Mr. Adam

CHAPTER 7

Mary Ellen arrived the next day. I had forgotten what an attractive girl she was, in a healthy Midwest way, and perhaps Homer had, too, because he seemed genuinely glad to see her. For a while I followed them about like an unwelcome duenna, fearful that Homer would implicate himself with The Frame by a thoughtless remark, but he appeared more self-possessed than at any time since he had been installed in Washington.

Mary Ellen was one of the few women I’ve ever seen who looks good with a shiny nose. She was fresh and crisp as newly laundered linen, and she had a lot of bounce. Things rocked along nicely, but the very sight of Mary Ellen and Homer holding hands and behaving like they were on a honeymoon made me feel lonesome and dispirited. On Sunday morning I put Jane Zitter in charge of the menage Adam and flew to New York. I soothed my conscience by telling myself I was duty bound to see Thompson and Ostenheimer, and give them a report on Adam’s progress.

My home, and my wife, made Washington feel unreal and faraway. Marge was wearing a new dress when I arrived, one of those dresses that make you keep watching. She was all smelled up with perfume, and it seemed to me that her makeup was a bit too perfect, and her hair-do a little professional. “You think we’re going out tonight,” I accused her, “but we’re not.”

She kissed me experimentally. “Of course not, darling,” she said. “We’re going to stay right here, and Maria and Tommy Thompson are coming over, and we’ll play bridge and talk.” She kissed me again, as if she were testing my breath for liquor, or something.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“Is there anything wrong with me wanting to kiss you?”

“No, certainly not. I like it. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’ve been having fun in Washington, haven’t you dear?”

“Fun? Hell no. What a snafu.”

“Your face is all full of lipstick,” she said. She took a handkerchief and went to work on me. “I thought it would be fun for you, with that curvy wench—what’s her name—The Frame?”

“The Frame! What about me and The Frame?”

“Oh, nothing. I just saw a picture of you and what’s her name—The Frame—in the Journal-American. The caption said something about Mr. Adam, glimpsed with the Special Assistant to the Director of N.R.P., the former newspaperman Stephen Decatur Smith, and The Frame, at a fashionable supper club. Since you had your arm around The Frame, I thought you must be having fun.”

This is the kind of reward people get for trying to render a public service. About a matter like this there is no use being serious. The more earnest your pleas of innocence, the more guilty you seem. I said, “That’s what you get for reading the Journal-American.”

“She must be charming,” Marge said. “And she’s probably very much impressed with your official position. I really don’t see why you bothered to come to New York and visit me, except of course you probably have business to discuss with Maria and Dr. Thompson.”

“Of course I’ve got business to discuss with them,” I said, “and of course that’s the only reason I came to New York. As a matter of fact, I do not see how I can stay the night.”

Marge kissed me again, and this time it wasn’t testing. “Come on,” she said, “give.” I told her about Homer and The Frame. It made her very thoughtful. “Stephen,” she said, “I think you’re in trouble. If that girl gets Homer, where will that leave the rest of us?”

“But she’s not going to get Homer. His wife is with him now, and they seem perfectly happy and contented.”

“But that isn’t much better.”

I considered this a very queer statement. “Marge,” I inquired, “honestly, are you considering having a baby by A.I.?”

“Perhaps,” she said. I knew that meant yes. Instantly, I felt betrayed. I felt like a cuckold, and I knew that every other husband whose wife contemplated having an A.I. baby would feel the same. I know it wasn’t sensible, but there it was, as fundamental as Homer’s desire for The Frame, or Marge’s urge to have children.

When Tommy Thompson and Maria arrived they seemed to be tiptoeing on a pink cloud. His St. Bernard eyes followed her, proud and possessive and devoted, and she sat beside him, and squirmed against his shoulder. A love affair between two doctors, or between a doctor and a nurse, is sometimes difficult to understand. How they can reconcile the terms of medical anatomy with the delicate language of passion is something that has never been fully explained, but they do it all the time.

Of course we talked about A.I. We played bridge, in the sense that someone dealt cards and we looked at them, but mostly we talked. Except Tommy didn’t talk much. Tommy Thompson was thinking. He did his thinking slowly. When you watched him you could almost hear his brain go click, click, click like an old grandfather clock, just as creaky, and just as right.

“I’ll tell you,” he said finally, “I don’t think the world is going to be permanently sterile. I think there’s a chance for it.”

“You mean through Mr. Adam?” Marge asked.

“Perhaps. He might get it started.”

“What then?”

“Well,” Tommy hesitantly explained, “you know I’ve been experimenting. I’m not entirely satisfied that the male sperm is really dead. I think he is stunned, knocked out, paralyzed, but I’m not sure he is dead. I think I saw one wriggle.”

“When you look through a microscope too long everything wriggles,” said Maria.

