I gave my name and explained that I’d like to see the president, Mr. Arthur Merchant, although I didn’t have an appointment. He nodded gravely and disappeared for about five minutes, during which time two members of the Junior Mafia could have waltzed in and cleaned out the place.
But finally he returned and ushered me to a back office, enclosed, walled with a good grade of polished plywood. A toothy lady relieved me of hat and trenchcoat, which she hung on a rack. She handled my garments with her fingertips; I couldn’t blame her. Finally, finally, I was led into the inner sanctum, and Arthur Merchant, bank president and Coburn mayor, rose to greet me. He shook my hand enthusiastically with a fevered palm and insisted I sit in a leather club chair alongside his desk. When we were standing, I was six inches taller than he. When we sat down, he in his swivel chair, he was six inches taller. That chair must have had 12-inch casters.
He was a surprisingly young man for a bank president and mayor. He was also short, plump, florid, and sweatier than the room temperature could account for. Young as he was, the big skull was showing the scants; strands of thin, black hair were brushed sideways to hide the divot. The face bulged. You’ve seen faces that bulge, haven’t you? They seem to protrude. As if an amateur sculptor started out with an ostrich egg as a head form, and then added squares and strips of modeling clay: forehead, nose, cheeks, mouth, chin. I mean everything seems to hang out there, and all that clay just might dry and drop off. Leaving the blank ostrich egg.
We exchanged the usual pleasantries: the weather, my reaction to Coburn, my accommodations at the Inn, places of interest I should see while in the vicinity: the place where a British spy was hanged in 1777; Lovers’ Leap on the Hudson River, scene of nineteen authenticated suicides; and the very spot where, only last summer, a bear had come out of the woods and badly mauled, and allegedly attempted to rape, a 68-year-old lady gathering wild strawberries.
I said it all sounded pretty exciting to me, but as Mr. Merchant was undoubtedly aware, I was not in Coburn to sightsee or visit tourist attractions; I had come to garner information about Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker. That’s when I learned that Arthur Merchant was a compulsive fusser.
The pudgy hands went stealing out to straighten desk blotter, pencils, calendar pad. He tightened his tie, smoothed the hair at his temples, examined his fingernails. He crossed and recrossed his knees, tugged down the points of his vest, brushed nonexistent lint from his sleeve. He leaped to his feet, strode across the room, closed a bookcase door that had been open about a quarter-inch. Then he came back to his desk, sat down, and began rearranging blotter, pencils, and pad, aligning their edges with quick, nervous twitches of those pinkish squid hands.
And all during this
a cappella
ballet he was explaining to me what a splendid fellow Thorndecker was. Salt of the earth. Everything the Boy Scout oath demanded. Absolutely straight-up in his financial dealings. A loyal contributor to local charities. And what a boon to Coburn! Not only as the biggest employer in the village, but as a citizen, bringing to Coburn renown as the home of one of the world’s greatest scientists.
“One of the
greatest,
Mr. Todd,” Art Merchant concluded, somewhat winded, as well he should have been after that ten-minute monologue.
“Very impressive,” I said, as coldly as I could. “You know what he’s doing at Crittenden?”
It was a small sneak punch, but Merchant reacted like I had slammed a knee into his groin.
“What? Why … ah …” he stammered. Then: “The nursing home,” he burst out. “Surely you know about that. Beds for fifty patients. A program of social—”
“I know about Crittenden Hall,” I interrupted. “I want to know about the Crittenden Research Laboratory. What’s going on in the lab?”
“Well, ah, you know,” he said desperately, limp hands flailing. “Scientific stuff. Don’t ask me to understand; I’m just a small-town banker. But valuable things—I’m sure of that. The man’s a genius! Everyone says so. And still young. Relatively. He’s going to do great work. No doubt about that. You’ll see.”
He maundered on and on, turning now to what an excellent business manager Thorndecker was, what a fine executive, and how rare it was to find that acumen in a doctor, a professor, a man of science. But I wasn’t listening.
I was beginning to feel slight twinges of paranoia. I am not ordinarily a subscriber to the conspiracy theory of history. For instance, I do not believe an evil cabal engineered the deaths of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, or even the lousy weather we’ve been having.
