He paused, as if astonished at this truth. He murmured it over several times, as if to apprehend it.
“You see, Hoag, he’s a no-good guy, maybe a petty, rotten man, but his seeing her in the street like that was like me, suddenly seeing that patch of wheat from along the road; and in spite of those two black bulls, one on each road, I had to go along and look at it. It was just what I wanted. The dry hill, the stony patch, and the plump wheat some peasant planted there. Now I see a lot of women in the street, I don’t think of their—body—never, never, never until I get them upstairs—not even then until I—until—they are like all the wheat you might see all over Manitoba, or all over the Ukraine. There’s some good in it. If they can be bought and sold like cattle—cattle too are good for something. Now this blondine has been corrupted, you see, like good food is adulterated in capital cities and countries where they have fraud everywhere. She’s innocent. The blood of people is stored up in banks, and it can go bad, but was good, and it can be sold by gangsters, but it grew up free, it flowed free—like milk, like water. Now that blood can be accessible only to monopolists and gangsters, and so can the blondine and so can wheat. They can all be allowed to the people only at high prices, and so there’s a sort of poison, rust, a rotten dew on that blood and that wheat, and even on my blondine, and so the wheat and cotton is whored. Why the style we have here of cheated-wheat and cheated-meat and whored-bread and tainted-cotton, I mean, only for gangsters—look at me. If I’d been born in a land where they wouldn’t let me put my hand in your pocket—not yours, Edda—I’d be a good commissar. But I’m corrupted. I’m a profiteer. Will I sit by and let the others take the pickings? It’s asking too much.”
“Look, I didn’t say body in a wrong way. The word body is a good word, too,” said Edda, ashamed. “I know the blondine is a beautiful woman, though I never liked that high, narrow forehead of hers, and the hollows in her temples. It is the face of a peasant—I don’t mean peasant is a wrong word,” she cried again.
“And supposing she goes back to the gutter! Some naval officer takes her, he’s a high-flier, a highjacker, and he leaves her and she goes back to the gutter again, and supposing he ends as a drunk, that’s a double tragedy.”
“Who? Who?”
“In your book, this man wanted to build up and he ends as a drunk,” he explained with droll melancholy.
“Your schemes on the side are like speculation in blondes,” said Flack.
He frowned. “No, no—I’m honest. I’m looking for that little patch of wheat, I want an oasis.”
It was four o’clock, time for his usual uptown “session.” He left.
Edda said angrily, “And to think I’ve seen him myself picking up one-dollar sidewalk speculation women! Why do we know this man?”
But Flack burst out into a tender, hopeful praise of Grant—as he had been in his youth; and of their future, “Bear with him; it’s for our future. He’s a big bull himself, snorting and tearing up the turf. He always speaks of our house, your boudoir—”
“I hate him,” cried the young girl, bursting into tears.
Flack looked at her for a minute, and then said, “I know you do. If you say so, I’ll give up the whole idea.” He spoke earnestly and looked resolute though disappointed.
“I know he’s kind and good. But I am jealous because he can love wholesale—he has money to secure it, and I have none and none! He throws his wholesale in my face without meaning it.”
The next day Grant was back again. He walked about looking uneasily at the clock and said he was waiting for a telephone call. “Better here, better not at my place, might get blackmailed.” He had employed a private agent in Flack’s name, asking for information about the blonde in Washington. He had already heard by phone at the office that she was dancing at the Diplomat Hotel with naval officers; that she was out every night. Grant had bombarded her hotel with telegrams and telephone calls.
“Perhaps she thought I was cooling off? Perhaps she treated me to my own medicine? What should I do? What do you recommend?” And all the time laughing anxiously, appealing to them with downcast face and fresh, simple glance, confessing his activities, his suspicions. He had sent one of his office men down to Washington to trail her. Parkinson said she was dancing at the Diplomat Hotel. She might be a spy.
“Oh, she’s a spy, of course,” said Edda.
