The Institute

14

Then the Garretts arrived. Hortense, wearing a green cocktail dress with a gold band around her head, looked simply beautiful. I presented Teddy as “my girl Friday who carried the press stuff for me so I could arrive like a gran signor — kind of like cruelty to children, except that she’s as strong as a bull.”

“How fortunate,” Hortense said icily.

“But prettier’n a bull,” Mr. Garrett said.

“Mrs. Garrett,” Teddy cooed, “I’ve seen your picture often. I’ve always admired your hair. I just love dark blonde.”

“You have quite beautiful hair yourself.”

“Not really. Right now it’s dyed with henna rinse. I wish it were blonde, like yours.”

“I’ll send you a wig. How’s that?”

“Oh, Mrs. Garrett, would you?”

There was more to this exchange than met the naked ear. I was somewhat uneasy at the way Teddy was tipping me off that she knew what my reason was.

Hortense tried her chair and reached for the mike, to adjust it. But it was stiff and wouldn’t budge. Teddy skipped over to it, and gave a yank that really did the trick. She pushed it a little bit at a time until Hortense nodded that it was the way she wanted it.

Hortense got up and came over to me. I was at the table I had had put in, looking at the various handouts. She nodded a couple of times. Then, after getting closer to me, she stiffened. “Get that girl out of here!” she snapped. “What do you mean, bringing such a creature?”

“What girl?”

“That girl!”

Her voice was pure venom, and she had the bad manners to point without looking where she was pointing, to the mikes where Teddy was standing. When she raised her voice, Teddy came over and took her wrist and began putting pressure on it. Hortense walked backward under the pressure of Teddy’s grip until she reached her armchair and plopped down on it. When Teddy spoke, the mike, which was turned on, picked up her voice and boomed it out over the entire room.

“I saw what you did, Mrs. Garrett, leaning close in to Dr. Palmer, so you could sniff his shirt to see if it smelled like me. I’m sure it did. It should have, the way I climbed on him and twisted around in his lap and slobbered on him. But he said no. Did you hear what I said, Mrs. Garrett? He made me wait downstairs because he had a reason — kind of a blonde reason. All I can say is, if you’re that reason, he might do better with me!”

She wheeled around and faced me, her eyes glittering with tears, and sobbed: “Dr. Palmer, I’ll thank you to pay me, so I can go. I want my wages, whatever they are. Also taxi fare to the bus and bus fare to College Park.”

But before I could get out my wallet, Mr. Garrett came over. He wrapped Teddy in his arms and said very loudly: “Take it easy, Teddy. Calm down, relax. College Park is right on my way. As soon as we’re through here, I’ll run you home.” He led her to one of the folding chairs, sat her down, and then went over to Hortense whose hand he picked up and patted, but she slapped him away. Then she jumped up and went out with that quick, boiling-hot walk a woman breaks into when she’s really mad. She went through the lobby and out the front door.

I wasn’t the first guy to get caught in the middle of by two women blowing their tops, but I felt like holy hell anyway. Mr. Garrett played it cool — adjusting the mikes, inspecting the food, conferring with the bartender, and joking with the girls. I sat on the table, watching him, trying to figure out where I stood, if anywhere. It was frightening, but I made myself own up to it, that here in just a few seconds, the whole ship had been blown out of the water. Mr. Garrett must know the truth now, whereas before he could only guess. How was he going to play it? And was he going to play it? But when he called me over, all he said was: “Lloyd, we’d better be getting ready.” Which meant that he wasn’t going to play it; he was just going to ignore it. I suppose for the moment it eased my mind, yet deep down inside, it left me more nervous than ever, because I didn’t know where I stood. How can you ignore something like that? But if he could, I had to.

As I passed Teddy, I asked her: “Would you take charge of the press stuff? See that each reporter gets a release from every pile?”

“Okay, Dr. Palmer. I’m sorry.”

“Why didn’t you bring a stink bomb?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Don’t bang at Teddy.”

It was Mr. Garrett, who had come over to give her a pat. “We all make mistakes,” he said, “especially when provoked.”

