Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Read online

  "Oh, Johnny, me b'y," he cried with almost the last bleats of his diseased lung, and the hand, miraculously, unfolded again from the tattered quilt and gripped his own in the same sweet way. "This country, she's done me in. 'Tis the curse of the Oirish."

  "I'll get the bastards, Pa."

  He knew that a smile lit his face as he sat there sipping the scotch and watching Fitz's hands, and he wondered what, indeed, he would do if he were defeated.

  "I just won't think about being defeated," he said aloud.

  "What the devil would we do?" Fitz continued.

  Worry seeped away the joy of this afterglow. He took another drink, swallowed quickly, deeply. The boozfelt warm in his gut, and even in his head it had a wonderfully floating effect. But long experience told him he had exceeded the limit, and soon his words would thicken and he would have trouble when he attempted to rise. Without another word, he stood up shakily, walked stiffly to the bedroom, and crawled in beside April, who turned slowly toward him, hugged him. She let her open palm range over the girth of his belly, downward to the curl of his pubic hair, then slipped his shorts downward cupping her hand around his phallus and balls. She squeezed them softly.

  Soon Sully was snoring. She pulled up his shorts and, with her hand still on his belly, followed him to sleep.

  ———— *3* WHEN April had been working for him for four months, he began calling her June or September or even January. It was the kind of lighthearted banter that took the edge off the hard grind of an ambitious Congressman who could still believe in his own sense of mission, although, even then, he would have denied it to himself.

  He was full of himself in those days, taking himself seriously, thrashing around ingratiating himself, plodding up to Brooklyn and back, making rounds of veterans' groups, bar mitzvahs, wakes, parades, and patriotic holidays. They were still taking things like that seriously in the late forties, even though there was some evidence even then that some people were beginning to be bored with the routine, especially in his district, where the principal issue was becoming the big invasion from Harlem.

  By then, too, the glory of his being a Congressman was beginning to wash off Jean, who after the first flush of finding herself the wife of

  a Congressman was learning its full reality — the long boring evenings listening to speeches and endless political haranguing, the insufferable private dinners with too much smoke, too much drink, too much food, and too much talk — until, finally, she began to welcome being out of it, being alone. It had not yet become loneliness, for she had Timmy, and Sully could not wind down at night until he had talked himself totally out.

  Sully often thought about those early years, before April, before the others.

  "She just doesn't make it interesting for me anymore."

  It became a standard line, a kind of ritual cleansing act, usually perpetrated somewhere in the three-quarter turn over the third or fourth martini. Star-fuckers were everywhere. They were being disgorged out of all those broken-down small towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio, just over pimples and the steady date who had decherried them around about their sophomore year in high school.

  The worst part was having to listen to all their dull twaddle, their meaningful experiences back in Aliquippa or Toledo, and the way their fathers drank, and how the guys back home were all a bunch of gas station attendants or bus drivers or insurance salesman who had "no ambition." Later, looking ba ck, he really felt pity for them, all those used and abused sweet little things, forced somehow into a condition of servitude, a kind of penance for being women. Perhaps because he was an instrument of their abuse, he understood what the damned women's movement was all about, insufferable as it was, with all those colorless dikes parading into and out of his office.

  Being Irish and tall and blue-eyed and confident of his manhood, he knew that soon after the drinks and an abbreviated dinner he would have them spread-eagled somewhere, seven inches of hard cock jammed into a sweet young cunt. He found them surprisingly experienced, and it was rare indeed when he couldn't get them to give him a good blow job. God, he loved them all, the sweet young girls from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Even in memory it was a joy to think of them, remembering the details.

  It was not that April was much different from them. She was even from Pennsylvania, and a refugee from a drinking father and a mother she dearly loved but could not bear to see destroying her life over a sewing machine in the new ctories. Four brothers and sisters, never enough money, and a broken-down house in a broken-down part of town.

  He had noticed her, the alabaster skin, the long legs, graceful and lean. Although she was hidden in a tight corner of an inner office, he knew she was there, knew, too, that she was ambitious. That was one human trait he could feel and understand. Ambition seemed to permeate the ozone of Washington. It was everywhere, slopping against the walls like a garbage-laden tide. You breathed it in, sensed it, lavished love on it.

  "What's wrong with wanting to be with people on the top?" she asked during their very first lunch together.

  "I know the urge."

  "Frankly, my goals are modest. I know I'm limited. I just want to be better than my parents were. Otherwise it's like living in some dreary photograph where nothing even has the possibility of movement."

  "So you want to be in movies," he sang.

  "You're not really going to take me seriously, are you, Congressman Sullivan?"

  "Why be serious?"

  "Oh, no. Not what you're thinking. I mean serious as a person."

  "As a person, I'll take you seriously."

  "Will you really?"

  There was nothing unique about the question. It was part of the regular charade. The only difference was that he _was_ taking her seriously.

  "Really." He reached for her hand, found it surprisingly cool and smooth. He lifted it and kissed her fingers. She blushed, the blood moving like a tide over her alabaster cheeks. He felt its tug, resisted it, shortened the lunch deliberately, and decided, vowed, to leave it alone. There was more here than a piece of ass.

  For the first time in years, he felt guilty, and for a while he made an effort to stop philandering and began to spend more time with Jean. By then, however, Jean was deep into housewifery and the local gossip of the apartment complex in Virginia.

  "The Gilberts are breaking up. She's the one with the red convertible."

  "Big deal."

  "She fell in love with their insurance man. He caught her in bed with him. They really busted up the apartment."

  "Sounds like my old walk-up back in Brooklyn on a Saturday night."

  "Timmy's teeth are late."

  "Oh."

  "Would you mind if I take courses in fabric design at night?"

  "Why should I mind?"

  He simply was not part of Jean's life, the life she had been forced to make without him. And because he wasn't in it, he could not manufacture any interest in it.

  "I just don't like being on that goddamned merry-go-round of yours, Sully, with all those phonies. I did it for four years. And I'll do it, if you really need me to, every two years for the campaign. But don't ask me to live in that garbage."

  "It's the life I want, Jean."

  "And if you become President of the United States, I'll play the game as you need me to, Sully … I will … I really will. I won't let you down. I promise you that."

  "I know you won't, Jean."

  "I come from very loyal stock."

  "I know that, Jean."

  There was, indeed, comfort in that. Being loyal. Being true. That was a rare commodity. And through all these years Jean had stuck to that contract and he had lived within it, even when everything else had died. It couldn't entirely be explained away by politics although that was the major factor. But back then it filled him with guilt, as it was designed to do.

  "All right, I surrender," he said to April one evening after they worked late. Perhaps it was coincidental, but they were the last to leave the office. He knew they were falling
in love. All those silly little side glances, heart shudderings, strange feelings in his crotch — not the disembodied rush of blood to the cock, something infinitely more mysterious, the kind of thing he had once felt with Jean, the thing that had died somewhere.

  "I know I've been ignoring you," he said at last after they settled into their drinks. He sat beside her in the darkened lounge of theongressional Hotel.

  "You're busy. You're my boss. You work very hard."

  "I'm nearly twenty years older than you," he said after a pause.

  "I know that."

  "I'm a married man with one child. I'm a Congressman. And I'm nearly twenty years older than you. What am I doing here?"

  "Mr. Sullivan." She sipped her drink and looked at him. "I feel why you're here. And I feel why I'm here. I'm afraid to do much questioning beyond that. I'm just not a very experienced person."

  She looked a little helpless, undefended. He moved closer to her, found her leg against his, found her fingers intertwined in his. He kissed her neck, her cheek, her eyes. They were moist. A salt tear brushed against his lips.

  "I know I'm falling in love with you, January. I know what is happening to me. I don't want it to happen."

  She said nothing, but tightened her hand in his.

  "O Lord, please don't let him betray me," she said, closing her eyes, the tears brimming over. He wanted to hold her, caress her, comfort her. Looking around the cocktail lounge, he knew people were watching. He went to the desk and checked into the hotel.

  Later he undressed her gently, kissing each part of her as he did so, lingering on her breasts, downward to her pubic hair. She stopped him and held his head in her hands.

  "You're going to be my first man," she said.

  "You're kidding," he said, annoyed after the words came out. "I didn't mean it that way."

  "I know. It's hard to believe. I wanted to be loved, really loved." She paused. "But I'm not totally inexperienced." She began to undress him, sitting up in the bed as she unzipped his pants and pulled them down. She held his erect cock and looked up at him, putting it between her breasts.

  "I love you, John Sullivan. And I will love you forever." She kissed the tip of his cock and caressed his balls. His hands caressed the softness of her cheeks, her hair, her eyes, as she kissed him, sucked him. Gently he stopped her, moved her body beyond the edge of the bed, and lay down beside her.

  "April," he said. "The beginning of spring." He kissed her deeply and moved his body over her. She grabbed his cock and directed it to the lips of her cunt, moving down on it as it found its mark. He felt its tightness. She held it hard, moved further on it, grunted, he thought, in pain.

  "Please don't let me hurt you," he said.

  She removed her hand from his cock and with both hands grabbed onto his hips. He felt the pressure of his cock, a squeezing. Then suddenly, she gripped his hips and pushed, harshly, rough, violent. He felt her body give way and heard her scream.

  "Don't move," she cried. "Don't move." He remained still, knowing she had ruptured the membrane and was contemplating the deed, like some primordial animal. He kissed her gently, spreading her lips, his tongue searching her mouth. Then he felt her body move under him and her hands move from his hips to buttocks, and he knew that the pain had become pleasure.

  "Please feel the pleasure with me," he begged, remembering all the times when the pleasure had seemed so one-sided, without giving.

  And it happened exactly that way, a perfect coupling, coming exactly together. It seemed then that it had some mystique about it, not that it had happened quite that way every time after.

  Perhaps it was that event, the memory of its details over the years, that had underpinned their relationship for twenty years. Nor was the arrangement as humiliating for April as it might have been. True, she was the other woman, and she knew that. But she came to think of Jean as the other woman. What registered most strongly in Sully's mind was that April's feelings for him, for old Sully, had never faltered, never hesitated, never been tentative, as if that brief, urgent elimination of the hymen sealed those feelings in her mind forever.

  "I'm sure now, Sully. I'm pregnant as hell," she had told him. They had known each other about five years th. It was the time before the pill, and abortion was still a filthy little act of murder.

  "I hope he has my eyes and your skin," Sully said.

  "We'll never know. I'm going to have myself fixed."

  "My God."

  He welcomed the evolutionary force as providential. Now he could go to Jean and lay it on the line. By then their lives had drifted into a kind of calm watershed, with Jean beginning to embark successfully on her own

  career as a dress-store owner. Timmy was in Landon by then, hardly a factor in their lives, although they knew he was another one of the cohesive edges that kept things tog ether, like the projected image of wedded bliss that seemed so necessary to average Joe Voter, especially if he was Catholic.

  Jean did not know about April. Of that he was sure. He had determined never to humiliate her. If she was to know, he himself would tell her one day.

  "I just won't let it happen," Sully said, after April told him she had made the arrangements.

  "It will be done by a very reputable doctor. Nothing to it, I've been told."

  "It's wrong, April. I've got to tell Jean and get it over with. Hell, we love each other. This is utter nonsense."

  "When you do tell her — if you ever want to make that commitment — it should be done without this … this complication. An abortion done correctly doesn't ruin your chances for more children. It's just that it's wrong to use it as a shotgun thing."

  "You've got to admit it's quite a catalyst."

  "My solution is the most practical."

  "It's murder. This is our child you're killing."

  "Don't be such a Catholic, Sully. I'm not upset."

  "Suppose something goes wrong."

  "That only happens in the movies."

  "But it could."

  "Sully, I'm only eight weeks gone. It's no big deal."

  "Have the kid, April. We could cook up a story."

  "Then you'd have some dirty little secret to conceal. Sully, you're a politician. It would come out someday, right in the middle of some important campaign, maybe for the Senate or even higher."

  "So what?"

  "And think of the kid. One day I'll have to tell him he's nothing but a little bastard."

  "I won't let you do it."

  "Come on, Sully, don't let's make this a crisis. It's no big deal."

  She kissed him deeply. They were in her apartment. She started to undress him.

  "We might as well enjoy the hay while the barn door is open," she said, drawing him to the bed. "You'll see. It's no big deal."

  But it was a big deal to him, and he always felt that she had murdered their child. Thinking of it always made him uneasy, especially since Timmy had turned out as he did. Sometimes when they were alone together, he would remember, and it would hurt him deeply.

  "I keep wondering what he would have been like."

  "It's morbid."

  "You mean you don't think about it."

  "I didn't say that. Only that it was morbid."

  "My God, April. It's a crime against nature."

  "Don't think about it."

  "I try not to."

  He suspected that all his decisions in those years were largely politically motivated. Had he turned it over in mind? Divorce was bad politically. Look at Adlai. Then Rockefeller and Reagan came along, and it was suddenly not as bad as people thought. And if he had sired a bastard? Even that had seemed to lose its negative sting as the years sped by, as the world changed. Even Timmy!

  Timmy had been in his junior year at Landon when the headmaster called Sully and Jean to see him. They sat in the living room in his private home, perhaps to allay their fear that it was all really official business.

  "You've had no hint," Mr. Wiggins said politely.

  "Not
really," Jean said. "He has always been rather neat, a gentle boy, always a gentle boy." She started to cry. "I never interpreted it as being effeminate."

  "It's just so damned difficult to imagine," Sully said.