Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “We’ve heard a lot about some of those votes …”

  “So have I,” Neil said. “Isn’t it curious he’s waited till now — that fellow — waited ten months to mention those votes? I was here all during the fall. I would’ve been happy to talk about them then. Isn’t that when we’re supposed to face the music?”

  “Maybe he thought folks would be sick and tired of him by now if he’d started that early,” one of the reporters said.

  “Maybe they’re suffering already,” another said. “And it’s only been a couple weeks.”

  Neil smiled at them. Perhaps he had two newsmen on his side! “That’s a reasonable assumption,” he said.

  “Can we quote you on that?”

  “You can quote yourself on it.” Now he’d gone and lost his partisans. He tried to catch sight of Stanley, but there were too many reporters closed in around him. Planes were droning overhead … He was beginning to perspire through the silk suit.

  “What about that ‘people’s choice’ business?”

  “He has a real gift of phrase — a sense of irony.”

  “And the Senator Nobody Knows …?”

  “Well … I don’t like to think nobody knew who I was. I have run for — and won — elective offices before. Some people must know me … Obviously the Governor knew me.”

  They all laughed again.

  “He says you’re the white rabbit in the Governor’s top hat. He pulls you out — presto — and puts you back again …”

  “He says you’re the errand boy … the hound dog on the old plantation …”

  “He says all these things? Well … I’ll tell you something. And this is the God’s truth. I just didn’t believe it when the wire came I’d been selected for this job. I knew the Governor — sure — I’d even campaigned a little for him. But I couldn’t say we were intimates. This thing was a complete surprise — I was staggered. I just didn’t believe it. Until you fellows started calling me on the phone and the photographers came around. There’d been no hint of it. I hadn’t seen the Governor in three months and I hadn’t talked with him for any length of time in more than a year. I’d been on a fishing trip. I didn’t even know Senator Morris had died until a week after it happened. I found out there was a vacancy existing on the same day I was appointed to fill it … Hey — what do you say we knock it off? I’ve got to run. I’ll try to have something for you before the Easter recess is ended …”

  “About your having won elections before … He says you got yourself elected through college — that the legislature paid your way through law school.”

  “Well … I’ll say he’s certainly found a home in the legislature. Did he ever do anything at all before he started running for office?”

  The reporters smiled. “That’s too far back for anyone to remember,” one of them said. “You made up your mind?”

  “About what?”

  “About running for a full term?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got ten days to decide.”

  “I know. Maybe I’ll have something before I go back. I’m just not sure.”

  “Are you getting much encouragement to run?”

  “Oh yes. What you’d expect. I wouldn’t call it a great groundswell of public sentiment or anything — but nobody’s threatened to come up there and haul me back kicking and screaming, either. People don’t seem outraged by the idea that I might consider trying to get elected to the job. And that’s been a comfort …”

  Again, the newsmen responded with laughter. He was good copy. He hadn’t yet learned the clichés. Either that, or he just didn’t give a damn.

  “There’s one thing that’s impressed me more than some of this other business,” Neil went on. “I really didn’t know there were so many nice people. Does that make sense? Somebody’s always coming around just trying to help — somebody up there or somebody down here. They’ve been awfully good to me. When I left the legislature I thought I was through with politics. I had to get out and make a living. Since then — and up to ten months ago — I’d forgotten how many nice people there were in the world …

  Then he smiled up at them and added: “… Not that there still aren’t a few sons of bitches around …”

  Before the laughter subsided Neil could hear Stanley’s high-pitched voice at the back of the crowd … “Don’t quote him, you guys! For chrissake don’t quote him on that.”

  “If we did he might be a cinch to win,” one of the reporters said. The crowd grew thin, and Stanley came over, looking distressed.

  “You think you’re Will Rogers or something? You got to stop talking that way … Unless you’re ready to practice law again. Or go on the stage.”

  “I’m about ready to give it up. I don’t think it’s exactly my milieu. Damn! I need a shower. My clothes are about to dissolve on me. I hate it, Stanley. I really hate it.”

  But it wasn’t true — both of them knew it wasn’t. Stanley had seen the way Neil responded to a crowd or a crisis, a group of newsmen or a gaggle of old women or a challenge of one kind or another. He had it — Neil really had it, whatever it was, in the make-up of some few men who seemed able to get high on their own adrenal fluids. It was what had made him a war hero — it must have been. It was certainly part of what Stanley sensed those ten years ago during the first months they were together, in the little one-windowed room at college with the “busy” wallpaper and the weekends at the beach and later when Neil began dating Andrea and decided he would have to get into politics if he had any hopes at all for marrying her and finishing law school.

  The trouble was, his tones were mixed. Sometimes he just didn’t care; it seemed so absurd. I want to be Adlai Stevenson with hair, Neil told himself as they moved through the crowded terminal. All those nice people — they don’t know me yet but maybe they will next year. I want to be Adlai Stevenson with hair. And win. Down here in the Hookworm Belt. And I don’t think it’s possible …

  “I got a cab,” Stanley was saying. “The bags are already loaded. And there’s a message for you … This number.”

