Tommy

by William Illsey Atkinson

  I would. I feel like Mr. Lonely Hearts, Friends Found for the Undeserving.

  You’re as good at that as you are at everything else. I like the governor.

  He certainly likes you. It’s most unusual.

  That he likes someone?

  That anyone our age hangs around anyone his age long enough to listen.

  You like him? Tommy asks.

  I do.

  Why?

  Same reason I like you.

  He amuses you?

  Don’t insult me. I want his approval.

  Tommy opens his eyes. You need approval? Him, sure, but me?

  Feathers isn’t smiling. Squalid, isn’t it?

  Just surprising. You’re so utterly self-contained.

  I have no purpose.

  You don’t need a purpose. Or rather your purpose is . . . Tommy stops.

  To be a butterfly. Isn’t that what you were going to say?

  More or less. To decorate, delight, amuse. Nothing wrong with that.

  Nothing wrong, nothing right. You now, Tommy, you’re going to build things. What butterfly ever held up a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars?

  Go easy on yourself, buddy. The world needs more than engineers. And yes, I caught the Sandburg.

  Past the Buick’s rolled-up windows, winter roads flash by.

  Tell me something, Tommy. Do you like me?

  Hell no, you’re a pain. For Christ’s sake, Feathers, you’re my best friend.

  But why do you spend time with me?

  I have to say you amuse me —

  I thought so.

  Let me finish. There’s more to it. You’re perfect, Feathers. You’re so utterly complete. That make sense?

  As much sense as any of my parasitic coupon-clipping clan makes. But I get your drift. I’m me and you’re you, and neither of us is the other.

  Exactly, Tommy says.

  On the last straight before Boston, Feathers speeds up, which Tommy had thought impossible. He can’t see the speedometer, which is good.

  My driving doesn’t scare you?

  Tommy shakes his head. I guess it should.

  Then why aren’t you scared?

  I trust you, I guess.

  Speed scares me. That’s why I like it.

  They’re silent a while. Then Feathers says, There’s another reason I took you to Providence. I wanted you to hear the militia story. It’s not well known.

  Tommy looks sideways. I have to say that shocked me.

  You know the certified version? After a single postwar term Mr. San Souci was not re-nominated by the Republican Committee because he had called out the state militia in a strike. That’s official National Governors’ Association history, you can look it up. But that wasn’t the situation, not at all. He sent the troops in solely to keep order. They were under orders not to fire even if provoked. Shoot the bastards! the bosses screamed. And the governor said, Order youngsters to turn high-powered military weapons on their unarmed parents? This I cannot and will not do.

  Feathers lifts his foot. The Buick slows beneath the speed of sound.

  So they bounced him. They never forgave his arrogance. A state governor who puts people’s safety before profits? What next, prohibiting the eviction of widows and orphans? Feathers sighs. You know what Jefferson initially had in the Declaration after Life and Liberty? Instead of Pursuit of Happiness?

  Property, Tommy says.

  Life, Liberty, and Property. With Liberty restricted to those with Property and Life restricted to those who protect it.

  God, Feathers, you’re the richest revolutionary I know.

  I’m no revolutionary. Storming barricades is hell on your clothes. I like my unearned comfort and my unearned position. But I’m not a dullard, either. I know I’m upheld by the sweat of you proles. So I befriend you out of guilt. Also to have a back door in case the whole rotten structure collapses. Put in a word for me with Iosef Vissarionovitch. Tell him I like my vodka cold.

  What a load of shit, Mason. You befriend me for the same reason I befriend you.

  And why is that, pray?

  Because we’re friends.

  Noblesse oblige from the proletariat! Amazing!

  The night before commencement, Tommy leaves the Sloan party early. Carl and Carrington seem ready to carouse all night, but Tommy knows his mental alarm will go off at five and he doesn’t want to spend his big day with a head full of sawdust. At eleven p.m. he’s reaching for his table lamp when it clicks off by itself.

  Tommy glances out the window. The street light outside, which normally gives his room the soft ambience of noon in Nairobi, is dead, too. His room is extraordinarily, apocalyptically, Carlsbad Cavern dark. Tommy gropes to his window and parts the curtains. All of mit is in darkness. So is Boston across the Charles. The only lights are on ships in the harbor. Tommy shrugs and goes to bed.

