Driscoll waited.
“My father’s a mortician, you know that. So’s my uncle. They wanted me to take over the business—only, I didn’t care for the idea. On the other hand, I wasn’t able to come up with anything better. I mean, if I’d said to them, ‘I can’t cut it because I want to be a doctor’—or a trumpet player, or something—anything—Dad would have understood. But it wasn’t that simple. All I knew was what I didn’t want to do; and that wasn’t enough. I thought that if I went away, maybe I could figure it out.” He paused. “You want to hear about all this?”
“Yes,” Driscoll said. “You keep talking, Mr. Haller. When I think you’re off the track, I’ll let you know. Okay?”
Preston Haller said “Okay,” dubiously, and went on: “Anyway, it didn’t work too well. I played with the idea of becoming a professor, but professors are supposed to know things; and the more I went to school, the more I realized I didn’t know anything at all.
“Living in a mortuary, growing up with death all around me, you understand, I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe in God and Heaven and Eternal rewards—or Eternal damnations, it didn’t matter. Anything would do. Anything to persuade me that a shabby old house in L. A. wasn’t the end of the line. . . . But it seemed the harder I tried to be like Dad, or my mother—maybe you’ve wondered about morticians, how they keep from being morbid. They keep from it because they don’t believe in death. It’s their business, but they don’t believe in it. Corpses are objects, that’s all: empty containers, shells. I’ve never met, I’m telling you the truth, an atheistic mortician!—Well, the more like them I tried to be, the further away I got. I studied all the great religions thoroughly, I mean it; and sometimes, like with Roman Catholicism, or Zen, I’d think I’d found it, finally. But you can’t kid yourself long on the big things. The little things, yes. Not the big things.” He took a long swallow of beer. “Quo vadimus, man?” he said, smiling suddenly.
“Nowhere, for a while. I hope,” said Driscoll. He ordered more beer. “Go on.”
“Yeah. I was living with a family named SchÖngarth, in Zurich. It was February, and the roofs had snow on them. I’d never seen snow before and I remember this gave the SchÖngarths a laugh. They thought students had seen everything. . . . Well, this wasn’t too long after the war. Our particular age-group, we were feeling sorry for ourselves because we’d been cheated anyway. Emancipation, Fornication, Dissipation: those were the watchwords. Why not? It’d only be for a year, in spite of all the threats of staying on and dying in a pissoir. Only for a year. Then home, to reality.
“But I was getting damn lonely because it was too cold to go walking, or whatever the reason was; and I took to dropping by Jackie’s. That’s an American bar. I met Adam there.
“I remember I was having a glass of beer, sitting in a corner near the fireplace. It was around midnight. Jonas Brady was trying to get me to go with him to a girl’s house. A ‘complaisant Swiss,’ he said, ‘amply upholstered,’ who’d seen me around and told Jonas—it was probably a lie!—that ‘she thought it would be fun to sleep with a Negro.’ A real typical gesture: Jonas was a guy who was filled with Sartre and Celine, and Huysmans; tiny perversions were all that interested him any more. He existed on Pernod, which he got by playing ragtime tunes on Jackie’s piano. Open-toe, broken-toenail set. You know? He liked me for only one reason: he didn’t dare not to. Lot of people that way, afraid to dislike any one Negro because then they’d be accused of prejudice. It’s prejudice-in-reverse, you might call it. Anyway, there was Jonas, babbling away, and me pretending to listen, when this dark-haired kid walked up and asked to bum a cigarette.
“Jonas introduced me and said for the guy to join us. He did, and for a while I was afraid that he was just another carbon copy of Jonas. ‘Reprieve Carriers’ we called them. But I was wrong. Adam Cramer turned out to be very bright and very friendly, and he was the only one who managed to persuade me that my color didn’t signify.
“He was taking a criminal medicine course at the time, but he knew philosophy, and we used to walk outside of the town, across the fields, freezing our asses and arguing, I don’t know, Kant, or whoever. He became my only friend in Zurich, and later, when we returned to America to finish up at the University here, we stayed friends.
