by Frank Capra
“I guess I’d better. Excuse me, Mister Gorski. Don’t forget to come in for a drink.”
She ran into the house, leaving Tony and Steve to walk silently toward my car. When out of earshot of the house, Tony turned to let Steve have it, his voice as cold and sharp as an ice pick.
“Steve…I resent anyone coming to my house without letting me know. And what’s all this malarkey about how I feel?”
“Stupid of me to come without calling. I’m sorry.”
“Fine. You’re sorry. Now will you please explain why you worried my wife with solicitations about my health?”
“Tony, I feel terrible about that. I had no idea she didn’t know.”
“She didn’t know what?”
“Well, about…” Steve said, groping for words, “about…uh…what you told us last night at the coffeehouse.”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea what the hell you’re talking about. I didn’t discuss my health with you or anybody else last night or any other night. What’re you trying to pull? Another one of your slimy tricks? Are you trying to spread more dirty rumors?”
“Tony, my boy…” Steve answered, on the verge of a blowup, “you have the most wonderful capacity for making things tough for everybody…”
“I have every intention of making things tough for everybody. Especially you, Steve…and that movie guy in the car…and that joker with the papers. I don’t know what you came here for, but whatever it was…forget it. And I’m warning you, Steve…come prepared. ’Cause I’m going to use that hearing to break you…and break Hoppy…and break anybody else that’s out to stop me. And that’s the real reason I made the Board call the hearing. Good night!”
He turned on his heel, marched into his house, and banged the door so hard it started little hanging bells tinkling on the porch.
“Come on, Steve,” I said, opening the car door from the inside.
Seething and muttering, Steve scrunched in, jerking the car door shut with a bigger bang. Again the bells tinkled. Then, gathering his accumulating exasperation all in one ball, he exploded it all in one blast:
“That arrogant…egotistical…son of a bitch!”
For the next ten minutes, neither of us spoke a word as I drove slowly down the twisting road through Mammoth. You can’t talk when your think gears have just been loused up with a handful of sand. Personally I was as baffled as a scientist who suddenly observed some cosmic phenomenon that made a liar out of Einstein; or one who ran into a group of numbers that kept adding up to different sums.
How do you make logic out of contradictions? Or put in parallel the divergent? Was Handsome Tony’s irrational behavior the paradox in logic that mathematicians call “the antinomy of the liar?”—in which some sentences are false only if the sentences are true? The statement: “Tony Caldwell has cancer is false,” is false only if it’s true. Or is it the other way round? To hell with mathematics. Think of him in film terms. Was Handsome Tony a tragic hero or a no-goodnik? A noble eagle or a tricky cowbird laying phony eggs in your nest? I gave up. The mind boggles, rejects, then lights up “tilt” at the irrational.
Gorski spoke first, his words about as baffled as his thoughts. “And the wunderkind has covered his trail, too. First thing this morning I called up Dr. Slingsby about Tony. His answer was short and sour. ‘Listen, Mr. Gorski. I’ll give you the same answer I gave that snoopy newspaper publisher. My Hippocratic oath not to discuss my patients with anyone is sacred, sacrosanct, and inviolable. And that goes for my staff and technical assistants or they’re fired. Good day.’”
“Steve,” I said, “just have to hear myself talk. Tell me, is Fancypants a Rudolf Hess or a Macchiavelli?”
“He’s worse. He’s a Galahad riding a white charger, hell-bent on carrying the Holy Grail of Law and Order to Sacramento, to the Senate, then to the White House.”
“Hmmm. Maybe it’s just static, Steve, but my hunch antenna is trying to tell me you admire Gorgeous—that maybe there’s a slight case of friendship. Or maybe something deeper—right?”
“Frank,” he answered, taking out his pipe, “I’m rich and successful. I can afford aberrations.”
“You take your opposition out fishing to win cases. Ever…”
“I don’t try to win cases. I settle them.”
“Yeah, I know. Ever take Tony out fishing?”
“Laughs bore him,” he answered, lighting his pipe. “Tony doesn’t believe in settling. With him it’s legal or illegal, black or white. If you’re right you win, if you’re wrong you lose. And, oddly enough, he has yet to lose.”
“In my business you’ve got to lose before you can win.”
