wanted to see him and try to make a pet out of him. We didn’t want anybody to hurt him. Mr. Jeliffe just better keep his dirty hands to himself.

“Say, Billy, this white deer, when gunning season starts, you don’t think anybody’d try to shoot him, do you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t, for one,” Billy said. “You know what they say about killing a white deer? It’s twice as unlucky as bustin’ a mirror.”

“Mr. Jeliffe better remember that.”

“That joker,” Billy said. “Last season I saw him open up on a hen pheasant on the ground. He’s from the city and I guess he don’t know any better. He’s liable to do anything.”

“Well, he better stay away from our white deer or I’ll shoot him in the kiester with my bee-bee gun,” Davy said. Davy likes to use words like that.

“Let me know if you spot ’im, fellers,” Billy said as he handed us the grocery bags.

We went out after supper that night and we looked and looked and we got in so late that Mom said what on earth were we doing out there in the meadow two hours after our bedtime. We didn’t tell anybody but we set our alarm for three o’clock, with the clock under our pillow so it wouldn’t ring but just buzz in our ear. There was almost a full moon and it sure was beautiful, only a little chilly when the wind came up, and finally we had to go in without seeing anything that even looked like a white deer. We did the same thing the next night and the next and the next and we were getting so pooped that we were yawning all over the place and Davy fell asleep right in the middle of his arithmetic. But we still hadn’t seen our white deer.