Читать книгу The Committee - Sterling Watson - Страница 11

FIVE

Stall burst through the door of the presidential suite where legendary Margaret Braithwaite, Typist Immaculata, sat doing what she did best. The entire university knew that Margaret Braithwaite ran a lucrative business out of the president’s office while also catering to the great man’s every need. It was remarkable, Stall thought, and a testament to the times that she could type whole dissertations for grad students and still manage the schedule of a university president. Either the president was not busy enough, or Margaret Braithwaite was the equal of any three mortal women. Stall halted on the carpet in front of her desk, pulling at the collar Maureen had ironed for him. It was drenched with the sweat of his walk from Anderson to Tigert Hall. Mrs. Braithwaite finished a paragraph, her Olivetti making a sound like the German machine gun so feared by the Allies—a ripping sound rather than that of individual explosions, however close together. The German gun had fired an unheard of 1,200 rounds per minute. Unfortunately, Stall had heard the sound.

Compassionately, Mrs. Braithwaite charged for typing on a sliding scale. Grad students, the poorest of the poor, received her services for a mere fifty cents per page. It was said that she occasionally gave sage advice to the writers she typed. (“If I were you, I’d check that reference to Reinhold Niebuhr on page 213.”) The manila envelope passed into your sweating hands and a smile sent you out the door. And Stall had never heard anyone say that her interventions were unwelcome.

He looked at his watch.

Without looking up, Mrs. B. said, “He’s stuck in a meeting. He’ll be here soon.”

Stall thought this probably meant that the president was unable to free himself from a grudge round of golf—which, come to think of it, could also be an important meeting with a regent. It was all of a piece, and in Gainesville, President Connor was almost as well respected as his secretary. Like most Southern university presidents, he was more man of action than scholar. His trajectory had been lawyer, soldier (the Great War), businessman, and university president. The soldier had earned the Croix de Guerre at Belleau Wood. The businessman had prospered with the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. But President Thomas Connor was known best by rank-and-file Floridians for having been an amateur boxer of some renown: he’d won a Golden Gloves title in the welterweight division. Gas station attendants and grove workers knew him as the young man who had passed the bar examination and lasted ten rounds with Benny Leonard in the same week. Connor had lost the exhibition match but had persisted. Neither fighter’s knee had touched the canvas. Inevitably, when the newspapers covered Connor’s frequent trips to Tallahassee to finagle dollars for the growing university, the headline was something like: “Connor Boxes Pols for Education Lucre.”

Stall took the chair that Margaret Braithwaite offered with a nod of her head, listened uncomfortably to the burring sound of the typewriter as she pushed the machine to the limit of its ability to whack words onto paper while avoiding an apocalyptic snarl of steel and inky ribbon, and examined the framed pictures of James Connor on the walls: a young Connor kissing a boxing trophy, a mature Connor shaking hands with Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the same grip with Senator Spessard Holland, Connor breaking ground for a new building with a golden shovel in his hand and a steel hard hat raked across his brow, and Connor standing beside a railroad track with his arm slung over the shoulder of Charley Johns, who had risen from railroad conductor on a stretch of track near Starke to president of the Florida Senate. It all fits, thought Stall, who was an English professor but no snob. Stall had fled from the House of War to the House of Examined Lives, but he knew that money flowed only in one direction. It was the way of the world, and better to embrace the world as it was than to worry too much about changing it. Stall was proud to have a man like Connor as his president, a man who had rolled up his sleeves and stalked into the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt had famously said, there to be bloodied but unbowed, his face marred by dust and sweat, and from thence to return to the groves of academe with cash in one fist and hard-won worldly knowledge in the other.

While he waited, Stall opened the envelope Sophie Green had given him.

Dear Professor Stall,

I hope you won’t think me too forward if I offer to teach one of Professor Leaf’s courses in American literature. I wrote my master’s thesis on The Leatherstocking Tales, and, though I later moved on to specialize in Chaucer (a lot of distance between those two!), I remember a good bit about American Romanticism, and I will certainly bone up on it if you repose faith in me to take over the course. I’m new and untried, I know, but I want to be helpful if I can in this sad time.

Sincerely,

Sophie Green

Stall watched Mrs. Flying Fingers exercise her calling and considered proposing to Amos Harding that Sophie Green take over Jack Leaf’s American Romanticism course. His Bad Angel whispered to him that he could present it as his own idea while holding the ace to his vest, that Professor Green had already agreed to do it. He imagined himself saying to Sophie Green, Professor Harding is very grateful to you for agreeing to teach the class, and, of course, I am too. I’ll be happy to help you with it in any way I can.

