Washington d c, p.5
Washington, D.C., page 5
But what was honor? The hand that held the bullet became a hard fist. The usual answer: to do what one had to do regardless of personal consequences. But in practice that sort of piety was not much help. One could not always know what it was one ought to do. If the country was best served by the Presidency of James Burden Day and that Presidency could come about only as a result of taking Mr. Nillson’s money, ought he not to take the money? After all, a defender of the Constitution who had taken a bribe was morally preferable to an unbribed President whose aim was to subvert the Republic. Then, finally, the familiar black question: What difference did any of it make? Recently he had been shown the plans for his tomb in the State Capitol. “There will be room,” said the architect comfortably, “for four people in the crypt. Naturally, Mrs. Day will want to join you and perhaps your daughter will, too.” In time no one would know or care which dust was Bill, which dust was Joe.
Half asleep in the sun, Burden once more reviewed the exchange in front of the Capitol and wondered again how Mr. Nillson could have been so certain that his victim would not bring charges against him. The only possible explanation was that the man Nillson was a born tempter, a bold provocateur whose instinct told him, rightly, that it was not in Burden’s nature to make a fuss.
Had other Senators been approached? This was worth opening eyes to contemplate. But the sunlight blinded him and he quickly shut his eyes, returning to the dark rose night of his own blood. Senators seldom discussed such things. He recalled the embarrassment that they had all felt when a famous but poor member of The Club had died and his widow discovered eight hundred thousand dollars in currency in a safety deposit box. “Well,” Burden had said to a colleague when this was mentioned over bean soup in the Senate dining room. “Well,” the colleague had replied. Some did; some did not. He did not. He would not.
Burden opened his eyes just as a man came out of the woods carrying a long rifle. He was obviously a hunter who might at any moment decide that Burden, viewed from a distance, was a raccoon or a fox or whatever was then being shot in Virginia. To prevent an accident, Burden waved to the man who leaped back and took refuge behind a stump. Burden was alarmed. “Runaway Convict” made black headlines in his mind. But then Henry was nearby; and the man was more frightened than he. Burden waved again, smiling and nodding to show that he meant no harm.
Cautiously, the man approached. At the foot of the earthworks he stopped. “Where you from?” he asked. The accent was Carolinian and comforting to his ear. The man was young, dirty and bearded, with long hair that fell across his forehead in a wide tangle.
Burden said that he lived in Washington; the boy frowned. “Then you oughtn’t to be here, sir.” The manner was curiously grave.
“Why not?”
The youth was now so close that Burden could smell the sweat of his body, could examine close-to the curious costume he wore: shapeless jacket, torn trousers, boots with slits between sole and shoe through which black toes showed. He wondered if he would have the strength to call for Henry.
The boy held the rifle across his chest as though presenting arms. He grinned down at Burden. “Now you know why, sir. Don’t make out you don’t.” He jerked his head toward the pine woods where he had come from and Burden saw that suddenly the woods were aflame. White smoke hid the sun. The sky was lurid. He tried to get to his feet but the man’s body was in his way and he did not dare to touch him or ask him to move for fear of the long rifle he held.
Burden sat back against the boulder. “But there’s fire,” he said weakly. “The woods are on fire.”
“ ‘Course there’s fire.”
Burden shrank back, trying not to breathe, not to smell the other’s sweat, to avoid the oddly intimate look in the bright bloodshot eyes. “Let me up,” Burden whispered. “Let me go.”
But the boy did not stir. Bearded lips grinned down at Burden who lay helpless on the ground, unable to move. Then suddenly the youth extended a sinewy brown hand in whose familiar curve Burden saw death remembered and death to come. He screamed and awakened just in time to keep from rolling down the earthworks to the stony field below. For a moment, he sprawled on the ground, heart beating wildly. Then carefully he touched grass, earth, stone, to make sure that he was still alive.
“You all right, Senator?” Henry stood at the edge of the field, like a black scarecrow.
“Yes, Henry!” He was surprised at the vigor of his own voice. Then he got up as rapidly as aging muscles would allow. “I’ll be right with you. Go on back to the car.”
When Henry was out of sight, Burden sat on the boulder and waited until his heart regained its usual slow beat. Apprehensively he looked across the field, half expecting to see the smoke and flame of that famous burning day. But the woods were green. There was no fire. It had all been a part of the mind’s theatre, without significance. Yet the face of the Confederate soldier had been familiar: but then the face of death would hardly be that of a total stranger and it was indeed his own death that had raised the rifle against him. Shuddering at the nearness of his escape, he rose to go. As he did, he noticed, gleaming dully in the grass, the bullet which had struck his father. Stooping down, he dug a hole in the ground with his fingers. Then he placed the bullet in the hole and covered it up. Pleased at what he had done, he began the descent of the earthworks and the crossing of the field.
III
“Yes, sir, I’ll check on him first thing tomorrow.” Clay Overbury sat at the Senator’s desk. “Why are you interested? I mean is there anything special you want me to look for?” Senator Day’s voice grew somewhat indistinct.