He became restless. “I can’t believe it. She’s always talking about her mother and how cruel her father was. A girl wouldn’t do that with her mother around. Her mother’s always on deck, reads her mail, I think. She’s an innocent old busybody, that’s all. No, no, I refuse to believe it till all the evidence is in.”
“Well, I’ve been invited to March’s place for some week end and I’ll make it this week end, if he wants me. I’ll see what the boys can do to find out,” said Flack.
Edda laughed, “Oh, she’s a spy: that is your big affair.”
Grant became very gloomy, “She can get men, why should she work at spying?”
Edda laughed, “Men aren’t enough for a woman.”
Grant frowned.
11
On a Saturday in April, 1942, Flack went to 44 Wall and met his friend Hugo March about twelve. They got into the green roadster to drive out to March’s home in Pennsylvania. He had few week-end guests; people avoided the Pennsylvania cottage, though March was generous with drink and food, and close-lipped, and as crony as any gangster.
It was a fine, cool day. The country showed faint signs of the change of season.
“It’s as fine as anything in Europe,” said Flack as they drove down a compacted dirt ramp into a broad, saucer-shaped valley that would be green, lush, soon.
“That’s something I’ll never know, but I’ll take your word for it and want to hear no more about it,” said March, in his slow, sinister way. He drove fast and steadily, a short, fat creature, sunk into the seat, flesh hanging in folds everywhere, bold, round, clear blue eyes staring at you from the mirror, thin sandy hair, a square chin not yet engulfed. After a moment he continued, emphasizing each word, “Any American that takes a boatride out of this country is crazy. Of course, if the Japs slam you, you have to go after them and even accounts; but they are crazy to dress American boys in soldier-suits and send them over the other way. Nothing good ever happened over that way. We have goods to export; we don’t want to export Americans that make the goods. I never could understand what you and your friend Grant—and the others—wanted to gallivant in Europe for—for my part—I don’t see why they issue passports to Americans. You’ll find in the Congressional Record that Senator Whittington—my friend—said the other day, he personally would refuse them. So would I. You’ll find those people who go abroad have never seen their own country. They have never seen Pennsylvania. They are afraid to go through New Jersey. They tell you people gyp you in Connecticut. They are a pack of noodles. They’re afraid to go west where Abe Lincoln came from. Anyone—that’s my opinion—who turns his back on the Statue of Liberty—deserves to stay wherever the hell he thinks he’s going. I wouldn’t let them in again. I’d say, ‘Take your damn bit of paper and do the needful with it, when you get over there with the dagoes and heinies. Leave this country to those who like it…’ But I’m damned if I’d let one of those goddamn s.o.b.’s take his American money with him. I’d make him try to do business on the other side, in the peanuts those monkeys use for money. Why not put the cheapskates in a concentration camp and say, ‘When you get out of this goddamn Coney Island you’ll be glad to see any part of the U.S.A., even the bit just outside the barbed-wire fence’?”
Flack laughed and made a sympathetic speech, first placating March, then growing eloquent upon the pleasures of travel, “And it wouldn’t do the American boys any harm to see the other side had bath-tubs too, sometimes.”
March waited in dead silence till he had finished and then, “All that don’t mean a good goddamn to me. I wouldn’t let Americans travel and they shouldn’t let one of
our boys pass the seas. They got nothing to teach us. If there’s any fighting to be done, we’ll do it at home. And I don’t mean on our cans, I mean against those who don’t want to work. That doesn’t please you, but your opinions don’t please me.”
All this was delivered as a quiet monologue and the remark at the end in a much softer tone. March laughed, “Well, come on, give me a stump speech.”
“I don’t fall for sucker bait,” said Flack.
