by John Barth
Harrison was crushed. “It’s unjust!”
I smiled. “You know how these things are.”
“Aw, but what the hell!” He shook his head, rapped his feet impatiently, pursed his lips, sighed in spasms. I expected him to faint, but he held on tightly, though he could scarcely talk. The truth was, of course, that it is one thing—an easy thing—to give what Cardinal Newman calls “notional” assent to a proposition such as “There is no justice”; quite another and more difficult matter to give it “real” assent, to learn it stingingly, to the heart, through involvement. I remember hoping that Harrison was strong enough at least to be educated by his expensive loss.
I appealed the judgment of the Court.
“Just to leave the door open,” I explained. “I might think of something.”
That evening, before I left Baltimore with Harrison, we had dinner at Bill Froebel’s club, as his guests. I praised his inspiration, and he my logic-twisting. Harrison was morose, and although he drank heavily, he refused to join in the conversation. He couldn’t drive home. On the way, he would clutch my arm and groan, “Three million bucks, Toddy!”
I looked coldly at him.
“Hell, man,” he protested, “I know what you’re thinking, but you should know me better. I don’t want the money like another man might, just to go crazy on. Think what we could do on three million bucks, the three of us!”
It was the first time since Jane and I had resumed our affair in 1935 that Harrison had spoken again of “the three of us,” as he had used to do.
“A million apiece?” I asked. “Or a joint account?”
Harrison felt the bristles and flinched, and all the way home he felt constrained to pretend that the loss of three million dollars touched his philosophical heart not at all. I watched the effort from the corner of my eye, and marveled sadly at his disorientation.
Finally he broke down, as we were crossing the Choptank River bridge, pulling into Cambridge. The water was white-capped and cold-looking. Dead ahead, at the end of the boulevard that the bridge ran onto, Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, Inc., spread its red neon banner across the sky, and I smiled. The town lights ran in a flat string along the water’s edge, from Hambrooks Bar Lighthouse, flashing on the right, to the Macks’ house in East Cambridge, its ground-floor windows still lit, where Jane was waiting.
“I give up, Toddy,” he said tersely. “I’m no philosopher. I can’t say I wouldn’t have been happy at one time without the money—I did get myself disinherited a few times, you know. But once it came so close and seemed so sure—”
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Ah, Christ—Janie and I had plans.” He choked on his plans. “How the hell can I say it? I just don’t feel like living any more.”
“You what?” I sneered. “What’ll you do—hang yourself in the cellar? There’s a twentypenny nail right there, in a joist—you’ll find it. It’s already been broken in. And I know an undertaker who can turn black faces white again.”
“All right, all right,” Harrison said. “I don’t care what you think. I said I’m no philosopher.”
“Forget about philosophy,” I said. “You don’t lack philosophy; you lack guts. I suppose you’re going to ask me to marry Jane afterwards, so the two of us can remember you? You’re wallowing, Harrison. It’s swinish.”
“I’m weak, Toddy,” he said. “I can’t help it. Don’t think I’m not ashamed of it.”
“Then cut it out.”
“You can’t just cut it out,” Harrison protested, and I sensed that he was growing stronger. “I’m past believing that people can change.”
“You don’t want to cut it out.”
“Sure I do. It doesn’t matter whether I do or not; I can’t do it. I’m weak in some ways, Toddy. You don’t understand that.”
I flicked my cigarette out of the ventilator in a shower of sparks. We were off the bridge then, coasting along the dual highway in the Macks’ big automobile.
“I know what weakness is. But you make your own difficulties, Harrison. It’s hard because you never thought of it as easy. Listen. An act of will is the easiest thing there is—so easy it’s laughable how people make mountains of it.”
Harrison had by this time actually put aside the idea of his loss and was following the thought.
“You know better,” he said. “You can’t discount psychology.”
“I’m not saying anything about psychology,” I maintained. “Psychology doesn’t interest me. We act as if we could choose, and so we can, in effect. All you have to do to be strong is stop being weak.”
“Impossible.”
“You never tried it.”
