Anna says, “I am not sure thee has found the wisest course, David. I don’t see how we can keep this from the town very long. And the more we delay, the worse it will be for Emily and the girls. And surely for Sarah Frisch, who thee says is badly hurt.”
David says, “Flood has made it plain that no one but Marcus is to get near the house. That would include doctors. Even if you could persuade any doctor to go walking in there.”
Anna says, “James Flood knows me well. He would not be alarmed if I walked in there. If I did that and offered myself in Sarah Frisch’s place, she could be taken away and attended to.”
Elizabeth says, “Not thee alone, Anna. He knows all of us. He knows of our tenderness to him. We should all go together to the house and hold him in the Light,” but Ethel Quimby says tartly, “Elizabeth, I happen to have three kids waiting for me to show up very soon. And I don’t think Jimmy Flood will let himself be held up in the Light right now. This is a very sick man.”
“Indeed?” says Anna. “Was he that well in the mind, Ethel Quimby, when he was in college and thee upheld his acts of violence there?”
“Please,” David says. “Anna. Elizabeth. Please understand that what you’re proposing leads nowhere. The one possible way of preventing murder is to isolate Flood and his gang. To put them in a vacuum. To break their nerve this way.”
“I’m sorry,” Uri says, “but I can’t agree. And I know all about our police chief here and how tough he is, but he’s the one to handle this, David. He’s trained for it. If you and Marcus explain the situation to him, explain our hopes that he could approach the problem without violence—”
“Did you ever hear Duffy on the subject of crime and the only way to handle it?” David demands. “Can you see him waving a white flag and inviting Flood to negotiate with him? And the police in Boston have to be considered too. And the police wherever Flood wants the plane put down.”
“I understand all this,” Uri says. “But reason can prevail, can’t it, with those women’s lives at stake?”
“Not enough to make the police put away their guns, Uri. And Flood is just waiting there for the cops to show up so he can blast their heads off. Believe me, I love my wife very much. If I didn’t think she’d understand and agree with what I’m trying to do, I wouldn’t do it.”
“But will she understand?” Uri asks. “Will Emily and Janet? They’re depending on Marcus to settle this quickly. All they’ll know is that nothing is being settled. And when Flood and his men get angry about it, the women will be the ones to suffer.” He turns to me. “Can’t you see this, Marcus?”
I say, “I’ve come to David’s point of view. If Flood can’t communicate his threats to anyone outside, he has no reason to carry them out.”
Uri says sharply, “These men are criminals. If they get in a bad mood, they’re capable of anything, whether you know about it or not.”
I shake my head. “I don’t accept that.”
“Because you don’t want to.” Uri turns to Kenneth Quimby. “Kenneth, if Flood took over your house like this, put guns to your family’s head, what would you do?”
Kenneth sits without speaking a long while. Then he says, “I don’t know. I think—I’m not sure—but I think I’d like the courage to do what Marcus and David are doing. To bear witness to what I believe. To what I say I believe.”
“But at whose cost?” Uri demands.
“Yes, I know what you mean. But of all the things that led Ethel and me to become Friends, I think it was the peace testimony that meant most to us. ‘We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fighting with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatever.’ I can give you that whole letter word for word, I know it so well. And I’ve wondered what I would do if I faced a situation where my family was threatened. Whether or not I’d kill for their sake. Whether I’d find myself making exceptions to that testimony. I still don’t know. Who can ever tell what he’ll do until he’s put to the test? All I know now, Uri, is that I agree with Marcus and David.”
Uri shakes his head. “You have no right to make them your testing ground.”
Ethel says to him, “Uri, you don’t have a family. I say that in love, because we know what happened to them in Germany.”
“Thanks to Hitler,” Uri says. “A Jimmy Flood who really made it big.”
