Mr. Adam

CHAPTER 5

I didn’t have any illusions about my chore. I knew that at the very best it would be thankless, and probably a perpetual headache, and something which called for a psychiatrist rather than a newspaperman. But I felt a sort of moral responsibility for Mr. Adam. I had been the first to launch him into his career as the last productive male, and it seemed only right that I should help guide his footsteps towards whatever strange destiny awaited him. In addition, I was just plain curious.

I underestimated Washington. I didn’t foresee any of the really frightening events that presently engulfed me. When I look back at it now, I was a toddling child who picks a river in flood as a nice place for wading, and instantly is seized by the current and swept downstream.

For instance, I thought the National Re-fertilization Project would be composed of a dozen or so people, with a committee of physicians like Maria Ostenheimer and Tommy Thompson acting as advisers. It wasn’t like that at all. The N.R.P. was an enormous chunk of government, expanding day by day. The creation of any new government agency is, in many respects, like bringing in a new oil field. With the N.R.P., to which the President had allotted unlimited emergency funds, it was as if gold had been discovered in California all over again.

The day on which I arrived in Washington—December 18—is eaten into my memory by the acid of shock, just as the men who were there will always remember the date of Anzio, or Omaha Beach.

I hadn’t expected anyone to meet me at the station, but when I went through the gates into the concourse a neat young man with a pointed, thin, suspicious nose—the type of nose I always associate with credit managers—stopped me. “You’re Mr. Smith?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

He held out his hand. “I’m Klutz—Percy Klutz, Deputy Director on the administrative side.” When he smiled his mouth looked like that of a fresh-caught skate. “The Chief sent me down to meet you.”

“That was nice of him,” I said. The Chief would be Abel Pumphrey. I wondered how he had recognized me, and asked. He said the AP Bureau had produced a description, and a photograph. He wondered whether I’d had lunch, and when I told him no, he suggested Harvey’s. Outside the station was a sedan, with a government seal, and N.R.P., stenciled on its door.

We ordered clams and steaks and then Klutz said: “I suppose this is as good a time as any to fill you in on the big picture. We’re really beginning to build an organization, now. Everybody thinks the Chief is the coming man in the Administration. Of course, it has been an uphill fight all the way. First the Interior Department tried to take over, and then the Public Health Service claimed it was their baby. Right now we’re operating under the Executive Office of the President, so we don’t have much budget trouble. The real test will come when we go to Congress for regular annual appropriations. I guess our big break was when we got Adam away from the National Research Council.”

“How is Homer Adam?” I inquired. “I’d like to see him as soon as possible.”

He looked at me, curiously, and then took a pencil from an inside pocket and began drawing a chart on the tablecloth. “Now up at the top, of course,” he went on, ignoring my question, “is the President, and right under the President—” his deft pencil drew a little box and began filling it with names—“is the Inter-Departmental Advisory Committee. They decide top policy.”

“On what?” I asked. “I thought the idea was simply to get Adam in shape, and then start producing babies.”

“Oh, no!” Klutz said, startled. “The production end is only the smallest part of it! That comes way down here—” he indicated the bottom of the tablecloth—“in Operations.”

“Now as you see,” he went on, “the top policy group is composed of the President himself, the Secretaries of State, War, Interior, and Navy—I don’t know why they put in Navy except that they put in War—the Surgeon General, Director of National Research Council—we couldn’t keep him off it—and finally the Chief.”

A strange light came into Klutz’s eyes, and he began to sketch more boxes, connected by lines horizontally and vertically, with lightning precision. “Now right under the top policy group N.R.P. operates. I’m over here to the right of the Chief, and under me I’ve got Administration, Budget, Housing, Communications, and Transportation. I don’t fool around with policy, planning, or operations. I’m just the man who keeps things running.”

Klutz’s pencil raced on. “Branching off this line that runs from the Chief up to top policy we have the liaison officers from the other departments or agencies—we’re having a tough time finding suitable quarters for all of them—and directly under the Chief we have the Planning Board.”

“Planning Board?”

“Certainly! You see, policy flows down to the Chief from the top group, and then down to the Planning Board, which is composed of our own heads of branches and divisions. The Planning Board issues the directives and passes them on down to be implemented. Right off the Planning Board, here, we have the Advisory Committee which is composed of leading physicians and biologists and such from all over the country. They aren’t in government, of course. They’re just to give us backing when we need it.”

