by W. T. Tyler
“Not much. Stop worrying about it.”
“What do you expect me to do? Besides, he doesn’t even have this political job nailed down yet.”
“I’d wait, then.” He turned up the ramp and across Roosevelt Bridge.
“Wait for what? Until he gets here and sticks me in some blintzy place I can’t live in?”
She didn’t speak again until he stopped the car in the small circular drive in front of her hotel. “The price she’s asking is too goddamned much,” she said. “You know it and I know it, so let’s talk sensibly for a change and stop screwing around. Park it and let’s have a drink. Let’s work it out.”
A doorman came to hold open the front door.
“Matthews will be back from Florida next week. Why don’t you wait and talk to him?”
“I can’t wait. Artie’s coming this weekend.”
“I wish I could help you, but there’s nothing I can do. The price won’t come down. I’ve talked to her lawyer about it, asked him to talk to you, but they won’t budge, none of them.”
“That’s on the level, you’re not hustling me?”
“On the level.”
She sat for a moment on the edge of the seat, ignoring the doorman. “All right,” she said. “I’ll think about it tonight, call you in the morning, maybe even tonight.”
He watched her stalk toward the glass doors, her head thrown back, remembering again the dancer from East Baltimore Street who’d shared his table and his nights when he was a greenhorn draftee just out of college, engaged to a shy young senior at Sweetbriar.
Too long ago, he remembered. For sixteen weeks that winter and spring, she’d taught him his life. Now he’d forgotten her name.
3.
Short and plump, with thinning brown hair, lightly oiled, and a seamless face chubby with baby fat, Shyrock Wooster prowled the fringes of the crowd gathered that autumn evening in the main reception room of the New Congress Coalition, one of Senator Bob Combs’s mail order foundations. He wore a dark-blue gabardine suit, and blue-and-white-striped silk tie, and lustrous mahogany-colored shoes with heel taps. Carried in his right hand was a glass of Beaujolais disguised as cranberry juice. The fat little finger of the fat little hand that held it was daintily elevated, demitasse style, and decorated by a ruby pinkie ring.
What he saw, he approved. The large parquet-floored room in the new Georgian building was similar in many ways to the East Room of the White House, visited that day by many of the out-of-town guests whose private tour Wooster had arranged. The room was elegantly furnished, the chandelier was crystal, the draped windows were tall and imposing, the ceiling medallions were reminiscent of the Tidewater aristocracy, and the only black faces in evidence belonged to the service and housekeeping staff, who, in white coats similar to those of the White House mess, were serving ginger-ale-and-cranberry punch. A small bourbon bar was discreetly located down a small corridor to the rear, but its presence wasn’t publicized. Those South Carolinians who preferred bourbon and branch water could find their own way.
Nearly a hundred guests were present, not all of them members of or subscribers to the New Congress Coalition but all of them shareholders in spirit to Senator Bob Combs’s congregations of the Moral Majority. Two groups were present, one a chamber of commerce tour from one of the larger South Carolina cities, and the other a group of touring bankers, insurance agents, real estate salesmen, and retailers from New Hope, a suburban community on the fringes of South Carolina’s largest city. Invited to share a few refreshments and shake hands with the senator himself, they were what Shyrock Wooster, Combs’s political strategist and senior aide, would have called an “ecumenical” gathering. Since “liberal” was a word Wooster had sullied far too often to ever reclaim for his own brand of folksy pragmatism, “ecumenical” was the word he’d coined in his dogeared strategy notebook when he’d conceived of a group slightly to the left of right-wing zealotry that might be organized as yet another political action foundation to help Combs retire his campaign debts and attract more funding for the battles ahead. The New Congress Coalition was the result.
“What you got here,” he’d told Combs at the time, “is your basic Presbyterian and Episcopalian, maybe a few white-shoe Catholics, the golf-playing kind, maybe a few upwardly mobile Baptists in social transition. What I mean is, it’s more your chamber of commerce and country club crowd, the kind you see down in the gallery at the Masters in April.”
