Death of an Old Sinner (2 page)

The General rested his backside on his desk and sucked on the empty pipe, gazing still at the portrait. “Not a memoir, not a biography,” he said aloud. “Look at you—sitting there like a handpainted burp, an apt subject for neither gossip nor historian, your back to the wall, not a decade between you and oblivion. You know, Mr. President, you would have done much better by us to have kicked up your heels a bit, and I dare say, by yourself as well. A bit of scandal has saved many a nincompoop.”

The General stuffed the bowl of his pipe and lit it. He went back to the desk chair then and from that vantage further studied the portrait. Get rid of that wrinkled sock around his neck and the old boy wouldn’t look so fatuous. And it was the heavy eyelids that kept you from getting a good deep look into the man. No one was going to surprise his thoughts out of him. Really, the artist was a hack and the old boy likely knew it. He had sat for him as he had, no doubt, for Congressional bores and diplomatic con men—because he had been told it was one of the things he needed to do to be president. He had put on a look he thought bespoke the cares of his office, and he came out like an old monk cowling the naughty thoughts in his eyes while he piously trolled the beads through his fingers.

“Tell me, Mr. President,” the General said aloud again, “was there nothing in your life that could, shall we say, prosper us now? I have an open mind and an empty purse. Tell me the truth, is it worth my while to go up to the attic? To sort out that trunkful of papers? Eh, Mr. President?”

T
HE SKY WAS GRAY
over Albany also at that hour, more snow starting to fall, great flakes of it clinging to the dirty hotel windows for an instant, slithering down then, down, down, down into vanishing rivulets. Jimmie Jarvis watched them, listening the while to the unending objections and justifications of himself in the blunt terms of political caucus.

Suddenly the men circling the table leaned back. Some lighted fresh cigars, some relighted stale ones. One of the two women present offered the other a king-sized cigarette. They all looked at Jimmie then, and their faces, friends’ as well as foes’, wore that slightly cynical expression which said in effect: all right, you’re it. Why? Why you and not me?

Jimmie Jarvis—James Ransom Jarvis—rose, and fastened the middle button of his coat. That was a mistake, buttoning his coat. He could feel his heartbeat outside as well as within him. But he was not in the habit of correcting his mistakes in public. He put his hands in his trouser pockets and rocked back on his heels.

“My friends—and if you are not completely friendly, I direct myself even more to you—I am aware of the responsibility you will be offering me as well as the honor and the privilege—if you sustain until convention day the sentiment just expressed…”

Jimmie smiled then, seeing one after another of the delegates relax. He had put in enough “ifs” to assure them of his humility. He was forty-two, a bachelor, and seemed boyishly earnest in everything he did. And he had done many things in an already long public career. Ironically, his potential enemies here opposed him for the same reason his friends proposed him: he had once been New York District Attorney. There were men present who felt that a prosecutor was a dangerous man in any office, especially that of governor to which Jimmie now aspired. He looked from face to face of the men whose consent was still grudging. “You must remember, gentlemen, that as well as my hitch in the office of district attorney, I have also served in the United States House of Representatives. That I submit, would take the spurs off any cock.”

This brought a crack in the great stone faces. At the moment there was no laughter in them.

“I have no speech to make, my friends, but I will answer frankly all questions.”

Al Rogers rolled the cigar from the center of his mouth to the side of it. “Jimmie, wasn’t your great-grand-uncle ambassador to somewhere before he was president of the country?”

Al had the subtlety of a tabloid newspaper: he was calling attention to the fact that there had been a president in Jimmie’s family.

Jimmie nodded. “To the Court of St. James, I believe.”

“We’d better hold it in confidence then,” said an old timer with a trace of a brogue. “Unless you don’t need to carry New York City.”

“It’ll be distinction enough,” said Al, “that he’s the great-grand-nephew of a president.”

Jimmie winced at the endless commercial.

“Great-grand-nephew,” another delegate weighed the words ponderously. “Wouldn’t it be all right at this distance to call him your great-grandfather?”

“It might be risky, sir,” said Jimmie, “his having been a bachelor.”

And no one found that amusing. Jimmie sighed. It was fortunate that the people had more wit than their delegates, and maybe more wisdom.

