by Ann Petry
Bullock said, “I don’t hold for no drunken bums in my office either, see?” And took an automatic out of the desk drawer, and aimed it at the chest region of Public Opinion’s dirty white shirt, and watched him deflate like a balloon, even to the hissing sound of his breath, just before he yelped and ran out, bumping into the door in his haste to get away.
Right after that he called in the city editor, and they planned the details of the story of the accident for the next day’s paper, a reporter was to interview the child’s parents, and another one was to get information from the hospital on the child’s condition. The finished story was a smooth minimization of the accident, but it contained new information: the child had a broken leg, and a mild concussion, and was enjoying the special nurses, the flowers, the toys that Mrs. Treadway had provided for her. The parents of the child were grateful for the many kindnesses and the special attention that their child had received at Treadway Memorial Hospital.
He thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. He was sitting in the dining room, eating breakfast with Lola, at eight o’clock the next morning when the telephone rang. He let it ring awhile, irritated that his normal-morning grumpiness should be disturbed by a telephone bell, feeling a curious kinship with his father, thinking that you had to get to be near fifty before you arrived at understanding of a male parent. His father had always performed like this at the breakfast table, and his mother had been as silent and as unobtrusive as Lola, not speaking until he downed his second cup of coffee.
Shrill ringing of the telephone again.
Lola said, “Pete—” softly.
Hush in her voice, just as though she were talking to an old and delicate invalid. He looked straight at her for the first time since they’d sat down at the table. She had on a white negligee, thin, silky, long. At eight in the morning she smelt good, looked good, red hair curling all over her head. Damn near forty and she could have passed for eighteen, with that handspan waist, and her breasts rising up out of that thin white pleated stuff, soft to the touch, delicately perfumed, ah, what the hell, he thought, she didn’t do anything else but work at looking like that, just like an actress, whose appearance is an investment to be protected.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
He sighed and got up from the table. The telephone was behind a screen, in the corner of the dining room. All dining rooms either eighteenth-century reproductions, or Swedish modern, theirs was Swedish modern, probably because it was more becoming to a redhead, and had cost enough to buy a house, just this modern furniture where he sat down to drink the skim milk and eat the mashed potatoes at night, and to drink the two cups of coffee in the morning, coffee that he wasn’t supposed to drink, but had to—like that stuff they shoot into a hasbeen racehorse, jazz him up so he can keep running.
He went behind the screen, eightfold screen of thin blond wood, with drawings or paintings of wheat or rye on it, the thin curved blades a pale green, and the grains of wheat or rye painted a deeper color than the wood; both sides decorated like that, the bend and sway of the wheat or rye suggesting wind blowing through it, and the goddamn thing had cost enough to have been a Picasso, and after he’d stared at that grain blowing in the wind for as much as two minutes, his stomach began to heave, it made him seasick, cost as much as a Picasso and it made him seasick.
He said, “Hello,” and stared at the wheat, and said, “Yes, all right,” voice stiff, sounding rude, and not caring because he was thinking, What the hell do you want now, have I got to let you ruin my paper, or is it just a small matter of a Chinaman you want murdered, or a simple case of blackmail or arson?
“Yes, I’ll be here,” he said. “Very well.” And hung up.
“Who was that?” Lola asked, holding a thin white coffee cup in both hands, the scarlet fingernails like an exotic decoration on the thin china.
“Mrs. Treadway.” He wondered what his mother would have thought of Lola, wondered what he really thought of her himself. Unproductive. Good in bed, sure, but aren’t they all? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to set her up in an apartment, and just go on from there? “She’s coming here. This morning.”
“Pete,” she said, face thoughtful, eyes thoughtful. “Don’t do it. Whatever it is she wants you to do, don’t do it.”
“Why?”
“It’s gotten too complicated. She’s still trying to save Camilo’s reputation. And she can’t. It’s shot to hell. She wouldn’t be coming here this morning, if she didn’t plan to use you. Pete, you’re not listening.”