  Power is back on by the time he rises. As expected, Feathers’ bed has not been slept in. Someone’s going to have a headache. Tommy showers, shaves, dresses, and emerges to a sweet May day. On his way to the stands he sees no one he knows. In the Sloan rows, only four chairs are filled. Still no sign of Feathers.

  The president of mit walks to the podium and taps the mike. Trying times . . . Show one’s mettle . . . Nation’s élite. Tommy stops listening and looks around with growing unease. Feathers is a big boy. Even if he’s drowned himself he can’t have taken the rest of the class with him.

  Polite applause: a vip has been introduced. It’s Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors Corporation. Benefactor of the Institute, founder of the feast, the great man himself, here for an honorary degree. Sloan steps up and commences to drone. Tommy pays attention but is puzzled: the man is complaining about something. It’s cars. He doesn’t like cars, even those his company makes. They’re too low. They don’t have headroom. A good Landau now, une calèche magnifique du Limousin, an elegant horsepiss-smelling vehicle that lets you step in without removing your top hat: now that’s the thing! Of course, you need a footman or two to hand you up, but that’s a small price to pay. Why, as recently as 1890, the porte-cochère of the Metropolitan Opera was clogged, simply clogged, with Landaux disgorging the crème de la crème of the Four Hundred . . .

  Tommy is appalled. No wonder Feathers is flippant: if this prune-faced prat represents the American ruling class, flippancy is the only thing keeping their kids sane.

  A black truck, loud and ugly and with faded white lettering on its side, grinds down Standish Street. It turns onto Institute Road and approaches the stands. It’s a riot car, a travelling cell, Boston’s infamous Black Maria. Sloan’s jeremiad fades to silence as the paddy wagon screeches to a stop beside the stage. A police sergeant gets out, unlocks the rear door, and swings it wide. Down steps Feathers in a three-piece chalkstripe. His hair is flawless, his shoes are like mirrors, and he’s perfectly composed. He’d look fit to welcome King George V if it weren’t for a big black eye.

  Tommy goggles. It’s amateurish: Presidents Sloan and McCain are together goggling the Defining Goggle, the Goggle to End All Goggles. Feathers waves at Sloan.

  Morning, Uncle Alfie! You go on pontificating, I’ll rejoin my friends. He calls into the Black Maria’s depths. Gentlemen? You can come out now.

  And out of the Black Maria troop the rest of mit Sloan ’35.

  But the Ninth Street power station?

  Feathers sips his beer. Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. We’re Sloans, not high-school juniors. What should I have done, unscrewed a light bulb? Res commissum est audace. We needed a splash, we got one.

  You got one.

  I confess to some trifling part in the strategic organization —

  You did it, Feathers. You killed the lights in America’s third biggest city.

  Ridiculously easy, too. Ah. Feathers holds a
misted beer stein to his eye.

  Tommy persists. Exactly what did you do?

  Nothing permanent. Jumped some barriers, snapped a padlock, flipped a circuit breaker or two. Umpty-ump amperes, piece of cake.

  But the harm you could have caused! Hospitals —

  All Massachusetts hospitals have backup power systems. So do prisons and cop shops. It’s Massachusetts law.

  You know that? How do you know that?

  Mother’s on the Greater Boston Municipal Advisory Board.

  She’s a New Yorker!

  We Masons get around. Look, how about some recognition? Without the Night of the Double-Knife Switch you’d still be suffering through Alfred P. Stoat, Chairman of the Bore.

  Did you see the look on him when you stepped out! Stanton says. I thought he’d have a brain hemorrhage!

  Not a chance, Mr. Stanton. That would require a brain.

  August 20, 1935

  It’s four a.m. and the lower deck is shaking, which means ship’s engines have slowed. They must be off Cape Hatteras.

  Tommy yawns and rolls over. With his right hand he takes a sawed-off broom handle from beneath his pillow. With his left hand he fumbles for a shoe and shakes it hard. Nothing. Next shoe. A scorpion falls out, and Tommy kills it with a single smack. No tarantulas. That’s a good start to the day.