That seemed to end the subject.

It didn’t end Hortense, though. Pretty soon the reporters came, fifteen or twenty of them. Some I knew, at least by sight, and some I didn’t, though on about half of them, I had done some background study. The two Washington papers sent men, and so did the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Women’s Wear, and the Associated Press.’ But the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, and Philadelphia Evening Bulletin sent women, and for some reason, they took us over the jumps. The show got off to a lefthanded start when one of them pressed Mr. Garrett as to where Hortense was and why she wasn’t there. “If the Institute is named for her, this show must be in her honor. What’s become of her?”

But he didn’t get excited. He answered: “She was here a moment ago, as a matter of fact; but then she changed her mind and left. My wife doesn’t like cameras. They make her break out in a rash.”

“Mr. Garrett,” the woman said, “I know Mrs. Garrett quite well, and I’ve never noticed any allergy to cameras on her part. I would say she’s not only photogenic but photogenerous.”

“Then that’s what you would say.”

By this time three or four men were in front of us, sitting, standing, and kneeling, their cameras to their eyes, taking pictures of him. Instead of smiling, though, all he did was look peeved. There are times when a stuck-out jaw is the one thing that wins the ball game, but a press conference isn’t one of them. The woman smelled something peculiar about it, and she meant to get some answers. Suddenly she turned to me. “Mr. Palmer,” she began.

“Dr. Palmer,” Mr. Garrett corrected her.

“Dr. Palmer, in my paper’s bio morgue I find eight envelopes on you, all in connection with football, but none that mentions biography. May I ask why you were picked to direct this institute?”

“Mr. Garrett picked me. Ask him.”

“Mr. Garrett?”

“I picked him because he knows more about biography than anyone else,” Mr. Garrett said. “He knows so much that it makes my head swim.”

“Do you have a degree in biography?” she said to me.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have you taken courses in biography?”

“There are no courses in biography.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She was obviously caught by surprise. Some of the other reporters suddenly began writing furiously.

“There is no course in biography, or discipline, as they call it, in any American university that I know of,” I said, “in spite of the fact that biography is the one literary field that Americans excel in. It was partly to fill this lacuna that I persuaded Mr. Garrett to endow the Hortense Garrett Institute of Biography.”

“She persuaded him, you mean.”

“I know what I mean, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve seen a lot of her, then?”

“Naturally. It was necessary in setting up the Institute.”

“At her apartment, we would assume?”

“If you would disconnect your assumer and stop telling me what I mean, we’d get along a lot better.” That got a laugh, and I added: “I’ve never been to Mrs. Garrett’s apartment. We’ve met for lunch and once or twice for dinner.”

“How about your apartment?”

Well, how about my apartment? How much homework had this woman done before today? Hortense was practically living at my apartment. Had she been seen even once coming or going from there?

I had to take a chance. “She has never been there.”

“But I have!” Teddy chimed in.

“That’s right,” I said. “She’s my weakness now.”

“And mine, too,” Mr. Garrett said.

“I’m Dr. Palmer’s packhorse,” she explained, “because I’m as strong as a bull. I also do back handsprings.”

She did a back handspring in the space between the folding chairs and the door. There was a stampede by those with cameras to get a shot of her doing it. But as she straightened up, she shied off.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she called; “not so fast with them pop-ups. You take a picture of me, I must have my patches showing. It’s my sorority rule. Okay, on my face, if you want it — but the patches have to be in.”

“Darling,” said the woman who had been badgering me, “one earthshaking gadget has not been invented yet — one permitting the camera to take your front end, where your face is positioned, and your hind end, where your patches are, at one and the same time. Do—”

“Aw? Then earth, stand by to get shook.”

She turned to the table, moved piles of stuff to one side, then climbed on and did a hand stand, facing the cameras. But, of course, that put her shapely bottom just above her face.

“Okay,” she said calmly, “shoot!”

They shot.

She hopped down, telling them: “That’ll be fifty cents, please. Four bits from one and all.”

Nobody moved to pay her. “Well, there’s their trouble right there,” she announced with an airy wave of her hand. “The media, I’m talking about. They’re mean, they’re chincy, they’re cheap. Making cracks about a wife right in front of her husband, and on top of that, not paying the human packhorse who’s posing for her picture. I do a handstand and what do I get? Nothing!”

“Teddy.”

“Yes, Mr. Garrett?”

“Have a Kennedy half-dollar.”

“You mean, shut up?”

“I’m too polite to say it.”

“O.K.”

She was quite meek about it. She pulled his face down and kissed him. They seemed to get on very well.

When Mr. Garrett had returned to his chair and Teddy was tucked away at the end of the table, the same woman reporter resumed with me.

“Dr. Palmer,” she asked, “have you actually written a biography?”

“It so happens that I haven’t.”

“Aw!” Teddy yelped once more. “Dr. Palmer, why don’t you tell her? Why do you let her run over you?” Then to the reporter: “You’re damn right, he’s written a biography — William Shakespeare’s! He wrote his dissertation on Shakespeare for the Ph.D. he has. He gave us a free copy — some of us, anyway — in his English poetry class, and it’s wonderful to read! All about the sonnets! And the Dark Woman; he indemnifies her! It’s like a detective story, only real.”

That doesn’t sound like much of a time bomb, but it caused me more trouble than any other thing that happened that day. I had intentionally not mentioned Shakespeare, because that’s one thing you learn: Lay off him. Don’t bring up the subject unless, for some reason like teaching a poetry class, you have to. Because you’re just opening a can of worms. There’s an expert on every block who knows more about it than God, all ready to show you up, and no matter how sharp your research is or how silly the previous research, you’ll get a drumming out of town that will make the Lion and the Unicorn sound like a moment of silence.

I ignored Teddy, but Mr. Garrett called her name. When she answered, he said it this time: “Shut up.”

“Yes sir.”

“Who was the Dark Woman?” another reporter asked.

“For that,” I told him, “send three dollars and fifty cents, plus postage, to the Lord Baltimore Press and ask them to send you Shakespeare and the Sonnets, A New Look at an Old Subject, by Lloyd Palmer.

“Who’s the outstanding American biographer?” asked one of the women reporters, at last bringing the discussion back to the reason for our being there. And on that, I decided to talk.

“The list is so long,” I told her, “you’d be helpless to pick out one name. For my money, James Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson has had a greater effect on biographical writing than anything else I know of. He got away from the literary style of Prescott, Parkman, Sparks, and the other early writers and introduced the simple, easy, intimate, colloquial way of writing that later writers followed, such as H. H. Bancroft, Sandburg, Leech, Tuchman, The New Yorker “Profile” writers, and a host of others. You have to remember, when you’re talking about American biographers, that the roster runs into the thousands. Then there are the wholesale biographers — Sparks with his Library of American Biography; Bancroft, with his Chronicles of Builders; Marquis with his Who’s Who in America, and Sammons and Martindell who followed Marquis as publishers; and very importantly, Adolph Ochs, of the New York Times, who bore the expense of the Dictionary of American Biography, that prodigious trove of biographical information in twenty volumes. We should also honor Dumas Malone, the Jefferson scholar and dean of our biographers. But let us never overlook the first American biographer, Mason Lock Weems, whose preposterous Life of George Washington, the one with the cherry tree in it, went through seventy-one editions and is kept in print by the Belknap Press of Harvard University.”

“He can talk all night if you have all night,” Garrett said. “Personally, I’ve heard enough. Are we finished? Is there anything else you want to know?”

There didn’t seem to be, so he signaled to the girls who began serving refreshments and cocktails. Then he called: “Come on, Teddy, we have to be running along.”

“I want something to eat.”

The girl with the tray of canapes wrapped some in a paper napkin and tucked them in Teddy’s bag. But she still wouldn’t go. She was rubbing her thumb with her finger at me, meaning pay me. Garrett said: “I’ll take care of her, Lloyd.” Then he smacked her on the patches, saying: “Get going!”