AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the Baileys—short of sleep and showing it—straggled into their dining room for breakfast. Mr. Bailey had to go to the bank. He was a punctual man.
He regarded the late arrival of executives at business offices as a bad example. Mrs.
Bailey joined her husband, out of custom. She had learned early in her marriage that, whenever she slept late, he found several ways to bring it to her attention publicly—ways that had the outward form of humor and the clear stigmata of a wife-husband friction. Mr.
Bailey had not been able to scare or scourge the second generation into early rising.
He was surprised, then, when Sarah showed up. “Have you been in bed? Or are you just going? I saw you leave the club with Francis Webster along about two.”
“I have an appointment for a fitting. Nine o’clock. Mrs. Gregg didn’t have any other time, worse luck. I’m dead! It’s the dress I’m going to wear tonight at the Wilsons’ party for Jimmie.”
Mr. Bailey chased a piece of bacon with his fork. “Anybody told Jimmie there’s another party for him tonight?” He looked accusingly at his wife.
“I hinted at it rather plainly. And he seems to like—”
Her husband cleared his throat. Biff came into the room, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “Coffee,” he said in a hollow tone. The swinging door banged and the butler came through. “Westcott, bring me a gallon of coffee.”
Mr. Bailey squinted at his son. “Huh! I should think so! I counted up to seven rum collinses last night. What you trying to do—drink yourself to death?”
Biff’s hands were trembling. A light perspiration shone on his face, here and there, in little clusters. “Anybody count yours? I have a hangover you could sell to an amusement park. Make the roller coaster feel like a lawn swing.”
“Who told you that crack?” Sarah asked.
Their father swallowed coffee. A big, square man, growing thinner as he came nearer to sixty. A man with a rectangular face and a chin that rode out beyond his necktie formidably. He wore rimless, angle-sided spectacles. The eyes behind them were china blue, but as bright as glass. His face was ruddy, and the almost unwrinkled skin on it was shaved so close it looked peeled. He wore his wavy gray hair long so that it would fall across his toupee-sized bald spot. He had a good voice, deep, resonant, and not loud unless he wanted it to be. He firmly believed that, in every hour of every day of his life, he had done the right thing—his duty—without consideration of his own pleasure or pain.
That such an attitude is psychologically—even physiologically—dangerous, cannot be denied. But it is the commonest attitude among successful men not just in America, but everywhere. Most people thought Kendrick Bailey was a brilliant man and a good man. In many ways, he was both. He looked, now, at his wife, and he said, “I repeat.
Does Jimmie know that there is another big party for him tonight?”
“Don’t be so hostile,” his wife replied. “I’ll ease him into the fact when he comes down—after he’s had some breakfast. No doubt he’ll sleep late. He must be very tired—going through submarine zones and all that. He certainly looked it when he got off the train.”
“He looked rotten,” Biff said comfortably. “The lousy interventionist!”
“Hannah,” said Mr. Bailey to his wife, “we made a mistake with that boy. Should never have allowed him to go to Oxford. He got the European taint.”
“It was the ‘V’ on his luggage,” Sarah said, “that was so darned corny! The very first thing I saw—even before I saw Jimmie—was that big suitcase Biff and I gave him for a going-away present, and that enormous red, white, and blue ‘V.’ He might at least have had the decency to find out that the better people in his own home town aren’t having any part of things like that!”
“I was kind of proud of that ‘V,’” Jimmie said.
Biff dropped his knife. Sarah flinched. Mr. Bailey spun in his chair. Hannah Bailey said, “James! You must quit sneaking up and listening in on what people are saying! That’s the second time you’ve been eavesdropping!”
Jimmie came into the dining room and looked cheerfully at his family and at the bright sun outside; he sat down in the empty place. “Oh, I eavesdrop all the time.” He was flushing a little, but his words did not show that he was in any way embarrassed. “It’s counterespionage that does it.”
“What?” said his mother.
Jimmie answered blandly, “Counterspying. In wartime England you get in the habit of slipping up quietly on every conversation. You know. The lovely old man in the walrus mustache taking tea with the beautiful young girl may well be a fifth columnist.
The bobby under Nelson’s statue ostensibly giving directions to the cockney errand boy may be Baron Hoffmann, chief of the Gestapo, telling a messenger the location of an AA battery—”
“He’s kidding, Mother,” Sarah said. The butler came in and looked inquisitively at Jimmie.
