Jailbird Read online

  The last time this had happened to me was in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-three, two years after Leland Clewes went to prison for perjury. Dozens of other witnesses had been found to testify against him by then--and more damagingly, too. All I had ever accused him of was membership in the Communist Party before the war, which I would have thought was about as damning for a member of the Depression generation as having stood in a breadline. But others were willing to swear that Clewes had continued to be a communist throughout the war, and had passed secret information to agents of the Soviet Union. I was flabbergasted.

  That was certainly news to me, and may not even have been true. The most I had wanted from Clewes was an admission that I had told the truth about something that really didn't matter much. God knows I did not want to see him ruined and sent to jail. And the most I expected for myself was that I would be sorry for the rest of my life, would never feel quite right about myself ever again, because of what I had accidentally done to him. Otherwise, I thought, life could be expected to go on much as before.

  True: I had been transferred to a less-sensitive job in the Defense Department, tabulating the likes and dislikes of soldiers of various major American races and religions, and from various educational and economic backgrounds, for various sorts of field rations, some of them new and experimental. Work of that sort, now done brainlessly and eyelessly and handlessly and at the speed of light by computers, was still being done largely by hand in those days. I and my staff now seem as archaic to me as Christian monks illuminating manuscripts with paintbrushes and gold leaf and quills.

  And true: People who dealt with me at work, both inferiors and superiors, became more formal, more coldly correct, when dealing with me. They had no time anymore, seemingly, for jokes, for stories about the war. Every conversation was schnip-schnap! Then it was time to get back to work. I ascribed this at the time, and even told my poor wife that I admired it, to the spirit of the new, lean, keen, highly mobile and thoroughly professional Armed Forces we were shaping. They were to be a thunderbolt with which we could vaporize any new, would-be Hitler; anywhere in the world. No sooner had the people of a country lost their freedom, than the United States of America would arrive to give it back again.

  And true: Ruth's and my social life was somewhat less vivid than the one I had promised her in Nuremberg. I had projected for her a telephone in our home that would never stop ringing, with old comrades of mine on the other end. They would want to eat and drink and talk all night. They would be in the primes of their lives in government service, in their late thirties or early forties, like me--so able and experienced and diplomatic and clever, and at bottom as hard as nails, that they would be the real heads and the guts of their organizations, no matter where in the hierarchy they were supposed to be. I promised Ruth that they would be blowing in from big jobs in Moscow, in Tokyo, in her home town in Vienna, in Jakarta and Timbuktu, and God knows where. What tales they would have to tell us about the world, about what was really going on! We would laugh and have another drink, and so on. And local people, of course, would importune us for our colorful, cosmopolitan company and for our inside information as well.

  Ruth said that it was perfectly all right that our telephone did not ring--that, if it weren't for the fact that my job required me to be available at all hours of the night or day, she would rather not have a telephone in the house. As for conversations with supposedly well-informed people long into the night, she said she hated to stay up past ten o'clock, and that in the concentration camp she had heard enough supposedly inside information to last her for the rest of her days, and then some. "I am not one of those people, Walter," she said, "who finds it necessary to always know, supposedly, what is really going on."

  It may be that Ruth protected herself from dread of the gathering storm, or, more accurately, from dread of the gathering silence, by reverting during the daytime, when I was at work, to the Ophelia-like elation she had felt after her liberation--when she had thought of herself as a bird all alone with God. She did not neglect the boy, who was five when Leland Clewes went to prison. He was always clean and well-fed. She did not take to secret drinking. She did, however, start to eat a lot.

  And this brings me to the subject of body sizes again, something I am very reluctant to discuss--because I don't want to give them more importance than they deserve. Body sizes can be remarkable for their variations from accepted norms, but still explain almost nothing about the lives led inside those bodies. I am small enough to have been a coxswain, as I have already confessed. That explains nothing. And, by the time Leland Clewes came to trial for perjury, my wife, although only five feet tall, weighed one hundred and sixty pounds or so.

  So be it.

  Except for this: Our son very early on concluded that his notorious little father and his fat, foreign mother were such social handicaps to him that he actually told several playmates in the neighborhood that he was an adopted child. A neighbor woman invited my wife over for coffee during the daytime exactly once, and with this purpose: to discover if we knew who the boy's real parents were.

  Peace.

  So a decent interval went by after Leland Clewes was sent to prison, two years, as I say--and then I was called into the office of Assistant Secretary of the Army Shelton Walker. We had never met. He had never been in government service before. He was my age. He had been in the war and had risen to the rank of major in the Field Artillery and had made the landings in North Africa and then, on D-Day, in France. But he was essentially an Oklahoma businessman. Someone would tell me later that he owned the largest tire distributorship in the state. More startling to me: He was a Republican, for General of the Armies Dwight David Eisenhower had now become President--the first Republican to hold that office in twenty years.

