Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “Not yet,” she said. It seemed a profundity.

  The older sister appeared with the salt and pepper. The two of them sat solemnly and watched him eat. Soon they grew restless and ran downstairs to examine the test pattern that preceded the morning television. Occasionally one or both would reappear to let him know Captain Kangaroo was coming soon and to hur-ry.

  On his way to shower he could see that Andrea was indeed fast asleep. Her face was only faintly drawn and her bare arms and legs were lovely. He wore his blue “speechmaking” suit. He wondered who in the world ever coined that awful word.

  The girls wanted to know where he was going.

  “Speechmaking,” he said. They stared at him, uncomprehending. He sat with them for a few minutes and exchanged views on the quality of the television. Emma was banging around in the kitchen. He gave her three phone numbers where he could be reached during the day and started out the back door with the keys to the other car. The morning was clear and sunny and uncompromisingly beautiful, and he began to feel a little better. Emma met him in the driveway at the front of the house to give him a message from Andrea. There was a party somewhere that evening. He could meet her here or there or …

  Or what? he wondered, driving through the nice neighborhoods toward the Capitol grounds, past the cool, deep-piled lawns and the serpentine walks that were bordered by thick blooms of flowers. He parked the car near the main entrance to the old granite building and proceeded unrecognized toward the Governor’s suite. Even the receptionist gave him her No Visitors smile until he identified himself. Fenstemaker met him at the door after the girl had delivered the message.

  They sat in the huge, high-ceilinged office; it smelled of good cigars, leather and polished furniture. A secretary was making coffee behind a partition. There were two secretaries — they moved about noiselessly on the thick carpets. Enormous cut-glass chandeliers hung down from the ceiling, and a massive mirror, framed in gold leaf, was set above the marble fireplace, too high even to see one’s head, reflecting only and rather pointlessly the opposite wall. One of the secretaries served coffee. She stood waiting, watching them. Governor Fenstemaker blew across the top of the cup. Then he glanced at the girl.

  “Ah?”

  “You be needing me around noon?”

  “Sybil be here?”

  “Yes … She’s having a sandwich at her desk.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks …”

  She turned, but the Governor called to her.

  “Where’re you goin’?”

  “Down on the Avenue. I thought I’d buy some shoes … It’s a good day to buy shoes …”

  “Oh.” The Governor looked at Neil and made a Frenchman’s face. Again he called to the girl. “Vydora …”

  “Yes?”

  “Why is it a good day?”

  “For shoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, because it’s cool and it’s supposed to cloud up around noon and …”

  “Yes?”

  “… And your feet don’t swell.” The girl bolted through the door.

  The Governor looked at Neil, mystified. “Last week,” he said, “last week it was the lights — the fluorescent lights. She insisted they were hot and were burning her. Way the hell up there on the ceiling and she was getting heat stroke or something … Probably flashes. She wanted to turn out all the lights and stumble around in the dark. We get an appropriation of twenty-five thousand to air-condition these rooms, and she’s hot from the lights …”

  They sipped their coffee. Then the Governor said: “Well what’re you gonna do about that fourteen-carat sonofabitch?”

  Neil set his cup down and looked at the older man. “Who’s this?”

  “Edwards. Who the hell you think —”

  “What’s he done?”

  “Haven’t you seen the morning papers?”

  “I saw ’em about two this morning. Something on Edwards … Just his usual.”

  “You haven’t seen this? You’re a hell of a politician. I’ve been up since five reading most of the papers in the state and last Wednesday’s New York Times.”

  “I got to bed about five,” Neil said. He examined the front page of one of the papers. Owen Edwards, in another city, had finally got hold of a copy of Neil’s remarks made at the impromptu airport news conference.

  OWEN EDWARDS BELIEVES CHRISTIANSEN WEAKENING

  ‘Knuckled Under’ in Past — Now Losing Nerve Again?

  State Senator Owen Edwards said last night he feels he can win a seat in the United States Senate “practically uncontested.”