Klutz hadn’t touched his clams, and he didn’t seem to notice when the waiter whisked them off the table. “The Deputy Director falls right under the Planning Board, and out from him you have our own liaison officers, who operate on the Planning Level, including the one to Congress, and our own advisory group on international problems which communicates directly with the State Department and sends proposals to the Planning Board. You see how nicely the channels flow.”

“Yes. I see.” I found I was watching like a child fascinated by a sidewalk artist sketching the Battle of Bunker Hill.

“Right under the Deputy Director come the Assistant Directors for the various branches,” Klutz went on. “Research and Analytical. Statistical. Public Relations. And of course, Operations. Then under the branches there come the various divisions, which I’ll just sketch in here in small boxes, because I don’t think they’d interest you just now.”

“And where do I fit in?” I asked.

“Well, you see we’ve already got an Assistant Director for Public Relations—Gableman. Did you ever meet him?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He’s a very fine newspaperman,” Klutz said, in some surprise. “I think he started doing publicity for the WPA, and later he shifted to the National Youth Administration. I think he also wrote for NRA. Anyway, he was one of the young writers for the Office of Facts and Figures, and then he graduated to the OWI. He went to the State Department from the OWI, and we got him from them. Very fine newspaperman. Very experienced. He’s building up an excellent branch. I’m giving them a building of their own very shortly.”

“And me?”

“Well, frankly, you’re rather a problem. You see we already have an Assistant Director for Public Relations, so we’ll make you Special Assistant to the Director, and put you in here.” He drew a line away from the line that connected Pumphrey to the Planning Board, and put a little box at the end of it, and wrote “Smith” inside the box. “I don’t know whether you’ll operate on the policy, or the planning, or the operations level,” Klutz explained, “so in any case that will take care of it.”

“Is Homer Adam in that little box with me?” I demanded.

Klutz appeared uneasy, as if the lunch he hadn’t eaten wasn’t agreeing with him. “Oh, no,” he said, “Adam is way down here, at the bottom. You’re way up at the top.” In a little square at the end of Operations he wrote, “Adam.”

I felt a powerful urge to finish my steak, leave the check for Klutz, and catch the next train back for New York, but instead I said, “Now look, bud. The only reason I came to this goddam town was to take care of Adam. If I’m not going to take care of Adam, say so now, and I’ll be on my way. This wasn’t my idea. It came from Adam first, and then from the White House.”

When I mentioned the White House, Klutz gulped, and instantly his manner changed. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know that.”

I recognized Klutz as one of the public servants who has no equals. He has only superiors or inferiors. Everybody is neatly tagged either above him, or below him. He keeps his nose nestled close under the coattails of those above, and his feet firmly planted on the heads of those underneath, and if he maintains this balance for thirty years he gets a pension and retires to Chevy Chase. “Well, you know it now,” I told him.

“I didn’t bring up the matter of Adam,” he explained, “because there seems to have been some confusion about him in the directives. You see, when Adam was turned over to N.R.P. the Army still managed to keep a finger in the pie. They claimed that the presidential directive merely gave N.R.P. the use of Adam, but that his security was still a matter for the Army. We reached an agreement with the Army by which a committee was set up.”

“Another committee!”

“Yes. It was set up simply to direct overall policy on Adam, personally, rather than Adam in the productive sense, and to hand down directives to the Operations Branch. I represented N.R.P. on the committee and Phelps-Smythe—”

“That bastard!” I remarked, and Klutz jumped.

“Well, he represented the Army. Phelps-Smythe and I reached an agreement that you could also sit on the committee.”

I told him what I thought of such an arrangement in a few words, all short and Elizabethan, and Klutz said he thought Pumphrey should decide, and I told him we might as well have a showdown right away.

The National Re-fertilization Project was camped in a group of buildings near the intersection of 23rd and D streets, in Northwest Washington, and it spread out into temporary structures, lately abandoned by the Navy, that occupied adajacent parkland.

Within the Administration Building there was an impressive bustle—the scuttling back and forth of girl messengers, the clatter of a typist pool, the buzz of telephones, the passionate murmurs that rose from conference rooms. Through the building there was the smell of fresh paint, and a sense of growth and change.

