Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Read online

"Roger," she said, smiling.

  "I think it's absolutely marvelous that a young man like you wants to go into politics. It's so needed." The sound was Our Crowd dowager.

  Aram spotted Guy Petrucci across the room, the columnist for the _New York Post_. "I recognize you from your picture."

  "I can hardly do that myself."

  "I appreciate your coming by."

  "It's my beat."

  "Well, I hope you can find something of interest here," Aram said, and backed away from Petrucci as he sought eye contact with others in the room.

  The penthouse overlooked Central Park, a black patch, mysterious and inchoate, surrounded by clusters of lighted pinpoints. Aram stood for a moment watching the lights, little hints of life enclosed by what seemed like an immense black curtain.

  He felt the vastness of this man-made stage, with the curtain about to rise, the players ready, the set complete, the knowledge that it was indeed he, Aram Yomarian, who was standing at the very center of the drama made him dizzy with joy.

  "That's one big motherfucking sight," Alby Winters whispered behind him. Aram turned. "Makes you want to gather it all up like it was yours."

  "You said it, Alby."

  "Are we nearly set?" Alby said, looking at his watch.

  "I'll give it another ten. Looks like we've got a good crowd…. Norman here yet?"

  "He's on the phone in the library."

  "Goddamn, Alby. We've got to keep him off the phones in this apartment. There must be ten extensions."

  "I'm sure he knows how to handle it."

  "My mother-in-law is a yenta. You know what a yenta is?"

  "It's been defined to me."

  Aram put his hand on Alby's shoulder. "She's ubiquitous," he said. "She finds things out. That's her hobby."

  He was paranoid on the point, almost but not qu ite as paranoid as Sandra. To be running things, or at least to know, was Mrs. Margolies' most pressing obsession. Aram looked at his tall, very tall, thin friend, Adam's apple stuck in the middle of his long, reedy neck like a golf ball, eyes set back deep behind high cheekbones, the blond hair thinning, the tight, almost cruel mouth with lips that hardly moved when he talked. When the words came, they were clipped, spare, swift, each fired like a bullet, aimed with perfect accuract the mark it chose.

  They moved together to the library, where sets of books in rich gold- stamped leather bindings, like soldiers in exotic uniforms — Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Zola — guarded the enclave that some chic interior decorator had created out of his very country-home fantasy. Seated in a leather wing chair was the immaculate ebony figure of Norman, watching them enter, like a dark icon in a niche, one leg crossed neatly over the other, fingers like varnished black drumsticks holding a red phone. He looked at them, flickered recognition without losing concentration as he listened, then ignored them. He was always languid, affected, even with them, preposterously theatrical, maddening in his put-on, knowing that his special style of cool made a deep impression.

  Aram stood at the library door searching for Sandra. He saw her in the center of a group of people, one of whom reacted, pointing to him. She came quickly, summoned by a brief movement of his head.

  When she had passed into the library, Aram carefully closed the door and clicked it locked. He made a movement with his hands, a pantomime of hanging up a telephone, as if he were playing charades. Without looking up, Norman understood, whispered into the mouthpiece, and hung up the phone without a sound.

  "There are telephone extensions around this house like minefields," Aram said.

  "It's all right," Sandra reassured them. "I had my eye on Mother."

  "It was Deegan," Norman said. "He won't be here. Sullivan came by today."

  They waited. Norman was always baiting them with dramatic effects. He reached into a side pocket and neatly brought out a single cigarette. He lit it with a tiny gold lighter, puffed deeply, and set the smoke out in white jets through shell-flared nostrils, like a dragon.

  "The message was hammered home … without grease, gentlemen. The nail went in rough and raw."

  "How will Sullivan play it?" Alby asked.

  "Deegan doesn't think he'll panic into a resignation."

  "We'll have to pile on a lot more persuasion," Alby said.

  "It certainly would save us one hell of a lot of trouble," Sandra pointed out.

  "We'll just have to keep the pressure on until all the doors are closed," Norman said. He stood up.

  "Sullivan's tough," he went on. "It will take a lot to break him."

  "There's certainly enough on the plate to choke him," Sandra said.

  "He's got to get each little morsel one by one," Alby pointed out. "Now that he's lured out of Washington he'll find he's walked into a fan."

  "He deserves what he's getting — the pompous ass," Sandra said.

  "We sound like a bunch of ghouls slavering after his blood," Aram said.

  Norman looked at his watch. "It's time for the big pitch. We've got a full house."

  Aram squeezed Sandra's hand, disengaged, and went into the adjoining washroom. Silver-papered, perfumed balls of soap were piled high in a

  gold dish, under a huge wall mirror in which his image appeared, looming. He felt vaguely irritated, feeling, he knew, a part of Sullivan's pain. It was a sign of terrible weakness, an Achilles' heel that had to be surgically removed — at once. There simply could be no room for compassion. The infliction of pain was a ritual of combat; bloodletting was cleansing, necessary. He told himself this, annoyed that he had to hide his anxieties from them, particularly Sandra. He needed to beat this man, to destroy him, as a jungle native must make his first animal kill. And to do that required, above all, a level of hate. He had to believe, truly believe, in the evil of Sullivan. What was Sullivan, after all, but a boozy Irishman with little commitment beyond his own survival as a political entity, a phony, a has-been, a worthless bullshitter?