Nor, alas, did he want to just then: I could see that plainly enough. We went into the house for a last drink. Jane had heard the news, of course, by telephone, and she cried awhile. I told her flatly that I had no sympathy for either of them while they behaved like that.
“What would you do, damn it!” she cried impatiently.
I laughed. “I’ve never lost three million bucks,” I said, “but I’ll tell you what I did once, after Dad hanged himself for losing a few thousand.”
I told them then, for the first time, the story of my adventures with Col. Henry Morton—which story, reader, I’ll pause to tell you, too, sooner or later, but not just now. I had decided that I didn’t want Harrison to brood over his money: he wasn’t ready to be strong of his own choosing yet, apparently, and so I opened the way toward turning him into a cynic, in emulation of me. He was ripe for it anyhow, it seemed to me, and even the one story might do the trick.
There’s little need for weakness, reader: you are freer, perhaps, than you’d be comfortable knowing.
As I left, Jane asked me: “You don’t have anything up your sleeve, Toddy?”
“I shan’t commit myself,” I said. “But Harrison might as well believe he’s out three million bucks, at least for a while.”
“What will he do?” she asked anxiously. “Did he say anything to you coming home?”
“He’ll either grow stronger or hang himself,” I predicted. “If he grows stronger it won’t matter to him whether he gets the money or not, really, and then I wouldn’t mind seeing him get it. If he kills himself over it, I’ll be just as glad he’s dead, frankly. Sissies make me uncomfortable. That goes for you, too. You’re not ready for three million bucks yet. You don’t deserve it.”
Then I left. I suppose if I ever lost three million dollars I’d holler like a stuck hero. Or perhaps not: one really can’t tell until the thing is upon one.
Well, the will case dropped out of the papers then; the Court of Appeals wouldn’t hear the appeal for at least six months, though I doubted that they’d wait much longer than that. In the meantime, Lizzie Mack, Harrison’s mother, couldn’t use up the old man’s estate (except for running expenses for the house), though it was temporarily hers.
I conducted, during the next few months, a rather intensive investigation into the characters of the appellate court judges—my findings confirmed my original estimate of the situation. As far as one with much information could guess, the decision would be four to three for Lizzie if the hearing were held when tentatively scheduled.
And if it weren’t? I considered that question, sitting in my office, staring at my staring-wall opposite the desk. What advantage was there in delay, if any? And how could one delay the appeal? The advantage was negative: that is, I was certain of defeat if there were no delay; if there were any, I might very possibly still be defeated, but there would be more time for something to turn up. So, I suppose, a condemned man snatches at a day’s reprieve, still hoping for a god on wires to fetch him off, and on the very gibbet, his neck roped, pleads eye-to-sky for the saving car. Who knows? Perhaps, hooded and dropped, he yet awaits in a second’s agony for God’s hands on him, till the noose cracks neck and hope in one sick snap. To be sure, ours was but a matter of money, but the principle was the same. By September the Loyalists might be winning,
or it might become dangerous over here to like the fascists, the way Hitler was behaving. By October Franco might win, and the poor crushed Loyalists be pitied, then when they were no longer a threat. Anything could happen to swing one more vote our way. November was an off-year election month: perhaps some party issue would ally John Forrester, the reactionary Democrat, with his more liberal colleagues. Perhaps—
I smiled, moved my feet off the desk, and went to the file. I looked up each of the judges, checking the length of their incumbencies and the number of years in office remaining to each.
“Ah, Freddie Barnes, you old whoremonger,” I cooed; “so you’re up to the post again this year, are you?”
That fact mattered little, since Roosevelt was going great guns and Barnes was a popular figure in Maryland: he’d be re-elected without difficulty. Of the other Democrats, Forrester had two years to go, Haddaway had four, and Stedman had six. I checked the Republicans: Abrams had two years yet; Stevens, six; Moore—
“Well, well, well!” I grinned. “You rascal, Rollo! Time to run again, eh?”