“I was still groping, still not quite sure; and upset at finding nothing solid to hang onto. I went along with Adam conversationally, but inside it was different. Maybe it was with him too.
“We made quite a pair. But while I was looking for a meaning to life, he was working on finding the way to—well, it’s hard to put. With Adam, you see, this was a personal thing. He didn’t care why other people were around; he wanted to know why he was around. But that was okay. One, I figured, would answer the other.
“It’s for certain that he was looking, though. Every bit as hard as I was.”
Preston Haller shifted his position on the bench and drank the rest of his beer.
“What about Blake?” Driscoll said. “I hear there’s a connection.”
“Max Blake teaches political theory at the U. We’d heard about him, Adam and I, and liked what we’d heard. So we enrolled. It was a disappointment at first. Whatever we’d expected, we didn’t get it. Professor Blake taught a slightly liberal but pretty orthodox course, and neither of us could dig the secret reputation he’d built up. For real leftist kicks, there were a dozen better classes. For brilliant remarks, great oratory, sly humor, almost every other full professor had him whipped. Blake was a washout. So pretty soon Adam decided to plant the needle, mostly out of boredom. He was a hell of a debater, following Schopenhauer’s bit to a T, and I’d never heard anyone get the best of him. He sounded off three days in a row, pulverizing certain theories that Blake was in the process of making—but it wasn’t a fight. ‘Very interesting point, Mr. Cramer,’ the old man would say and that would be it. We got fairly contemptuous of him finally. Then one day Blake mentioned that he was having an informal discussion at his home that night and that perhaps we’d be interested in attending. Adam didn’t want to, but we didn’t have anything else to do, so we dropped by. And that was the bomb.
“The daytime Blake was a masquerade, we saw: a masterful pose. The real Blake was a completely different person. These ‘informal discussions’ were his actual classes, and he reserved them for a handful of the sharpest students.
“It was here that he showed his wit, his thing with sarcasm—Adam tried to joust only once, but he was cut down; here that Blake came out as one of the most electric minds either of us had known. He threw off ideas like sparks. Finally they caught fire in Adam.”
“What sort of ideas?”
“Difficult to explain,” Haller said. “At first I was as knocked out as anyone else, but when I began to understand what it was he was saying, I took off. Blake was (and I haven’t heard that he’s changed) essentially a Fascist, in the way that he follows the theory that the Masses are incompetent to rule—you know. However, he’s a ‘leftist’ Fascist: he believes that the ‘small governing body of men’—expressed in fascist doctrine—is by nature a chimerical ideal. I’m quoting him now, I think. That’s one of his expressions: chimerical ideal. It comes simply to a rule of one man, and, according to Blake, even if that man is a tyrant, it’s better than any so-called democratic form of government. Hitler almost made it work, but Hitler—I am quoting now—was both ignorant and mad. Mussolini had brains, but he was pompous. They both had too much regard for humanity.”
“So that was the trouble,” Link said, grinning mirthlessly.
“According to Blake, yeah. He used to refer to his after-hours class as a ‘nursery for dictators’—because that was what he was proposing. He even outlined a general plan for success. Let me remember: ‘A man could succeed by seizing upon an area of unrest—’ ”
Preston Haller hesitated and looked at Driscoll, who nodded and said, “Don’t stop now.”
“ ‘By taking over as a negative force, spouting a communist-
inspired line—to gain the support of the sheep who would not yet consciously understand the concept of single authority—then, by instituting small pogroms and purges, destroying all but the single power, keeping the minor counselors in a state of nameless and faceless flux, he could switch carefully to a semi-fascist line, and become a dictator before the people’s eyes without anyone’s seeing it happen.’ Unquote. His dicta were ‘Play on their ignorance; underline and reflect their prejudices; make them afraid.’ But, of course, this is a pocket edition of several months’ discussions, before I quit—it was all vague and diffuse.
