by W. T. Tyler
Painters, carpenters, and electricians appeared that week at the old Victorian complex in Foggy Bottom. Refurbishing the offices in the main building had been Angus McVey’s idea, come to him that Tuesday evening over drinks at Ed Donlon’s house after Haven Wilson told him he was willing to take a closer look at the Center’s problems and submit his recommendations for its reorganization, if that was necessary. He also said that he’d need help and that he’d asked Nick Straus to assist him, not on a full-time basis, since that was impossible at present, but as a consultant. Ed Donlon had been surprised but had held his peace. McVey was agreeable to anything. Wilson proposed a sixty-day study, McVey six months, and Ed Donlon had offered the compromise, a ninety-day contract.
The subject of a permanent director was also discussed and Wilson told them he’d begin the search and make the recommendations in his final report. Wilson had Nick Straus in mind; Donlon, Haven Wilson; and McVey? It was difficult to tell. They had dinner at the Cosmos Club and afterward toured the deserted Center, accompanied by Fletcher. McVey, who’d avoided the Center for almost a year—since Foster’s stewardship, he’d admitted: the man made him profoundly uncomfortable—was dismayed by the grimness of the offices in the late evening cold.
The Center’s architect appeared a day later and the painters, carpenters, and electricians soon followed.
Wilson began at the Center the same week, installed in a small office behind the director’s suite, which was converted into a conference room. There, all the various Center committees held their meetings, which Wilson attended as a silent observer, and there, too, he met each morning with individual members of the Center staff, inquiring about projects, schedules, and organization, as well as soliciting ideas. His afternoons were usually devoted to organizing his morning notes, to dictation, and, as the weeks continued, to interviewing candidates for the directorship.
His meetings with the various specialists of the thalamus group left him uneasy. He knew little about the behavioral sciences and decided he should learn more. The relevance of some of the special studies the Center was conducting for the Institute of Health and a few other government agencies escaped him completely.
“Like much that goes on in Washington, you have to take it on faith,” Dr. Foster advised him one morning as they were discussing it.
“That really doesn’t answer the question, does it?” Wilson had said. “The fact is, the Center, as Angus McVey conceived it, is now doing things that have absolutely no relationship to its original purpose.”
“The condition of modern life,” Foster said sorrowfully.
“Sorry?”
“The condition of modern life,” he continued, “is to live with questions so complex that the questions are as obscure as the answers. Life lives on the margins.” He’d smiled, pleased with his aphorism, but Wilson had grown tired of Dr. Foster’s evasive tautologies. Foster had returned to his old office in the building across the quadrangle and had left behind a cabinet drawer filled with unresolved administrative problems, including the coming year’s budget, appointments of fellows, and three folders of unanswered correspondence. Wilson had sat him down one morning and gone through the folders item by item, suggesting how Dr. Foster, still the acting director, was to respond. By the end of the second week, those daily administrative sessions with Foster had become part of his routine.
“Simplicity,” Nick Straus had counseled. He’d taken up evening residence in a dark office across the hall from the director’s suite. Once set aside for Angus McVey’s use, it hadn’t been occupied for over a year. A large oak desk sat at the rear of the room, in front of a wall of empty bookshelves. At the other end of the faded Persian carpet was an arrangement of leather chairs grouped about a gas-fired hearth. In the corner behind the desk was a pair of combination safes, now filled with the confidential and secret material Nick had transferred from his house in McLean. Wilson had a vague idea of what they contained, but asked no questions. Nick still clung perilously to his job with the DIA special watch, waiting for the ax to fall. He hadn’t yet worked out a strategy for bringing to public attention what conscience demanded of him, and Wilson, besieged by other problems, left him to grapple with it alone. Nick’s advice on the Center was straightforward enough—simplicity. Haven Wilson should cut boldly through the entanglements that obscured the Center’s activity—including the dismissal of the entire thalamus group—and return it to its original purpose.
Rita Kramer called Wilson unexpectedly one dark, windy afternoon, a curious reprieve.
She was waiting for him near the front entrance to the Watergate Hotel, standing out of the raw wind, shoulders hunched, knees together the way some women stand when they’re cold and miserable.
“You sure took your time,” she said, her jaw stiff, her watering eyes leaking a shadow of mascara down her cold cheeks. “I’m freezing. Which way?”