A new government agency on the upgrade mushrooms within the capital like a tropical plant. Its growth is exotic and surprising as an orchid, but like a fungus it is a frail plant, likely to wither swiftly and die under the cold breath of Congress or the Bureau of the Budget.

But the offices of Abel Pumphrey were cut off from the surrounding uproar by soundproof walls, and furnished in the solid good taste of one who has been firmly fastened to the public teat for years. Abel Pumphrey’s name kept appearing in the Congressional Directory long after the bureaus and agencies he headed became half-forgotten combinations of initials. He came to Washington as a liberal Republican, at the proper time switched to being a conservative Democrat, but he was born a bureaucrat. This means that he had thousands of acquaintances, no firm allegiances or convictions, no enemies, and probably no close friends with the possible exception of his wife.

He was picked as Director of N.R.P., immediately after W.S. Day, because he was considered “safe.” There wasn’t any other place to put him at the moment, and he had six children. At that time Mr. Adam had not been discovered, much less acquired by N.R.P., so the task of re-fertilization seemed more theoretical than practical. Now Pumphrey’s post had suddenly become extremely important, and of the most consuming public interest, and Pumphrey was more than somewhat worried.

Outwardly, however, he seemed calm and cheery—an apple-red and apple-round man with a Herbert Hoover collar squeezing his neck—when he greeted me. “Well, well, Steve!” he said. We had never met before. “It’s certainly fine of you to come down here and help us out. Fine! Fine! Percy here will get you all squared away. How about it, Percy?”

I didn’t give Klutz a chance to speak. I said, “I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding. I came here to get Adam on his feet. That’s all. Nothing else. As far as I know, that’s all the White House wants me to do.”

Every time I said White House, Klutz jumped. I decided to say it more often. “Naturally,” said Pumphrey. “I am in full accord with that. Didn’t you explain, Percy?”

“I told him about the directive,” Klutz said, “and the little committee we’d set up, and how he could sit on the committee.”

I said, “No committees. I hate committees.”

Pumphrey spread out his hands in a placating gesture. “Now Steve,” he said, “wouldn’t it be better if there was a committee, even if you did all the work and made all the actual, ah—contacts? The protection of Adam is a very delicate matter, very delicate. Very delicate, and ticklish. If anything happened, if there was, ah—any scandal, wouldn’t it be better if the War Department shared the responsibility?”

I said, “No.”

Pumphrey drooped. “I suppose ultimately,” he decided, “the responsibility is that of the President. After all, he picked you for this particular phase of our work. I’ll ask him to clarify the directive. Or maybe I’d better not. I’m not sure that it’s not clear now. Anyway, I’ll call in Phelps-Smythe, and we’ll tell him about it. Phelps-Smythe is the Army’s liaison officer over here. He’s been representing the Army on the committee, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

Phelps-Smythe hadn’t changed since Tarrytown, neither he nor his ribbons. He knew what was up, of course, and by the way he talked I could tell he had discussed it with his general and decided upon a course of action. After Pumphrey explained that the committee was ended, he said, with the formality of a diplomat delivering a démarche to a hostile state:

“The War Department strongly disapproves of relaxing security measures for the protection of Homer Adam. The War Department wishes to point out that if anything happened to Adam the future of the nation would be endangered.”

“What you mean,” I interrupted, “is that there wouldn’t be any future for the nation—or the world. Maybe that’s why the President wants me, and not you, to handle Adam.”

I shouldn’t have said it, I guess, but I couldn’t resist. Phelps-Smythe glared at me. I hoped he would have a stroke, but he didn’t. Behind his desk Pumphrey began to nibble nervously at the edge of his lips.

“The War Department,” Phelps-Smythe continued, “wishes a written release of all responsibility for the safety and protection of Adam. The War Department wishes this release immediately, because we intend to withdraw our guards and security patrols from the Shoreham at 6 o’clock this evening.”

“So that’s where you’ve got Adam caged up?” I said.

Pumphrey didn’t pay any attention. “Is the War Department going to make anything public on this?” he asked Phelps-Smythe.

“Naturally.”

“But it’s liable to start a lot of controversy.”

“That is not the fault of the War Department!”

Pumphrey sagged like a toy balloon from which enough air has escaped so that it is no longer round and shining. “Very well,” he sighed. “I’ll send the release round to your office, Colonel, as soon as I get a chance to dictate and sign it.”