I believe in the Single Nut theory of history, holding that one goofy individual can change the course of human affairs by a well-placed bomb or a well-aimed rifle shot. I don’t believe in conspiracies because they require the concerted efforts of two or more people. In other words, a committee. And I’ve never known a committee that achieved anything but endless bickering and the piling up of Minutes of the Last Meeting that serve no useful purpose except being recycled for the production of Mother’s Day cards.
Still, as I said, I was beginning to feel twinges. I thought Agatha Binder had lied to me. I thought Art Merchant was lying to me. These two, along with the Thorndeckers, Dr. Draper, and maybe Ronnie Goodfellow and a few other of the best people of Coburn, all knew something I didn’t know, and wasn’t being told. I didn’t like that. I told you, I don’t like being conned.
I realized Arthur Merchant had stopped talking and was staring at me, expecting some kind of response.
“Well,” I said, rising to my feet, “that’s certainly an enthusiastic endorsement, Mr. Merchant. I’d say Dr. Thorndecker is fortunate in having you and the other citizens of Coburn as friends and neighbors.”
I must have said the right thing, because the fear went out of his eyes, and some color came back into those clayey cheeks.
“And we are fortunate,” he sang out, “in having Dr. Thorndecker as a friend and neighbor. You bet your life! Mr. Todd, you stop by again if you have any more questions, any questions at all, concerning Dr. Thorndecker’s financial affairs. He’s instructed me to throw his books open to you, as it were. Anything you want to know. Anything at all.”
“I’ve seen the report of Lifschultz Associates,” I said, moving toward the door. “It appears Dr. Thorndecker is in a very healthy financial position.”
“Healthy?” Art Merchant cried, and did everything but leap into the air and click his heels together. “I should say so! The man is a fantastic money manager. Fan-tas-tic! In addition to being one of the world’s greatest scientists, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “By the way, Mr. Merchant, I understand you’re the mayor of Coburn?”
“Oh …” he said, shrugging and spreading his plump hands deprecatingly, “I guess I got the job because no one else wanted it. It’s unpaid, you know. About what it’s worth.”
“The reason I mention it,” I said, “is that I haven’t seen any public buildings around town. No courthouse, no city hall, no jail.”
“Well, we have what we call the Civic Building, put up by the WPA back in 1936. We’ve got our fire department in there—it’s just one old pumper and a hose cart—the police station, a two-cell jail, and our city hall, which is really just one big office. We have a JP in town, but if we get a serious charge or trial, we move it over to the courthouse at the county seat.”
“The Civic Building?” I said. “I’d like to see that. How do I find it?”
“Just go out Main Street to Oakland Drive. It’s one block south, right next to the boarded-up A&P; you can’t miss it. Not much to look at, to tell you the truth. There’s been some talk of replacing it with a modern building, but the way things are …”
He let that sentence trail off, the way so many Coburnites did. It gave their talk an effect of helpless futility. Hell, what’s the point of finishing a sentence when the world’s coming to an end?
I thanked him for his kind cooperation and shook that popover with fingers. I claimed hat and trenchcoat, and got out of there. No customers in the bank, and the people at the desks marked New Accounts, Personal Loans, and Mortgages didn’t seem to have much to do. I began to appreciate how much a big, active account like Thorndecker’s meant to First Farmers & Merchants, and to Mayor Art Merchant.
Having time to kill before my visit to Crittenden at 1:00
P.M.
, I spent an hour wandering about Coburn. If I had walked at a faster clip, I could have seen the entire village in thirty minutes. I made a complete tour of the business section—about four blocks—featuring boarded-up stores and Going Out of Business sales. Then I meandered through residential districts, and located the Civic Building. I kept walking until vacant lots became more numerous and finally merged with farms and wooded tracts.
When I had seen all there was to see, I retraced my steps, heading back to the Coburn Inn. I had my ungloved hands shoved into my trenchcoat pockets, and I hunched my shoulders against a whetted wind blowing from the river. I was thinking about what I had just seen, about Coburn.
The town was dying—but what of that? A lot of villages, towns, and cities have died since the world began. People move away, buildings crumble, and the grass or the forest or the jungle or the desert moves back in. As I told Constable Goodfellow, history is change. You can’t stop it; all you can do is try to keep from getting run over by it.