“No, I am sure I saw one wriggle.” Tommy looked into his glass, as if he saw one there. “I might as well tell you all about it. I’ve been working eighteen hours a day on this idea of mine. If it is true that the male germ isn’t totally destroyed, then it is just a matter of nursing him back—or jarring him back—into full vitality. I’ve got a compound—”

“Quack!” I interrupted. “Medicine man! Purveyor of snake oil!”

“It is a silly sort of business,” he continued, ignoring me. “It is mostly seaweed. High iodized content.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Maria, suddenly alert. “Why don’t you try it out?”

“I am trying it out. But I need more experimental animals—mostly husbands. How about you, Steve? Some of my colleagues at Polyclinic are taking it.”

“Not me,” I said. “I’m no guinea pig.”

Marge looked at me. “Go ahead and try it,” she urged. “You ought to contribute something to humanity.”

“All over the world,” I replied, “pathologists and biologists and endocrinologists are undoubtedly working, just like Tommy here, on such ideas. Maybe Tommy or one of the others will come up with something. When he does, why naturally I’ll take it. But right at the moment I don’t feel like filling my stomach with seaweed.”

“You’re a big help!” said Marge. “You’re practically a traitor to the human race!”

“If he changes his mind,” Tommy told her, “I’ll give him a bottle of the stuff. It can’t hurt him—at least I don’t think it can hurt him because it hasn’t hurt any of the others. I prescribe forty drops a day, in this test period, and none of the fellows at the hospital are sick yet. On the other hand none of them seem to be starting any babies.”

“He won’t change his mind,” Marge said. “He just doesn’t want to have any children—never has.”

I didn’t argue. What was the sense of arguing? Marge has that damnable type of memory that goes back through the years and picks up evidence that you have long forgotten, and drowns you in it.

I told Maria and Tommy about Homer’s progress, touching lightly on the episode of The Frame, and they agreed that it sounded as if he were greatly improved, and probably on the way to recovery. They promised to come down to Washington and look him over. Perhaps he was in shape for the beginning of A.I., although they couldn’t be sure until they’d given him a thorough checkup.

At nine o’clock we listened to Winchell. He sounded breathless as if he had run up twenty flights in Radio City. He started off with a flash from London. The British Foreign Office had learned, he said, that two unsterilized males had been discovered in Outer Mongolia. They had been discovered several months ago, but the Russians were keeping it a secret. It seems that they were miners, and like Adam they had been in the lowest level of a deep lead workings when Mississippi blew up.

“That’s very interesting,” Tommy said. “I wonder if it’s true?”

“It sounds plausible,” said Maria.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It isn’t very likely that the British Foreign Office would know what goes on in Outer Mongolia. There probably have been some rumors floating around, and finally the rumors reached London, and the Foreign Office allowed them to leak, just to sound out the Russians as to whether they were true.”

“If it is true, what effect would that have on the N.R.P.?” Marge asked.

“Oh, I think it would start a production race between us and the Russians. And there would be a lot of pressure to utilize Adam immediately. I’m glad he’s better, because even the hint of an unsterilized Russian is likely to send Washington spinning.”

“It is sort of frightening,” Marge said. “Those Mongols breed like mice, don’t they?”

“All things considered,” Tommy said, “I think a good husky Mongol would outbreed Adam three to one, from what I have seen of him.”

“That’s probably true,” said Maria, “but if we’re able to perfect improved methods of A.I. utilizing a single germ for each impregnation—which as you know is what I’ve been working on—why we can meet their competition. However, they’re just as advanced as we are in those things and if they have two men to our one, and a bigger population to work with, why I suppose they can keep their birth rate well above ours.”

I said it was all hypothetical anyway, until something definite was known, and if it was true then that was good, because then both countries would get together and pool their knowledge and perhaps save the human race after all. Maria said she didn’t think it would work out that way, because all her experiments were viewed as military secrets, and she supposed it was the same with the Russians.

I explained about military secrets, so far as I knew. It seems that every major power has two operations, one called S.I.—Secret Intelligence—and the other C.I.—Counter Intelligence. “Now that this is peacetime,” I said, “ordinarily those guys would be back in their normal occupations as purveyors of buggy whips, peddlers of brushes, operators of shooting galleries, and clam and oyster salesmen. But a secret agent makes a lot of money and he doesn’t have to account for it. In every country in the world it is called ‘unvouchered funds,’ and a secret agent supposedly pays out these unvouchered funds to people for information.”

“It sounds very profitable,” Marge agreed.

“Oh, it is. It is a wonderful racket. It is sort of an international club. All the fellows in S.I. try to penetrate other countries, and all the fellows in C.I. try to keep other countries from penetrating us.”

“We have very nice counter-intelligence men,” Maria objected. “They come to see me all the time. They put up baskets in our laboratories, and we are supposed to throw all our notes in them, and then they come around and burn the baskets. It is just like collecting the garbage, only cleaner.”

