Jailbird. Part 6

Calm down.

Cleveland Lawes commented that I sounded like an educated man to him.

I admitted to having gone to Harvard.

This allowed him to tell me about his having been a prisoner of the Chinese communists in North Korea, for the Chinese major in charge of his prison had been a Harvard man. The major would have been about my age, and possibly even a cla.s.smate, but I had never befriended any Chinese. According to Lawes, he had studied physics and mathematics, so I would not have known him in any case.

"His daddy was a big landlord," said Lawes. "When the communists came, they made his daddy kneel down in front of all his tenants in the village, and then they chopped off his head with a sword."

"But the son could still be a communist-after that?" I said.

"He said his daddy really had been a very bad landlord," he said.

"Well," I said, "that's Harvard for you, I guess."

This Harvard Chinese befriended Cleveland Lawes and persuaded him to come to China instead of going back home to Georgia when the war was over. When he was a boy, a cousin of Lawes had been burned alive by a mob, and his father had been dragged out of his house one night and horsewhipped by the Ku Klux Klan, and he himself had been beat up twice for trying to register to vote, right before the Army got him. So he was easy prey for a smooth-talking communist. And he worked for two years, as I say, as a deckhand on the Yellow Sea. He said that he fell in love several times, but that n.o.body would fall in love with him.

"So that was what brought you back?" I asked.

He said it was the church music more than anything else. "There wasn't anybody to sing with over there," he said. "And the food," he said.

"The food wasn't any good?" I said.

"Oh, it was good," he said. "It just wasn't the kind of food I like to talk about."

"Um," I said.

"You can't just eat food," he said. "You've got to talk about it, too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food."

I congratulated him on having learned Chinese, and he replied that he could never do such a thing now. "I know too much now," he said. "I was too ignorant then to know how hard it was to learn Chinese. I thought it was like imitating birds. You know: You hear a bird make a sound, then you try to make a sound just like that, and see if you can't fool the bird."

The Chinese were nice about it when he decided that he wanted to go home. They liked him, and they went to some trouble for him, asking through circuitous diplomatic channels what would be done to him if he went home. America had no representatives in China then, and neither did any of its allies. The messages went through Moscow, which was still friendly with China then.

Yes, and this black, former private first cla.s.s, whose military specialty had been to carry the base-plate of a heavy mortar, turned out to be worth negotiations at the highest diplomatic levels. The Americans wanted him back in order to punish him. The Chinese said that the punishment had to be brief and almost entirely symbolic, and that he had to be returned nearly at once to ordinary civilian life-or they would not let him go. The Americans said that Lawes would of course be expected to make some sort of public explanation of why he had come home. After that, he would be court-martialed, given a prison sentence of under three years and a dishonorable discharge, with forfeiture of all pay and benefits. The Chinese replied that Lawes had given his promise that he would never speak against the People's Republic of China, which had treated him well. If he was to be forced to break that promise, they would not let him go. They also insisted that he serve no prison time whatsoever, and that he be paid for the time he spent as a prisoner of war. The Americans replied that he would have to be jailed at some point, since no army could allow the crime of desertion to go unpunished. They would like to jail him prior to his trial. They would sentence him to a term equal to the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and deduct the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and send him home. Back pay was out of the question.

And that was the deal.

"They wanted me back, you know," he told me, "because they were so embarra.s.sed. They couldn't stand it that even one American, even a black one, would think for even a minute that maybe America wasn't the best country in the world."

I asked him if he had ever heard of Dr. Robert Fender, who was convicted of treason during the Korean War, and was right inside the prison there, measuring Virgil Greathouse for a uniform.

"No," he said. "I never kept track of other people in that kind of trouble. I never felt like it was a club or something."

I asked him if he had ever seen the legendary Mrs. Jack Graham, Jr., the majority stockholder in The RAMJAC Corporation.

"That's like asking me if I've seen G.o.d," he said.

The widow Graham had not been seen in public, at that point, for about five years. Her most recent appearance was in a courtroom in New York City, where RAMJAC was being sued by a group of its stockholders for proofs that she was still alive. The accounts in the papers amused my wife so, I remember. "This is the America I love," she said. "Why can't it be like this all the time?"

