King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “Hello, Jeremy,” he said in a grave and gravelly voice. “Who do you have there with you?”

  “Taft, this is Roger Whirley,” Jeremy said. “Roger has just been sent down by the central office in Rochester to assist us in straightening out some of the little glitches in our operation.”

  I stood stock-still, stunned by the enormity of this lie. My first time on the Hopkins campus and I was using an assumed name. In my mind, both Dr. Spaulding and Henry James shook their heads at me.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Whirley.”

  I walked ahead and shook the great man’s hand, convinced that at any moment he would discover Jeremy’s hapless ruse.

  “Well, I hope you’ll help Jeremy out, Mr. Whirley,” President A. Taft Manley said. “Because he has a very, very promising product here, and it would be a shame to see it go down the drain.”

  On that final phrase, A. Taft Manley’s voice took on a stentorian gravity. I looked over at Jeremy and saw his Adam’s apple jump.

  “Surely there were no problems with the last batch of photos, was there, Taft?” Jeremy said. There was a little catch in his voice, the first sign of vulnerability I had seen in him.

  “Yes, Jer,” the great man said gravely as he walked toward an antique end table and picked up a box of cards. “I am afraid there was and there are.”

  He sighed a little to show how sad it was for him to impart this information, then he picked up the little box and let a pile of the cards fall into his great red hands.

  “Take a look at these, Jer,” he said. “You, too, Whirley.”

  I looked down at the cards, half expecting them to be out of focus or in some other way ruined, but to my surprise I saw a picture of a young student named Maurice Reskind. The picture wasn’t what you would call memorable, but it was a very decent likeness.

  “What do you think, Whirley?” President Manley said.

  “Well, not bad,” I said. “I mean it’s not a picture to be hung in a photography exhibit but a thoroughly professional job. Let me see the others.”

  Jeremy quickly shuffled through the deck, and we looked at pictures of students named Billy Brandau and Terry Dearborn. Again, the photography seemed to be perfectly acceptable. But there was something wrong, terribly wrong, you could sense it from Manley’s raised eyebrows and quickened, impatient breath. I looked at Jeremy, who smiled and looked up at the Hopkins’s president.

  “You’re kidding, right, Taft?” he said. He turned to me and smiled. “That’s how Taft is, Whirls, a great kidder.”

  “You think I’m kidding?” A. Taft Manley said. His voice was low and serious.

  “Of course,” Jeremy said. He tried out a wink and a smile, but A. Taft Manley took off his pince-nez and gave him his Great-Man Scowl. I felt myself sinking a few inches into the deep-pile carpet.

  Jeremy shook his head and took another look at the cards.

  “I don’t know, Taft,” he said. “I look down here at these cards and I see good pictures, the number embossed in neatly, the student’s name and address.”

  “Yes,” A. Taft Manley said, “but that is precisely the problem! Read me a card. Any card.”

  “Well, okay.” Jeremy said. “The first name is John Westcott. He’s a senior and he lives at 2335 Charles Street.”

  “Right,” said the president. “Very good. The only problem is that isn’t John Westcott’s picture.”

  “No?” Jeremy Raines said, his voice cracking.

  “No,” said A. Taft Manley, “and this next picture isn’t Bradford Karnes. You see this fat boy in the back, whom you have under Bill Dillon, that’s Westcott. And this one here is Karnes. Every one of these cards has the wrong picture with the wrong identity. These cards are what I would call Anti-Identity cards. As in unusable!”

  There was a long silence, and I saw Jeremy’s knees buckle slightly. God, I thought, why have you led me here? Then, to my horror, Raines turned and, with a whiplike wraith, pointed an accusatory finger at me!

  “Now listen here, Whirley,” he said. “This was exactly the kind of thing you fellows in the processing plant assured me would never happen!”

  “Huh?” I explained.

  “No ‘huhs,’ Whirley. You said you had the new solutions, the whole new matching index,” Raines said, pushing his face so close to mine that spittle flew into my eyes. “You assured me that the marsgale filters and the data-coded I.D. number nelds were all color sequenced so that none of this would happen. But look, just look at what you’ve done.”