“Thank you,” said Phelps-Smythe, and left. I could have sworn he clicked his heels.

Immediately Klutz turned to Pumphrey. “I’d better find Nate,” he said. “This looks like trouble.”

It turned out that Nate was Gableman, the Assistant Director for Public Relations, a dark and cadaverous young man with his hair two inches longer than the barber ordinarily allows, and fingernails that matched his hair, both in length and color. His eyes ran over me in quick speculation and appraisal, he listened to Pumphrey’s account of what had happened thus far, and he said, “I should have been cut in on this right away. What do you think a Public Relations man is for?”

“I’m sorry, Nate,” Pumphrey said. “But it happened so fast.”

“You haven’t written that memorandum for Phelps-Smythe yet?”

“Oh, no. He just left.”

Gableman’s dark eyes came alive behind his spectacles. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll move in a hurry. I’ll get out a special press release right away. You hold that memorandum until I’m ready. We’ll get our story out first.”

“What is our story, Nate?” Pumphrey asked.

“Why, it’s very simple. Abel Pumphrey, Director of the National Re-fertilization Project, today announced that N.R.P. had taken over complete personal control of Mr. Adam from the War Department, at the President’s request. You see, that puts the onus on the War Department. They can’t buck the President. He’s Commander in Chief. Then we say that Mr. Adam wasn’t getting sufficient personal freedom under present conditions. He should have all the rights and freedoms of every other American. That gets us in good with the Liberals. Then we say that Steve Smith here has been appointed a Special Assistant to Mr. Pumphrey and entrusted with the safety of Adam. Smith and Adam are personal friends—you are, aren’t you?”

“Hardly old friends,” I said.

“Well, anyway, personal friends. That shows we have Adam’s best interests at heart.”

I could see that Gableman was a pretty smooth customer around the edges. He may have learned all his newspapering as a government press agent, but he was an expert in mimeograph warfare. “We might also hint,” he went on, “just to get in a dig at the War Department, that Adam hasn’t been doing so hot under the previous arrangement.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that!” Pumphrey protested. “It might bounce back on us as well as the War Department.”

“I should say not,” said Klutz.

“It could start rumors,” said Pumphrey. “It could start a panic. Why you ought to see the letters I get from really big businessmen—I mean the very biggest—on the importance of Adam. Do you know what would happen if anything happened to Adam? Why the insurance companies would go bust. The effect on the market—inconceivable—”

“Okay,” Gableman agreed. “I hadn’t considered that angle. I’ll get to work.”

Klutz wanted me to take a look at my office, complete with secretary, but I insisted on seeing Adam immediately. Pumphrey told me there would be plenty of room for me in Adam’s suite. There would be plenty of room for a company of Marines, I gathered from the description.

This was correct. The Army hadn’t yet withdrawn its security patrols when I arrived at the Shoreham. There was an armored car, and two weapon carriers mounting .50 calibre machine guns, strategically placed in the hotel’s driveway. It turned out that Adam occupied the entire fifth floor of F wing. I had some trouble getting up there, because there were MP’s posted in all the hallways and at the elevators, but the captain in charge had been informed I was on the way, and he finally agreed to let me go up a few minutes before six, when the Army’s Operation Adam officially ended.

I found Adam in the living room customarily given over to the Duke of Windsor, visiting Indian rajahs, and presidents from the banana republics. For a hotel it is quite a room, gaudy with modern paintings, cream-colored furniture, and silky white rugs. Magazines and newspapers were tossed about it, however, so that at this moment it resembled the picnic grounds in Central Park at the end of a summer Sunday. On a folding serving table was an enormous tray loaded with lobster salad, shrimp, hors d’oeuvres, and pastries, all resting in untouched and pristine glory on heavy silver. A stuffed shirt of a voice, which sounded like Kaltenborn, boomed out of a wall radio like a muffled drum.

I saw a mop of red hair protruding over the back of an armchair. It was Adam. He was not asleep, nor could he be classified as being awake. He appeared to be in a half-comatose state, slumped in upon himself like a daddy longlegs at rest, his eyes glazed, and his mouth slack and open. Then he saw me, wobbled to his feet, and held out his hand. I admit I was shocked. He looked like one of those walking skeletons after seven years in Dachau. He said, “Steve! You finally got here. Jesus, I’m glad to see a human face!”

