“I want at this time to commend, too, Mrs. Beatrice P. Lisbon, secretary to Herbert Kronenberger of Dixie Chair, for her untiring efforts during this crisis. Not everyone knows this, but it has been chiefly Mrs. Lisbon with whom we have been in communication in Charlotte, and Miss Lane apprises me that the woman has been unstinting in her efforts to keep on top of the situation. I understand that she has put in numerous calls to the Coast Airlines people and the C.A.B. people and the Charlotte tower people, some of them during her lunch hour at perhaps her own expense. From what Miss Lane tells me, I am thoroughly satisfied that we could not have had a more selfless anchor man in Charlotte, and I mean at some not too distant date to formalize our appreciation with a small token from one of our departments.
“Now I don’t mean to extend to you here something which might ultimately turn out to be a deluded hope. We’re adults, and we must accommodate ourselves to adult reality.
However
, I would be finessing my responsibilities and would perhaps irretrievably undercut any future claim to candor, or claims on
your
candor, did I not acknowledge now one tiny morsel of possibility that Chester
may not in fact have been aboard Coast Airlines’
—let’s face it—
FATAL
Flight Number Eighty-seven at all
.” Feldman paused. “Would you close the doors please, Waiter? Very good. Thank you very much.” He leaned forward. “What I am about to tell you must go no further, ladies and gentlemen. Should it turn out to all our infinite relief that Flight Number Eighty-seven did not crash, or that it did crash but that Chester was not aboard it, the information I shall impart must remain privileged. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, save that in matters of life and death, those concerned, even only peripherally concerned, are entitled to all the facts, that they might more intelligently apprehend the dangers. Not even Chester himself—if he’s alive—must ever know you know this…Very well, then. Here’s the situation.
“On first hearing reports of the alleged crash, I had Miss Codlish in Payroll research Mr. Credit’s expense sheets. This was a routine measure, intended merely to provide us with the name of Chester’s Charlotte hotel. Many things can happen, people oversleep, people miss planes. I wanted it confimed that Chester had or had not checked out. Well—and this struck me as peculiar—there just
is
no record of a Charlotte hotel, not a single voucher for the last five years. I had Miss Codlish double-check—with the same result. His dinners are accounted for, mind you, his
lunches
are, and there were even some significantly costly breakfasts, but not a single hotel or motel bill. It was upon discovering this that I first contacted Mrs. Lisbon, or rather had Miss Lane contact her, to find out if Chester had divulged his plans for the evening. You all travel. You know the small talk that goes on between a buyer and a secretary. Evidently she at first denied any access to Chester’s confidences, but from a certain tone she took, Miss Lane suspected she was concealing something. She pressed her on this, and several things came out. It seems that on one of Chester’s Charlotte trips
five years ago
Mr. Kronenberger gave a party. I know Herbert Kronenberger and have always found him to be a gracious, hospitable man, not one to stand idly by while a lonely buyer fends for himself in a strange city. He
would
invite Chester to his party. It would be a typical Kronenberger gesture. Mrs. Lisbon was at the party too—perhaps as innocent company for Chester; that part isn’t clear. What is clear is that evidently Chester had quite a lot to drink. Let’s not mince words: Chester was drunk. Rather than let him go back to his hotel by himself, one of the guests—
not
Mrs. Lisbon, and it’s chiefly this which leads me to suspect that Mrs. Lisbon had been invited to the party earlier and not merely as the extra woman to Chester’s extra man—volunteered to take him back. He left with a Mrs. Charlote DeMille, a prominent Charlotte divorcée, and there is some reason to believe he spent the night with her. What happened, evidently, is that in the car on the way home, Chester vomited all over himself. (Many of you will remember his behavior during the store’s tenth-anniversary celebration some years ago.) You can appreciate Charlotte DeMille’s position. She could not enter the hotel with him, and he was in no condition to negotiate the lobby by himself. Even to discharge him into the custody of a doorman would be to compromise herself irrevocably. (Charlotte is not the biggest city in the world, and this woman is, as I say, a prominent person there.) All evidence points to the probability that she drove him directly to her own home. There, from what I can gather from Miss Lane, who pieced it together from the discreet Mrs. Lisbon, Mrs. DeMille helped the helpless Chester to the bathroom next to her master bedroom, there being only a half-bath on the main floor, and a tub, in which she must have feared he might drown, in the guest bathroom on the second floor—helped Chester to the bathroom next her master bedroom, and undressed him and put him under the shower. Then, perhaps seeing that he was still helpless and that the vomit was not coming off, she found it necessary to lather him herself, and one thing led to another and she began to lather his penis and testicles. (Mrs. DeMille is a healthy woman, ladies and gentlemen, a healthy divorcée with the appetites and needs—I say
needs
—of any healthy woman.) All indications are that the warm water, the creamy lather, the concupiscent silences and darknesses of the divorce-lonely house created in Chester an erection a foot and a half long, and to make a long story short—no pun intended—Chester and Mrs. DeMille have been lovers for the past five years.
