Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “Two glasses of the light,” Willie said. “And when you see Huggins come in, ask if he wants to order some pitchers.”

  The waitress nodded.

  “I’ll get your lousy fifteen-cent beers,” the girl said.

  She turned, walked across the garden and up the stone steps into the building.

  The beer garden was shielded on three sides by the low yellow frame structure, a U-shaped Gothicism, scalloped and jigsawed and wonderfully grotesque. The bar, the kitchen and dining spaces were at the front; the one side and the back were clubrooms for the Germans who came to town once or twice a week to bowl and play cards. The Germans had bought half the block years before and built the bar and clubrooms. During the hard times of the 1930s they had begun leasing out the front part as a public bar, an arrangement that had proved so profitable that it was continued through the war years and was now apparently destined for the ever-after.

  Just prior to the war there had been rumors of German-American Bund meetings in the back rooms. People in town talked about seeing goosestepping farmers through the windows, their arms raised in fascist salute. But nothing was ever proved; no one ever came forward to substantiate the claims, and after Pearl Harbor it was nearly forgotten. There was even a little plaque got up to honor certain of the clientele gone off to war; there were waitresses who boasted of being Gold Star Sweethearts. Business — and the beer — had always been good, before, during, after the war, and even in recent years when some of Roy’s and Willie’s friends had petitioned for a change in names: when they wanted to call it the Weltschmertz.

  The waitress brought the two glasses of beer. She came toward them, both hands occupied, weaving between the bare tables and the crowds of people. The place was gradually filling. “Thirty cents,” the girl said.

  Roy insisted on paying. He pushed out a half dollar. The waitress hesitated with the change. “You want some pennies?” she said. “Let’s see — ten per cent of thirty is …” Roy waved her off.

  “I’m going to be short the end of the month,” he said. “I got to get in good with my friends.”

  “You don’t have any friends left,” Willie said. “They’re all furious.”

  “As it should be,” Roy said. “They’re all sewers.”

  “They disapprove.”

  “Stuffiest bunch of bohemians ever existed,” Roy said.

  Willie shrugged. “It’s just they don’t think you ought to be hoo-hawin’ around with a fellow legislator’s wife,” he said. “Even a fellow ex-legislator’s wife.”

  “Or even a fellow ex-legislator’s ex-wife,” Roy said.

  “She’s not Mrs. Ex yet,” Willie said.

  “I got censured today,” Roy said. “My district caucus.”

  “Oh, Jesus … What does that mean?”

  “Don’t know,” Roy said. “They’ve never had occasion before. No precedents.” He laughed horribly. “They even went into executive session … I started to make a point of order about whether this sort of thing was germane. I suppose it was. Since they called the meeting on account of me.”

  They went on drinking. They had two more glasses apiece. The beer was close to freezing cold, with slivers of ice floating on top; if you took too much right off, it made shooting pains in the back of the eyes. They had two more glasses.

  “You see?” Willie said. “We should’ve ordered a pitcher.”

  “I thought Huggins’d be here by now.”

  “Not on Tuesday nights,” Willie said. “He remembers about the bowling on Tuesday nights and comes late to avoid the noise.”

  “Awful place,” Roy said.

  “He probably paid an early call at the whorehouse,” Willie said.

  “I wish I had his money.”

  “You got his money,” Willie said. “I wish I had anybody’s money. I wish I had yours.”

  “It’s a myth about my money,” Roy said. “It’s all tied up in a trust fund until I’m seventy-five years old.”

  They were silent for a time, watching the college students come and go. The noise from the bowling alley subsided, and the German farmers appeared, filing out, carrying their equipment in little bags. It was much better with the bowling ended, though the record machine continued to play at full volume.

  “They think we’re deaf?” Roy said, looking up at the trees, scowling, as if the liveoaks were personally responsible. “I’m going inside and raise hell …” But he did not move from the straw-bottomed chair.

  After a moment, Willie said: “That’s why you’re being so insufferable tonight.”