  Mr. Walker wished to express, he said, the gratitude that the whole country should feel for my years of faithful service in both war and peace. He said that I had executive skills that would surely have been more lavishly rewarded if I had employed them in private industry. An economy drive was underway, he said, and the post I held was to be terminated. Many other posts were being terminated, so that he was unable to move me somewhere else, as much as he might have liked to do so. I was fired, in short. I am unable to say even now whether he was being unkind or not when he said to me, rising and extending his hand, "You can now sell your considerable skills, Mr. Starbuck, for their true value in the open marketplace of the Free Enterprise System. Happy hunting! Good luck!"

  What did I know about Free Enterprise? I know a great deal about it now, but I knew nothing about it then. I knew so little about it then that I was able to imagine for several months that private industry really would pay a lot for an all-purpose executive like me. I told my poor wife during those first months of unemployment that, yes, that was certainly an option we held, in case all else failed: that I could at any time raise my arms like a man crucified, so to speak, and fall backward into General Motors or General Electric or some such thing. A measure of the kindness of this woman to me: She never asked me why I didn't do that immediately if it was so easy--never asked me to explain why, exactly, I felt that there was something silly and not quite gentlemanly about private industry.

  "We may have to be rich, even though we don't want to be," I remember telling her somewhere in there. My son was six by then, and listening--and old enough, surely, to ponder such a paradox. Could it have made any sense to him? No.

  Meanwhile, I visited and telephoned acquaintances in other departments, making light of being "temporarily at liberty," as out-of-work actors say. I might have been a man with a comical injury, like a black eye or a broken big toe. Also: All my old acquaintances were Democrats like myself, allowing me to present myself as a victim of Republican stupidity and vengefulness.

  But, alas, whereas life for me had been so long a sort of Virginia reel, as friends handed me on from job to job, no one could now think of a vacant post anywhere. Vacancies had suddenly become as extinct as dodo
birds.

  Too bad.

  But the old comrades behaved so naturally and politely toward me that I could not say even now that I was being punished for what I had done to Leland Clewes--if I had not at last appealed for help to an arrogant old man outside of government, who, to my shock, was perfectly willing to show the disgust he felt for me, and to explain it in detail. He was Timothy Beame. He had been an assistant secretary of agriculture under Roosevelt before the war. He had offered me my first job in government. He, too, was a Harvard man and former Rhodes Scholar. Now he was seventy-four years old and the active head of Beame, Mearns, Weld and Weld, the most prestigious law firm in Washington.

  I asked him on the telephone if he would have lunch with me. He declined. Most people declined to have lunch with me. He said he could see me for half an hour late that afternoon, but that he could not imagine what we might have to talk about.

  "Frankly, sir," I said, "I'm looking for work--possibly with a foundation or a museum. Something like that."

  "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh--looking for work, are we?" he said. "Yes--that we should talk about. Come in, by all means. How many years is it now since we've had a good talk?"

  "Thirteen years, sir," I said.

  "A lot of water goes over the old dam in thirteen years."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "Ta-ta," he said.

  I was fool enough to keep the appointment.

  His reception of me was elaborately hearty and false from the first. He introduced me to his young male secretary, told him what a promising young man I had been, clapping me on the back all the time. This was a man who may never have clapped anyone on the back in his life before.

  When we got into his paneled office, Timothy Beame directed me to a leather club chair, saying, "Sit thee doon, sit thee doon." I have recently come across that same supposedly humorous expression, of course, in Dr. Bob Fender's science-fiction story about the judge from Vicuna, who got stuck forever to me and my destiny. Again: I doubt if Timothy Beame had ever addressed such an inane locution to anyone ever before. This was a bunchy, shaggy old man, incidentally--accidentally majestic as I was accidentally small. His great hands suggested that he had swung a mighty broadsword long ago, and that they were fumbling for truth and justice now. His white brows were an unbroken thicket from one side to the other, and after he had seated himself at his desk, he dipped his head forward so as to peer at me and speak to me through that hedge.

  "I needn't ask what you've been up to lately," he said.

  "No, sir--I guess not," I said.

  "You and young Clewes have managed to make yourselves as famous as Mutt and Jeff," he said. "To our sorrow," I said.

  "I would hope so. I would certainly hope that there was much sorrow there," he said.

  This was a man who, as it turned out, had only about two more months to live. He had had no hint of that, so far as I know. It was said, after he died, that he would surely have been named to the Supreme Court, if only he had managed to live until the election of another Democrat to the presidency.

  "If you are truly sorrowful," he went on, "I hope you know what it is you are mourning, exactly."

  "Sir--?" I said.

  "You thought only you and Clewes were involved?" he said.

  "Yes, sir," I said. "And our wives, of course." I meant it.

  He gave a mighty groan. "That is the one thing you should not have said to me," he said.

  "Sir--?" I said.

  "You ninny, you Harvard abortion, you incomparably third-rate little horse's ass," he said, and he arose from his chair. "You and Clewes have destroyed the good reputation of the most unselfish and intelligent generation of public servants this country has ever known! My God--who can care about you now, or about Clewes? Too bad he's in jail! Too bad we can't find another job for you!"

  I, too, got up. "Sir," I said, "I broke no law."

  "The most important thing they teach at Harvard," he said, "is that a man can obey every law and still be the worst criminal of his time."

  Where or when this was taught at Harvard, he did not say. It was news to me.

