Chapter 22
Larry took Bemrose to Washington the next week to hear about the job that Tom Newton had in mind for him. They entered one of the newest and most dazzling of the government tombs, rode to the floor of Tom’s office, and started down the endless corridor. Larry felt as if he were walking into his own burial place, with the white hall a collapsible telescope, and the exit of the corridor a side road into the hereafter. It was a future world requiring neither ascent nor descent but approached on the same level at which one had lived. Elations and frustrations rotated unhappily in the tube of white stone, until they seemed more important than when first they had been laughed or ached over. Larry thought of how an acorn dropping on an awning sometimes detonates like a bullet.
The rubber tips of Arthur’s crutches grabbed the stone floor. Obsessed with memories of his first trip to the Capitol under Judge Haynes’ tutelage, Arthur kept quoting the Old Man. Either Bemrose was aging, Larry decided, and reached into the past for gifts the present withheld from him, or the Old Man’s restless spirit demanded a hearing.
“Whenever we walked through the Capitol, he’d never let me stop to read the inscriptions on the statues. I think he envied them,” Arthur said. “Do you know the one of Marshall on the west terrace of the Capitol? I used to feel like taking off my hat when I saw it, but he’d rush me past. I don’t know why he should have felt that way about Marshall.”
“Competition, maybe.”
“We used to drop into the old Supreme Court. When it was still in the Capitol,” Arthur added. “I think he hated those staring marble busts of the Justices. He never had much use for tradition, you know. He said the past was something we couldn’t help. His theory was that you didn’t have to like the past. You only had to put up with it.
“Now he’s the past.” Bemrose sighed. “I can never get it through my thick head. Some mornings when I walk into the office, or when I’m on a trip to Washington like this, I expect to see him coming at me, his black robes billowing around that skinny frame of his.”
“As long as his ideas are still good, he’s really not the past,” Larry said.
“They weren’t always good. That’s the trouble. He was often stinking anti-social.” The rubber thumped the stone dully as Arthur beat out his re-evaluation of Haynes. “He smothered his reactionary views in charm, and people forgot to take offense.”
“What do you mean by ‘anti-social’? Whose society was he against?” Larry asked, grateful to have a human voice penetrate the mausoleum quiet of the hall and break the mournful rhythm of this walk.
“He’d take me to Rock Creek Park, and we’d race his game leg up and down the hills—they have real inclines over there. But it wasn’t the exercise he wanted. Mostly he’d want to talk.” Arthur bore down on his crutches as he reconstructed the Judge’s thinking while Larry watched to make sure that his crutches didn’t skid.
“He’d say that whenever labor got control, it began to fuss and rail against conditions. The more gadgets the working man bought and the more bathrooms he had, the more he complained about conditions. The Judge’s theory was that people had a better time without modern comforts, that when they lived poorer, worked harder, and didn’t have the benefits of education, they had more fun than with their high wages, their ideology, and their unions. He claimed that the soldiers who were with him at San Juan Hill laughed more and had a better time living in mud than the well-fed working man at home. He said when you shortened hours and gave people time and energy to complain, they would start being miserable, like the French peasants before the revolution. He called union leaders big business men who had forgotten what most business men knew—that the way to make a living was to work hard. As much as he liked the adventure and excitement of a military war, that’s as much as he hated class war.”
A Senator that Arthur knew stopped to say hello.
“Another labor-baiter,” he said when the Senator had gone.
“You wouldn’t call the Old Man——?”
“He wasn’t intentionally vicious,” Bemrose admitted. “His trouble was that he believed the best in people. Capital offered no threat to labor, and labor would smarten up in time and see class war didn’t get anywhere. No one, according to the Old Man, ever plotted against anyone else. Naïve, wasn’t it? I suppose he was wrapped in court wool for too many years. Street fights and brawls were just newspaper stories to him. He didn’t think they happened. Besides, he always thought more education would iron out the unreasonableness.”
Larry paced his step to Arthur’s measured gait.
“The Old Man himself, for all his learning, could never control his temper,” Arthur said. “On Sunday we’d go out to Arlington and read the names on the graves, and he’d growl at every fourth or fifth name. He was an eloquent hater. He could hate the dead as hard as he hated the living.” Arthur paused.
