We would, your Honor.
Proceed.
Room very large, excessively bright despite the layers of blue-green smoke, mercurious, stiffening to mare’s tales before the tiered dais. The Judge is bored. Beware of a bored Judge, Counsellor. A bad beginning. This bodes ill, oh ill! for William Hodge, acting in his own defense. A fool. Colossal idiot. It is impossible to act in one’s own defense. Miserable. Well, C’est la mort.
I will not be judged by Him.
Kleppmann is my judge. O lead us not into Milwaukee, deliver us from Pittsburgh.
Sholly hoolibash! Niscera willy-bill bingle-um gimpf!
Don’t mock me, Kleppmann. We’re past that, you and I. Another martini?
Don’t mind if I do. You’re paying, of course?
Naturally. Or my firm is. Naturally.
Smile.
You had me running for a while there Kleppmann, I’ll give it to you. Well, that’s over.
The pistol in his hand (so he imagines) is utterly still and comfortably warm.
A woman with a sweet voice mumbled something, and he smiled, and she mumbled it again. He opened his eyes.
“Fasten your seat-belt, please, Mr. Hodge. We’re landing.”
“Is something wrong?”
She smiled and tipped her head. She had not heard him.
‘Les amis’ my foot. Secretly married, quintuplets in the stroller, at home with her husband who was born in Ely, Iowa. At heart a pig grower; by trade, a bicycle mechanic.
He could see the lights of St. Louis shooting out behind the wing like sparks, stretching out forever, beautiful. And then the plane was diving, as it seemed to him—now leveling again. Before his stomach was ready for it, the landing-gear bumped on the runway.
He caught the train south (with an hour to spare) and sat reading of earthquakes and the walls of Jericho. It made him remember, more vividly than he would have thought possible, his cousin Ben Jr, head tipped nearly to his shoulder, grinning, arguing about whether God, like Merlin, was so powerful he could make a cage so strong He couldn’t get out of it Himself. Or was the Merlin story another of Ben Jr’s lies? And then he was remembering a song Ben would sing—irrelevant, surely.
King David was my dancing man,
And a juggler too as well;
The way he thrown his balls around
I’ll dance with him in hell!
2
In fact, he had no idea what it was he expected. It was as if he had thrown away his compass, in the classical way, and had ventured into the thickness of the woods prepared for whatever he was destined to meet (Phaiakians?), including the man with the gun in the public lavatory. She had said she wanted to talk to him, and it was pleasant to think it was really that—pleasant not so much in any sexual way as metaphysically, if that was not too big a word for it: pleasant to think she might innocently tell him the truth. But he didn’t expect it.
He was pleasantly numb from the martinis on the train, but not so drunk he was entirely indifferent to matters of, as the expression goes, life and death. The pistol was not in his briefcase but in his pocket.
He was almost alone on the concrete platform. A few students had gotten off—it was a college town—and there was a man with a sunken, Southern mouth, an engineer’s cap, a frock, and pantlegs limply cylindrical, walking along beside the train looking under it, as if watching for a rabbit for his hounds. It was a small town, and, after the hurtle of motion he’d endured this past hour, he had a sharp sense of its spatial isolation—the expanse of bare farmland on every side, the profound darkness outside the pale rim of dead white light from the depot lamps. Against the wall there were taxi drivers, but they did not call out to him or even, as far as he could tell, notice his presence on the platform. He put the pipe in his mouth, selfconsciously solemn, and walked toward the waiting-room doors.
“Thank heavens,” Mrs. Kleppmann said from the shadow of the pillar where she waited, “you’ve come!”
It rang false—but everything was ringing false. He nodded, smiling politely, and moved toward her. She took his hand. “Thank you,” she said. Perhaps she meant it. He felt queerly indifferent.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“This way.” She drew him toward her and down the wide-boarded hall.
They came out on a parking lot lit in gray-white, like the platform on the other side of the depot, and she led him to a long blue station wagon that he might have known at once belonged to Mrs. Kleppmann. It had no chrome, no decorations, no radio, even, and he could not tell what kind it was but knew it was expensive.