  "Mr. Starbuck," he said, "in case you haven't noticed: We have recently come through a global conflict between good and evil, during which we grew quite accustomed to beaches and fields littered with the bodies of our own brave and blameless dead. Now I am expected to feel pity for one unemployed bureaucrat, who, for all the damage he has done to his country, should be hanged and drawn and quartered, as far as I am concerned."

  "I only told the truth," I bleated. I was nauseated with terror and shame.

  "You told a fragmentary truth," he said, "which has now been allowed to represent the whole! 'Educated and compassionate public servants are almost certainly Russian spies.' That's all you are going to hear now from the semiliterate old-time crooks and spellbinders who want the government back, who think it's rightly theirs. Without the symbiotic idiocies of you and Leland Clewes they could never have made the connection between treason and pity and brains. Now get out of my sight!"

  "Sir," I said. I would have fled if I could, but I was paralyzed.

  "You are yet another nincompoop, who, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time," he said, "was able to set humanitarianism back a full century! Begone!"

  Strong stuff.

  8

  SO THERE I SAT on the bench outside the prison, waiting for the bus, while the Georgia sun beat down on me. A great Cadillac limousine, with pale blue curtains drawn across its back windows, simmered by slowly on the other side of the median divider, on the lanes that would take it to the headquarters of the Air Force base. I could see only the chauffeur, a black man, who was looking quizzically at the prison. The place was not clearly a prison. A quite modest sign at the foot of the flagpole said only this: "F.M.S.A.C.F., Authorized Personnel Only."

  The limousine continued on, until it found a crossover about a quarter of a mile up. Then it came back down and stopped with its glossy front fender inches from my nose. There, reflected in that perfect fender, I saw that old Slavic janitor again. This was the same limousine, it turned out, that had set off the false alarm about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse somewhat earlier. It had been cruising in search of the prison for quite some time.

  The chauffeur got out, and he asked me if this was indeed the prison.

  Thus was I required to make my first sound as a free man. "Yes," I said.

  The chauffeur, who was a big, serenely paternal, middle-aged man in a tan whipcord uniform and black leather puttees, opened the back door, spoke into the twilit interior. "Gentlemen," he said, with precisely the appropriate mixture of sorrow and respect, "we have reached our destination." Letters embroidered in red silk thread on his breast pocket identified his employer. "RAMJAC," they said.

  As I would learn later: Old pals of Greathouse had provided him and his lawyers with swift and secret transportation from his home to prison, so that there would be almost no witnesses to his humiliation. A limousine from Pepsi-Cola had picked him up before dawn at the service entrance to the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, which was his home. It had taken him to the Marine Air Terminal next to La Guardia, and directly out onto a runway. A corporate jet belonging to Resorts International was waiting for him there. It flew him to Atlanta, where he was met, again right out on the runway, by a curtained limousine supplied by the Southeastern District Office of The RAMJAC Corporation.

  Out clambered Virgil Greathouse--dressed almost exactly as I was, in a gray, pinstripe suit and a white shirt and a regimental-stripe tie. Our regiments were different. He was a Coldstream Guard. As always, he was sucking on his pipe. He gave me the briefest of glances.

  And then two sleek lawyers got out--one young, one old.

  While the chauffeur went to the limousine's trunk to get the convict's luggage, Greathouse and the two lawyers looked over the prison as though it were a piece of real estate they were thinking of buying, if the price was right. There was a twinkle in the eyes of Greathouse, and he was imi
tating birdcalls with his pipe. He may have been thinking how tough he was. He had been taking lessons in boxing and jujitsu and karate, I would learn later from his lawyers, ever since it had become clear to him that he was really going to go to jail.

  "Well," I thought to myself when I heard that, "there won't be anybody in that particular prison who will want to fight him, but he will get his back broken anyway. Everybody gets his back broken when he goes to prison for the first time. It mends after a while, but never quite the way it was before. As tough as Virgil Greathouse may be, he will never walk or feel quite the same again."

  Virgil Greathouse had failed to recognize me. Sitting there on the bench, I might as well have been a corpse in the mud on a battlefield, and he might have been a general who had come forward during a lull to see how things were going, by and large.

  I was unsurprised. I did think, though, that he might recognize the voice from inside the prison, which we could all hear so clearly now. It was the voice of his closest Watergate coconspirator, Emil Larkin, singing at the top of his lungs the Negro spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

  Greathouse had no time to show his reaction to the voice, for a fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. This was a gut-ripping sound to anyone who had not heard it and heard it and heard it before. There was never a warning build-up. It was always an end-of-the-world explosion overhead.

  Greathouse and the lawyers and the chauffeur flung themselves to the ground. Then they got up again, cursing and laughing and dusting themselves off. Greathouse, supposing correctly that he was being watched and sized up by people he could not see, made some boxing feints and looked up into the sky as though to say, clowningly, "Send me another one. I'm ready this time." The party did not advance on the prison, however. It waited by the limousine, expecting some sort of welcoming party. Greathouse wanted, I imagine, one last acknowledgment of his rank in society on neutral ground, a sort of surrender at Appomattox, with the warden as Ulysses S. Grant and himself as Robert E. Lee.