Alethea went on, with wonderful aplomb considering that no one seemed interested, about horses and riding. Her father listened abstractedly, his manicured fingers patting the tangles of his fantastic beard.
Alethea fell silent.
No one took the initiative.
“Mr. Whiting,” said Daniel, “was it you I spoke to earlier, when I was at the gatehouse?”
“I’m sorry to have to say it was. Candidly, Daniel, I hoped I might just wriggle out of that one. Did you recognize my voice? Everyone does, it seems.”
“I only meant to apologize.”
“Apologize? Nonsense! I was in the wrong, and you called me down for it quite properly. Indeed, it was then, hanging up the phone and blushing for my sins, that I decided I must have you come to tea. Wasn’t it, Alethea? She was with me, you see, when the alarm went off.”
“The alarms go off a dozen times a day,” Boa said. “And they’re always false alarms. Father says it’s the price we have to pay.”
“Does it seem an excess of caution?” Grandison Whiting asked rhetorically. “No doubt it is. But it’s probably best to err on that side, don’t you think? In future when you visit you must let us know in advance, so that we may shut off the scanner, or whatever they call it. And I sincerely hope you will return, if only for Bobo’s sake. I’m afraid she’s been feeling rather… cut-off?… since she came back from the greater world beyond Iowa.” He raised his hand, as though to forestall Boa’s protests. “I know it’s not for me to say that. But one of the few advantages of being a parent is that one may take liberties with one’s children.”
“Or so he claims,” said Boa. “But in fact he takes all the liberties he can, with whoever allows it.”
“It’s nice of you to say so, Bobo, since that gives me leave to ask Daniel — you will allow me to call you Daniel, won’t you? And you must call me Grandison.”
Serjeant snickered.
Grandison Whiting nodded toward his son, by way of acknowledgement, and continued: “To ask you, Daniel (as I know I have no right to), Why have you never had that terrible apparatus removed from your stomach? You’re quite entitled to, aren’t you? As I understand it — and I’ve had to give the matter some consideration, since officially I’m on the governing board of the state prison system — only convicts who are paroled, or who’ve committed much more… heinous crimes than yours—”
“Which isn’t,” Boa hastened to remind her father, “any crime at all, since the court’s decision.”
“Thank you, dear — that’s exactly my point. Why, Daniel, having been wholly exonerated, do you submit to the inconvenience and, I daresay, the embarrassment of the sort of thing that happened today?”
“Oh, you learn where the alarms are. And you don’t go back.”
“Pardon me, um, Daniel,” said Serjeant, with vague good will, “but I’m not quite following. How is it that you go about setting off alarms?”
“When I was in prison,” Daniel explained, “I had a P-W lozenge embedded in my stomach. The lozenge is gone, so there’s no chance of my blowing us all up accidentally, but the housing for it is still there, and that, or the traces of metal in it, is what sets off alarms.”
“But why is it still there?”
“I could have it taken out if I wanted, but I’m squeamish about surgery. If they could get it out as easily as they got it in, I’d have no objections.”
“Is it a big operation?” Alethea asked, wrinkling her nose in pretty revulsion.
“Not according to the doctors. But—” He lifted his shoulders: “One man’s meat…”
Alethea laughed.
He was feeling more and more sure of himself, even cocky. This was a routine he’d often gone through, and it always made him feel like Joan of Arc or Galileo, a modern martyr of the Inquisition. He also felt something of a hypocrite, since the reason he’d kept the P-W housing in his stomach (as anyone who thought about it would have known) was that as long as he was still wired for prison he couldn’t be drafted into the National Guard. Not that he minded being or feeling hypocritical. Hadn’t he read, in Reverend Van Dyke’s book, that we’re all hypocrites and liars in the eyes of God? To deny that was only to be self-deluded besides.
However, some molecular switch inside must have responded to this tremor of guilt, for much to his own surprise Daniel started to tell Grandison Whiting of the corruption and abuses he’d witnessed at Spirit Lake. This, on the grounds that Whiting, being on the governing board of the state’s prisons, might be able to do something. He developed quite a head of steam about the system of food vouchers you had to buy just to keep alive, but even at the height of it he could see he was making a tactical error. Grandison Whiting listened to the exposé with a glistening attentiveness behind which Daniel could sense not indignation but the meshing of various cogs and gears of a logical rebuttal. Clearly, Whiting had known already of the evils Daniel was denouncing.
Boa, at the close of Daniel’s tale, expressed a hearty sense of the wrong being done, which would have been more gratifying if he hadn’t seen her through so many other tirades in the Iceberg’s classroom. More surprising was Serjeant’s response. Though it amounted to no more than his saying that it didn’t seem fair, he must have known that he would be flying in the face of his father’s as-yet-unexpressed opinion.
After a long and dour look at his son, Grandison Whiting brightened to a formal smile, and said, quietly: “Justice isn’t always fair.”
“You must excuse me,” said Alethea, putting aside her cup and rising, “but I see that Father means to have a serious discussion, and that is a pastime, like bridge, that I’ve never learned how to enjoy.”