“Yes,” Ethel says, “but what I’m trying to get across is that ever since you became a member of this meeting, we’ve all of us tried to be the family you lost. We are your family now. And if we were all locked up in our meeting house by somebody like Flood, and you were put in Marcus’ position, I have a feeling we’d all want you to do what he’s doing now.”
“I approve,” says Anna, and then Elizabeth says, “I approve,” and when Uri looks from them to me and I nod approval, he slowly shakes his head again in that regretful gesture. “But I won’t stand in the way of the meeting,” he says.
David says, “Then the sense of the meeting is to support our course of action. I think you all know what that means. Spreading the word about Janet’s being under doctors’ care in a critical condition. Blocking anyone in town, especially the authorities, from getting the least idea of what’s really going on.”
“The end justifying the means,” Uri says harshly.
It is like hearing an echo of my own reaction to McGrath’s compliment, and it stirs a deep discomfort in me. I say, “Uri, that would stand as a condemnation if we were looking for excuses to allow murder. We’re only searching for a way to prevent it.”
He looks stricken. “Marcus, I didn’t mean it to sound like that. My God, I went through it all myself all those years ago. But people like the ones who threw my family into the furnaces—people like Flood—they frighten me. I keep telling myself yes, yes, there is a Light in them as in all humanity, but in my heart I can never really make myself believe it. These are not humanity, Marcus. These are the dregs, the lumpen. Look at all we gave Flood when he was a kid. The kindness, the make-work jobs, the education we almost forced on him. What became of that? He saw the kindness as our weakness, he used the education to sharpen his brain for criminal acts, he made himself a leader of the lumpen, the most dangerous of them. And you think you can prevent him from murdering policemen, and policemen from murdering him? In the end you won’t be able to do that, Marcus. All you’ll do is prolong the agony.”
I say, “Do you want to stand aside from the meeting in this, Uri?”
“Yes. But I know I can’t. If I don’t tell the same lies, put on the same act as everyone else, this won’t hold up at all.”
“That’s true,” David says, and Kenneth says, “You’re making it hard for us, Uri.”
“Am I supposed to make it easy for you?” Uri demands. “Are those my orders, Ken?”
“No, of course not, but—”
“Then let it go at that. I told you I won’t stand in the way of the meeting. I’ll do what has to be done, I’ll say what has to be said.”
Anna says to Elizabeth, “If Herbert Hill at the bank has started to spread the news, we will be getting telephone calls very soon. I will attend to them. I doubt if thee has the mettle to speak falsely, Elizabeth.”
“I think I do,” Elizabeth says.
“I hope so at this time. And there will be visitors. Thee must follow me in what I say to them.”
Ethel says, “Ken and I will spread the word at the boatyard. That’s as good as broadcasting it.”
There is the sound of cars racketing up to the house. “The commune people,” David says, and he and I go to the door and open it as three battered-looking machines pull up on the road and Lou Erlanger steps out of one of them. We walk over to him, and he says, “We’ve got the old bus blocking the road good our side of your house. Dug it in so it can’t be moved. We’ll do the same with two of these clunkers here on this side. How far down the road do you want them planted?”
“About at Lookout Point,” David says. “That way they can’t be seen from
here.”
“No sweat,” Erlanger says. “We also had a couple of the women go mushroom-hunting in the woods near your place. They came back right away and said there’s a man sitting on your roof with a gun in his hand. It really shook them up. Like, talking about guns is one thing, but having one maybe aimed your way for real is another. They won’t go back there now.”
“They shouldn’t,” I say. “David and I will take care of that.”
“Yeah, sure,” Erlanger says, and gets back into the car. He leans out of the window. “Did you make out all right with the phone company?”
“Hell,” David says.
We go back to the house, and I pick up the phone and dial my own home number, my fingers suddenly so thick and clumsy that I have to start twice over before I finally make the connection.
A click, and then a mechanically toneless voice.
“The number you are calling is not in service,” says the voice.
Good.
But what happens when Flood discovers this?
