Mr. Adam (7 page)

“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.

CHAPTER 6

B
efore I opened my eyes, the next morning, I could smell coffee, and for some time there seemed no doubt that I was in Smith Field, and that Marge had wakened me first. I didn't hear coffee bubbling, however, nor did I hear the radio, nor did Marge tickle me behind the ears, the way she usually did when it was time to get up. I just smelled coffee. I opened my eyes and discovered that I was in the Adam suite, but that something new had been added.

I won't describe her the way she first appeared to me, because that would be unfair. I will describe her the way she was, and is. Jane Zitter, in her way, is a wonderful girl. Wonderful. It is true that she is not beautiful, in the sense that The Frame is beautiful, or Fay Sumner Knott is beautiful, or Marge is beautiful. She has something beyond regular features, a perfect complexion, or streamlined legs. Jane Zitter is part of the workaday world. She is as much a part as a freighter that carries its seven thousand tons of grain at a steady eight knots. No glamour, just service.

She is a little person all around. She isn't very tall, and she isn't
filled out in the right places. About the best you can say for her clothes is that they are neat, and her thick glasses make her eyes larger and rounder than they actually are, so that she appears perpetually startled.

She'll never get to be a secretary to a Secretary to the President. She is simply a lubricant for the wheels of government. When the oil becomes gritty with age it is changed, and nobody knows what happens to the old and cracked and tired oil. All that matters is that the wheels still turn.

I opened my eyes and Jane shoved a cup of coffee at me, black. “I suppose you wonder who I am,” she began.

“Oh, no! Not at all! I expect to wake up with strange females in my bedroom.”

“Mr. Smith, I hope I didn't make a mistake. I'm your secretary. My name is Jane Zitter and I'm your secretary and everything was piling up so that I thought it best that if Mr. Smith wouldn't go to the office then the office had better go to Mr. Smith.”

I told her I thought this was very nice of the office, and it was an arrangement of which I approved, particularly if the office appeared with black coffee. “But I really don't see why I have to have an office at all,” I added. “You see, I'm not a real executive of N.R.P. I'm just a sort of glorified nurse-maid.”

Jane turned her startled eyes on my red pajamas. “But if you didn't have an office, how would you answer your mail, and your telegrams, and dictate your memoranda?”

“I'm not going to dictate any memoranda,” I said firmly. “Not a one.”

“But you have to dictate memoranda,” Jane said. “People write you memoranda, and you have to write them back. Why, already you've received a whole envelope full, and I've got them with me, in case you care to work here. You see, you're quite an important man, Mr. Smith, being Special Assistant to the Director, and so you get copies of all the really important memoranda
that originate in National Re-fertilization, plus the important inter-office and inter-departmental memos, even those classified secret and top secret.”

I could see she was genuinely serious, and so I decided to be serious too because I didn't want my secretary to have any delusions that I was a Klutz, or even a half-Klutz. “Look, Miss Zitter,” I said, pushing myself up in bed, “under no circumstances—not ever—will I write a memorandum to anyone about anything. That is a pledge. May God strike me dead if I do!”

“Oh, Mr. Smith—”

“Never, so help me Christ!”

“But you don't understand, Mr. Smith. If you don't answer the memoranda, or at least initial them, the files would never get cleared! You see, here's the way it works. Suppose Mr. Klutz sent you a memo.”

“God forbid!”

Jane went on persistently and patiently. “Well, suppose Mr. Klutz sent a memo to Mr. Gableman, for action, with copies to you and the other members of the Planning Board for information. Well, until everybody has done something about that memo, it hasn't been cleared up or settled, and the file clerks cannot put it in the files.”

“It floats around in a kind of limbo?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Unless I initial a memo it can never die?”

“It can never die, Mr. Smith. It just keeps coming back to you and coming back to you from the communications section, and they write covering memos to you calling your attention to the first memo, and so on, and this complicates things. Please, Mr. Smith, I hope you will do something about this, because if you don't people will think I'm inefficient, and I'll get some kind of bad report on my 201 file, and I'll never be able to get my classification changed.”