  “What’s that?” Roy said.

  “Because you know everyone’s disappointed with you.”

  “The hell with everyone,” Roy said. “They’re all a bunch of sewers.”

  “I’m on your side,” Willie said. “I like her. Even —”

  “Even what?”

  “Even,” Willie said. “Even-even. She’s got, as the phrase used to go, a reputation. Most eligible married woman in town.”

  “You’re a sewer,” Roy said. “You’re middle class.”

  Willie was silent for a moment. Then he added: “Censured, hah? You think they’ll keep it quiet?”

  “It’ll get around,” Roy said. “I just hate for it to get back to my family. They’re liable to have me impeached.” Again he laughed. “Have a recall election and send one of my cousins up here, instead.”

  “Who else knows about this? So far.”

  “Only the people I’ve told,” Roy said.

  “Told? Who the hell you told, for God’s sake?”

  “You. You and one other.”

  “Who’s the other? Your mistress?”

  “She’s not my mistress,” Roy said immediately. “… No … Not her.”

  “Who?”

  “Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker.”

  “Godalmighty. How come him?”

  “Well I think he knew about it, anyhow. The way he talked. Sonofabitch knows everything goes on. We had breakfast this morning.”

  Willie looked stunned. “You? You and the Governor?”

  “At the Mansion, even,” Roy said. “Eight o’clock. I’ve had three hours sleep the last thirty-six.”

  “How come?” Willie said. “How come you’re suddenly on the inside? Or did you just break in on the Governor at breakfast?”

  “Last-minute invitation,” Roy said. He told about the phone call that morning. He didn’t embellish; he was entirely matter-of-fact; Willie could count on his friend being absolutely candid. Roy Sherwood didn’t ordinarily talk about himself, though when it was unavoidable he did so with objectivity, standing off and regarding his own conduct with an amused and occasionally bewildered curiosity.

  Willie smiled and signaled to the waitress for more beer. “Your life is suddenly very complicated,” he said.

  “Try to resist writing me up as a sellout artist just yet,” Roy said.

  “Trust me,” Willie said. He attempted a look of cynicism; tried and failed. He couldn’t play the role. He was a tall, well-constructed young man (though not a really very young one any more) whose innocent face, blue eyes and straw-colored hair had brought about the speculation among friends that he secretly posed for soft drink advertisements depicting unimaginably wholesome teenagers grinning at one another next to drugstore soda fountains. He struggled, with singular unsuccess, against this portrayal. He was thirty years old and rather liked to think of himself as a thoroughgoing degenerate, and if he failed in exhibiting himself as such, it was probably the result of his conveying precisely the reverse image years before at college. In those days he had not only presented the façade of unreconstructed wholesomeness, he had lived the role with conviction: as a member of the glee club, football player, honor student, debater, summer camp counselor, and author of some of the most earnest and tiresomely obvious editorial essays ever to be published in the college newspaper. The years since graduation had, to use his own phrase, muddled his vision and corrupted his ideals — and he was
unqualifiedly pleased with the transformation. He might have looked like the same person from all outward appearances, but inwardly, he insisted, he had changed. He was currently editing what he preferred to call his “little left wing weekly newspaper,” and he was happiest when anyone belabored him with the charge that he was a mere political propagandist.

  If Willie, then, first impressed with his innocent good looks and tired-eyed naïveté, his companion at the bare wooden table in the beer garden was a study in villainy, a road-show Rasputin, dark and bent-nosed with what certain of his women friends occasionally described as a “sensual” face. The characterization invariably depressed and annoyed Roy. He did not consider his face sensual by any standard, and he did not much like women, either, though he thought about them most all the time. He simply felt they were up to no good. He had been married once, for a few months in 1945 while serving in the Navy. He had met the girl at a USO dance and married her soon afterwards, on the mistaken assumption that he had got her pregnant on the first date. Now he could scarcely remember the way she looked. Not that there had been a great many women in between — it was just that after the naval service and his divorce while still on sea duty, after four years as an undergraduate and then law school, an attempt at private practice and then entering politics, the whole business of his youth and early marriage seemed as vague and fanciful in the memory as some unusually strenuous but otherwise undistinguished weekend assignation.