“Harder,” he continued. “I’m glad they let him go to Arlington. He always wanted to. I think he liked the idea of spending the rest of time across the bridge from Lincoln. You’ve seen that seated figure of Lincoln—the memorial by French.”
Larry nodded.
“The Old Man used to stand in front of it for hours, looking into Lincoln’s wise face. It was one statue he didn’t sneer at— I think he felt Lincoln knew something human, something about the way people operate, that he had never got hold of.”
“How about taking the Old Man some flowers if we finish with Newton early?” Larry suggested.
“We’ll take him geraniums. He always said they smelled badly and looked awful, and that’s why he liked them. Honest. No frills about geraniums and no perfume worth mentioning.”
“You’re sure Newton’s office is down the hall?” Larry asked. “I bet we’ve passed fifty doors already.”
Arthur indicated some doors about a quarter of a mile further on. “Five minutes away. When Zantzinger, the architect, submitted blueprints for this tomb, he should have included roller skates.”
“Did the Old Man ever say what he wanted for you? What he really hoped? Was it the Supreme Court?” Larry asked.
“It might have been,” Arthur admitted. “He might have had it in mind. That is, before they moved it east of the Capitol and gave it the biggest columns and the biggest pediment and entablature of any tomb in Washington. He hated the biggest of anything. He had misgivings about the new Court and said they would get the swelled head once they’d moved over there. I’d see him stand in front of the new building, a Pigmy alongside those marble slabs, and wither the columns with his superiority. You could see them shrivel. Then he’d turn around and threaten me. ‘Wait ’til they send you up here someday!’ That’s how he put it.”
“Send you up, huh. Like Sing Sing.”
“He probably had naïve ideas of what I had to do in order to be ‘sent up.’ Write a few brilliant briefs and execute a couple of first-class jobs in Washington. That’s all there would be to it. I’d be noticed and they would invite me to sit on the Court.”
“Well, here’s your chance. Newton’s noticed you. What do you think he has lined up?”
A black cat ran in front of them, and Arthur twisted his left shoulder to look down the corridor, watching it slide along the floor. “Murder cases,” he said.
“You said it was a war job, didn’t you?” Larry asked. “I suppose that would have suited the Old Man down to the ground.”
“Sure. He’d say I was committed to fighting this War, and I ought to go on with it. Even if they hand me a tough assignment which doesn’t seem to be hooked up directly with the fighting. He’d say that if I believed in the War, I ought to work with everything I’ve got no matter where I come out, and if——”
It was the first time during the funereal walk that Bemrose’s speech stumbled.
“You’re tired.” Larry steadied his elbow.
“If brains are all I have left, I ought to fight with them,” Arthur concluded his thought.
Larry had a sudden flash of insight. The march down the long corridor showed Arthur’s incapacity to make war like other men. It confirmed his fears about others doing his physical fighting for him. His decision to consider Newton’s desk job was recognition that he considered himself through physically. He must feel that the quickness was drained from him. While he might believe hard in the War, he couldn’t physically execute his beliefs. The alternative was to accept Tom’s job and fight at a desk. Larry figured that was the way Bemrose reasoned about it.
“Lucy’s the one I have to worry about,” he continued. “This trouble of mine is costing real money. She’s never complained about the cost or the bother, but I haven’t any right to ask her to live on a dollar a year.”
“After all, she won’t have to, will she?” Larry pointed out.
Arthur braced himself for the final sprint down the hall and swung along silently. This last wordless stretch seemed longer than the initial mileage. Larry had a sense of proceeding to a waiting doom at the end of the cryptlike corridor. Then, as swiftly as the brush of a cat’s tail, the mood of bleak fate altered. A figure stepped from Newton’s door into the hall and turned sharply toward them. She stopped, cried out, and reached to steady Bemrose.
Larry saw the tightly wrapped face and dark searching eyes and knew that this was the inevitable and recurring pattern in Bemrose’s life—a long face with high cheekbones and oversized eyes, an economy of smooth, dark skin distributed over a large-boned frame. This was the leitmotif relentlessly performed and encored.
“Tom told me he was expecting you.” Janice kept her hand on the sleeve of his overcoat.
Arthur rejoined the living with his smile and swung around accusingly. “Did you write Janice?” he asked Larry.
With exaggerated fervor, Larry protested. “Of course not. I thought this trip was going to be business.”