I tried to conceal my surprise at his wretched appearance. “Take it easy,” I said. “From now on things are going to change. Let’s have a drink.”

“Oh, I’m not allowed to drink,” said Homer. “Nothing but eggnogs. I get sick when I think of eggnogs. I’ll never be able to look a hen in the face again.”

“From now on,” I told him, “you can have anything you damn well please—anything at all.”

“Really?” he said. “Honest to God?” It was pretty pathetic. His hands were shaking, and tears had started into his eyes.

“You’re damn right.” I picked up a telephone, called room service, and ordered a case of rye. If ever a bundle of nerves needed alcoholic relaxation, it was Homer Adam.

He began to tell me the tale. “They treated me like a prize puppy dog. They wouldn’t let me off this floor, except when they came to put me on exhibit. Then they’d dress me up, and lead me around to a party where I didn’t know anybody, and show me off like I deserved the blue ribbon. I’m not a freak! I’m a normal human being.”

“I’ll say,” I agreed.

“They’d discuss me like I was a stud horse—right in front of my face. How long I could be expected to produce, and whether they should inject testosterone, and stuff like that. It was embarrassing. You don’t wonder I’ve been off my feed?”

“No, I don’t wonder at all.”

The rye arrived, and I poured Homer a big slug. He kept on talking, and I encouraged him. I’m no psychologist, but it was apparent there was a lot he had to get off his chest. It was part of the cure.

Finally he said, “I don’t mind doing what I can. I suppose it’s my duty. But they’ve got no right to keep me away from my family.” His eyes misted again, like the eyes of a child who has been needlessly and wantonly injured. “I don’t know if I ought to talk about it. It’s sort of personal, Steve.”

“You go ahead and talk, Homer,” I said. “You tell me every little tiny thing. I’m here to listen.”

“Well, it’s me and Mary Ellen. She’s the only girl I ever had. Know what I mean?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh.” I didn’t smile.

Homer poured himself a drink. I could see that what he had to say needed priming. I didn’t try to hurry him. “When I say I never had a girl except Mary Ellen I mean it literally,” he continued finally. “I mean she’s the only woman I’ve ever been with—slept with. I always thought I was funny-looking, because when I was a kid girls laughed at me on account of I was so tall and thin. I guess I was funny-looking. Anyway, I never had the guts to make a pass at a girl—never in all my life.”

The full implication of what he was saying began to sink in. Nature, in a final touch of irony, had picked an inhibited and sex-shy man to become the new father of his country. To some men the thought of possessing the entire female population as a private harem—even if most of the conception would be of necessity by remote control—would have been enormously satisfying to their ego. But to Homer it must have been sheer horror. It was this that had frightened him into his present decline, more than being jailed in the Shoreham’s luxury, or being trotted around to Washington’s most important salons, and placed on exhibition. “Go ahead and talk, Homer,” I urged him.

“That’s about all, except that I want Mary Ellen now more than I’ve ever wanted anything in all my life. I need her, Steve. I’ve got to have her!”

I thought to myself that if Homer’s mother still lived it would be his mother, in all likelihood, whom he would want. I tried to remember what I had read about how an Œdipus complex is transferred. “They haven’t let you see Mary Ellen?”

“Gosh, no. I begged them to let me go to Tarrytown for a day or two, or to let her come down here. Mrs. Brundidge could take care of the baby all right. But Colonel Phelps-Smythe and Mr. Klutz said absolutely not.”

I wondered what was wrong with them, which shows how naive I was at the time. “Don’t worry, Homer, I’ll get it fixed up,” I promised. For the first time, he smiled. He positively grinned. “Let’s have another drink,” I suggested, “and then tackle that dinner over there, and then let’s go down to the Blue Room and look around.”

“Sure!” he said. “Sure!”

He attacked the lobster as if he were starving, which I am quite sure he was, and ate most of the shrimp, and wolfed three of the pastries. I didn’t do much talking. I kept trying to reconstruct the first ten years of his life in Hyannis, Nebraska. I saw a gangling kid, preyed upon by smaller but older boys, running to his mother for protection. I saw an overgrown high school sophomore teased by the girls, and not understanding that their teasing was as much invitation as anything else. I saw a lonesome youth escaping into archeology, and finally geology, who worked hard and earnestly so that in his mind there would be nothing else but his work. Finally I saw a grown man who had thrust human relationships into the well of his subconscious—a man whose marriage was probably the passionate seeking for a second mother to whom to run whenever he encountered the frightening facts of life.