It wasn’t the decay of Coburn that depressed me so much as the layout of the residential neighborhoods. I saw three-story Victorian mansions right next to leaky shacks with a scratchy yard and tin garage. Judging by homes, Coburn’s well-to-do didn’t congregate in a special, exclusive neighborhood; they lived cheek-by-jowl with their underprivileged brethren.
You might find that egalitarian and admirable. I found it unbelievable. There isn’t a village, town, or city on earth where the rich don’t huddle in their own enclave, forcing the poor into theirs. I suppose this has a certain social value: it gives the poor a
place
to aspire to. What’s the point of striving for what the sociologists call upward mobility if you have to stay in the ghetto?
The problem was solved when I spotted a sign in a ground-floor window of one of those big Victorian mansions. It read: “Rooms to let. Day, week, month.” Then I understood.
All
of the Incorporated Village of Coburn was on the wrong side of the tracks. As I trudged back to the Inn, the sky darkening, the smell of snow in the air, I thought this place could have been the capital city of Gloom.
I went into the bar and asked the spavined waiter for a club sandwich and a bottle of beer. While I waited, I looked idly around. It was getting on to noon; the lunch crowd was beginning to straggle in. Then I became aware of something else about Coburn, something I had observed but that hadn’t really registered until now.
There were no young people in town. I had seen a few school kids on the streets, but no one in the, oh, say 18-to-25 age bracket. There was Miss Dimples in the
Sentinel
office, but except for her, Coburn seemed devoid of young people. Even the gas jockeys at Mike’s Service Station looked like they were pulling down Spanish-American War pensions.
The reason was obvious, of course. If you were an eager, curious, reasonably brainy 20-year-old with worlds to conquer, would you stay in Coburn? Not me. I’d shake the place. And that’s what Coburn’s young people had done. For Albany, New York, Miami, Los Angeles. Or maybe Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Karachi.
Any
place was better than home.
On my way out, I stopped at the bar for a quick vodka gimlet. I know it was a poor choice on top of my luncheon beer. But after the realization,
“Any
place was better than home,” I needed it.
Once again I drove to Crittenden through that blasted landscape, and was admitted by the gate guard. He was pressing a transistor radio against his skull. There was a look of ineffable joy on his face, as if he had just heard his number pulled in the Irish Sweeps. I don’t think he even saw me, but he let me in; I followed the graveled road to the front of Crittenden Hall.
Dr. Kenneth Draper came out to greet me. I took a closer look at him. You know the grave, white-coated, eye-glassed guy in the TV commercials who looks earnestly at the camera and says, “Have you ever suffered from irregularity?” That was Draper. As a matter of fact, he looked like he was suffering himself: forehead washboarded, deep lines from nose to corners of mouth, bleached complexion, and a furtive, over-the-shoulder glance, wondering when the knout would fall.
“Well!” Draper said brightly. “Now what we’ve planned is the grand tour. The nursing home first. Look around. Anything you want to see. Meet the head staff. Then to the lab. Ditto there. Take a look at our setup, what we’re doing. Meet some of our people. Then Dr. Thorndecker would like to speak with you when we’re finished. How does that sound?”
“Sounds fine,” I assured him. The poor simp looked so apprehensive that I think if I had said, “Sounds lousy,” he would have burst into tears.
We turned to the left, and Draper hauled a ring of keys from his pocket.
“The wings are practically identical,” he explained. “We didn’t want to waste your time by dragging you through both, so we’ll take a look at the west wing. We keep the door locked for security. Some of our patients are mentals, and we try to keep access doors locked for their protection.”
“And yours?” I asked.
“What?” he said. “Oh yes, I suppose that’s true, although the few violent cases we have are kept pretty, uh, content.”
There was a wide, tiled, institutional corridor with doors on both sides.
“Main floor”: Dr. Draper recited, “Doctors’ and nurses’ offices and lounges. Records and admitting room. X-ray and therapy. Clinic and dispensary. Everything here is duplicated in the east wing.”
“Expensive setup, isn’t it?” I said. “For fifty patients?”
“They can afford it,” he said tonelessly. “Now I’m going to introduce you to Nurse Stella Beecham. She’s an RN, head nurse in Crittenden Hall. She’ll show you through the nursing home, then bring you over to the lab. I’ll leave you in her hands, and then take you through the Crittenden Research Laboratory myself.”