Jailbird. Part 5

"You were wiped out in the Second Battle of the Somme in the First World War," he said, "and now, in this show, you've been wiped out again at E1 Alamein. You might say, 'Not the luckiest regiment in the world.'"

The stripe scheme is this: A broad band of pale blue is bordered by a narrow band of forest-green above and orange below. I am wearing that tie on this very day, as I sit here in my office in the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation.

When Clyde Carter and Dr. Fender returned to the supply room, I was a civilian again. I felt as dazed and shy and tremble-legged as any other newborn creature. I did not yet know what I looked like. There was one full-length mirror in the supply room, but its face was turned to the wall. Fender always turned it to the wall when a new arrival was expected. This was another example of Fender's delicacy. The new arrival, if he did not wish to, did not have to see at once how he had been transformed by a prison uniform.

Clyde's and Fender's faces, however, were mirrors enough to tell me that I was something less than a gay boulevardier boulevardier on the order of, say, the late Maurice Chevalier. They were quick to cover their pity with horseplay; but not quick enough. on the order of, say, the late Maurice Chevalier. They were quick to cover their pity with horseplay; but not quick enough.

Fender pretended to be my valet in an emba.s.sy somewhere. "Good morning, Mr. Amba.s.sador. Another crisp and bright day," he said. "The queen is expecting you for lunch at one."

Clyde said that it sure was easy to spot a Harvard man, that they all had that certain something. But neither friend made a move to turn the mirror around, so I did it myself.

Here is who I saw reflected: a scrawny old janitor of Slavic extraction. He was unused to wearing a suit and a tie. His s.h.i.+rt collar much too large for him, and so was his suit, which fit him like a circus tent. He looked unhappy-on his way to a relative's funeral, perhaps. At no point was there any harmony between himself and the suit. He may have found his clothes in a rich man's ash can.

Peace.

7.

I SAT NOW SAT NOW on an unsheltered park bench by the highway in front of the prison. I was waiting for the bus. I had beside me a tan canvas-and-leather suitcase designed for Army officers. It had been my constant companion in Europe during my glory days. Draped over it was an old trenchcoat, also from my glory days. I was all alone. The bus was late. Every so often I would pat the pockets of my suitcoat, making sure that I had my release papers, my government voucher for a one-way, tourist-cla.s.s flight from Atlanta to New York City, my money, and my Doctor of Mixology degree. The sun beat down on me. on an unsheltered park bench by the highway in front of the prison. I was waiting for the bus. I had beside me a tan canvas-and-leather suitcase designed for Army officers. It had been my constant companion in Europe during my glory days. Draped over it was an old trenchcoat, also from my glory days. I was all alone. The bus was late. Every so often I would pat the pockets of my suitcoat, making sure that I had my release papers, my government voucher for a one-way, tourist-cla.s.s flight from Atlanta to New York City, my money, and my Doctor of Mixology degree. The sun beat down on me.

I had three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents. Two hundred and fifty of that was in the form of a government check, which could not easily be stolen from me. It was all my own money. After all the meticulous adding and subtracting that had gone on relative to my a.s.sets since my arrest, that much, to the penny, was incontrovertibly mine: three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents.

So here I was going out into the Free Enterprise System again. Here I was cut loose from the protection and nurture of the federal government again.

The last time this had happened to me was in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-three, two years after Leland Clewes went to prison for perjury. Dozens of other witnesses had been found to testify against him by then-and more damagingly, too. All I had ever accused him of was members.h.i.+p in the Communist Party before the war, which I would have thought was about as d.a.m.ning for a member of the Depression generation as having stood in a breadline. But others were willing to swear that Clewes had continued to be a communist throughout the war, and had pa.s.sed secret information to agents of the Soviet Union. I was flabbergasted.

That was certainly news to me, and may not even have been true. The most I had wanted from Clewes was an admission that I had told the truth about something that really didn't matter much. G.o.d knows I did not want to see him ruined and sent to jail. And the most I expected for myself was that I would be sorry for the rest of my life, would never feel quite right about myself ever again, because of what I had accidentally done to him. Otherwise, I thought, life could be expected to go on much as before.