Mrs. Graham came into the courtroom without a lawyer, but with eight uniformed bodyguards from Pinkerton, Inc., a RAMJAC subsidiary. One of them was carrying an amplifier with a loudspeaker and a microphone. Mrs. Graham was wearing a voluminous black caftan with its hood up, and with the hood pinned shut with diaper pins, so that she could peek out, but n.o.body could see what was inside. Only her hands were visible. Another Pinkerton was carrying an inkpad, some paper, and a copy of her fingerprints from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her prints had been forwarded to the F.B.I. after she was convicted of drunken driving in Frankfort, Kentucky, in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-two, soon after her husband died. She had been put on probation at that time. I myself had just been fired from government service at that time.

The amplifier was turned on, and the microphone was slipped inside her caftan, so people could hear what she was saying in there. She proved she was who she said she was by fingerprinting herself on the spot and having the prints compared with those possessed by the F.B.I. She said under oath that she was in excellent health, both physically and mentally-and in control of the company's top officers, but never face-to-face. When she instructed them on the telephone, she used a pa.s.sword to identify herself. This pa.s.sword was changed at irregular intervals. At the judge's request, I remember, she gave a sample pa.s.sword, and it seemed so full of magic that it still sticks in my mind. This was it: "shoemaker." Every order she gave on the phone was subsequently confirmed by mail, by a letter written entirely by her own hand. At the bottom of each letter was not only her signature, but a full set of prints from her eight little fingers and two little thumbs. She called them that: "... my eight little fingers and my two little thumbs."

That was that. Mrs. Jack Graham was unquestionably alive, and now she was free to disappear again.

"I've seen Mr. Leen many times," said Cleveland Lawes. He was speaking of Arpad Leen, the very public and communicative president and chairman of the board of directors of The RAMJAC Corporation. He would become my boss of bosses, and Cleveland Lawes's boss of bosses, too, when we both became corporate officers of RAMJAC. I say now that Arpad Leen is the most able and informed and brilliant and responsive executive under whom it has ever been my privilege to serve. He is a genius at acquiring companies and keeping them from dying afterward.

He used to say, "If you can't get along with me, you can't get along with anybody."

It was true, it was true.

Lawes said that Arpad Leen had come to Atlanta and been Lawes's pa.s.senger only two months before. A cl.u.s.ter of new stores and luxury hotels in Atlanta had gone bankrupt, and Leen had tried to snap it all up for RAMJAC. He had been outbid, however, by a South Korean religious cult.

Lawes asked me if I had any children. I said I had a son who worked for The New York Times The New York Times. Lawes laughed and said that he and my son had the same boss now: Arpad Leen. I had missed the news that morning, so he had to explain to me that RAMJAC had just acquired control of The New York Times The New York Times and all of its subsidiaries, which included the second-largest catfood company in the world. and all of its subsidiaries, which included the second-largest catfood company in the world.

"When he was down here," said Lawes, "Mr. Leen told me this was going to happen. It was the catfood company he wanted-not The New York Times." The New York Times."

The two lawyers got into the backseat of the limousine. They weren't subdued at all. They were laughing about the guard who looked like the President of the United States. "I felt like saying to him," said one, "'Mr. President, why don't you just pardon him right here and now? He's suffered enough, and he could get in some good golf this afternoon.'"

One of them tried on the false beard, and the other one said he looked like Karl Marx. And so on. They were incurious about me. Cleveland Lawes told them that I had been visiting my son. They asked me what my son was in for and I said, "Mail fraud." That was the end of the conversation.

So off we went to Atlanta. There was a curious object stuck by means of a suction cup to the glove compartment in front of me, I remember. Coming out of the cup and aimed at my breastbone was what looked like about a foot of green garden hose. At the end of the shaft was a white plastic wheel the size of a dinner plate. Once we got going, the wheel began to hypnotize me, bobbing up and down when we went over b.u.mps, swaying this way and then that way as we went around curves.

So I asked about it. It was a toy steering wheel, it turned out. Lawes had a seven-year-old son he sometimes took with him on trips. The little boy could pretend to be steering the limousine with the plastic wheel. There had been no such toy when my own son was little. Then again, he wouldn't have enjoyed it much. Even at seven, young Walter hated to go anywhere with his mother and me.

I said it was a clever toy.

Lawes said it could be an exciting one, too, especially if the person with the real steering wheel was drunk and having close shaves with oncoming trucks and sideswiping parked cars and so on. He said that the President of the United States ought to be given a wheel like that at his inauguration, to remind him and everybody else that all he could do was pretend to steer.

He let me off at the airport.

