Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  Part of the trouble, they agreed, was Sideboard. Sideboard, though forty-one, was still counted a boy wonder, which he was. In America it’s so hard to get ahead any more, that if you get anywhere, you qualify as a boy wonder until they start sending you burial insurance. Sideboard hailed from California, which he seldom hailed in return, and was undeniably bright. But his sense of the fitness of things was more attuned to Lady Hester Stanhope’s keeping a white horse in the stable, in case she should be called to Jerusalem to fulfil an old prophecy, than it was to the technique of properly making one. By the end of that train trip it was easier to count the number of people who would speak to Sideboard, than the number of people who wouldn’t. Tom, by then, was still speaking to Sideboard.

  Then there was Bühl. Bühl was a professional political ghost writer, and had accepted this job with reluctance. He had heard that Tom liked to rewrite his own speeches, and no professional likes his work tampered with by an amateur. So, when Tom learned that Bühl had sent out what is called a think-piece without so much as thinking to tell him what was in it, and insisted that it therefore be recalled, there was a fight.

  “Who the hell cares what you think?” shouted Bühl. “You’re not here to think. You’re here to win an election. Leave the thinking to someone who knows something about it.”

  During the French Revolution, one of the leaders pointed out the window to the mob below. “You see those people,” he said. “They are my followers. I must follow them because I am their leader.” That was not Tom’s attitude. He said to get the piece back, and to get it back fast.

  Bühl went off to complain to the Pattersons. He was a Patterson man. They attended to it. That is what they were there for. But alone in their compartment, they became thoughtful.

  *

  So the train set out across the country. A journalist who later described that trip seemed, said a friend, to be taking a last lingering look at a corpse. And so he had been. So were they all. The country was on the verge of a profound change, feared the change, or pretended to ignore it. It was autumn, the season of changes. It was also autumn in the West. Much in America, much in the world, would go, perhaps almost everything lovable in it, and everything worth loving. A greater, richer, stronger America might come out of the ordeal ahead. A few believed that. Or we might forfeit our birthright, our heritage, our spirit. Few wished to believe that. At any rate, nothing would ever be quite the same again. The high wind of change was whipping off the mountains.

  Unfortunately the wind of change, when it comes to setting a house in order, has the habits of an Irish housemaid. The dead leaves are not removed. They are swept under the rug or into the spare room.

  It was only Tom who thought they could be removed. But then, Tom was a fool.

  Chicago

  The first stop of any importance, Hog Butcher of the Western World, as its Swedish poet had informed it, and a description of which it was proud, but also the home of the Boss Kelly political machine, the iniquities of the Cook County Jail, and the absurdities of Colonel McCormick, whose phobias embraced everything from head scarves for women, a Communist invention, even when made of silk, to Great Britain, which he seemed to confuse with a sow’s ear. And Cicero, of course (it was not inaptly named), was famous forever more as the exit (through a garage), than as the entrance (at Lake Avernus) to the underworld. Still, small boys, of whatever age, must have a hero, and the inhabitants of Chicago were not so much ashamed of their gangsters, as ashamed that they were not ashamed of them.

  Tom spoke at the stockyards, in the full commercial stench of the meat-packers and boilers of glue. They sat on the corral fences, burly blank-faced men in bloody aprons, gobs of yellow waste fat on their shoes, and said nothing. They were sullen in their own smell. Their manner said only that they had come to see him before he went away. Somewhere, in one of the sheds, you could hear the whine of a vertical power saw, as a sow was shoved through it, neatly bisected through the spine, from snout to tail, though no such judgment of Solomon is ever perfect, and the tail usually wound up either on one half or the other. Whole steers, stripped of their skins and heavy with refrigeration, swayed on their hooks beyond an open door, like a multitude of Rembrandts.