“Fascinating career, this boy,” he went on. “An orphan at seven—he watched two burglars hack up his father and mother—he was taken in by an aunt and step-uncle who raised hogs and sold smoked hams and bacon in a tiny store in Bishop. Young Tony worked his way through Bishop High School by collecting pig garbage for his uncle and doing odd jobs for Hoppy’s Chalfant Press. He made Eagle Scout and earned such outstanding marks he got a scholarship to Berkeley. I made the commencement speech at his high school graduation. I spoke on ‘The Values of Compromise.’ Young Tony followed with a valedictorian speech on ‘The Evils of Compromise.’ When I gave him his diploma I said ‘Good speech, son,’ and he answered, with an assurance that some might call arrogance, ‘As you can see, I disagree with you…sir!’
“Well, before he graduated from Cal, he made student body president, and head of the debate team, set a record for touchdowns as a running back, married the most beautiful girl on the campus, and got a scholarship to Harvard Law School. And would you believe it? He was tapped as a Rhodes Scholar and went to Oxford. Hoppy’s Mono papers ballyhooed Tony’s triumphs with the huzzahs reserved for astronauts. He was Mono’s man in orbit.
“Well, when he returned to Mono I quickly sensed we had a young supernova among us, a man-in-a-million, Frank. He had it all—good looks, courtliness, a super-intelligence, the super-charisma I know your stars have, and that indefinable leadership endowment that men like Moses, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Saint Paul, Thomas Aquinas, and Napoleon must have had, and that such women as Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, and Saint Therese certainly had. And I fell in love with this boy, Frank, and I began to dream the “impossible dream,” as the song says. I envisioned this small-town Lochinvar, first in the governor’s seat in Sacramento, and then, so help me, I saw him in the White House, another Jack Kennedy but with the drive of a General Patton, if you please. I saw him calming our fears and healing our wounds with the robust vigor of his youth, and bringing fresh hope to a war-sick world that a new, bright, healthy, happy day of peace would soon be coming.”
Boatcourt paused to relight his pipe and, I surmised, to re-savor that “impossible dream.” How little we know of people that daily fill our lives. The hero of Boatcourt’s “impossible dream” had only impressed me as an insufferable, egotistic bore. And what did Gorski mean when he said, “I fell in love with this boy?” Was I sticking my nose into the tawdry tantrums of some sleazy “old man, young man” relationship? I turned north on Highway 395 and began speeding up that pine-scented twenty-mile drive through the Jeffrey Pine Forest. I wanted to get home fast and talk everything over with my commonsense wife.
“What I didn’t know then, of course,” resumed Boatcourt, as if he had as much need of talk as I had of silence, “was that young Lochinvar had had the same dream—only with him it wasn’t just a dream. It was a coldly calculated obsession…his Eastern Star, his Golden Fleece. Well, he was young, Frank, and I had become so fond of him that I brought him into my law office as a junior partner, hoping I could season and humanize the young meteor before he rocketed himself out of the pull of human gravity. By the end of the second month he had grown much too big for my office. Clients offered him big jobs, big pay. So I nudged him, prematurely I knew, toward his g
oal of politics. ‘There is no limit to how high or how fast you can rise in public service, Tony,’ I said, ‘if you can keep from tripping over your own mistakes. And I’d like the honor of managing your first political campaign.’
“He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Mister Gorski, I have no plans for tripping, and I don’t make mistakes. As for your becoming my James Farley, what’s the catch? Your politics and mine are as far apart as the poles. Why should you manage my political career?’
“‘Because, Tony,’ I answered, ‘I love this country and I love its people. And you’ve got it all to serve them well. I offer you my experience, Tony, and my backing. Free. No strings. Political or otherwise. I just want to become famous. People will point to me later and say, ‘There’s the bloke that coached the great Tony Caldwell in his first dive into the dirty pool of politics.’ So he allowed me to run him for county tax assessor—won going away. Then I ran him for district attorney—a landslide victory.”
“Help me, Steve, I’m on a merry-go-round. If you worship Tony Caldwell as God’s answer to American politics, why are you running against him for the state assembly job?”