  “I’m … I’m sorry,” I said, both panicky and in a state of almost supernatural rage. “I’ll make a memo of this and take it to … to …”

  “To J.B.” Jeremy said. “You take it to J.B. and you tell him that I cannot and I will not tolerate this kind of screwup. Really, Whirley, I thought when we joined up with you Rochester boys we had signed on with professionals. But apparently you only talk a good game. When it comes down to delivering product, you fall abysmally short. I must repeat again, this is simply unacceptable!”

  I swallowed hard and looked up at the unflinching and damning gaze of A. Taft Manley. I had a sudden urge to rip Raines’s heart out and eat it in front of the unforgiving president.

  “I am extremely sorry, Mr. Raines,” I said through clenched teeth. “Believe me, I will look into this at once.”

  Jeremy turned and shook his head at President A. Taft Manley.

  “What can I say, sir?” he said. “It’s completely my fault. I take full responsibility for the entire foul-up. I mean, I trusted Whirley here to do a professional job, but in the end I have to take the blame for hiring him. If you want a full refund, I’ll be more than happy to …”

  “Well,” said A. Taft Manley, putting his glasses back on and shaking his head. “That won’t be necessary, son. I’m certain we can work something out. If you have the cards straightened out by, say, Saturday two weeks.”

  “No problem,” Jeremy said. “We’ll reshoot everything at our expense. Don’t you worry, sir. The cards will be done right next time through. Won’t they, Whirley?”

  Jeremy stared at me as though I were a very small piece of snail dropping.

  “I’ll certainly see that Spaulding in the front office hears about this, sir,” I said to Manley. “The next batch will be picture-perfect. You can count on that.”

  A. Taft Manley grumbled something that sounded like agreement and shook his head. Then he turned and stood in noble half profile against the window, and we hurried on out of his office.

  Where are you going?” Raines asked as I walked away from him in the sun-baked parking lot. “The car is in the other direction.”

  “I know where it is,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “Which is why I’m walking in this direction. Because I never, ever want to see you again!”

  I picked up my pace and headed for Charles Street, but in a flash Raines caught up with me.

  “If you don’t want to get punched in the face,” I said, “then I strongly suggest that you get the fuck away from me.”

  He stopped walking then and dropped his hands at his side.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. Punch me. Go right ahead. I deserve it. Give me your best shot.”

  I stopped and looked at him hard. I made my right hand into a fist. I held it up in front of my chest. Then I let it fall back to my side. He looked so helpless, so distraught standing there in the steaming heat.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do. I mean, the whole damned company could go down the tubes if we lose the Hopkins contract. I was desperate. And you pulled me out, Tom. Man, I owe you.”

  “Owe me?” I screamed. “Owe me? You asshole, you set me up as a whipping boy in front of the president of Johns Hopkins University? I know it doesn’t mean anything at all to you, but just recently in my life I found out I have a goddamned brain, and I’d like to maybe become a teacher someday, and if a guy like A. Taft fucking Manley found out the truth, he cou
ld have me blackballed from all graduate schools in the Northern fucking Hemisphere!”

  I shocked myself at the fury in my voice.

  “I know, I know,” Raines said, “and I’m sorry. I really am. I’m going to make it up to you. I swear.”

  “No,” I said, “promise me that whatever you do, you won’t try and make it up to me. I can’t take anymore of your goodwill.”

  He looked hurt when I said that. His mouth curled down, and he frowned deeply.

  I realized that I had wounded him and felt some of my furor fade, which irritated me even more.

  “Look,” I said, “you owe me nothing. Zero. Nada. Let’s just shake hands, wish each other luck, and call it a day.”

  “Okay,” Raines said, “but at least let me give you a ride home.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’d like to keep what’s left of me together. Do you realize you’re the worst driver in the known world?”

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” Raines said. And suddenly there was defeat in his voice. “Okay. Do what you want. I’m sorry, though. Really. Take it easy, my boy.”