Moral Minutemen, on the other hand, another merchandising outlet for Bob Combs’s mail order politics, was made up almost wholly of religious fundamentalists, Methodists and Baptists for the most part, generally rural, like the early catalogue patrons of Sears Roebuck. At a Moral Minutemen reception a week earlier, held in a smaller, less ostentatious building on Capitol Hill, the refreshments had consisted of nothing more elevating than orangeade, hard cider, and prune juice. “Good for moral constipation,” a Washington Post photographer had cracked when he’d seen the prune juice. “Better than the liberal runs,” Wooster had thought aloud five minutes later, but by the time he’d run to the front foyer to deliver his riposte, the photographer had vanished.
The guests Wooster now saw about him in the New Congress Coalition reception room—some smoking, many with bourbon and water—wouldn’t have felt at ease in that kind of tabernacle grimness, no more than the iron-britches Moral Minutemen fundamentalists would have felt at home in the opulent Georgian setting of the NCC. Yet the goals were identical: ban legalized abortion, busing, welfare government, sex education, pornography, and permissiveness; bring back prayer to the public schools, discipline to the budget, laissez-faire to the marketplace, tax exemptions to segregated Christian schools, and superiority to the national defense. If all these things were done, then the moral fiber of the nation would be in large part restored and the country would again resemble that city on the hill sought by the founding fathers: New Hope, South Carolina.
To small groups of the Moral Minutemen, Shy Wooster might say, voice lowered to that funeral parlor unction he adopted in moments of moral gravity: “Basically, what we’re talking about is faith in Jesus Christ, our Savior, as opposed to the Satans of intellectual confusion that’re running loose these days and the Babylon of Big Gov’nment they built up. They’re whisperin’ in your ears these days, folks, everywhere you turn, same as in the Garden back yonder, at the beginning of time.”
To a group of knit-suit Presbyterians from the New Congress Coalition, the same message would emerge more urbanely, delivered in Wooster’s chamber of commerce voice: “Basically, what it comes down to, friends, is faith in God, Country, and Free Enterprise as opposed to the polytheism of secular humanism you see everywhere you go these days, from Big Government in Wash’n’ton to pornography in the public schools. If we could just handle our national problems the way you people down in New Hope handle yours, we wouldn’t be in all this mess we’re in.…”
A soft Southern voice called to him and he turned back across the parquet floor to join a group of women standing and talking together. All but one were middle-aged. The exception was a plump, dowdy, sharp-eyed younger woman in her middle thirties, who was drinking bourbon. Next to her was a short lady in a blue-flowered dress who’d been in charge of the entertainment for the chamber of commerce delegation.
“You all enjoying yourselves this evening?” he asked.
“Indeed we are and we do thank you for it. It’s a lovely reception.”
“How was your White House tour? Everything fine?”
“Indeed it was,” said the older woman.
Although Shy Wooster still had the scrubbed antiseptic look of a University of South Carolina or Clemson undergraduate—he’d attended both schools and graduated from neither—a vein of Old Testament carnality ran through that porcine wholesomeness like a strip of lean through a flank of salt pork. He preferred the healthy, lusty blond cheerleader type, like those he’d hankered after so miserably during his undergraduate days, a plump freshman
sitting high in the nosebleed section of the bleachers, unattractive, unpopular, unpledged, and unscrewed. He’d left college after two years with his virginity intact. In time, he learned to settle for less, like his first wife, a legislative secretary at the state capitol with an appetite as robust as his. He’d gotten her into bed on their second date, but a month after their quick marriage, he’d discovered that the staffs of at least three legislative committees had been there too, including one red-eared rube from the piny woods who had the habit of winking lewdly at Shy Wooster on the morning elevator during those first months of marriage. They were divorced after less than two years, but Wooster had learned his lesson well. “Never get your meat where you get your potatoes,” a nimble bachelor senator had told him one weekend at his rural hunting camp, spreading his trousers carefully out beneath his mattress. His white hairless legs were as scrawny as a rooster’s, his hair was thin and silver, but his gymnastics that night on the front room couch with a woman from down the road had led Wooster and his partner to take refuge on the kitchen floor. After a few early lapses in Washington and overseas with Senator Combs, Wooster had learned to be more discreet.