  It was not perhaps the place to launch a spiritual crusade. It had too much the air of the world on the last day, or of Belsen just around the corner. There was certainly something unpleasantly human about the smack of one cadaver on another, as the stevedores slung them into waiting trucks and the trucks drove away. The teamsters were a strong union, a closed shop, and their minds were closed to everything but the imminence of five more cents an hour and the dangers of Argentinian or even of Uruguayan beef.

  Nor was this quite the reception Tom had expected, for his progress through the financial section on LaSalle Street had been a ticker-tape ovation. In the suburbs it was different. In the suburbs small children were paid quarters to throw eggs at him, which was lagniappe, as far as they were concerned. They would have done it for free. Small children love to throw things.

  It was at the Western Electric Company plant in Cicero, though, that he made his worst mistake. The crowd was thick, he was nervous, and he wanted to make friends. Also, how was he to know? He had been driven through too many streets much too fast, Chicago had spread out like pond algae until it covered the entire banks of Lake Michigan, so taking a chance, he said he was happy to be in Chicago.

  “Not Chicago,” somebody yelled. “Cicero.”

  “All right,” he shouted back, grinning down at them. “To hell with Chicago. I’m happy to be in Cicero.”

  He was only trying to be agreeable. His entire staff covered their faces with their hands, and then got him out of there. They could not make him understand what he had done.

  The next day’s papers made it clear enough, even to him. Nobody must ever be happy to be in Cicero, because gangsters once came from there. Besides, he had used the word “hell’. That brought the Bible belt down on him, hard. Hell, they said, he couldn’t be worth much, if he’d use a word like hell. And the citizens of Chicago were frothing busily at being told where to go.

  “Tom Tells Chicago To Go to Hell,” said banner headlines all over the country.

  That was the end of Chicago. The next time he went through there, he was hit in the face with a deep frozen egg, before he got out of LaSalle Street Station.

  How in God’s name could they make him learn?

  Illinois

  They couldn’t stop his speaking off the cuff. He spoke every time the train stopped to take on water, and never asked for a drink himself. At Peoria he had finally been trapped into saying something about the school system. What was needed was more and better schools, a Federal programme, better wages, and more teachers. That was what one always said in these campaigns. It was harmless enough.

  Hadn’t anyone ever read Jefferson’s advice about that? Or even printed it? What was needed was not more and better, but fewer and good. Jefferson’s system called for three schools. From grammar school you kept the top tenth, and sent it on to a high school and forgot about the other tenths. From high school you kept the top tenth, threw away the others, and enrolled your remainder in a college. That way everybody landed where he belonged, and you skimmed the crop, instead of lowering the standard. That made sense.

  This egalitarian twaddle didn’t. All it did was leave the naturally ignorant unhappy, the mechanic ill-trained, and the brilliant half starved on a curriculum watered down to the sensitive digestive systems of the incompetent or dull.

  But then, even he knew better than to say that publicly.

  Peoria disappeared. So did several other towns. Finally he was reduced to waving his hands and saying, “Sorry, the spirit is willing but the voice is weak.”

  He’d strained his vocal chords. All he could manage was a croak. His advisers panicked. They’d begged him to go to a voice coach, or at least to use a microphone. But no, he knew better. He despised a microphone. They tried to reason with hi
m. It did no good. He’d already flung out one throat specialist. Something had to be done. There were millions tied up in this train trip, and what good was a candidate who couldn’t speak?

  Somebody wired Hollywood. That’s where Roosevelt had gone. This was an age of mass communication. You couldn’t be seen as you were. All sorts of people wound up in the White House. They had to be taught how to walk, how to smile, how to look sincere, how to modulate a phrase. So naturally you went to Hollywood. When you need a specialist, you go where specialists are. In Radio City, in New York, there was a colony of ulcer specialists, for the top executives, right in the building. But the crew for actors and public figures didn’t work full time, and was mostly out west.

