The Institute

21

A Croak came over the loudspeaker system: “This hearing’s adjourned,” and the people were swarming around us, shaking hands and aiming cameras. Then we were back in Senator Hood’s office with everyone gloating over what we’d done — Mr. Garrett “for teaching the bastard manners,” and me “for really settling his hash — that cooks his goose in Georgia, make no mistake.” Well, it did cook his goose, as we know, but I didn’t much care at the time. I wanted out of there. Then I found myself down on the street with Mr. Garrett. He was patting me on the back and saying: “Lloyd, as you know, this stuff that Hood peddles — discretion and going along — I’m for most of the time. I practice it myself. But every so often the one thing that fills the bill is a sock on the snoot, and boy, did you give him one today. I’m still exulting over it. I glory in what you did. I can’t thank you enough.”

Then I was home lying in bed with no idea how I got there. I had to be alone, to face up to this thing in my life, not the clobbering of Pickens, because that was something I had to do but took no interest in. It was that handshake and how it made me feel that I had to face up to now, especially what it meant in my life. One thing was clear, and it kept hitting me: once that handshake was given, once I felt as it made me feel, I couldn’t lie anymore. I had to come clean, with no fiddling or foodling or faddling around. So where did that leave me? I wrestled with it, hating to face up to what it was leading to.

Sometime during the afternoon I realized that I hadn’t heard from Hortense and thought it very odd. She must have heard about what had happened. It seemed peculiar that she wouldn’t have called me. A few other people did, those who had my number, with congratulations for what I had done. But she didn’t. Then in the early evening I heard her key in the lock and then she was calling me.

“I’m in here,” I called out, sounding thick.

She came in and without saying hello lay down beside me in the dark but without taking off her clothes. I was dressed, too, with the spread pulled over me. There we lay for several minutes, the first time, I suppose, we’d ever stretched out that way. But she acted so strangely that I asked: “Is something wrong, Hortense?”

“Wrong? I’ll say there is.”

Then, almost at once: “Lloyd, it’s not that Teddy creature, the one I thought it was. It’s Inga.”

“Who?”

“The housekeeper, the Swedish housekeeper.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s so, just the same. The woman detective reported today, at last. Lloyd, she got in there by going up in the elevators, the way I told her to, pretending that she wanted a job when Inga came to the door. And when she spoke Swedish, Inga let her in. She had no work for her but gave her coffee and the names of some places she might apply at. Then she apologized for running the woman out, but said her boss was coming and she had to give him lunch. Then when the woman was leaving, Inga called out: ‘Oh, no, not here! We have a hideout downstairs, a little place with two rooms where no maid is on duty to see. My boss mixes love with lunch’ — and she flipped up her skirt to show she had no pantyhose on... Lloyd, how could he?”

“Easy, just stretch her out and—”

“It’s no laughing matter!”

“I didn’t say it was. I just said it’s easy.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel about it!—”

“Ask me what’s new, why don’t you?”

“You? What are you talking about?”

“They had a hearing today. Remember?”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

“Well? What happened?”

“I clobbered the senator — and your husband finished him off.”

“So?”

“Then we shook hands.”

“And the sun stood still — or what?”

“It changes things.”

“In what way?”

If she couldn’t see in what way, I didn’t know how to tell her. I didn’t even try. She started all over again, telling me what Inga had said. It seems that there was quite a bit more — how loving her boss was at night, and how he liked auser, as Inga called it in Swedish, meaning extra, at lunchtime, for which they needed the hideaway so the maid wouldn’t catch them at it. Then she raised up on one elbow and announced: “Lloyd, I have to know what this means! I can’t fool around any longer, playing it in the dark.”

“Nobody asked you to.”

“And my waist is an inch bigger than it was this time last week. It’s beginning to show!”

“You’re six months gone. That’s why.”

“I have to talk to him!”

She reached him not at the hotel but at the ARMALCO offices. It took some arguing to get him to come, but finally she snapped: “Richard, do you think I’m playing games? I said get out here to Lloyd’s apartment in College Park — and come now!”

Why it should have bucked me up, I have no idea, but it did. I suddenly felt proud of her — and hopeful — in spite of what I had to do. As soon as we got up and she made the bed, I got out my personal stationery and wrote my resignation in longhand.

I addressed it to Mr. Garrett and simply said: “I resign as the institute’s Director.” I wrote it on the cocktail table in the living room while Hortense was back in the kitchen, fixing bacon and eggs. I went back and we ate. Then we sat in the dark, holding hands, whispering, waiting for Mr. Garrett to come. He had said he would be there about ten.

At last Miss Nettie called to say he was there. I put on the lights, opened the door, and waited. When he came, I gave him my hand. He took it again and gave it that extra shake that said that he meant it. When he came in, he kissed Hortense and looked around at the apartment, especially the pictures. At the one of me on my perch as a lifeguard at Ocean City, he snapped his fingers sharply. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere!” he said. “I said so, didn’t I, that very first day, when you came to the apartment in Wilmington? Remember?”

“Yeah. But give — what’s the rest of it?”

“At Ocean City — I was spending the day there and got interested in this guard, the wigwagging he was doing, and asked him about it. But he corrected me. ‘We don’t wigwag,’ he said; ‘we semaphore.’ And it turned out that he was semaphoring about a child, a girl in a red dress with white polka dots—”

“I remember now,” I said; “and you told me, ‘If that’s all that’s bothering you, there’s a red dress under the boardwalks, sticking out of the sand,’ and we both crawled under, and there was the lost child. A lot of gratitude we got. Some children get lost on purpose.”

“It just goes to show,” Hortense said.

“Show what?” he said.

