Adam worked hard and honestly and sadly. He could not get over the feeling that the young men he passed to the army were under sentence of death. And because he knew he was weak, he grew more and more stern and painstaking and much less likely to accept an excuse or a borderline disability. He took the lists home with him, called on parents, in fact, did much more work than was expected of him. He felt like a hanging judge who hates the gallows.
Henry Stanton watched Adam grow more gaunt and more silent, and Henry was a man who liked fun--needed it. A sour-pussed associate could make him sick.
"Relax," he told Adam. "You're trying to carry the weight of the war. Now, look--it's not your responsibility. You got put in here with a set of rules. Just follow the rules and relax. You aren't running the war."
Adam moved the slats of the blind so that the late afternoon sun would not shine in his eyes, and he gazed down at the harsh parallel lines the sun threw on his desk. "I know," he said wearily. "Oh, I know that! But, Henry, it's when there's a choice, and it's my own judgment of the merits, that's when it gets me. I passed Judge Kendal's boy and he was killed in training."
"It's not your business, Adam. Why don't you take a few drinks at night? Go to a movie--sleep on it." Henry put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest and leaned back in his chair. "While we're talking about it, Adam, it seems to me it don't do a candidate a damn bit of good for you to worry. You pass boys I could be talked into letting off."
"I know," said Adam. "I wonder how long it will last?"
Henry inspected him shrewdly and took a pencil from his stuffed vest pocket and rubbed the eraser against his big white front teeth. "I see what you mean," he said softly.
Adam looked at him, startled. "What do I mean?" he demanded.
"Now don't get huffy. I never thought I was lucky before, just having girls."
Adam traced one of the slat shadows on his desk with his forefinger. "Yes," he said in a voice as soft as a sigh.
"It's a long time before your boys will be called up."
"Yes." Adam's finger entered a line of light and slid slowly back.
Henry said, "I'd hate to--"
"Hate to what?"
"I was just wondering how I'd feel if I had to pass on my own sons."
"I'd resign," said Adam.
"Yes. I can see that. A man would be tempted to reject them--I mean, his own."
"No," said Adam. "I'd resign because I couldn't reject them. A man couldn't let his own go free."
Henry laced his fingers and made one big fist of his two hands and laid the fist on the desk in front of him. His face was querulous. "No," he said, "you're right. A man couldn't." Henry liked fun and avoided when he could any solemn or serious matter, for he confused these with sorrow. "How's Aron doing at Stanford?"
"Fine. He writes that it's hard but he thinks he'll make out all right. He'll be home for Thanksgiving."
"I'd like to see him. I saw Cal on the street last night. There's a smart boy."
"Cal didn't take college tests a year ahead," said Adam.
"Well, maybe that's not what he's cut out for. I didn't go to college. Did you?"
"No," said Adam. "I went into the army."
"Well, it's a good experience. I'll bet you wouldn't take a good bit for the experience."
Adam stood up slowly and picked his hat from the deer horns on the wall. "Good night, Henry," he said.
2
Walking home, Adam pondered his responsibility. As he passed Reynaud's Bakery Lee came out, carrying a golden loaf of French bread.
"I have a hunger for some garlic bread," Lee said.
"I like it with steak," said Adam.
"We're having steak. Was there any mail?"
"I forgot to look in the box."
They entered the house and Lee went to the kitchen. In a moment Adam followed him and sat at the kitchen table. "Lee," he said, "suppose we send a boy to the army and he is killed, are we responsible?"
"Go on," said Lee. "I would rather have the whole thing at once."
"Well, suppose there's a slight doubt that the boy should be in the army and we send him and he gets killed."
"I see. Is it responsibility or blame that bothers you?"
"I don't want blame."
"Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn't carry any pleasant egotism."
"I was thinking about that time when Sam Hamilton and you and I had a long discussion about a word," said Adam. "What was that word?"
"Now I see. The word was timshel."
"Timshel--and you said--"
"I said that word carried a man's greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it."
"I remember Sam Hamilton felt good about it."
