Читать книгу An Affair of State - Harry Hart Frank - Страница 3
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The way Jeff Baker got his name was like this.
His father, a State Department clerk, was called to George Washington Hospital at the lunch hour. He remained at the hospital all the rest of the day, and all that night, in the late September of 1919. Mabel Baker was thirty-seven, this was their first child, and it was a difficult labor. Through the whole night Nicholas Baker kept his miserable watch on the bench in the corridor, his hands locked across his sharp knees, and his unsubstantial frame braced against the muffled cries that issued from the delivery room, and rolled down upon him in ever-quickening rhythm like storm waves. Yet so unobtrusive was Nicholas Baker that when the baby was born neither the doctor nor the nurse remembered he was waiting. At eight in the morning he ventured into the hospital office and asked whether there was any news, and the startled telephone girl said the baby had been born an hour before, and it was a boy, and weighed five-and-a-half pounds, and where had Mr. Baker been all this time.
Mabel Baker was in a semi-private room, which was as much as they could afford. There were three other women in the room, and their unreserved inquisitiveness and rude staring made Nicholas Baker self-conscious as he took his wife’s hand and bent to kiss her cheek. Her face was gray and showed all its lines. “Was it bad?” he whispered. “Was it bad, dear?”
“Not too bad,” she said. “It’s hard to remember. It was like a nightmare you didn’t think would ever end, and now it has ended.”
“It’s wonderful—a boy.”
“He’s very small, the doctor said.”
“He’ll grow bigger. He’ll grow big enough for the Foreign Service.”
“He’ll grow up to be Ambassador to London,” Mabel said, because that was the grandest thing she could imagine.
“Won’t he have to make a million first?” Nicholas laughed. Mabel was positive, but had never convinced her husband, that only his lack of money prevented him from crossing the invisible line separating the career diplomats from the clerks, the gentlemen from the shabbily respectable, in the Department. He knew, although he never mentioned it, that there were barriers more inflexible than penury. There was family, and school, and the clothes he wore and the way he wore them, and the people he knew, and the wife he had married.
They talked of the things to be done—the telegram to her family, the announcement cards, the eight dollars a week to the colored maid to clean the house and cook breakfast and dinner while she was in the hospital, and finally a name for the boy. “We’ll name him Nicholas, junior,” Mabel said, “and we’ll give him Rowley for a middle name. That’ll please my dad.”
“All right,” Nicholas agreed. It was certainly the conventional, the expected name. He took his watch from his trousers pocket.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Eight-forty.”
“Then you’d better get down to the Department,” she suggested, accurately reading his thought. Nicholas had not been late to work in fourteen years. It was something of a record in the European Division. It was his only distinction, and it would distress him to see it shattered.
“You’re sure you’ll be all right? I’ll stay if you want me to.”
“Of course I’m all right. Anyway, the doctor is coming to look at me again at ten, and then you can come back at noon.”
A nurse, gauze mask swinging below her chin, entered the semi-private room. “You want to see the baby, don’t you, Mr. Baker?” she said.
“Oh, yes, of course I want to see the baby.” He was surprised that he hadn’t thought of this himself. One of the first things he should have done, he was sure, was to ask to see the baby. He hoped that Mabel hadn’t noticed his lapse in protocol.
The baby was one of twelve babies, displayed like packaged dolls in a department store window, in a room shielded from the corridor by plate glass. “This is a new idea,” the nurse explained. “Protects them from the flu germs.” She pointed to one of the baskets. “That’s yours.”
Nicholas Baker saw a red face, wrinkled like a dried apple, but afterwards he was never absolutely certain he had looked at the right one. He wondered what custom required him to say, and how many minutes he should look at this wrinkled, red face. “Ah, fine, fine!” he said. After he was gone the nurse thought he behaved not at all like the father of a first-born son. It might have been his sixth, he seemed in such a hurry to get out of the hospital.
2
At the corner of Fourteenth and H Streets he detoured into a cigar store. “I want a box—no, twelve will be enough—twelve of your best cigars,” he told the man behind the counter. “Coronas or Havanas or whatever is the best.” He never smoked cigars himself so he wasn’t sure of the brands.
“Fifty centers?”
“Well, I don’t know. You’ve got good quarter ones, haven’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, quarter ones will do.” It wasn’t so much saving three dollars, Nicholas thought. It was simply that it would appear ostentatious for a man in his position to pass out fifty centers. Fifty centers were for Assistant Secretaries, and Chiefs of Division, and Consul Generals, and FSOs in Classes One and Two.