Mrs. Lake, at my request, spent the rest of her afternoon telephoning various Baltimorians for me, some eminent and some shady, some honest and some flexible, some friendly and some employable. By quitting time I was one of perhaps seven people who knew as a fact, beyond puny speculation, that Judge Rollo Moore, despite the backing of Maryland republicanism, was going to lose his coming election by a well-insured margin to Joseph Singer, who, bless his heart, was a chronic if somewhat fuzzy liberal—a man after Harrison’s own heart.
We would win, by God, almost certainly, if we could hold off the appeal until November! No, until January of 1938, after the new officeholders had been sworn in. Nearly a year! I racked my brain, in my thorough but unenthusiastic way, to think of some stalling maneuver, but of the few I could imagine, none was satisfactory. What I needed was something diverting, something tenuous and intricate, that I could go on complicating indefinitely, if need be. Nothing crude would do: my maneuver, whatever it was, must be subtle even if its motives were clear to the professional eye, or else I should lose the respect, and possibly the vote, of men like Judge Haddaway, for instance, whose decisions were more often influenced by such things as the symmetry and logical elegance of a brief than by more mundane considerations like the appellant’s politics.
Ah, nonsense, there was nothing. The months passed; it was spring; August and judgment would soon be upon us. Harrison sweated but kept silent. Jane wept a little, and sometimes failed to come to my room when I expected her, but kept silent. They were learning; they were strengthening, or else they were naïve enough to have some canine faith in me. At least they kept silent about it, though I often caught them looking at me intently, at supper or wherever. In fact, they often stared at me, and sometimes didn’t even notice when I noticed them.
As for me, I stared at my wall. I have in my office, opposite the desk, a fine staring-wall, a wall that I keep scrupulously clear for staring purposes, and I stared at it. I stared at it through February, March, April, and May, and through the first week of June, without reading on its empty surface a single idea.
Then, on the very hot June 17th of 1937, our Mrs. Lake, who is as a rule a model of decorum, came sweating decorously into my office with a paper cup of iced coffee for me, set it decorously on my desk, accepted my thanks, dropped a handkerchief on the floor as she turned to leave, bent decorously down to retrieve it, and most undaintily—oh, most indecorously,—broke wind, virtually in my coffee.
“Oh, excuse me!” she gasped, and blushed, and fled. But ah, the fart hung heavy in the humid air, long past the lady’s flight. It hung, it lolled, it wisped; it miscegenated with the smoke of my cigar, caressed the beading oil on the skin of my nose, lay obscenely on the flat of my desk, among my briefs and papers. It was everywhere, but I had learned, even then, to live with nature and my fellow animals. I didn’t flinch; I didn’t move. Through its dense invisible presence I regarded my oracular wall, and this time fruitfully.
“By God, now!” I cried.
I heard a small sound in the outer office.
“Mrs. Lake!” I rushed to my door. “Where’s all the crap?”
“Oh, Mr. Andrews!” she wailed, and buried her face in her arms. Harry Bishop and Jimmy Andrews peered skeptically from their doorways.
“No!” I said, patting Mrs. Lake furiously on the head. “No, I mean old man Mack’s pickle jars. Where’ve they been all this time? Where does Lizzie keep them?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Lake sniffed, wiping her eyes.
“What was it?” I hurried back to my file, began pushing things around, and finally found the inventory of the Mack estate. “One hundred twenty-nine bottles of it, in the wine cellar!”
“Well,” remarked Mr. Bishop, and returned to his work. Jimmy Andrews hung around to see what was up.
“Call ’Stacia,” I said to Mrs. Lake. “No, hell no, don’t. I’ll run up to Baltimore.” I looked at my watch. “Will you run me to the bus, Jim? I bet I can catch the four o’clock.”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. He drove insanely; I made the bus with two minutes to spare, and was soon off to Baltimore.