As it usually did, Stall’s Good Angel flogged his Bad One back into its dark lair, and he decided to tell Harding the truth: Professor Green had offered, and he, Stall, was merely delivering her message.

President Connor came through the door like a . . . yes, by God, like a boxer answering the bell. Everybody stood, Mrs. B. behind her desk with a look of maternal affection for the president, and Stall in front of his chair and tugging at his sodden collar, with a look, he hoped, of proper respect. Connor tossed an old-fashioned panama at the hat tree in the corner (direct hit), saluted Mrs. Braithwaite smartly, and, as he passed, smacked Stall on the shoulder. Stall took this to mean, Follow me.

In the inner room, Connor went to his desk, opened a drawer, and stared down into it thoughtfully. Stall stood at attention, then at parade rest on the carpet in front of the desk. Connor sat, leaned forward with more energy than the move required, and dropped both hands flat onto the blotter with a sound like Stall’s mother using a mallet to tenderize a cheap cut of beef. “Whew,” Connor huffed, “tough meeting!”

Yes, Stall thought, that five iron to the tenth green, with the big pine leaning ominously over the bunker, is probably the toughest shot on the entire eighteen. But he only looked patiently, intelligently, inquisitively at his president.

“Hell of a day for news,” Connor muttered. He looked at Stall for confirmation.

Stall assumed he meant Jack Leaf’s unfortunate walk in the air, but that was yesterday. Well, Stall thought, we don’t hold this man to certain forms of precision. He’s busy. Stall’s confusion must have showed.

“What?” Connor said. “You haven’t heard?”

Stall could only stare, a new sheen of perspiration breaking out on his forehead.

Connor shook his head slowly, not, Stall hoped, at the English professor’s dullness. Then the president rose from his chair and reached into his inside coat pocket. Out came a copy of the Tallahassee Democrat. Connor spread the paper on the desktop, turned it to toward Stall, and waved him forward. The banner headline read: “McCarty Dies of Apparent Heart Attack. Johns Sworn in As Governor.”

Stall bent over the paper long enough to read a few lines about Charley Johns. The handsome and probably corrupt McCarty was now history. Johns would be a force. The article said:

Senate President Charley Johns swore to uphold the laws of the State of Florida and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic this afternoon at 4:00 in the chambers of Florida Supreme Court Justice John R. Mathews, Sr., in front of legislators from both parties and his wife Thelma. A grief-stricken Mrs. Dan McCarty was also present in a gesture of goodwill to her husband’s successor. The State Capitol building was draped with black bunting, and flags hung at half-mast today in honor of the deceased thirty-first governor of Florida.

There was a grainy photo of Charley Johns, the former railroad conductor, rumored to be almost illiterate, who hailed from Bradford County, one of the most backward in the state. A place where the Klan marched in broad daylight.

When Stall looked up from the paper, Connor sat and folded his beefy arms across his chest. “It’s a shock, is it not?”

“Yes sir.” Stall backed up until his calves hit a chair and he sat in it.

Connor’s voice was suddenly full of emotion: “So, we lose one of our own, Professor Leaf, and the governor of our state in the space of two days.”

“Yes sir.” Stall shook his head in astonishment and sorrow. Seconds passed while Connor seemed to master his feelings.

“I called you in here this morning to thank you, Tom, for what you did yesterday.”

“Oh, well . . .” Christ, why hadn’t Stall prepared something to say? He had known there’d be mystery in this visit to the president’s office, but he’d also known that a simple thank you would be a part of it. He managed, “I only did what any man would do.”

Connor shook his head sadly. “I only wish that were true. What, uh, what caused you to be there just then, Tom?”

Stall told the story of the strange sound drifting through his window and how he had risen to it, as though to a voice calling him, and hurried to the place where the young coed had stood looking down at dead Jack Leaf.

“I understand that you covered the man with your coat?”

“Yes sir.”

“We’ll, uh, we’ll take care of the expense of—”

“Oh, no sir, that won’t be—”

Connor waved his hand as though such things were done as gentlemen did them. No need for further discussion. He cleared his throat and made a church and steeple of his hands.

Stall remembered Jack Leaf’s fingers curling into fists as though, from across the divide, he wanted to fight someone.

Connor said, “What do you think happened, Tom?”

“I think he jumped. One of the students saw it. She seemed like a credible kid. She said he just stepped out into the air.”

Connor shook his head again and his eyes widened as, Stall supposed, he pictured what Jack Leaf had done. He raised a hand to the side of his head and made a vague sign. “Was he . . . ?”

“No sir, I don’t think so. We weren’t close, but Jack always seemed as balanced as the next guy, if you know what I mean.”