  He turned and shuffled off toward his car, and I stood there looking at him go, at his drooping head and his sad penguin walk, and there seemed something terribly familiar about that gait, something I couldn’t name then but know now without a doubt. That walk was the walk of defeat, the very same walk I had seen so many hundreds of times in my own home. The stoop-shouldered walk of my father, trudging from the bedroom to the bath, the walk that said, “Yeah, I could have done something. I had the talent, but the bastard Baltimorons slapped me down.” In spite of all he had done to me in two short hours, I couldn’t bear to see Raines dejected like that.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Wait a damned minute! I could use a ride after all.”

  He turned and smiled at me, but there was no happiness in his face.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s the least I can do.”

  I trotted after him, and sweat pouring freely off of me, I got once more into the Deathmobile.

  We drove out Charles Street in stony silence. I was furious at Raines and tried my best to pretend I was simply being taken home in a cab. My God, he had made a fool of me, and I’d gone along with it. Hell, I had even dragged Dr. Spaulding’s name into the sham. Now the paranoia machine went into high gear: What if A. Taft Manley knew Dr. Spaulding? What if Manley called him and they formed a cabal, burning my body at the academic stake?

  This was no way to think. I had to shut down my brain.

  Desperate, I stared gloomily out at the big houses in Roland Park, the palatial homes of the rich. I remembered that as a kid I had cut lawns for these people. Go vans, the neighborhood I’d first grown up in, was just north of here. I still remembered the stone wall that separated our hillbilly, Hank Williams-playing neighborhood from these discreet houses, recalled pushing my old hand lawn mower door to door, asking the maids and butlers if the lady of the house was home. More often than not I got no farther than that, but sometimes the owners would come out and agree to pay me a dollar and a quarter to mow their front and back lawns. I recalled wanting to do the best job in the world to show them that I was somebody, too, somebody worth knowing. Oh, Lord, the fantasies I had. It’s a steaming hot one hundred percent-humidity Baltimore day, one hundred degrees in the shade. The rich man’s wife (young, beautiful) looks through the window and sees the honest craftsman tilling in her garden. She is drawn to his seriousness of intent, to the absolute conviction he brings to the job. She tries to turn away from the window, to go about her frivolous life, but there is something about him, something irresistible. Soon she is walking down the garden path, a glass of lemonade in her hand, and they are talking. In a very few minutes she realizes that this boy is special, sensitive, bright, an artist. He makes her feel more alive than her husband, a dull banker, ever could. They form a friendship, rebels in the eyes of the world.

  Of course, nothing like this ever happened. Mostly, the ladies of the houses complained that they had to pay a whole dollar and a quarter to have their lawns cut, and not one of them ever even offered me even a drink of water.

  But that didn’t stop my fantasies. Oh, Lord, where did I get such romantic claptrap? From my father, of course. And, more importantly, from his mother, my grandmother Grace. She lived only three blocks away on Thirty-eighth Street. A brilliant, brook-clear woman, there was no one in the world I loved more. It was she who taught us all that though we were poor, we were as good as anyone, that we had to turn on the secret light that shined from within. Now, as I drove with Raines out leafy, shady Charles Street, it occurred to me how similar my grandmother’s teachings were to Dr. Spaulding’s. Indeed, both literature and religion taught that the inner life was the true life and that the life we could easily observe, the life of money and ambition and power, meant nothing. Yes, eventually the people in the big houses would offer you that drink, eventually they would introduce you to their daughters, for by associating with you, they would become more fully human, more alive themselves. Though they might not know it yet, they couldn’t really live without you.

  Was any of this true? I didn’t know. At this time I still hoped it was, that much I was sure of. I still thought that if I refined my sensibility, became as great an artist or humanist as, say, James or my grandmother’s hero, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, then the world would love me for it.