“As you please, my dear,” said her father. “And indeed, if the rest of you would prefer… ?”
“Nonsense,” said Boa. “We’re just beginning to enjoy ourselves.” She took hold of Daniel’s hand and squeezed. “Aren’t we?”
Daniel went, “Mm.”
Serjeant took another pastry from the plate, his fourth.
“Let us say, for the sake of argument,” said Boa pouring tea, and then cream, into Daniel’s cup, “that justice is always fair.”
Grandison Whiting folded his hands across his waistcoat, just above his watchchain. “Justice is always just, certainly. But fairness is to justice as common sense is to logic. That is to say, justice may (and often does) transcend fairness. Fairness usually boils down to a simple, heartfelt conviction that the world should be ordered with one’s own convenience in mind. Fairness is a child’s view of justice. Or a bum’s.”
“Oh, Father, don’t go off on bums.” She turned to Daniel. “I don’t know how many times we’ve had the same argument. Always about bums. It’s Father’s hobbyhorse.”
“Bums,” he went on imperturbably, “as opposed to beggars. Men who have chosen abjection as a way of life, without the extenuating circumstances of blindness, amputation, or imbecility.”
“Men,” Boa contradicted, “who simply can’t take responsibility for themselves. Men who are helpless before a world that is, after all, a pretty rough place.”
“Helpless? So they would have us believe. But all men are responsible for themselves, by definition. All adults, that is. Bums, however, insist on remaining children, in a state of absolute dependency. Think of the most incorrigible such wretch you’ve seen, and imagine him at the age of five instead of five-and-fifty. What change might you observe? There he is, smaller no doubt, but in moral terms the same spoiled child, whining over his miseries, wheedling to have his way, with no plans except for the next immediate gratification, which he will either bully us into giving him or, failing that, will attempt to seduce from us by the grandeur and mystery of his abasement.”
“As you may have gathered, Daniel, we’re not speaking of a completely hypothetical bum. There was a real man, one summer when we were in Minneapolis, with a shoe missing and a cut over one eye, and this man had the temerity to ask Father for a quarter. Father told him: ‘There
’s the gutter. Be my guest.’ ”
“She misquotes me, Daniel. I said: I would prefer, really, to contribute directly. And dropped what change I had in my pocket down the nearest drain.”
“Jesus,” said Daniel, despite himself.
“Perhaps the moral was too astringent to be improving. I confess to having had more than my sufficiency of brandy after dinner. But was it an unjust observation? It was he who had chosen to go down the drain, and he’d achieved his desire. Why should I be called on to subsidize his more extensive self-destruction? There are better causes.”
“You may be just, Father, but you aren’t at all fair. That poor man had simply been defeated by life. Is he to be blamed for that?”
“Who but the defeated are to be blamed for a defeat?” Grandison Whiting asked in turn.
“The victors?” Daniel suggested.
Grandison Whiting laughed, somewhat in the manner of his beard. Even so, it didn’t register as wholly genuine: its warmth was the warmth of an electric coil, not of a flame. “That was very good, Daniel. I quite liked that.”
“Though you’ll note he doesn’t go so far as to say that you’re right,” Boa pointed out. “Nor has he said anything about all the horrors you’ve told us about Spirit Lake.”
“Oh, I’m slippery.”
“But really, Father, something ought to be done. What Daniel described is more than unfair — it’s illegal.”
“In fact, my dear, the question of its legality has been argued before several courts, and it’s always been decided that prisoners have a right to buy such food as they can to supplement what the prison provides. As to its fairness, or justice, I believe myself that the voucher system performs a valuable social function: it reinforces that most precious and tenuous of ties, which connects the prisoner to the outside world, to which he must one day return. It’s much better than getting letters from home. Anyone can understand a hamburger; not everyone can read.”
Daniel’s indignation had escalated from being politely scandalized to full rankling outrage. “Mr. Whiting, that is a sinful thing to say! That is brutal!”
“As you said yourself, Daniel — one man’s meat…”
He gathered his wits. “Aside from the fact that it creates a situation where guards profit from the prisoners’ misery, which you have to admit is not a healthy situation…”
“Prison is not a healthy situation, Daniel.”
“Aside from that, what about the people who just don’t have any ties to be ‘reinforced’? And no money. There were lots of those. And they were slowly starving to death. I saw them.”
“That’s why they were there, Daniel — for you to see. They were an example, for any who might suppose, mistakenly, that it is possible to get through life alone, without what the sociologists call primary ties. Such an example is a powerful socializing influence. You might say it’s a cure for alienation.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Ah, but I am. I’ll admit that I wouldn’t put the matter quite so plainly in a public forum, but I do believe what I’ve been saying. It is not, as Boa would have it, ‘just for effect.’ Indeed, as to whether the system works, recidivism rates show that it does. If prisons are to act as a deterrent to crime, then they must be significantly more unpleasant than the environments available outside of prison. The so-called humane prisons bred career criminals by the millions. Since we began, some twenty years ago, to make the prisons in Iowa distinctly less congenial places to pass the time, the number of released convicts who return on a second offense has been enormously reduced.”