“Nice car,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“What’s up, Mrs. Kleppmann?”
“Later,” she said. She nodded toward the man in the driver’s seat, waiting for them. He had his hat off because of the heat.
They got in then and arranged what little he had in the way of gear—not much: his briefcase, the hat he for some reason felt he should carry, not wear, the raincoat Louise had insisted on his bringing. The driver switched on the motor, quiet as a vacuum cleaner, and the car slid back out of its parking slot and as if without change of direction, smooth as a barque turned in the wind; started forward. Soon the pale light of the town sank behind them and they were moving through a darkness deeper than any he had seen since earliest childhood.
“You’re a long way from civilization,” he said.
She reached over, matronly, and patted his hand. “Farther than you think,” she said. Not sly. She meant him to understand it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She laughed.
They flowed into what might have been the limits of the world, the depths of the Midwest, oakwoods and farmland where St. Louis was a dream and Chicago an old wives’ fable, Cimmerian country. There was no sign of the moon, only mist and cloud, and it was hard to believe that in the morning there would be sunlight.
“You sounded worried,” he said. She had, in fact, but he understood the game.
“I am.”
In the darkness, Will smiled.
At last there was a yellow glow in the mist—the sharp yellow of mosquito bulbs—and there were pillars and lighted windows.
“That your house?” he said.
He felt, rather than saw, her nod in the darkness. She closed her hand on his more tightly, and he understood that for her it partly wasn’t a game. More the pity for her then. His armpits itched, and he thought, I’m afraid. And yet he was not. It was as if he had nothing more to do with the fears of his common mortality.
She withdrew her hand.
“You had nothing to say to me?” he said. “—For the record.”
After a moment: “Nothing.”
Will sighed and slipped his hand into his pocket where the gun was. And now, suddenly, he saw how absurd it was: the gun was no protection, a weighty inconvenience. “I’m a fool,” he thought.
“Do you think so?”
He had not meant to speak out loud.
They were up in the driveway turn-around now, and the car had stopped. Time, too, seemed to have stopped. He saw Kleppmann’s huge barn, clean-lined against the mist, windows lighted as on a Christmas card, and Kleppmann’s long chickenhouse of cinder-block, and to the east, the ornate, absurd old house, sheltered by maples. The grass was white from the mist; the light coming out through the windows was orange. With the motor off, the world was as quiet as the North Pole. Kleppmann bowed, opening the door. “Ah yes,” he said. “You’ve come.”
Will bowed back, abstracted and polite. “Certainly.” His stomach closed as if what he confronted were not a man but an upright crocodile.
Strange meeting. One saw too much television, no doubt. In any case, it took him a long time to get used to it. He had come half-prepared to kill or be killed, but Kleppmann was having a party. The guests moved all through the house, talking, their voices blending to a roar as indefinite as the overhanging mist, and Kleppmann the Terrible stood on the front lawn like an elderly
serpent looking after his barbecue. Like a middle-class merchant. He was cooking not on a barbecue grill of the usual sort but on a long, wide trench with cinderblocks around the edge and, across the middle, steel rods and chickenwire. He stood in his white apron, pouring wine on the meat like a drink-offering to the newly dead—or, to be precise, pouring beer first, and afterward wine, and after that, when the fat began burning, water. Finally he sprinkled flour on the meat, his fluttering fingers incongruous against his somber death’s-head face. Grimly, as though any humorous gesture were the farthest thing from his mind, he intoned: “Amen.” Tentatively, watching his eyes, Will smiled.
“We usually have nothing but steak,” Kleppmann said. “Young heifer. But these people—echh! My wife’s friends, as you’ve guessed. However, for you a coal black ram without a spot.” He pointed with his fork.
“I wouldn’t have known the difference, you know,” Will said, and smiled again.
“You are a wise man,” Kleppmann said.
“Not really.” He shrank back then, an instant late. The old man was angry, overflowing with hate, or anyway seething, waiting; and Will had been a fool to expect it to be different. He studied the face gray-orange and still as lead cooling in a smelter’s mold, Kleppmann bending toward the fire, looking in, and decided abruptly that he, too, could wait.
