Three to Be Read

by Philip Wylie

  “Mr. Stratton?”

  “Wouldn’t it be an interesting idea to get some gangster in here to debate the matter?”

  Professor Burke saw his opening. “Any gambler, or gangster, or other such person among your associates would be welcome here, Mr. Stratton.” The class laughed.

  Mr. Stratton sat down rather sheepishly. Professor Burke made his usual pre-vacation speech—wishing all of them a pleasant trip home, a safe return, and an interlude of Merry Christmas combined with Happy New Year. He repeated that he hoped none of them would use his course as an excuse for turning to crime: the faculty would disapprove, he ventured.

  Several of them came forward to return his greetings and wishes. Among them was Miss Macey, who had to wait while Miss Orme extracted from the professor the titles of books to read over the vacation period. He glared at her ensnooded hair—which always reminded him of a beaver’s tail—and gave her the toughest list he could think of.

  She would eat it up, he thought morosely.

  Miss Macey shook his hand and said, “Merry Christmas! Stay out of pool halls and don’t pitch pennies!”

  He picked up his lecture, remembered he had forgotten his hat, and walked slowly from the long chamber.

  Chapter II

  Some moments later Mr. Stratton overtook Miss Macey on the palm-lined thoroughfares of Coral Gables.

  “Sip, drip?” he asked.

  “Sure, boor.”

  They turned in the direction of a drugstore. “That Burke,” he said, “shoe-horned himself out of a hole with a crack at me. Cheap trick. You had him surrounded.”

  Her brown eyes performed a small minuet. “I was investigating. All fall, I’ve wondered how much of Martin Burke was theory—and how much was experience.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me? I know the type. Pure brass before a class—and outside, pure mouse. When their mothers look in their mouths to see if, maybe, there’s a silver spoon, they find a bookmark. I bet he never got five paces away from an encyclopedia in his life!”

  “He’s cute,” she said demurely.

  “Cute!” Mr. Stratton bridled. “That dodo cute?”

  “If he’s a dodo,” she said, stopping to pick a blossom from a city owned hibiscus, “the best years of your life are shot, too, Wally. He can’t be more than thirty-four.”

  “He was born at least twenty-eight, which is my age. How a dame can see anything in such a oiseau … !”

  She fixed the flower in her hair. It was reddish brown and salmon. It matched her skirt and did no harm to her skin and her eyes. “He’s such a pleasant contrast to the average American male—like you—always leering down rudely from among the chandeliers. A small girl such as me resents the effect of modern nutrition. She feels as if she is dating stepladders all the time.”

  “Flooey,” said Mr. Stratton, who was six-four. “When the moon comes pouring up from the Gulf Stream, do you think about some tame rabbit like Burke? Some one-watt theory-maker? Does he set the petite pulse bouncing?”

  “That’s what I’ve wondered all autumn.”

  “You’d be throwing yourself at a human hamster.”

  He pushed open the drugstore door. A blast of undergraduate clatter rushed out with the conditioned air. They entered the soda fountain of youth and he pointed to a vacant booth. “Park, lark.”

  “Delighted, benighted.”

  “And no more sighing over the professor. As soon as I tap a waitress, I am going to work on you, myself—”

  “He gives me maternal feelings,” she said, as he began waving his arm, “which mother wouldn’t recognize as such. Sometimes I wish I were the local type-Southern, coy, extraverted. I would lead him astray—slightly… .”

  The object of this mild controversy made his way along Pondosa Boulevard and turned into Philomel Court. He turned again into West Cortez Circle. Some boys, playing baseball in a vacant lot, cracked out a hard hit which caromed off a lemon tree, whistled through a plumb ego hedge, and rolled toward the sidewalk. Professor Burke ran forward automatically, fielded the ball adeptly, held it until the runner had made a well-earned circuit of the coconut bases, and threw it to the shouting pitcher. He walked on, grinning.