  Norman, Alby, and Sandra had a flair for ruthlessness. Norman particularly. His black skin could shield him, like the hide of a rhinoceros, which could destroy an opponent in the jungle by its impenetrable toughness. Norman knew hoto handle a man like Sullivan.

  Aram smoothed down his tight curly black hair, put cold water on his temple to calm himself, and stepped out of the washroom.

  "Ready?" Sandra said.

  "Ready."

  They walked hand in hand into the large living room with its huge stark Wyeth at one end and a Lowell Nesbitt at the other, a perfect bloom of painted flowers, with matching live counterparts in a vase on the piano. Sandra's mother herself began the fanfare on the perfectly pitched instrument, her ringed fingers dancing over the keys in a ta-da dum-dum that quickly silenced the conversational hum.

  Aram stepped before the shiny black piano, surveyed the mixed crowd, and smiled boyishly. He knew it was a boyish smile; the opinion of many observers had confirmed it in his mind, making it a useful tool in the arsenal of his charm.

  "The real reason you're here," he began, "is to provide a captive audience for my mother-in-law's concert." The group laughed, a kind of nervous titillation as if called for in the script. He turned to his mother-in-law.

  "She's a rare human being, this lady." They applauded. Mrs. Margolies smiled modestly. "And she makes the best chicken soup and yogurt this side of Armenia." More laughter.

  Aram paused. The pause was another great asset, the pregnant pause after laughter, a sense of timing, a feel for the audience. Aram knew he possessed this sense of timing, and he had learned its power.

  "You know," he began, "self-doubt is a great affliction, especially for a politician. It is one thing to decide to run for public office for the satisfaction of one's sense of worth and ambition, and quite another to answer the real questions: Am I worthy of your trust? Am I equipped to speak for your destiny? Have I the wisdom and insight, the understanding and knowledge, to represent your aspirations?" The room was hushed now, silent. "There are two ways to answer that question. Surely I could
do no worse than those who now hold the office I seek. After all, the facts of contemporary life speak for themselves. The quality of life in America is declining. Injustice, inequality, greed, hate are smothering us to extinction. Everything is out of sync. The haves acquire more and more. The have-nots find themselves with less and less. In their corruption and cynicism the politicians have sold us out."

  "Right on," someone shouted. "Right on," others piped in. He could feel the excitement rise in himself.

  "Or I could answer that question by saying, 'By God, somebody has got to speak what is true and honest and fair and decent.' For that's the prime qualification for political leadership in this country." He paused. "And I believe that I'm qualified to do just that."

  Applause exploded in the room. He let his eyes wander, looking into each person's face.

  "And I say this to you in all sincerity, all the humility that comes from my own early years of struggle and pain … If we don't remove these terrible people from the tiller of our ship of state, they're going to steer us right down to purgatory."

  "Right on" sounded again, followed by more applause.

  "These people are playing Russian roulette with our lives. Just look around you. Our cities are becoming ratholes where hopelessness and despair and poverty become the norm. We sent our boys, not the advantaged ones, of course, to bleed their lives away in the name of some misbegotten national pride, in an orgy of genocide that is a crime against humanity. We put our citizens in a rack for life, making the prizes more and more elusive through inflation, so a family must break its back just to survive. We put the poor man in a straitjacket of want and lock him away in a ghetto of despair from which he can never escape. All he can be is a caged animal growing more and more angry with each sunset. My God, what are our leaders doing to us? How long can we allow them to carry us to the edge of the desert?

  "Maybe running for a seat in Congress means only one small voicn a deafening roar of banality, but it's a place to start, a base for the power of honest people. I know it's no bed of roses. My wife knows the risks. But, ladies and gentlemen, I am outraged, outraged." There was more applause.

  "I am compelled to run. I feel called to run, to defeat that kind of human being who preys on us, bleeds us, takes from our pride. The Sullivans of this world cannot be allowed to run our lives anymore. They must be taken out of the decision-making process and sent out to pasture, where they can do no more harm to innocent people."

  He felt like crying for suddenly he found he was believing himself, and he wished that his wizened little father, the peddler who walked the beaches in the hot summers selling Turkish candies and who died in a dirty Brooklyn gutter, were alive to see this, to feel with him the pulsating power that flowed from him to the people in this room, these strange people, who somehow had attached themselves to him, had become part of him. He could see Sandra's eyes blur, then a brief quiver of her lips. He had made no effort to compose a speech in advance. It all came out as if it had been filed away in his b rain waiting to be released. Perhaps, too, he had said it all before, in his dreams, somewhere. He knew it was the way Sandra wanted him to say it.

