Three Days Before the Shooting ... (20 page)

So, standing before him, I was filled with a kind of joy, as though watching a skillful act of impersonation. For my work in Washington had made me aware that behind the political parties and the public gestures of public figures there is usually in progress a game of hide-and-seek. Ofttimes relatively obscure men write the political speeches which affect our destiny, and much too often disreputable machine politicians, a holdover from more rambunctious days, formulate policies (and ofttimes wise policies) that are proclaimed publicly by respectable public servants who are themselves little more than masks, the true mouthpieces and figureheads of the nation. Not always, fortunately, for some public figures are indeed what they profess to be. They do their own thinking, their own speaking, and their own dirty work—much as our prewar gang leaders were wont to do. They make no pretense that politics can ever be pure and unambiguous, and they recognize that no politician is ever free of the murky mysteries handed down to them from tribal chieftains through medicine men, publicity experts to ministers of state. Yet, even this makes for more mystery and speculation rather than
less. It is still difficult to distinguish real man from mask, true voice from recording, real leader from actor.

I had left the interview without putting a single question; it wasn’t necessary. M. Vannec was highly competent, and he led the line of questioning with such skill that each of us was satisfied with the information received and the analysis of events presented. I was pleased to know that for once, unexpectedly, I had left my boring work on shipboard to glimpse behind the European scene. I had peeped into chaos and encountered a hero, and now I could see some of the results. It pleased me that for all the relative stability attributed to prewar European class lines, M. Vannec, who comes from the upper class, and who had an established identity as an artist before the Spanish outbreak, exhibited some of that same mobility of identity and shifting of purpose which my work in Washington led me to believe was so common to our own society. I had known of his legend as reported in our press, but the brief personal identification made during the war rendered it all the more meaningful to me. I speculated as to the transformations, or, to use a favorite term of one of the more intriguing French writers, the
metamorphosis
, the process, by which he had transformed himself. Certainly transformations of identity were necessary under the Nazi occupation, but, on the whole, the concrete conditions in France were too much for me. I had to settle for the small, silent satisfaction of having recognized him in an earlier role, while he had been completely unaware.

Then, when his letter arrived on the morning of the shooting, I realized that the laugh had been on me. M. Vannec had indeed picked me out of the crowd and had been no less poker-faced than I. When I first read his letter, this had delighted me, but now, sitting in the hospital corridor in my shaken state, my response was vastly more questioning. I felt that he had subjected me to an insidious inquisition. Insanity, I am told, is a coincidental state. Correspondences flutter ever before the victim’s eyes. Faces appear in rocks, clouds, streams, and fireplaces. Everything and anything becomes imbued with personal significance, and in Auden’s words “Time remembered becomes one with time required.” Dreams cling, gongs make waves of deep silence, ten-ton trucks glide past like trout plying the sandy, pebble-strewn bottom of a stream; artificial flies come alive and curve around to attack the artful fisherman. It happens to each of us at some point, I’m sure. And what is the recommended cure? A “plunge into reality,” that is the recommended cure. A plunge into life’s “well of facts.” So with old Hickman and the FBI man before me to mark my boundaries of speculation, the one a symbol of authority and the other of some nameless chaos, I tried to reread the letter carefully and coolly—and only succeeded in increasing my agitation.

CHAPTER 8

A
FTER BLANDLY INTRODUCING HIMSELF
and recalling our encounter in Rouen and at the press conference, M. Vannec’s letter was one question after another.

Prior to my visit of last year, I hadn’t seen your country since 1937, during the crisis of the Spanish Civil War…. I see American journals and newspapers, of course, but so much has happened since my first visit that I now find myself confused whenever I compare the “factual data” of the United States with the ideas which I’ve formed at this distance. Thus, if you would be so kind, I should like to have the private unofficial opinions of one so well informed as yourself. In other words, the opinions of an informed citizen who sees his country from the inside, one who sees, shall we say, with the warm mystique and intuition of the heart as well as with the intellect…. I am confused, for instance, when I read the statement of one of your leading men of letters who says that he no longer recognizes as his own the country which is presented photographically by one of our leading journals. What do you make of this statement?