He had seen little at the reception that evening to tempt him.
“We were very impressed with what the senator had to say this afternoon,” offered a gray-haired woman who’d been in the Senate gallery that day. “He had some very interesting things to say.”
“Doesn’t he always,” added the sharp-eyed woman. Her dark hair was teased out in a riot of unkempt curls. Wooster, who had a quick eye for such things—the libber’s hair, the lack of make-up, and the aggressive posture—tried to ignore her.
“School prayer is something we all feel real strong about,” the older woman continued.
“I sure am glad to hear that,” Wooster responded.
“I should say so,” put in the oldest of the group. She, too, had been in the gallery. “He had all the answers right there on the top of his tongue.”
“It’s the same old speech, he’s given it before,” said the younger woman. “What’d someone once say? ‘Give Bob Combs a mouthful of birdseed and he’d whistle a chicken hawk off a ten-pound rooster.’”
“I’ve never heard that particular line,” Wooster said.
“You have now. Ten dollars and it’s yours.”
“Sally wrote it,” a woman explained. “Sally’s the tour scribe. She’s going to do an article on our trip for the chamber of commerce magazine, maybe even the paper.”
“Is that right,” Wooster said. “Well, I declare.”
“Maybe I should be talking to you,” the woman said. “Where exactly do you fit in, I mean in the hierarchy?”
“I’m just a staff aide, you might say.”
“Oh, Mr. Wooster’s much more than that. He arranged the White House passes.”
“Maybe I should be talking to you, then,” the young woman persisted.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not much for giving interviews.”
“Come on, I wouldn’t be too hard on you.”
Wooster chuckled. “That’s what they all say.”
“Say I’m an unwed mother. Take that for a sample. What is Bob Combs going to do for me?”
“Find you a preacher,” Wooster said, winking at an older woman. “She’s some journalist, isn’t she? Comes right at you with her knife out. That’s what we like to see. Show ’em a little jujitsu of our own.”
“Sally went to Chapel Hill. She was a journalism major.”
“Well, I declare,” Wooster repeated, his smile dimming as he understood a little better the source of her viciousness.
“You know Chapel Hill?” she asked. Across the room, the assembled guests had begun to clear the floor in front of Senator Combs, who was preparing himself to offer a few words of welcome.
“You could say I’ve been there,” Shy Wooster admitted.
His first foray to Chapel Hill had been a humiliating one. His first year at Clemson, he’d taken the bus to Chapel Hill to see the annual Clem-son-North Carolina football game. It was homecoming for the Tar Heels and, as was customary during those years, the Clemson Tigers had been crushed on the football field. Shy Wooster had spent an hour or so after the game rubbernecking about the campus, an orange freshman beanie on his head, two inches of gaudy orange sock showing below his chino trousers. Returning alone through the autumn twilight to the bus station for the long trip back to South Carolina, he’d been overtaken by a carful of drunken Chapel Hill fraternity brothers returning from a victory beer bust. They had with them a libation intended for the Clemson band bus, but that target had been denied them by the campus police. They’d discovered Shyrock Wooster instead. They cornered him under a Honey-Krust bread sign, treated him to a vigorous scalp massage, and then shampooed his head with two bottles of Skrip blue ink. So Shy Wooster had returned to the scrub country of South Carolina that night, sitting alone at the rear of the bus, a newly baptized Tar Heel, blue-faced and blue-scalped, his damp eyes leaking blue tears, another South Carolina hayseed victimized by the tweedy cosmopolites of Chapel Hill’s Tudor-style fraternity row.