Clay, holding the receiver between shoulder and cheek, lit a cigarette. “I see,” he said, realizing that either he had missed something or nothing had been told him. Then the Senator gave orders with his usual clarity and, as always, Clay marveled at how the old man could keep so many things straight in his mind. He forgot nothing, unlike Clay, who was forced to make notes.
“Do you believe in dreams?” The Senator asked this question in precisely the same tone of voice he had used to give instructions for the next day’s press conference.
Clay was taken aback. “Dreams?” he repeated. The Senator chuckled, a thin mocking sound in the receiver. “Neither do I,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Yes, sir. Oh…and tell Diana I’ll call her tomorrow, if you would, sir.” The Senator said that he would and hung up.
Clay rang Miss Perrine in the outer office and asked her to bring him Who’s Who in America. Then he sat back in the chair. The day was almost over. With a sigh he unbuttoned his shirt; he hoped the evening would be cool. Opposite him a last ray of sun illuminated Cicero’s tragic mouth. He must read Cicero one day; to please the Senator.
Miss Perrine entered, pushed at her mass of hair to make it form a symmetrical frame to her pretty face, and failed. She gave him the large red book and waited while he looked up Nillson, Edgar Carl, b. 1881, Havre de Grace, Md.; m. Lucy Wavell 1921 (divorced 1932). No degrees listed. Directorships in a number of corporations: land development, gas, oil. Membership in one of the best of the New York clubs. That was interesting. Residence: 1106 Fifth Av., New York City. He gave Miss Perrine the book. “Check on each of these companies, will you? Ask Commerce if you need any help. Also, check with Dun & Bradstreet. Senator needs it tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.” She gave him a sidelong glance which he did not acknowledge. On dangerously high heels, she tottered from the room.
In the waning light, Clay walked through the garden of the Capitol, among trees neatly tagged with their Latin names. The air was still. The furnace of the Washington day was shutting down. As Clay passed an elderly Senator, he wished him good evening, tactfully supplying his own name. The old man flashed him a smile, grateful for the identification.
At the foot of Capitol Hill he hailed a taxicab. The driver was a compulsive talker who did not in the least mind that Clay was not a listener, particularly when the subject was “niggers,” a Washington obsession. Apparently, they were flowing into the city from the South, and as a result the streets were no longer safe to walk in.
The taxicab stopped before a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue above which, in four apartments, Clay and three other bachelors lived. The rent was low, and the location convenient the Mayflower Hotel, where the movers and shakers met, was only a minute’s walk away.
Clay seldom saw his neighbors but relations were pleasant. They were all rising men, and Clay did his best to get along with them. Early on, he had observed that most ambitious young men tend to gravitate to those who already have power; and though this was natural and necessary, too often in the process they neglected those who did not have power—like themselves—but some day would. Clay liked to think of himself as one who planned ahead. But in actual fact, he merely existed from day to day, waiting for a door to open. Meanwhile, he spun himself a wide web of relationships, just in case.
Clay’s apartment was a single furnished room with a double window overlooking Connecticut Avenue, a wide thoroughfare whose trees and low buildings made it seem more like the main street of some small town than a principal avenue of a national capital. Clay had never got over his first surprise at discovering that Washington was not a city but a town. Except for the huge and pretentious government buildings, the streets were pleasantly familiar even to a provincial’s eye. In fact, the capital of his own state seemed to him in many ways more of a city than Washington with its slow Southern ways.
Clay let his trousers drop in the center of the room, flung his undershirt over a broken standing lamp which already supported a pajama top, kicked his shoes into a dark corner, stepped on the toes of his socks and pulled them off without once bending over, and kicked his drawers accurately in a high arc so that they landed on the knob of the bathroom door, from which they hung like a green and white striped banner. Then he allowed himself to fall, straight as felled timber, onto the unmade studio couch. A small breeze dried the moist flesh until his skin felt as if it were made of warm dry parchment that would tear if he moved. He did not move. The eye which was pressed into the pillow made everything look slightly double-exposed. For a moment he slept with eyes open.
A soft rapping at the door awakened him. Without dressing, he crossed to the door and opened it an inch, expecting to see one of the bachelors. Instead, he saw Miss Perrine, very nervous and bright-eyed.
“Oh,” he said without enthusiasm. “Dolly.”
“I was just in the neighborhood. I’m meeting Munson at the Continental, it’s just a block from here, at eight, and I thought…”
He opened the door wide and ended her rattle. “Come on in,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.” She gasped when she saw that he wore no clothes.
“You’ll catch your death,” she said blushing but not retreating. He shut and locked the door behind her.
