Читать книгу The Committee - Sterling Watson - Страница 13

SEVEN

When Stall walked into their good-smelling kitchen, he threw his coat over the back of a chair and noted the absence of martinis. Maureen turned from the sink with a shimmer of perspiration on her forehead and said in her put-my-foot-down voice, “Tonight we visit Sarah Leaf.”

“Sure, okay,” Stall said, deflated. Couldn’t a man take a load off his feet and make himself a drink (even if his wife would not have one with him) before getting his marching orders for the evening’s proprieties?

“Okay, then,” Maureen said a little more softly. She walked over and kissed his cheek, depositing there some of the sweat from her upper lip. Stall reached up and wiped it off, then turned away and secretly tasted it. Good. (And for the hundredth time wondered why he couldn’t do things like this where his wife could see them.) He loved her sweat but not his own and not these long hot summers. Someday they’d be able to afford air-conditioning. He’d debated with himself about where the first machine should go—their bedroom or the kitchen, which he sometimes called Vulcan’s Forge, though he did not like to think of his wife as a hulking demigod.

The kitchen smelled good. The chicken casserole, probably. Probably Maureen had made two of them, one for the family and one for Sarah Leaf.

Stall found the gin bottle in the cupboard above the refrigerator and began to build himself a martini. “Where’s Corey?”

“Spending the night with Jenny Sprague.”

Maureen said this with a practiced lack of inflection. Stall knew she was thinking, as he certainly was, that tonight, with no daughter in the house, he might lift her nightgown. He even allowed himself to wonder if his wife had encouraged their daughter to sleep under the roof of Gerald Sprague, an agronomist who worked for the university’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, for reasons of nightgown-lifting. It was possible, and it occurred to Stall that Jack Leaf’s death might have something to do with it. Death, he believed, made people more than ordinarily interested in life.

Maureen left the kitchen and returned with a coat hanger that held a new blazer almost identical to the one Stall had sacrificed to Jack Leaf’s mortal dignity. She stood solemnly holding it out to him. The price tag dangled from a pin in the front pocket. “On sale at Wilson’s Department Store. I thought this might cheer you up. And you need it, so don’t complain about the money.”

“Maureen, I—”

“Oh, shut up and come here.” She held out her open arms to him.

* * *

After the dishes were washed and dried and Maureen had freshened her makeup, she said, “It’s time to call Sarah.”

Stall said, “Okay.” He waited.

“You call her.”

“Me.”

“You. You’re going to be the chairman. You need to practice these things.”

Stall called Sarah Leaf.

“Sarah, I’m so sorry.”

“I know, Tom.”

“Maureen and I want to come over and see you, and bring some—”

“God, Tom, please no food.”

“Oh, oh, well, Sarah, of course, if you—”

“I’m sorry, Tom, that was rude. It’s just that I’ve done nothing since I heard the news but cry and answer the doorbell, and cry, and thank people for casseroles, and then Maddie Harding came over, and we’ve done nothing but play gin rummy for a penny a point and drink bourbon and brush our teeth every time the doorbell rings. I’m just sick of it. I know that sounds terrible, but it’s the truth, and isn’t this a good time for a little truth, Tom?”

“Well, all right, Sarah, we won’t bring any food. Is there, uh, is there anything we can do for you? Anything at all? Anything you need done, we’ll take care of it for you.”

Stall heard a long sigh, then, “Take me to a bar. No, meet me at a bar. The cheapest one we can think of. I know! The bowling alley out on Waldo Road! I want to drink cheap whiskey and not see anybody I know but you two for the rest of the day.”

“Sure, Sarah, we’ll do that. We can do that.” Stall covered the phone with his hand and looked at Maureen, who had only heard his side of the conversation. If her face had been words, it would have said, What the . . . ? Stall said, “So we’ll pick you up?”

“No, meet me there. I want to drive. And I want to drive drunk. I want to take some goddamn risks.”

“Okay, Sarah. We’re on the way.”

Stall had his hand on the doorknob when the doorbell rang. A young Negro man stood on the front step holding a plastic clothing bag. There was an envelope pinned to the bag. The man said, “Dr. Stall?”

“Uh, yes?”

“This is for you, suh.” The man handed him the bag and stepped back. A delivery truck idled in the driveway.

