The Early Stories (47 page)

It was true, the Englishman's calm—so cheering in Oxford, so strong that, even meeting him on High Street, against a background of steel-workers on bicycles and whey-faced bus queues, you smelled pipe smoke, and felt the safety of his room in Magdalen, with the old novels in many thin volumes and the window giving onto the deer park and the drab London magazines stacked like dolls' newspapers on the mantel—in America had become a maddening quiescence, as if the thicker sunlight of this more southern country were a physical weight on his limbs. He had protested the bother of being included in this dinner engagement,
but he had not suggested, as they had hoped, that he could manage a night on his own.

“No,” he was saying to Tim, “they haven't taken me to Louie's. You say it's an interesting place. Does it have lots of ethos? You Americans are always talking about ethos. Margaret Mead is something of your White Goddess over here, isn't she?”

“Mamie is,” Kathy suddenly said, thrusting her fingers into the hair at her temples and laughing when the others did.

Donald said that once again the American people had proven themselves idiots in the eyes of the world. Luke said it would be a different story in 1960. “Wait till 'sixty, wait till 'sixty,” Donald said. “That's all you people think about. The 1960 model of Plymouth car; the population in 1960. You're in love with the future.” He touched, in an unconscious gesture, the breast of his coat, to make sure the stiffness of the notebook was there. Luke smiled and saw them all through Donald's eyes: the mild, homely heir; his fretful, leggy wife; Liz with her half-formed baby; Luke himself with his half-baked success—pale, pale. Poor Americans, these, for the
New Statesman & Nation
. What Donald couldn't see that Luke could was how well he, Donald, his sensible English shoes cracked and his wool clothes frazzled, blended into their pastel frieze.

The man introduced to them as Mr. Born walked into the room. “Looks like Ah'll be getting a ride,” he said to Tim. “With your pa and ma.” His voice, as Luke had expected, was rich and grainy, but the accent forced a slight revision of his first idea of the man. He was not a New Yorker. In the black suit, Born's body, solid as a barrel, stood out with peculiar force against the linen-covered wall, where Mrs. Fraelich's Japanese prints made patches of vague color.

“Would you like a Scotch-and-water, John?” Tim asked. “Or cognac?” Mr. Born shook his massive head—severed from his body, it might have weighed forty pounds—and held up his square, exquisitely clean hand to halt all liquor traffic. In the other he gripped a heavy cigar, freshly lighted.

“We've been chewing over the election,” Tim said.

“You desahd who won it?”

The young people made a fragile noise of laughter.

“We've been deciding who should have won it,” Donald said, cross spots appearing on his cheekbones and forehead.

“Yeass,” Mr. Born said, simultaneous with the hissing of the cushions as he settled into a leather armchair. “There was never any doubt about
the way it would go in Texas. The betting in Houston wasn't on
who
”
—
his lips pushed forward on the prolonged “who”—“would get it but at what
taam
the other fella would con
cede
.” He rotated the cigar a half-circle, so the burning end was toward himself. “A lotta money was lost in Houston while Adlai was making that speech so good. They thought, you see, it would be
soon
er.”

“How did
you
do?” Donald asked tactlessly, as if this were an exhibit they had arranged for him.

“Noo.” The Texan scratched his ear fastidiously and beamed. “I had no money on it.”

“What
is
the situation out there? Politically? One reads the Democrats are in bad shape,” Donald said.

The broad healthy face bunched as he pleasantly studied the boy. “What they say, Lyndon didn't show up too good at the convention. We aren't all that proud of him. As I heard it expressed, the feeling was, Let those two run and get killed and get rid of 'em that way. That's the way I've heard it expressed: Run those two, and let 'em get killed.”

“Really!” Kathy exclaimed. Then, surprised at herself, she bit her lower lip coquettishly and crossed her legs, calling attention to them. Luke liked her legs because above the lean and urban ankles the calves swelled to a country plumpness.

“The American scramble,” Donald murmured.

Luke, afraid Mr. Born would feel hostility in the air, asked why the South hadn't pushed someone like Gore instead of Kennedy.

“Gore's not popular. The answer's very simple: The South doesn't have anyone big enough. 'Cept Lyndon. And he's sick. Heart attack. No, they're in a bad way down there. They got the leaders of both houses, and they're in a bad way.”

“Wouldn't there be a certain amount of anti-Catholic sentiment stirred up if Kennedy were to run?” Tim asked. His mother, for a period in her youth, had been a convert to the Church.

Mr. Born puffed his cigar and squinted at his friend's son through the smoke. “I think we've outgrown that. I think we've outgrown that.”

The rough bulge of Donald's forehead burned with political antagonism. He blurted, “You're pleased with the way things went?”

“Well. I voted for Aahk. Not particularly proud of it, though. Not particularly proud of it. He vetoed our gas bill.” Everyone laughed, for no clear reason. “If he had it to do over again, he wouldn't
do
it.”

“You think so?” Donald asked.

“I know it for a
faact
. He's said so. He wants the bill. And Adlai, he
wouldn't promise if he got in he wouldn't try to get the Lands back to Washington. So we voted Aahk in; he was the best we could get.”

Donald pointed at him gingerly. “You, of course, don't want the Tidelands to revert to the federal government.”

“They
cain't
. There won't be any gas. It's off twelve percent from last year now, for the
needs
. You see—Are you all interested in this?”

The group nodded hastily.

