The Porkchoppers Page 16

  19

  The auditorium of the Calumet City high school was packed with 2,711 local union members, including wives and girl friends, who had paid a dollar for ten chances on a shiny new fiber-glass Chris-Craft cruiser that retailed for $6,499. The cruiser now rested on a trailer that was parked on stage next to the blue and white state flag that was correctly displayed on the audience’s right.

  Donald Cubbin arrived at the high school in Fred Mure’s black Oldsmobile. He sat in front with Mure and in back were Oscar Imber, Charles Guyan, and Kelly Cubbin. A phone call from Fred Mure had produced a Chicago squad car that used its flashing top light to shepherd Cubbin’s car from the Sheraton-Blackstone to Calumet City. A block from the high school the squad car switched on its siren, thus enabling Cubbin to make something of an entrance.

  While the officials of the local union were welcoming Cubbin, Fred Mure walked over to the squad car. He held out his hand to the cop behind the wheel and said, “Thanks, you guys.”

  The cop felt the folded bills and grinned at Mure. “Anytime, Mr. Mure.” He glanced down and saw that Mure had slipped him two twenties. “We’ll be glad to stick around a little while, if you think you might need us.”

  “No, we can find our way back all right,” Mure said and patted the sill of the car door.

  “Well, thanks a lot,” the cop said.

  “Sure thing,” Mure said and turned away, reaching for his notebook. He went back to his own car and used its interior light to write down, “Chicago Police Escort, $75.” Then he moved over to join Cubbin and the local union’s welcoming committee.

  “Well, you’re sure looking good, Don,” the local union president was telling Cubbin for the fourth time.

  “Feeling fine, Harry, really fine. You got a pretty good crowd?”

  “Packed,” Harry said. “Right up to the roof.”

  “What’s the schedule?”

  “Well, you’re the big attraction, just like I told you you’d be. No other speakers except me when I introduce you and I’m gonna make that sweet, but short. Of course we’re gonna pledge allegiance to the flag and then we got some fella who used to sing with Fred Waring who’s gonna lead us in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and then after I introduce you well, you’re on.”

  “When did he sing with Waring?” Cubbin said.

  “I think back in forty or forty-one.”

  “Huh,” Cubbin said. “What’s he do now?”

  “He teaches music here in the high school and sings around at funerals and weddings and stuff like that. I guess he’s over sixty now but he can still carry a tune pretty good.”

  They led Donald Cubbin through a side door to the high school and down a corridor to the backstage entrance of the auditorium. The group made its way down the corridor, with the local union officials jockeying for advantageous positions close to either Cubbin’s right or left elbows.

  Inside the auditorium Charles Guyan found that all three networks had already set up their cameras, lights, and sound equipment. The three newsmen were standing together near the stage. Guyan went over to them and said, “Welcome to Calumet City, gentlemen.”

  “We’re all atremble,” the CBS man said and shook hands with Guyan who then shook hands with the two men from ABC and NBC.

  “I thought you were down in Guatemala or some such place,” Guyan said to the ABC man.

  “I was in some such and now I’m being punished. You got a copy of his speech?”

  “Here,” Guyan said and gave each of them two copies. “The more brilliant passages are noted in the margin in case you don’t want to read the whole thing.”

  “Who’s writing his stuff now?” the NBC man asked.

  “Don still writes his own,” Guyan said. “He stays up all night and writes on parchment with a quill pen. I thought you knew that.”

  “I forgot,” the NBC man said as he scanned the speech. “Where’s he reply to Sammy?”

  “It’s not in the speech,” Guyan said. “He’ll probably say something about it in the beginning.”

  “He say anything else?” the CBS man said.

  “He makes a passing reference to what a wonderful job he’s done for the union,” Guyan said.

  “Anything nasty about Sammy?” the ABC man said.

  “Page five,” Guyan said. “I think he calls him a man with a ‘chronic case of the can’ts.’”

  Guyan moved off toward the cafeteria table that had been set up in the space just beyond the stage for five men whose professionally bored expressions told Guyan that they were gentlemen of the press. Nobody else in the world, he thought, can look quite that bored.

  Backstage in a small dressing room Donald Cubbin was combing his long silver hair. He wore a dark blue suit, a blue and white polka dot tie, and a white shirt. He had slept for two hours that afternoon and after that he had gone down to the hotel barbershop for a shave and a massage. Now he looked rested, pink, and sober, which he almost was. He turned from the mirror and asked his son and Fred Mure, “Do I look okay?”

  “Fine,” Mure said. “You look great, Don.”

  “Kelly?”

  “Great.”

  “Where’s my speech?”

  “Here,” Kelly said, handing him the ten-page speech that had been typed on a special machine in twenty-four-point capital letters. Cubbin glanced at the first page and then flipped quickly through the rest of it. He glanced up at the ceiling and moved his lips silently. Then he nodded to himself and looked at Fred Mure.

  “Well, shit, Fred, I guess I’ll have one for the road,” Cubbin said and glanced at his son as if to see how Kelly would take the news. Kelly grinned at his father. “You don’t have to check with me.”