"It set him free," said Lee. "It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man."
"That's lonely."
"All great and precious things are lonely."
"What is the word again?"
"Timshel--thou mayest."
3
Adam looked forward to Thanksgiving when Aron would come home from college. Even though Aron had been away such a short time Adam had forgotten him and changed him the way any man changes someone he loves. With Aron gone, the silences were the result of his going, and every little painful event was somehow tied to his absence. Adam found himself talking and boasting about his son, telling people who weren't very interested how smart Aron was and how he had jumped a year in school. He thought it would be a good thing to have a real celebration at Thanksgiving to let the boy know his effort was appreciated.
Aron lived in a furnished room in Palo Alto, and he walked the mile to and from the campus every day. He was miserable. What he had expected to find at the university had been vague and beautiful. His picture--never really inspected--had been of clean-eyed young men and immaculate girls, all in academic robes and converging on a white temple on the crown of a wooded hill in the evening. Their faces were shining and dedicated and their voices rose in chorus and it was never any time but evening. He had no idea where he had got his picture of academic life--perhaps from the Dore illustrations of Dante's Inferno with its massed and radiant angels. Leland Stanford University was not like that. A formal square of brown sandstone blocks set down in a hayfield; a church with an Italian mosaic front; classrooms of varnished pine; and the great world of struggle and anger re-enacted in the rise and fall of fraternities. And those bright angels were youths in dirty corduroy trousers, some study-raddled and some learning the small vices of their fathers.
Aron, who had not known he had a home, was nauseatingly homesick. He did not try to learn the life around him or to enter it. He found the natural noise and fuss and horseplay of undergraduates horrifying, after his dream. He left the college dormitory for a dreary furnished room where he could decorate another dream which had only now come into being. In the new and neutral hiding place he cut the university out, went to his classes and left as soon as he could, to live in his new-found memories. The house next to Reynaud's Bakery became warm and dear, Lee the epitome of friend and counselor, his father the cool, dependable figure of godhead, his brother clever and delightful, and Abra--well, of Abra he made his immaculate dream and, having created her, fell in love with her. At night when his studying was over he went to his nightly letter to her as one goes to a scented bath. And as Abra became more radiant, more pure and beautiful, Aron took an increasing joy in a concept of his own wickedness. In a frenzy he poured joyous abjectness on paper to send to her, and he went to bed purified, as a man is after sexual love. He set down every evil thought he had and renounced it. The results were love letters that dripped with longing and by their high tone made Abra very uneasy. She could not know that Aron's sexuality had taken a not unusual channel.
He had made a mistake. He could admit the mistake but as yet he could not reverse himself. He made a compact with himself. At Thanksgiving he would go home, and then he would be sure. He might never come back. He remembered that Abra had once suggested that
they go to live on the ranch, and that became his dream. He remembered the great oaks and the clear living air, the clean sage-laced wind from the hills and the brown oak leaves scudding. He could see Abra there, standing under a tree, waiting for him to come in from his work. And it was evening. There, after work of course, he could live in purity and peace with the world, cut off by the little draw. He could hide from ugliness--in the evening.
Chapter 48
1
Late in November the Nigger died and was buried in black austerity, as her will demanded. She lay for a day in Muller's Funeral Chapel in an ebony and silver casket, her lean and severe profile made even more ascetic by the four large candles set at the four corners of the casket.
Her little black husband crouched like a cat by her right shoulder, and for many hours he seemed as still as she. There were no flowers, as ordered, no ceremony, no sermon, and no grief. But a strange and catholic selection of citizens tiptoed to the chapel door and peered in and went away--lawyers and laborers and clerks and bank tellers, most of them past middle age. Her girls came in one at a time and looked at her for decency and for luck and went away.
An institution was gone from Salinas, dark and fatal sex, as hopeless and deeply hurtful as human sacrifice. Jenny's place would still jangle with honky-tonk and rock with belching laughter. Kate's would rip the nerves to a sinful ecstasy and leave a man shaken and weak and frightened at himself. But the somber mystery of connection that was like a voodoo offering was gone forever.