“They don’t return to prison because they leave Iowa the minute they’re released.”
“Splendid. Their behavior outside Iowa is not our concern as members of the state board. If they’ve reformed, so much the better. If not, we’re well rid of them.”
Daniel felt stymied. He considered further objections, but he began to see how each of them might be stood on its head. He found himself admiring Whiting, in a sneaky way. Perhaps ‘admire’ was too strong. There was a fascination, certainly.
But did it (this fascination) derive from the man’s ideas (which were not, after all, so original as to be beyond comparison) or rather from knowing that this was the actual and unique Grandison Whiting, celebrated and vilified in newspapers and on tv? A man, therefore, more real than other men, more vivid, composed of some lordlier substance so that even his hair seemed more red than all other red hair, the lines of his face more crisply expressive, and the inflections of his speech full of larger significances.
There was more talk, along less divisive lines, and even some laughter. Serjeant so far overcame his shyness (not of Daniel but of his father) as to tell a droll and fairly scathing story about his analyst’s extra-marital difficulties. Boa insisted on telling about Daniel’s moment of glory in Mrs. Norberg’s class, and made it sound a much larger moment than it had been. Then, as the talk began noticeably to flag, a servant came in to tell Mr. Whiting that he was wanted on the telephone, urgently, by Miss Marspan.
Grandison Whiting excused himself.
A moment later Serjeant took his leave.
“Well,” said Boa eagerly, “what do you think?”
“About your father?”
“He’s incredible, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He is incredible.” That was all he said, nor did she seem to require more.
The snow had continued steadily through the afternoon. It was arranged that Daniel would ride home in the next car going in to town. He had only a twenty-minute wait at the gatehouse (with a different and much friendlier guard on duty), and there was the further good luck that his ride was in a pick-up in the back of which he could put his bicycle.
At first Daniel couldn’t understand why the driver of the truck was glaring at him with such a degree of unprovoked ill will. Then he recognized him: Carl Mueller, Eugene’s brother, but more to the point, Roy Mueller’s oldest son. It was common knowledge that Carl worked at Worry, but in all his daydreams since he’d started being a friend of Boa Whiting Daniel had never indulged in this one.
“Carl!” he said, slipping off a mitten, holding out his hand.
Carl glowered and kept both gloved hands on the steering wheel.
“Carl,” Daniel insisted. “Hey, it’s been a long time.”
The guard was standing by the open gate, above which a lighted sign commanded them still to WAIT. He seemed to be watching them, though against the dazzle of the truck’s headlights this small contest must have passed unwitnessed. Even so, Carl appeared to have been unnerved, for he conceded Daniel the acknowledgement of grimace.
WAIT changed to PASS.
“Christ, this is some snowstorm, isn’t it?” Daniel said, as they moved ahead in second gear along the path that Worry’s own plows had cleared not long before.
Carl said nothing.
“The first real blizzard of the year,” he went on, twisting sideways in his seat so as to look directly at Carl’s stony profile. “Will you look at it come down.”
Carl said nothing.
“He’s incredible, isn’t he?”
Carl said nothing. He shifted to third. The truck’s rear end swayed on the packed snow.
“That Whiting is incredible. A real character.”
With a slow unsymmetrical rhythm the wipers pushed the wet snow off to the sides of the windshield.
“Friendly, though, once he puts aside his company manners. Not that he ever lets it all hang out, I suppose. You’d know that better than I. But he does like to talk. And theories? More theories than a physics textbook. And one or two of them would set a few people I know back on their fat asses. I mean, he’s not your average run-of-the-mill fiscal conservative. Not a Republican in the grand old tradition of Iowa’s own Herbert Hoover.”
“I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about, Weinreb, and I’m not interested. So why not just shut the fuck up, unless you want to ride that bicycle the rest of the way to town.”
>
“Oh, I don’t think you’d do that, Carl. Risk a swell managerial position like yours? Risk your exemption?”
“Listen, you god-damn draft-dodger, don’t talk to me about exemptions.”
“Draft-dodger?”
“And you fucking well know it.”
“As I see it, Carl, I performed my service to God and country at Spirit Lake. And while I’ll admit I’m not exactly anxious to go off to Detroit and protect the good people of Iowa from dangerous teen-agers, the government knows where I am. If they want me, all they have to do is write and ask.”
“Yeah. Well, they probably know what they’re up to, not drafting shits like you. You’re a fucking murderer, Weinreb. And you know it.”
“Up yours, Carl. And up your fucking father’s too.”
Carl stopped, too suddenly, on the brake. The truck’s back wheels sloughed to the right. For a moment it looked like they’d do a complete spin, but Carl managed to ease them back on course.
“You put me out here,” Daniel said shrilly, “and you’ll lose that fat job tomorrow. You do anything but take me to my front door, and I’ll have your ass for it. And if you think I can’t, just wait. Just wait anyhow.”
On Wings of Song Page 14