  In an interview following his speech at Miller Auditorium, Edwards assailed Senator Neil Christiansen’s “characteristic mental flabbiness” and “noticeable lack of any real conviction — good or bad.”

  Christiansen is “poorly equipped, emotionally and intellectually, to hold a position of public trust,” Edwards said. “I’m not telling anything new. Christiansen will probably confirm this in a few days when he disqualifies himself for holding public office. This facet of his nature was first apparent when he refused to stand up on his own two feet and fight like a man for his political life seven years ago. He didn’t give the people the opportunity to replace him then, as they surely would have done, and I’m certain he won’t let the people judge for themselves now, as I would like for them to do. He lacks any real qualities of leadership — most of all he lacks heart and guts …”

  “I wonder why,” Neil said, “they didn’t report spitum dribbling down his chin …”

  The Governor nodded. “But what are you going to do about it?”

  “Well … Like you said last night. Stay above it … Ignore him … Jesus Christ, listen to the rest of this …”

  “I’ve read it. Several times,” the Governor said. “I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to do something. And the obvious thing is for you to announce as a candidate. Today. Soon as possible.”

  “I’m not going to let that baboon make up my mind or push me into anything before I’m ready …”

  The Governor got to his feet and paced around, hands jammed into trouser pockets, breathing hard. He, too, had married into money long ago, long before he had entered public life. But Arthur Fenstemaker hadn’t resisted the idea of wealth. He had gone after it, seized it, invested wisely and made some on his own. He had fought with the money and had, therefore, a healthy respect for wealth and its gorgeous machinations.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s a goddam good day to buy shoes.”

  “Because it’s cool and your feet don’t swell,” Neil said. And the mind doesn’t boggle, he thought to himself.

  “The way I see it,” the Governor said, “you’ve just about got to get into this thing now — whether you announce today or tomorrow or the day after. Whenever. Otherwise —”

  “Otherwise he will have put a pox on my house … He may be right. Maybe I don’t have the heart for this sort of thing.”

  The Governor stood with his back to him, staring through the window, unwrapping an enormous cigar. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “You want to know something?”

  Neil nodded. The Governor had pushed open a window and through it came the sounds of birds and dogs and children and morning traffic in the streets.

  “If you don’t get into this, it’ll ruin you. As a man. I know you — I’ve known you for seven, eight years. You’re goddam good. You got sense. Hell! I remember the first time I saw you. When I was Attorney General … I’d dropped in to visit some friends on the House floor. There was a bill coming up that day. I forget exactly … Something that permitted state funds to be deposited in banks without drawing interest. A real jackpot. I didn’t particularly like it; not many people did. But it had some solid support and the skids were greased. I was sitting next to the press table and you brushed by heading toward the back microphone, reading the bill and mumbling to yourself. I remember — I heard what you were saying: ‘What a lousy goddam bill.’
So you got the floor and I sat back and watched you, throwing out a few parliamentary questions, making notes all the time on little pieces of paper. You stood up there and talked and made notes for more than an hour, passing bits of paper to your secretary and whispering to anybody who came near you. After an hour the secretary came back with that pile of typed amendments and then you went after them — you must have tried to change every line during the course of the debate. You stood up there and organized the opposition yourself, operating right out of the seat of your goddam pants, and by God you beat ’em down. It was a real pleasure to watch, Neil … what the hell’s happened since? You run out of gas at the age of thirty-three?”

  The Governor puffed on the cigar. Neil sat looking down at the pile of morning papers. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I just got out of the habit.”

  “Well don’t you have any contempt for Edwards? You just can’t —”

  “That’s it,” Neil said. “I don’t feel much of anything about Edwards. It’s like he’s been talking about someone else all this time.”

  The Governor came close. “Then you ought not to feel that way. You ought to despise him … You know he’s the one?”

  “The one who what? What’re you talking about?”

