“Tell me,” the anthropologist said urgently, “whether a man sits or stands up to wipe himself, and I’ll tell you everything else about him. This cuts through cultures, Dick. It obliterates history and geography. Dick, it’s the single distinction between men. It annihilates everything else. Religion, laws, custom — these things are nothing. He stands because his mommy wiped him. Do you see this, Dick? He stands now because he still expects some great, warm soft hand to rub his shit away. All else is nothing. Freud never really understood the true significance of the anal-retentive concept. It’s his own term, but he missed the boat. Incidentally, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Freud himself was a stander.”
“I thought this had something to do with the Seminoles.”
“Forget the Seminoles. They’re nothing but a bunch of poor-mouth bastards. Poor mouth, poor mouth, that’s all they know. All that Mighty-Have-Fallen crap. Forget the Seminoles. The Seminoles aren’t my real work anyway. Dick, I have so many ideas, I’m exploding with insights. Truth is everywhere, Dick; significance is as available as gravity. Do you know the best place to learn about a people’s legal and penal system? Its zoos! Go to its zoos, Dick, and you’ll find out more about its laws and prisons in a half-hour than you would in its courts and jails in a year.”
“I don’t—”
“Did you know there are three fundamental pieces of furniture— the table, the bed, and the chair — and that a people behaves according to the article of furniture dominant in its culture? Did you know that the living-room sofa, or couch, is only a sort of hybrid bed, and that it was introduced by the degenerate Assyrians as a means of formalizing adultery?”
“You’re going too fast, I can’t take all this—”
“There’s more. There’s always more. If you miss one truth there’ll be another along. It’s like streetcars. Wait, wait. The Axis Powers were the only nations involved in World War II which didn’t conclude their news broadcasts with weather reports. No question of secrecy was involved; it was simply a matter of the lack of regard for one’s fellows. Since the people within the range of a given broadcast knew whether it was raining or the sun was shining, they didn’t care what was happening in the rest of the country.”
“I don’t see—”
“Flags! Red, green, blue, white, black and gold are the predominant colors used throughout the world for its flags because those are the colors — with the exception of red, which is always blood — that symbolize not only the basic forces of nature but the particular natural forces most valued by a culture. Your flag is a dead giveaway.”
“What has this—”
“Sandwiches! What’s the thickness ratio of the contents of a sandwich relative to its bread? Is lettuce used to add height? This gives us the hypocrisy quotient. Or those little soaps with a hotel’s trademark on the wrapper—”
“What? What about those soaps?”
“Or matchbooks! Matchbooks particularly. Why does a man become attached to the iconography of a particular trademark?”
“Why does he? Is that significant?”
“What’s to be made of the fact that soaps wane with use, that fire consumes the matchstick, that the height of a pile of letterhead stationery goes down in a drawer, that a swizzle stick is made to be snapped in two?”
“What? What is to be made of it?”
“Oh Dick, Dick. My real work isn’t the Seminoles, it isn’t zoos, it isn’t furniture or artifacts. It’s your program. My real work is your program, Dick. Look out, Dick. Be careful. Please be more careful. Watch your step. A scientist is warning you. Don’t take calls after the show. Don’t put people on hold. Get your rest, try not to worry. Be like the man in Cincinnati.”
“Who is this? What’s this all about? What are you saying to me?”
The anthropologist giggled and broke off; Dick heard the buzz of the broken connection. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he was almost certain that the man had been disguising his voice. The giggle had been a sort of sudden relaxation. Something about it had seemed familiar.
And then he remembered. A name flashed into his mind. No, he couldn’t be mistaken. Behr-Bleibtreau! It had to be. The idea was disquieting at first, but later, going back to the Deauville in the car, he was filled with a marvelous sense of relief. An enemy! He had an enemy. An enemy had appeared!
5
Angela called. Dick asked after Robert and the baby. They were both asleep, Angela said, but Robert would be getting up soon. If he wanted she could wake him now. Dick told her to let him sleep.
He asked if she’d be working in the fall — she taught third grade in an all-black Tallahassee public school — but Angela was vague about it. It was very difficult, she said, to get someone really reliable to come in, and the baby was on a schedule which it might not be a good idea to upset just now.
Dick asked if Robert, who was on the Attorney General’s staff, was involved in that Ft. Myers business. (Recently there had been a ghetto revolt in the Gulf Coast town, and the local authorities had been pressing for the death sentence under Florida’s Anti-Sedition Act.) Angela told him they were both so busy now they didn’t discuss each other’s work much. In fact, she said, she didn’t really know what had happened in Ft. Myers because she hadn’t been reading the papers. Dick started to explain, but Angela broke in to say that she thought she heard a sound from the baby’s room. He held on while she went in to check.
The Sohnshilds were New Yorkers who had come to Florida in a spirit of missionary zeal, Robert believing it was more to the point to guarantee due process in the South than in New York. From the occasional references to him in the newspapers Dick knew that Robert was highly respected and very effective.
Oddly enough Dick Gibson had heard of the couple even before they became Mail Baggers; he had read an article about the Sohnshilds in Esquire in the early sixties. Angela, the article said, had graduated from Smith with a Magna in Philosophy and had met Robert when both were graduate students at Harvard. By the time the article appeared each of them had already been through a number of successful careers. Angela had given piano recitals at Carnegie Hall and had appeared as a soloist with the London Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall. Her essays on the New Left, written in the fifties while she was still a graduate student, were said to be the best philosophic justification that radical politics had ever had. She had even been — though this had not been publicized because of her associations with the left — a speech writer for the Kennedys. Robert Sohnshild, as illustrious as his wife, had given up a successful private practice and an inherited seat on the New York Stock Exchange to become the first major news analyst on National Educational Televison, and, as an adviser to SCLC, had helped develop the principle of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. Somewhere he had also found time to establish the first successful, nationally distributed underground newspaper.
The article in Esquire had been entitled “The Silver Spoon Set,” and in it four immensely successful young couples had posed, grinning, in full color in their lovely New York, Washington and Boston apartments, with silver spoons dangling from their mouths like cigarettes. In the text Robert was quoted as wanting to extricate himself from the tangled skein of personal success. “Cut your winnings,” he had said. “It’s a Thoreauvian thing. I refuse to be a great man. There are too many great men already. They explode on the world like bombs. What I want, and Angela agrees, is for men of talent and judgment and imagination — for men of success — to turn their backs on the ‘world’ and begin to pay some attention to the community.”