Stall said, “Do I need to sign anything?”

“No, all taken care of.”

Stall dug out his wallet and tipped the man a dollar.

“Thank you, suh.”

The Stalls went back to their kitchen and Stall handed the bag to Maureen, who unzipped it while he unpinned the note. She removed a blazer from the bag almost identical to the one Stall had placed over Jack Leaf’s face. She looked at the label inside the coat. “Fancy,” she said.

Stall read the note aloud: “Dear Tom, With my compliments and my gratitude, Jim Connor.”

Maureen said, “Jim? That’s even fancier. Two coats in one night and this one’s better than the one I got you.”

“I like yours better. And I’m returning this one.”

“Don’t do anything rash.”

Stall hung the coat in the closet by the front door. “Let us go then, you and I, coatless to a bowling alley.”

* * *

On the way to Alley Gatorz Bowling Center, Stall told Maureen about Sarah playing gin rummy and drinking bourbon with Amos Harding’s wife. “And she calls her Maddie.”

“Must be short for Madeleine.” Maureen shook her head and looked out the window of the Packard at one of the town’s ugliest streets, a strip of junkyards, industrial dry cleaners, and auto body shops.

“Bourbon and gin rummy,” Stall said. “Who knew the old lady had it in her?”

“She probably loves getting away from Harding.”

To that, Stall said nothing.

“When I’m an old lady, I’ll have it in me.”

Stall wanted to say, When I’m an old man, I’ll put it in you, but he kept it to himself. He said, “Are you gonna drink, or are you finished with demon rum forever?”

“I’ll let you know when I see the demon quivering in a glass.”

“Fair enough.” Stall pulled into the parking lot.

Bowling alley bars were the same in every city. The liquor was cheap because the owners knew drunks bowled more lines, and the noise was deafening, which either drove you to drink or made you bowl more lines. And maybe the uneasy business of renting shoes made people think of alcohol as a disinfectant. Stall and his wife found a table as far away from the nearest lane as possible, and he went to the bar for Maureen’s Coke and his own bourbon and water. Sarah Leaf had said she was drinking whiskey and Stall figured misery loved company. They sat, sipped, and when he could sneak a peek without offending Maureen, Stall watched the ball game on the blurry television above the bar. The Yankees were pole-axing the White Sox, as usual.

“So how do you think she’s taking it?” Maureen twirled her glass in its little pool of moisture on the table.

“Based on one phone conversation, I’d say she’s taking it pretty strangely, but I don’t know. I’ve never been a widow.”

Maureen drank some Coke. “She’s not a widow yet, she’s in shock. She won’t be a widow for a while, and then we’ll know how she’s taking it.”

Sarah Leaf entered the bar blinking her eyes after the harsh August sunlight of the parking lot. The bright smile on her face reminded Stall of the look he had once seen on the face of a distant cousin who had just been discharged from the county asylum for the insane. Sarah waved and walked toward them fast. Stall stood and so did his wife. Maureen hugged Sarah Leaf first. Maureen’s hug was hard and close, two women exchanging messages that men could never parse.

Stall hugged Sarah more formally and held a chair for her. “What can I get you?”

“I’m drinking rye now,” Sarah Leaf said, her voice crisp, her words not at all slurred. “Maddie and I went right through the bourbon. On the rocks, please, with an ice water back.”

Stall headed for the bar. On the way he thought, Why have we been chosen for this? We didn’t know them all that well.

The Leafs and the Stalls had attended parties at each other’s houses and a lot of other houses too. In the ebb and flow of social gatherings, they had washed up together on sofas and in hallways for conversations of all kinds, ranging from kids to real estate to which doctors delved into which human mysteries in this small university town. When Maureen and Sarah had put their heads together, Stall supposed they had talked about the usual womanly, housewifely things. Maureen had never told him what they talked about.

When he and Jack talked, it was about their research, students they shared, and sometimes about their colleagues. Reserved was the word Stall would have chosen to describe Jack, reserved in all things, and he supposed others might describe Tom Stall in the same way. Was this one of the reasons that he and Jack had been able to talk easily and enthusiastically about their work and to go no further? Never into anything personal, just a few comments about kids, cars, sports, and wives? Stall had liked Jack Leaf and, had he asked himself about it, he probably would have realized that he’d have liked to get to know the man better. Perhaps his own reserve had made him defer an approach to Jack, put off the day when he might say, Hey, Jack, let’s have lunch and talk some more about that flow you see from poets like Bradstreet and Whittier to Eliot and Stevens. Waiting for the bartender to pour, Stall shook his head and thought, It’s too late for that now.