He grunted his refusal to commit himself. Did she think he was a simpleton? Well, wasn’t he? Lola’d seen Jubine’s pictures in the tabloid, she knew the Chronicle hadn’t mentioned the accident. She must have heard the jokes, the salacious stories being told about Camilo, on every street corner, in the markets, on the busses and trolley cars. The flavor of the stuff being mouthed in the beauty parlors and the department stores, the special domain of the female, would be subtler and nastier than what was said in the bars and the barber shops.
He’d heard a fair sample of the barber shops’ opinion of Camilo when he went to get a haircut yesterday afternoon. The barber behind the chair, right next to him, said to his customer, “Rich women got some funny tastes. I’ve heard that some of ’em got to go with colored fellers, just like they believed—”
“I don’t think—” the customer started to say.
The barber slapped a hot towel firmly over the customer’s face, and said, “So what was Camilo doing up in Niggertown at that hour in the morning when she said that the colored feller raped her? My wife says someone told her Camilo’d been to a dance, or somep’n, and she got out of the car to take the air, and kinda cool off. Now we got air all over Monmouth but Camilo’s got to go breathe the stink up at the Dumble dock. After I see that picture of the colored feller, I figure he’s been layin’ her right along.”
He had wondered if Mrs. Treadway knew what was being said about Camilo, and when he opened the door in answer to her ring, and she said, “Good morning, Mr. Bullock. I want to thank you for seeing me at this hour,” he knew by the strained, tired note in her voice, the weariness in her face and eyes, that she probably knew more than he did of the stories being told about her daughter. Inside forty-eight hours, her face and voice had become that of an old woman.
He ushered her into the library, a pinepaneled room, that he rarely ever sat in, let alone used. The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with shelves filled with books that had belonged to his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. The worn bindings were a shabby anachronism in the artful brightness of this modern widewindowed room, with its white linen draperies and its handwoven offwhite nylon rug. A woman’s room. A pretty room. Except for the dark grimy leather bindings on the old books.
It was a room in which Mrs. Treadway in her fur cape and dark gray tweed suit, small fur hat on the hair that once had been pale yellow and was now streaked with gray, should feel at home. A pretty woman in a pretty room. A woman’s room.
“Won’t you sit down?” He indicated an armchair near his desk, chair upholstered in some kind of nonsensical whimsical geranium-red fabric.
She sat down, but she leaned toward him, and her manner was urgent, unrelaxed.
“These stories about Camilo,” she said. Then the tired voice died, came to life again. “You’ve got to help me put a stop to them. You’ve got to help me, Mr. Bullock. She’s disintegrating, emotionally, psychologically, because of them.”
I could tell her about the monkey and his friend, the cat, and the roasted chestnuts, he thought. I could say, These are not my chestnuts, Mrs. Treadway; and I will not thrust my paw into the fire to pull them out for you. But if I plan to keep, hold on to, that thirty thousand a year she pays out for advertising in my paper, then I will pull rabbits out of hats, I will stand, sit, beg, charge, sic ’em, and pull her hot chestnuts out of the fire—as or
dered.
“They are saying horrible things about her. I didn’t know people could be so cruel. Nobody believes—they’re saying that she—” the tired voice faltered, stopped, refused to put in words the accusations against Camilo. “I never knew that people could be so cruel,” she said again. “My own servants believe these dreadful stories. I have been to see the Judge, and he will not set a date for that man’s trial. He was evasive, full of excuses. He—he managed to express doubt of Camilo’s innocence—” Her face changed, still haggard, old, but the expression was angry, ruthless, coldly determined.