  A naive and not very bright young man’s fantasy? Perhaps. But it occurred to me that it wasn’t out of the question. After all, look at the way my family loved my grandmother. Loved her for keeping them together while my drunken sea captain grandfather, Rob, hit the sailors’ bars and strip joints down on Baltimore Street, the infamous Block. Loved her, because she stood up for Negroes by inviting interracial groups to her house on Sundays, though the hillbillies stood on their front porches in their sleeveless T-shirts and screamed, “Grace Fallon is a nigger lover.” (To which my grandmother said, “They’re trash, and we don’t truck to trash.”) Loved her for insisting that we learn to love Mozart and Bach and Hayden, even though the rest of our neighborhood believed only in Hank Williams and later Elvis Presley.

  No one could have loved her more than me, for her home and her great, open heart were my sanctuary from the madness that was my own home life. When things had become so bad I could stand no more, I had often packed up my things into my old Baltimore Colts overnight bag and walked to Gracie’s, where I was given hot chocolate and tollhouse cookies and where we sat on her old glider on the front porch, rocking gently back and forth, talking of Schweitzer and Kafka and Hans Castorp on his frozen sled of death.

  Now all that was gone. First, my grandfather had died in a bar fight in a place called the Wishing Well Tavern on old rummy Pratt Street, and then Grace had become enfeebled and moved to Washington to spend her last days with my aunt, who had herself died soon after. I held tight to Raines’s armrests and remembered the ordeal of their funerals. Only two years ago they were both still alive. Now they only lived in memory, stories. My mother, my miserable father, and I were all that was left of the Fallons, and as Raines and I drove up Charles Street, I felt my dead family’s absence as though someone had amputated my left arm. I could not let them all die in vain. I had promised my dear grandmother that I would somehow distinguish my family. I had promised her and I had promised Dr. Spaulding, and I had to somehow show my father, too, that his life as a failed artist had not been for nothing. No, though Baltimore and his own weakness had beaten him down, his son would sail on and on, on brilliant plumed wings. If he could learn to write a decent sentence first and if he could find a place to live outside of the madhouse that had become his home.

  Which brought my thoughts full circle back to Raines. I had hoped that moving in with him and his friends would be the answer, but clearly this idea was a bust. I would have to start all over again, seeing other houses, other furnished rooms, and that sad thought made me sag against the car door.

  Raines seemed to notice my mood,
for he turned and smiled at me: “Hey, it’s not that bad,” he said.

  “Oh, shut up,” I said.

  “No, I mean it,” he said in a sweet shy voice. “You really don’t have anything to worry about with good old Manley.”

  “No?” I said. “Why’s that?”

  “Because,” Raines smiled slightly, “he doesn’t even know your real name. He thinks you’re some guy named Roger Whirley!”

  There was a brief silence during which I tried with all my might not to laugh. I sucked in my breath, I bit my lower lip until it bled, I threw my right hand over my mouth, but I failed miserably. The name Roger Whirley, the full-blown absurdity of it, struck me with gale force.

  “Whirley,” I blurted out. “Whirley? Where the hell did you get that name?”

  “I don’t know. It’s something about you. Don’t take this wrong now, but you look like you’re in some kind of whirl. A massive state of confusion. You gotta admit, it’s a killer name.”

  I suppose I should have been insulted, but Raines fell into a great howl of laughter, and in spite of everything I’d suffered, I couldn’t help but join him. In a few seconds both of us were pounding the dash and screaming out the name Whirley over and over again.

  And then right in the middle of this hysteria, a funny thought occurred to me. I rarely laughed like this anymore. No, ever since I had become a literary person, I had perfected a kind of superior ironic sneer.

  Raines, on the other hand, laughed, truly laughed, wildly, deeply, and in spite of what he had just pulled, he had me laughing with him in hysterical joy.

  He shook his head and pushed his hair out of his eyes and said in a portentous voice: “All right, Mr. Roger Whirley! You better get those pictures right the next time or else, Mr. Roger Whirley!”

  “Whirley, Whirley,” I said, helpless. I found myself doubled over in my seat, my sides aching from the sheer joy of it.

  It took a while before I could get control of myself and assume my newfound air of literary dignity. Finally Raines stopped laughing and shook his head.