But the subject of bachelorhood had been turned up again, as though it had not already been well explored: he had been cautioned to marry a widow before summer; no, better a young girl of modest means and no renown; but the best advice was finally calculated to be that of the two female delegates who were unanimous in their recommendation that he go before the people uncommitted in that regard; not a woman in the state then but would vote herself into the governor’s mansion pulling the lever in his behalf.

With the bulldog air of having held onto one thought until he could spring it, Mike Zabriski waited till the lady’s last remark and then said: “I don’t suppose you’ve ever done anything in your life, young fella, that couldn’t stand the scrutiny of the public eye?”

“I think, sir, the public eye would have long since found it,” Jimmie said. “Look how it finds my father, every tumble he takes.”

“An old man’s tumbles, as you call them, are news—a young man’s are maybe gossip. But in a man your age, they’re dangerous.”

In a man my age they are inevitable, Jimmie thought, but he put on a long face and said: “Yes, sir.”

“Now answer my question,” said Bulldog Mike.

Jimmie drew a deep breath. “I have been as honest as any man, Mike, and more discreet than most.” To tell a lie as though it were the truth, he thought. But it was not a lie the way he had said it. Once only he had been less than cautious, and at a time in the world’s history when caution was labeled the worth of fool’s gold. And even in that instant, the cloak fate put about him and the lady resembled honor: she belonged to that noble race of people, who, if they were not proud of their sins, at least did not stoop to call them folly.

“That’s good enough for me,” said Mike, referring to Jimmie’s avowal of honor and discretion.

With old Mike satisfied, no other delegate present dared complain. The meeting adjourned in good spirits. His enemies would not bare their fangs until he showed some weakness, and that was not to be at this, the king-making caucus. The Buffalo and New York timetables were already passing from hand to hand. Jimmie was bade by several gentlemen to give his father, the General, their warmest regards. He was asked if the old man would take to the stump on his behalf when the time came, and it was said that many an aging heart would flutter if the old boy strode out again.

Jimmie held Judge Turner’s coat for him. He shrugged himself into it like a tired bear. The Judge, actually retired from the Appeals bench and a friend of his father’s, would take upon himself more than ordinary arrangements in the forthcoming elections. He would try to arrange as well Jimmie’s life for him. The Judge belonged to the Morals Squad of his party. He took Jimmie’s arm. “It would be a fine thing to see your father in the reviewing stand for the St. Patrick’s Day parade, a general in all his decorations.”

“Better certainly than a mere major,” said Jimmie, referring to his own rank in World War II.

“Is that as far as you got?” said the Judge as though a major were a very minor thing indeed.

Jimmie nodded.

“Didn’t you go overseas?”

“Oh, yes. That I managed.”

“Where?”

“I was stationed outside London,” Jimmie said, wishing the Judge would get off the subject.

“Oh yes, yes. I remember. Well, just let your father stand in for you in matters military,” he counseled. “I’ll arrange it.” Then as an afterthought: “How is he with the bottle these days?”

“Moderate,” Jimmie said.

“And with the automobile?”

“More cautious than he used to be.”

The Judge leaned closer to Jimmie after a glimpse around. One of the lady delegates stood nearby, her back to them. “And with the ladies?”

“More cautious than he used to be.”

The Judge chuckled, forgetting then the temperate tune he sang himself these days. “I remember him on our first leave after the Battle of the Marne. We were in France together, you know.” He pulled himself up to a creaking attention. “Oh, by God, he was a man!”

As soon as Judge Turner marched off, Madeline Barker swung around and laid her fingers on Jimmie’s arm. She had been a woman of great beauty, Jimmie thought. Much of it was there still as she ran on for fifty, but it was shadowed with bitterness, and more deeply now for her smile.

“I was outside London, too, during the war, Mr. Jarvis. I wonder if we do not have some friends in common.”

Jimmie could feel a prickle at the back of his neck: a legitimate danger signal or merely his own conscience? It was a difficult distinction. “No doubt we call all Englishmen our friends,” he said smiling and taking her hand. “Who could fail to, having lived with them?”

“And English women?” said Miss Barker.