  A man slightly under medium size, with a tendency to stoop. A man with eyes now blue and now grey—now steely or ironical and again soft, or vague. A man whose dark hair was worn in a wavy pompadour—an expedient arrangement that exposed all of a rather high forehead. A conventional dresser—in polished brogues, heather socks, gabardine slacks, a light-weight tweed coat, a dimly striped shirt and a conservative blue tie, fixed with a plain gold clip. The stem of a pipe showed in one pocket; from the other, his folded lecture protruded.

  Nine strangers out of ten would have confidently guessed that he was a college professor. If they had seen him field the home run they would have added that he was a good egg—and at peace with the world.

  Professor Burke was a good egg, insofar as scholastic tradition permitted him good-eggishness. He had New England virtues and a New England conscience. His character and life direction were well established, before he entered the First Grade, by the firm-minded Congregationalists who had been his parents. At thirty-three, he was exactly the way he expected to be at fifty, save that he hoped by then to be a Department Head. He had self-assurance, calm, and a near-fanatical courage of an occasional conviction. He was shy.

  At the moment, however, he was not at peace.

  He turned into the rather jungly lawn of the house where he had dwelt since his arrival in Miami, after the war. He stumbled on its front steps—which was unusual. He put the wrong key in the lock of the door to his upstairs apartment.

  “Martin!” his landlady called. “What’s wrong? I’m on the side porch having tea. Scones, too. Come aboard!”

  Bedelia Ogilvy was the widow of a retired Naval officer who had quietly passed away in his bed before Pearl Harbor—an event which would certainly have brought him to a more violent demise. Occasionally, Bedelia used such terms as, “Come aboard.” She was said to be the homeliest woman in Coral Gables; she was certainly the best cook in that flower-spangled suburb. She had taken Professor Burke very dubiously, and on probation, as a roomer-boarder. After three weeks, she had begun using his first name.

  After three months, he had commenced unconsciously to regard her as a sort of relative whose pleasure at feeding him superbly was as normal as her constant cross-questioning, anent his mail, his friends, his students, other professors, their wives, and such further lore as might interest her.

  He walked around to the side porch, opened the screen, and ducked under the spiny arms of the bougainvillaea. Bedelia sat like a resting camel, behind a rattan coffee table. Her august and bony frame filled the settee. Her large, pale eyes, enlarged further by spectacles, seemed worried. “What’s the matter? You’re skittish. I can tell.”

  He knew she could. He did not even try to guess the criteria by which she had detected his nervousness at the distance of thirty-odd feet. “Hypocrisy,” he said glumly.

  “Hypocrisy? My dear man! The world’s full of it! Take it in your stride!”

  “My own.”

  An alert look came into her eyes. “Yours, Martin?”

  He told her. He told her his basic advice to his students and of Miss Macey’s probing. His eyes even glimmered with appreciation of his predicament. “There I stood—parroting a dozen authorities on criminology—and preaching direct experience—yet I never so much as met a pickpocket face to face in my life! It’s absurd!”

  “You are hardly expected to be everything you discuss.”

  “A point I tried to suggest. It fell rather flat. We were not prepared, in Israel Putnam Teacher’s College, for the present postwar generation.” He sighed and popped a scone into his mouth.

  “Break the next one in two,” Bedelia said absently. “I’ve heard you mention Miss Macey before. Attractive, isn’t she? I noticed her picture in the paper when she was elected a sorority president.”

&
nbsp; “Very attractive.” He skipped hurriedly over the fact and railed at the modern student: “Married and with children! In business! Working at places like race tracks! One of our students is a hat check girl in a night club—not in my classes, I’m relieved to say.

  No, Bedelia. We were not prepared for leadership on campuses where the world—the nonacademic world—pushes in at every door. I felt extremely inadequate today. I questioned myself. What right have I—after all—to invite my students to sup at the wellsprings of experience—and to reject them for myself? It’s snobbishness, in a way. I felt tempted… .” he broke off.

  “Tempted, Martin? How?” She seemed to relish the idea that he was tempted by anything.

  “Well—I can hardly say how. Here we live—in the very midst of a world we never encounter. We read of it in the papers. We learn of it in sociological texts. But the University Campus is as far from the gay life of, say, Miami Beach, as if an ocean lay between-instead of a bay crossed by three causeways. I lecture on gambling. But I have never observed the fact. I was tempted to take precedent in my hands—and go and see.”