Connor looked at Stall with the eyes of an attorney, a judge.

Stall continued: “Jack saw a lot of action in the war.”

Connor nodded sagely. “Ah.”

“It made him, I think, a little remote, more inclined to observe than to get involved.”

“You mean politically?”

“No sir. I mean just life. Jack was a spectator.” To say this, here, now, to this man, made Stall feel strange. Did he, Stall, resemble Jack Leaf? Stall had told no one, not even Maureen, about his theory of himself. Tom Stall, observer of life.

“So, Professor Leaf wasn’t involved in politics?”

“Not that I knew,” Stall said. Far from it. Jack considered politics the wasteland of scoundrels.

“We have to be careful about politics, Tom. Especially now.” Connor put his hand flat on the Tallahassee Democrat. On the grainy picture of Charley Johns’s redneck face. Connor looked at Stall for a long moment out of narrowed eyes. Eyes that said, You understand me, don’t you?

The mystery had commenced, but Stall was certain of three things: Harding and Connor had talked, this meeting was the beginning of Stall’s vetting for the chairmanship, and there was something in Connor’s mind about Jack Leaf, something he was not telling Tom Stall.

Florida was America’s Vacation Land, and her beautiful beaches, the ring of white sand that enclosed her like a necklace of pearls, were cosmopolitan places where North and South mingled and even the races occasionally came within shouting distance of each other. But, oh God, go inland a few miles and Florida was Alabama and Mississippi with a vengeance. She was a land of lynching, convict labor, peonage, and the bare-knuckles politics that had not changed since Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest had served as the first grand wizard for the Ku Klux Klan.

People of breeding knew that you talked about politics and religion in polite company at your peril. Stall had no idea what he was free to say to his president about either one in a state where politics and religion went hand in hand if the religion was Protestant. God help you if you were Jewish or Catholic. In the eyes of Charley Johns and his wilderness tribe, disciples of the Church of Rome were only slightly better than Jews.

Stall decided to play it safe. “Sir, I don’t involve myself in politics much, except to vote when November comes around. I’ve got all I can handle with a wife and daughter, and these courses you pay me to teach.”

Connor nodded abstractly as though Stall had just delivered a paean to motherhood and apple pie. In a way, Stall supposed he had.

Connor said, “Tom, have you heard anything about the Committee?”

“The Committee, sir?”

Stall had heard about a lot of committees. He had sat on more of them than he liked. The tenure and promotion committee had been the worst, the august body that decided who kept a job and who had to slink off looking for work with the mark of Cain on his forehead. It was a duty that guaranteed enemies. When this committee’s decisions were announced, wives snubbed one another in supermarkets. One of Stall’s colleagues had pounded on the door of another man’s office late one afternoon, screaming, “Come out, Dawson, you gutless, brainless son of a bitch! Come out and fight! I know you voted me down, and the least I can do is knock you on your goddamned fat ass before I leave this godforsaken sump of mediocrity!”

Stall had sat in his office through this rant waiting to hear if Dawson’s door opened, in which case, he would have to go out and try to restore order. But who knew? Grimes, the screamer, might have a weapon. And by the sound of him, Grimes was desperate. Desperate men did desperate things. Stall had waited until he heard Grimes stomp away. Dawson, it was later reported, had made his escape by climbing out his window and scrambling down the ivy that grew up the redbrick wall.

President Connor was waiting.

Stall said, “No sir. I have not heard about the Committee.” Stall tried to introduce some levity. “I sure serve on a few of them!”

Connor’s eyes brooded. He bit the inside of his cheek and sucked his teeth. “You’ve heard no rumors. Nobody talking in the faculty mail room?”

Stall shook his head, wanted to look at his watch, but knew that would be a gaffe. Where was this going?

Connor sighed, the long breath that preceded climax. “The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee is Charley Johns’s brainchild, though I doubt he has one. A brain, I mean. I don’t know what Dan McCarty was thinking when he let Charley get this thing up and running. The Committee has police powers, subpoena powers, a team of lawyers and investigators, and they’re all hell-bent to root out Communists, homosexuals, and other undesirables in our schools. I’ve been working against this behind the scenes, talking with friends up in Tallahassee, trying it keep these people out of our business down here in Gainesville, but now that Dan’s gone and Charley’s sitting in his chair, well, it could be, Loose the dogs of war.”

Stall smiled. The president knew his Shakespeare. “With respect, sir,” he said, “what does all of this have to do with Jack Leaf?” And with me?