“Some bloaters, Westcott, and a bit of cold pork pie—” Jimmie chuckled at the man’s expression. “I want anything strictly American in the kitchen! Everything, in fact.”
Westcott smiled understandingly and hurried out.
Mr. Bailey scowled. “You know, son, I suppose, that there’s another party to be given for you tonight.”
“Is there?”
“The Wilsons’.”
Mrs. Bailey glanced indignantly at her husband and amiably at her elder son. “It’s really a ‘must,’ dear. I’m dreadfully sorry you got up so early. You must take a good, long nap this afternoon.”
“I had to get up,” Jimmie said pleasantly. “Work.”
“What is there so terrifically important about that work?” Sarah sounded honestly puzzled. “Me—if I were you—I’d take a month off, enjoy the food in a country that still has sense enough to stay out of war, go to the club, pick out a whole harem of women and indulge my more frivolous nature to the limit—”
“Sarah!” said Mr. Bailey.
“Sis is right!” Biff looked at his brother.
“You could, you know,” Sarah went on. “Ninety per cent of the gals in Muskogewan would be a pushover for you. Would be, that is, if you quit carrying the torch for the Empire. I could hear ’em panting last night, when you came into the club. I’ll arrange it for you. Some nice numbers—”
“Sarah!” said her mother, more loudly.
“Why deceive the man?” Sarah grinned wickedly. “He knows he’s sort of the Ronald Colman type—intellectually, and without the mustache—crossed with the Gary Cooper build. Honestly, Jimmie, when you got off the train I passionately wished I were pro-British—and not your sister! In a nice way,” she added, aware that her mother was reaching the point of explosion. “No fooling. Why the drudgery? You don’t look like a chemist. Last night, you didn’t even act like one.”
Jimmie said, airily, “Oh, social service. I work for some people that I want to get out of a jam.”
“Really—” said his mother.
“He means the English,” said Sarah.
“I mean,” Jimmie explained, “about a billion or so people. English, French, Poles, Czechs, Chinese, Malays, Russians—”
“We know geography,” Biff said irritatedly. “How’d you like Audrey?”
Jimmie’s face was expressionless. “She’s very attractive.”
“She didn’t—?” Sarah began.
Mrs. Bailey said, “Shh! It’s supposed to be a surprise! ”
“You better tell him then, Mother.” Mrs. Bailey considered. “Very well. Audrey didn’t say anything about the party for you tonight?”
“Not a word.”
“Well, it was going to be a surprise party—and you can pretend you’re surprised anyway—”
“ You’ll be surprised, Mother. I’m not going.” Mrs. Bailey was triumphant. “Oh, yes, you are! Audrey’s folks are giving it!”
“Oh?” Jimmie pondered. “Well, I’m still not going. ”
“But, Jimmie!” Mrs. Bailey’s voice was tearful. Mr. Bailey looked at her with an I-expected-as-much expression. “Jimmie, dear! This is really by far the most important of all the parties we’d planned for you! And you were so devoted to Audrey last night! I was extremely relieved by it.”
He felt, again, the weight of his first disappointment: the fact that his family was angry with him and the deep violence of their disagreement. It was not the shock it had been on the day before, but it still outraged him—as if he had come home to find them gleefully engaged in some lunatical act of arson or assault. “I liked Audrey all right. She has feelings—infantile and hard to reach—but there, anyhow. She reminds me of a much more real woman I knew once, too. And dancing exclusively with her saved me from hordes of those little numbers Sarah just described as pushovers. Lord! Parlor English has deteriorated!”
Mr. Bailey started to say something forceful. His wife gave him an imploring signal—a signal that promised to treat later with the situation.
Westcott came in with the papers on a tray. Mr. Bailey seized the Chicago paper vigorously, and his wife accepted the Muskogewan Times. She turned immediately to the Society page, without seeming to be aware that the Times had a front page at all.
But Mr. Bailey concentrated on the front page of the Chicago journal.
Jimmie, of course, had never watched his father read a newspaper in the latter years of the New Deal. He did so now. It was an extraordinary experience.
Mr. Bailey’s eyes ran along the banner headline with rapid interest. He said, “Huh!” in a moderate tone. He read the first few lines of double-column type. He said, “So. Two more freighters, eh?”
Sarah and Biff went on eating, scarcely noticing the one-man melodrama fomenting under their noses. But Jimmie watched, repressing a grin.