True: I had been transferred to a less-sensitive job in the Defense Department, tabulating the likes and dislikes of soldiers of various major American races and religions, and from various educational and economic backgrounds, for various sorts of field rations, some of them new and experimental. Work of that sort, now done brainlessly and eyelessly and handlessly and at the speed of light by computers, was still being done largely by hand in those days. I and my staff now seem as archaic to me as Christian monks illuminating ma.n.u.scripts with paintbrushes and gold leaf and quills.

And true: People who dealt with me at work, both inferiors and superiors, became more formal, more coldly correct, when dealing with me. They had no time anymore, seemingly, for jokes, for stories about the war. Every conversation was schnip-schnap! schnip-schnap! Then it was time to get back to work. I ascribed this at the time, and even told my poor wife that I admired it, to the spirit of the new, lean, keen, highly mobile and thoroughly professional Armed Forces we were shaping. They were to be a thunderbolt with which we could vaporize any new, would-be Hitler; anywhere in the world. No sooner had the people of a country lost their freedom, than the United States of America would arrive to give it back again. Then it was time to get back to work. I ascribed this at the time, and even told my poor wife that I admired it, to the spirit of the new, lean, keen, highly mobile and thoroughly professional Armed Forces we were shaping. They were to be a thunderbolt with which we could vaporize any new, would-be Hitler; anywhere in the world. No sooner had the people of a country lost their freedom, than the United States of America would arrive to give it back again.

And true: Ruth's and my social life was somewhat less vivid than the one I had promised her in Nuremberg. I had projected for her a telephone in our home that would never stop ringing, with old comrades of mine on the other end. They would want to eat and drink and talk all night. They would be in the primes of their lives in government service, in their late thirties or early forties, like me-so able and experienced and diplomatic and clever, and at bottom as hard as nails, that they would be the real heads and the guts of their organizations, no matter where in the hierarchy they were supposed to be. I promised Ruth that they would be blowing in from big jobs in Moscow, in Tokyo, in her home town in Vienna, in Jakarta and Timbuktu, and G.o.d knows where. What tales they would have to tell us about the world, about what was really really going on! We would laugh and have another drink, and so on. And local people, of course, would importune us for our colorful, cosmopolitan company and for our inside information as well. going on! We would laugh and have another drink, and so on. And local people, of course, would importune us for our colorful, cosmopolitan company and for our inside information as well.

Ruth said that it was perfectly all right that our telephone did not ring-that, if it weren't for the fact that my job required me to be available at all hours of the night or day, she would rather not have a telephone in the house. As for conversations with supposedly well-informed people long into the night, she said she hated to stay up past ten o'clock, and that in the concentration camp she had heard enough supposedly inside information to last her for the rest of her days, and then some. "I am not one of those people, Walter," she said, "who finds it necessary to always know, supposedly, what is really going on."

It may be that Ruth protected herself from dread of the gathering storm, or, more accurately, from dread of the gathering silence, by reverting during the daytime, when I was at work, to the Ophelia-like elation she had felt after her liberation-when she had thought of herself as a bird all alone with G.o.d. She did not neglect the boy, who was five when Leland Clewes went to prison. He was always clean and well-fed. She did not take to secret drinking. She did, however, start to eat a lot.

And this brings me to the subject of body sizes again, something I am very reluctant to discuss-because I don't want to give them more importance than they deserve. Body sizes can be remarkable for their variations from accepted norms, but still explain almost nothing about the lives led inside those bodies. I am small enough to have been a c.o.xswain, as I have already confessed. That explains nothing. And, by the time Leland Clewes came to trial for perjury, my wife, although only five feet tall, weighed one hundred and sixty pounds or so.

So be it.