“There’s a coffee shop over there,” he told her, looking down the street toward the familiar orange roof of the motor hotel. They didn’t speak as they walked, heads averted from the punishing wind. He had no idea what she wanted to talk about. Inside, she disappeared into the powder room while he got coffee from the serving line. Her make-up was intact when she joined him at a booth in the rear.
“Artie wants to talk to you,” she said as she opened her purse and took out her cigarette case. “He’s going back to L.A. for a few days and he wants to talk to you. He said something about a rain check.”
“Matthews is back now.”
“So I heard. He doesn’t want to talk about real estate.”
“What’s he want to talk about?”
“Just talk.” She lit the cigarette and studied him, disappointed. “Try not to look so enthusiastic.”
“The last time I talked to him, it didn’t make much sense.”
“Don’t be a nebbish.”
He had nothing to say, and so they sat in silence, looked disapprovingly at each other. “Don’t be so thin-skinned,” she said finally.
“I’ll try,” he said.
“Maybe he’s not your kind—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, but I know what you’re thinking. Maybe he fractures the king’s English, maybe he’s a little hard to take sometimes, but give him a chance. What do you want me to do—turn him off?”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“I wanted to make sure you didn’t brush him off if he called, like everyone else seems to be doing these days.” A couple seated nearby arose and her eyes followed them. “I’ve had it with this place. Maybe you can make sense of it; I can’t.”
“What’s the problem?”
“A lot of things. This political appointment, for one thing. It’s not getting anyplace.” She turned to look out the window at the gray figures passing along the sidewalk, bundled up against the cold. “Edelman told me you were supposed to get some big job at the Justice Department if the Democrats won.”
“It was a possibility, nothing definite.”
“So when it didn’t work out, you just walked away.”
“I’d been thinking about it for some time.”
“Just walked out and didn’t let them tear you to pieces. It must have been pretty hard. I know how some things can tear you up like that.” She waited for his reaction, but he said nothing, still watching her. “You don’t make it very easy, do you? Always in the driver’s seat. Edelman says you’ve got a lot of contacts in this town.”
“He does too, probably.”
“Artie doesn’t trust him; not these other amateur political flacks he’s been talking to, either.”
“Is that what he wants to talk about?”
“Maybe. He thinks you showed a little class that day at Grace Ramsey’s house.”
“I thought I was highly pissed.”
“Stop making fun of him.”
“That’s what my youngest son used to say, ‘highly pissed.’ That was when he was a high school freshman. His wo
rd for moral outrage. He lived in a kind of three-tone universe those years. I wasn’t making fun of anyone.”
She stubbed out the cigarette emphatically and then picked up her purse and gloves. “I can see you’ve got other things on your mind.”
“If he wants to talk, I’ll talk to him.”
“How about tomorrow night, stopping by for drinks?”
“All right,” he answered after a minute, but then hesitated, as if he finally understood her purpose. “What do you want me to tell him?”
“Stop trying to read my mind,” she replied coolly.
“You said that before,” he recalled. “Are you ever the same person two days in a row?” He slid out from behind the table and stood up.
She’d started to get up too, but now hesitated. She gave the question some thought, her eyes lifted toward him, as if no one had ever asked before. “No,” she decided finally, rising. “Who can afford to be?”
3.
To Haven Wilson, the voices of the three Californians held the querulousness of in-laws shut up too long together in the same room. He’d begun to regret he’d come.
“I appreciate what you done,” mumbled Artie Kramer, resuming his monologue, “handing back that check like you did. Times like this, it wasn’t easy. What are you doing?” He looked up from the deep couch where he was reclining, shoes off, toward Chuckie Savant, who was idly twisting the dial of the radio on the table beside him.
“Changing the station. I got tired of that disco.”
“It wasn’t disco, it was classy music. Turn it back.”
“I thought you weren’t listening.”
“Sure I was listening. Wasn’t I listening?” he asked Wilson. “Sure I was listening. My foot was tapping. Didn’t you see my foot tapping?”
“You got your shoes off.”
“So what if I got my shoes off. Am I a tap dancer, I gotta have my shoes on when I listen to music? Hey, babe,” he called to his wife, just entering, from the kitchenette of the hotel suite with a plate of hors d’oeuvres. “What’s the name of that black singer I go for, the one that plays the piano?”