“ ‘Be ruthless!’ he told us, though. ‘Be ruthless! If you’re to be a dictator, employ every low trick there is. Deceive, cheat, lie, steal, murder. Show no mercy whatever. In that fashion, perhaps you will succeed. The Great Unwashed’—no; he said, ‘The Great Unwashable’—live on fear and hate alone; their prejudices keep them afloat—it is the only strength they have. Your success, ipso facto, will demonstrate the gift of man; it will raise your estate a bit higher than that of the animals . . . for what animal ever led more than a small pack?’
“That’s the gist of what Max Blake had to say. I said it was complicated because fascism itself isn’t acceptable to him. Some of the literate Fascists, like Alfredo Rocco, or even Ernest Renan, talked of the glorification of man; but the point that was important to Blake was the glorification of men, at the expense of others. That was his big bit. One great man, devil or saint, he said, is quite adequate. ‘History is not Man, but men—and very few of them, at that.’
“Well, Adam begged me to keep going to the classes, but I couldn’t see it. Fun was fun, and it was okay for a man to exercise his mind but this was too thick. With Adam, no. He told me that Max Blake had helped him find the thing he had been looking for, had acted as a catalyst to his thoughts.
“But you’ve got to understand, because I can see what you’re both thinking, that there was a kind of a sense of make-believe to the whole thing. Most of the time we were together, Adam and I were never all-the-way serious—it’s a fine point, hard to put across. In a way, it was like the Jonas Bradys in Switzerland: we were in school, school was unreality, and we could afford to let our minds fall into dissipation. We could go on intellectual benders and know, at the same time, that it wasn’t of any account. Do you understand that?”
“Sure,” Driscoll said. “You might not believe this, Mr. Haller, but I went to college once myself. For all I know, so did Link.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that it’s a little confusing to me, and I’ve gone through it . . . What I’m trying to say is that it was, in a sense, no more than a game. Go over to the University right now, and you’ll find hundreds of avowed Communists, you know? Some of them might even know what communism means. But it doesn’t signify, except the taking advantage of a nice situation. The newspapers and magazines certainly don’t understand this. They’re always attacking the ‘college Commies’ and urging all sorts of ridiculous measures. Which is stupid—the truth is that it’s healthy to be able to dabble in these things in a state of harmlessness. For that reason, what the hell, I never objected to Max Blake’s courses, any more than I would object to fraternity orgies. Because the few students whose thinking is actually shaped by university life are always able to bring these things into their proper focus.
“Adam and I stayed friends, even though I was no longer attending Blake’s courses. We occasionally went out on double-dates together, or, sometimes, for a drive down Sunset to the beach, alone, to talk. It wasn’t strained.
“But I began to sense a change in him. He wouldn’t allow any disrespectful remarks to be made about Blake, and even went so far, once, as to suggest that the reason I withdrew was because I was afraid. Again, it was part of the game; and I went along with it. Maybe so, I said. Maybe I don’t want to be a dictator. And he’d laugh then, and everything would be okay.
“But he was changing. He seemed troubled, not in the way we’d been, but in a deeper way. Once he said, ‘What does a guy do, Pres, when he’s been told all his life that he can’t do anything? When he’s been trained through the years for failure?’
“ ‘Succeed,’ I told him.
“He said that was right.
“Then—it wasn’t too long ago—he came to my room and woke me up one night and said he was going away. Quitting, with only a few months to go for his graduation. I thought he was kidding at first. But Adam never kept a gag going long, so I tried to talk him out of it. He wouldn’t listen, and he wouldn’t give me any hint where he was going, or why. All he said was that he’d found what he could do, and that whatever I heard, I should believe it. ‘Because it will be true, Pres,’ he said. And then he asked to borrow my gun. I gave it to him and showed him how to work it, because even then I wasn’t absolutely sure he was serious.
“He left that night.
“I haven’t heard from him since, except for what I’ve read in the newspapers.”
Preston Haller folded and unfolded his hands, and for a time the three men sat quietly, listening to the deep hum of the air-conditioning unit.
Driscoll was the first to speak.
“You still like him, don’t you?”
Preston Haller said: “Yes, but he’s got to be stopped. Use whatever you want . . .”