He ran up the steps of the State, War, and Navy Building at five to nine and when he reached his office on the third floor, West Executive Avenue side, he was gratified to find that as usual he was first. He went to the closet to change his coat and was astonished to see his blue serge on the hanger. If his blue serge was on the hanger then he must be wearing his alpaca office jacket. He looked down and saw that this was true. He had been wearing the black alpaca all along, since noon the day before. This was very disconcerting. He was glad he was alone in the office.
Miss Grimsby, the red-haired stenographer, came in a bit after nine, and the others in Eastern Mediterranean not long after that, and then at ten Horace Locke arrived.
Mr. Locke accepted a cigar and pumped his hand. “Nick,” he said, “you did it. You produced a boy. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mr. Locke.” He was senior to Horace Locke by six years, both in age and in the Department, and had given him his elementary instruction in tariffs, visas, admiralty law, code and cipher, and protocol. He had charted for him the often devious channels through which international gossip and information flowed into and through the Department. On both Horace Locke’s tours of duty in Washington they had been in the same office, and shared the same work. Within this room they were friends. As men of comparable mentality and similar feelings they discussed the Department’s policies and the great issues of the day—the peace treaties, the League, the Army’s Siberian adventure, the disastrous strike of steel workers just begun and the threatened strike of coal miners within the next few weeks, the disquieting international organization called the Comintern formed in Russia, John Alcock’s non-stop flight across the Atlantic, the new Volstead Act, and the HCL. But Horace Locke was a Foreign Service Officer, and Nicholas Baker was a clerk, and so it was always “Mr. Locke,” and “Nick.”
“What’re you going to name him? Nicholas of course. He’s your first.”
“Well, my wife wants me to call him Nicholas.” It seemed silly, to carry on a conversation like this. He couldn’t imagine Horace Locke caring whether the boy was named Nicholas or Julius Caesar. Nicholas Baker was wondering whether it would be proper, and politic, to ask for the afternoon off when Mr. Locke took him by the arm and led him to his desk, so that the others in the room were excluded from what next he had to say.
“Nick,” he asked, his long, handsome face suddenly sober, “did you hear the news?”
“No. What news?”
“The President had a stroke yesterday. In Wichita. Apoplexy.”
“No!”
“Yes. It isn’t generally known yet. I heard it from the Undersecretary last night at dinner.”
“Do you think it’s serious?”
“Apoplexy is always serious.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that, exactly. I was thinking of the League.” Nicholas Baker had a theory, which he discreetly pushed when the moment was right, that the League would fail unless it was led by the United States, and there would be another war. He had another theory. It was too radical to voice openly. He believed that all the countries in the world should be formed into one government, as all the states were bound together in the United States.
“The League is finished, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Locke.
“It’s certainly finished unless the President is able to continue his speaking tour.”
Mr. Locke shook his head. “It seems that our people are aroused and united only when they are immediately threatened. You take away their food, or their jobs, or put fear of sudden death into them—then they are aroused. But this League seems to them a faraway thing. It’s like joining a lodge in another city. They don’t see any quick benefit. They don’t see how it can help them personally.”
“But certainly they must think of their children.”
“They don’t think of their children. Only one generation in ten considers its children, and we had that generation in the last half of the Eighteenth Century. Anyway, Wilson’s speaking tour will have to be cancelled. He can’t possibly go on.”
“It’s a shame.”
Mr. Locke sat down in his swivel chair and looked out of the wide window, over the White House, and over the Capitol beyond, so that the warm autumn sun was full on his face. “Poor Wilson,” he said. “Poor, idealistic Wilson. What was it Jefferson said? It went something like this, ‘The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ ”
“It’s always the patriots’ blood. The tyrants never seem to bleed,” Nicholas said.
“Well, that may be because most of us are patriots, really. So there are more of us to get hurt.”
“Do you think so, honestly?”
“Yes, I do. The world is getting better. It must.”
“Perhaps. We’re due, and overdue.”
3
Nicholas Baker spent his lunch hour at the hospital, and washed down a cheese sandwich with a glass of milk at the drug store on the way back to the Department. Mabel had assured him that she was perfectly happy, and so he did not ask for the afternoon off. Just before he left the office at six he drew up a chair to Mr. Locke’s desk and announced: “Well, I’ve decided on a name, Mr. Locke. Do you know what I’m going to name him? I’m going to name him Jefferson Wilson Baker.”
“That’s a very ambitious name,” said Horace Locke.
“For my son,” said Nicholas Baker, “I’m a very ambitious man.”
As he left the Department he was already considering where little Jefferson should go to school, and what he should be taught at home.