  It is not surprising. Everything devoted to a hint of perpetual youth comes from the Los Angeles area, except burial insurance, and words of geriatric cheer, which seemed to be centred in the east. If you need a false breast, or an extra one removed, a false leg, a false chin, a false sun-tan, a tight girdle for a false waist, eye-shadow, or something imperceptibly to turn your hair the colour of ink, it comes from L.A. In fact if, failing to be a perpetual teenager, you decide you must make do with one, instead, you can get that there, too. They graduate from the steps of the Beverley Hills High School and go straight into the actors’ workshops or the nearest polite brothel, and many a career has risen, like Venus, all naked, from the foaming steam of the nearest Turkish bath. You can get anything you want, except dignity, which nobody wants any more, or conscience, which nobody has time for any more; but in return they will wish to erase the marks of character from your face, for character is not a youthful quality, they will give you lessons in voice culture, for all voices must sound alike, which is part of the egalitarianism which has levelled the country, and above all, sincere; and in addition and in particular they will remove all expression from your face but a vacuous public smile, for in America we have to keep smiling. Otherwise there is some danger that it might be perceived that despite the widespread educational benefits of egalitarianism, there are still a few among us capable of emotion and thought.

  Robert Montgomery, the movie actor, was a staunch Republican. He understood these things, and phoned back to say he’d put Dr. Harold A. Barnard on the plane.

  Dr. Barnard arrived and was taken aboard. Tom threw a catfit and refused to see him. He had his own ideas about that sort of thing. Dr. Barnard was not a successful practitioner through mere medical competence alone. He’d dealt with temperament before.

  “Go to hell and take your tools with you,” croaked Tom.

  Barnard grinned. Hollywood teaches us the power of round numbers. “Personally I don’t give a damn,” he said. “But that throat of yours right now is the only way some 20,000,000 Americans can express themselves.”

  He’d struck just the right note. Tom grinned right back at him and then opened his mouth.

  Half an hour later, Dr. Barnard was soothing down the staff. No, it wasn’t an infection. Just strain. He was a damn fool, but Barnard would keep him going somehow, only someone had better take away his cigarettes and put him to bed in Kansas City for a few hours, if he was going to be able to make that Coffeyville speech.

  Coffeyville was one of the key speeches of the campaign. They bore down on Tom and put him to bed. They were enormously grateful to Dr. Barnard. Would he stay aboard?

  Yes, he would. Three packs a day. That practically made Tom the cancer kid. Never mind. He could be treated for that when the time came.

  Coffeyville

  Coffeyville was another one of Sideboard’s ideas. Elwood hadn’t taught him a thing. He was still chasing the American dream, that bogus counterfeit invented to soothe the nerves, because the real frontier had closed up sixty years ago. In the interim they had filled in the wilderness the way a child colours a map. And once it was filled in, they crossed it out with cities, factories, and indifference, the way a child scribbles over and then tears up the map which it has coloured.

  It seemed to the Pattersons that Sideboard, like most liberals, would rather die for a phrase than face a fact, and somewhere or other he had picked up the phrase “grass roots democracy” and found it as hard to get rid of as Bermuda grass. It was choking out the smooth growth of the whole campaign. Still, it was the biggest clambake Coffeyville had had since the Dalton boys shot up the town in ’52. It took twenty-eight trains just to get the spectators in.

  It had been planned to give a speech denouncing the iniquities of public power and the obstructive policies of the New Deal, which were destroying American Free Enterprise. Sideboard’s doing again. At the last moment, the staff discovered that Coffeyville not only had its own municipal electric system, but operated it to such good effect that the town government had been able to pave all the local streets out of the excess profits. So that speech went down the drain. Damn Sideboard. Tom would have to give an inspirational address instead.

  If he should be nominated, a commentator had said in June, he would have to stop talking blunt horse sense, and repeat instead the drooling phrases of campaign ghost writers. True enough. But in Coffeyville he spoke not his thoughts, which were dangerous and not quite clear yet, but his mind, which had always been clear.