Except for this: Our son very early on concluded that his notorious little father and his fat, foreign mother were such social handicaps to him that he actually told several playmates in the neighborhood that he was an adopted child. A neighbor woman invited my wife over for coffee during the daytime exactly once, and with this purpose: to discover if we knew who the boy's real parents were.

Peace.

So a decent interval went by after Leland Clewes was sent to prison, two years, as I say-and then I was called into the office of a.s.sistant Secretary of the Army Shelton Walker. We had never met. He had never been in government service before. He was my age. He had been in the war and had risen to the rank of major in the Field Artillery and had made the landings in North Africa and then, on D-Day, in France. But he was essentially an Oklahoma businessman. Someone would tell me later that he owned the largest tire distributors.h.i.+p in the state. More startling to me: He was a Republican, for General of the Armies Dwight David Eisenhower had now become President-the first Republican to hold that office in twenty years.

Mr. Walker wished to express, he said, the grat.i.tude that the whole country should feel for my years of faithful service in both war and peace. He said that I had executive skills that would surely have been more lavishly rewarded if I had employed them in private industry. An economy drive was underway, he said, and the post I held was to be terminated. Many other posts were being terminated, so that he was unable to move me somewhere else, as much as he might have liked to do so. I was fired, in short. I am unable to say even now whether he was being unkind or not when he said to me, rising and extending his hand, "You can now sell your considerable skills, Mr. Starbuck, for their true value in the open marketplace of the Free Enterprise System. Happy hunting! Good luck!"

What did I know about Free Enterprise? I know a great deal about it now, but I knew nothing about it then. I knew so little about it then that I was able to imagine for several months that private industry really would pay a lot for an all-purpose executive like me. I told my poor wife during those first months of unemployment that, yes, that was certainly an option we held, in case all else failed: that I could at any time raise my arms like a man crucified, so to speak, and fall backward into General Motors or General Electric or some such thing. A measure of the kindness of this woman to me: She never asked me why I didn't do that immediately if it was so easy-never asked me to explain why, exactly, I felt that there was something silly and not quite gentlemanly about private industry.

"We may have to be rich, even though we don't want to be," I remember telling her somewhere in there. My son was six by then, and listening-and old enough, surely, to ponder such a paradox. Could it have made any sense to him? No.

Meanwhile, I visited and telephoned acquaintances in other departments, making light of being "temporarily at liberty," as out-of-work actors say. I might have been a man with a comical injury, like a black eye or a broken big toe. Also: All my old acquaintances were Democrats like myself, allowing me to present myself as a victim of Republican stupidity and vengefulness.

But, alas, whereas life for me had been so long a sort of Virginia reel, as friends handed me on from job to job, no one could now think of a vacant post anywhere. Vacancies had suddenly become as extinct as dodo birds.

Too bad.

But the old comrades behaved so naturally and politely toward me that I could not say even now that I was being punished for what I had done to Leland Clewes-if I had not at last appealed for help to an arrogant old man outside of government, who, to my shock, was perfectly willing to show the disgust he felt for me, and to explain it in detail. He was Timothy Beame. He had been an a.s.sistant secretary of agriculture under Roosevelt before the war. He had offered me my first job in government. He, too, was a Harvard man and former Rhodes Scholar. Now he was seventy-four years old and the active head of Beame, Mearns, Weld and Weld, the most prestigious law firm in Was.h.i.+ngton.

I asked him on the telephone if he would have lunch with me. He declined. Most people declined to have lunch with me. He said he could see me for half an hour late that afternoon, but that he could not imagine what we might have to talk about.

"Frankly, sir," I said, "I'm looking for work-possibly with a foundation or a museum. Something like that."

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh-looking for work, are we?" he said. "Yes-that we should talk about. Come in, by all means. How many years is it now since we've had a good talk?"

"Thirteen years, sir," I said.

"A lot of water goes over the old dam in thirteen years."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Ta-ta," he said.

I was fool enough to keep the appointment.

