Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn

by Banquet Before Dawn [lit]

  "We'll make mistakes along the way," Alby continued, lost now in thhrill of his own ambition. "But we'll self-correct. We've taken too many chances in this one. We've probably practiced overkill. Sullivan might have responded with more skill, caught us out on a limb. We finished him off too quick. Too easily. The next go-round will be harder. We'll have to be smarter."

  Was it possible? Aram wondered. Was it really possible to control all the responses? He was, he admitted to himself, excited by the idea, as he had always been excited by Alby's ideas. Or were they aberrations?

  "Is it possible?" he asked.

  "It is possible," Alby said, and then, as if reading his thoughts: "Modern elections are a learned technology, subject to predictable responses. What we can predict we can learn to control."

  "What about human beings?"

  "Man is also a machine," Alby said emphatically. "And man and his universe are quickly losing their mystery. We will know all about man soon. _All_ about him."

  There were other questions Aram wanted to ask, but he feared to go too far down that road. He had never been frightened of Alby, until now. He looked beyond Alby to the sea, its rhythm immutable, mysterious. Will there soon be no more mystery in life? There is no mystery now, Alby would say, only questions soon to be answered. Will we live long enough to know those answers? Yes, Alby would surely say. And God? God is a creation of man, a product of man's as-yet-unanswered questions. And democracy? A technique to keep order, a brilliant idea. Subvertible. Aram remembered the long nights in the little room in Brooklyn and Alby speaking into the darkness, spinning his web.

  "We might learn to predict and control," Aram argued then, "but without ethics, without an ethical perspective, immoral men would take control." The words that stuck in Aram's memory now stuck in his throat. He felt chilled.

  "You scare the shit out of me, Alby," he said, standing up.

  "I suppose I do."

  "If I stick with you, I don't know where the hell I'll end up. I feel like a dumb kid playing with matches," Aram said.

  "I know."

  "You're so fucking sure of yourself."

  Alby didn't answer, and they walked toward the boardwalk into a brilliant setting sun. Perhaps some day he would find the flint in himself, Aram thought. Until then, he'd go along. Maybe Alby was right. He did want to get even with the bastards. Time enough for other considerations.

  "I hope we like Washington," Aram said as they drove back toward Brooklyn. Alby looked at him and smiled.

  "I'm not as sure of myself as you think, kid," Alby said. "But I am pretty sure of my ideas."

  Aram looked at Alby again, deeply, the thin face with the bad skin and deep ruts where the lines had begun to take permanent shape, the long neck, the bobbing Adam's apple. If only he could burn with the same intensity as Alby.

  "You son of a bitch," he said after a while. Then he was silent until they began to drive through the Brooklyn Eighth District with its massive display of YOMARIAN FOR CONGRESS signs plastered on the decaying or abandoned buildings.

  REACH TO DIGNITY WITH YOMARIAN, the slogans read.

  _Bullshit,_ he thought. Then he said aloud, "Bullshit."

  ———— *21* SULLY watched the late-afternoon sun slide beyond the jagged border of Brooklyn's rooftops, bathing the tenements and fire escapes in an orange glow. The living room of the suite was uncommonly silent. April, Perlmutter, and Fitz would be on the lower levels of the Dutchman working out the last-minute details of the rally. He had slept

  most of the afternoon, a deep miraculous sleep, filled with unremembered dreams. With the exception of an annoying tremor in his hands, he felt very much in control, almost jaunty. He was surprised his hangover wasn't worse.

  On his way to the bathroom he stopped at the sideboard, its jungle of liquor bottles proudly vertical in the reflected sunlight, poured half a tumbler of scotch and carried it with him into the bathroom. He sipped ahe pissed, heartened somehow by the familiar sound as his stream agitated the water. Smiling, he remembered the days when horses pissed their heavy steaming jets onto the Brooklyn streets, always a curiosity, a brutish, incomprehensible, and mysterious action that came suddenly, without warning, a phenomenon.

  He shook the last lingering droplets off his dangling penis with his free hand, then held it a moment, observing it, as if it were a living piece of flesh apart from himself.

  "You old prick," he said aloud, smiling. "We've been into a lot of things together."

  Looking into the mirror, he observed himself with a heightened awareness, a sensitivity he had not experienced before. Little veins in his eyes formed strange designs, like roots of big watery plants. Blue orbs peered back at him from between still-black lashes. On either side of his eyes jagged lines of crow's-feet reached forward toward prominent veins, which in turn lost themselves in the whiteness of his hair. Under the eyes, little bags of jellied flesh quivered as he touched them with his fingers.

  "You old black Irish bastard," he told his image in the mirror. He lifted his glass. "I drink to you and all the misbegotten race." Tipping his glass, he watched his lips as they hugged the glass, then opened his mouth and watched the amber fluid pour down his gullet.

  He took great pains with his shaving, scraping the gray beard close with his safety razor, against the grain, until even the errant beardlings around the base of his nose disappeared. Pouring a big splash of after-shave in his palm, he slapped it onto his face, feeling the always-unexpected tingle, smelling the sweet scent, savoring the joy of it as if the act had been done for the first time. Or the last.