She appeared solemn, and a bit pitiful, and she was obviously such a nice girl. “I'll make a deal,” I said. “You learn to make my
initials, and you initial every memo that comes to the office. That's all you have to do.”

“Won't you ever read any of them?”

“Never!”

“Well, certainly you'll read some of the directives. Everybody reads the directives, because they're classified secret.”

“Never!”

Jane Zitter shook her head. “Oh, dear, Mr. Smith, the N.R.P. is such a strange organization, and you are such a strange man! Sometimes I think I should never have left Interior. I get six hundred more with N.R.P. than I did with Interior, and I thought working with N.R.P. would be more progressive, and advanced, and even exciting. But I never thought it would be anything like this.” She looked again at my red pajamas. “I suppose you're crazy,” she reflected, “and I'll probably get into trouble, but I won't let you down.”

I remembered Homer, in his bedroom down the hall, and wondered whether I'd fed him enough drinks to afflict him with a hangover. Jane seemed to anticipate my question. “Mr. Adam,” she said, “went out.”

“Went out?”

“Oh, yes. He went out an hour ago. I told him I didn't know whether he should or not, but he said you had said he could do anything he pleased. And out he went.”

“Did he say where?”

“He said somebody had called and he had made an engagement to discuss archeology. He didn't say where or with whom. He just said, ‘I'm going to see a person about archeology.' He appeared very happy about it, and chipper. He even tried to comb his hair.”

“Oh, my,” I said. “He's been kidnaped by The Frame!”

“The Frame!”

I scrambled out of bed. “Either turn your head or go into the next room,” I told Jane. “We've got to find out what this is all about.”
She apparently didn't think I was especially dangerous, because she simply turned her head.

I dressed in a hurry, although I wasn't actually worried. As a matter of fact, the thought of Homer being interested in The Frame was in some ways encouraging. At least one inhibition was breaking down, and for a man in Homer's position, such an inhibition was not good for the soul. Further, it seemed a good sign that his lethargy and despondency could be cured. He could go out with The Frame if he wanted—so long as complications didn't develop. However, I wasn't going to allow any Hollywood press agent to use Homer for creating headlines. If Homer found relaxation and a measure of escape with The Frame, it was one thing. But as a publicity stunt, it was out.

I called the Press Club, located Finney, and got him on the phone. “Look, Oscar,” I said, “that bimbo of yours is out with my boy Homer, and it smells ungood.”

“Oh, is that where she went?” Oscar said. “I've been trying to reach her all morning, because I'm going to New York.”

“You know damn well that's where she is,” I said.

“No. Honest, Steve, I didn't.” He sounded like he was telling the truth.

“Oscar,” I warned him, “don't try to pull any stunts with Adam. This business is too fundamental to mess it up just for the sake of a little publicity.”

Finney hesitated a moment before he answered. Finally he said, “Steve, I'll lay it on the line. Kathy herself suggested it would be a smart pitch to hook her up with Adam. She's been after me about it for days. Last night when I saw you and Adam in the Blue Room I thought I'd go ahead with it. Then I thought, no, I'd better not. For one thing, from now on Kathy's got to make her name on the screen, and not in the papers. And it might have bad repercussions, especially with the women. She's not too popular with the women
now, for a number of obvious reasons, and if it looked as if she were trying to snag the only whole male on earth, she might get decidedly unpopular. You saw how that amateur Borgia acted last night. I told Riddell to lay off. I told her that grabbing Adam would be like stealing the U.S. Mint, and it would be bad box office. So she said okay, and if she's out with Adam, then it's news to me. Do you know where they are?”

“Haven't the foggiest notion,” I said, and added, “Don't get me wrong. I don't mind Homer seeing Kitty—or Kathy—so long as it doesn't break into print. It might be good for Homer.”

“Have you ever seen a pregnant starlet?” Oscar inquired.

“Don't worry,” I reassured him, “Homer is shy and harmless. Nothing like that is going to happen.”