His reception of me was elaborately hearty and false from the first. He introduced me to his young male secretary, told him what a promising young man I had been, clapping me on the back all the time. This was a man who may never have clapped anyone on the back in his life before.

When we got into his paneled office, Timothy Beame directed me to a leather club chair, saying, "Sit thee doon, sit thee doon." I have recently come across that same supposedly humorous expression, of course, in Dr. Bob Fender's science-fiction story about the judge from Vicuna, who got stuck forever to me and my destiny. Again: I doubt if Timothy Beame had ever addressed such an inane locution to anyone ever before. This was a bunchy, s.h.a.ggy old man, incidentally-accidentally majestic as I was accidentally small. His great hands suggested that he had swung a mighty broadsword long ago, and that they were fumbling for truth and justice now. His white brows were an unbroken thicket from one side to the other, and after he had seated himself at his desk, he dipped his head forward so as to peer at me and speak to me through that hedge.

"I needn't ask what you've been up to lately," he said.

"No, sir-I guess not," I said.

"You and young Clewes have managed to make yourselves as famous as Mutt and Jeff," he said. "To our sorrow," I said.

"I would hope so. I would certainly hope that there was much sorrow there," he said.

This was a man who, as it turned out, had only about two more months to live. He had had no hint of that, so far as I know. It was said, after he died, that he would surely have been named to the Supreme Court, if only he had managed to live until the election of another Democrat to the presidency.

"If you are truly sorrowful," he went on, "I hope you know what it is you are mourning, exactly."

"Sir-?" I said.

"You thought only you and Clewes were involved?" he said.

"Yes, sir," I said. "And our wives, of course." I meant it.

He gave a mighty groan. "That is the one thing you should not have said to me," he said.

"Sir-?" I said.

"You ninny, you Harvard abortion, you incomparably third-rate little horse's a.s.s," he said, and he arose from his chair. "You and Clewes have destroyed the good reputation of the most unselfish and intelligent generation of public servants this country has ever known! My G.o.d-who can care about you now, or about Clewes? Too bad he's in jail! Too bad we can't find another job for you!"

I, too, got up. "Sir," I said, "I broke no law."

"The most important thing they teach at Harvard," he said, "is that a man can obey every law and still be the worst criminal of his time."

Where or when this was taught at Harvard, he did not say. It was news to me.

"Mr. Starbuck," he said, "in case you haven't noticed: We have recently come through a global conflict between good and evil, during which we grew quite accustomed to beaches and fields littered with the bodies of our own brave and blameless dead. Now I am expected to feel pity for one unemployed bureaucrat, who, for all the damage he has done to his country, should be hanged and drawn and quartered, as far as I am concerned."

"I only told the truth," I bleated. I was nauseated with terror and shame.

"You told a fragmentary truth," he said, "which has now been allowed to represent the whole! 'Educated and compa.s.sionate public servants are almost certainly Russian spies.' That's all you are going to hear now from the semiliterate old-time crooks and spellbinders who want the government back, who think it's rightly theirs. Without the symbiotic idiocies of you and Leland Clewes they could never have made the connection between treason and pity and brains. Now get out of my sight!"

"Sir," I said. I would have fled if I could, but I was paralyzed.

"You are yet another nincomp.o.o.p, who, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time," he said, "was able to set humanitarianism back a full century! Begone!"

Strong stuff.

8.

SO THERE I I SAT SAT on the bench outside the prison, waiting for the bus, while the Georgia sun beat down on me. A great Cadillac limousine, with pale blue curtains drawn across its back windows, simmered by slowly on the other side of the median divider, on the lanes that would take it to the headquarters of the Air Force base. I could see only the chauffeur, a black man, who was looking quizzically at the prison. The place was not clearly a prison. A quite modest sign at the foot of the flagpole said only this: "F.M.S.A.C.F., Authorized Personnel Only." on the bench outside the prison, waiting for the bus, while the Georgia sun beat down on me. A great Cadillac limousine, with pale blue curtains drawn across its back windows, simmered by slowly on the other side of the median divider, on the lanes that would take it to the headquarters of the Air Force base. I could see only the chauffeur, a black man, who was looking quizzically at the prison. The place was not clearly a prison. A quite modest sign at the foot of the flagpole said only this: "F.M.S.A.C.F., Authorized Personnel Only."