  “Well, I don’t like to drink in front of you like this,” Cubbin said as he reached for the half-pint of Ancient Age that Mure held out to him.

  “I’m not my father’s keeper,” Kelly said.

  “Yeah, well, by God, I’m beginning to think he needs one,” Cubbin said as he handed the bottle back.

  There was a knock at the door and Fred Mure answered it after slipping the half-pint into his coat pocket. It was the local union president, a little nervous, but trying to conceal it.

  “I guess we’re ready if you are, Don.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” Cubbin said.

  “Well, you get in here behind me in the middle and then we’ll go out and sit down on the stage.”

  There were twelve men standing around outside the dressing room in dark suits and white shirts and ties, all of which seemed to have too much red in them. They were the officers and board members of the local union.

  “Here, you mean?” Cubbin said, indicating a space between two men.

  “No, just up there ahead of Dick.”

  “Here, you mean?”

  “Yeah that’s fine.”

  The local union president looked around and decided that they were in as much of a line as they would ever be. “Okay,” he said, “let’s move on out.” The twelve local union officials and their international president, all wearing expressions that were grim enough for such a solemn occasion, expressions that indeed would have been appropriate for a hanging, moved out onto the stage to scattered applause and took their seats in folding chairs that were placed against the green backdrop that bore a large white paper sign that read “WELCOME, PRES. CUBBIN.”

  “You coming out front?” Kelly asked Fred Mure.

  “No, I’ll stay back here in case Don needs me.”

  Kelly nodded and left. By the time he reached his seat in the front row of the auditorium between Guyan and Imber, the young Methodist preacher had finished his prayer for the general welfare of everyone assembled there that night, and especially for their national leaders, and the local union’s secretary-treasurer was introducing his twelve-year-old niece who was going to have the privilege of leading the audience in the pledge of allegiance.

  After the pledge of allegiance the music teacher who had once sung with Fred Waring was int
roduced and he led the audience in the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” accompanied by his wife on the piano. Cubbin thought that for an old guy, the music teacher did pretty well on the high notes.

  Cubbin got a nice hand as he strode to the podium after his introduction. As the applause died Cubbin stood there, his head bowed, not looking at the audience.

  “You ever see him make a speech like this?” Imber whispered to Guyan.

  “Not like this,” Guyan said.

  “He knows what he’s doing.”

  Cubbin stood there for all of a minute, the spotlight gleaming on the silver hair of his bowed head. Slowly he raised his head and looked at the audience, raking it with his eyes until the auditorium was perfectly still.

  When he spoke he made it sound like a whisper, but one that reached all the way to the back rows. He put a great deal of feeling into his tone, a mixture of contempt and bitter scorn:

  “They say that I should quit my job and run.”

  He paused and then repeated the line stronger, louder, and with even more scorn:

  “They say that I should quit my job and run.”

  Another dramatic beat, and then the blast:

  “Quit, hell! I’ve just begun to fight!”

  It brought some of them to their feet cheering and whistling, and those who didn’t rise pounded their hands together as much in anticipation of a good show as in appreciation for Cubbin’s declaration.

  “I’ll be damned,” Guyan said. “What is it? Does he do it every time?”

  “You tell him, Kelly,” Imber said.

  “It’s a combination,” Kelly said. “I don’t think he knows he’s doing it really. He just knows that it works. Did you get those first two lines?”

  Guyan glanced down at some notes he’d made. “Yeah. It’s really not much of a line when you read it: ‘They say that I should quit my job and run.’”

  “‘Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane,’” Kelly said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Five feet to the line, iambic pentameter,” Kelly said. “But he doesn’t only steal the beat from Shakespeare, he also borrows from the blues. The first line of all real blues songs is usually repeated and if you think about it, they’re also iambic pentameter, or try to be.”

  “Does he do it consciously?” Guyan said.

  Kelly shrugged. “He’s been doing it as long as I can remember. I tried to analyze it for him one time, but he wasn’t interested. He said he just kept thinking up lines until he got one that felt right.”

  Donald Cubbin spoke for fifteen minutes and was interrupted by applause twenty-one times. He sat down to a standing ovation that came from an audience that not only liked his speech, but that also wanted to thank him for not speaking too long. The audience was in such a good mood that nobody seriously objected when the $6,499 Chris-Craft was won by the brother-in-law of the local union’s secretary-treasurer.

  20

  In Washington’s Cleveland Park on September 10, a Sunday, Samuel Morse Hanks was seated in his kitchen, drinking coffee, and reading the comics to his daughter Marylin who had turned six the day before.

  Sammy Hanks was reading the comics to his daughter because his father had never read them to him. When his father had died ten years before Hanks had not gone to the funeral. He sometimes thought that he probably would have gone if his father had taken the time to read the comics to him. But his father always had been too concerned with his own private misery to pay much attention to the needs of his son.

  Samuel Morse Hanks, Senior, had spent his life teaching European and American history to the sons and daughters of the men who worked in the plants and factories of Schenectady when those plants and factories were open. Shortly after he had arrived in the town he met a girl who was almost as ugly as he and to whom he quickly proposed marriage, mostly because she had a job in a library. Samuel Morse Hanks, Jr., was born in 1933, inheriting his pickle nose and Punch chin from his father and his bad skin from his mother.