“Tom won’t give you more than an hour. It’s a madhouse in there.” She indicated the door. “I’ll pick you up and drive you to the house for lunch. I have a place in Georgetown, and a new painting by Julio de Diego someone lent me for the drawing room. You’ll have to see the painting. Is it all right if I come back at one?” She glanced nervously at her watch.
Larry offered to check with Newton’s secretary and find out. He found five secretaries in a reception room large enough for a Legion convention and promptly located the one who knew about Bemrose’s appointment.
A resigned and weary line waiting to see the Attorney-General eyed Larry hostilely as he hurried past the pale blue walls, indirect lighting, and chromium to the outer hall.
“Newton will see him in five minutes,” Larry touched her cheek. “You don’t mind if I look at your house another time, do you, Jan? I have some personal business to take care of.”
She grabbed his hand. “How personal?”
“No, honestly. I’ve been promising a client for a month that I’d see a man in the O.P.A. about the ceiling price on bone buttons.”
“You’ll drive him back to the hotel in time, won’t you, Jan?” He guided Arthur to Newton’s door. “We’re planning to catch the five o’clock home.”
“No one has to drive me to the hotel. I’ll get a cab,” Arthur protested, but Janice reassured Larry with a nod that she would take care of him.
They missed the five and the six o’clock back to New York, and Larry, tired of waiting for Bemrose, changed their parlor car seats to a drawing room on the sleeper. After a late dinner which consisted mainly of succulent chincoteagues on the half shell, one of the reasons for coming to Washington, Larry always figured, they went up to their hotel room. Larry unpacked his toilet kit in the next room while Bemrose told him about the interview with Newton.
“It’s cloak and dagger stuff,” he explained. “Work with the F.B.I. drawing up indictments against Nazi sympathizers in this country. The F.B.I. has the evidence, and my job would be to make it legal under section nine, title eighteen, of the federal code.”
“Have you grounds for indicting the bastards?” Larry asked. “They’re slick operators, particularly that Yorkville jerk—you know the one I mean. They probably are smart enough to sweep up good and clean when they finish a job.” Larry threw away a torn tube of shaving cream. The wartime metal was like tissue paper and had split the second time he used the tube.
“They’ve tried to stir up insubordination and mutiny in the Army and Navy,” Arthur said. “Distributed printed matter advising disloyalty and refusal of duty.”
“What can they get?” Larry asked. “What’s the maximum?”
“Ten years’ imprisonment, or a ten thousand dollar fine, or both.”
Larry whistled. “And Tom thinks the F.B.I. has the goods that will nail them?”
Arthur nodded. “Tom has to make it stick. That’s not so easy.”
“Every time I hear those birds talk about how Roosevelt asked the Japs to attack Pearl Harbor—” Larry spit into the wash basin. “The bastards should be locked up. Remember Jan and that fellow Richter, the art dealer?”
“You understand it’s graveyard, Tom’s proposition,” Arthur reminded him.
“What kind of money did he talk? You told him a dollar-a-year was out——”
“He recognizes my medical expenses are heavy, and thinks he can stretch the job to pay eight or nine thousand. I can manage on that. Not in style, but we can live. I still have to talk to Lucy and see how she feels about pulling up stakes in New York.”
“I hope you can get rid of the slimy bastards. That would be an accomplishment, all right,” Larry said enviously. “If you decide to come down here and close the office, I may try for a commission.” He walked in from the bathroom, and threw his toilet kit on the bed. It bounced on the damask bed cover.
“See how things shape up with me first,” Arthur suggested. “There may be a job down here for you. Or this thing of Tom’s might only last a few months. Maybe I’ll even decide to keep the office going.”
Larry frowned and sat down hard on the edge of the bed.
“There I go again, telling you what to do while I go out and cut myself a slice of war. I guess I’ll never learn,” Arthur apologized. His voice was high and strained. “You do what you want.”
“It’s okay.” Larry went back to the bathroom for a shoe cloth.
“Next time kick me around the block.”
Larry bent over the tub and wiped his shoes. “What does Jan think about your moving down?”
“Come again.”
“What does Jan think?” Larry repeated.
There was silence from the other room.
Larry waited for Bemrose to answer, and when he didn’t hear anything, he went into the bedroom, circled the bed and picked up the phone. “You’re packed, aren’t you?” Larry asked him. “I’ll find out from the bell captain what time the train is made up. Let’s get to the station early and grab some sleep before we pull out.”