The limousine continued on, until it found a crossover about a quarter of a mile up. Then it came back down and stopped with its glossy front fender inches from my nose. There, reflected in that perfect fender, I saw that old Slavic janitor again. This was the same limousine, it turned out, that had set off the false alarm about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse somewhat earlier. It had been cruising in search of the prison for quite some time.

The chauffeur got out, and he asked me if this was indeed the prison.

Thus was I required to make my first sound as a free man. "Yes," I said.

The chauffeur, who was a big, serenely paternal, middle-aged man in a tan whipcord uniform and black leather puttees, opened the back door, spoke into the twilit interior. "Gentlemen," he said, with precisely the appropriate mixture of sorrow and respect, "we have reached our destination." Letters embroidered in red silk thread on his breast pocket identified his employer. "RAMJAC," they said.

As I would learn later: Old pals of Greathouse had provided him and his lawyers with swift and secret transportation from his home to prison, so that there would be almost no witnesses to his humiliation. A limousine from Pepsi-Cola had picked him up before dawn at the service entrance to the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, which was his home. It had taken him to the Marine Air Terminal next to La Guardia, and directly out onto a runway. A corporate jet belonging to Resorts International was waiting for him there. It flew him to Atlanta, where he was met, again right out on the runway, by a curtained limousine supplied by the Southeastern District Office of The RAMJAC Corporation.

Out clambered Virgil Greathouse-dressed almost exactly as I was, in a gray, pinstripe suit and a white s.h.i.+rt and a regimental-stripe tie. Our regiments were different. He was a Coldstream Guard. As always, he was sucking on his pipe. He gave me the briefest of glances.

And then two sleek lawyers got out-one young, one old.

While the chauffeur went to the limousine's trunk to get the convict's luggage, Greathouse and the two lawyers looked over the prison as though it were a piece of real estate they were thinking of buying, if the price was right. There was a twinkle in the eyes of Greathouse, and he was imitating birdcalls with his pipe. He may have been thinking how tough he was. He had been taking lessons in boxing and jujitsu jujitsu and and karate karate, I would learn later from his lawyers, ever since it had become clear to him that he was really going to go to jail.

"Well," I thought to myself when I heard that, "there won't be anybody in that particular prison who will want to fight him, but he will get his back broken anyway. Everybody gets his back broken when he goes to prison for the first time. It mends after a while, but never quite the way it was before. As tough as Virgil Greathouse may be, he will never walk or feel quite the same again."

Virgil Greathouse had failed to recognize me. Sitting there on the bench, I might as well have been a corpse in the mud on a battlefield, and he might have been a general who had come forward during a lull to see how things were going, by and large.

I was unsurprised. I did think, though, that he might recognize the voice from inside the prison, which we could all hear so clearly now. It was the voice of his closest Watergate coconspirator, Emil Larkin, singing at the top of his lungs the Negro spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

Greathouse had no time to show his reaction to the voice, for a fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. This was a gut-ripping sound to anyone who had not heard it and heard it and heard it before. There was never a warning build-up. It was always an end-of-the-world explosion overhead.

Greathouse and the lawyers and the chauffeur flung themselves to the ground. Then they got up again, cursing and laughing and dusting themselves off. Greathouse, supposing correctly that he was being watched and sized up by people he could not see, made some boxing feints and looked up into the sky as though to say, clowningly, "Send me another one. I'm ready this time." The party did not advance on the prison, however. It waited by the limousine, expecting some sort of welcoming party. Greathouse wanted, I imagine, one last acknowledgment of his rank in society on neutral ground, a sort of surrender at Appomattox, with the warden as Ulysses S. Grant and himself as Robert E. Lee.

