“Do you ever come down to New York?” she asked.

“Once in awhile.”

“If you’ll let me know, the next time you’re coming,” she said, “I’ll get tickets for a show. Bring your girl, if you want. I’d like to meet her.”

“She’s nothing much,” Billy said.

“Anyway, let me know.”

“Sure.”

“How are you doing in your work?” she asked.

Billy made a face.

“Rudolph says you’re not doing very well. He says there’s a chance that you’ll be dropped from school.”

“Being Mayor of this burg must be an easy job,” Billy said, “if he has time to check up on how many classes I cut a semester.”

“If you get kicked out, you’ll be drafted. Do you want that?”

“Who cares?” Billy said. “The Army can’t be more boring than most of the courses around here.”

“Do you ever think about me?” Immensely wrong. Classically wrong. But she had said it. “How do you think I’d feel if you were sent to Viet Nam?”

“Men fight and women weep,” Billy said. “Why should you and I be different?”

“Do you do anything about trying to change things? About stopping the war, for example? A lot of students all over the country are working day and night to …”

“Kooks,” Billy said. “Wasting their time. The war’s too good a racket for too many big. shots. What do they care what a few spastic kids do? If you want, I’ll take your button and wear it. Big deal. The Pentagon will quake when they hear that Billy Abbott is protesting against the bomb.”

“Billy,” Gretchen stopped walking and faced him, “are you interested in anything?”

“Not really,” he said calmly. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“All I hope,” Gretchen said, “is that it’s a pose. A silly, adolescent pose.”

“It’s not a pose,” he said. “And I’m not an adolescent, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m a big, grown man and I think everything stinks. If I were you, I’d forget about me for awhile. If it’s any hardship to you to send me the money to keep me in school, don’t send it. If you don’t like the way I am and you’re blaming yourself for the way I turned out, maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. I’m sorry to have to talk this way, but there’s one thing I know I don’t want to be and that’s a hypocrite. I think you’ll be happier if you don’t have to worry about me, so you go back to my dear Uncle Rudolph and to your dear Evans Kinsella and I’ll go back to my ball game.” He turned and strode away, along the path toward the playing fields.

Gretchen watched him until he was just a small blue-and-gray figure in the distance, then walked slowly, heavily, toward where she had parked Rudolph’s car.

There was no sense in staying for the whole weekend anymore. She had a quiet dinner with Rudolph and Jean and took the morning train down to New York.

When she got back to her hotel, there was a message from Evans saying that he couldn’t have dinner with her that night.

Chapter 6

1967

On the plane down to Dallas, Johnny Heath, sitting next to him, was going through a briefcase full of papers. Rudolph was going through his own briefcase full of papers. He had to submit the budget for the next year to the town council and he frowned as he went over the thick booklet which contained the Comptroller’s estimates. The price of everything was going up, the police and fire departments, the public school staffs, and the clerical employees were all due for a rise in salary; there was an alarming increase in the number of welfare recipients, especially in the Negro section of town; a new sewage-disposal plant was on the books; everybody was fighting tax increases; state and federal aid were being kept at their old levels. Here I am, he thought, at thirty thousand feet, worrying about money again.

Johnny Heath was worrying about money in the seat next to his, too, but at least it was his own money, and Rudolph’s. Brad Knight had moved his office from Tulsa to Dallas after his father had died, and the purpose of their trip was to confer with Brad about their investments in the Peter Knight and Son Oil Company. Suddenly, Brad had seemed to have lost his touch, and they had found themselves investing in one dry hole after another. Even the wells that had come in had suffered from a series of disasters, salt water, collapsing shale, unpredictable, expensive formations to drill through. Johnny Heath had made some quiet investigations and was sure Brad had been rigging his report and was stealing from them and had been doing so for some time. The figures Johnny had come up with looked conclusive, but Rudolph refused to move against Brad until they had had it out in person. It seemed impossible to him that a man he had known so long and so well could turn like that. Despite Virginia Calderwood.

When the plane landed, Brad wasn’t at the airport to greet them. Instead, he had sent an assistant, a burly, tall man in a brown straw hat, a string tie, and a madras jacket, who made Mr. Knight’s excuses (he was tied up in a meeting, the assistant said) and drove with them in an air-conditioned Cadillac along a road that throbbed in heat mirages, to the hotel in the center of Dallas where Brad had rented a suite with a salon and two bedrooms for Johnny and Rudolph.

The hotel was brand new and the rooms were decorated in what the decorator must have thought was a Lone Star improvement of Second Empire. On a long table against the wall were ranged six bottles of bourbon, six of Scotch, six of gin and vodka, plus a bottle of vermouth, a filled ice bucket, dozens of bottles of Coke and soda water, a basket of lemons, a huge bowl of oversized fruit, and an array of glasses of all sizes.

“You’ll find beer and champagne in the refrigerator in the closet,” the assistant said. “If that’s your pleasure. You’re the guests of Mr. Knight.”

“We’re only staying overnight,” Rudolph said.

“Mr. Knight told me to make you gentlemen comfortable,” the assistant said. “You’re in Texas now.”

“If they had all this stuff at the Alamo,” Rudolph said, “they’d still be holding out.”

The assistant laughed politely and said that Mr. Knight was almost sure to be free by five P.M. It was a little past three now. “Remember,” he said, as he left, “if you gentlemen need anything, you call me at the office, hear?”

“Window dressing,” Johnny said, with a gesture for the suite and the table loaded with drink.

Rudolph felt a twinge of irritation with Johnny and his automatic reflex of suspicion in all situations.

“I have some calls to make,” Rudolph said. “Let me know when Brad arrives.” He went into his own room and closed the door.

He called his home first. He tried to call Jean at least three times each day. He had finally taken Gretchen’s advice and there was no liquor in the house, but Whitby was full of liquor stores and bars. No worry today. Jean was cheerful and bright. It was raining in Whitby. She was taking Enid to her first children’s party. Two months before, she had had an accident while driving drunk with Enid in the rear seat. The car had been demolished but aside from a few scratches neither of them had been hurt.

“What’s it like in Dallas?” she asked.

“All right for Texans, I suppose,” Rudolph said. “Intolerable for the rest of the human race.”

“When will you be back?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Hurry,” she said. He hadn’t told her why he and Johnny had had to come to Texas. Sober, she was depressed by duplicity.

He then called his office at the Town Hall and got his secretary on the phone. His secretary was a young man, a little effeminate, but usually serene. He wasn’t serene this afternoon. There had been a demonstration of students that morning in front of the offices of the Sentinel because of an editorial in favor of the continued existence of the ROTC at the university. Rudolph had approved the editorial himself, as it was moderate and had not advocated compulsory military training but said it should be open to those students who felt that they wanted a career in the armed forces or even those students who felt that in case of need they would like to be ready to defend their country. The sweet voice of reason had not helped to mollify the demonstrators. A rock had been thrown through a plate-glass window and the police had had to be called. President Dorlacker, of the university, had phoned, in a black mood, the secretary said, and had said, quote, If he’s the Mayor, why isn’t he at his desk? Unquote. Rudolph had not deigned to tell the secretary the nature of his business. Police Chief Ottman had been into the office, looking harassed. Something very, very important, Ottman had said. The Mayor was to get back to him soonest. Albany had telephoned twice. A Black delegation had presented a petition about something to do with a swimming pool.