Uri and the Quimbys leave, Ethel stopping at the door to suddenly hug me hard. The door closes behind them, their cars move off, leaving the rest of us facing each other in a silence so acute that the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway becomes a series of small explosions in my ears.
The phone rings. Anna snatches it up, almost drops it before she gets it to her ear. Then she turns to me. “The commune. Raymond McGrath.”
I take the phone. “Ray?”
“Yes. Listen, it’s something you forgot—we all forgot. That mailman, Farrow. He’s on his way up South Road right now with the delivery. We can see him from the porch. And, man, he is going to drop our stuff here and then head down Ridge Road right into that bus we’ve got planted there. You know how he is, Marcus. He is sure as hell going to get the law up here as fast as he can.”
“Ray, you’ll have to stop him. Tell him that story about Janet. Tell him I ordered the road blocked until the doctors give me the word. He can leave our mail and the Marcys’ mail with you.”
“It won’t work, Marcus. Not the way he feels about us here.”
True. The mail route is up South Road from town, then along Ridge Road and down Quaker Lane, and never have I encountered Henry Farrow, the postman, at my box without getting a lecture on my foolishness in renting to a gang of Commie sex maniacs and drug addicts. A meddlesome and angry man, Henry Farrow. Faced with the chance to do damage to the commune, he will work it for all it is worth.
Unless I intervene. I may be a fool to Henry Farrow, a dangerous fool at that, but I am still Marcus Hayworth. “Ray, as soon as he gets there, have him call me here.”
“He’s outside now.”
“I’ll wait.”
I put a hand over the mouthpiece so that I can tell David what’s going on, and he says, “Ah, damn. Damn,” so that Anna and Elizabeth glance at him sharply for this language. Then there is a voice over the phone, Henry Farrow in a temper.
I talk to him. Talk to him passionately, lying, indeed, with all the intensity Digby had put into his Pentecostal performance last night, and Farrow’s temper slowly dissolves into embarrassment, into sympathy, into a muttered “Yeah, that’s too bad” or “Sure, I understand, Mr. Hayworth” any time I draw breath. And in polite language I promise a bribe if Ridge Road is left inviolate for the next day or so. “As soon as this is over, Henry, I’ll want to show you my appreciation.” The Santa Claus who bribes you just to do your proper job every year, Henry, will show up long before Christmas this year. “No need, Mr. Hayworth. Glad to help out for Janet’s sake, even if it means a little trouble,” lying his own polite lie, although maybe I’m being unjust in that, maybe some of James Flood has rubbed off on me.
I put down the phone, and David says, “It worked?”
“It worked.”
“You’re doing fine,” David says.
I am doing fine. We are all doing fine.
So far.
James Flood
Nine o’clock.
Harvey takes over for Lester on the roof. Lester moves down to the kitchen, plants his transistor on the table and monitors the local station. The first word to the public about the July Group will probably arrive over that station. Meanwhile, Lester leans back in his chair against the wall, keeps one eye on curvy little Deborah, the other eye on the rest of the women.
Coco prowls.
I check out the shuttered windows of the house, then go into the library across the hall from the living room and pipe in on the big radio there. It’s part of a stereo set that takes up half of one wall. The color TV in a corner is, from the look of it, the biggest and best. A fair percentage of the books in those shelves from floor to ceiling are, I suspect, collector’s items. The oriental carpet on the floor is definitely a collector’s item. The pieces of furniture in the room, mahogany, walnut, teak, are definitely collector’s items.
Simplicity.
I attended their meetings for worship sometimes. Part of it was the money. If I stayed after coffee hour, washed up the dishes, swept out the building, I could count on a handout. Part of it was a perverse need to luxuriate in the warm, oozy bath of hypocrisy provided by the Friends. They sat in silence, but now and then one of them felt called on to deliver a message to the rest. Always a predictable message, always tepid, always reducing what should be a gale force of emotion to a gentle pitter-patter of lukewarm raindrops on a well-shingled roof. They had it made, the Hayworths especially, so they sat and waited on a Light which let them clearly see how sweet and kind and reasonable they were.