“Is that all they do?” asked Marge.

“Oh, no. They make you sign papers.”

“The British,” I explained, “are wise to the racket, and they do it better. Most of the men in the British Secret Service have to hold other jobs too. In that way the government gets some work out of them. It is also a very good cover, because it is an honest cover. We aren’t that smart. A guy turns up in a place like Istanbul and claims to be a reporter for Field and Stream, or Vogue, and everyone knows it is a phoney cover, but nobody says anything about it, because it would hurt the racket generally.”

The telephone rang. It was Jane, in Washington. The N.R.P. was boiling, she said. Everybody was excited about the news from Outer Mongolia. Both Gableman and Mr. Pumphrey had called, and they wanted me to return to Washington immediately. There was to be a special conference with the State Department at ten in the morning, and the Planning Board would meet at eleven, and at noon Mr. Pumphrey would call at the White House. “But is it true about this Outer Mongolian business?” I asked.

“They don’t know,” Jane said. “But whether it is true or not, it is bound to have repercussions in Congress, and that’s what worries them.”

“Nothing doing,” I said. “Tell them I’ve got a very important business engagement with the Advisory Committee, and we are discussing every phase of the situation. Tell them I’ll bring in the recommendations of the Advisory Committee when I get back. Do you think that will fix it?”

“I hope so,” Jane said, “but they are terribly excited.”

She asked how soon I’d be back, and I said probably in a couple of days, unless something really urgent developed. She said that was all right, and she would call Mr. Gableman and Mr. Pumphrey and stress the importance of my conferring with the medical advisers at this time. I said she was a sweetheart, and that I would give her a kiss when I got back, because I saw that Marge was listening.

“You don’t make me a bit jealous,” Marge said when I hung up. “That was your secretary, and she doesn’t worry me at all, if you gave me an accurate description of her. However, I’m still not sure about that Hollywood person.”

Maria and Tommy left about one. Smith Field never seemed so wonderful.

When I awoke, sleet and rain were beating against our windows. Marge was scratching me behind the ears, and I relaxed with the luxurious determination to spend the day in bed and thumb my nose at the weather, Washington, the N.R.P., A.I., and unsterilized Mongolians.

All our lives, most of us have been the targets of a devilish propaganda campaign designed to rout us out of bed at the same hour as the beasts of the field and the farmyard. Whoever invented the slogan “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” was an advertising genius. That slogan bullies most of us from childhood to old age. It shows the power of repetition, which Goebbels so well understood. We have heard “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” so often that we believe it without question, although when you analyze it, it is obviously hokum. It is hokum in all three claims, particularly the part about making you wealthy. Who is it who gets to the office at eight on the dot—the shipping clerk or the Chairman of the Board? I drowsed in Smith Field, thinking how successful the inventor of that slogan would be if he were alive today, and what he could do for cigarettes, soap, hair tonic, and soda pop.

Around noon I flicked on the television, and who should be there, looking directly into my eyes, but Senator Fay Sumner Knott. Marge said, “Isn’t that a charming suit? I saw one like that at Best’s the other day, only it was a different shade.”

“Hush,” I said, “I can’t hear what she’s saying.”

“Oh, switch it off,” said Marge. “She’s only talking politics in the Senate. She is photogenic, isn’t she?”

Then I heard something about N.R.P., and I concentrated on listening, instead of watching. For months, very likely, Fay had been waiting to insert her stinger into the Administration. If she hadn’t miscalculated her timing, I shuddered to consider the consequence. As it was, it was bad enough.

She was, obviously, just at the beginning of her speech in the Senate Chamber. The first thing I heard distinctly was that the N.R.P. was a total failure, and worse, a public scandal.

“I speak at a critical moment,” she said. “News has just reached us that in Outer Mongolia there are two men capable of perpetuating the human race. Now I do not begrudge the Communists the right to continue, but think what it would mean if the world were swarming with Communistic Mongols?”

She smiled, and paused so that her listeners would have time for the picture to sink in. “Our most critical and vital resource,” she went on, “is one man—Mr. Adam. And what has the Administration done about Mr. Adam?

“The Administration is apparently unaware of the fact that people are dying every day, and nobody is being born—at least here in the United States. We don’t know how many are being born in Russia. Not only has the N.R.P. failed to promote the conception of a single baby—although it has been provided with unlimited funds—but it has as yet announced no definite plans for utilizing Mr. Adam.”

Not only that, Fay continued, but the Administration had allowed Mr. Adam to consort with a number of women. She herself had seen Mr. Adam drinking with a notorious actress. She understood, “from the highest military authorities,” that there was a woman living with Mr. Adam even now.

She said she very much regretted being forced to expose this scandalous state of affairs. She was not one to interfere in anyone’s private life. However, this was a matter of transcendent importance to the nation, and it was particularly important to the nation’s womanhood. Was the eternal hope of motherhood to be forever condemned by the soiled politicians who, for the time being, composed the Administration clique?