“Well, if you don’t know—”

“She’s always doing that,” he complained, turning to me. “Getting off a real deep thought and then leaving it up in the air, dangling. But it does explain why I remembered you, and you had no recollection of me. You hardly looked at me.”

He left the pictures at last, then crossed to a sofa and sat down, facing Hortense. “What’s this all about?” he asked her.

“Richard, I want a divorce.”

“No.”

“I must have a divorce. I’m pregnant.”

“I’ve known you were for some time, knew it before you did, perhaps. Your eyes betrayed you. For several days they had that madonna look they had that other time. The answer still has to be no.”

“The answer has to be yes. Richard, I’m going to get a divorce whether you like it or not; I’m going to get it regardless of what you say.”

“You’re not going to get it. Under the law, you must come to court with clean hands. As far as I’m concerned, you’re as clean as baby’s breath, but a court — when your pregnancy comes to light — might feel differently.”

“How would it come to light?”

“I would light it, that’s how. Hortense, I mean no.”

“Why?” I said.

He didn’t answer me or even look at me.

“Did you hear what I said?”

He still didn’t answer or look at me. I took my resignation out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Mr. Garrett,” I said, sounding pretentious but not knowing how to sound otherwise, “that note will tell you, I think, the depth of my feeling for you, especially after today — what we did to that son of a bitch and the moment it gave us later. I mean the handshake we had. After that, I couldn’t play it slick. I couldn’t have false pretenses with you. So I wrote this note... to get it over with. In spite of all that, in spite of what I feel, I have to tell you that you don’t get out of here until you spit it out — what it’s all about, why Hortense can’t have a divorce. A football player is no more persuasive than anyone else, except for one thing: he doesn’t mind playing rough. So, making it as plain as I know how, if it means you stay here all night, here’s where you’ll stay — until you tell Hortense why she can’t have a divorce. We know about Inga, so take it from there.”

He got up, his face falling apart, apparently stunned. It crossed my mind that it was probably the first time that he had been told what to do, what he had to do, by anyone. He took out his handkerchief, crumpled it, and pressed it to the palms of his hands. Then suddenly he said: “I can’t stay out of her bed.”

“But, Richard, how could you?”

Her voice was quavering. Suddenly, instead of talking to me, he began giving out to her. “There’s no mystery to it,” he told her. “The night you had your miscarriage, I carried you downstairs. Remember? To the ambulance, and rode in it with you to the hospital. Then, when I got in the cab to go back to the apartment, I knew I had strained my back. That’s where Inga came in. She had a vibrator, already plugged in by her bed, which she used on herself sometimes. She stretched me out and put it on me. So... I spent the night. That’s all — or almost all. Hortense, you, of all people should know: I have a hang-up about sex. I don’t know why, I just do. She’s the only woman I’ve ever known who really responded to me. As I said, there’s nothing mysterious about it.”

He trailed off, still talking to her, and then sat looking at nothing while she stared at him for a long while.

“You haven’t answered my question,” I said. “Why—?”

“Oh. Oh, yes. If Hortense divorced me, Lloyd, I’d be free to marry this woman. I don’t think I would, but I might — I’m nuts about her, that I have to admit. I must not, cannot, will not let it happen! If she had stolen a million dollars or murdered someone or danced the hula in church, I don’t think I’d mind very much. I could probably tough it out. But marry a servant — no. No, NO!”

He breathed it in a whisper that had the Book of Revelations in it. Hortense got up, walked around, and looked out the window as though thinking it over.

“Yiss,” she trilled, “it devolves. It devolves that you smaken me on my pretty Swenska tail whenever I uppen my skurt. But wait, wait, wait unteel I peepen and see if mein pantyhosen iss clean!”

“Goddamn it, knock it off!”

“Now there’s a hostess for you! ‘Come in, pliz! Yiss, he iss home — aye tink.’ ” And she popped two or three kneebends which I have since heard are called “knicks,” so jerky they make you uncomfortable, while he chased her around, furious. I stepped between them and motioned for her to sit down.

“We get the idea,” I said. Mr. Garrett stood for several moments, clenching and unclenching his fists. Then he stalked to the foyer, got his hat and coat from the closet, and put them on. He turned to her and said: “The answer is still no. While Inga is alive, there will be no divorce for you.”

“But what am I going to do?”

“Nothing! Nothing. Do that, you will be sitting pretty. Have your child — and who knows whose child it is except you, me, and Lloyd? I’ve told you, it’s well provided for. I’m putting it in my will, as well as any other children you have. I’m providing for you in the trust fund that’s already set up for you. I dote on you, you must know by now. I feel for Lloyd much as he says he feels for me. You can’t have everything, Hortense. All you need do is nothing and you’re sitting so pretty, someone should take your picture.”

“Except for the one thing I want!”

“I don’t. That’s the difference.”

I went to bed but lay in the dark a long time before she came in and undressed and presently slipped into bed beside me. But she didn’t come close. Then, when I turned on the light, she was staring at me with a strange look in her eyes, as though she were scared to death or had just waked up to something or had gotten a terrific idea — or all three. I made a speech about getting some sleep, how we needed it so we would be fresh in the morning to tackle what had to be done in some kind of clear-headed way. She made no answer, so I turned out the light.

I must have fallen asleep, because all of a sudden I woke up with the feeling that I was alone. I put out my hand. She wasn’t there! I turned on the light. Jumping out of bed, I rushed through the apartment, shouting her name; but she wasn’t there. She was gone.

I came back to bed and turned out the light. Now I faced a darkness blacker than black. I had lost my job, my dream, and now this woman who had meant so much to me. Yet there is a limit to how much you can feel. By daybreak I didn’t feel anything — just cold gray nothingness.