  "But don't get me wrong. This is no put-down of the people who have made it in the system. The point is that those that have made it should not foreclose on those who have not made it. And I'm not just talking material things, but psychic things as well, pride, for example. Where there is no pride there is nothing.

  "The most demeaning part of this running for office," he continued, "is the necessity of raising money. The fact that Congress cannot come up with some sensible campaign-financing solution is symptomatic of the sickness that prevails in our society. It is wrong. It is simply another injustice, a way for the haves to manipulate the have-nots."

  He smiled and put up his hands, palms outward.

  "But let's face it. You can't beat an entrenched incumbent without money, lots of money. You know it. I know it. In fact, you probably wouldn't be here if you didn't plan to help us out. So I say to you in my own behalf, no matter how hard it hurts me to talk about it, folks, we need money! We need as much as we can get, as much as it takes to give the Eighth District of New York real representation. Thank you all for coming."

  The applause was enthusiastic and sustained, genuine, he observed, no matter how carefully it had been orchestrated. When it subsided, he held up his hands, then put his arms around the shoulders of Alby and Norman.

  "My co-campaign managers, the great salt-and-pepper team of Alby Winters and Norman Johns, or vice versa, depending on your ethnic persuasion. After they give you the final pitch, stay around and enjoy my mother-in-law's booze. Right, Mom?" Mrs. Margolies smiled thinly and blew him a kiss. He wondered if she really meant it.

  She had not, could not, ever mean it, because he was eternally the poor goy, never knowing which was the real standard, "poor" or "goy." It would not have been quite so traumatic if she had been merely so-so rich or one-generation American Jewish. But she had to be uncountably wealth- ridden, five American generations long, a genuine Our Crowder.

  ———— *7* IT had taken Aram a long time to come to understand and to cope with the realities of class distinction. Even as a young law student, lying on his stomach in Jacob Riis Park while he struggled with torts and horseflies and gazed enviously at the line of young bodies, male and female, that stretched itself in an arrogant and amorphous mass along the beach, he did not fully come to realize the boundary beyond which he lived.

  His adolescence was lonely and marked with guilt over his mother's death and resentment of poverty and the long days of helping his father make and peddle the Turkish candies and halvah. But he retained a ctain pride, inherited from a father whose own sense of pride prevented his steady employment.

  One day when he was six, his father came home in a rage and broke every movable object in their two room Brooklyn walk-up. A chip of a cup sliced a five-stitch gash in his mother's eyebrow, ending the tantrum but forever alienating his parents. Perhaps it was guilt over such actions that made the old man overpossessive of Aram until the end, when he was hit by a car on Atlantic Avenue, squashed out almost casually by some uninterested force. The two right wheels of the Buick snuffed out his life instantly, and the big carton of halvah split on the curb, where neighborhood children snatched it for use as missiles against the storefronts.

  Aram was a senior at Brooklyn College by then, boarding on Avenue K near the college in the house of Mrs. Winters, whose son Alby was away at Harvard. Aram had grown — the low Armenian forehead, acquiline nose, and swarthy, olive skin that tanned to a kind of golden copper.

  He took great pride in his muscular physique, medium height, smooth, hairless body, tight buttocks, slim waist, and thick, longish, uncircumcised cock, a little embarrassing in the school locker rooms, where the majority of cocks were circumcised and looked strangely nobby and denuded. He was the stranger, his cock the exception, and he always dressed quickly, giving them the back of his dark tight ass.

  He gave the member a lot of hand action in those days. That and going to school and working in the campus cafeteria filled up lots of time. But mostly he read, sitting up there on the second floor of Mrs. Winters' semidetached Tudor-style private house. Between jerking off and eating bagfuls of apples and bananas, he put away a whole world of American fiction: Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. All that latent power put a bite into his lonely soul and also kept him out of the mainstream of what was happening around him in the country, to people, to the world. He watched little television and was further isolated from the pop culture, hardly relating at all to the other students at school, not even to the girls over whom he was constantly fantasizing and erecting.

  It wasn't until November 22, 1963, that he was jolted, kicked awake — by the bullet from Oswald's mail-order Italian rifle. How many millions of others did that bullet hit? He sat in Mrs. Winters' living room hypnotized by the little electronic window that, for the first time in his life, made him feel that he
was inside what was happening, not just on the sidelines. By God, he felt that all this was, at last, happening to him, and he watched long after Mr. and Mrs. Winters dozed off,

  waiting for Armageddon. He even bought a little secondhand portable TV so that he could watch the funeral. The process, all those heads of state and Jackie and Teddy and Bobby walking down Connecticut Avenue made him bawl like a baby, far more than he cried at the deaths of his own mother and father.

  From that moment on, politics became an obsession, an addiction. He changed his major from economics to political science and began to prepare for law school, not that a career in law was tantalizing, but he had learned that lawyers dominated the political scene, and that was where he wanted to be.

  But while his goals were now better defined, he still suffered from that damnable insulation and could barely get his mind to work until he had stilled the raging urgency of his sex drive with a good jerk-off over the gloriously haired cunt of the nameless female who lived only in his head.