  As politician, Roy Sherwood had little to worry about so long as he behaved himself. He called himself a “conservative States’ rights Democrat” — it was a little game he played with people back home — and his seat in the Legislature had practically been conferred on him, like a title. His grandfather, father, and older brother had served the same district before him — an uncle had even put in twelve years as a Congressman in Washington. If anyone ever got rid of Roy, it would be his family, not his constituents. And Roy tried to tell himself he didn’t especially give a damn, anyhow.

  The waitress came with a pitcher of dark beer. Huggins was following close behind.

  “Hah yew men tonight?” Huggins said.

  “Hello, Pancho,” Willie said.

  “Hello, Frank,” Roy said. He turned to the waitress. “Get Pancho a glass for his own beer, will you honey?”

  Huggins dragged over a chair and poured beer. He was about average height, spindly in the limbs but lumpish through the middle: a spectacle, really, for anyone who had not got used to him. There came a time when he seemed unreal even to his friends, a little too much to believe. People came to accept his appearance, his seedy, gaping face, unmanageable hair, disproportionate weight (food-thin, whiskey-fat), but there were moments, inevitably, when the idea of Huggins, alien and uneasy in ski sweater and baggy corduroys, strained all credibility, when he seemed the most nearly perfect Undesirable anyone could imagine. During the past year he had tried to do something about himself by calling on the Brooks Brothers traveling representative, but the mail-order wardrobe made no appreciable change, succeeding, instead, in merely parodying the whole natural-shoulder mystique.

  There was family money behind him, but no more than was used to support many of his colleagues in the Legislature. Yet his friends ordinarily made some pretense of assuming responsibility during adjournment: managing family businesses, experimenting with breeds of cattle, speculating on oil properties, holding down ceremonial positions of one kind or another. Some friends felt the least he could do was open a law office if not take any action so drastic as to constitute actual practice of the law, but Huggins couldn’t qualify. He had, at last count, tried and failed seven times to pass the bar exam.

  He was a winner, all the same. He was unbeatable in his home district, having been elected and re-elected to successive terms of office since his freshman year in college just after the war. The year before he had registered his greatest triumph, defeating a blind lady justice of the peace while “campaigning” in Europe and Mexico.

  Huggins sat at the table, grinning at Roy and Willie, looking terrible. He paid for the beer, still grinning, looked up and said: “I cashed a check out on the highway.”

  “You’re in for trouble if an opponent ever gets hold of your canceled checks,” Willie said.

  “Maybe I’ll start making them out to cash,” Huggins said.

  “Make one out to me,” Roy said.

  “They got a new girl out there,” Huggins said. “She said she was from Mount Holyoke. Where’s that?”

  “South Hadley, Mass.,” Roy said.

  “Couldn’t be,” Huggins said. “She had an awful twang. But she was something to look at. That’s the beauty of whorehouse syndicates — always bringing in new faces.”

  “You’re gonna get caught in a raid,” Willie said.

  “Don’t write me up if they do,” Huggins said. He turned to Roy. “You need some money?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s the matter? Family cut you off?”

  “I never was on,” Roy said.

  “They’re down on Roy,” Willie said. “They want him to come home and help his brother try a case.”

  “I heard you were mean as hell in a courtroom,” Huggins said.

  “I’m mean everywhere,” Roy said.

  “I remember your brother my first term here,” Huggins said. “He was an awful conservative.”

  There seemed nothing that could be done about Roy’s brother, so they concentrated on a new pitcher of beer. Soon a crowd of people — a great, tortured gang of them — appeared at the entrance and headed directly toward the table. Some were in evening dress, some in khakis and tennis shorts and tropical worsteds. There were eight or ten in the party, and after a drawn-out interval of handshaking and high-pitched laughter, tables being pushed together and trips to the ladies’ room and inquiries about beer and jukebox preferences, they were settled.