This was the man chosen to re-populate the earth! I wasn’t at all sure that I should arrange for him to see Mary Ellen. Perhaps he should see her for a day or two, but certainly he should not be with her constantly. A different therapy was indicated. “You know, Homer,” I said, “what you told me about your personal life was very impressive. I suppose you know by now that you were mistaken. I should think you would be very attractive to women.”

“Oh, no!” he said emphatically.

“I would think so.”

“But why should I be?”

“Well, you’re young, and you’re tall. All the movie actors are tall. Look at Gary Cooper.”

“Yes. But they’re not so thin.”

“Well, look at Frank Sinatra. Anyway, you’ve got a good frame. All you have to do is put some flesh on it.”

Homer considered this. “I looked pretty good,” he admitted, “when I was in Australia. Lots of fresh air, and exercise. I felt good, too, and ate well. I haven’t had a bit of exercise since I’ve been in this darn prison.”

“We’ll fix that,” I promised. “Now go shave, and put on a fresh shirt, and I’ll take you out of this prison and show you how life is being lived, at the moment.”

Ten seconds after we entered the Blue Room I discovered that acting as shepherd to Homer Adam would have complications, for Homer was no ordinary white sheep who could fade into the flock. If you are some six and one-half feet tall, and your hair flames like a stop light, and you are constructed on the general lines of a flagpole, and if in addition you are the most talked of mortal on earth, and your features are familiar to everyone who has seen a newspaper, then it is very hard to be inconspicuous.

When we turned up at the Blue Room and asked for a table, Pierre, the headwaiter, recognized Adam and almost did nip-ups. He bobbed us to a ringside table, swept away a notice that it was reserved, and then fluttered over our order for a couple of drinks. Barnee, the bandmaster, craned his neck, missed a beat, the trumpet went astray, and the rhythm scattered like a covey of quail. Nobody seemed to notice.

The band pulled itself together, and the music again took form. People were staring. If Homer had been a pink Bengal tiger, he could not have caused more of a sensation. I noticed that the dancing couples were converging towards us. Strangely, the women were maneuvering the men.

The music stopped, and there was absolute silence. Ordinarily, when the music isn’t playing in a night spot it is still pretty noisy, what with the tinkle of glass and china, political and business arguments, the throaty sound of verbal lovemaking, and occasional laughter. But this time when the music stopped there was no sound at all. Then buzzing began, like a swarm of bees, but not exactly. It had a strange timbre to it. Finally I realized it was from three or four hundred women all whispering at once.

“What’s wrong with these people?” Homer asked.

“I dunno,” I evaded.

“This is worse than a dinner party. It makes me feel dizzy—all these people staring.”

“Relax and drink your drink.”

Homer obediently drank his drink. Across the floor I spotted Oscar Finney, who stepped out of a reporter’s cocoon to become a Hollywood butterfly, officially titled Public Relations Counsellor, at a thousand a week. With him was a golden-skinned creature partially clad in gold lamé. I’m always forgetting names, but I never forget a shape like that. Once it belonged to Kitty Ruppe, who danced in the chorus line at an uptown club. Now its name had been changed to Kathy Riddell, and Oscar Finney had made it fairly famous as “The Frame.” I say fairly famous, because Kathy Riddell was one of those Hollywood stars who never seems to appear in a movie, but you see her picture everywhere. She wasn’t enough of an actress to make a USO troupe, but every young man would recognize her instantly, even from the rear, which is more than you can say for Cornell or Hayes.

Finney waved to me. I waved back. “These women,” Homer said suddenly, “are giving me the creeps.” I noticed that while the interest of many of the men had turned elsewhere than towards our table, every woman had her eyes fixed on Homer. Furthermore, they were being very womanly.

“What’s wrong with them?” Homer asked.

“I think they want to have babies.”

Homer’s long neck stretched across the table, and his eyes grew round like a boy who has requested the facts of life from an elder brother. “Don’t they—” he began. “I mean, are all the men—you know, isn’t it possible—?” He stopped, thought for a moment, and went on: “What I mean to say is this, to be blunt. When you—we’ll say you—when you go to bed—” He faltered again. “When you go to bed with your wife, what—I mean—”

“Oh, I see. Here’s the way it is, Homer,” I told him. “Everything is just as usual, except one thing. Afterwards, nothing happens. Nothing at all. No babies.”

