While people tagged up on these public codes and incantations, baby talk took over private conversation — naughty and cranky, in particular. Personal treachery and acts of violence were naughty. Citizens in the middle of small betrayals or murder trials described themselves as in a cranky mood. Murders, generally, were called brutal and senseless slayings, to distinguish them from all other murders; nouns thus became glued to adjectives, in series, which gave an appearance of shoring them up. The concept of the jig itself being up, however, had retreated into thrillers. Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn’t remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether. It was in the interest of absolutely nobody to get to the bottom of anything whatever. People were no longer “caught” in the old sense on which most people could agree. Induction, detection, the very thrillers everyone was reading were obsolete. The jig was never up. In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, “You’re too hard on yourself.”
The frail, serious four-year-old boy stood, arms outspread, at the foot of the staircase. He looked at his infant sister, who stood three steps above. “Jump, baby,” he said, gravely, encouragingly. She summoned her courage, let go of the banister, and jumped. He caught her, but since she was quite plump, she flattened him. “Good baby,” he said, when his breath had returned. Then he went to his room, put on his pajamas, and lay down for his nap. Every day, when he got home from school, they repeated this process. It was his way of taking her education in hand.
At twenty-six, Kate, though not promiscuous, had slept with most of the decent men in public life. When our first campaign spokesman returned from a press conference saying, “My dears, I’ve never been so buffeted,” Kate left her job at the museum and took over a lot of the campaign’s hardest work. On a summer Monday, after a morning rally, Kate was walking along Forty-second Street from the subway station. She saw a tall, young, scholarly-looking man obviously about to say something to her. “Excuse me,” he said at last. He said he was from the Stanford urban-contaminations study. Kate said nothing. “Sidewalks,” he went on, frowning slightly. “Sidewalk contamination.” He said they were working on the right shoes of pedestrians. He wondered whether he might take a slide from hers? Kate nodded. She felt a flash of unease the moment she leaned against a wall and raised her foot to take the shoe off. He was already on the sidewalk, quietly licking the sole. No passerby took any notice. In another moment, he had stood up and walked away.
Our committee, which means well but has as yet no name, no charter, and no acronym, meets every month. We drink and talk, and plan, and have dinners that begin with sherry watered down in turtle soup. At our last meeting, our distinguished painter, who is also rich, suggested that, for our next public symposium, we invite poets to speak, in prose, of their views of the contemporary world. The painter spoke at length of the unique vision poets have of things, their lack of veniality or institutional affiliation; their quality, in short, of divine ecstasy.
“Have you known many poets, Mr. Hardemeyer?” our distinguished historian, a lady, asked.
“Stacks,” Mr. Hardemeyer replied.
It had been a bad day at nursery school. One of the class’s six Kevins had been left in the Park. The children had been out there for an hour. The teacher noticed what she took to be a disreputable lingerer in the bushes near the pond. She went for the police. Kevin went to the statue of Alice and sat down. The teacher returned and put the children on the school bus. When they got back to the classroom, the teacher noticed she was one child short. Hysterical, she called the precinct and the mother. The officer on duty thought it best to have the mother wait at the station, while a patrolman and the teacher went back to the Park to look.
Kevin, it turned out, had climbed down from the statue of Alice and found no one. A man, probably the original lingerer in the bushes, had taken him for a walk and bought him an ice-cream cone. Kevin had not wanted an ice-cream cone especially. Having incurred enough losses in one day, he respected his obligations in the matter of adults. He returned, with his cone, to the statue, and waited to be found. The patrolman and the teacher did find Kevin. They brought him to his mother, who had behaved admirably from the first. It turned out that every single child on the school bus had known that one of their Kevins was missing. They had not mentioned it to the driver, or their teacher, or each other. They took it that Kevin had been left, forever, for some reason, which would become clear to them, with patience, in the course of time.
Here’s who, of course, is out there in this city: all those Kevins (the class also includes four Wendys), the teacher, the mother, our staff at the paper, Myrnie, Lothar, the Cardinal, the committee, Lewis the barber, Mel, the unions, Bernstein, O’Malley, Garcia, Jones.
Lothar was on the board of a museum, two projects in urban renewal, a television network, a public utility, a college, a film institute, and a foundation, which, after several disheartening experiences with projects that became “controversial,” confined itself to very expensive, highly critical studies of other foundations’ work in dealing with the problems of the poor. Lothar knew, and was consulted by, many politicians, whom he numbered among his closest friends. When, not infrequently, two such politicians were running against each other, Lothar was asked which one he favored. “All I can tell you,” he would say, “is that they are both among my closest friends.” If, however, there was a considerable difference in age between two friends running for a single office, Lothar gave one to know that, consistent with his openness to ideas, he preferred the younger man.
Lothar permitted — in fact, encouraged — his wife to take an interest. Myrnie liked to travel in the South. She took part in almost all of Lothar’s public-service projects. Sometimes, rarely, she had occasion to worry about Lothar’s state of mind. Lothar’s early upbringing had been religious, fundamentalist. He was high-church now, and had not been, in forty years, devout. An office building that he owned distressed him. It was vacant. It had been vacant for a long, long time. Myrnie noticed that Lothar was sleeping badly. It was not so much the money. Creative problem-solving had been the pride of Lothar’s youth and middle age. There was, of course, the money question, too. Myrnie gave the matter thought. One evening when Lothar was at his health club, Myrnie invited the Cardinal for a drink. Myrnie and the Cardinal had met at board meetings of one sort or another. They had weathered scandals. They had been relieved, together, when the museum scandal was so rapidly replaced by the Equity Funding scandal, the Queens District Attorney Ponzi racket scandal, the famous restaurants with sanitary violations scandal, the Boy Scouts of America local chapters padded enrollment scandal, the Biaggi testimony before the grand jury scandal, the Soap Box Derby scandal, the firemen’s union strike-vote scandal — in fact, so many scandals, local, personal, and national, that it was hard to sustain attention to any single one.