Presently his father said, “Ha!” bitterly. He pulled the paper closer to his eyes. He whispered between his teeth, “Rat!” There was a moment of absolute quiet. “The dirty rat!”
Mr. Bailey fumbled busily with the stubborn sheets as he tried to follow a news story over to page six. He finally found the continuation. He read. He exclaimed, “Communists! Communists, everyone!”
He went back to the front page. For some minutes he read quietly again. He said, “Well, they had another flood in Los Angeles. Killed three.”
This observation brought no response. His eye flicked over the type. Suddenly he made a noise. It was an animal noise. He kept reading, and he kept making animal noises.
Moans, growls, whinnies. Like the noises of something caught in a steel trap—past its first hysteria but not yet dulled to resignation. Presently he stared at nothing. “They put him in!” he whispered in a grisly tone. “They put him in again! They put him in for a third term! How could they do it?” He shook his head and bowed it, as if he were in the presence of some fantastic betrayal of himself by a dear friend.
The lowering of his head put his eye in range of still another heading. Instantly, his reverent despair was gone. He read—electrically. “Oh—God!” he whispered, as if it were one word. “They passed it! Forced it through!” He clapped his hand to his head. The newspaper fell from his other hand. Stricken, he nevertheless seized it again. He pored over the words. And a peculiar thing began to happen to him.
His face became empurpled. His body swelled like a frog’s. The great arteries in his temples beat rapidly. His breath went in and out, sharply. His fingers stiffened out, and closed, and straightened again. He looked like a boiler that is popping rivets immediately before bursting. He swore fluently, softly, using up the common expressions and repeating them in fresh combinations. With one fist he began to hammer in a steady rhythm on the edge of the table.
Only then did his wife take open cognizance of his condition. “Finish your breakfast, Kendrick,” she said pleasantly.
He stared at her glassily. Westcott brought the morning mail on a tray. Mr. Bailey continued to stare while the man distributed it. He said, “Well, Hannah, they passed it! That means there’s a ceiling on everything, now. No room for business to budge in! I’m not a banker any more! I’m just a teller! We’re Communist now—all of us! We might as well go out in the street and start saluting with fists! You wouldn’t think that one man, one solitary traitor to his class, one egomaniacal idiot, could steal from a hundred and thirty-two million people every right, every power, every privilege, every decent democratic principle—”
Suddenly he stopped. He quivered. He looked at Jimmie. “What’s the matter?”
It was some time before Jimmie could get his breath. Quite some time. He was choking—choking badly. But when he did recover he loosed the breath again in a tremendous roar of laughter. “Oh, Lord!” said. “Oh, my Lord, Dad! All these years I’ve thought of you as the most self-controlled, self-disciplined man I ever knew! And now!” He chortled again.
“It took Roosevelt to turn you into a thundering infant! No kidding!” He fought again for air. “No fooling! You’ll get apoplexy.”
His father came up standing. “Infant!” he bellowed. “Infant!”
Jimmie’s mirth was only partially quenched by his attempt to regain composure.
“You looked exactly like one. Ten months old. When you take away his rattle! Ye gods! Are many grown people going into spins like that, over the morning paper? Do it again, Dad! Do it some more!” A paroxysm of hilarity bent him double.
His father was still standing. He opened his mouth and closed it. His eyes were raging and his face was still violet. “Son—” he began.
Then Biff said, “Go on. Laugh.” His voice was so odd that even his father looked at him.
Biff was as white as chalk. Around the corners of his mouth was a slack sullenness. The perspiration that had made small damp areas on his upper lip and forehead was now pouring from his entire face. He had a letter in his hand. He looked, Jimmie thought, like a man who has just been hit. In the vivid vocabulary of Jimmie’s memory, that simile meant hit mortally, with a splinter of a bomb or a spear of flying glass. Jimmie seized his brother’s arm strongly and said, “Hey, fellow! What’s wrong?”
“Laugh some more,” Biff replied vacuously, insanely.
Jimmie seized the letter. He frowned perplexedly and looked around the table. His family seemed scared. “It just says,” Jimmie reported calmly, “that Biff, my proud young brother, has been drafted.”
“Just!” said Biff. “Just says!”
“What’s the matter with that?” Jimmie asked.
Mrs. Bailey was rising. A dewy light shone in her eyes and her face was working.