Looking down the corridor at old Hickman I thought,
How blinding is flattery!
Why on earth had I kept reading the first time? And why on earth didn’t M. Vannec write to our so-called leading man of letters, who, perhaps, would have been overjoyed to convey his national and most unoriginal disgust to one so distinguished. And why did M. Vannec consider me privy to our superior leading man of letters’ opinions, perceptions, insights, out-sights, hindsights, around-sights, or lack of such? Me, a mere reporter and taxpayer. And what did that bored old party expect from his complaints, when he should know very well that in this country a man is exceptionally
lucky if he is able to recognize the child he rears as his own. Hadn’t he noticed, I thought, that besides the normal factors that have always made family life a cuckoo’s delight—the culture, environment, whatever it is—is in such a constant and cyclonic whirl that our children not only grow like weeds, but they grab such strange nourishment out of the air that their mothers might well chuck the traditional concern with getting their brats to wash their hands and faces, and see to it that whenever they come in off the street they washed their brains? Our leading man of letters should consider a Boston child of proper background whom I know, who spoke with a South Carolina Geechee lilt after brief contact with the Negro maid who worked next door on Williamsburg Square. Within two weeks he was referring to his father, a Harvard professor of distinguished attainments, as “de buckra.”

Oh de burrhead and de buckra
Dey de same in de dark, ainty?

I heard him sing. What would Vannec’s leading man of letters, that matinee idol of the word, that latter-day Francis X. Bushman of prose, make of this? How does this child fit into
his
America? His America indeed! Where does he keep it, in what safe-deposit box? And is his America old Hickman’s America or that of the FBI man?

And when did this country ever slow down long enough for him to stake out his claim? Perhaps the deed his grandfather filed expired long ago, or perhaps his father, armed with Civil War plunder, was too busy pushing to establish himself with his betters to keep up with the changes. Why on earth should Vannec think that I should give my attention to such a haughty gentleman? My job is reporting the facts, and change is implicit in the fact—or isn’t it?

M. Vannec, I thought angrily, is like many Europeans whom I’ve met; he expects us to be familiar with all of
their
proprieties but fails absolutely to recognize the few we have of our own. The first shot out of the bottle and he’s revealed himself as the type of European who delights in telling you endless stories illustrating American materialism, vulgarity, uncouthness, pushiness, ignorance, etc., while observing your reaction with eager and calculating eyes. But why should he ask a favor of me—if it
was
a favor—and then go on to inquire: “This Senator Sunraider of yours, how is he able to function in your section of the country?”

Vannec really got to me now. This question had aroused no reaction when I first read the letter, but now with the Senator shot and in surgery it brought a chill. Here was the shadow no bigger than a man’s hand which announced the storm, and I had ignored it. Once, Europeans slapped us in the face with Joseph McCarthy, and now that McCarthy has had it, they are beginning to
express their superiority by hitting us over the head with Sunraider. But it was what came in the very next line that made my hair stand on end.

“What, by the way, has happened to our young friend Severen?” he wrote—a question which had appeared innocent enough on first reading. But now I realized that the very circumstances of my first contact with Vannec should have made it plain that I was no friend of Severen’s, and had no idea of what he and Vannec had been up to. Hadn’t they sent me packing the moment they exchanged passwords? And what frightened and infuriated me now was having such a question put to me at a time when the whole country seemed on the verge of collapsing under the weight of a fantastic practical joke. It struck me, in other words, that M. Vannec’s questions were not only exceedingly malicious and calculating, but the product of some special, inside knowledge of our national affairs.

When I was a child, … I thought as a child:
but when I became a man,
I put away childish things
.

So saith the Scriptures, and so ‘til now I had thought of myself. And so, too, my sober mind told me, I should think of M. Vannec. For not only did charity require it, but my desperate sense of hope—which is a
will
to sanity if nothing more—demanded it. But with the shooting and with old Hickman waiting, I no longer knew where one drew the line between the childish and the mature matters of this world. What is play and what sheer desperate thrashing to keep a foothold on the whirling sphere? What are the uses of sober reflection, and what the role of “infantile regression and passionate irrationality”?