“Roberta Flack,” said Rita Kramer, looking at Haven Wilson. “Are you ready for a drink?”
“Yeah, Roberta Flack. Jesus, can that broad sing. She was singing now and Chuckie turned it off, the stoop. Sure Wilson’s ready for a drink. Bring him a piña colada.”
“He doesn’t drink piña coladas.”
“Anything’s fine,” Wilson said. “Beer will do.”
“How do you know what he drinks?” Artie said. “Sure he drinks piña coladas. How do you know he doesn’t?”
“He’s not the type.”
“You think it’s a pansy drink because your faggot hairdresser goes for it?”
“He’s not a faggot and he drinks wine these days, like me.”
“Yeah, white wine. That’s all you see these days,” Artie said. “Take a doll to lunch and what’s she want? White wine. That or that fancy soda water, that French stuff. That’s the trendy drink, even in L.A., just like that broad last week. Sure, white wine—”
“Like what broad last week?” Rita asked.
“Just a figure of speech.”
“Yeah, what kind of figure, what kind of speech?”
“Nothing, O.K.? Just nothing, see? Go get the man his cold beer.”
“What’s he talking about, Chuckie?” she asked, turning.
“Nothing!” Kramer said, rising from the cushion. “Just a figure of speech, like I said, so climb off my back, where you been all week.” She turned abruptly and went back to the kitchen. “Give him some imported stuff, O.K.?” he called after her. “The stuff Franconi got.” He sank back again. “Where the shit was I?”
“You started to say something about Kansas.”
Chuckie Savant got up and silently crossed the carpet toward the rear kitchen. “Yeah, Kansas,” Kramer said, his eyes following Savant. “A lotta people don’t understand me, figure me all wrong. What they don’t understand is the way I think, how I grew up. It wasn’t in Kansas.” He stopped, listening to the voices from the kitchen, Chuckie Savant’s first and then his wife’s, angry and loud. The kitchen door closed violently and Kramer put his head back against the couch, looking at the ceiling. His coat had been cast aside, like his shoes, and his tie was loosened. The room was in shadows and the cones of lampshades at each end of the couch drew concentric shadows against the recessed ceiling. Through the gauze of drape at the windows, the lights of Washington flickered within the darkness. “It’s a nice suite,” Kramer said after a minute, “real class. A friend of mine leased it last January. Pete’s a beautiful guy, Pete Rathbone. He’s down in Acapulco for a month, told me to use it while I get this political job lined up. He spends a lotta time in Washington. You heard of him?”
“I think so,” Wilson said. Peter Rathbone was a Washington lawyer and PR man who’d served under the Nixon administration and had settled on the West Coast.
The kitchen door opened and Chuckie Savant returned with a beer and a glass for Wilson. “What’d she say?” Kramer asked as Savant sat down to put on his shoes.
“She’s hot. What’d you say that for, taking a broad to lunch last week?”
“It’s my problem, O.K.? Don’t put your nose in.”
“I think I’ll go downstairs,” Savant grumbled, “let you guys talk.”
“I gotta wait here for my L.A. call,” Kramer said. “Did she ask who it was?”
“She said she didn’t give a shit anymore,” Savant said as he pulled on his coat. “See you later.”
Artie Kramer watched the door close. “She’ll be O.K.,” he said after a minute. “What this is all about is I know a doll who runs this ad agency in L.A., so I take her to lunch. We do business that way, but Rita gets hot. I give her a little ad business, but it’s just peanuts and she’s got two kids to support, so I buy her lunch. A few other dolls like that, but Rita still gets hot. You married?”
“Yes, I’m married.”
“Yeah, well, you know how it is, then.” Kramer sat back, listening for sounds from the kitchen. “That’s the reason I asked you about Kansas, if you ever been there,” he resumed again, pulling a cigar from his pocket. “The reason I know about Kansas is because I grew up in Brooklyn, never mind where. The worst, the pits, just a jungle, see—a fucking jungle. Where do you come from? You talk a little funny. Not funny; different.”
“A little town down in Virginia.”