  Neil looked at the slip of paper for a moment, half hoping. Then: “It’s the Governor’s. Anything else?”

  “No.”

  They headed through the swinging doors. Neil was mumbling under his breath.

  “What’s that?”

  “Stevenson with hair …”

  “What?”

  “I want to be Adlai Stevenson with hair.”

  “Win or lose?”

  “Win … Or either … Or both … There was just this one message?”

  Stanley nodded. Then he said: “Did you call Andrea? Is she in town?”

  Neil shook his head. “I don’t know. She was up in the hills last week with the kids. That was the last I heard. She just knows I’m coming. I guess.”

  The mist continued to fall, though the light seemed to improve even at the late hour in the afternoon. There was a mauve luminescence halfway up in the sky where the sun ought to have been. It was a Good Friday afternoon with people moving about all over the city, more than the usual activity, all of them starting out early for the holidays. There would be some parties underway in an hour or so … The cabdriver affected an Eastern accent. Had he picked it up from watching television? The way cabdrivers are supposed to talk?

  “Where to, Mac?”

  “I’m not Mac,” Neil said.

  “What?”

  “I’m Mr. Stevensonwithhair … You don’t recognize me?” Stanley was gasping for his breath in the back seat.

  “Whaaat?”

  The driver seemed genuinely concerned. He looked at Neil closely and lapsed into the native accents.

  “What was that yew said?”

  “The hotel district.”

  “Yessir.”

  “The hotels. We’ll get rid of this young man downtown and then I’ll tell you where … Or whare … er … whirr. Then I’ll introduce you to Miz Stevenson. Withaire!”

  Four

  N
OW THEY WERE IN the better neighborhoods. They had moved through the commercial district and the Capitol grounds and dropped Stanley at his hotel, and now the cab rolled on past the endless old-frame dwelling places of forgotten first families to a higher level where, occasionally, if one looked back, a glimpse was caught between trees and rooftops and church spires of the torpid little river that half-mooned the town. From these highlands the original settlement seemed always to be changing faces, like a painted dowager, burgeoning in all directions in rockfront, ranchstyle subdivisions. These higher levels represented the city’s middle period, and time had mercifully softened the landscapes, the strident designs. Luxuriant trees and shrubs pushed next to the big obtrusive homes — the replicas, gold and dross, of Tudor mansions, Spanish villas, Edwardian manor houses, edifices vaguely reminiscent of the Georgian, the Colonial, and the inevitable “California bungalow.” Age now gave the neighborhoods a kind of absolution from their original sinful ways. Now they were not so much bizarre as merely eccentric and (charitably) somehow charming. At least Neil preferred to think this was so. He had even contrived to give an identity to his own home, a florid and truculent structure of ornate flutes and columns and interior arabesques. He called it Coonass Gothic.

  It was early evening as the cab moved through this section of the city, and in the dim light Neil could barely distinguish one home from another. They all ran together in a purplish wash of pitched roofs, gables, towers, and massive porticoes. Between them lay flowering shrubs and great white-blooming magnolia trees. Neil sat staring through the back window. The cab slowed and turned into a narrow drive. The man who talked in strange accents looked back at him.

  “Zis ah place?”

  “It looks like it,” Neil said. “It rather resembles it … I spent a little time here once …” He peered out through the gloom …

  When the driver had gone, he stood for a moment in front of the big house … alone for the first time since … He could not remember the last time. He was conscious of an incredible quietude, in himself and around him. The dampness clung to trees and grass and graveled walks. There was only the slightest rustle in the tranquil air and he was utterly alone. The cabdriver had fled — Stanley was off in some pink hotel room doing his flexing exercises — all those airport people had met and caught their planes …

  He moved across wet flagstone and let himself in the front door. The downstairs rooms were empty; from the second level came the sounds of children at their bath. He switched on lights and set his bag down in a hall before pausing in the main room, examining books and pictures and straightening small objects. He sorted through a stack of phonograph records; they were old ones mostly: Ellington, Ray Brown, Basie, Jimmy Rushing, Red Norvo, Mildred Bailey, Teddy Wilson. In a moment, the sound of the music filled the room, and he turned and headed up the stairs.

  The two children, both girls, wet and glistening, confronted him midway. He smiled down at them; he thought they were his; he remembered them from last time. “Daddy! Daddy!” they screamed. He thought about committee reports he’d read on amounts of Strontium-90 in the bones of children to age four. The girls jumped up and down, screaming, one of them holding onto his hand and the other embracing a leg. An enormous Negro woman in white uniform loomed at the top of the stairs. He walked on up, the girls clinging to him. On the second landing he stooped down and kissed their wet faces. He sat on the edge of a bed and talked with them for several minutes, speaking in an adult, unpatronizing way as if he had forgotten how it was you were supposed to communicate with children and old people. They told him about their beagle dog, lost and later found; they showed him gaps in their sweet smiles where baby teeth had worked loose; they talked about measles and an epidemic of “monks” in the neighborhood. The older one stood facing him while the other brought out props to illustrate her sister’s babbling commentary on books and pictures and puzzles and new ballet slippers. They asked if he had been following the Saturday morning television shows; they sang a little song in Spanish; they told about a large family that had moved into the house across the street — four children and a batch of parakeets; they gave him a detailed report on the girl next door who was twelve and who had recently begun to develop “breasks.”