  All in all, he liked the look of his face, he told himself as he brushed his white wavy hair carefully, blessing the genes that were responsible for its preservation. He knew he was thinking things that he had never thought before, feeling at the same time the importance of thinking them, knowing he was, after all, on the verge of some special occasion. It was, he told himself, a sweet gift to have been, to be, Irish. An Irishman could always savor his doom, find something deliciously satisfying in it.

  Turning sideways to the mirror, he looked at the plaster over his stitches, started to rip it off, then abandoned the act at the first twinge of pain. He rejected the idea of taking a bath. It seemed too lonely an idea. Perhaps later, he thought, when April and old Fitz had returned. Old Fitz — that lovable mass of belligerency. What would happen to old Fitz? He knew, of course. Fitz would survive. He had the constitution for it, the will to pull himself together just enough to survive. He would spend his last years spinning yarns, weaving tapestries about Washington days with Sully, days of power and glory.

  He finished his tumbler of scotch and went into the bedroom. Opening drawers, he chose his clothes carefully. He picked new, unopened underwear, soft, cool, white, and took great care in unpinning the packages. Surely there was something festive, something important, in picking new underwear for just this occasion. The shirt, too, had to be his newest, whitest, the one with the most carefully starched collar. April had already pulled his navy-blue pinstripe out of the closet and hung it on the doorframe. Over the shoulder, she had hung a dark-blue tie with white polka dots. He knew she had had to search the bunch

  hanging on a simple metal hanger for one that he hadn't stained.

  Dressed, he viewed himself in the mirror, pulled the ends of his suit jacket down, feeling it tightening against his girth. Turning sideways, he tucked in his big belly as far as he could and saw a slimmer Sully, a figure remembered from old, vanished days. He had always been vain, had always liked his image in the mirror. It was a pleasant, familiar figure

  — broadly smiling, eyes twinkling — a rakish look perhaps. It was the kind of facade one cld feel comfortable wearing, the kind that gave you confidence, especially before an audience. "You're an imposing figure, Sullivan," Jean had said in their courting days, in the days when she devoured him with her eyes.

  He was still an imposing figure, he told himself, on the very precipice of defeat. An Irishman must ne
ver feel a loss of dignity, for that was worse than purgatory, far worse.

  Sully saluted his reflection — a two-fingered tip from the forehead — then walked again into the living room. He partially refilled the tumbler and carefully diluted the scotch with water, pacing himself.

  He sat quietly now, watching the sun fade, waiting. The telephone rang. It was Perlmutter.

  "Would you like to come down and see how we've set things up?"

  "I'm sure you've done a great job."

  "There's people beginning to line up outside. We had to hire Pinkertons for crowd control."

  "No police?"

  "They said they'd stand by outside only. They don't like the whole idea."

  "Do you think we'll have a big crowd?"

  "Very big. The biggest ever. There's more people around here than we know."

  The telephone clicked as Perlmutter hung up abruptly.

  Would they think him a tragic figure, his cronies back in Washington, those shrewd, cynical, gregarious Congressmen? _My God, what a conglomeration of bullshitters,_ he thought, smiling. How the hell did the country get run anyway? He thought of all the endless committee meetings, the interminable debates, words mumbled, words screamed, words belched, bleated and bombasted, a cacophonous yet poignant symphony in his memory. He had loved that life, by God. He had loved the clicking of his heels along the marbled floors of the Old House Office Building and the muffled echo as the sound bounced down the halls. He had loved the oversized doors, the fantasy of some early American architect who assumed that congressmen were Gullivers in a world of Lilliputians.

  "How the hell should I vote, Fitz?"

  "How the hell should I know?" Fitz would reply.

  "I'll just throw them more meat."

  "Yeah, more meat."

  "More meat." Ms. Rose had suggested. Ben had said it too. Well, he had seen what "more" had done. But something _he_ had done, or not done, had in the end fucked up the piece of real estate that was his domain. Was it because he represented only geography, only a place? Surely he did not represent the people in this snakepit now. Then where were the people he _did_ represent? What had become of them? Were they happy in their suburban gardens? Who was going to clean up their mess?

  He sipped his drink and watched the shadows lengthen along the threadbare carpet. Turning toward the window, he watched the lights of the neighborhood flickering on. And something inherent in the Irish psyche, scrubbed endlessly by the priests, and all their dark forebodings in the icy churches made him accept, even yearn for, the full blame.

  "Don't blame yourself," April had said in her gentle, soothing, protective way. "Who gets the blame then?"

  "Forces beyond your control."

  "What about the forces I controlled?" he persisted.

  "You didn't control a damn thing," she said. "It was an illusion."

  "Then what was I doing there?"

  "Having fun."

  "You bet your sweet ass," he said, smiling.

  But standing down there in that alley, with death tossing an open switchblade knife back and forth from hand to hand, he had known that retribution had risen and had found him naked and defenseless. And he would have killed to save his own life, would have squashed out the life in that boy with his hands. He had not thought of that dark flesh in his hands as anything human.