“You fall for Red bait. The whole world’s going to hell without our aid. Let it, is my remedy. We got a big enough country. All we’ve got to do is to sit on it. No good ever came out of meddling in other people’s affairs. It don’t matter who’s right, it don’t matter who’s wrong, you get that rainbow in your eye and you pay the damages. Why did the British get us in? If we’d let the Japs mind their own business in China and clean up the Reds, we wouldn’t have had a Pearl Harbor. We don’t give a good goddamn about Hitler. I don’t know one good American who cares if he dies or walks all over Europe. Do them a lot of good. But who cares what a pack of starved mongrels do? I got a Great Dane out at my place. There’s a little bit of fluff, a white snarling little mutt, comes past and snarls round his feet. My Great Dane looks the other way, he makes believe he doesn’t know he’s there! My Great Dane is the U.S.A.! And that’s what we’ll do—make believe the rest of the curs aren’t there. We’ve only got to tend to business, and make our own money. If there’s something we don’t like in our country, we’ll fix it up our own way. A guy who lets wind about Russia and Hitler and whatnot ought to be locked up. He’s either crazy or a traitor. You’ll find his mother or father wasn’t born in this goddamn country, or he don’t want to work, born lazy.”
They drove on and on. The hills were rising and growing black; their vegetation darkened. They began to go through ugly roadside villages. Presently, they passed a village, a railroad spur-line, and through a notch between two hills which were hardly more than outcropping coal seams, so dark were they; and then out into a great sullen valley, both limbs opened wide, unresisting but repelling.
“This is my country.” March pointed to a low, plump knoll covered with plucked-out native growth. He smiled, “My place is there, but you’d never get a glimpse of it from the road.”
“A hideaway?”
There was a long pause. Then March, with a chuckle, “It could serve—for a hideaway. I put in all the woodwork myself. It’s right on top of the goddamn rise; and from my study window you can see a hundred miles, it looks like. I can see a deer moving ten miles away. I could shoot him ten miles away, on a clear day.”
They switchbacked up a long, raw, hidden drive.
It was stony country, worthless for farming or orchard; and March had got a hundred acres very cheap. The house was not on top of the rise, but on the crest of a lower slope. The spur rose about it some fifty feet; and all the scrub had been cleared from this part of the hill.
The house had been a farmhouse, consisting of a large kitchen, narrow bedroom, and leanto. To these parts were added a series of small rooms and porches downstairs, and a second story, small, awkward, sitting on the ground floor like a housing on a horse. The entire house had been fitted with heavy oak panels, and the second story with marble-plated bathrooms, glass-and-chromium showers, and mirrors. The furniture was bird’s-eye maple, with brown and yellow cushions, curtains, hunting prints, and a few cheap ornaments. The study had a bookcase with detective novels, a collapsible bar, several closets with sliding panels, an Army cot, a brick fireplace with heavy firedogs. The small leaded windows were fitted with double locks and bronze screens. Doors were few, but the farm bedroom, now used for a dining hall, opened toward the valley. The study had a door which opened toward the valley and on to a drop of about ten feet, there being no step or porch beneath it.
They had lunch early. There were, with Flack, only March and his wife, Angela, his son, Claud, and two unexpected guests, March’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Muriel, nicknamed Fairy, a buxom, languid, sly-eyed child with fine skin and hair, and Davis, a nineteen-year-old friend of Claud, who had brought Fairy from her convent school apparently on a sort of escapade.
The cocktail sandwiches and the meal were prepared and served by a good-looking forty-year-old woman called by March “Violet” and by the others, Mrs. Downey.
When Flack complimented Mrs. March on the soup, she sang out, with pretty plaintiveness, “I don’t know what’s in it, I didn’t even taste it, you noticed. Perhaps there are hairs in it, perhaps face powder, she uses some rice powder his mother used to use,” she looked with a wicked smile at March. She continued, “It’s not my doing; it’s Mrs. Downey’s. Everything here is run by Mrs. Downey. She is the real wife, not I.”
Claud and Davis and the daughter covered this up by youthful byplay; March frowned and Flack, who had never met Mrs. March before, rushed into the breach with one of his long, hilarious improvisations. March said, “You needn’t put on a song and dance, Flack; Mrs. Downey’s manager here because I want her and I pay her and anyone who opens her goddamn puss on the matter is out looking for trouble.”