  He sits up on his sagging mattress and rubs his eyes. Assuming this is Hatteras, they’ll dock New York by six p.m. They’ll unload bananas till nine next morning, refuel, head back to Nicaragua, load another thousand tons, and do it all over again. In the last three months Tommy has come to loathe bananas. He will not eat another banana in the seventy years, nine months, fourteen days, twenty-three hours, and fifty minutes remaining to him.

  He draws ten bucks a week for eighty hours of work, not the best profession for a Sloan Fellow and ljg usn summa cum laude. At least he’s afloat, but it’s such a waste. Tommy uses a sextant the way Lou Gehrig uses a bat. He’s a master in using chronometry to calculate longitude and can fix his position by shooting Venus, something most Academy professors couldn’t do. His fourth-year navigation professor called his computations elegant, then crossed that out and wrote exquisite. Tommy Atkinson is sober and smart and young and fit and highly educated at the public’s expense. And he makes his living schlepping fruit.

  By noon next day he’s worked thirty-two hours without a break. He’s ready to drop when a mate hands him a thick cream-colored envelope. Tommy tears it open.

  Stone & Webster Engineering Incorporated requests

  Mr. A.H. Atkinson

  To present himself at 3 pm, Tuesday, September 3rd, at

  S&W Head Office

  Floor 58 Empire State Building New York, N.Y.

  To interview for the position of

  Trainee Project Manager – Civil Engineering

  (Signed) W. Bradley Foreman, P.Eng.

  Director Major Projects S&W Eastern Region

  Tommy rubs his stubble. He hasn’t applied to Stone and Webster. He lives on a tramp steamer whose plates are rotten with scale and he’s in New York six days a month. How did these people find him?

  Tommy looks at the letter again. He doesn’t need to be a detective to know whose fingerprints are all over it.

  Tommy! Good of you to come. Feathers gestures at an adjacent bar stool.

  Tommy, in a new ill-fitting suit, sits down. Schlitz, he says to the bartender. Thanks, he says to Feathers.

  Why?

  You know why. Stop pissing around.

  Feathers shrugs. You were hired on your merits, nothing else. Though I’d be shocked if a corporate dinosaur like S and W knows what a gem it’s got. No matter. At least you’re off that Christ-awful banana boat.

  I don’t know what to say.

  Then shut up and drink up. How much do they pay you?

  Fifteen dollars per week.

  Feathers whistles. I’ll sell you Mother’s Dusenberg. Where are you living?

  Forty-first, up near the El. Noisy, but it’s close to work. You?

  Still with Mother. You must drop in now that you’re spider-free. I warn you, the grub is awful. Better come just for cocktails.

  You working too?

  Me? Really, Mr. Atkinson. What can a butterfly do?

  June 11, 1937

  For the second time in his life Tommy’s aboard a transcontinental train, this time westbound. Stone and Webster have transferred him to Washington State.

  He’ll miss some of New York. Schorr and Melchior at the Met, worth every one of the fifty precious cents for standing room. The parks, the galleries, the museums. But most of his memories are of bitter slush or foundry heat, bracketed spring and autumn by a few fine days when he and the other working stiffs could stroll the streets and stare at the wealthy. A debutante and her greyhound stepping from a chauffeur-driven Cord, two blade-thin purebreds strutting their stuff. A Tiffany window displaying more money than he’ll make in a lifetime. A glimpse at the Astoria of Alfred P. Sloan.

  Now all that’s gone. It’s midnight, nothing out the window but stars and prairie. Tommy settles down to sleep.

  He likes Seattle. Its harbor has a sharper, cleaner tang than the oily rivers around New York. Eastward, the top of Mount Rainier floats like a balloon; Pike Market is full of profane and happy men who fling fish to one another. Feathers meets him at the Moore Hotel.

  Tommy hasn’t slept well in a week and feels rag-ass, but he lights up when he sees Feathers. His friend leaps up, pumps his hand, plants him in a chair, and beckons a waiter. Tommy would feel intimidated if Feathers weren’t such infinite self-mocking fun. Despite his silliness, command drips from the man. Tommy can’t summon a waiter for screaming; Feathers lifts an eyebrow and half the hotel staff tear in like they’re stealing third.