Maureen and Sarah Leaf were deep in conversation when Stall set Sarah’s drinks on the table. “So I told her,” Sarah was saying, “she might be able to beat me at gin, but I could drink her under the table. And then, you won’t believe this, the old broad winked at me real big and said, Try me. Just you try me, and that’s when I went for the bottle of Old Overholt.”

Maureen put her hand on Sarah’s on the tabletop. “Oh my God, the chairman’s wife. Who knew?” Stall recognized well the expression on his wife’s face. It was, Get me out of here.

He sat and took a healthy sip of his bourbon. “So,” he said, “Old Lady Harding turns out to be the secret sister of Tugboat Annie?”

“Nothing secret about it,” Sarah Leaf said. “She’s a daytime drinker.”

Stall was thinking, Maybe just with you, with a recent widow, maybe just in a crisis and very rarely, but he doubted it. Whole vistas of Amos Harding’s hard life opened up to Stall. Suddenly, he felt sorry for the man.

“Maybe,” Maureen squeezed Sarah’s hand, “she just knew what you needed.”

“And sacrificed herself to it.” Sarah threw back her head and laughed. “I see. I get it. Mrs. Amos Harding is the village voodoo princess who knows exactly what I need to get through my grief. Well, let me tell you something, kids. You don’t get through a thing like this.”

And so the conversation turned from a kind of hysterical levity to grim platitudes. Stall and his wife sat mute while Sarah Leaf talked about how her life had changed forever, about the two boys, off at tennis camp together, still living in blissful ignorance of their father’s . . . what was it? A rejection of them? That was how they would see it, Sarah said. And they would spend the rest of their lives wondering what they had done to cause the father they had loved and who had loved them to take his own life. No, to throw it away. Her voice ground on mechanically as she stared straight ahead, occasionally sipping whiskey. Finally, she just stopped. “I hope I’m not boring you two.”

Maureen took the plunge that Stall would not even have considered: “Why did he do it, Sarah?” She leaned forward and looked deeply into Sarah Leaf’s eyes, and Stall knew that the two women had crossed again to the terrain where men could not follow. His wife was asking a widow what signs to look for in a husband, what signals came from the masculine side of Marriageland, that could tell a woman when her husband might jump out a window.

Sarah finished her rye and took a sip of cold water. “Jack was unhappy. Underneath it all, he was a very troubled man.”

Jack Leaf, Underground Man.

Sarah Leaf was a trim, athletic woman who played tennis in a league with faculty wives and served as secretary of the Garden Club. She never looked flustered, never too busy, never anything but in charge. She kept an immaculate house, was a good cook and hostess, and played excellent bridge. She wore slacks (rarely skirts and dresses), flat shoes, and blouses that showed off the lovely arms she had earned from hours on the tennis court. The effect, Stall thought, was a little masculine, a little like the Katharine Hepburn of Pat and Mike, but Sarah had a pretty face and there was no mistaking the come hither that came into her eyes sometimes late at night at parties when she’d had one too many. She was sexy in a sleek, hard way. Sexy like a fast car or an expensive hunting rifle.

Sarah and Jack had not been what people called a loving couple; they didn’t hold hands or stand with their arms linked, or anything like that. Stall could not remember ever seeing them touch, not even the stray drifting of fingers across a shoulder as one passed the other in a narrow hallway. He had said nothing to Maureen about his talk with Connor and the photos of Jack. Now he sat thinking, What kind of life did this woman have with a man who could go to a bus station men’s room, a man who lived double? They must have talked about Jack’s other life. Must have come to some kind of accommodation so that life could go on. Life with its placid surface of kids, tennis, teaching, bridge, and literary criticism.

Stall invaded the feminine front. He entered at his peril, but he needed to know some things, and Sarah Leaf seemed in the mood to talk. “Was Jack in any kind of trouble? Anything with money?” Were the people who took the pictures blackmailing him?