Simplicity. With trimmings.
They warmed up to their business meetings by reading from something called Advices and Queries—a copy to little Jimmy for his enlightenment, free of charge—and the query that hit my funny bone hardest was Do we keep to moderation and simplicity in our standards of living? I memorized it, knowing that some day I’d work up enough guts to stand in meeting and deliver a message of my own on the question, let some passion heat up that passionless room, send Jeremiah out of his corner to belt their sweet Jesus cold with one swing.
Made gutless by no money, never did it.
But thought about it. In college, every time the monthly check arrived from them. And in Raiford. Again and again in Raiford.
The sun is burning off the Lake George mist. The house, windows shuttered tight, is heating up. But there is central air conditioning in this simple domicile. I go out into the hall to the thermostat, switch it on. A big baby, that conditioner. The house shakes under its thud as it turns over, and a minute later a coolness steals into the hallway.
Oh yeah, man, simplicity can be beautiful.
Ten o’clock.
Coco walks into the library. “I’m taking my turn on the roof now. You will relieve me at eleven o’clock.”
“I’ll be there.”
He nods toward the radio. “Lester says there is no news about us yet.”
“Lester is telling it like it is.”
“Does that seem natural to you, man? I mean, about the news. Could Hayworth really keep it hushed up so long, once he started to make the arrangements?”
“It looks like he can. Don’t worry. Any minute you’ll be getting it all over a national hookup.”
“You let me know when that happens.” Coco looks around the library. He nods approval. “A quality room. Some of the old money in St. Hilary can show the same thing. It takes a long time to put together a room like this.”
“And a lot of that old money.” I point at the desk. “I used to do homework there sometimes, when I was in high school. Hayworth got in a mood to help now and then. Great on math, cast-iron head for everything else. He read a couple of things I did for the school magazine—good stuff, Hubert, really good—and all he saw was punctuation.”
“That is what you have on your mind at a time like this, man? Your happy school days?”
“Dear old Golden Rule days, Mr. Digby.” I go over to the desk, take the heavy brass
stiletto-style letter opener from the leather cup there and gouge a track full length across the slick mahogany surface. “Therapy,” I tell Coco.
He is not in a playful mood. “You told Hayworth the deadline is twelve o’clock. What is the chance of some action before then?”
“Depends on how long he can hold back Duffy and the FBI. If it’s up to Hayworth alone, he’ll deliver the money and try to get it back from the insurance company and the hell with it. That’s how his mind works. You have a revolution marching down Front Street in town, you ask how much money it’ll take to make everybody break it up and go home happy, and you pay it. Duffy might not buy that. So if there is any action before deadline, it’ll be Duffy out there on the road with a bullhorn. What the hell, it’s not his family in here with us.”
“All right,” Coco says, “whoever it is except Hayworth, I’ll pin him down. Keep an ear open, man. One short burst, a cop with a bullhorn. Two short bursts, heavy stuff moving in.”
“If it’s Duffy, save him for me. And you’re overdue up there now. You don’t want to get Harvey too heated up.”
Coco, the old blacksnake, slides out of the room. A few minutes later Harvey, the bull of the Everglades, comes in. He is shirtless, gleaming with sweat. “Man, it is hot up there.”
“Better than cold. Or rain.”
“That’s a fact.” He knits his brow. “Suppose it does rain? How do we spot anybody moving in on the house then?”
“Don’t worry. I arranged for clear weather right up to St. Hilary.”
Harvey hee-haws. Then his brow wrinkles again. “What about nighttime? Suppose we’re stuck here in the dark?”
“We’ll convert some of those brass lamps into spotlights. With the house blacked out, we can cover the whole perimeter that way. And there’s almost a full moon tonight.”
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