  His mother had lost her library job as soon as she had married because the library had a policy of not employing married women. She had pretended to be surprised when she had been dismissed, although she had known she would be, but she had also known that nobody other than Samuel Morse Hanks, Senior, would ever ask her to marry.

  The earliest emotion that Samuel Morse Hanks, Jr., could remember was anger. He had been an angry child because his parents were poor, ugly, and seldom spoke to him, or for that matter, to each other. The only way that he could draw attention to himself was by throwing tantrums. That sometimes won him a little attention, although not enough, so he increased the number of tantrums, but with diminishing results. The more tantrums he threw, the less attention his parents paid him, until they virtually ignored him just as they ignored each other.

  Until he was fifteen years old, Sammy’s mother maintained what could be called a nodding acquaintance with reality. She cleaned the house sometimes and occasionally cooked meals, although she had a tendency to serve break fast at 6:30 P.M. and dinner at seven in the morning. She had become completely oblivious to her son’s tantrums, although he still produced them, but mostly from habit.

  When Sammy came home from school on his fifteenth birthday his mother was sitting in a chair, motionless, staring without comprehension into what may have been the lower depths of some private hell. She was also completely naked.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sammy said and when his mother didn’t answer, Sammy threw a tantrum, a real beauty that lasted for nearly five minutes. When she didn’t even blink at that he took a blanket from his parents’ bed and threw it over her and then found her purse and stole all she had, eighty-seven cents, and went downtown to a movie.

  When he came back that evening, his mother was still sitting motionless in the chair with the blanket over her. His father was listening to the radio, which was virtually his sole amusement and had been since 1933.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sammy said.

  “I don’t know,” his father said.

  “Maybe you’d better get a doctor.”

  “She’ll snap out of it.”

  Sammy shrugged and went to bed after fixing himself a peanut-butter sandwich. When he got up the next morning he found his mother in the same position except that there was now a large pool of urine on the bare floor under her chair.

  “She’s pissing all over the floor,” he told his father.

  The senior Hanks had shrugged. “Then she can clean it up.”

  When Sammy came home that afternoon his mother had gone, but his father was already there. “What happened to her?”

  “They took her away.”

  “Away where?”

  “To the insane asylum. She’s catatonic. An interesting case, the doctor said.”

  “When’s she coming back?”

  “I don’t know,” his father said. “Perhaps never. Do you mind?”

  “No,” Sammy said. “Do you?”

  “No,” his father said, “I don’t mind.”

  Three weeks later Sammy Hanks was awakened shortly after midnight when his father tried to crawl into bed with him.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Just lie still, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “What do you mean lie still?”

  “Just turn over and lie still; you’ll like it.”

  Sammy Hanks didn’t know what else to do so he threw a tantrum. That didn’t prevent his father from finishing what he had started and when it was over he had giggled and told Sammy, “Thank you very much.”

  By five-thirty that morning Sammy was packed. At five thirty-five he crept into his parents’ bedroom and stole his father’s wallet which contained nine dollars. He never saw his father and mother again, but if anyone ever mentioned his father, Sammy promptly threw a tantrum. He couldn’t help it.

  Twenty-four years and four months later Sammy Hanks was sitting in his kitchen with his slender blond wife and his slender
blond daughter, determined to do for them what his father had never done for him and his mother.

  Sybil Davis Hanks had married Sammy after Donald Cubbin had made him secretary-treasurer of the union because he seemed to worship her, he had a politically acceptable job that paid well, and because it was time for her to get married and Sammy at least didn’t bore her. An additional bonus was the way that his dark ugliness provided a splendid setting for her blond beauty. Sammy had married Sybil because she was everything that his mother had never been.

  Sammy Hanks put down the second section of The Washington Post’s comic strips and tousled his daughter’s blond hair. “That’s all, honey. Why don’t you run out and play in the street?”

  “I’m not supposed to play in the street.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you supposed to play?”

  “In the yard. You know that, Daddy.”

  “I guess you’re right. Okay, why don’t you go out and play in the yard?”

  It was an old joke between father and daughter and both of them still liked it. He also liked to watch her play, sometimes with other children in the neighborhood, and sometimes with her imaginary friends. Marylin hadn’t minded introducing her father to her imaginary friends because she knew that he would treat them with grave respect.

  “We oughta get her a dog, a big one,” he said as his daughter wandered out into the backyard.

  “A St. Bernard or a Great Dane?” Sybil said.

  “I mean a big one. One of those Irish wolfhounds.”

  “Who do you want it for, you or Marylin?”

  Sammy Hanks smiled his charming smile at his wife. “For me, I guess.”

  “You never had a dog?”

  The smile vanished. “No,” he said. “I never had a dog or a cat either.”

  Sybil recognized the danger signals and quickly shifted the topic because Sammy’s childhood was something they had spoken of only twice and both times he had gone into raging tantrums. The first time she had asked casually about his parents. The second time she had done so purposely, to see what would happen, and when she found out she had never mentioned his parents again. Instead, she mothered Sammy a lot because he seemed to like it.