Busy as I was following the campaign trains, concerned as I was for the success of my bad scheme, I saw all this in Eisenhower and in Stevenson. They were like heavy bags of precious coins, like treasure in firm caskets at the bottom of the sea.
(I have just thought of something. Perhaps cause and effect are somehow mixed up here. Perhaps we pick our leaders as we pick our actors — for their looks; perhaps the great are destined by nothing so much as their physical well-being; perhaps the world is all appearance. Is this the meaning of life? I may have stumbled onto something. I shall have to think about it.)
I was reminded of all this again last night when I met Dr. Morton Perlmutter.
Perlmutter was not yet at the Gibbenjoys’ when I arrived. When I am operating on a contraband invitation I take care to come after the other guests. In that way I am often unnoticed by the host, who, after all, doesn’t usually have any idea who I am. If you have to arrive at an affair late, it is important to be precisely as drunk as the other guests by the time you get there.
The Gibbenjoys were in the hall when I presented my invitation to their butler. I didn’t know they were the Gibbenjoys, of course. All I saw were some men and women in evening dress talking to each other, but I couldn’t take any chances. Indeed, it’s only logical that if someone is standing in the hall it’s probably the host or hostess. If I walked past without acknowledging them they might have blown the whistle on me immediately.
I walked by the group slowly and gazed warmly into their faces. It was my trickiest maneuver; with it I try to make it appear that I am personally known to all the group save the individual I am immediately looking at. It requires the nerves and timing of an acrobat. I look expectantly and just a shade blankly into a face, and at precisely the instant when recognition and intelligence must dawn or be abandoned, I flash a smile of recognition and overwhelming intimacy immediately to the person’s left. (Most people are right-handed so their peripheral vision is greater on their right than on their left side.) I may even wink. Frequently there is nothing to the person’s left except a statue or a piece of drapery. So precise and delicately off-center is this movement that even when someone actually is there he takes my look as intended for someone to his right. There are variations; sometimes I have tilted my head back, smiled, opened my mouth and exhaled an inaudible “Ah, there!” to pictures on the wall just behind and above the fellow in front of me.
I peered into the faces of the small gathering, nervous, as I say, that my host and hostess might be among them. If they were, my technique would flush a nod from one of them.
“Hello there,” a man said uncertainly. “Nice to see you.”
“Good evening, Irving,” I said without hesitation.
The man looked startled and for a moment I thought I might have made a mistake. Then he glanced in desperation toward a woman in a rose-colored evening gown and I knew I was all right. I turned to the woman quickly. “Eugenie,” I said. “How are you, darling?” I leaned down and brushed Mrs. Gibbenjoy’s confused face with a deft kiss. I turned back to Irving. “Perlmutter here yet?” I asked.
“Why no, not yet. We were waiting for him,” he said.
“He told me he’d be a little late,” I said, “but I thought he’d certainly be here by now.”
“No,” Irving Gibbenjoy said, “Not yet. We’re waiting for him.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, look, I’ll go get a drink. When he comes in tell him Jim Boswell wants to see him.”
“Yes. Yes, I will, of course,” Irving brightened at once. “Oh, Mr. Boswell, forgive me for being so rude. You may not know all these other people.” I blew a kiss to a waiter serving drinks in a room behind Irving Gibbenjoy’s back; I waved the fingers on my left hand to an umbrella stand just as a woman walked by. She stopped, turned, and pointing to herself mouthed, “Who, me?” I looked back hastily at Irving Gibbenjoy. “Mr. and Mrs. Philo Perce,” Irving Gibbenjoy said.
I bowed to Mrs. Perce, shook Mr. Perce’s hand.
“General and Mrs. Bill Manara,” said Irving.
“General,” I said, “I go to all your wars. Mrs. Manara.”
“Hope Fayespringer.”
“Ah,” I said, “the Carnegie. How’s Granddad?”
“Mr. Jim Boswell, everybody,” Irving said a little uncomfortably.
“Are you a Philadelphian, Mr. Boswell?” the General asked me. Irving looked eager, thinking that now, perhaps, he might learn something about his guest.
“Not for some time, General,” I said.
“Where do you live now, Mr. Boswell?” Mrs. Gibbenjoy wanted to know. She was a tough one, Mrs. Gibbenjoy. It did not do actually to lie to these people. One hoped that the necessity for the truth simply did not come up.
“I’m at the Love right now, Eugenie.”
“The love?” said Hope Fayespringer.
“It’s a hotel,” I said.
“In Philadelphia?” the General asked.
“For some time, General.”
“Is that one of yours, Pilchard?” Mr. Gibbenjoy asked a man who had just joined us.
“What’s that, the Love? Lord, no, I wish it were. It’s a gold mine. It’s actually a kind of flophouse at the bad end of Market Street. Marvelous profits. Fresh linen just once a week. What do you pay, young man, a dollar a night?”
“One fifty.”
“There, you see? An enormously successful enterprise. Fellow named Penner owns it. He buys some of his supplies from us. There’s a motto on his letter head: ‘For We Have the Poor Always With Us.’ I tell you, Hilton and Sheraton and Pick and I are in the wrong field. A chain of flops, that’s the thing. Can’t you see it? ‘The Bowery Pilchard.’ ‘Skid Row East, a Pilchard Enterprise.’ It makes the mouth water. ‘For We Have the Poor Always With Us.’”
Mrs. Manara and Irving Gibbenjoy looked from Pilchard to me doubtfully. General Manara smiled, and Mrs. Gibbenjoy rubbed her cheek where I had kissed her.
“Do I know you, Mr. Boswell? When you came in and looked at our little group I had the impression we’d met,” Irving said.
“No, sir. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Is Mr. Boswell your friend, Eugenie?”
“No. He’s not.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Boswell,” Irving said, “this must be embarrassing for you, but may I ask how you’re here?”
“I crashed.”
“Do people do that?” Mrs. Perce asked.
“But you had an invitation,” Irving said. “I saw you hand it to Miller.”
“It was an invitation to a bar mitzvah, Irving,” I said.
“Oh,” Irving said.
“You’ve not come to rob us, have you?” Hope Fayespringer asked, touching her necklace.
“Well, of course not,” I said.
“Well, you can’t stay,” Irving said.
“Why not?” I asked. “I probably know some of the people here.”
“You do?” Mrs. Manara said.
“From other parties,” I said.
“That makes no difference. You’ll have to leave,” Irving said.
“All right,” I said. “I hope I haven’t spoiled anything.”
“No, of course not,” Irving said. “Actually it’s rather flattering of you to try to crash, but… well, I just can’t have it. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
“I quite understand.”
I turned to leave, then looked back. “General Manara,” I said, “it’s been delightful.”
“Yes, it has,” General Manara said.