The planes to New York City were all overbooked, it turned out. I did not get out of Atlanta until five o'clock that afternoon. That was all right with me. I skipped lunch, having no appet.i.te. I found a paperback book in a toilet stall, so I read that for a while. It was about a man who, through ruthlessness, became the head of a big international conglomerate. Women were crazy about him. He treated them like dirt, but they just came back for more. His son was a drug addict and his daughter was a nymphomaniac.

My reading was interrupted once by a Frenchman who spoke to me in French and pointed to my left lapel. I thought at first that I had set myself on fire again, even though I didn't smoke anymore. Then I realized that I was still wearing the narrow red ribbon that identified me as a chevalier chevalier in the French Legion d'honneur. Pathetically enough, I had worn it all through my trial, and all the way to prison, too. in the French Legion d'honneur. Pathetically enough, I had worn it all through my trial, and all the way to prison, too.

I told him in English that it had come with the suit, which I had bought secondhand, and that I had no idea what it was supposed to represent.

He became very icy, "Permettez-moi, monsieur," "Permettez-moi, monsieur," he said, and he deftly plucked the ribbon from my lapel as though it had been an insect there. he said, and he deftly plucked the ribbon from my lapel as though it had been an insect there.

"Merci," I said, and I returned to my book. I said, and I returned to my book.

When there was at last an airplane seat for me, my name was broadcast over the public-address system several times: "Mr. Walter F. Starbuck, Mr. Walter F. Starbuck ..."It had been such a notorious name at one time; but I could not now catch sight of anyone who seemed to recognize it, who raised his or her eyebrows in lewd surmise.

Two and a half hours later I was on the island of Manhattan, wearing my trenchcoat to keep out the evening chill. The sun was down. I was staring at an animated display in the window of a store that sold nothing but toy trains.

It was not as though I had no place to go. I was close to where I was going. I had written ahead. I had reserved a room without bath or television for a week, paying in advance-in the once-fas.h.i.+onable Hotel Arapahoe, now a catch-as-catch-can lazaret and bagnio one minute from Times Square.

9.

I HAD BEEN HAD BEEN to the Arapahoe once before-in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. Fire had yet to be domesticated. Albert Einstein had predicted the invention of the wheel, but was unable to describe its probable shape and uses in the language of ordinary women and men. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer, was President. The sale of alcoholic beverages was against the law, and I was a Harvard freshman. to the Arapahoe once before-in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. Fire had yet to be domesticated. Albert Einstein had predicted the invention of the wheel, but was unable to describe its probable shape and uses in the language of ordinary women and men. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer, was President. The sale of alcoholic beverages was against the law, and I was a Harvard freshman.

I was operating under instructions from my mentor, Alexander Hamilton McCone. He told me in a letter that I was to duplicate a folly he himself had committed when a freshman, which was to take a pretty girl to the Harvard-Columbia football game in New York, and then to spend a month's allowance on a lobster dinner for two, with oysters and caviar and all that, in the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe. We were to go dancing afterward. "You must wear your tuxedo," he said. "You must tip like a drunken sailor." Diamond Jim Brady, he told me, had once eaten four dozen oysters, four lobsters, four chickens, four squabs, four T-bone steaks, four pork chops, and four lamb chops there-on a bet. Lillian Russell had looked on.

Mr. McCone may have been drunk when he wrote that letter. "All work and no play," he wrote, "makes Jack a dull boy."

And the girl I took there, the twin sister of my roommate, would become one of the four women I would ever truly love. The first was my mother. The last was my wife.

Sarah Wyatt was the girl's name. She was all of eighteen, and so was I. She was attending a very easy two-year college for rich girls in Wellesley, Ma.s.sachusetts, which was Pine Manor. Her family lived in Prides Crossing, north of Boston-toward Gloucester. While we were in New York City together she would be staying with her maternal grandmother, a stockbroker's widow, in a queerly irrelevant enclave of dead-end streets and vest-pocket parks and Elizabethan apartment-hotels called "Tudor City"-near the East River, and actually bridging Forty-second Street. As luck will have it, my son now lives in Tudor City. So do Mr. and Mrs. Leland Clewes.

Small world.

Tudor City was quite new, but already bankrupt and nearly empty when I arrived by taxicab-to take my Sarah to the Hotel Arapahoe in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. I was wearing a tuxedo made to my measure by the finest tailor in Cleveland. I had a silver cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case, both gifts from Mr. McCone. I had forty dollars in my billfold. I could have bought the whole state of Arkansas for forty dollars cash in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one.

