Poorhouse Fair (2 page)

'A wise old owl

Sat in an oak.

The more he heard,

The less he spoke.

The less he spoke,

The more he heard:

Let's imitate

This wise old bird.'"

Lucas, grimacing, had been digging into his ear, and now, watery-eyed from the pain, studied his two companions. Then, his eyes on the sulphur end of the match-stick, he said, "If you want, I'll go up to Conner and ask what his idea was."

Hook's sole answer was to draw up to his height in his chair; his face lifted entirely into shadow. The corners of his lips were downdrawn as fine as pencil points. Lucas had no fear of Conner; it was what everyone had noticed. Hook had momentarily forgotten.

"You give him this," Gregg said, and he held up and vibrated a skinny white fist, yellow in the sun, "and tell him it came from me."

CONNER'S office was approached by four flights of narrowing stairs, troublesome for these old people. Accordingly few came to see him. He intended in time to change this; it was among the duties of the prefect, as he conceived the post, to be accessible. It had not been he but his predecessor Mendelssohn who had chosen to center the executive in the cupola. Why, Conner could guess from the look of the man in his coffin and the layout of the buildings. Though the fourth flight, the last and narrowest --tan unpainted stairs rising between green walls barely a shoulders'-breadth apart--led only to the cupola and alone led away from it, once this brief diagonal descent had been made, a man could easily thread unseen through the fourth floor--half of it the closed doors of the bedridden--to the rear stairs, and thus reach the out-of-doors, and sneak behind the pig buildings and along the edge of the west wall into the adjacent town of Andrews, where Mendelssohn was well-known as a daytime drinker. The altitude of the office assured that it would seldom be visited, except by Mendelssohn's subordinates, who understood him. Further, the view commanded from the cupola was inclusive and magnificent. From what Conner had seen in the coffin--the ponderous balding head, the traces of Jewishness in the vital nostrils and the smile the embalmers had been unable to erase from the lips like the lips of a gash long healed, the faint eyebrows, the unctuously, painfully lowered lids--Mendelssohn had in part thought of himself as God.

Conner thought of no one as God. The slats of light from the east and south windows, broken into code by the leaves and stems of the plants on the sills, spoke no language to him. He had lost all sense of omen. Rising as early as Hook, he had looked at the same sky and seen nothing but promise of a faultless day for the fair. Young for the importance of his position, devout in the service of humanity, Conner was unprepossessing: the agony, unworthy of him, he underwent in the presence of unsympathetic people was sensed by them, and they disliked him for it. The ignorant came to him and reaped more ignorance; he had no gift of conversion. The theatre of his deeds was filled with people he would never meet--the administrators, the report-readers--and beyond these black blank heads hung the white walls of the universe, the listless, permissive mother for whom Conner felt not a shred of awe, though, orthodox in the way of popular humanist orators, he claimed he did. Yet there were a few --friends, he supposed. Buddy was one, the twin, tapping out budgetory accounts at his porcelain table in the corner of the spacious room. Frequently Conner could feel Buddy's admiration and gratitude as a growing vegetal thing within himself, fed by his every action, especially the more casual; the joking words, the moan over a tangled business, the weary rising at the end of the day to pour, out of a wax-paper cup, a little drinking water on the roots of the decorative plants--like the Venetian blinds, a post-Mendelssohn innovation. Moving in, Conner had found the office bare, drab, dirty, unordered: a hole where a tramp napped.

"Conner? Hey, Conner." It was Lucas's habit to come half-way up the last flight and then shout, his voice highly acoustical in the narrow enclosure. Conner did not know how to correct him; there was no bell; he did not know how they did it in Mendelssohn's day, nor did Lucas, Lucas and his wife having entered the place a month after the new prefect.

"Yes, George. Come on up." He frowned for Buddy to see and kept his hands on the piece of paper he had been reading, a letter from an anonymous townsperson. Buddy's hands ostentatiously rapped on, not compromising his noise for their visitor. The twin's brain in boyhood had been soaked in thrillers, and to him Lucas was the Informer, indispensable yet despicable.