“Riddell isn't harmless,” Oscar said. “Furthermore, she might get ideas. All the women seem to be crazy nowadays. There are plenty of girls out on the Coast who wouldn't think of spoiling their figures by having babies when babies could be begat by their own husbands with no trouble at all. Now that they can't have 'em, they all want 'em.”

I told Oscar I would be responsible. It occurred to me that for a newspaperman who had always watched other people carrying the world's burdens I was making myself responsible for a lot of things.

It wasn't hard to locate Adam and The Frame, for as I pointed out he was not a person who could vanish into the stream of humanity without a ripple. The doorman at the Shoreham remembered that Mr. Adam had taken a cab to the Smithsonian Institute. Jane wondered why, and I told her about the archeological mating of Homer and The Frame.

At the Smithsonian we went to the South American annex. It was a good guess. We found Homer and the girl sitting on a stone bench, her tawny hair barely brushing his shoulder, staring steadfastly at what appeared to be a large and ornately carved stone altar.
Behind them, glaring from the wall, was a horrid wooden mask, with tusks, which could frighten large adults.

I will say this for The Frame. She not only had a shape on which to hang clothes, but apparently she possessed an instinct for what clothes to hang on the shape. Now she looked as if she had just been voted the Best Dressed Senior in her college. I don't recall exactly what she wore, except that it was something with a wide belt and a flaring skirt, and it gave her that collegiate look which blends so well with an interest in archeology.

“Hello, people,” I greeted them. “If you want to be alone I can think of more comfy places, without goons like that.” I nodded at the mask.

They didn't appear particularly happy to see us. “I hope you don't mind, Steve,” Homer protested. “You're not going to be a Phelps-Smythe, are you? You said I could do whatever I wanted, you know.”

“Of course, Homer,” I soothed him, “but just let me know what's going on. If you start wandering off, and I don't know where you are, people might not understand. First thing you know you'll find yourself being tailed by the FBI and the Secret Service and Army G-2, and maybe Abel Pumphrey himself—it would frighten him so.”

“We were followed,” said The Frame. “I'm sure of it.”

“Honest?”

“Absolutely,” said Homer.

“By who?”

“I don't know. Kathy noticed him first. I never got a good look at him. But he's somewhere in the building now.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I'll find out about it. So long as you don't get in a jam, what the hell? People can't object to you taking an interest in some old stones or mummy cases.”

Jane Zitter looked worried. “That might depend,” she observed, “as to who's acting as guide.” I noticed that Jane and The Frame were eyeing each other like a pair of strange tabbies, and remembered the introductions. Then I asked, casually:

“And how is archeology today?”

“We were just discussing the legend of Tezcatlipoca,” The Frame remarked coolly. “Although one cannot really call it a legend, since it has been so well authenticated.”

“It must be fascinating.”

“It is for poor Homer,” said The Frame, “because he can see himself in it.”

Homer's lips smiled, but his eyes were sad as a spaniel's. “That is quite true,” he said, and explained.

It seems that one of the most bizarre Aztec rites was in honor of the god Tezcatlipoca, the god of fertility and creation. He was depicted as a young man, and handsome. Once each year the Aztecs picked a young man to represent the god. For a year he lived in splendor, and led the most exotic kind of life. His clothes were the finest, he was sprinkled daily with perfume, and flowers were thrown in his path when he went abroad. He was attended by the royal pages, and the people prostrated themselves when they saw him.

Four beautiful girls, each bearing the name of a goddess—or more if he wanted them—were his.

Things went along like this for a year, but at the end of a year they took him to the top of their highest pyramid, and stretched him naked on a sacrificial stone of jasper. “Just like this one,” Homer said.

Then a red-robed priest zipped open his chest and cut out his heart with a volcanic stone knife, holding it aloft towards the sun. The corpse was thrown to the foot of the pyramid. “And then,” Homer continued, shuddering, “they ate him!”

“I would not worry too much about that last part,” I told him. “They might find some soup bones on you, but I don't see any steaks.”

The Frame leaned against Homer. “I think he is perfectly fine as he is,” she said. “You are just trying to fatten him up so you can use him for your own purposes—all of you.”