We come to the matter of physical size again: Sarah Wyatt was three inches taller than me. She did not mind. She was so far from minding that, when I fetched her in Tudor City, she was wearing high heels with her evening dress.

A stronger proof that she was indifferent to our disparity in size: In seven years Sarah Wyatt would agree to marry me.

She wasn't quite ready when I arrived, so I had to talk to her grandmother, Mrs. Sutton, for a while. Sarah had warned me at the football game that afternoon that I must not mention suicide to Mrs. Sutton-because Mr. Sutton had jumped out of his office window in Wall Street after the stock market crashed in Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine.

"It is a nice place you have here, Mrs. Sutton," I said.

"You're the only person who thinks so," she said. "It's crowded. Everything that goes on in the kitchen you can smell out here."

It was only a two-bedroom apartment. She had certainly come down in the world. Sarah said she used to have a horse farm in Connecticut and a house on Fifth Avenue, and on and on.

The walls of the little entrance hall were covered with blue ribbons from horse shows before the Crash. "I see you have won a lot of blue ribbons," I said.

"No," she said, "it was the horse that won those."

We were seated on folding chairs at a card table in the middle of the living room. There were no easy chairs, no couch. But the room was so jammed with breakfronts and escritoires and armoires and highboys and lowboys and Welsh dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks and so on, that I could not guess where the windows were. It turned out that she also stockpiled servants, all very old. A uniformed maid had let me in, and then exited sideways into a narrow fissure between two imposing examples of cabinetwork.

Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in "the electric" that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.

Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.

"I suppose this all looks very temporary to you," Mrs. Sutton said to me.

"No, ma'am," I said.

"It's quite permanent," she said. "I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated."

"Yes, ma'am," I said. escritoires and armoires and highboys and lowboys and Welsh dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks and so on, that I could not guess where the windows were. It turned out that she also stockpiled servants, all very old. A uniformed maid had let me in, and then exited sideways into a narrow fissure between two imposing examples of cabinetwork.

Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in "the electric" that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.

Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.

"I suppose this all looks very temporary to you," Mrs. Sutton said to me.

"No, ma'am," I said.

"It's quite permanent," she said. "I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated."

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Men in tuxedos as beautifully made as yours is should never call anyone but the Queen of England 'ma'am,'" she said.

"I'll try to remember that," I said.

"You are only a child, of course," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Tell me again how you are related to the McCones," she said.

I had never told anyone that I was related to the McCones. There was another lie I had told frequently, however-a lie, like everything else about me, devised by Mr. McCone. He said it would be perfectly acceptable, even fas.h.i.+onable, to admit that my father was penniless, but it would not do to have a household servant for a father.

The lie went like this, and I told it to Mrs. Sutton: "My father works for Mr. McCone as curator of his art collection. He also advises Mr. McCone on what to buy."

"A cultivated man," she said.

"He studied art in Europe," I said. "He is no businessman."

"A dreamer," she said.

"Yes," I said. "If it weren't for Mr. McCone, I could not afford to go to Harvard."

"'Starbuck-' "she mused. "I believe that's an old Nantucket name."

I was ready for that one, too. "Yes," I said, "but my great-grandfather left Nantucket for the Gold Rush and never returned. I must go to Nantucket sometime and look at the old records, to see where we fit in."

"A California family," she said.

"Nomads, really," I said. "California, yes-but Oregon, too, and Wyoming, and Canada, and Europe. But they were always bookish people-teachers and so on."

I was pure phlogiston, an imaginary element of long ago.

"Descended from whaling captains," she said.

"I imagine," I said. I was not at all uncomfortable with the lies.

"And from Vikings before that," she said. I shrugged.

She had decided to like me a lot-and would continue to do so until the end. As Sarah would tell me, Mrs. Sutton often referred to me as her little Viking. She would not live long enough to see Sarah agree to marry me and then to jilt me. She died in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-seven or so-penniless in an apartment furnished with little more than a card table, two folding chairs, and her bed. She had sold off all her treasures in order to support herself and her old servants, who would have had no place to go and nothing to eat without her. She survived them all. The maid, who was Tillie, was the last of them to die. Two weeks after Tillie died, so did Mrs. Sutton depart from this world.

Back there in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, while I was waiting for Sarah to complete her toilette, Mrs. Sutton told me that Mr. McCone's father, the founder of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, built the biggest house where she spent her girlhood summers-in Bar Harbor, Maine. When it was finished, he gave a grand ball with four orchestras, and n.o.body came.