“Join the party if you like,” Kleppmann said. “Don’t let me keep you.”
“I may do that,” he said, but remained. He became conscious of the rumble of a train now, somewhere in the distance. No light from it reached him.
Kleppmann was making no further pretense of talking. Will took a Tums and moved away a little to stand looking out into darkness. Casually, he asked, “What have you got on me, Kleppmann, that makes you so brave?”
Kleppmann gave no sign. “Brave?” he echoed politely.
“This property’s yours all right,” Will said, looking up into the trees. The branches and the leaves were sickly yellow from the mosquito bulbs on the porch. “The car’s yours too, and the horses or chickens or whatever’s out there in the barn.”
“I never mean to take advantage,” Kleppmann said. It seemed to Will—but it was hard to be sure—that the directness made Kleppmann uneasy.
“It can’t be merely the long hours I put in,” Will continued as if Kleppmann hadn’t spoken. “You’re a foxy old man, so I imagine you see through the long hours. They’re not struggle for survival, not a pain in the neck that would make me vulnerable to, say, some gratuity from you. They’re for pleasure.”
“It’s a good thing when a man likes his work,” Kleppmann said. He was a dead man, all mechanical good manners, or the Wizard of Oz, his mind far away, behind some curtain pushing buttons and watching with tiny, sharp eyes. He needed jarring.
“I know now! The business in Chicago.”
Kleppmann glanced at him, then away.
Will’s voice was not booming with confidence now, or so it seemed from inside, but it made no difference. He wasn’t bluffing. His hatred swelled his chest; not anger but the feeling one has toward things with cold blood. “The drinking, the orgy. I suppose you know about all that. Well, I’d be sorry to have it come out, that’s true. For the children’s sakes, and Louise’s.” He frowned, checking his emotions to see if it was true—if anything at all in his attic of old opinions, as Uncle Tag used to say, was true to his feelings. But the question was hard, and he put it off. “Not for my own sake though, not for myself. That is, I wouldn’t drop pursuit of you merely to keep that quiet. It doesn’t strike me as sufficiently evil, though I suppose I know how other people might feel—so I wouldn’t pay. Also—” He folded his hands around the glass he was carefully not drinking from and sucked at his teeth, collecting his thoughts. “Also, fact is, I believe my wife would feel the same, ultimately. We’re not desperate, like some, for complete approval from everybody on the block.” (“Love,” she’d scornfully echoed, he remembered, meaning “What is love?” It was a question people were always asking nowadays, scornfully—at the cafeteria where he ate with Sol and Hawes and the others, in the tiresome art films, at parties. It infuriated him that he couldn’t snap out the answer at them. It seemed to him he had it on the tip of his tongue. Just the same, he thought, I love her, as well as I can. Such things exist.) Then, less than certain that the troublesome shade was at rest for good, he returned his attention to Kleppmann and the fire. “In short,” Will said, “if it was in your mind that you might blackmail me off your ass, so to speak, with the Chicago business, forget it.”
Kleppmann smiled, still hiding behind his curtain pushing buttons. “These are shameless times,” he said.
“Maybe. Yes, certainly, I suppose. But you get me wrong, I think. I’m no scoffer, proud of having risen out of my middle-class morality. I have no pentecostal urge to declare the new dawn of fornication—no such thing! I have merely lost my feeling for what I have believed.” He pursed his lips, struggling to be precise. “It happens to many people, I suspect. I have known some.” He nodded. “And it seems to me it could be dangerous to pretend, when the feeling dies, that it’s there. There was a woman in our family—generations back, this was—who had a child that wandered off and was never seen again. She kept his room for him, dusted it and kept things tidy for years, and one day she began to see him when he wasn’t there, so they locked her up. That’s how it would be.” His expression went stern as it came to him that he’d run on more than the conversation required. But when he looked at Kleppmann it seemed to him that the old man understood that Will Hodge was not talking to him now, Kleppmann, but to himself. And strangely enough, Kleppmann had taken on a human look, though his eyes were not friendly. He was listening.