The funeral was also by order of the will, the hearse and one automobile with the small black man crouched back in a corner. It was a gray day, and when Muller's service had lowered the casket with oiled and silent winches the hearse drove away and the husband filled the grave himself with a new shovel. The caretaker, cutting dry weeds a hundred yards away, heard a whining carried on the wind.
Joe Valery had been drinking a beer with Butch Beavers at the Owl, and he went with Butch to have a look at the Nigger. Butch was in a hurry because he had to go out to Natividad to auction a small herd of white-face Herefords for the Tavernettis.
Coming out of the mortuary, Joe found himself in step with Alf Nichelson--crazy Alf Nichelson, who was a survival from an era that was past. Alf was a jack-of-all-trades, carpenter, tinsmith, blacksmith, electrician, plasterer, scissors grinder, and cobbler. Alf could do anything, and as a result he was a financial failure although he worked all the time. He knew everything about everybody back to the beginning of time.
In the past, in the period of his success, two kinds of people had access to all homes and all gossip--the seamstress and the handy man. Alf could tell you about everybody on both sides of Main Street. He was a vicious male gossip, insatiably curious and vindictive without malice.
He looked at Joe and tried to place him. "I know you," he said. "Don't tell me."
Joe edged away. He was wary of people who knew him.
"Wait a minute. I got it. Kate's. You work at Kate's."
Joe sighed with relief. He had thought Alf might have known him earlier. "That's right," he said shortly.
"Never forget a face," said Alf. "Seen you when I built that crazy lean-to for Kate. Now why in hell did she want that for? No window."
"Wanted it dark," said Joe, "Eyes bother her."
Alf sniffed. He hardly ever believed anything simple or good about anybody. You could say good morning to Alf and he'd work it around to a password. He was convinced that everyone lived secretly and that only he could see through them.
He jerked his head back at Muller's. "Well, it's a milestone," he said. "Nearly all the old-timers gone. When Fartin' Jenny goes that'll be the end. And Jenny's getting along."
Joe was restless. He wanted to get away--and Alf knew he did. Alf was an expert in people who wanted to get away from him. Come to think of it, maybe that is why he carried his bag of stories. No one really went away when he could hear some juicy stuff about someone. Everybody is a gossip at heart. Alf was not liked for his gift but he was listened to. And he knew that Joe was on the point of making an excuse and getting out. It occurred to. him that he didn't know much about Kate's place lately. Joe might trade him some new stuff for some old stuff. "The old days was pretty good," he said. " 'Course you're just a kid."
"I got to meet a fella," said Joe.
Alf pretended not to hear him. "You take Faye," he said. "She was a case," and, parenthetically, "You know Faye run Kate's place. Nobody really knows how Kate come to own it. It was pretty mysterious, and there was some that had their suspicions." He saw with satisfaction that the fella Joe was going to meet would wait a long time.
"What was they suspicious about?" Joe asked.
"Hell, you know how people talk. Probably nothing in it. But I got to admit it looked kind of funny."
"Like to have a beer?" Joe asked.
"Now you got something there," said Alf. "They say a fella jumps from a funeral to the bedroom. I ain't as young as I was. Funeral makes me thirsty. The Nigger was quite a citizen. I could tell you stuff about her. I've knew her for thirty-five--no, thirty-seven years."
"Who was Faye?" Joe asked.
They went into Mr. Griffin's saloon. Mr. Griffin didn't like anything about liquor, and he hated drunks with a deadly scorn. He owned and operated Griffin's Saloon on Main Street, and on a Saturday night he might refuse to serve twenty men he thought had had enough. The result was that he got the best trade in his cool, orderly, quiet place. It was a saloon in which to make deals and to talk quietly without interruption.
Joe and Alf sat at the round table at the back and had three beers apiece. Joe learned everything true and untrue, founded and unfounded, every ugly conjecture. Out of it he got complete confusion but a few ideas. Something might have been not exactly on the level about the death of Faye. Kate might be the wife of Adam Trask. He hid that quickly--Trask might want to pay off. The Faye thing might be too hot to touch. Joe had to think about that--alone.