He knew what these people wanted—not only victory but humiliation. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, like the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the Washington Post, the desk officers at the State Department, or the subcommittees on foreign relations on the Hill, was the instrument of everything betrayed in his native region and in the country at large, a collection of carpetbagging intellectuals and effete patricians in pin-striped suits or tweedy jackets with elbow patches, prattling on in their drawling nasal voices about everything under the sun except what was good for the country. Their devouring rationalism had first betrayed the small-town ethos, that sense of community from which the nation had sprung, and now had moved on to corrupt the national fiber.
Looking at this frazzle-headed woman with the arrogant smile, the condescending quip, and the viper eyes, Shy Wooster knew she was his enemy. He even knew the slur she was now preparing in her quick little mind. “How’d you know I was a Clemson man?” asked the old joke describing the meeting of two Carolinians at the Cosmos Club in Washington. Shy Wooster had heard it three times during his first year on the Hill. “Easy,” replied the suave Chapel Hill graduate, hoisting his brandy and soda as the Clemson grad lifted his bourbon and Coke. “I saw your class ring when you were picking your nose.”
“Well, it’s a mighty fine school, Chapel Hill,” Shy Wooster said as the familiar voice of Senator Bob Combs lifted from across the room. The other ladies had moved in his direction, but the younger woman had lingered behind.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any pull with any of those Senate committees, do you?” she asked. “I’ve been thinking about finding a job here.”
“Well, I just might,” he admitted, admiring her bulky sweater beneath the small jacket. “What might be your particular line of endeavor?”
“You must write the senator’s speeches,” she said, eyes lifted toward Combs. “I haven’t heard that line in years. I’ll bet you used to sell Fuller brushes. Political science, part-time journalism, like I’m doing now.”
Up yours, sister, he thought tardily as the barbs quivered home. “Try the Washington Post,” he offered instead.
The irony escaped her, as his quips usually did with the literati. The only music they heard was their own. “I wouldn’t have a prayer,” she said. “That’s why I was thinking of the Hill. I wrote them some letters last year, through the local congressman, but I didn’t hear squat. What kind of pull do you have?” She was standing on tiptoes, head lifted toward Bob Combs, whose voice was barely audible. “Jesus, don’t tell me he’s going to start that again. How many times has he given that speech, anyway?”
“The folks I know over on the Hill wouldn’t much appreciate that kind of remark,” he said, smiling.
“What’s wrong—don’t you know any Democrats?”
Wooster chuckled. “Sugar, lemme tell you some
thing. Handing you over to the Democrats would be like giving your own mugger a Saturday night special. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.”
“Don’t worry, I can go either way.”
He chuckled again. “I’ll bet you can.” An English transvestite he’d met in a smoky Soho nightclub during his first trip to London had told him the same thing. Wooster had thought he was in a singles bar. “You sure got spunk, I’ll say that for you. That’s what it takes to get ahead in this town.”
“I need the experience; I’d work anywhere. I’m in a rut working part-time for this chamber of commerce rag.”
“I know what you mean.” He leaned closer and said softly, “Only fast lanes down there are on the track over at Darlington.” She didn’t retreat.
“What about Combs’s staff? Doesn’t he need someone who could write fast copy?” They were quite close, moved together by the guests behind them who were pressing toward Senator Combs’s mumbled valedictory.
“Only trouble is he’s got them standing in line,” said Wooster, encouraged. “There’s an awful lot of folks that want to go to work for Senator Bob Combs.” But that was only part of Wooster’s problem. After Wooster’s escapades in Athens and Rome had drawn State Department notice, a State security officer had had a quiet confidential talk with the senator and Shy Wooster had been duly warned. Now when Wooster helped young women find Hill employment, he scattered his wares in the various office buildings, caching them about squirrel-like, where they wouldn’t be obvious to the predators about.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” she responded. He leaned forward again, subjecting her to the second Shy Wooster shrink test. If a woman held her ground and didn’t flinch from physical contact, whether it was their shoulders touching, or his face near her ear, close enough to brush her hair, she was the kind he might put a third move on. She didn’t budge, but instead seemed drawn to the contents of his wineglass. She leaned down and sniffed it, then dipped her finger in the contents. “You hypocrite,” she said. “That’s not cranberry juice, it’s wine.”