Eustacia Callader was an old Negro servant in the Mack household, whom I’d met during the course of the litigation. She had virtually raised Harrison Junior and was quietly on our side in the contest over the estate, though she grasped little of the controversy. She it was whom I sought now. Arriving in Baltimore four hours later, I stopped in a drugstore to buy envelopes and stamps, and then took a taxi out to Ruxton, getting out at the driveway of the Mack house. The sun had just set, and I actually hid myself on the grounds in the rear of the house—it was all quite theatrical—and waited, I suppose, for ’Stacia to come out of the kitchen for something. An unlikely plan, but then my whole scheme, my suspicion, was unlikely: when the great Negro woman did, as a matter of fact, come out just forty-five minutes later, en route to the garbage cans down by the big garage, I took her appearance as a good omen. Following her out of earshot of the house, I approached her.
“Lord ’a mercy, Mister Andrews!” she chuckled enormously. “What y’all doin’ up here? Come see Lizzie?”
“ ’Stacia, listen,” I whispered urgently. “I’ve got a five-buck question.” I gave her the five, and she giggled helplessly.
“Where does Lizzie keep the old man’s fertilizer?” I asked. “Is it still in the wine cellar?”
“De fertilize’?” ’Stacia chortled. “What fertilize’?” She laughed so hard that I knew she didn’t understand.
“The crap, ’Stacia,” I demanded. “How does Lizzie feel about all those bottles of crap?”
“Oh, dat’s what you mean de fertilize’!”
“A hundred and twenty-nine jars of it,” I said. “Used to be in the wine cellar. Are they still there?”
When ’Stacia regained control of her risibility, she admitted that she didn’t know, but she promised to find out and tell me. I gave her a buss on the cheek and took up lodgings in a clump of forsythia bushes near the garbage cans, while ’Stacia returned to the house to question the other servants who lived in. I was prepared, if it should prove necessary, to bribe somebody heavily to destroy those pickle jars for me secretly, but I didn’t look forward to taking that step, since it opened the way for blackmail. Still, it seemed highly unlikely to me that Mrs. Mack had ordered them removed herself, although it was exactly that possibility which had occurred to me on the occasion of Mrs. Lake’s faux pas.
I was pleasantly surprised, then, when three hours later—it was after midnight—’Stacia lumbered back with the announcement that though the bottles were indeed still in the wine cellar, Mrs. Mack had observed last week to R. J. Collier, the gimpy, dusty old fellow who tended the gardens, that the seals on the jars were apparently not airtight, and had mentioned the possibility of someday disposing of the collection. Indeed, ’Stacia verified that with the coming of hot weather the jars had begun to smell notice
ably, and that the odor was creeping up occasionally to the ground floor. Two days before, R. J. Collier had taken it upon himself to pile the whole stack into the far corner of the wine cellar and to cover it with a wet tarpaulin, hoping thereby to check the bouquet, but his experiment had yielded no apparent results. Mrs. Mack was growing annoyed. R. J. Collier had, that very day, broached the suggestion that his late employer’s singular remains be put to work around the flower gardens—the zinnia beds, especially, could use the nourishment, he declared. All the servants considered the suggestion more touching than tactless, and I, too, sensed a seed of poetry in the gardener’s practicality. But Lizzie had remained noncommittal.
“Listen, ’Stacia,” I said, “you mustn’t say a word about the pickle jars, or about me being here. I’m going to give you ten dollars, honey—”
“Hoo, Mister Andrews!”
“—here, ten bucks. Now I want you to keep a close watch on those jars. Make sure you know everything that Liz or R. J. Collier or anybody else does to them. Look. I’m giving you all these envelopes with stamps on them. They’re addressed to me, so keep them hidden, and there’s paper inside. Now, then, every time even one of those bottles is moved from where it is now, you write to me and tell me. Understand?”
’Stacia giggled and shook and grunted, but I was fairly sure she understood.
“For Christ’s sake don’t say a word,” I cautioned her again. “If everything turns out right, Harrison will give you a brand new car. A yellow roadster, he’ll buy you. Okay?”
’Stacia could scarcely stand for laughing. But she stuck the envelopes deep between her endless bosoms and rumbled off to the house, shaking her head at my derangement. I walked out to the road and hiked two miles to a telephone. Next day I was back in my office, smoking cigars and staring at my wall. I didn’t bother to tell Harrison anything about my trip—perhaps nothing would come of it after all.