He thought, Juggernaut. I’m in the path of a juggernaut. It’s more serious than that. He remembered having seen this same expression on his mother’s face. He was ten years old, hair always hanging down over his eyes, because he would not have his hair cut, and a trip to the barber shop entailed assault with intent to kill on the part of his parents; so they postponed the necessary violence until he began to look like Rip van Winkle or a buffalo, or both. He was in that shaggyheaded state one night, at supper, and there were candles on the table; and he stood up, bent over, long unkempt hair falling forward over the lighted candles. His hair caught on fire. His mother reached out and smothered the fire with her hands, bare, unprotected hands. As she bent toward him, reaching across the table, beating the fire out, just with her hands, the expression on her face had frightened him, so that he cried out in alarm. Years afterwards he saw a painting of The Furies, and there was the same expression that had been on his mother’s face as she thrust her hands straight into his blazing hair—a ruthlessness, and a fury, and a cold determination. Same expression still on Mrs. Treadway’s face.
“You’ve got to help me,” Mrs. Treadway said. “I want—”
After she left, he wondered how it was that he came to be in a position where he couldn’t say no. It was the rising cost of newsprint, it was the cost-of-living increase in wages that he had paid because it was requested, open threat behind the request. Most of the people who worked for him belonged to the Newspaper Guild, and it was perfectly obvious, though he had done everything he could to prevent it, that sooner or later his newspaper, the newspaper that had belonged to his father, and to his grandfather, The Monmouth Chronicle, started as an abolitionist newspaper, started by that erratic highly moral definitely crazy man, his great-grandfather, would soon be run as a closed shop.
Yes, and it was the payments on that modern horribly-expensive-but-absolutely-necessary rotary press; it was the real estate tax on the building; the interest on the mortgage on the building, and on this ranchtype completely modern and unjustifiably expensive house that Lola had had to have. Now that she had it, she was not one whit happier than she’d been when they lived in that oldfashioned three-story affair that had belonged to his father—or maybe she was, she could spend more money living out here. There was the upkeep and the payments on the two cars and the station wagon, and the income taxes, and the Social Security payments. There was Social Security to be paid for the maid, and the laundress, and Social Security to be paid for the three-times-a-week heavy cleaning woman, whom Lola facetiously called the work girl; work horse would be a better name, he thought.
Social Security for maids. Blah! People didn’t want to work any more. He could remember when maids saved for their old age, worked and saved, just like anybody else, and now they didn’t have to, the State would take care of them, just like in Russia.
But what of a man named Bullock? Who was going to take care of Bullock in his old age? Not the State. Just Bullock.
If Mrs. Treadway took that institutional advertising with the American flag at the top, advertising that consisted of editorials on democracy, hymns of praise to the United States, out of his paper, it would just about fold up.
Lola would have to give up the green Buick, and the maid, and the laundress, and the cleaning woman, and the new fall clothes and the new winter clothes, the new spring clothes, the new summer clothes, and the annual cruise to Bermuda. She would have to do her own washing and ironing. What the hell did she do all day anyway? There was always extra help brought in for dinner parties, for luncheons, for bridge parties.
He could remember, how well remember, that his mother had had one girl, Swedish, name of Jenny, who stayed with the family until she died, and not only had his mother’s house been a pleasant, orderly place, but she’d had five children and— But Lola had to have someone to do the cleaning and the dusting, someone to do the washing and the ironing, someone to do the cooking, and they had no children, yet there were always the most terrific, the most unexplainable and unexpected bills.
Take this house, this big mortgaged completely modern house that they’d built in the most exclusive section of Monmouth, on the outskirts, near Treadway Hall, and Lola still said they were lucky to be able to buy the land because after all, only millionaires lived out here. Monmouth’s tradespeople knew it, so it cost them three times as much to live here as it had to live in his father’s oldfashioned house in the center of the city.
Suppose I’d said no to Mrs. Treadway. Would Lola, could Lola, do her own washing and ironing and cooking? Would she? Could she? No. Well, he supposed she could, there were women who did. Lola? Why blame it on Lola?
Mrs. Treadway had said, again, “We have no contract with your paper, Mr. Bullock.”