  He remembered Coffeyville High School with some pleasure, for he had taught there for a year once, in order to finance his law degree. But that was back in the days when education was regarded as training, not a method of filling in time. It was also back in the days when you learned things in order to be well informed, and because knowledge was pleasant in itself as well as sometimes useful, rather than to be one up on your egalitarian neighbours. Though just why a skilled mechanic should resent someone else simply because he happened to be a skilled accountant, minister, statesman, or gentleman, was something he never would be able to see, unless it was because the resentful mechanic was not really skilled at all, and took no pride or pleasure in his work. That the whole culture should be forced to truckle to and descend to the level of an unleavened mob, in order to satisfy the demands of cheapjack politicians and specialists in mass marketing and advertising media, was what had brought the whole culture down. But it was futile. One man cannot stop an inevitable process. However, one man can try.

  He had one thing on his side. A good many people found him lovable. They found him lovable because he was absurd. He was much too intent upon what he was doing to worry about appearances. Once, at the convention in Philadelphia, his braces broke while he was walking out the door. If that had happened to Dewey or Taft, there would have been a cluster of aides, at the very least. But Tom held his trousers up with his hands and went right on walking. The President’s braces, of course, never would have broken. It is that, more than anything else, which makes him seem a little chilly. And Dewey, too, was one of those people of whom it could be said that there was never a button missing, including their eyes. Taft, on the other hand, had certain attributes of the human. It was conceivable that at some time, in the distant past, he had opened an umbrella only to discover that he had forgotten to have it patched or had taken the wrong bus somewhere, though just how a New England conscience got born in Ohio was anybody’s guess.

  So Tom gave an inspirational address. He talked about the heritage of Theodore Roosevelt, that intellectual Pierre Loti, in his pinafore, with his toy soldiers, his popgun, his integrity, his dignity, his good humour, and his common sense. He talked about the heritage of Lincoln, taught these days as a mollycoddle, but actually a shrewd and Machiavellian fighter.

  It meant nothing to his audience. His audience was empty faced. These people were of Kansas, Bleeding Kansas, with its hatred of the outsider, and its unforgiving history. But at least they loved what they were. It was not a mongrel state. It stood where it was, and it would always be there, whatever the country was called.

  But they were not the people he remembered. Something had gone wrong. These people were not the kids he had once taught school to, the big, shambling, gracious kids, with their silly boots, thei
r piccaninny drawl, and their resourcefulness. Yes, that was what was gone. They weren’t self-reliant any more. How they had liked to shag up their pants, standing on the stairs of the high school, just to prove that, peg-heeled or not, they were planted square in Kansas. And now they seemed a little uncertain.

  The uncertainty brought out their xenophobia. It was partly economic. These days you had to own at least 500 head of cattle (an investment of at least 55,000, which you sold, if it was a good year, for 162,000 up, but forcible feeding and vitamin injections had lowered the profit), to tuck your pants into your boot-tops, whereas when he had been teaching, everybody did it. Well, Kansas wasn’t his state. But he could see how it was theirs, all right. And more power to them.

  Of course, that looked like a big profit, but there were kick-backs all along the line, and in a bad year you just about went to the poor-house. When he had been here last, teaching, the middlemen had been fewer. Like maggots, they come out, when the body politic begins to die, and the weather is warm.

  Tulsa

  Oklahoma. The last open frontier. It had closed up on 22nd April 1889, three years before he was born. That was when the settlers poured over the border, to claim land that belonged by right to the Cherokees, the Choctaw, the Creeks, the Chickasaw, the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, and Cherokee, and had ever since the government had driven them out into that godawful desert. Who was to know that there was oil there?

  Tulsa still pumps night and day. There are some oil-rich Indians to prove it. Their birth-rate is going up, and who knows, some day maybe they’ll get their land back, when the rest of us are over with. But the Indians have one strike against them. They don’t believe in the spiritual significance of the puritan doctrine of work. They believe in leisure. So naturally they don’t fit.