“Shameless, no,” Will said, “I’m not that. Taking my middle-class values from me is like pulling teeth, and when the value’s gone, how dizzying and jagged the abyss revealed to the tongue! But holes must not be denied.”
Kleppmann nodded, smiling again, a nervous flicker. “Up-mobility, it’s called.”
Will scowled. “It’s what?” Then: “Nonsense. Are you purposely misunderstanding?” Absurdly, he was furious. “I tell you the truth, Mr. Kleppmann, as a believer in Law. Law in the old sense, Justinian. I have never for one minute, so far as I know—” He was shaking his finger, and noticing the ridiculous gesture he lost track of what he was saying. Kleppmann was piling the meat onto trays. It was black. Will remembered again, abruptly. “I’m not social-climbing. Another thing entirely. I am stubbornly trying to understand, in my own rational middle-class terms, why it is that I no longer feel what I believe.”
Three men with white faces stood watching like birds at the rim of the fire’s influence.
“You say it again and again, though, don’t you. ‘Middle-class,’ ‘middle-class,’“ Kleppmann said.
“That’s pride, Mr. Kleppmann. My family’s been middle-class for centuries. Doctors, lawyers, ministers, farmers, a Congressman once. We’re all very proud of that.”
For the first time all night, Kleppmann looked at him levelly, not merely snatching an impression to manipulate with from behind his curtain, but scrutinizing his face. “We’re somewhat alike, you and I,” he said. He bent down for the meat.
It was not until hours later that they talked again. Kleppmann, at his wife’s suggestion, was showing Will to his room. Will still had the pistol, a great bulge in his suitcoat pocket which Kleppmann could not possibly have failed to notice. It seemed now more ludicrous than ever, as Will sat on the side of the bed in the large, farmhouse room, and Kleppmann stood remote but curious at the door.
Will said, “It’s come to me, I think. It’s the money. The tax business. They’ll beat me, you figure—because though God knows justice is on my side, I was never a ‘responsible officer,’ merely a legal consultant, whatever the fancy title they gave it, it’s not so clear that Federal law is neatly squared with justice.”
Kleppmann bowed as if to acknowledge that it might indeed be something along that
line.
“You forget what ego-gratification I get out of honesty,” Will said.
Again Kleppmann bowed, admitting it might be so.
Will stood up and went to the window to look out. He felt cramped, here inside the house. But the fog was thicker now. He could barely see to the pillars of the high portico.
“Ego-gratification,” Will said with disgust. “I sound like the rest of them.”
“Ah well, one may as well be honest,” Kleppmann said. It sounded as though he were mimicking someone, and at first Will couldn’t think who. He remembered then. He could feel his neck swelling.
“Scoff if you like,” he said. “But consider this. You can’t get me through the tax business either. It’s true, they may beat me, and it’s true that I haven’t got even the cash to buy them off. Nevertheless, and you can call it what you like—ego-gratification, whatever—I’m as indifferent to jail as to scandal.” It sounded grandiose, and he tried to think of a better way to say it. He looked at his hands, white and soft as a woman’s. “I have this image of virtue. Idea of nobility. Something.”
Kleppmann nodded. “And you actually feel it,” he said.
“Sometimes.” He was not sure that even that was true, but he kept the doubt to himself.
“I understand, of course. Yes. If you were caught in shady dealings—not, in fact, that I have anything of that kind to propose, for all this strange talk of yours—it would be the end. Disbarred, or whatever the phrase is.”
“Good night,” Will said.
“You’re right.” He tipped his head, slow and poised, and glanced at his watch. “It’s after two. Forgive me.” He drew the door partway shut and added, “I look forward to talking more with you in the morning.”
And so, at last, he was alone.
He lay in the dark, drifting gently between daydream and nightmare.
One final question, Mr. Hodge.
There are no final questions.
One. I grant, and without reservation, that you are invulnerable. Yes. I can offer no reason under the sun why you should capitulate to my insidious suggestion. But let me ask, indifferently, for mere logic’s sake, is there any reason on earth why you should not?