That was when Sarah Leaf lied, and Stall knew it and he thought Maureen did too.

Sarah said, “Money? He liked to spend it. Jack liked nice clothes. I’m sure you noticed that. But, uh, no, no, he wasn’t in any trouble I knew about.”

Maureen leaned forward again. “Were you and Jack in trouble?”

“You mean our marriage? No, I wouldn’t say so. Jack wasn’t seeing another woman, if that’s what you’re asking, and I sure wasn’t seeing anyone.” Showing her liquor a little now, she leaned over and touched Stall’s hand. “Although I’ve always had a secret fancy for you, Tom. Sorry, Maureen. I’m just feeling truthful today.”

No, thought Stall, you’re lying.

Maureen took it well. “That’s all right, Sarah. All the girls like Tom. He’s cute, is my Tom.” Unmistakable emphasis on my.

Stall said, “Sarah, let’s get you home.”

“Home? The party’s just getting started.” She looked around the bowling alley with the startled eyes of a woman who has just noticed how drunk she is. “Maybe I’ll bowl a few . . . what do you call them, a few rubbers, a few strikes, some pars, an inning? It looks like an interesting game.”

Stall said to Maureen, “I’ll drive Sarah in her car. You follow in ours.” He lifted Sarah by her elbow.

She pulled away from him with a dignified flexing of her tennis muscles. She stood looking defiantly at him, then at Maureen, and then a sad gravity took her limbs and her shoulders fell. “All right,” she said, “home. More gin rummy with Maddie. The bottle of rye’s only half-empty.”

Stall walked her to her car where she stood at the driver’s door digging into her purse for her keys. When she found them, she said, “I’ll drive. I told you I want to drive drunk.”

“Not this drunk,” Stall said gently, and held out his hand. He was going to stand firm even if she made a scene. She looked into his eyes and there it was, that come hither he had seen a few times before, though never aimed at him.

“Okay, Tommy.” Her voice was girlish and flirtatious. She handed him the keys. “You drive.”

Maureen came out of the bowling alley stuffing money into her purse. She had paid and tipped.

Stall drove the Leaf’s Buick to their house in the fashionable Duckpond area of Gainesville. It was an old Florida bungalow from the thirties, with the neat lawn and shrubbery you would expect of Jack and Sarah Leaf. Stall pulled into the driveway, waved his good intentions to Maureen who had pulled in behind him, and got Sarah Leaf out of the car.

On the way to the front door, she said, “I guess Maddie’s gone home. I don’t see her car.”

Well, Stall thought, somebody’s driving drunk.

He unlocked the front door and followed Sarah Leaf inside. The house was as he remembered it, except for the faint smell of bourbon and the casseroles piled on the kitchen counter. Sarah pointed at them. “Too many for the fridge. I had to leave them out. Would you like to take some home?”

“No, but thanks. Look, Sarah, are you gonna to be all right? Maybe you should come home with us. Spend the night and we can talk more if you want to.”

“Talk?” She gave him a bleak look. “What good is talk, Tom? Jack and I talked forever and it never did us any good.”

All Stall could do was shrug. English teachers were men of words, and most of them thought talking did some good.

Sarah Leaf opened a drawer beside the kitchen stove and pulled out an envelope. She handed it to him. “The medical examiner’s office gave me Jack’s clothes. They found this in his coat pocket. Go ahead, open it.”

The envelope held a subpoena from the Johns Committee. The document commanded Jack Leaf to appear on August 25, 1958, to testify under oath before the Committee. Stall knew the answer, but he had to ask the question: “Why did they want to talk with Jack?”

“They don’t like perverts. Jack was . . . I suppose the common term is homosexual. Jack preferred to call himself gay. It’s a British word, he told me. But really, Jack was . . . hard to define. He liked me . . . sometimes.” She looked up into Stall’s eyes like a little girl would look at her father. “And I loved him.”

She went to the dining room table where two gin rummy hands were still laid out beside a pile of pennies. She picked up the bottle of Old Overholt and brought it back to the kitchen where she poured two straight shots and handed one to Stall. He pictured Maureen waiting outside. She was too polite to honk the horn, though she wouldn’t hesitate to come inside to see what was keeping her husband in Sarah Leaf’s house. When Stall didn’t take the glass from Sarah’s hand, she pushed it against his chest and let it go. He caught it, and she touched hers to his and drank. Stall drank with her. She looked into his eyes.