“Maybe we’re too late to bomb him out of there completely,” Driscoll said, “but we can go a long way in that direction. That isn’t supposed to be my interest: I’m not crusading, only writing about a guy. But the piece is going to have quite an effect on his plans. Mr. Haller, I’d like you to answer a few direct questions. One: Did Adam Cramer ever, to your knowledge, go out with any Negro girls?”
Preston Haller said, “Yes. Several times.”
“Are the girls around? Can you give me their names?”
“I think so.”
“Question number two: In all the time you knew Cramer, did he ever express to you any anti-Negro or anti-integration views?”
“Never.”
“So it can be said, can’t it, that he’s doing this for, you might say, intellectual reasons; he isn’t really against integration; that the whole thing is an effort to put the theories of an off-horse college professor into actual practice.”
“Nothing is as simple as all that,” Preston Haller said. “He has other motivations, I’m sure.”
Driscoll said, “Yes; we’ve spoken to one of them already.”
He removed a five-dollar bill from his wallet and picked up the check. Then they walked out of the darkened bar, out into the hot, white sun.
20
Past rows of shacks and broken toys, past garbage heaped in careless mounds and scattered by the dogs that roamed these streets, gray wood, frayed clothing hung on rusted wires, past fat and scarred-up men who stood on corners laughing in the vomit-heavy air, he walked; and thought that hours had gone by, although, of course, that couldn’t be.
I ought to go on back, he thought.
I got no business here.
But somehow, the quiet of the hospital, the slow-moving nurses, all the eyes, had grown unbearable, and he had rushed out, suddenly, and wandered to this part of Farragut, where rats were known to eat dead children, where the women sold their evil-smelling bodies for a buck, where men carried ritual scars and believed in voodoo.
I got no business here!
But Joey knew that it wasn’t wholly so. For standing in the little room, the dark face there about to vanish, he had heard a voice: Go take a walk, boy. Go to Jeremiah Street. See all the sights. See your people. Your people. Then come back. There’s time!
“Hey, Jim, you got a cigarette?”
He turned and faced an old Negro in a double-breasted blue suit, wide tie, sweat-soaked gray hat. The man was drunk, and dirty.
“You got a cigarette for Sonny?”
Joey reached into his pocket and withdrew a package of Pall Malls. The man took one of the cigarettes and tried to light it. In the darknes
s, Joey saw that he bore scars and bruised marks on his flesh.
“You want some fun?” the man said.
Joey shook his head and started away. A clawlike hand tightened on his shoulder.
“Wait, I ask you, you want some fun? Listen. Come on, you ain’t in no big fucking hurry. Come on. Listen.”
“Get your hand off me.”
“Bullshit,” the man said. “What kind nigger are you, anyway? You a fairy-boy? Maybe you think I kidding you. Listen, I don’t kid nobody. I got my little girl staying with me, and I mean, she something. She really something. All this other ginch around here ain’t worth poking a finger in. But Harriet—let me tell you something, Jim. She been a year in New York. She ain’t really working, now, I mean, she just paying her daddy a visit, see. But she do anything I tell her. Five dollars and she go down, you do anything you want. She—”
Joey grasped the wrist firmly and pushed it away. He began to walk quickly. The man danced along behind him, shrieking: “You no fucking man, you a fucking queer. Hey, queer! Hey, fairy-boy!” Then the man stumbled, and Joey glanced back; but the man did not move.
Joey walked to the hospital, which was an old house like a boardinghouse, and went up the steps.
The waiting room was filled with people.
He passed the receptionist’s desk, turned right, and climbed the flight of stairs. They were covered with dark linoleum which had worn through in the center and was edged with misshapen aluminum stripping.
He entered the silent, sharp-smelling hall. His fingers drew into fists. A large woman in the well-lit alcove where the nurses made their reports and took their calls looked up.
“Is he any better?” Joey asked quietly.
“Just a moment,” the nurse said. She got up and walked down the hall to room twenty-two. She returned with a large, well-built man.
“Is he any better?”
The doctor shook his head. In a professional whisper, he said, “Mr. Green, do you want me to tell you the truth?”
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