  “Why not?” she asked quickly.

  His iced tea halted in mid-air, as if by an invisible brake. “I scarcely expected such a reaction from you!”

  Bedelia balanced jam on the remnants of a scone. “Martin, did it ever occur to you that a man can become stuffy—by not resisting stuffiness?”

  “Stuffy? A harsh term, Bedelia.”

  “Why don’t you put on your dinner clothes, Martin, and drive over to the Beach and watch some genuine, illegal gambling. You might even see a gangster.”

  “Because,” he answered, obviously wishing the subject had never reached that point. “I haven’t the price of a costly meal in my pocket. I would hardly indulge in gambling. And I would hardly patronize such a place with no such intentions. Finally”—he smiled with satisfaction—“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of where to go!”

  “The Club Egret,” she said, “which is off Collins, at the north end of the Beach.

  Mrs. Witherspoon told me Wednesday that she lost a hundred and twenty dollars there, the night before. It was probably ten dollars. I have some cash—and you can give me a check. I’ve kept cash in the house ever since I first moved here. Went to the bank to get the money for a rail ticket and found it was Lee’s Birthday! I drew out a hundred dollars the following morning—and I keep it on tap. No telling what obscure Southern heroes might close the banks, I thought-and how was I to remember the date of Lee’s Birthday?”

  “Really, Bedelia,” he said uneasily, “it’s most kind. But I wouldn’t think of it.”

  Her face took on an expression of sympathetic contradiction.

  Chapter III

  He did not know whether he was elated or depressed. The long drive from Coral Gables across the luminous causeway to Miami Beach was exhilarating but not reassuring. He had previously been swimming at Miami Beach. He had played golf there on occasion. He had never visited it at night—and at night the homes seemed richer and more mysterious—the streets strange and a little confusing. The hotels were altogether startling: bathed in colored light—fretted and fringed from top to bottom in cascades of electric glitter. It was opulent and it was ominous.

  He located the Club Egret—and drove past it. The Club Egret was boldly set amidst showy residences. It had no windows. Under its portico, attendants were serving the owners of vehicles which markedly outshone his prewar, hand-repainted coupe.

  Conscience urged him both ways. To enter was folly; not to enter, after being committed, was weak. He drove around the block and under the portico.

  An obviously disenchanted attendant handed a parking check to him. He gave the man a quarter and received audible thanks. He walked up a flight of stairs.

  He found himself in a foyer. There was a checkroom at his left—and a curtained hall—guarded, apparently, by two men in tuxedoes. Straight ahead was a bar-long and shimmering—low lighted—with tables and people at the tables. Men in sports coats—in plain suits—and a few, he saw with relief, in dinner jackets. Overhead was a rosy, vaulted dome. To his right were steps going down—into a tremendous dining room where people in twos and sixes and twenties were busily consuming dinner. The dining room had grey walls with chromium trimmings, a thick, grey carpet, and glass stars in its ceiling; behind each star was a colored light. A large orchestra played rhythmically on a podium. People were dancing. The polychromatic stars twinkled in what seemed to be orchestral tempo.

  It was dim in the room. The expanse of white tablecloths, the gleaming dance floor, the lofty ceiling and stellar lights, made the professor think of the snowcape under a Christmas tree, expanded magically, so that human beings could walk into it.

  The headwaiter came forward. “One?”

  Professor Burke was escorted into the shimmering, theatrical wonderland. He was seated along the wall.

  “Something to drink?”

  “A martini. Very dry.”

  Professor Burke was familiar with the best dining places of Boston. One of these had a bar that turned like a merry-go-round. He was familiar with night clubs through rare visits to the motion pictures. A single cocktail was his limit. However, he knew a good martini from a fair one. He was served a martini he regarded as excellent.