“Now, I had Miss Lane urge Mrs. Lisbon to call Mrs. DeMille to check about Chester’s sleeping arrangements last night, and although she manifested some reluctance, as they are no longer friends and such a question breaches the proprieties of estrangement, she did at last agree to have Mr. Kronenberger himself make the call. I have every confidence in Mr. Kronenberger’s delicacy in such an affair, but the fact is that Mrs. DeMille hung up on him, and we know no more now—unless one interprets outrage as guilt—than we did before. Even if Chester lives, I feel that a permanent strain may have been put on the Kronenberger / DeMille relationship. But I say
this
. I hope he lives. Although I better understand the real justification for those exorbitant breakfasts I have been paying for for the last five years, and although he was committed to return to our Quarterly Lunch, and although in the light of these developments we must soon undergo a searching reexamination of our furniture requirements—I must say that up to now I have never fully understood Chester’s insistence on using the products of North Carolina when other, cheaper merchandise is available elsewhere—I hope he lives. I hope, in sum, that it was a lovers’ quarrel, or some happy passion, some newly discovered refinement of shower love, that has kept him from us. And while I am not of course in a position to guarantee his job, I hold his life of value.”
At this point the maître d’ approached Feldman and whispered in his ear. Feldman straightened. “Thank you very much Maître d’,” he said. “See what else you can find out, please.” He turned back to the table. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, “I have just been informed by the maître d’ that Charlotte has confirmed the crash. Fragments of the plane and the main fuselage have been discovered in a woods thirty-five miles from the airport.” Again the maître d’ approached the table, and Feldman heard what he had to say. “Yes,” he said, “I see. Thank you.” He sighed. “A headless body that fits Chester Credit’s description, and in the suit pockets of which have been discovered some singed identification papers belonging to him, was one of the first recovered. Under the circumstances, I have suggested to the maître d’ that we probably don’t want dessert, but if I have been unduly presumptive in speaking for all of you, I would want at once to be told about it, and in that case we could call the fellow back.”
The developer turned out to be little Oliver B.’s father.
Feldman went with him to the site, an ovoid valley three miles from the western edge of the city, where the developer tried to explain what the scarred, bulldozer-bruised area would look like in a few months, with its facilities in—the spanking planes of cement and intricate ramps and the cunning approach of the access road from the new interstate. But Feldman, who had no imagination in these affairs—he could not read blueprints or conceive how furniture would look rearranged—and for whom there was a terrible inertia in things, had difficulty following the developer’s explanations.
Instead, he found himself fascinated by the man, saw something terribly virtuous in him. For all the developer’s slim, distinguished appearance, his large eyes scholarly behind glasses, and odd, ruminative quality as he talked, the muscular mounds of cheek rising and falling comfortably with his words, Feldman sensed in him a fearful, optimistic energy, and found himself resenting what he knew would be the man’s good luck with machines—he was positive the developer got better mileage than he did—and skill with nature. He looked into the developer’s white, fierce teeth and knew at once that they were teeth that had sucked blubber and jerky—is that jerky on his breath now? he wondered—as easily as his own had scraped the pulp from an artichoke. He had a mouth that had saved lives. Feldman imagined its ardent kiss on a snakebite, or slipping over the blue lips of a man dragged from the sea. Listening to him, Feldman grew oddly comfortable, easy, and found that he had to move about to shake out the warm sensation in his extremities, the sense he was beginning to feel of melting into the universe.