  “He’s the one, goddammit. He’s been after you for seven years. He’s the one I warned you about in 1950. That’s what’s behind those statements in the paper. He thinks he scared you off once, and now he figures on doing it again …”

  “You mean it was him? He’s the —”

  “Exactly … So what do you plan to do about it?”

  “I …”

  The phone’s ringing saved him from having to force some tortured confession of helplessness across his lips. He did not know what he proposed to do about anything. He’d already lost his navigator, and now, after long months of studying the stars and the tides and the great ocean currents — with all the facts and figures in his head, the accumulated wisdom, the distress signals — he was piloting a rudderless ship. What the hell did he propose to do? Fenstemaker was right. There was only one —

  “Yes,” the Governor was saying, “… tell them I’ll be there in a minute. The conference room is a good place. Order them some coffee from downstairs …”

  He put the phone down and looked at Neil. “I’ve got to talk to some people …”

  “I have to leave anyhow,” Neil said.

  “I’d like for you to stay,” the Governor said. “I’d like you to meet ’em when I’m finished. They’re money people. Career contributors, you might say. I’m going in there right now and make a pitch for Neil Christiansen. If they’re sold, I’d like to bring them in here to meet you. If you’re not going to think for yourself, I’ll think for you until you tell me otherwise. These people in there — they got no convictions to speak of. They carry their politics in their vest pocket. They just want to go with a winner. I’m going in there now and threaten them with every kind of horror if they don’t back my candidate. They know I mean it too. I think I can tap the bloody mother lode if I handle it right. They’ll probably put some money on Edwards just to be on the safe side, but I want them to take a look at you. And I want you, for my own sake if not yours … So at least try to look like a winner. Get mad … Get goddam mad!”

  The Governor turned and strode out of the room before Neil could object. He sat sipping coffee. So that was how. Get mad. Get goddam good and mad and look like a winner. He stood and stretched himself so that he could see three quarters of his face in the big mirror. He tried to affect the look of a winner, but the image that gaped back at him merely exuded a kind of vast, benign self-deprecation. The dime store Jesus, he thought: Gandhi with a twang. Gray flannel loincloth and button-down lip.

  And so it was Edwards …

  It was curious he had never even thought to ask. The Governor only told him there was someone, the Enemy, lurking outside, faceless and impersonal. But that was exactly the point: It hadn’t mattered who it was. He’d never even looked outside to see.

  Seven years before — such a melancholy time. All of them, they were all enemies; every man a Hawkshaw, every king suspect. Our national malaise. Some few — the pathologists like Arthur Fenstemaker — had seen it coming, but there had scarcely been time to flee the plague, much less sound a warning or stem the virulence in any noticeable degree. “It’s the year of the locust,” Fenstemaker told him. “These things come and go, like the business cycle. You got to know when to buy and sell. Dump all your holdings — that stuff’s out of fashion for a time. It’s your brother, don’t you see? They’re going after him, but it’s really you — and these people believe in blood guilt …”

  Seven years now he had been trying to tell himself it had all been done for John Tom. Was he still not quite convinced? Why else? A man looks after his own. And there had been sacrifices — he was still in debt to the bank for the bookstore. It was a long time between campaigns, seven years between, such a time as to cause him to lose sight of whatever vision it was that sustained him. So what the hell if he did come back again to fight another day? He had only Arthur Fenstemaker to thank for that. Washed up until Arthur arrived with a direct commission and an oxygen tank. That was all irrelevant. He had done the thing for John Tom — pulled him off the faculty at the college and set him up in a business of his own. It had been perfect. Who could give a damn if a bookstore proprietor talked a heresy to students?

  Then Neil had gone out of business for a time.

  “It’s like this,” he had told John Tom, trying to remember how old Fenstemaker had phrased it. “We’re facing a bad year. Got to get out from under. Sell before our margin’s wiped out. One more campaign and I might be plowed under.

  “It’s like this,” he went on, reversing reality in deference to his brother’s feelings, “they come after me, they’re liable to bring you down, too. Teaching in a state college is no place to hide during a political purge. I can take care of myself — I got the law practice. Now you … You interested in a bookstore? I just bought us … you … you and me and Andrea — however you want it — I just bought a bookstore.”