I asked myself quite seriously:
Is Vannec playing with you, McIntyre? Plotting against you out of some godlike sense of humor? Or has he involved you in some deadly serious political game? Has he fed you into some rare and elaborate machinery of historical spite, a machine geared to his European desire for revenge against the brash and self-assured upstarts living across the seas?

And suddenly, just as the nurse left the elevator and hurried down the corridor, it occurred to me that it was even possible that old Hickman might very well know M. Vannec, even as he appeared to know the Senator. It was highly unlikely, I knew, but now anything seemed possible. Hickman appeared to be nodding, and when I hurried down to him I could hear the slight buzz of his breathing.

“Mr. Hickman, sir,” I said, “excuse me, but I’m burning with curiosity….”

He looked up suddenly, saying, “What?” and I could see a thin blue circle rimming each brown eye. He sat up, looking toward the sound of the retreating nurse.

“Oh,
burning,”
he said, clearing his throat. “Well, you’ll get over it, son. Saint Paul’s got something to say about that. But you take old Jack Johnson’s advice and take cold showers, eat pickled walnuts, and think distant thoughts. Besides, son, nurses are dedicated to the Lord—at least when they’re on duty.”

And before I could reply or explain, he was snoring again. I shook my head and went back and sat down. He appeared in calm sleep now, his chin against his chest, but he’d succeeded in making my thoughts even more turbulent.

And now, for all my desire to deny it, I sensed a plot, scaled to huge democratic proportions, having as its driving and malicious essence the feat of selecting for its victim, not some American dignitary or captain of industry or hero of the intellect—i.e., someone of Vannec’s own stature—but some unimportant, near-anonymous common man such as I. I realized that this resounded with delusions of grandeur; indeed, it was as though a squadron of bombers were dispatched to pinpoint Joe Doe with the latest in bomb-sights for the express purpose of blasting him with ten megatons of Silly Putty, that defining substance of our own stoned age and of which it is both product and symbol. But the feeling not only persisted, it grew.

And why aim at Joe Doe? I
asked myself.
Ah, but here
, I thought,
is where Vannec is most clever. It is because Joe Doe is the nut who holds the entire complex of highly unstable political machinery together. Hit
him
hard enough, give him a sudden left-handed wrenching, and the whole business gets the jitters, falls apart! He shakes, the next man shakes, you and I shake, those around us do a shake-shake, and the tremors move swiftly out across the countryside. Joe Doe shakes and yells, and the next thing you know everyone is shaking and yelling. Soon it becomes a contest with everyone trying to outdo the other. Then the politicians get into the act and promote the shaking. Then the magazine writers move in along with the village intellectuals, the provincials, exradicals, pseudo-avant-gardists, the parochial savants, and the radical hipsters, and hysteria itself becomes ashamed before all of the extremes committed
.

For instance, in Salzburg once, while on my first trip to peacetime Europe, I was dining at a restaurant near the Festung where it was the custom for the host to place upon the tables miniature versions of the guests’ national flags. It was a pleasant custom, usually evocative of national pride and quite productive of friendly inter-table conversation—truly a civilizing custom. Now this evening, since there were French, English, Australian, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, and American nationals present, their flags shone brightly throughout the room, and while the four-piece orchestra played waltzes by the elder Strauss, the guests smiled and bowed to one another in an atmosphere of gustatory goodwill, national affirmation, and international good fellowship. I had been enjoying myself with a meal of wild pig, stuffed with wild rice and wild mushrooms, when I looked up to see a large group of Americans entering with their European friends. They were seated at a nearby table and were laughing and talking pleasantly when a miniature
version of Old Glory was placed on their table. Then one of them, a poet of some reputation—which accounts, perhaps, for his charismatic effect upon his fellow countrymen—this gifted and highly volatile man suddenly grabbed the flag and—with a grand gesture—threw it beneath the table! I dropped my forkful of pork, the others fell back in slack-jawed shock, and I looked on with frozen disbelief as the poet leaped to his feet, yelling: