Twilight at Mac’s Place

Three

The man with the courtly air and the bald head turned from the seventh-floor window at 1:13 P.M. and dropped into his high-backed leather chair with a sigh just as Gilbert Undean finished the last of his egg salad sandwich on whole-wheat toast.

The man in the high-backed chair was Hamilton Keyes, who had sent down for the sandwich after learning that Undean had not yet eaten. After Undean licked a trace of mayonnaise from the left corner of his mouth, carefully folded the unused paper napkin and stuck it down into the right-hand pocket of his brown herringbone jacket for possible future use, Hamilton Keyes said, “Steady was never in any branch of the service, you know.”

“Wrong,” Undean said. “He was in Korea in ’fifty and ’fifty-one.”

“But not in the service,” said Keyes, leaning back in the leather chair and resting his feet on one corner of the 137-year-old rosewood desk his rich wife had given him as a fifteenth wedding anniversary present. He had given her a copy of the 1915 Woodberry Society edition of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, numbered (No. 27) and signed by George Edward Woodberry himself. Keyes had acquired the copy at a Georgetown garage sale (where it had been called an estate sale) for $3.50 after realizing it was worth between five and seven hundred dollars.

“We talking about the same Steadfast Haynes?” Undean said.

Keyes smiled slightly and nodded. A careerist, Keyes only recently had realized he had gone as high as he would ever go in the agency. The realization had come not as a shock, or even as a disappointment, but rather as a curious kind of relief, and he now took an almost morbid interest in the progressive atrophy of his ambition.

Undean said, “Well, if he wasn’t in the Army in Korea, what the fuck was he doing there?”

“He was a C.O.”

“Different Steady Haynes then,” said Undean, who had known the courtly man since 1962, when, fresh out of Brown with a full head of hair and even then a certain mannered courtliness, Hamilton Keyes had joined the agency as a probationer.

“Steady was with the American Friends Service Committee,” Keyes said. “The Quakers. He drove an ambulance or carried a stretcher or passed out doughnuts. Something humanitarian. He was attached to the Seventh Division when the Chinese hordes overran it on Thanksgiving Day in nineteen fifty. It was Thanksgiving, wasn’t it?”

“Around in there,” Undean agreed. “He get captured?”

“No, but during the retreat he hooked up with six GIs, all that was left of a rifle company, who were hell-bent on surrendering. Steady argued against it. The ringleader, or lead surrenderee I suppose one might call him, aimed his piece at Steady and told him to shut up.”

“And?”

“And Steady, of course, refused. The ringleader shot at him and missed, probably on purpose. Our Quaker friend snatched a submachine gun, a Thompson, I believe, from the hands of one of the other GIs.” Keyes looked doubtful for a moment. “They did use Thompsons in Korea, didn’t they?”

“Must’ve.”

“At any rate, Steady promised to shoot the first fucker who tried to surrender. The ringleader fired again and this time the round grazed Steady’s left arm just above the elbow. Steady shot him dead. After that he led the remaining five down to Hungnam, where they were evacuated.”

“Leaving his faith behind” Undean said.

“He may not have lost it completely until after the five he led to safety preferred murder charges against him, which was their way of thanking him for saving their lives. The Army couldn’t decide whether to shoot Steady or give him a medal. So they shipped him back to the States and forgot him.”

“That must’ve been when he went back to school” Undean said. “The University of Pennsylvania.”

“Where we tried to recruit him just before graduation in nineteen fifty-five.”

“Tried?”

“They say he laughed at us. Well, smiled anyway. He told our recruiters that if he ever went into the hearts-and-minds business, it would be for money, not country. So he landed a job with one of the big New York ad agencies and made such an impression that three years later they transferred him to their Paris office.”

“This was when?” Undean asked.

“ ’Fifty-eight, I believe. In late ‘fifty-nine, the ad agency’s Paris office was approached by representatives of the Belgian government. The Belgians were concerned that there might be something of a mess in the Congo after independence — nothing to fret about, you understand — but they still thought an American ad agency might be useful in putting the best face on it. The ad agency’s Paris office, for various reasons, said no thanks. So our friend Steady quit, made his own presentation to the Belgians in his quite serviceable French and landed the account. And that’s how he wound up in the Congo during the troubles of the early sixties.”

“And where he met Tinker Burns,” Undean said.

“Apparently. Had you ever run into Burns during your travels?”

“I’d heard the stories about him, but today’s the first time I ever met him.”

“And your immediate impression?”

“White hair. Stiff neck. Smart mouth.”

“Then he hasn’t really changed,” Keyes said. “Except for the hair.” His right palm made an exploratory pass over his own bald head. “Tinker’s used to be coal black.”

“He really at Dien Bien Phu like everybody says?” Undean asked. “Or is that just more bullshit?”

“There were four of them with the Legion there. Four Americans, I mean. Tinker was the only one to survive.”

“How long was he in?” Undean said.

“The Legion? Ten years. From ‘forty-six to ‘fifty-six. Before that he was a paratrooper with the Eighty-second Airborne. A battlefield commission made him a second lieutenant. When he left the Legion after ten years, he was a captain, which, for an American, I understand, is quite extraordinary.”

“Why the fuck would he join the Legion?”

Hamilton Keyes smiled. “If you’d accepted his invitation to lunch, Gilbert, you could’ve asked him. He might even have told you.” Keyes paused. “Like some coffee?”

“Yeah. I would. Thanks”

Keyes picked up his telephone and asked for two coffees. They waited in silence until a young man brought them in on a tray. After the young man left without speaking, Undean took a sip, put his cup down and said, “If Steady wasn’t ever in any branch of the service, why bury him at Arlington?”

“The woman who was at the graveside services thought it would be nice if we did.”

“Isabelle Gelinet.”

“Pretty name, isn’t it?” said Keyes. “Mile Gelinet quit her job at AF-P a few years ago and moved in with Steady at that place of his in Virginia.”

“The farm near Berryville?”

Keyes nodded.

“Heard it was part of his divorce settlement from that rich widow he married.”

“I see you’ve kept up with the gossip, Gilbert.”

“I’m retired, not deaf.”

“In any event, Gelinet moved in, ostensibly to help Steady write his memoirs.”

“I’ll buy a copy.”

Keyes chose to ignore the comment. “The day after Steady died, the day of the inauguration, in fa.ct, Gelinet called us. Her call was finally routed to me at home because Steady, there at the very end, had been one of mine. She refused to identify herself, but I’m sure she didn’t care that I could easily guess who was calling.”

“What’d she want?”

“She wanted him buried at Arlington with a bugler blowing ‘Taps’ over his grave. That was the last forthright statement she made. The rest was all hints and verbal nudges, the gist of them being that unless we agreed to bury him at Arlington, the manuscript of his memoirs would be expressed that same day to a most reputable literary agent in New York. I hinted back that if this indeed were to happen, we might be forced to take legal remedies. She said we were more than welcome to try and hung up.”

The courtly man stopped talking, looked somewhere past Undean’s left shoulder and added, “So we buried him at Arlington.”

“And sent me to count the house.”

“You were the only one left who had the slightest reason to go — except for me.”

Undean frowned. “What happened to your legal remedies?”

Keyes shrugged.

“A bluff, right? And after she called it, you caved in.”

When Keyes only stared at him, saying nothing, revealing nothing, Undean smiled sourly and said, “It doesn’t scan. You’ve stopped plenty of others from publishing. You even stopped two or three guys so hard they went bankrupt. So why not Steady?”

“Because one, he’s dead, and two, he never worked for us.”

“Number two is bullshit”

“Not this time, Gilbert. You see, we never had a contract with Steady. He would never sign anything, never endorse any check of ours or even set up an offshore account we could move his funds into. From the very first — there in the Congo — he insisted on being paid all fees and expenses in either Swiss francs or gold. So how could we stop a dead man, who we couldn’t even prove had ever worked for us, from publishing his memoirs, which we hadn’t even read? And that’s why we caved in, as you so nicely put it, and buried him at Arlington.”

When Undean made no reply, Keyes picked up his cup and drank the rest of his now tepid coffee. As he put the cup down, he said, “What did you make of his son, Granville?”

“I thought he was nice and polite, maybe too polite for this day and age, and I think you just threw the switch.”

“To sidetrack you?”

Undean nodded. “What’re you really going to do about them?”

“Who?”

“His memoirs.”

“Oh. Those, Well, nothing more than we’ve already done, which is to pay a plot of what? — hallowed ground? — to prevent them from being published. Of course, I wouldn’t really worry if they were published because I’m sure they’re nothing more than the same old thrice-regurgitated public domain rogue elephant stuff. Warmed-over old hat, to mix yet another metaphor. At best, a slow read on a long flight.”

“I know better,” Undean said. “And if I know better, you damn sure do.”

Hamilton Keyes favored Undean with another polite but empty stare.

“Want some advice?” Undean said.

“Not really.”

“Buy ’em,” Undean said. “Buy the memoirs and all the rights thereto. It’ll save you one hell of a lot of grief and money in the long run.”

The courtly man rose with a smile that was neither warm nor cold. A room-temperature smile, Undean decided. A smile of dismissal.

“It’s been awfully nice chatting with you again, Gilbert,” Keyes said as he came around the rosewood desk, waited for Undean to rise, put a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder and gently guided him to the door.