Indeed, that Lucas, in the midst of such general hostility, should be comparatively natural with him made Conner himself uneasy. The man perhaps thought he was winning kindness for his wife, though there was no evidence that he was; impartiality with Conner was a crucial virtue. By way of comment on his puffing, Lucas said, "A lot of stairs. You'd think you were hiding."

Conner smiled mechanically, his eyes glancing to the letter; help not hinder, I myself, and rights leaped from between his fingers. He lacked the presence, however, to hold a silence. "Martha getting her cake made?" he asked, clipping away minor words in embarrassment at being conventionally cordial.

"She's fussing at something, I know."

"You must be glad," Conner said, "that she's on her feet again." He felt this remark instantly as fatuous; of course Lucas was glad. Yet he had meant it well, and he felt irritation at the invisible apparatus that, placed between himself and any of the inmates, so scrupulously judged the content of expressions that were meant to be carelessly amiable.

To his relief Lucas removed their talk to the plane of business. "They noticed their names on the porch chairs downstairs."

Conner's heart tripped, absurdly. He should have given up hope of pleasing them long ago; it was enough to help them. Ideally, his dedication wore blinders, but he was too weak not to glance to the side for signs of approval. The sculptor has his rock and the saint the silence of his Lord, but a man like Conner who has vowed to bring order and beauty out of human substance had no third factor; he is a slave, at first, to gratitude. In time, he knew, this tender place grows callous; he had heard the older men whose disciple he was discuss, not entirely in joking, mass murder as the ultimate kindness the enlightened could perform for the others. "From your tone," he said to Lucas, "I take it their noticing should cause me anxiety."

"Well, they're confused. They can't read your purpose."

"Who is this they?"

Lucas poked something small and wooden into his ear and made a face of pain, his clayey skin eroding in rivers suddenly.

"You needn't name them," Conner added.

"Hook and Gregg were the ones I heard talking about it."

"Hook and Gregg. Poor Gregg, of course, is one notch removed from dementia. Hook is something else. Tell me, do you think Hook is senile?"

"In the head? No."

"Then there must be a rational cause that has set him against me."

"Oh, he's not against you. He just talks on the first thing that comes into his mind."

"And I'm always in his mind. What better friend does he think he has than myself? Hook's been here fifteen years; he knows what it was like under Mendelssohn."

Lucas looked startled to be feeling the edge of an apologia that was, Conner realized, principally excited by the preposterous and insulting letter he had been reading. "He speaks real well of him," Lucas said, with an odd steadiness of his eyes. "I have no opinion; I came here after you."

"Half the county home acres were lying fallow, waste. The outbuildings were crammed with refuse and filth. The west wing was a death trap. When Hook, last autumn, ate that unwashed peach, he would have died if Mendelssohn had still been in charge."

"Doesn't anybody realize," Buddy interjected in his somewhat frantic boy's voice, "what Mr. Conner has done here? This home has one of the five highest ratings in the north-eastern sector."

"I read that on the bulletin board. It makes us all proud." Lucas's hands went to the side of his head, and his face crumpled again. This over, he asked soberly, "But now what was the idea about the nameplates?" Dogged, flashed on Conner as an adequate summation of Lucas.

Conner wondered if it were wisest to be silent. Words, any words, gave a person a piece of yourself. Swiftly, reasons marshalled against this unworthy impulse:

You should not make shows of authority.

Lucas, fat and blunt and coarse-pored as he was, soiling the order of this office and the morning's routine, deserved politeness, as one of the unfortunates.

If Conner fudged, Lucas would convey the fact to the others.

The question was not, as it seemed (so strong was Conner's impression this moment of defiance and ingratitude everywhere), an impudence to which there is no answer.

There was an answer; everything Conner did he did for a reason; his actions were glass.

His motives occurred to him; he stared at the shine on Lucas's taut hooked nose and then shot his gaze to the stripes of blue at the window, saying, "There have been complaints, a complaint--one of the women came to me, in regard to her husband--that on rainy days the men who work on the farm can't find chairs on the porch, or at least the chairs they think of as their own. The vacant chairs are scattered, so some are unable to sit with their friends. It's childish, of course. Mendelssohn, I'm sure, would have laughed her away. But I--my duty is to take all complaints seriously. Part of my policy has been, within the limits of the appropriations, to give the residents here some sense of ownership. I think especially of men like Hook, who have known a share of respect and prosperity. It strengthens, is my belief, rather than weakens a communal fabric to have running through it strands of private ownership. Lucas, I want to help these men to hold up their heads; to retain to the end the dignity that properly belongs to every member, big or little, of humanity."

