Sex and the High Command (14 page)

He pushed a button and the curtain closed behind him, another, and a bookcase rolled back to reveal a screen, another, and the chandelier above them grew dim and went out. From the opposite wall, a beam of light projected a chart onto the screen.

“What you are seeing, Mr. Pope, is a chart showing average sales, per unit, in houses throughout the country last year. Note the rise in sales beginning in February of last year. At that point, we knew that something had gone wrong on the outside. Later, the government confirmed our discovery.”

He pushed another button, apparently, for the chart changed to show the first seven months of the current year.

“Notice, business continues good. That leveling off you see in May was brought about by a shortage of personnel, but revised recruiting methods bring the chart back up for June and into July. That break on the fourth is for the family holiday, but by the tenth, business is climbing again. But notice the twentieth.”

Pope would have been unable not to notice the twentieth. On that day, the chart began a nose dive.

“So, Mr. Pope, on the twentieth, the decline begins. By the twenty-fifth, the decline is a recession. By the thirtieth, it is a depression… Now, I have had my accountants prepare a day-by-day chart of the first week in August. Watch this.”

He flipped another chart into the projector.

“Catastrophe!”

He turned the lights back on.

As the curtain rolled back from the window and the bookcase slid again into place. Pope turned to him. “Did your girls quit?”

“No, sir. We have maximum security residences for the girls.”

“Did you price yourself out of business?”

“No, sir. We have even tried bingo nights, but nothing works. The men are not buying.”

Pope thought for a moment. It couldn’t be a boycott from the outside and it wasn’t a strike from the inside. It couldn’t be a plague, for HEW would have told Mr. Powers.

Whatever it was, it was big.

“I’m checking on it, tonight,” Pope said, “I’m calling on your Park Avenue joint.”

Pope arose and walked out, abruptly, less from rudeness than from shock. It had been bad enough when girls quit giving it away; but when men quit buying, then the world had gone mad.

Two unexpected happenings occurred on the road to Birch Mountain Monastery: Professor Steward proved interesting to Hansen, and McCormick turned girl-shy.

McCormick’s condition was obvious from the outset of the drive in the limousine with liveried chauffeur which the State Department had provided. In a white, starched collar and highly polished shoes, wearing an immaculately creased dark blue suit, the commander sat rigidly between his tutor and the captain. He reminded Hansen of a class portrait for Yale, class of 1898, and Hansen commented on his rigidity.

“Captain, it’s not that I’m meeting a girl. It’s that I’m meeting a virgin.”

“They’re much like other young ladies,” Hansen said, “except shyer and more modest.”

“Sir, I know she’s going to be shy, and if she don’t know what that little thing is for…”

“Repeat that last sentence. Commander,” Steward ordered.

“If she doesn’t know what that little thing’s for, how’m I going to show her if she’s shy?”

“You seem to be doing a job, Mr. Steward. My compliments,” the captain said.

Steward’s long face smiled a Woodrow Wilson smile, and Hansen, remembering the injunction to use humor with the taxpayers, added, “You must have used a cattle prod on our boy.”

Steward slumped back in his corner and rubbed his long jaw reflectively. “That’s an idea. Captain. That just might be an idea…”

McCormick was stricken. “Captain, you’ve really done it, now. Mr. Steward was born and raised in Selma.”

Hansen realized he might have overdone it. Perhaps a sense of humor wasn’t as common among civilians as Primrose presumed.

But Steward wasn’t a civilian! Primrose had said, “We don’t want any other service hogging the act.”

“I jest, of course. Colonel,” the captain said.

“The professor’s no colonel. Captain.” It was McCormick who spotted the deftly inserted title. “He’s a G-man, and he’s my bodyguard, too, until Secret Service takes over.”

“It’s quite all right,” Steward said. “They call me Colonel when I’m on homicide duty and Professor when I’m assigned as a bodyguarding tutor.”

“But you must be a grammarian,” the captain said.

“Grammar is my hobby. When I was a boy, I read a poem by Browning—
The Grammarian’s Funeral
. I was so touched by the poem that I became morbidly interested in the enclitic
te
.”

Primrose had warned him to avoid enclitics.

“That’s a rather technical hobby, I should think, for a man in your line of work.”