“Jack liked me if I lay on my stomach.” She turned around and looked at him over her shoulder. “See this ass? Doesn’t it look a bit like a man’s?”

Stall could barely choke the words out through the sudden lump in this throat: “It’s a very fine ass, Sarah. It’s an admirable ass.”

“Jack went both ways, Tom. Some men are like that, and some women too, they tell me. His view of it was that the rest of us, who can’t go both ways, are missing out on, well, half the good things in life.”

She finished her drink and put her fingers gently under the bottom of his glass and raised it to his lips, making him finish too. Like you’d do with a baby, Stall thought. And when it comes to talking like this, that’s what I am.

“After I got used to everything I learned about Jack, I was just glad to have half of him. Oh, I worried about him. Some of the things he did, some of the men he met, were maybe a little dangerous, but I knew he was as careful as he could be, and I knew he wouldn’t hurt me if he could absolutely help it.”

Careful? Stall’s throat burned from the whiskey, his stomach rolled with too much of it. Careful in a bus station?

“May I take this with me?” He held up the subpoena between himself and Sarah Leaf, where it had the desired effect. Her eyes closed, and when they opened again, she was finished telling the truth. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t think it matters to anyone now. Do you?”

Oh, it matters, thought Stall. If the newspapers get ahold of it, it will matter to you and your children.

Even if the Committee moved on to other business, the papers would want to know why a man had killed himself. They wouldn’t stop spilling ink until they found out. And the reporters would become the tools of the Committee whether they liked it or not. Florida’s sodomy laws were clear. A man could go to jail for having sex with another man. He could go to jail for addressing his own wife from behind. But it didn’t have to go that far. A committee of the state legislature in open session could ruin a man in minutes and the press would cover every word of it.

Stall said quietly, “Yes, I think it matters.” And you’ll think so too, in the morning. He tucked the subpoena into his pocket. “I’ll take good care of this. Don’t worry about it.”

When he got to the car, Maureen moved from behind the wheel.

“No,” he said, “you drive.”

This was rare. She raised her eyebrows. “You two were in there for . . . ?”

“She’s not in very good shape right now.”

“So, did you loosen her clothing or something?”

He gave her their come off it look and they both shook their heads.

Maureen started the car. “Jeez, the things that happen when you least expect, right?”

“Right.” He leaned his head back on the seat and put his hand on the subpoena in his pocket. He knew who would want to see it.

* * *

At home, the Gainesville Sun was waiting for them on the doorstep. Wearily, Stall picked it up and went into the kitchen to spread it on the table. He looked at the headline with dread: “UF Professor’s Death Thought to Be Suicide.”

Another article was headlined: “Committee Subpoenas UF Professors in Classrooms, Students Look On.” And another: “Political Science Professor Targeted for Alleged Subversive Statements in Classroom. Students Read Communist Manifesto.”

Stall sat at his dining room table and let his head fall into his hands. Christ, the world was ending. What were these people doing to the university he loved? Didn’t they know they were running through a village of thatched houses waving burning torches? Were they too drunk with power and hatred to know it? They could destroy in a few months something that had taken a thousand years to build. Stall’s face burned with anguish and shame when he realized that now he would have to worry about the economic theories and the political affiliations, however whimsical, of the writers he asked students to read. Christ, Wallace Stevens, hadn’t he flirted with communism in his youth? If a political science prof was in trouble for teaching Marx—Marx who was wrong about almost everything but whose work was foundational to modern political philosophy—then what might happen to an English teacher who taught D.H. Lawrence?

Stall felt Maureen’s hands come to rest on his shoulders. “I’d offer you a drink to relax you, but you’ve had enough.”

Stall muttered, “More than enough.” Of a lot of things. He reached up and rested a hand on hers. “But not of you,” he said. “You’re a brick.”

“What, you mean I’m hard and red and good for stacking?”

“No, I mean solid. You know what I mean.” She knew.

“I’m your Lady Brett,” she said, “and you’re my Jake. Wait, that doesn’t quite work. You’ve still got your . . .”

“Last time I looked. Let’s go upstairs and use it.”

“After you, my bullfighter, my man.”