He pivoted in his socketed chair and saw that in his typing corner Buddy was blushing jealously, to hear his superior speak with such fervor to an interloper. The boy (so touching, his blurted proclamation of their fifth-place honors) had perhaps assumed that the image of the thread of private property and the hope concerning dignity to the end had been a confidence shared between just the two of them. It would not do for Conner to explain, by even so much as the tone of his eyes, that in this instance, without disbelieving his words, he was using them more for their impact than their sense, more to keep Lucas at a distance than convey a creed. When Conner had been Buddy's age he would have been repelled by any revelation to the effect that within the outer shell of a man's idealism is fitted a shell of cynicism; within this shell, another, contracted compared to the first, of idealism, and so on down, in alternate black and white, to the indivisible center; and that it is by the color of the star here alone that the course of a man's life is set. Obliquely mitigating his unintended offense to Buddy, Conner mentioned his name in continuing to Lucas, "Mr. Lee, with a few of the other women, took much trouble in fixing each man's favorite chair. In some cases the old men themselves sat in a new place every day. The present arrangement is a work of love on his part. And yet Hook takes it as a cause of complaint. This is the reward Mr. Lee receives for the devotion he brings to his work in this institution; his talents would earn him three times his present salary in private or semi-private industry."

"Well, I'll tell them," Lucas said, though his attention for the last minute had been turned toward the inside of his head.

Perhaps still appeasing Buddy, Conner asked sharply, "What in hell are you doing to your ear?"

"A little soreness." Lucas went on the defensive; his head bowed and the pink inner skin of his cumbersome lower lip showed.

"For how long?"

"Not long."

"A day? Two?"

"I guess longer."

"You've been running an earache for longer than two days. What medication have you received?"

No answer.

Conner answered for him, "None."

"I've had a soreness, off and on, for some time."

He might have been speaking of an animal he had befriended. "Well, could you go to the west wing now, please? And throw the matchstick into the wastebasket. This waste-basket. Good God, you'll give yourself otomycosis." Conner hated, more than anything, pain dumbly endured. Oppression, superstition, misery--all sank their roots in meekness.

Lucas, turned into a child by this undeserved streak of rebuke, left as commanded. Conner, grieving for the bad temper brought on by the uneasy conscience unjustly forced on him by Buddy's sulk and the letter on his desk, rose and stood by the east windows and looked down through parted blinds to people foreshortened on grass. On the east, south, and west sides, the cupola had big windows, sets of three with round-arched tops, the middle one taller than the two flanking. The metal supporting the Venetian blinds muddled the stately lines, and the semi-circles, each fitted of five pieces of hand-worked wood, peeked above the manufactured horizontals like the upper margin of a fresco painted where now an exit has been broken through. On the fourth side, the north, the steep stairway climbed from the floor below, contained within the external silhouette of the cupola, so that the door came into the room, making on each side of it an alcove, in which a simpler window had been let. Light at all times of the day came into the room; each standing object in it became a sundial, which no one there could read. The man, Walter Andrews, who seventy years before had built the mansion had meant this for the piano room; the system of supports and joints above had been left free, diagonal rafters and slender crossbeams where music could entwine, and the musicians grouped around the piano below could play on and on, feeding the growing cloud above without having their noise press out from the walls and crowd them. The piano was still in the room, underlying terraces of green steel cabinets. There was no way of getting it out; it had been hoisted up and set on the bare floor when the room was unfinished. Where the east set of windows were the next day placed, the wall was open on blue air, the ends of the golden boards making a ragged hole in which the romantic black piano-shape appeared, a miracle, the ropes too thin it seemed, the workmen apprehensive, a breeze blowing, the points of the tapered legs tracing a fugal phrase largo on the emptiness as the huge instrument gently twirled in its secure cradle of rope. The piano within, the workers completed the well-knit wall, Andrews giving no consideration to the day after tomorrow or to the species that would follow his.