Frequently, as Feldman spoke, the developer smiled, inclining his head in an attitude of listening and judgment, his mood not of attention but of nostalgic concentration and courtesy and patience. At these times Feldman looked over the teeth and into the mouth and throat at the healthiest tongue he had ever seen, choice and red as a prime cut. You could drink his bright juices, his saliva clear as a trout stream. He could feel the man’s immense, beaming tolerance, concentrated as heat from a sun lamp, and had actually to shuffle his feet to dodge bolts of the chipper good will.
Then the developer, making a point, smiled a wide one, the biggest Feldman had yet seen, and Feldman stared deep down the man’s eyes, past good wishes, deeper than good hope, past faith itself to the sourcy bedrock of the developer’s vision, where he thought he saw the basic mix—the roily vats of molassesy premise that worked the circuits of his phoenixy will and gave him his feel for reclaimed land, for swamp and ashpit and trashy field where rats lurked and mice skittered. Feldman had seen enough. He interrupted him. “Excuse me, but that’s some smile you’ve got there.”
“I beg your pardon?” the developer said.
“You make jumping rabbits for Oliver out of an ordinary pocket handkerchief. Am I right?”
“Well, yes—but…”
“Sure,” Feldman said. “You do an admiral’s hat and a paper airplane from the war news. You make a tree from rolled-up newspapers, and forest animals from the shadows of your fists. Right?”
“The developer nodded slowly.
“I know. And a flute from a reed, and a kite from the wrappings around your shirts from the laundry.”
“What about the property?” the developer asked coolly.
“The property? I don’t want it.”
“Mr. Victman said—”
“I don’t want it,” Feldman said. He was very excited. “I won’t have it. Fuck your virgin land.” He looked at him narrowly. “We’re in the homestretch of a race: your energy against my entropy. The universe is running down, Mr. Developer. It’s bucking and filling. It’s yawing and pitching and rolling and falling. The smart money’s in vaults. Caution. Look both ways. Look up and down.” He picked up a beer can one of the workers had discarded. “Here,” he said, pushing the can toward him, “get yourself a string and another can. But don’t call me, I’ll call you!”
S
hortly after Warden’s Assembly, Feldman was notified that he had been elected to the Crime Club. The notification came in the form of a note from the warden:
Your name has been placed in nomination for membership in the Crime Club. Lest you get any funny ideas about your popularity, let me tell you right now that I do the nominating and the electing. I nominate and elect people to the Camera Club, the Model Airplane Club, the Literary Club—all the clubs. That’s what it means to have power, Feldman. Also I have made you president of the Crime Club; you will conduct your first meeting this Tuesday week. (Room 14, W. wing, 7 o’clock. Sharp!
)
Your Warden,
Warden Fisher
P.S. The other members do not know that you have been accepted as a member or that you are their president, so you will have to wrest your leadership from the incumbent. He is a man that the others have nicknamed “God,” and you will have no difficulty recognizing him, as the underside of his tongue is tattooed. (It is my understanding that his armpits are also tattooed, so it’s my guess that he probably isn’t ticklish
.)
Feldman decided to ask for Official Respite, making his request formally, in a document witnessed by a guard from another cellblock (he had to waste a permission slip and a pass) and by a prisoner in sick bay (another permission slip, another pass). In his petition he asked the Director of Prison Labors that he be permitted to absent himself from the canteen during a portion of the workday on which the Crime Club was to meet.
He wanted the extra time because the warden had underscored the necessity of being punctual, but the terms of Respite were difficult: three hours of labor for every one of Respite, the labor to be accomplished in shops in which the Respiter was a stranger. What made the conditions even harder was that mistakes were to be paid for on a strict retail basis. Thus, if a Respiter were to fudge, say, a license plate, he was charged the full sum the state would have received for the perfect plate. Moreover, this sum was repayable only in work—again, exclusively in shops in which the prisoner had had no experience—at a rate just
one third
the convict’s already low rate of pay. An inept man could conceivably add months to the end of his sentence by accepting even one hour of Respite.