“I have a trillion feet of gas. It's down there. In the ground. It's not gone to go away. Now, I made a contract to sell that gas at eighteen cents in Chicago. In the city of Chicago there are maybe twelve thousand meters now that don't have adequate supply. I wanted to pipe it up, from Texas. That was two years ago. They won't let me do it. I've been in Washington, D.C., for most of those two years, trying to see a bill passed that'll
let
me do it.” He released some smoke and smiled. Washington, the implication was, had agreed with him.

Donald asked why they wouldn't let him do it. Mr. Born explained in detail—clearly and kindly, and even got to his feet to explain—federal agencies, state commissions, wellhead quotas, costs of distillate, dry holes (“They don't allow you for drah holes
after;
the ones up
to
, O.K., but then they don't recognize 'em”), and the Socialist color of thinking in Washington. On and on it went, a beautiful composition, vowel upon vowel, occasional emphasis striking like an oboe into a passage of cellos. The coda came too soon: “But the point, the point is this: If they
do
pass it, then fine. I'm contracted out; I'm willing to stick by it. But if they
don't—
if they don't, then I sell it for more
insaahd Texas
. That's how demand is gone up.”

Luke realized with delight that here, not ten feet away, walked and talked a bugaboo—a Tidelands lobbyist, a States' Righter, a Purchaser of Congressmen, a Pillar of Reaction. And what had he proved to be, this stout man holding his huge head forward from his spine, bisonlike? A companion all simplicity and courtesy, bearing without complaint—and all for the sake, it seemed, of these young people—the unthinkable burden of a trillion feet of gas. Luke could not remember the reasons for governmental control of big business any better than he could recall when drunk the defects of his own personality. With a gentle three-finger grip on his cigar, Mr. Born settled back into the armchair, the viewpoints alternative to his hanging vaporized in the air around him, a flattering haze.

The next minute, Mr. and Mrs. Fraelich came and took John Born away, though not before old man Fraelich, his bulbous gray voice droning
anxiously, exuded every fact he knew about the natural-gas industry. Mr. Born listened politely, tilting his stogie this way and that. The possibility occurred to Luke that, as Mr. Born owned a trillion feet of gas, Mr. Fraelich owned John Born.

“He's really a hell of a nice guy,” Tim said when the older people had gone.

“Oh, he was wonderful!” Liz said. “The way he stood there, so big in his black suit—” She encircled an area with her arms and, without thinking, thrust out her stomach.

Kathy asked, “Did he mean a trillion feet of gas in the pipe?”

“No, no, you fluff,” Tim said, giving her a bullying hug that jarred Luke. “
Cubic
feet.”

“That still doesn't mean anything to me,” Liz said. “Can't you compress gas?”

“Where does he keep it?” Kathy asked. “I mean have it.”

“In the
ground
,” Luke said. “Weren't you listening?” But she wasn't his to scold.

Kathy kept at it. “Gas like you burn?”

“A trillion,” Donald said, tentatively sarcastic. “I don't even know how many ciphers are in it.”

“Twelve in America,” Luke told him. “In Britain, more. Eighteen.”

“You Americans are so good at figgers. Yankee ingenuity.”

“Watch it, Boyce-King. If you British don't learn how to say ‘figures' we'll pipe that gas under your island and float it off into space.”

Though no one else laughed, Luke himself did, at the picture of England as a red pieplate skimming through space, fragments chipping off until nothing remained but the dome of St. Paul's. And after they had sat down to dinner, he continued, he felt, to be quite funny, frequently at the expense of “Boyce-King.” He felt back in college, full of novel education and undulled ambition. Kathy Fraelich laughed until her hand shook over the soup. It was good to know he could still, impending fatherhood or not, make people laugh. “… but the
great
movies are the ones where an idol teeters, you know, all grinning and bug-eyed”—he wobbled rigidly in his chair and then with horrible slow menace fell forward, breaking off the act just as his nose touched the rim of the water glass—“and then crumbles all over the screaming worshippers. They don't make scenes like that in British movies. They save their idols and pawn them off as Druid shrines. Or else scratch ‘Wellington' across the front. Ah, you're a canny race, Boyce-King.”

After dinner they watched two television plays, which Luke ingeniously
defended as fine art at every turn of the action, Donald squirming and blinking and the others not even listening but attending to the screen. Liz in her passive pregnant state didn't resist TV. The young Fraelichs nuzzled together in one fat chair. The black-and-white figures—Luke kept saying “figgers”—were outlined on Fraelich's costly color set with rainbows.

Luke, at the door, thanked their hosts enthusiastically for the excellent meal, the educational company, the iridescent dramas. The two couples expanded the last goodbye with a discussion of where to live eventually. They decided, while Donald nodded and chuckled uneasily on the fringe of the exchange, that nothing was as important as the children's feeling secure in a place.

In the taxi, Luke, sorry that in the end Donald had seemed an extra party, said to him, “Well, we've shown you the Texas Billionaire. You've gazed into the heart of a great nation.”

“Did you notice his hands?” Liz asked. “They were really beautiful.” She was in a nice, tranquil mood, bathed in maternal hormones.

“It was extraordinary,” Donald said, squeezed in the middle and uncertain where his arms should go, “the way he held you all, with his consistently selfish reasoning.”

Luke put his arm on the back of the seat, including his visitor in a non-tactile embrace and touching Liz's neck with his fingers. The packet from France, he reckoned, was on the way. The head of the cabby jerked as he tried to make out his passengers in the rearview mirror. “You're afraid,” Luke said loudly, so the cabbie, democratically, could hear, “of our hideous vigor.”

Dear Alexandros