Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Read online

"It's not all that uncommon. I've been a headmaster r years. I've known psychiatry to cure it."

  "And the other boy?" Jean asked.

  "I've spoken to the parents of the other boy. It's just as confusing to them."

  "He's such a good boy, a wonderful person," Jean said. She started to cry. Sully put a hand on her shoulder.

  "I blame myself," he said. "Politics always came first. Home second."

  "I'm told," Mr. Wiggins said, "that you shouldn't blame yourself. Although, I must say, that there has to have been something in the life at home. After all, it's not genetic."

  "Are you sure of that?"

  "No. But the idea of being, well, different, has got to be a trauma." He opened a folder that he had beside him. "Here. These are love letters. Adolescent, but powerfully sexual."

  Sully opened one he knew to be in Timmy's hand.

  "My God!" He had read only the first two lines: "Feeling your nearness, inside me, the wonder of your filling me with love's dart…."

  "My God! Oh, my God!" He felt sickened by it. Crumpling the letters, he threw them down on the floor. "Filth," he said. "Filth. My son is a goddamned pansy."

  "The problem is how to keep it from being blatant. Luckily it was I who had caught them. I was checking the lights in one of the classrooms. They were on the floor, kissing each other's genitals. I deliberately made a noise. I didn't want them to feel that I had caught them. You understand. The important thing is to know it and, perhaps, cure it."

  "I'll beat the shit out of him," Sully said angrily.

  "I'm afraid that's not the way to handle the problem."

  It wasn't. But psychiatry also proved useless. The worst part of it was that Sully loved the boy, and the knowledge of the problem was enough to seal his fate with Jean, irrevocably. Perhaps it was guilt after all, but he knew then that he would never divorce Jean. Timmy's being queer became just another dirty little secret that could hurt him at the polls.

  Perhaps it was all those sacrifices, those deliberate wrong turns, that made him afraid to lose now, late in life. What would it all have been for?

  ———— *4* SULLY loved the big old bathtubs of the Dutchman, sitting on graceful porcelain legs, high above the white-tiled floor. Besides, you could get a good toehold on the four-pronged faucet and let in the steaming water before the surface cooled. He loved it hot, really hot, until the mirror steamed.

  April brought him a cold beer, ripping off the opener from the can and flipping the waste metal into a trash can.

  "How about a kiss, darlin'?" he said, playfully gripping her arm as she handed him the beer.

  She wriggled free and smiled.

  "This heat's gonna screw up my hair." She laughed. "Besides, you couldn't be roused this morning with a derrick. Really, Sully, you can't stay up so damned late drinking and still carry on a tough campaign."

  "Everybody's worried about old Sully," he said.

  She closed the door behind her, and he lay back in the tub, holding the beer can stiff-armed upward as he immersed himself totally in the warm water, held it there, then rose again, and sipped the cold beer. April was right, of course. Good old April, confidante, secretary, mistress, friend, a real lifesaver. Everybody worried about Sully, except, of course, Jean Sullivan. He shook his head, as if in the

  shaking he would jog loose the memory of her.

  That Timmy! He still could not think of his son without that involuntary little convulsion. A couple of years ago just the thought of him could move him to tears of frustration. Even the old guilt returned, as if it were his fault that Timmy turned out to be as queer as a three- dollar bill. It was as if he were someone else's offspring, despite that unmistakeable Sullivan carriage and that damned dimple that had passed down from his father and all the doomed generations before him. Was it really their fault? And yet he could not deny, especially to himself, that he loved the boy. He had observed him as he grew up, but ner participated in the process. He had coolly watched, as if Timmy were in a little glass box. He was annoyed at himself for dwelling on the subject, an irrelevancy, in this time of campaign stress.

  Fitz opened the bathroom door.

  "Top o' the mornin', Congressman," he said cheerfully, grabbing the beer can and sipping deeply. "The eight-thousand-dollar boy wonder has arrived. Perlmutter's bringing him up."

  Sully locked his toe in the faucet and let some more hot water in. The steam rose from the surface. He let the hot water continue to flow in a thin, slow stream. Fitz brought in two straight-backed wooden chairs, flipped the lid on the toilet seat, and sat down. The light had already gone out on his cigar, which, tucked in a corner of his mouth, would be sure to remain for the morning. He reached into his coat pocket and brought out a letter.

  "From your boyfriend down below. Reminds us that we've got to come up with the money tonight before six." He looked up, his watery blue eyes squinting in the steam. "Really, Sully. What're we going to do?"

  "Old worrywart." The idea, the merest hint of the idea, of how he would get the money had not entered his mind yet this morning. It was simply amazing how matters of money managed to slip away. Now that it was back it would begin to have its effect, like an itch.

  "I've been giving it a lot of thought," Sully lied. "I guess I'll have to see Ed Deegan over at the Brooklyn Trust."

  "Christ, Sully, I think he's got our marker for twenty-five thousand. We've never even made a payment on that one."

  "April," Sully bellowed.