  He ordered dinner. He began to look, covertly but searchingly, at the people around him. He thought of them in terms of the textbooks and newspaper articles. They were largely—he felt—gamblers, gangsters, corrupt politicians, labor czars squandering the dues of union members, ladies of the evening, and the like. It would have surprised him a good deal—and disappointed him even more—had he realized that nearly all the men and women were respectable citizens of, or visitors to Miami Beach enjoying an evening of dining and dancing—and not even planning to gamble.

  When he cut an excellent filet mignon—for which he would pay a shocking seven dollars—he beckoned the headwaiter. “Where is the gaming room?”

  The phrase was not the ordinary one. And it was not customary of newcomers to ask that information of the headwaiter. “You—oh—have not been here before, sir?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  The headwaiter said, “Quite so,” and walked away, leaving the professor deeply embarrassed.

  The office of Mr. William Sanders was paneled in cypress. In these walls were slots from which the two principal chambers of the Club Egret could be discreetly surveyed. The room also contained a powerful wall safe, expensive, modernistic furniture, and Mr. Sanders himself—a very tall man, lanky, and pleasant. His smile was ready, almost constant; his voice quiet and amiable. One needed, as a rule, a second glance to note that his eyes had a quality like the blade of an adze—seen edge-on.

  There was a knock on his door.

  Mr. Sanders glanced up from his desk. He said nothing. The door opened and a man entered—a thick-shouldered man with black hair parted in the middle and black eyes of the sort called liquid. The term connotes fluidity and warmth. There was nothing warm about The Tip. If there ever had been, it had turned to ice years before, during The Tip’s childhood on the streets of South Chicago.

  Mr. Sanders still said nothing.

  “There is a laddie-boy outside whose looks I dislike.” The Tip touched the ruby-red bow above his soft evening shirt. “Table eighty-six. Are you sure, Double-O, that you have all the dope on tonight’s operations?”

  Perhaps six people in the world called Mr. Sanders “Bill.” Possibly twenty people called him “Double-O” to his face. Thousands, however, used that name when he was not present—though they called him “Mr. Sanders” when they accosted him. Newspapers, also, referred to him on frequent occasion as “Double-O” or “Double-O Sanders.”

  He regarded The Tip with a smile. The Tip’s words showed not the slightest trace of Chicago’s streets or even its universal nasal register. The Tip spoke in pure American Park Avenue—an eastern accent which, itself an imitation, is readily copied by anyone who i
s willing to practice affectation. Smooth phoniness amused Double-O. He answered the question.

  “Who’s ever positive he has all the dope, in this town? Tonight’s operations are set—sure. What’s wrong with the guy?”

  “Just—keeps looking the place over. The customers. Could be a new Fed income-tax snooping. He asked Rudolph where the ‘gaming room’ was. Sounds too sappy to be solid. If he is a Fed, he’s outsmarting himself.”

  Double-O crossed to one of the discreet slots, his long legs moving like jointed crowbars. He peered. “I see what you mean,” he said, after a while. “I’m willing to bet he’s a husband with a wife at a hen convention—afraid somebody he knows will see him here. But tell Connie, anyhow.”

  Professor Burke ordered coffee and a cigar. He was pleased by the pulchritude of the cigarette girl—and startled by her costume. Hardly enough clothing, he thought, for a large doll. He tipped her a quarter and lighted the cigar. Like everything else in the establishment, it was of superlative quality. He blew smoke.

  He was filled with a sentiment of self-satisfaction. The fact was that he liked the Club Egret. The fact also was that, even while he enjoyed the music and the lights and the spectacle of the people, he was contriving a few sentences to slip into his next year’s lecture—sentences which would make it plain that he had personally investigated the dens of iniquity and found them a tinselly sham.

  The house lights went down. A master of ceremony took possession of a microphone—in a cone of smoke-washed light. The professor recognized the first joke as almost identical with one which had been used by Plautus, a little more than two thousand years before.

  A girl said, “Hello!”

  He turned with surprise—and some discomfiture. The young lady, not identifiable in the dark, was standing at his side.

  “May I sit down?” she asked in a warm, husky voice.

  “Why, certainly. Of course!”

  The professor hurried to assist her. She had long, blonde hair, done up beautifully.