So that night he sat in the pinepaneled library, in the mortgaged ranchtype house, and thought about Mrs. Treadway, and then about his maiden aunt, who used to say, “A lie will be all over Providence while Truth is getting his boots on,” salt of the sea in her speech, on her tongue, so that she looked and sounded as though she had been pickled in brine, remembering her house with its three chimneys, and a fireplace in every room, captain’s house, double house. He’d lived with her in that house during the four years he went to Brown, thought of the city of Providence, lowlying city, and yet hilly, and of the graduation exercises and the baccalaureate held in the Baptist Meeting House, long hill to go down, and the caps and gowns descending, moving slowly, might have been a procession of blackrobed priests, except for the mortarboards, except, too, for the Baptist Meeting House, sacred to the memory of Roger Williams.
“A lie will be all over Providence,” he said to himself, “or Berlin, or Rome, or MonmouthConnecticut, or any other damn place, while Truth is getting his boots on.”
But this that he had agreed to do, and he reminded himself that he had agreed, was simply a matter of selecting one or two stories about crimes committed in The Narrows (Why not Niggertown? Because there is in me somewhere a reluctance. Then call her up and say you won’t do it, say you changed your mind; and thought, Social Security, income tax, interest on mortgages and the amortization thereof, and payments on cars, and all the different kinds of insurance) and giving them a front page spot, in the Chronicle, every morning. Simply a matter of emphasizing, spotlighting, underlining these stories about crimes committed by Negroes. Simple. Uncomplicated. Neither truth nor lie. But truthlie. Lietruth.
Then he thought, But the mind of man being what it is, I know, and Mrs. Treadway knows, that if the Chronicle keeps saying that The Narrows breeds crime and criminals, a new set of images will be superimposed over those pictures that Jubine sold to the goddamn tabloid. The face of that nigger (Why not Negro? Because of the arrogance) Apollo will change first. It will almost immediately be transformed into the face of The Criminal, and will be remembered as such. Camilo’s slackjawed face, face of the eternal whore, will be changed, transformed (more slowly, of course), until it becomes the face of The Victim, and she will be remembered and spoken of as such. Truthlie? Yes.
Is this possible? Of course. And quite necessary because that highly moral man, Judge Doan, has thus far refused to set a date for the trial. Someone must have got to the Judge, must have tampered with the Judge. He suddenly remembered Rutledge’s seemingly idle question, “What’re you going to do when the old lady comes in to cop a plea?” T
hought of Rutledge’s face, the way he talked, the lack of expression in his lead-colored eyes, and decided that he had the corrupt look of a man who had been born with a dollar sign where his soul should have been.
Then thought, Who am I to appraise, evaluate, another man’s soul?
But if Rutledge got to the judge, then who got to Rutledge? Who persuaded Monmouth’s Chief of Police to intervene, interfere, in this case? A person or persons unknown. Person powerful enough to push a judge and a chief of police in the direction he wanted them to go, just as though they were pawns on a chessboard.
Jubine? Hardly. He is a simpleton with a monomania, a monomaniacal simpleton, and therefore powerless. Not really powerless. He has already tried the case and turned in a verdict. With his camera.
It doesn’t matter who controls the Judge and the Chief of Police. What really matters is that Monmouth has a venal judge, and a venal chief of police. What of Bullock? Man named Bullock? Venal, too. The purchase price for all of us is low. We’re bargain basement stuff. Marked way down.
These days people make that nasty counting gesture with the fingers, whenever my name is mentioned, whenever the Chronicle is mentioned. They say I sold out to the Treadway interests. Truthlie. Lietruth.
At midnight Lola came into the library, slender, redheaded, perfumed, wearing a dress of some kind of pale green brocaded stuff. Emerald earrings in her ears. He’d given them to her at Christmas.
“Whatever are you doing?” she asked. “You’ve been in here for hours.”
“I am paying the piper,” he said slowly. “I met him just the other day and he told me that I’ve been dancing to the tune he plays for a long time. Therefore I must pay him.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said. My business is, at the moment, inextricably mixed up with the piper’s business.” I wish she’d go away, leave me alone. She looks like a wood nymph.