“A man came to my office yesterday. I was out. He wanted to talk to me about Professor Leaf.” Connor opened the desk drawer into which he had stared hard when he’d first invited Stall into this office. “He told Mrs. Braithwaite he represents the Committee. He left this with her.” Connor lifted a manila envelope from the drawer and pushed it across the desk.

Stall looked at the president for permission to open it.

Connor nodded.

The first picture showed a man walking into a bus station men’s room. The second showed another man, well-dressed, dark-skinned, slender, with black hair, entering the same men’s room. The third shot, taken inside the men’s room through the open door of a stall, showed the slender, dark-skinned man standing with his trousers halfway down his thighs and his arm raised to the wall for support. The arm obscured half of the man’s face. Another man kneeled in front of the slender man doing what Stall knew some men did. He thanked God he’d never seen it.

Stall knew why there was no fourth photo, one that might have identified the standing man. There was no fourth photo because after the flashbulb had revealed the lurid pose of number three, all hell had broken loose. Stall closed his eyes and imagined the two men running from the bathroom, stampeding right over the photographer who had caught them in the act. He opened his eyes, looked up at President James Connor, and could not stop himself from muttering, “Holy Christ.”

“Far from it.” Connor’s tone was grim. “That’s Jack Leaf.”

With these words, Stall knew, he and Connor ceased to be master and man.

They became confederates. Comrades in what project, what venture, Stall was not sure, but he knew they were linked now and forever. He tried this: “You can’t tell that’s Jack Leaf, not really.”

“Come on, Tom.”

“It could be someone—”

“You liked the man. From what I hear, a lot of people did, but we’ve got to face facts. And we’ve got to stop this before it goes any further if we can.”

Stall told the president about the student with the slide rule who had seen two men leaving Murphree Hall only minutes before Jack Leaf had taken his walk in the air. And he told about seeing two men in front of the College Inn.

“Yeah,” Connor said, “Margaret described the guy who delivered those photos. Apparently, he played football for Miami. She thinks he’s good-looking.” The president shook his head at the strange discriminations of women. “A linebacker, I’m told. Also an ex-cop and a sometime preacher of the gospel, a real versatile type. Carries a badge now under the aegis of the Committee. I’m coming to the conclusion that the two men went to Leaf’s classroom, talked to him, or . . . did something to him, and then he jumped.”

Stall, who felt now a little more at ease with Connor, said, “So . . . ?”

“Tom, I want you to look into this as discreetly as possible. Find out what you can about Jack Leaf and about anybody else in the department who might be . . .”

Stall couldn’t keep the anger out of his eyes, and the surprising thing was that Connor was surprised to see it. “Sir, are you asking me . . . ?”

“Only to help me protect what I know we both love. This university, its integrity. Its founding principles. The values you talk about every day in those classes of yours.”

“Sir, what Jack Leaf did in his private life has nothing at all to do with the integrity of this university. No more than what my wife and I do in our own bedroom.”

“Tom, nobody’s life is completely private. Nobody knows that better than I do. I can’t even curse on the golf course without it getting in the newspaper. And Tom . . .” Connor put the flat of his hand on the manila envelope. “Tom, a bus station? A men’s room in a bus station? Can you defend that on grounds of privacy?”

Maybe I can, maybe not, Stall thought. My God, what did the man want—Stall to haunt the men’s rooms of Anderson Hall with a spy’s camera in his lapel? Stall to take ten pisses a day to insure the integrity of the English Department?

The idea of two men kissing, or doing more, turned Stall’s stomach. He didn’t think he had to defend that reaction any more than a man did whose guts roiled at the thought of eating an oyster. But if some men kissed and more, and if some others liked or didn’t like the idea, Stall considered this none of his business as long as reasonable limits were observed. Was a bus station men’s room reasonable? No, it wasn’t. Not if somebody’s ten-year-old son went in there for the usual reasons and saw what was going on. That could scar a kid for life. Stall’s head was dizzy with all this. For now he had to make it clear that he would not spy on his colleagues.

“Sir, I won’t police the English Department for inappropriate behavior by male faculty members.”

“So, you are saying there are other men in your department who do what Professor Leaf did?”

“No sir. I’m saying I consider what they do nobody’s business but their own.”

Connor stood. After a space, so did Stall.

“Well, Tom, if a man who wants to be the next chairman of the department won’t look out for its welfare, somebody else will do it. And you and I both know who that somebody could be—a former University of Miami linebacker who preaches the gospel in his spare time.” Connor walked in his still-athletic way past Stall and opened the door. “Think about it, Tom.”

Stall stopped, thought better of saying anything more, nodded, and moved past Mrs. Braithwaite’s machine-gunning typewriter into the world he loved.