“In this heat? Come on, and get out of those hot clothes.” He kissed her. She responded by biting his lower lip with tiny sharp teeth. He grumbled at the pain. Somewhere Dolly Perrine had read that to bite means Passion. Clay had tried, without success, to disabuse her of this notion on the several occasions she had visited him, usually just before she was to meet Munson, her fiancé, who had a punctured eardrum and worked at the Mint. She was going to marry Munson because he was kind and considerate and steady; on the other hand, she could not get enough of Clay, who had casually taken her to bed the first week she had come to work for the Senator. At first she had tried to be sentimental but he would have none of it. He told her plainly that she was a big girl who did what she did because she wanted to and not because he had, with guile and promises, seduced her from virtue. “There’s nothing in it. Nothing except fun.”
“No love?” she had whispered, her face covered by the tangle of hair. He had replied with a hard expletive, and she had wept a little; but since he was a good lawyer, he had misrepresented nothing. He believed that each party to an agreement must fully understand his responsibilities. He also disliked telling lies, could not bear scenes, despised emotional excess. He liked neutrality and pleasure. Dolly Perrine gave pleasure. As for neutrality, he saw to it that her thoughts never strayed too far from the central idea of Munson and the Mint and the little house that they were going to buy on Vermont Avenue.
“What a mess,” she said, looking about the room with the eye of the housewife she would be once her long engagement had ended and, from the chrysalis of a five-year courtship, she and Munson would together emerge into the world as a single great domestic moth.
“It’s just me,” said Clay, pouring a stiff shot of bourbon into a dusty glass. He seldom drank himself but he knew that whisky and Dolly went well together. With each drink she would become increasingly happy and useful in the act of love. And it was love, of course, though not in the way she had been taught to think of that grand passion: two superb faces projected thirty times life-size on a movie screen, offering to share with one another every thought, every dream that a pair of thirty times life-size brains could conjure up. Clay’s love was for the flesh, no more. Also, the conquest was important. He could not have enough victories over women and, indirectly, over the men who did love them. Each time he took Dolly, he conquered Munson too.
Clay watched her as she undressed, a slow process involving many buttons, hooks and zippers. He enjoyed the metamorphosis between women clothed and woman nude. Clothed, she was armored and disguised, with legs lengthened by high heels, hips and breasts diminished by elastic. Naked what had been tall and slender suddenly became short and solid and one realized not only how small she was but how powerfully she was put together, unbreakable, made of earth. Compared to woman, man was a fragile nervous instrument all fire and air, no match for earth and water. Complaining about how light the room was and why didn’t he ever draw the drapes, Dolly Perrine came to bed with him and they mixed the four elements for half an hour.
When Clay came out of the shower, Dolly was already half hooked and buttoned into her armor. Grinning happily, all tension gone, Clay pushed aside the disastrous hair and kissed the round mouth.
“What are you smiling at?” Dolly backed away suspiciously. “What’s so funny?”
Like most women Clay knew, she was wary of humor on the no doubt legitimate ground that sooner or later the joke would be on her. Seeing the bewildered and suspicious face, Clay knew a moment of tenderness, something he seldom experienced in the sexual act. He kissed the tangled hair which was now inexorably making its way across her face, hairpins springing from the twisted depths like arrows fired by frightened forest dwellers.
“Nothing’s funny. Everything’s serious. I’ve got to get dressed. And you must put yourself in the mood for Munson.” He pulled on a dress shirt.
Dolly stepped into shoes with long spike heels and said, “I don’t understand you, Clay.”
“I’m simple.” He tied his black tie in the dust-streaked mirror.
Viciously, hopelessly, Dolly attacked her hair with a comb. “Not really. In the office you’re so free and easy and on the make but when I’m here…”
“On the make with girls?” Clay was sharp. He wanted to know exactly how he seemed to others.
“No. Senators.” She got this out just as the central bang slid back over one eye, giving her a rakish look.
Clay did not allow himself to scowl. “That’s what they pay me for. They put an ad in the papers: energetic young lawyer on the make to go to Washington to charm senators, small salary, large prospects.” He adjusted the white double-breasted evening jacket, hoping the worn shirt cuffs would not be noticed.
“I still think it’s better for you back home, better for anybody.” This was Dolly’s favorite theme. Washington was Versailles, glittering and corrupt, transforming simple yeomen into dandies and worse. Forlornly, she put away her mirror; the hair had won.
“Then why don’t you go back?”
“I am back. This is where I come from, remember? Munson and I are both native-born Washingtonians.” She rose, as though in pride.
Clay turned to her and started to laugh. She looked frightened. “Now what are you laughing at?”
“Something I just thought of. Nothing.” He had indeed recalled a story one of the bachelors had told him.
“You’re laughing at me!” The hands flew to the hair as though betrayed.
“I’m not. It’s something one of the men who lives here told me, a funny story. He’s British.”
“What story?”
“When he was twenty-one his father gave him just three pieces of advice. First, never drink whisky with oysters. Second, never go hunting south of the Thames. Third, never have a woman before sundown because you might meet someone better later on.”
“You are a bastard,” said Dolly with deep feeling.
“I thought that was funny. Especially about hunting south of the Thames. I mean, what’s wrong with south of the Thames?” But Dolly was already out the door.