Surely she was not that gauche! “What they lack in beauty, they atone in fervor,” he said, tacking into the weather to test it for storm.

“And what they lack in fervor they atone in discretion,” she said.

“I admire that quality in all people,” Jimmie said with all the considerable suavity he could muster. He pressed her fingers slightly before releasing them. “I expect I shall lean a great deal on your support, Madeline.”

She gave his fingers a little squeeze in return. “I am but a fragile Barker on the sea of politics,” she said.

There was something ludicrous in the bad pun as well as in the notion of her fragility. Miss Barker had run twice for Congress, unsuccessfully. She was all but resigned now to the making and breaking of other candidates, sitting on the State policy committee, and apparently she was not above a bit of intimidation after the candidate was made.

“Forgive me for running off,” Jimmie said, “but I want very much to catch this train. Call me in New York? I promise an excellent lunch?” He put it all like a question which she must answer for him. If necessary, he could have caught a later train, but he felt it imperative to put Miss Barker congenially in her place. To stay and court her company, even to buy her a drink would, he thought, show alarm at her suggestion of intimacy with his affairs.

“Thank you, Mr. Jarvis.”

“Jimmie?” he prompted.

“Jimmie,” she repeated, “good luck!”

It was said with such conviction, he once more doubted everything save his conscience. As he got into his coat, he wondered if he was as much a hypocrite as he felt at that moment. The possibility depressed him.

I
T WAS THREE DAYS
before Jimmie got home to Nyack, what with several things in a personal and business way to be put in quick order before the rumor of his candidacy got too far ahead of him. He talked to Mrs. Norris on the telephone, however, and confided that he was bringing home some rather extraordinary news.

Consequently the house was aglow with lights when he turned into the driveway, and as soon as he put his foot on the step, he could see the housekeeper bounce across the living room like a robin, pushing her bosom ahead of her. If this was not what some men would call home, Jimmie mused, many a man would settle for it as a better than fair substitute.

“Was it a provident trip, Mr. James?” the housekeeper inquired, taking his coat.

“In a way you might say it was, Mrs. Norris. And in another way, you might say it was expensive. Where’s the old fellow?”

She threw up her hands. “He’s been flying round like a bat in the attic for days. One minute he’s sour as a quince, and the next he’s skipping with glee. I’m very glad you’re home, sir.”

“Call him down,” said Jimmie, “and I’ll tell you the news…but in the strictest of confidence.”

“I’m not in the habit of spouting, Mr. James. I leave that to your father.”

“And bring some ice when you come,” said Jimmie.

Just how the General would take the news, Jimmie didn’t know. There was no doubt about it, the old boy liked things happening, and while he liked fame in the family, he preferred it to be his own. Now that he was retired he was touchier than ever about Jimmie’s success. And sure enough, after making a few congratulatory remarks, he said, “I suppose having me for your father was something of a handicap?”

“Judge Turner helped me overcome that,” Jimmie said.

“Did he?” the General snapped. “I thought I was making a joke.”

“So did I, father. Actually, Judge Turner suggests that you might be willing to help me.”

“In what way, may I ask?”

To tell him anything specific when he was in this mood, Jimmie thought was to get “no” for an answer. “Oh, a few personal appearances.”

“At the old peoples’ homes, I suppose.”

Jimmie merely sighed.

So did Mrs. Norris, who, invited to have a drink on the occasion, sat now with her empty glass cupped in her hands like a votive offering. “Think of it: Master Jamie the Honorable James Jarvis, Governor of the Sovereign State…”

Jimmie shuddered as though she were casting a charm on him. “Have another drink, Mrs. Norris.”

“The Honorable James Ransom Jarvis,” the General corrected. “I suppose the campaign will cost a great deal of money?”

But of course, Jimmie thought, that was the burr now rubbing the old man. “I expect the party will make available enough money.”

“Will it?” said the General, on the verge of sudden good humor.

“When the time comes I expect so. Are you broke, father?”

“Smashed.”

“Well, that makes a pair of us. I’ve drawn all I can from the firm for the present.” Jimmie turned to Mrs. Norris. “I suppose we’d better have dinner soon.”