“Well, then why are these women—”

“It is a matter of instinct,” I explained. “The instincts of man are purely physical, and of the moment. With women, it is different. Most women. I don’t know about nymphomaniacs. But most women, essentially, want babies. Sure, babies are only part of it to women. But it is an essential part, where to the man it is no part at all. Get it?”

“Yes, I get it,” said Homer, and sighed.

I looked up, and there was Oscar Finney, with The Frame. Her breasts looked round as radar globes, and she was tuning them on Homer. You can’t chase old friends away from your table, and I did the introductions, but I told myself I wasn’t having any more rye, because now was the time for all good men to be alert.

Kitty Ruppe, or Kathy Riddell, or The Frame—whatever you want to call her—was either a very smart girl (which at the time seemed doubtful) or she had been carefully coached. Anyway, apparently those radar globes told her something, because she began talking archeology. She had read in the papers how Homer intended being an archeologist, when he was young, and so there was a bond between them.

“Oh,” said Homer, “are you interested in archeology?”

Indeed she was, The Frame replied. Had Homer ever heard of Professor Ruppe, at the University of Chicago? Well, that was her father.

Homer hesitated, and then he said he thought the name sounded familiar, and wasn’t he connected in some way with the Aztec excavations? Absolutely, said The Frame, and she herself was particularly interested in archeology in Mexico, and she was simply fascinated by the finds in the Temple of Huitzilopochtli. Homer said he was too.

It was quite the queerest supper club conversation I remember, but it only made me more suspicious. This plant smelled all the way to the top of the Washington Monument. No dope, he, my friend Oscar Finney. To hook the name of any actress to Homer Adam was worth how many columns? How many papers are there in the United States?

Presently I saw it was coming. It approached in the shape of one of those “house” photographers you will find in night clubs and places like the Blue Room. She wore a blue evening gown that matched the decor, and the camera she held in her hand, flash bulb attached, seemed incongruous as a debutante toting a forty-five. She asked us to move a little closer together. When she raised her camera I let my right arm slide around the back of The Frame’s chair. Nobody noticed, except Finney. The flash came, the girl drifted away, and Finney said:

“Steve, you’ve got an evil and suspicious mind.”

“Just careful,” I said.

Homer and The Frame looked at us, not understanding, and then their conversation went back to Mexico. Oscar and I talked shop, and I fed Homer drinks. It was a necessary adjunct to my program of relaxation. You could almost see the layers of repression scale off his shoulders as the drinks took hold, and his interest mounted in The Frame—or her archeology. Two tables away I saw Senator Fay Sumner Knott. She had been sitting there all the time, but I did not notice her until she began to move, in the same way that a snake seems part of the ground until it bunches itself to strike.

Of course you know Senator Knott. When she was nineteen she was the most beautiful debutante in New York, when she was twenty-five she was the loveliest young matron in London, and at thirty she was the smartest divorcée in Rhode Island, both in brains and looks. When she was thirty-five she married the President of Executive Trust, thereby becoming the most beautiful, the brainiest, and almost the richest woman in the world. At least, that was her opinion. When Executive Trust died she dipped a dainty toe into the mud puddle of politics, and lo, there she was in the Senate.

Fay kept looking at Homer, but Homer kept his eyes on The Frame. Presently Fay rose and walked past our table, slim and magic as a wand, but holding her chin tip-tilted to erase the lines in her neck. She ignored The Frame as if her chair were vacant, smiled at Homer, nodded at me, and just at the proper distance—close enough so that we could hear but it would not be heard at other tables—said: “That stupid little bitch!”

The Frame started out of her chair like a leopardess, but Oscar grabbed her, and anyway Fay had already reached the door. I knew she was trouble—big trouble. Homer was white, and his bony hands were shaking. Oscar said: “What a pleasant job you’ve got, Steve! What a nice, uncomplicated, pleasant job!”

Wasn’t it, I agreed. I signed the check, herded Homer to an elevator, and led him to his bedroom in the distinguished guest suite. I helped him undress, fed him a couple of aspirins, made him drink two glasses of carbonated water, and rolled him into bed. His feet stuck a half-foot over the end, but there was nothing I could do about it.