  “I can’t run a bookstore,” John Tom had said. “Not even a coffee house. All I can do is paint. I’m not even very good teaching people how to paint.”

  “You don’t have to do anything … Just give ’em a book and take their money. The place is right off the campus. You can’t add and subtract, I’ll get you an accountant. All you got to do is play it straight — wear baggy trousers and hang your paintings around and maybe even grow a beard. Give ’em the crap artist routine. They won’t care about your politics …”

  “For Chrissake, I don’t have any politics. What’s all this —”

  “I’ve got politics then. All over me. And you might lose your job.”

  “So what?”

  “Everything! Me. I care. You understand? Look — I’ve already signed the papers … Come down and see the place. Another month and it’s mid-semester. You can give notice today.”

  Suddenly Neil knew he could not face Arthur’s friends. He looked round the big room, blinded by the mirrors and the morning sunlight streaming in through those enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. He wondered if it would ever cloud over and whether one’s feet would swell after sprinting across those thick carpets and down the marble halls …

  He paused at the receptionist’s desk.

  “Would you tell the Governor I had to run. I’ve got an appointment at ten-thirty … I’ll check back with him later in the day.”

  “I’ll do that, Senator. Have a nice Easter.”

  “Same to you. Nice weekend.”

  It may cloud over but the lady’s feet will swell, he told himself. He was perspiring through the blue suit, and he wondered if he would have to return home to change before the luncheon. The hell with it. He punched on the air-conditioning in the car and drove slowly through the Capitol grounds, circling round the old building several times. Then he turned out into the av
enue and headed toward the campus again. What had been his motives? Covering his own flank or looking after little brother? And what was it those Hawkshaws had on John Tom? He had never even thought to ask, never known it was Edwards until that morning. John Tom hadn’t any politics, not really. He wondered what it was they planned to spill on him, what spleen and feces squeezed from some half-finished lecture note on modern art. He could hear his brother now … “The top’s hunky-dory but the bottom’s rotten, young ladies and gentlemen. Picasso and Rivera knew that — Rivera knew it from firsthand experience … But what they don’t know is that Communism’s just an inversion of the system. Place the bottom on the top and a great leavening action permeates the whole. Evolution slips on a banana peel but continues onward, as it must, until that day when absolute zero grips the universe, making quiescent all things for all time …”

  Once he had heard John Tom in serious discussion with Andrea’s father. At least he had looked serious, giving no indication of having tongue firmly planted against cheek. “It’s Truman’s war,” he was telling the fiercely agreeing old man, “but MacArthur will have the boys home by Christmas …”

  Old John Tom. In that plague season of pursuer and pursued, foul breath in the face and the rending of flesh, traducer and traduced. Who was to guess at motives? Who could speculate on what passes through the backsides of the brain? He had lived to fight another day but serious doubts befogged him now as to whether it had been worth it and who it was he was prepared to fight. Lost that vision, he was thinking; John Tom took it with him when he left. Were there no more possibilities for individual moral achievement? Or was it just unintelligible human savagery. He knew, then, where the sleek dark car was taking him, filling his head with a glimpse of meaning and manufactured ice-cold air.

  Ten

  THE BOOKSTORE WAS LIKE a sanctuary, cool and funereal in a second-story loft on the main street just off the campus. Only an hour remained before the luncheon, and he wondered if it would be possible to cancel that engagement also: beg off everything and begin the morning in this gloomy, vaulted chamber, free from disorderly notions, content in the muted chaos of all those endless volumes. There was music coming from somewhere, behind the stacks, an album of Vaughn Williams played on John Tom’s old record machine. At first he had thought the place was empty, but then two college girls rounded one of the bookcases, glanced at him briefly, and moved past toward the hall … “I lost his black star sapphire ring in the ladies’ room at the Club De Pesca,” one of them was saying. “We spent all night exploring the sewers of Acapulco …”