“I don’t know about God, but Tony would have been my answer to politics if I could have… You asked me if I had ever taken Tony out fishing. Yes, once. The day he moved into his new job as district attorney, I stepped into his office and said, ‘Tony, to celebrate your first day in office, I think I’ll do something different and go fishing. Want to come along?’
“Again he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Steve!’—it had always been ‘Mister Gorski’ before—‘I’d make a bad patient. There’s nothing your psychiatric boat can do for me.’
“I laughed and said, ‘You wanna bet?’
“He thought a little, then rose from his chair. ‘Okay, let’s go. I might have a bit of advice for you, too.’
“Within two hours we were fly-casting in the rippling waters of that small but, as you well know, beautifully hidden, rarely fished Parker Lake. I keep a small rowboat stashed away in the willows at the lower end. Well, wouldn’t you know? Tony could cast a dry fly some sixty feet and make it land six inches from a log as gently as a fluff of down. Could even lay that fly right on the log, then flip it off into the water. Beautiful. With the disciplined ease of a champ. Like he did everything else. Well, when he began pulling in brookies faster than I, he put down his rod and asked, ‘Well, Boatcourt—I haven’t got all day. When does the treatment begin?’
“I laughed. But not too easily. It’s difficult to relax around wonder boy. ‘Laddie,’ I said, ‘the treatment—as you call it—began with your first fly cast, which you do superbly well. It consists of drifting around in a boat, letting the sun and the beauties of nature soak into you, casting a fly now and then, swigging a little bourbon when you feel like it, and maybe swapping a fish lie or two.’
“It’s a very old treatment. Some two thousand years before Christ, an Assyrian philosopher chiseled the prescription on a stone tablet: ‘The gods do not subtract from the allotted span of men’s lives the hours spent in fishing.’ As good advice today as it was four thousand years ago, don’t you think? Every day spent in fishing adds one more to your life. And of course you remember Isaac Walton’s saying that ‘Angling is somewhat like poetry.’ An art that was a ‘calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions…and that it begat habits of peace and patience in those that practiced it.’ And President Herbert Hoover paid a wry tribute to fishing: ‘It reduces the ego even of presidents…for all men are equal before fishes.’”
Boatcourt interrupted his soliloquy—he was really talking to himself more than to me—to knock the ashes from his pipe. We had just passed Crestview Lodge and had begun the short but steep climb up Deadman’s Grade (so called because an old-time mail carrier and his mule disappeared here in a blizzard while carrying the mail from Mammoth to Mono). “Well, Steve,” I said, irked at the suspense. “Was Wonder Boy impressed?” He heard my voice but not my words. Like a man reliving an evil day, he resumed his monologue.
“I offered Wonder Boy my pint of bourbon. Disregarding it, he reeled in his line, selected one of his classy little cigars from a classy monogrammed case, lit it with a classy gold lighter, and blew out its smoke with the classy superiority only Oxonians seem to master. Then shaking his head in disbelief, he said, ‘Mister Steve Gorski, you are a bloody disappointment. Of course, I’ve known all along that you had your heart set on becoming my political guru—my own spiritual Iago, so to speak. Well, even though years ago I had discovered and made a pact with my perfect guru, my own intellect, I thought it might prove amusing to see how old famed Boatcourt contrived his pitch. Mind you, I fully expected to be cloyed sick with sugary platitudes, and to be harangued on my need to practice that holy trinity of virtues known as pity, compassion, and humility—if I wished to rise in public affairs.’ This he said while carefully inserting his three-piece rod into its velvet sheath. ‘But really, Boatcourt, I looked forward to you laying it on with intellectual finesse, with style, but not with a trowel. So if you don’t mind rowing me ashore—’
“‘No, Tony. Not till you hear me out. Yes, I admit it. You’ve been on my mind, and perhaps even in my heart, ever since I handed you your diploma in Bishop ten years ago. And yes. It’s been my fondest hope, my constant dream, to become your political adviser. Because, Wonder Boy, whether by finesse or by trowel, it comes straight from the heart: You need me! Need me to tell you that it’s happened before. To warn you that without the mellowing graces of moral principles, men gifted with your superior capacities have become monsters! And it can happen to you!’