  At last he sent them off to prepare for bed. The Negro woman moved in and took charge. She smiled at the children and then at him.

  “Miz Chris’ensen went out ’bout five. Say she call if she was late.”

  “Thanks. Let me know when they’re ready for bed.”

  He went back downstairs and stood in the big room for a few moments, listening to the music. It was Ellington — an old composition but a fairly new record. He remembered there was an old shellac version of it somewhere in storage, one he had bought before the war, his freshman year in college. He remembered pushing a secondhand lawnmower out into these neighborhoods twice a week that year. It was miles from the campus, but he had earned enough money at yard work to pay for nearly all his room and board. Sweet melancholy, he thought — and all of it now seemed so unimaginably remote.

  In the kitchen he spooned out meat and vegetables from open pots. He poured some whiskey. There was a pitcher full of an aging martini mixture in the freezer, gone cloudy in a film of ice. He walked back toward the front of the house, humming to himself, sipping the whiskey. The piece of paper with the telephone number was still in his pocket — he would have to make the call …

  “Capi-tawl …”

  “Is the Governor in?”

  “Who are you calling please?”

  “Governor Fenstemaker …”

  “Who is calling please?”

  “This is Neil Christiansen.”

  “Mister … Christian? I’m afraid —”

  “Christiansen. Neil Christiansen … I’m returning the Governor’s call.”

  “Mister Christiansen returning a call … I’ll check our rec —”

  “Yes. That’s right …” Then he thought: What the hell? Throw your weight around. “Listen,” he said, “this is Senator Christiansen … In Washington … I’m calling long distance, so will you please —”

  “Oh! Sen-ator … I’m real sorry … I’ll ring the Mansion.”

  He stood and carried the phone from the hallway into the other room, holding the instrument in one hand, the drink in the other, executing a little dance step. He lowered the volume on the phonograph and lay back in an overstuffed chair. It seemed he had just got settled, holding the receiver to his head, when he noticed the glass was nearly empty. He sucked on an ice cube and wondered if there was time to pour another drink. “Operator …” He said, “… Operator.”

  “Just a moment, Senator,” she said.

  He lay back in the chair again and closed his eyes. He opened them almost immediately and stared at a painting partially hidden by a vaguely oriental lamp that was suspended from the ceiling. He had not seen the painting before. It was unmistakably his wife’s work — there were a number of her oils hung throughout the house — but this one was new to him. He sat upright in the chair and stared across the room at the picture. It was himself and yet not quite himself, a portrait of him, younger and older, grinning like death with white-glazed eyes as in a poorly done piece of sculpture. Then he realized it wasn’t himself … but his brother. He lay in the chair with his head against a rough-textured Mexican cushion, his eyes closed, for perhaps half a minute. He started up suddenly, unaccountably, as if his whole body had been seized by a furious bunching of the nerves, some enormous tic, a spasm of old horror, wonderful and ecstatic. He heaved a great sigh and from upstairs came the sweet singsong voices of the little girls.

  “Senator … Senator … Senator …”

  He brought the receiver up. “Yes.”

  “I have Governor Fenstemaker for you.”

  “David McNeil Christiansen,” the Governor said. His voice was loud and always reassuring. “I think you ought to use that some — the full name — part of the time at least. Neil most of the time, but occasi
onally the whole goddam works. Names are important.”

  “How are you, sir?” Neil said. He was trembling slightly and he wondered about another drink. There was a decanter of sherry on a small table nearby; he reached across, got hold of it, and splashed half a glassful over the ice. It had a nutty, sour-mouth taste.

  “Whattayou think of that, Neil? You agree with me?”

  “You mean the name — in campaigning?”

  “Exactly. Your last name’s too long — like mine, Fenstemaker — too much name for political purposes. Tom Moore — that’s a good political name for an unknown. You can remember a name like that. Fenstemaker … Christiansen … They’re too much. But you can reverse the psychology. You can make the name even longer and they’ll sure as hell remember that. The full name has a nice sound to it, and it registers visually, whereas —”

  “Assuming, of course, you’re in a campaign,” Neil said.

  “Assuming — yes. Am I assuming too much, son?”

  “Well. It’s just that I really haven’t decided. Really. You’d know if I had.”

  “Get me a fresh one …”

  “What, sir?”

  “I was talking to the butler,” the Governor said. “I’ve got this great old dark-complected butler who …”

  Dark-complexioned, Neil said to himself. And he really ought to have one in his own white-columned mansion. Someone standing by at all times to replenish those sweating highball glasses. He’d call him Gunga Din. And equip him with a syringe so the stuff could be fed directly into one of the main arteries. He touched a distended vein on his forehead and wondered if it led to the brain.

  The Governor was talking between loud smacking gulps of whiskey.

  “You’re in town, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Got in late this afternoon.”

  “That girl must have been confused … Neil?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s only a few more days, son. You got to make up your mind soon.”