But the warden wasn't even in Georgia. He would have been there if he had had any advance notice that Greathouse was going to surrender on this particular day. But he was in Atlantic City, addressing a convention of the American a.s.sociation of Parole Officers up there. So it was finally Clyde Carter, the spit and image of President Carter, who came out of the front door a few steps and motioned to them.

Clyde smiled. "You all come in," he said.

So in they went, with the chauffeur bringing up the rear, carrying two valises made of b.u.t.tery leather and a matching case for toiletries. Clyde relieved him of the bags at the threshold, told him politely to return to the limousine.

"You won't be needed in there," said Clyde.

So the chauffeur got back into the limousine. His name was Cleveland Lawes, a garbling of the name of the man I had ruined, Leland Clewes. He had only a grammar-school education, but he read five books a week while waiting for people, mostly RAMJAC executives and customers and suppliers. Because he had been captured by the Chinese during the Korean War, and had actually gone to China for a while and worked as a deckhand on a coastwise steamer in the Yellow Sea, he was reasonably fluent in Chinese.

Cleveland Lawes was reading The Gulag Archipelago The Gulag Archipelago now, an account of the prison system in the Soviet Union by another former prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. now, an account of the prison system in the Soviet Union by another former prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

So there I was all alone on a bench in the middle of nowhere again. I entered a period of catatonia again-staring straight ahead at nothing, and every so often clapping my old hands three times.

If it had not been for that clapping, Cleveland Lawes tells me now, he would never have become curious about me.

But I became his business by clapping my hands. He had to find out why I did it.

Did I tell him the truth about the clapping? No. It was too complicated and silly. I told him that I had been daydreaming about the past, and that whenever I remembered an especially happy moment, I would lift my hands from my lap, and I would clap three times.

He offered me a ride into Atlanta.

And there I was now, after only half an hour of freedom, sitting in the front seat of a parked limousine. So far so good.

And if Cleveland Lawes had not offered me a ride into Atlanta, he would never have become what he is today, personnel director of the Transico Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. Transico has limousine services and taxicab fleets and car-rental agencies and parking lots and garages all over the Free World. You can even rent furniture from Transico. Many people do.

I asked him if he thought his pa.s.sengers would mind my coming along to Atlanta.

He said that he had never seen them before, and that he never expected to see them again-that they did not work for RAMJAC. He added the piquant detail that he had not known that his chief pa.s.senger had been Virgil Greathouse until the arrival at the prison. Until that moment Greathouse had been disguised by a false beard.

I craned my neck for a look into the backseat, and there the beard was, with one of its wire earloops hooked over a door handle.

Cleveland Lawes said as a joke that he wasn't sure Greathouse's lawyers would come back out again. "When they were looking over the prison," he said, "seemed to me they were trying it on for size."

He asked me if I had ever ridden in a limousine before. For simplicity's sake I told him, "No." As a child of course, I had often ridden beside my father in the front seat of Alexander Hamilton McCone's various limousines. In my youth, as I was preparing for Harvard, I had often ridden in the backseat with Mr. McCone, with a gla.s.s part.i.tion between myself and my father. The part.i.tion had not seemed strange or even suggestive to me at the time.

And when in Nuremberg I had been master of that grotesque Fafner of a Mercedes touring car. But it had been an open car, freakish even without the bullet holes in the trunk lid and the rear winds.h.i.+eld. The status it gave me among the Bavarians was that of a pirate-in temporary possession of stolen goods that would certainly be restolen, again and again. But, sitting there outside the prison, I realized that I had not sat in a real limousine for perhaps forty-five years! As high as I had risen in public service, I had never been ent.i.tled to a limousine, had never been within three promotions of having one of my own or even the occasional use of one. Nor had I ever so beguiled a superior who had one that he had said to me, "Young man-I want to talk to you more about this. You come in my car with me."

Leland Clewes, on the other hand, though not ent.i.tled to one of his own, was forever riding around in limousines with adoring old men.

No matter.