“Everything here belongs to Mrs. Downey. This is not my home, I am no one here,” continued Angela March naughtily, and she smiled a little, like a beautiful young cat, which smiles deeper and deeper and looks into your eyes just before it reaches for them.
Mrs. March was a youthful, deliciously formed woman, blonde, in confectionery colors, very pretty, very gay. March looked at her across the table and spoke to her for the first time since he had entered the house: “If you don’t like it this way get into the goddamn kitchen and hustle your behind.”
The wife seemed pleased at this opening, “How can I go in there? She runs everything. I don’t know where my own pots and pans are. I would not be welcome there, you know. I could not have a cocktail, but I am sure Mrs. Downey had a cocktail in the kitchen.”
“Did you forget to take Mrs. Downey a cocktail?” March asked his son.
Claud laughed without embarrassment, “Oh, no, she got one—two, in fact.”
“That’s better,” said the man.
Afterward he explained the whole business of Elias Brown, his friend. The marriage with the Washington woman had fallen through. The banquet had been magnificent. They had sent the photographs to all the Senators. But Udall’s scheme was foiled by two lawyers down from Chicago who were counsels for the receivers, and who had a vested interest in the bankruptcy and dreaded the day when the railroad would become solvent. These boys obtained a temporary bankruptcy financing, enough to keep the railroad alive but not to put it on its feet. In the meantime they foiled Udall’s other scheme which was in effect to obtain control of all the railroad president’s assets while crashing his reputation and indirectly leading to his suicide through the destruction of his earning power. The railroad president was at present bankrupt and the hero of this widely whispered story; but—strange to relate, women are funny cattle—the woman he married had suddenly taken to him and stood by him, and she told the boys to go and play in another back yard. She told Udall to stick to his original wife, she knew too much about him, she did not believe he would do anything but swallow the whole of the money and leave her out in the cold, too. Said she, “I’d rather be married than president.”
The boys thought ill of her for this, though they admitted you never could tell what a woman would do when she got married.
March went on to discuss the future of the U.S.A. Hitler had the right idea in some things, so did Mussolini, only they were two-cent administrators. What they needed were a few billion dollars, the organizing ability of men who could handle dollars and government. Just to show Flack how wrong he was, he let him into a great secret, which was that March’s “friends were organizing all the time behind the scenes to take over”; they had their men, they had the money, they had the key positions, and they had an army which they would use at home, not abroad. The U.S.A. would be turned into a magnificent producing machine,
producing for March and his friends. March said in his wise, ponderous way, with his dewlaps moving slowly as he champed out the phrases, “I’m not speaking of fraud, grand larceny, some grand swindle as your friends over the other side try to make out. I mean legal procedure, strictly honest business, all-embracing scheme for government that cuts overhead by ninety-five per cent. The government has to be a different sort. Look at the money thrown away on the workers. Have unions with millions of dollars only used to upset industry and waste our money. You want to cut out all those high-paid union officials, with cars. A state within the state. We’ll have one state only. Modern government is a halfway house to monopoly, not the kind we have now, with the boys filling their own pockets, but a stern, sane monopoly. You have to have monopoly: it’s economical, efficient, progressive. This Government stands in the way of proper monopoly. Monopolies are now run with the Government in mind: there’s a scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours policy. Government doesn’t intend to do its duty. Government is Tammany on a big scale. It wants to be popular. A true monopoly wouldn’t worry about being popular, it would be efficient. Because of this Government, with Tammany façade, you have plenty of waste. Birds who don’t know their elbow from their foot do buying and selling. In the monopoly state, the biggest monopolist in the steel business runs the steel business, and that’s government. We revoke the Wagner Act and all those brakes on industry and let the wheels turn. Your friends over there have never been in business and they don’t understand efficiency. What they say about capitalism is a horselaugh. They have an idea of monopoly; only ours is better. If they could take a gander at Radio City they’d wish they had one too. You can build Radio Cities out of our production, plus our efficiency. But you haven’t seen the half of it yet. Only let us stay at home and work, and not play with toy soldiers.
A Little Tea, a Little Chat Page 10