  And suppose the knife had gone in a few inches to the left, plunging into Sully's old ticker, cutting his lifeline. What a sorry sight that would have been — his aging hulk, bleeding away its substance on a spittle-stained, chewing-gum-clotted Brooklyn gutter. At ast his father had died in bed, seeing the vision of the Emerald Isle from his window.

  Fitz came in. He still looked pale and haggard from his recent bout, but the energy had somehow returned, and he had cleaned himself up, changed his clothes, shined his shoes, and miraculously found a place to buy a fresh carnation for his buttonhole. He put another one in Sully's lapel, his watery eyes smiling.

  "We've had the best of it, Sully," he said. "I can live with that. I've made my peace on that. We've had the best of it."

  "The best," Sully agreed. He felt the tears well up, the tingle in his nose, the quiver on his tongue.

  "We've got some fucking good memories," Fitz said.

  "Fucking good."

  "Nothing is forever, Sully. Right?"

  "Right."

  "There'll be lots of stories to tell. Lots of good times to talk about."

  "Lots."

  "I'm just a dumb Irishman, Sully. Dumb as they come."

  "Dumb as shit, Fitz."

  Sully put both hands on Fitz's shoulders and felt the tears roll down his cheeks.

  "God'll know, Sully. God'll know."

  Fitz gripped Sully's arm and squeezed it, then sobbed one involuntary shudder before he turned and walked to the sideboard. He poured out a short one in a shot glass, lifting it carefully, swiftly, to his lips without spilling a drop.

  "It's going to be one hell of a goddamned son-of-a-bitchin' political rally, Sully. We've got a buffet table down the whole length of the corridor leading to the ballroom, and what with all the paper bunting in red, white, and blue, it looks exactly like the old days." He paused. "Maybe we could beat the bastard anyhow."

  "Great, Fitz." He slapped Fitz on the back. "What the hell?"

  "I got to hand it to that old Jew boy Perlmutter," Fitz said. "He even got a big picture blow up of you for the back of the podium. And a whole line of American flags. Man, what a setting. He did one hell of a job."

  "He's a good man, Fitz."

  "The best, Sully."

  "To Perlmutter." They lifted their glasses.

  "To Perlmutter."

  They hadn't seen him come in with April behind him.

  "Stop singing my praises, gentlemen. I still think the whole thing is nuts. Nuts."

  "You wouldn't recognize the old Dutchman, Sully," April said. "It's having its rebirth. We've hid as much of the cracks as we could."

  "What the hell is that?" Sully said, startled as a huge ball of light

  flooded the darkened room. He peered out the window.

  "Floodlights. My God."

  "Looks great," Perlmutter said. "We ordered three. The schmucks gave us credit, too. They wouldn't come at first, but I assured them there would be adequate protection."

  "Is there?"

  "In this place? Never."

  The floodlights played darting patterns in the clear sky, bouncing against the hotel facade, crisscrossing the darkness, visible for miles around.

  "There's a huge crowd still forming outside," Perlmutter said, pleased and exhilarated in spite of himself. "It'll be one helluva swan song."

  "They'll know that John J. Sullivan was here," April said, her lip quivering.

  Suddenly, a new sound wafted in from the street. Bagpipers. The Royal Order of Hibernians. He knew them at once, the sweet, wonderful old Irish bagpipers.

  "We bused them in from the island," Perlmutter said. "We invoked the Irish curse. We told them they'd better come or you'd put a curse on them that would last a hundred years."

  "Indeed I woul d," Sully agreed, the antiquated phrasing of his father popping out in exactly the same intonation. "Indeed I would."

  They listened quietly as the strange uplifting sounds continued their uncommon medley of familiar Irish marches and jigs. Sully had watched them as a boy marching down Fifth Avenue on St. Paddy's Day — craggy, pale Irish faces and green kilts and long green socks with red trimming.

  "We'll open their eyes a bit tonight," Fitz said. "The bastards."

  "We've got a drum and bugle corps lid up for the main ballroom. They'll play, march around, then escort you into the room. We'll raise the roof." Perlmutter was energized, his eyes moist with exhilaration. "We'll open the doors in about ten minutes."

  "And you say it looks like a big crowd?" Sully asked.

  "Mostly black, Puerto Ricans. A sprinkling of whites. We printed ten thousand flyers and plastered them all over the distric
t. Our constituency. These are our people, Congressman Sullivan. Face to face. Person to person."

  "We've got the press here, too," April said. "Television cameras. Reporters from the big major dailies. It's a biggie."

  "Yomarian must be shivering in his boots," Fitz said.

  "I doubt that," Perlmutter said. "Not after today's story in the _Post_. He must feel rather superconfident. I can't say as I blame him. _C'est la guerre._"

  "You just watch, Perlmutter," Fitz said. "Rallies like this have a way of turning things around."

  "Poor old Fitz," Perlmutter said. "Let's not have illusions about this one. Right, Congressman?"