  A girl named Ellen Streeter sat between Willie and Roy. She was splendid looking, with marvelous legs, and Willie watched her closely, examining her sweetly freckled and slightly over-baked chest and shoulders, feeling unaccountably sad. He had been secretly in love with the girl for several years, but had never got anywhere with her. No one ever seemed to — and he had only recently given up from exhaustion. Willie sat watching Ellen Streeter, who watched Roy, who was giving his attention to Alfred Rinemiller, at the other end of the table, whom he regarded as a monumental sewer.

  “How’ve you been?” Willie said to the girl.

  “Fine. I went to a party last night with a bunch of hoods. My date has the football card concession in town. They smoked marijuana.”

  Someone wanted to know how Ellen Streeter could afford to be seen with such a crowd. A woman across the table said it was because she was a virgin. “Ellen’s notorious,” the woman said. “Everybody knows about her. Virgins can do things like that.”

  Ellen looked resigned. “What can I say? I don’t advertise — I don’t put it in the want ads.”

  Roy lost interest in Alfred Rinemiller for a moment and turned to stare. “You don’t advertise what?” he said.

  “That she’s honest,” one of the women said. “Is that the right word?”

  “How do girls get that way?” Roy said.

  “It’s just that you start out thinking you ought to save yourself,” Ellen said. “Now there’s a lovely expression. For someone special. You start saving and the longer you wait the more special it seems the fellow ought to be. So after a while there’s really no one anywhere who is as special as all that. Except maybe that Shah at Harvard.”

  Roy smiled. “It’s a problem, all right,” he said. He turned round to listen to what was being said at the other end. Rinemiller was talking, so he tried hard to hear it all. Harry Belafonte sang to them from the treetops about how it was loading banana boats.

  “I told him off,” Rinemiller was saying. “I gave him hell.”

  “Who?”

  “Old Fenstemaker.”

  “What about Fe
nstemaker?” Roy called out.

  “He gave me one of his hard-sells,” Rinemiller said.

  “How?”

  “He called me in and said, ‘Looky heah, Alfred, wooden yew much rathuh git haff uh loaf than none at all? Then whyn’t yew git buhind me on this heah legislation …’ ”

  It was a pretty bad imitation of the Governor, but there was some laughter around Rinemiller. Roy squinted and started to say something but then changed his mind and got to his feet. Somebody had a bottle of gin and was ordering ice and setups. Some of the others were examining menus. Roy walked behind Willie, leaned down and spoke into his ear.

  “I’m going.”

  “Comin’ back?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What?” Ellen Streeter said.

  Another woman leaned over. “What’re they whispering about?” she said. Crazy Kermit suddenly appeared. They all had a great affection for Kermit because he was genius gone to seed — gone slightly askew, in fact — and it was very sad. He had a Ph.D. and insisted on regarding all his friends as doctors of philosophy.

  “Hey, Doctors,” Kermit said, moving round the table, shaking hands. “Hah yew Good Doctors?”

  There was a young man with him from the college whom he introduced as Jobie. The boy named Jobie moved behind Roy and smiled at everyone. He spoke to Roy.

  “We’ve got to hold on to our principles. We’ve got to shape issues and advance the fundamental concepts of economic and social enlightenment.”

  “Whaat?” Roy turned and stared.

  “We need more liberal intellectuals like you in politics,” Jobie said.

  “I’m a conservative States’ rights Democrat,” Roy said. “Excuse me.” He turned and walked away.

  “Where’s he going?” Ellen said to Willie. They watched him heading up the stone steps and through the bar. “Where?” someone else said. “He coming back?”

  Some of the others looked up. One of the women said: “Earle Fielding’s going to be furious when he gets back to town.”

  “He’s already back,” Rinemiller said. “I talked with him tonight.”