  April hung back slightly in the doorway.

  "What's the bank note list?"

  "I can do that from memory. We owe twenty-five thousand to Brooklyn Trust, eighteen thousand to Brooklyn National, and another twenty to National Federal in Washington.

  "That's it?"

  "Aside from the American Express, Diners Club, AT & T, and the Grand Dutchman Hotel and…."

  "Never mind. It's too early in the morning."

  "Okay, Sully, what are we going to do?"

  "We'll think of something."

  He could hear Perlmutter's voice in the outer room. April ushered them into the bathroom.

  "Sit down, gentlemen."

  "Here?" Ed Fountain asked. He was a thin youngish man in an immaculate gray flannel suit. Obviously, he was a man w ho took great pains to make himself presentable. He carried a slim black leather attache case with the initials E.F. engraved on a gold plate near the handle. He shrugged and sat down, carefully crossing his legs and smoothing the top crease.

  "Hello, Fountain," Sully said from the tub. He ducked under the water again. It spilled over the side, making puddles on the tile.

  Perlmutter sat down on the other chair.

  "Well, let's get on with it," he said.

  Fountain snapped open the attache case and brought out a packet of computer readouts, looking very formidable. He treated the readouts

  carefully, smoothing them out along his knees.

  "That the repository of all knowledge?" Sully asked.

  "The repository of eight grand," Fitz said. He unstuck the dead cigar from the corner of his mouth, turned it, then returned it to its place.

  "Hey, April, bring us another beer. Want a beer?"

  Fountain shook his head. April passed in some beer cans through Fitz, who broke open the tab and handed one to the Congressman.

  "Let's start with name identification. Fifty percent of those sampled knew who you were."

  "The shit you say," Fitz cried.

  "That's pretty good as big-city name identification goes. I'd give you good grades on that."

  "You mean after twenty-six years in Congress," Fitz growled, "only fifty percent know John Sullivan. I think your research is one big pile of sheep shit."

  "Hey, Fitz. He says I got good marks on that."

  "Sheep shit!"

  "The reasons are logical. This is a highly mobile area. Neighborhoods are changing rapidly. There's a language prlem. Twenty percent of the area is Spanish-speaking. Seventy percent is black. Low income. B
ottom of the ladder. Not politically oriented. Hell, there are some big-city districts where only twenty percent know the Congressman's name."

  "It's very logical, Congressman," Perlmutter agreed.

  "There's been lots of changes in your district over the last few years, Mr. Sullivan."

  "You're telling me. When I first ran — remember, Fitz — it was all Irish, Polish, Italian, some Jewish. Corn beef and cabbage, Polish sausage, spaghetti, and knishes. Do you know, I used to be able to walk into a shul — that's a synagogue for you goyim — and practically deliver a speech in pig Yiddish. _Ayn klaynakeit_. I'll drink to that."

  "It's serious, Mr. Sullivan," Fountain said gravely. "Everything's changing. Race. Age. There's a hell of a lot of young people, under thirty, no family …"

  "Christ, another worrier," Sully said, drinking deeply from the beer can.

  "You should be the worrier, Mr. Sullivan. I've just done the research."

  "That bad, eh?" Sully said.

  "Bad."

  "Like what?" Fitz asked.

  "Like five percent, say, perceive you as doing a good job. Sixty-five percent don't know, and thirty percent say you're doing a bad job."

  "Son of a bitches," Fitz exploded. "We been working our ass off for these bastards for twenty-six years; right, Sully? You and your smart- ass research."

  "It's not going to do you any good to be angry at me about it," Fountain said. "This is the way the potential voter perceives you. Don't forget we have no previous research comparisons to work from."

  "We didn't need research," Fitz said.

  "So I can't tell you if it wasn't that way at the beginning of your last campaign or any of the previous campaigns. They all might have started out this way. The only judgment I can make is that, based on many surveys we've taken, this kind of rating level is low."

  Sully finished the beer and turned the faucet on full blast for a moment. A spray of steamy water scattered. Fountain casually brushed off some errant droplets from his trousers.

  "That's only one small facet of the gloom," Fountain said. "When asked if they would vote for you again, seventy percent of the fifty percent said no."

  "That's a fucking lie," Fitz exploded. "You're a fucking liar." His face became red. He got up and waved his arms in front of Fountain's

  face. Fountain became annoyed.

  "Does this man have to stay?" he asked Sully.

  "Come on, Fitz," Sully said. "Back off. Let the man make his report. We paid for the goddamned thing."

  "The Congressman's right, Fitz," Perlmutter said gently. "Come on. Take it easy."

  "Marvin, it was a dumb idea," Fitz grumbled. "I don't believe it at all."