Marge said, “Stephen, isn’t this awful!”

“No,” I said. “I think it’s wonderful. Wait until people find out that the woman with whom he is living is only his wife.”

“That doesn’t make any difference.”

“Don’t be silly.”

N.R.P. was nothing more or less than a gigantic boondoggle, Fay told us, and a swindle. Mr. Adam was being allowed to run wild on the taxpayers’ money. She began to go into details. She mentioned “a woman known as The Frame, whole real name is Kitty Ruppe, and whose screen name is Kathy Riddell.”

“I think she’s catty,” Marge said. “She’s just jealous. I’d never vote for her.”

“In her state,” I pointed out, “there are more men than women. Otherwise she’d never have been elected in the first place.”

Fay began to talk about tete-à-tete in the Footlight Club. It occurred to me that Mr. Adam’s movements had been pretty closely watched, and when I pieced this together with her reference to “high military authorities,” I could smell Phelps-Smythe.

The television’s eye shifted so that it encompassed the whole Senate Chamber. An announcer’s voice said, “The Senate Chamber, which was almost empty when Senator Knott began to speak, has been rapidly filling.” You could see that was true, and I recognized several members of the House standing in the background, a certain indication that this was the day’s main attraction on Capitol Hill.

The announcer said that Senator Knott had yielded the floor to Senator Frogham, and immediately Frogham’s face, jowls hanging down like a tired bloodhound, appeared on our screen. He started off by saying that he was shaken by his colleague’s revelations, although hardly entirely surprised. “This is a terrible blow at our democratic and capitalistic system. What’s going to happen to free enterprise and everything? How can we tell our school children they can grow up to be President when there aren’t any school children?” He suggested that the Senate form a committee to investigate the N.R.P., with Senator Knott as chairman.

Senator Knott reappeared, and said it had been a mistake to take Mr. Adam out of the hands of the military in the first place, and that she was sure that there was sabotage, “probably inspired by a foreign power,” within the N.R.P.

I shut her off and climbed out of Smith Field. “Where are you going?” Marge asked.

“We’re going to Florida. I just resigned.”

“Oh, no you didn’t,” Marge said. “You’re not going to let a bunch of politicians chase you out of your job. Remember, there are a lot of people depending on you—Maria, and Thompson, and poor Mr. Adam. You can’t just run away and leave Mr. Adam in this mess.”

I put on my trousers. The telephone rang, Marge answered it, and said it was Mr. Gableman, for me. “Tell him I’m not in. Tell him I just had apoplexy.”

“Stephen,” Marge said sweetly into the telephone, “wants me to tell you that he’s not in or he has just had apoplexy.”

I took the telephone and said, “It’s me, Smith. I quit.”

“Oh, you heard about it,” said Gableman. “Well, you can’t quit now while we’re under fire. That’s the worst possible thing to do. That’s what starts an organization disintegrating. Anyway, what’s the dope? We’ve got to get out a press release, fast. Who’s the woman staying with Adam?”

“His wife.”

“His wife!” I could hear Gableman sigh. “Why, that’s not bad! That’s not bad at all. But what about this tomato, The Frame?”

“Purely platonic,” I lied. “It just turns out that they’re both interested in archeology.”

“Even if that’s true, which I doubt, we’re not going to say anything about it,” said Gableman. “We will just give out a simple, dignified statement that Mr. and Mrs. Adam are living together. That’ll create sympathy, and it’ll make Knott seem like a gossipy bitch. But what about The Frame?”

“You don’t have to worry about her,” I told him, “because her studio doesn’t want her to get involved. They know it would be bad box office.”

“Well, then, there’s hardly anything to worry about at all. It will all blow over in a couple of days.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“We’ll ride this out, all right, but you’d better come on back right away.”

Suddenly I thought of Mary Ellen, and Adam, and Jane Zitter, and I wondered what was going on in suite 5-F, and whether Mary Ellen had scalped Homer by now, and whether he had confessed, and what the Knott blast would do to his nerves. “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll get out to La Guardia and catch the first plane.”

Marge said, “Thank goodness, you aren’t ducking your responsibilities.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

Marge helped me fix my tie. “Darling,” she said, “won’t you try some of Tommy Thompson’s tonic, or whatever it is? I do wish you would try something because I do want you to be the father of my children.”

“Preposterous!” I told her. “There are probably a thousand varieties of snake oil being consumed all over the world, and none of them are going to do any good. Your only chance of becoming a mother is for Homer to be the papa, unless, of course, it is true about the two Mongolians, and the Russians agree to share them with us. And when you consider how many women there are in the world, I don’t think your chances are very good. Honestly I don’t.”

“I am going to have a baby,” Marge said. “I am, I am!”