“On the contrary, the department has constant need for our specialized knowledge. John Pope, for instance, who brought in the commander’s young lady, speaks Anglo-Saxon, and we have one operative whose hobby is dodging bullets.”

“By heavens, isn’t that dangerous?”

“He has fantastic reaction time and a keen sight. He watches your trigger finger and can see it flex. But I’ve been working on a finger movement…”

Steward paused, reconsidered his line of conversation, and said, “The bureau uses him to weed out temperamentally unfit rookies. My own hobby has no practical value, unless religious values are considered practical. I’m speaking, now, of enclitics.”

“I’ve developed an interest in religion of late,” Hansen interjected quickly. “It occurred to me that if the freeze develops far enough, the priesthood might be a logical calling for a Navy man. It’s not too much of a change.”

“Strange,” Steward mused, “I’ve been thinking about a monastic career myself. I had a heart attack six months ago, that’s why I’m on limited duty, and…”

Hansen expressed amazement. “It’s limited duty when you’re assigned to protect a future President?”

“It’s not physically exhausting to pull a trigger. I was thinking of the Birch Mountain Monastery, in particular. It’s manned by a silent order. If I could retire there, get away from the infernal chatter, it would be easy to trace the development of enclitics.”

“Wouldn’t God be a consideration?”

“God’s dead.”

“Who said so?” McCormick blurted.

“We get a lot of inside information in the department,” Steward said.

“Wasn’t it quite a shock to learn this?” Hansen asked.

“Not too much,” Steward said. “We still have Mr. Powers.”

“If God’s dead, Professor,” McCormick asked, “why’re there so many churches?”

“I didn’t say religion is dead. Religion can be an ethical order, like Buddhism, or a social and economic order, here in the West. But, above all, religion is a personal convenience. Personally, I’ve come to the point in life when death is near, but I have been very fortunate in that I have spent most of my youth in the study of applied nothingness. As it were, I’ve become adjusted to nothingness by degrees. You are aware, of course. Captain, that there are stages in the evolution of nothingness?”

“No, sir, I’m not,” Hansen said, suddenly interested. Odd minds had been the rule on this tour of duty, and Steward was promising to have the oddest mind of all. “Tell me about it.”

“Comes now the enclitic
te
,” Steward said. “Most enclitics are elided. Where can you go from an elision?”

He paused.

Hansen didn’t know, of course, and he awaited an answer.

“You go to the hiatus, the silent pause between two unelided vowels. Now, of what technical value is silence? Plenty! Observe the hiatus: In Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, the rhyme scheme is basically terza rima with the occasional interpositioning of a hendecasyllable. But, the hendecasyllable is, in actual fact, a twelve-footed line, with the twelfth foot furnished as hiatus following the first syllable, accented or unaccented. In Canto XXIX, when Dante and Virgil stand above the cloister of Malebolge…”

Two hours later, when the gray stone wall of the monastery hove into sight atop its hill, Hansen felt an urge to send a telegram to Admiral Primrose placing hiatus on the list of proscribed topics for persons dealing with Operative Steward.

Charm keynoted the dinner.

The dining room, vaulted and spacious, reserved for the First-Lady-to-be, had a medieval atmosphere. Cowled and barefooted waiters brought trenchers loaded with viands and a delicate white wine from the monastery’s own vineyard. It was sipped before the catfish course, and a rich, full-bodied red wine before the marinated side meat. Three FBI agents, dressed as monks, joined them at the dinner table.

There was feminine charm in the coolly efficient, yet witty, nurse and the full-bodied Miss Barnard, dressed appropriately in a wine-colored gown of velvet with a medieval bodice laced across her white blouse. Her wardrobe had been donated by a Richmond theatrical costume house.

Conversation, carried on in the naval tradition of no religion, no politics, and no sex, was guided and controlled by the Father Superior whose self-immolation as a monk was relieved by his decisiveness of manner remaining from his old days as a Navy admiral, and it was limited to prearranged topics suggested by the FBI monitoring agent as those most likely to interest Miss Barnard.