  "Come on, Fitz," Perlmutter repeated. His light horn-rimmed glasses had clouded over. He took them off, revealed an intense boyish face under long ringlets of curly hair. Large eyes, brown and slightly popped, were intense, emotional. There was a softness about Perlmutter, whose role as resident intellectual and repository of facts was sometimes in conflict with his compassionate nature. He was known to cry over constituent letters describing despair and tragedy, and it was he who had written the programmed letters for the robotype so filled with sympathy and understanding. ("Mush," Fitz had told him. "It doesn't hurt to be sympathetic," he had answered.) "Maybe you've overestimated the possiblities," Sully had told Perlmutter, but he, too, had secretly agreed with the concept. "We can't always give them tea, so we'll give 'em sympathy."

  And yet, Fitz, like all mean-streaked street Irishmen, had his own standard of compassion — for an old stick of a drunk, for a gone-to-seed charwoman, especially Irish, for a dirty-faced boy with torn sweater, especially white. He had never married, and his one unalterable irrevocable obsession was the life and fortunes of John Sullivan, who knew it.

  "Whall this means, Congressman Sullivan," Perlmutter said, tucking his glasses into a pocket of his shirt, "is that apparently we're in a tough spot, not of our own making."

  "That's right," Fountain said, almost too joyously. "In the first place it seems as if the constituency is turned off by any incumbent politician. Again and again the dissatisfaction surfaces. Eighty percent just simply don't perceive you, substitute any incumbent, as having done anything at all for the people in the district. At least sixty percent think you're too old…."

  "Fifty-eight is not old in politics," Sully said.

  "To people in their twenties it's old. And even the old people are dissatisfied."

  "Old people," Fitz exploded again. "Listen to that, Sully. Hell, Congressman Sullivan was a cosponsor of Medicare in the House and has always voted for more money for old people."

  "This has nothing to do with votes in the House or past performance or anything," Fountain asserted. "Just take a look at the makeup of this district. It's like this hotel, this neighborhood, this borough. It's a loser, and most of the people in it are losers, and through their lens they see you as having done nothing to improve their lot."

  "What about issues?" Perlmutter said. "What's on their minds?"

  "You know," Fountain began, smiling. Perhaps it was the moist air, or the strange, incongruous intimacy of the bathroom, but even Fountain was beginning to unstiffen. "I've done hundreds of surveys of this type over the past ten years. It's so much simpler in, say, a group of towns in the Midwest, where people have lived for decades. There's a sense of community. You take a sample; you can understand the results. Parts of this district are a … snake pit. That's perhaps unkind, but that's the way it seems to me. Christ, my researchers had to go in triplets, for self-protection, and even then a number of them were mugged. There's so much antagonism here…."

  "Please, Ed, don't make surface judgments," Perlmutter said. "We know what we've got here. Just give us the issues."

  Fountain bit his lip and reread his readouts. "Bread-and-butter

  issues. More money, however it's equated. Better jobs. Bigger welfare

  checks. Better opportunity."

  "No national issues?"

  "Oh, sure. Go to a Spanish district and the burning issue is to make Puerto Rico a separate country. In a black neighborhood there is so much hate for the honky that we literally couldn't get anything that made any sense at all. Frankly, Congressman Sullivan, I haven't the faintest idea how you can relate to these people."

  "People are people," Sullivan said. In a sense he meant it, but only, and this he knew, in a sentimental way. Perhaps it was the feeling of warmth and protection that he got from immersion in the bath, but he "sensed" that the human animals shared the same aspirations, feelings, desires, even if they could not articulate their needs. They could barely communicate with a trained researcher. But Sully knew where his great strength lay, his gift. It was not simply a flair, a minor talent, a practiced method. It was a gift. Put into words, it could be called persuasion. Manipulation, which had also crossed his mind, seemed harsh. Persuasion! The ability to project confidence to another person, to communicate confidence, to feed it into his psyche and give him back his hope. He would not let this research shake him from his own pure feeling about his gift.

  He lay back and listened to Perlmutter question Fountain.

  "What about Yomarian?"

  "Forty percent know who he is."

  "Is that good?"

  "Not for you. More than eighty percent of the forty percent perceive him as dynamic and interested in their welfare. Also, they think he would make a better Congressman. That's because he comes over as new. Also, of the forty percent that know him, most are young. And of course, he's been busy for weeks and you've only just started."

  "So you say he's making headway," Perlmutter asked.

  "iftly," Fountain said.

  "We should have started earlier," Per lmutter said.

  "How do you read his chances, Ed?" he continued.

  Fountain glanced at the sheaf of papers on his lap.

  "New broom and all that," he commented, looking up again. "In the light of the mood detected here, I'd say Yomarian has a gre
at chance. Normally, the primaries in this district have been a joke. Most of the voters are Democrats. In a primary only thirty percent of registered voters turn out. The question is who will get out the vote."

  "That's the heart of the matter," Perlmutter agreed.

  "Good precinct organization is half the answer. The other half is how the candidate motivates the voter to get off his ass and vote. How's your organization?" Fountain asked.

  "Damned good," Fitz said.

  "Not good," Perlmutter interjected. "Come on, Fitz, let's face it. We've let it slide. We haven't had a real challenge in years. We may have to collar our voters and drag them to the polls."