“That’s what I figured A nice place, I’ll bet. Guys like you don’t know. Maybe you being a fed once, maybe you know, but not most of them. Like this Pete Rathbone; a beautiful guy, but he don’t know. Guys will tell you, ‘That goddamn Artie Kramer’s a paranoid,’ but they don’t know, either. It was just a jungle, which is maybe why I come on strong to a lotta people. Kids have playgrounds now—swings, jungle gyms, backyard pools. Where I grew up was just the goddamn jungle without the gym, you know what I mean? I mean, you’d be surprised by a lotta people I meet that think they know everything there is to know about this country—Yosemite, Yellowstone, Big Sur, all those places. A guy who’s lived in California all his life, what’s he know? If you don’t know Brooklyn—only now it’d be the South Bronx or Harlem, maybe—you don’t know shit about this country. You ever been to Brooklyn?”
“Once or twice,” Wilson said.
“Well, you gotta grow up there to know what I mean. When you’re a kid, a shrimp like I was in a place like that, you grow up scared. In your apartment, the streets, in school, in your own goddamn bed. When I was eight, nine, there was this widow lived across the hall, an Italian. She had a son who’d been in the slammer, up at Sing Sing. So he came back and I used to hear them talking about him, this Ferruci guy. ‘The Sing Sing Canary’ was what they called him, but I was eight or nine and it didn’t mean shit to me. So one day he brought home this washing machine for his old lady. This was about two weeks after he got out of Sing SIng. It was one of those wringer types, you know? It�
�s got an arm that swings around and it rolls around the kitchen or wherever it is on casters. You know the kind I mean?”
“I think so.”
“It’s no big deal, right? So this was December and this guy Ferruci was in the kitchen putting that goddamned wringer washing machine together for his old lady and I’m across the hall, looking out the window. I’m all alone. It was snowing outside, a blizzard’s what I mean, and if it hadn’t been snowing like that, I woulda been across the hall in the kitchen, watching this stoolie—only I don’t know he’s a stoolie, right?—watching this stoolie put this goddamn washing machine together. I always had a mechanical aptitude that way, only I never did anything with it. Wasted it, like Rita with that dancing act she used to have. So I’m standing there at the window, watching all this snow dumping down, like it does when these old sanitation trucks used to dump it in the East River. I mean, there it is, all this snow falling in the street, beautiful stuff, like they got up in Central Park or out on Long Island, real Christmas snow, like Saks Fifth Avenue, and here’s this dumb nine-year-old kid watching it through the window, like it was a real miracle, see, just three days to Christmas, and maybe two, three blocks away a bunch of Dago street cleaners are shoveling it up like crazy in these dump trucks they got and hauling it off to dump in the fucking river. I mean, that’s got to be ironical, don’t it?—like in a Frank Capra movie or something. The goddamned East River too, which is about the filthiest goddamn sewer in the world, O.K.?…”
Kramer paused as he sucked at his wet cigar, his eyes narrowed against the smoke as visions of Brooklyn sugar plums danced in his head.
“So I’m standing there at the window, watching the snow, see. That’s the only thing I’m seeing, nothing else.” His voice was quiet, very deliberate, and Wilson knew that the scene was with them, in this very room. “The apartment house is real quiet, like it is when you’ve got this heavy snow, like it’s got a blanket wrapped around it. But while I’m standing there, there were these two hoodlums, these two animals, come walking up the stairs real quiet like and into the Ferruci apartment and back into the kitchen where he was putting together that washing machine, both of them wearing these black overcoats, and they back Ferruci up against the back window and blow him right through the glass with a sawed-off shotgun. But I don’t know anything, see, like the sanitation trucks around the corner, shoveling up the snow. When I get there and then the police, there’s Ferruci lying over the shed roof over the back where an old Lithuanian family lived, like my old lady. There’s Ferruci, all twisted up down there, his legs bent under him, wearing this big bright-red Christmas necktie all over his face and neck and chest, only it isn’t no necktie. It’s Ferruci’s brains hanging out—brains and everything else, like someone just threw a bucket of slops from the back door of the butcher shop. But it’s still snowing, see, only now it’s blowing in the window that’s all smashed open. And you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking, ‘It’s sure gonna be cold in here tonight for old lady Ferruci,’ because I know she don’t even have the dough to get her goddamn heels on her shoes fixed. I know because I followed her up the stairs a couple of times that week and she told me about it. So that’s what I mean. It’d make a classy film shot, wouldn’t it?”