Her interests were mainly curiosities, since her life in the cove had been restricted, so Hansen felt at home with her. Even the badinage among guests was woven around noncontroversial subjects. Miss Barnard spoke very little. “I’ll thank you for some more peas” and “I’ve had a sufficiency, thank you” constituted most of her conversation until McCormick drew her out in an animated discussion of how long mash should be allowed to cook.

Despite the charm of their hostess, Hansen found himself eager for the older folks to withdraw and leave the parlor to the young people. Religion had hammered at his attention ever since Admiral Primrose’s monologue in the station wagon. Now that he had heard the arguments of a flag officer who had deserted God in favor of the High Command, he was eager to hear the arguments of a former flag officer who had deserted the High Command for God.

Steward and the three Federal monks excused themselves, going, Hansen knew, to the communications room to warm up the monitoring equipment for Steward who planned to listen to the McCormick-Barnard tête-à-tête “live” while it was being taped. Over coffee, saucered and blown to spare Cora Lee social embarrassment, the Father and Hansen lingered awhile with the young couple to mitigate the discomfort of a sudden mass exodus.

Finally, alone in the passage with the Father, Hansen requested an audience and was pleased when the Father patted him on the back and said, “My son, I always have time for an old comrade.”

“I’m glad you put it that way. Father, for your comrade is transmitting May Day. All my life I believed in God, the Navy, and my family. Admiral Primrose has come up with some good arguments which have almost convinced me I’ve got to choose the Navy. My family is two girls, and the admiral is pessimistic about the female withdrawal. If he’s right, I’ll have to abandon my girls and go over to God or the Navy, but the Navy High Command’s been behaving rather strangely, lately. To top it all off, along comes the FBI and tells me God is dead.”

“If God is dead,” the Father said, “then He has gone to heaven, and that cancels that argument out.”

Hansen almost gasped. The Father’s theological reasoning was so lucid and incontrovertible that a scratched horse was suddenly back in the race.

“Father, I would like to believe in all three—God, the Navy, and my girls, but I’ve been around the tracks enough to know it’s hard to win a three-horse parlay. You’ve made a choice, Father. How does a man figure this form chart?”

As Hansen spoke, the Father ushered him into his office, motioned him into a chair, and seated himself, listening intently. Suddenly, he raised his hand for silence.

He sat for a moment, eyes closed, head slightly bowed. For a moment, Hansen thought he was taking time out for prayer, but when he raised his eyes, they were alert and confident. “My son, I can’t help you with your women problems because I’m a celibate and not qualified to answer, unless celibacy is the answer. But there is no conflict between God and the High Command. God is the High Command. You’re confusing the issue, semantically. You were not betting on a three-horse parlay. You were seeking a winner in a three-horse match; I have now scratched one of the horses. It’s a two-horse match, and you wish a tip on the winner. Is that not correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course, I cannot answer you,” the Father said, and Hansen’s heart sank. But it soared again when the Father added, “But I can help you handicap the starters.”

“That’s all any man could ask. Father. Two horses running and a solid tip on the winner.”

“For the sake of my own sensibilities, Captain, I’d like to change the names of our horses. Let’s call God faith and women, hope. Besides, those terms will put us on firmer theological turf.”

“That’s all right with me, Father.”

“My son, are you a Christian?”

There the question was again, and Hansen met it head on. He was not a Jew and he was not a Mohammedan. “Father, I’m a Christian.”

“Then, you accept the Virgin Birth?”

“Yes, but let me qualify that right at the start, Father; accepting the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ doesn’t keep me from sympathizing with Joseph, one whit, and Vita-Lerp isn’t the Holy Ghost. I’m a father, too, and I have to admit I’m worried about my daughter. Father, would you like it if your daughter married a capsule?”

The Father’s expression of spiritual serenity was broken by a sardonic smile, and he wiped the question away with a swipe of his hand before his face. “Oh, no, my son! You’re not trapping me with that argument. I know where the pope and I stand on birth control. I want to know where you stand.”

“I’ll go along with Jesus,” Hansen said, “but His is the only parthenogenesis that’s getting my okay. I’m one hundred percent against Vita-Lerp.”

“Well,” the Father said, rubbing his hands together to signify his task was finished, “that scratches hope, so lay every dime you’ve got on faith. Faith is your horse, my son. God willing, you will find peace in Jesus.”