She ran to her son’s side. “Oh, Biff, Biff, Biff! I won’t let them take you away. My boy, my youngest boy!”
Her husband threw into the scene a tone of reasonableness. “Take it easy, Mother.
This whole thing’s preposterous, and you know it. There must be something we can do.
I’ll look into it—immediately.”
“Of course, you can do something,” Mrs. Bailey answered, sniffling, but comforted. “It’s such a waste! Biff was just getting ready to hunt for the right job!”
Jimmie glanced at his frantic mother, his frowning father, and his sister, who seemed to be undergoing mixed emotions. Then he brought his gaze “I’m not scared,” Biff said harshly. He met Jimmie’s eyes, and Jimmie knew that was the truth. “But I’ll be everlastingly damned if I’m going to spend a year of my life marching around with a lot of Boy Scouts, getting up at the crack of dawn, doing day labor, eating swill—just because Franklin Delano Roosevelt says there’s an emergency! And that’s flat!”
Mrs. Bailey added her explanation. “I told Biff he should do something when he wrote out the application—or whatever you call it. He was bound to get an ‘A’ rating.
Maybe we can do something about his physical examination.”
“I’m a football player,” Biff said coldly.
His mother answered, “Still, we must know the examining physician—whoever it is. Laddy Bedford got put way back because of his heart, though I never heard before about his having heart trouble. There must be some loophole, somewhere.” She seemed to see a stoniness in Jimmie’s stare. She added, “It isn’t as if we really needed an army! As if we’d been invaded, or anything! Besides, there still isn’t enough equipment to drill with for half the boys that they’ve already taken. They shouldn’t call any more until they have the things.
And even Congress almost had sense enough, last summer, to put a stop to it!”
Jimmie said, “That’s a devil of a mood to show a guy who’s about to join the army.”
She said, “Jimmie!”
Mr. Bailey pontificated. “Now, James, this is something that demands thought.
Thought—and possible action. A boy like Biff is too valuable to be put in the infantry.
And the time for raising a militia hasn’t come, even if the president does create it later.
You’re fresh from other people’s battles. You’ll have to Jet us work this out in the way most suitable to Americans in America.”
“Biff’s going,” Jimmie said bluntly.
Biff whirled. “Says who?”
“Says me, Biff.” Jimmie was very quiet.
“You think you can make me?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
Jimmie shrugged. He was still sitting at his place. He picked up the letter. “Here.
It tells you to report. You’ll pass the physical, because you have the constitution of a buffalo. So-you’ll go. If you”—he spoke still more quietly—“or Dad, or Mother, or anybody tries to weasel on this, I’ll go before the draft board or committee—or whatever it is—and report the whole unselfish and patriotic conversation we have just been having here! I promise you!”
He stopped there—because Biff slugged him. He hit from the floor, with all his might. Biff was also sitting. Otherwise the blow would have downed Jimmie. It caught him on the cheekbone. It made a nasty sound. Sarah screamed. Biff grabbed his fist and rubbed it. He said, “I’ll run this show! You interfere—and that’s just a sample! I’ll about kill you!” His voice was shaking.
Jimmie lowered his head a moment. The first fierce pain died away. The sparks stopped floating. He put his hand up to his cheek and rubbed hard. His palm was bloodied. He took out his handkerchief, dipped it in his tumbler, and pressed it against the cut bruise. “I didn’t see that one coming,” he said, finally. “You better always throw ’em without warning me. You’re a husky boy, Biff. But I’ve been training in the home guard for nearly two years. If you ever slug me again I’ll lay you cold. If you want to fight fair—come on outside. Do you?”
Biff said nothing.
Mrs. Bailey was weeping voluminously. Her husband was staring rabidly at his sons. Sarah sat still, shivering. The telephone rang. Westcott came in. He was astonished by the tableau. He showed it only slightly. “For you, Mrs. Bailey. It’s Mrs. Wilson.”
“I can’t possibly—” said Mrs. Bailey. Then she gulped. “Mrs. Wilson!” She rose.
While she was away no one said a word.
When she came back her face was pasty and her eyes were bleak. “The p-p-party tonight is off,” she said hollowly. “Off-because of Jimmie’s views. That’s the real truth.
Mrs. Wilson is telling people—except us, of course—that she’s been taken very ill, all of a sudden.” She sat down and burst into tears again. “Now, everything’s ruined.”