  My oath, Tommy. You look terrible.

  Don’t worry. I’m in better shape than I seem.

  Of course you are. Your great-grandfather survived the Oregon Trail and so will you. How’s your drink? I like the Moore’s martinis. But enough chitchat. No doubt you’ve troubled yourself about where we’re going to stay in this benighted burg? Well, troubled or not, set your mind at ease. I have found us a pied-à-terre. Or, rather, dear old multi-chinned Mommykins has found us one.

  Tommy’s eyes open. I thought your mother was in New York.

  What matter? She works at a distance, like magnetism or gravity. Her body may be sequestered on Tenth Avenue, but the old dear’s perpetual unstoppable relentless inalterable inexorable meddling interfering arranging rearranging organizing managing buggering snoop-nosed presence has cast itself westward to this frontier locale. And has found us, you and I, a refuge.

  You and me. Objective case.

  Grammar is for butlers. Anyway, Mother has located a bachelors’ residence, the Monks’ Club, right around the corner. We have two rooms on indefinite stay.

  What’s it like?

  No idea.

  You took it sight unseen?

  Mother says it meets her standards, which means it beats my standards twice over. Four times for you.

  But wouldn’t it be prudent —

  Tommy. Mother’s our landlord. She cut a check and bought the goddamn thing.

  The Monks’ Club is just up Pickett Street, ten minutes from the lobby where Tommy and Feathers have just demolished five martinis (final score: Mason 3, Atkinson 2). Tommy takes one suitcase and Feathers the other. It’s less work in the absolute sense, fewer candle–hertz per newton–furlong or whatever, but it’s destabilizing: Tommy made better headway counterbalanced. Anything to give Feathers the holy joy of assisting the poor.

  The Monks’ Club is as advertised, a perfectly maintained three-story brownstone with lead-glass windows and, in its parlor, a brass-trimmed mahogany bar the size of Delaware. Most of the time Feathers and Tommy are on opposite
sides: the former drinks, the latter serves. Tommy isn’t resentful. It’s easier on his liver, and he and his friend can still talk.

  Tommy’s good at slinging bar. When customers grouse, he quietly administers the antidote. When they’re happy, he whips up a celebration. Obejoyful, he thinks, Victorian slang for booze. His new friend Mabel uses the term whenever he tops up her brandy.

  Tommy’s settling in to Seattle: it’s New York with manners, Aurora with style. With work under control and home comfortable, for the first time in his life he feels relaxed.

  Not, of course, relaxed like Feathers, who defines relaxation like a sleeping cat. Feathers rises at ten, has coffee-and-brandy until noon, drives to his club for tennis and swimming, and sips cocktails until eight. Dinner, also at the club, is always with a different good-looking woman. Most days he’s home by midnight and never stays out past three. Privacy, says Feathers, sustains the bachelor.

  Feathers breezes into the Monks’ Club one Sunday afternoon to find Tommy’s not behind the bar. He walks over to a heap of rags in a corner wingchair. It’s Tommy, head in hands.

  Jesus, buddy. What’s the matter?

  I met my father. Tommy lets out a shuddering breath.

  Not a happy encounter, I take it. How long’s it been?

  Twenty years. He called me Junior.

  Any contact since he walked out? Calls, letters, money?

  Headshake. We had to scrape. Now he shows up. Says he’s proud of me.

  When you’ve made it on your own. The son of a bitch.

  Even that I could understand. Maybe he just wanted to fix things. But then, then he suggested —

  I’m listening.

  He said we should go somewhere.

  Where?

  A w-whorehouse.

  Feathers stays silent.

  I told him to get out, Tommy says. Said I never wanted to see him again.

  When was this?

  I don’t know. Noon.

  Go have a shower, Feathers says. I’ll cover bar.

  When Tommy returns he’s walking straighter and his shirt is clean, but he still looks bad. Sit, says Feathers. He pours from a shaker into a squat glass. Tommy knocks it back. Feathers refills.