At the end of a couple of hours Alf was restive. Joe had not played ball. He had traded nothing, not one single piece of information or guess. Alf found himself thinking, Fella that close-mouthed must have something to hide. Wonder who would have a line on him?
Alf said finally, "Understand, I like Kate. She gives me a job now and then and she's generous and quick to pay. Probably nothing to all the palaver about her. Still, when you think of it, she's a pretty cold piece of woman. She's got a real bad eye. You think?"
"I get along fine," said Joe.
Alf was angry at Joe's perfidy, so he put in a needle. "I had a funny idea," he said. "It was when I built that lean-to without no window. She laid that cold eye on me one day and the idea come to me. If she knew all the things I heard, and she was to offer me a drink or even a cupcake--why, I'd say, 'No thank you, ma'am,' "
"Me and her get along just fine," said Joe. "I got to meet a guy."
Joe went to his room to think. He was uneasy. He jumped up and looked in his suitcase and opened all the bureau drawers. He thought somebody had been going through his things. Just came to him. There was nothing to find. It made him nervous. He tried to arrange the things he had heard.
There was a tap on the door and Thelma came in, her eyes swollen and her nose red. "What's got into Kate?"
"She's been sick."
"I don't mean that. I was in the kitchen shaking up a milkshake in a fruit jar and she came in and worked me over."
"Was you maybe shaking up a little bourbon in it?"
"Hell, no. Just vanilla extract. She can't talk like that to me."
"She did, didn't she?"
"Well, I won't take it."
"Oh, yes, you will," said Joe. "Get out, Thelma!"
Thelma looked at him out of her dark, handsome, brooding eyes, and she regained the island of safety a woman depends on. "Joe," she asked, "are you really just pure son of a bitch or do you just pretend to be?"
"What do you care?" Joe asked.
"I don't," said Thelma. "You son of a b
itch."
2
Joe planned to move slowly, cautiously, and only after long consideration. "I got the breaks, I got to use 'em right," he told himself.
He went in to get his evening orders and took them from the back of Kate's head. She was at her desk, green eyeshade low, and she did not look around at him. She finished her terse orders and then went on, "Joe, I wonder if you've been attending to business. I've been sick. But I'm well again or very nearly well."
"Something wrong?"
"Just a symptom. I'd rather Thelma drank whisky than vanilla extract, and I don't want her to drink whisky. I think you've been slipping."
His mind scurried for a hiding place. "Well, I been busy," he said.
"Busy?"
"Sure. Doing that stuff for you."
"What stuff?"
"You know--about Ethel."
"Forget Ethel!"
"Okay," said Joe. And then it came without his expecting it. "I met a fella yesterday said he seen her."
If Joe had not known her he would not have given the little pause, the rigid ten seconds of silence, its due.
At the end of it Kate asked softly, "Where?"
"Here."
She turned her swivel chair slowly around to face him. "I shouldn't have let you work in the dark, Joe. It's hard to confess a fault but I owe it to you. I don't have to remind you I got Ethel floated out of the county. I thought she'd done something to me." A melancholy came into her voice. "I was wrong. I found out later. It's been working on me ever since. She didn't do anything to me. I want to find her and make it up to her. I guess you think it's strange for me to feel that way."
"No, ma'am."
"Find her for me, Joe. I'll feel better when I've made it up to her--the poor old girl."
"I'll try, ma'am."
"And, Joe--if you need any money, let me know. And if you find her, just tell her what I said. If she doesn't want to come here, find out where I can telephone her. Need any money?"
"Not right now, ma'am. But I'll have to go out of the house more than I ought."
"You go ahead. That's all, Joe."
He wanted to hug himself. In the hall he gripped his elbows and let his joy run through him. And he began to believe he had planned the whole thing. He went through the darkened parlor with its low early evening spatter of conversation. He stepped outside and looked up at the stars swimming in schools through the wind-driven clouds.