“Well, Frank, I touched a nerve. He shouted, ‘Monster? Moral principles?’ so loud they echoed back from the rocky banks. His contorted face jarred strangely with his elegance, as he opened up on me like a scourging Jeremiah. ‘Why you hypocritical old fart, you’re the monster. You’re the one that hoped the warm sunshine and the scenery would soften me up for your mealy mouthed chestnuts. You’re the impious one that doesn’t know that in all the beauties and wonders of nature there is not one jot, one tittle, or even one flick of your precious pity, compassion, or humility. Look around you, why don’t you, with the eyes of reason. Nature is evolution according to natural law; where the strong devour the weak, and the weak devour the weaker. A doe, a “Bambi,” the very symbol of peace and shy innocence, will, if it’s hungry enough, ingest the fetus of its own unborn fawn! Babbling brooks will, in flood-time, devastate everything in their path. Soft, beautiful, snowflakes, symbols of Christmas, which your John Muir so nauseously called “heaven’s snow flowers,” well, those “flowers” will compact into a glacier that will cut the heart out of the toughest granite that gets in its way.
“‘Look around you,’ he went on, ‘Strong trees shade out weaker trees, which shade out bushes, which shade out grasses. And will one strong tree ever say to another, “See that little old weak sapling fighting for sun—shall we give him some room and let him live?” Never. They kill it. That’s the great beauty of Nature: the realistic beauty of the justice and logic of its “survival of the fittest” law. And no compromises! No “The Values of Compromise” speeches at Bishop High School. And no hypocrisy in Nature’s Law.
“‘It gives you great pleasure to hook a fish by deceit, doesn’t it? And it’s fun to play it on a light line until its heart gives out. Oh, yes. It adds days to your life said some Assyrian jerk. But what the hell does it do to the fish? How many months or years does it subtract from its life? Pleasure for you, but murder for the fish. So where’s your pity, compassion, and humility? In your hypocritical dreams, you fake. You live in the jungle world of dog-eat-dog like the rest of us, but you’re too scared to admit it. I had a hunch you’d resurrect those Isaac Walton bromides on me, so I came prepared with one of his better ones—on the noble art of torture. Listen—’
“He pulled out a small notebook, from which he read me a quo
tation from The Compleat Angler on how to prepare a live frog for fish bait: ‘“Thus use your frog… Put your hook, I mean the arming wire, through (the frog’s) mouth, and out at his gills; and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming wire of your hook; or tie the frog’s leg, above the upper joint, to the arming wire; and in so doing, use him as though you loved him.” End of quote. Yes, sir. Pity, compassion, humility. There it is. Ask the frog.’
“Frank, I was speechless,” said Boatcourt, as we approached June Lake Junction, “and so sick in the stomach I grabbed the oars and rowed for shore. But he’s a killer, Frank. He wouldn’t let me up. ‘It’s hypocrites like you,’ he hammered, ‘that are really the prime cause of all our national and international troubles. Yes, hypocrites, appeasers, frightened by the rabble into play-acting and glorifying pity and charity instead of nailing them for what they really are—make-believe virtues, counter-evolution myths invented by weaklings to cut the strong down to their size. “Why do the wicked flourish?” has been the despairing lament of weaklings since they first equated strong with wicked.
“‘It’s the riff-raff rabble that’s wicked. They stoned the Prophets…murdered the Apostles…crucified the Christ. They assassinate the Gandhis and the Lincolns and the Kennedys. They multiply our crime statistics. When George Orwell wrote: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” you intellectual snobs howled with laughter. You didn’t realize he was impaling your bleeding hearts with a perfect squelch: “God did not create a Law of the Strong for Nature, and an opposite Law of the Weak for Men.” It is a sin, a reversal of God’s and Nature’s Law when the weak cower from the strong; when the parasites spit on the hands that feed them. And by all that’s holy, Boatcourt, I intend to reverse that trend, and put Nature’s Law back on the right track. I intend to emancipate our citizens from the chains of pity, compassion, and humility. And people will listen to me, Boatcourt! And I will be President of the United States before I’m forty-five! So—rich man, lawyer, art collector, do-gooder, fairy godmother, or what the hell ever you are—thanks for past favors, and goodbye! AND STAY THE HELL OUT OF MY WAY!’”
