“Now, the sands of a decade and more have run out. We cannot challenge without venturing the world’s end. Quite possibly our death notice is written, a few months or years farther along on the track of this wretched planet. Then, perhaps, our flight from freedom will get the globe rent into hot flinders, atomized gas. But the only question before you, citizens of Green Prairie, of River City, of the wide prairie region, of this momentarily fair nation and the lovely world, is this, apparently:
“What new idiocy can you dream up, with your coffee, your porridge, your first cigarette, to keep yourself awhile longer from facing these truths?”
Coley fell silent. He wiped his brow again.
“What do we do with it?” Mrs. Berwyn asked, a little stunned by the blunt finale.
“Eh?” He was paying no attention.
“I said, what shall I do? Tear it up? Do you want it transscribed? Is it for the archives, so you can whip it out someday in case it’s justified?”
He was looking at her, then, perplexedly. “I said. It’s tomorrow’s editorial.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why?”
She glanced apprehensively at her wrist watch and back at the smallish man in the chair.
“It would fill the whole page. There’s hardly time to set it up, anyhow, to make the home-delivery edition. Bulldog’s almost out….”
“Shoot it right to composing,” he said, yawning.
She stood up and came to the side of his desk. “You quitting the Transcript, Coley, after you spent your life to build it?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean— maybe? This thing rubs salt in every sore in town! It kicks every private idol to smithereens!”
“Yeah. And may wake up a sleepwalking nation.”
“It violates what people believe. Even some of what I believe.”
“Does it?”
“I think it does,” she answered, suddenly doubtful. She was close to unprecedented tears.
“You can’t do it, Coley. You can’t kick apart the town you love!”
“I’m trying to keep it from being kicked apart!”
“Do me a favor. Do us all a favor. Do the Transcript a favor. Wait till tomorrow. Let everybody mull it over—”
“Remember, Bea, back in nineteen forty-three. When I went abroad?”
“What’s that got to do—”
“To England,” he said, musingly. “The whole Middle West refused to believe in the blitz.
The folks were deluded then, the same way. They wouldn’t face the fury of Hitler’s Luft waffe—
and they wouldn’t admit the British had the guts to take such a beating. I went over, just so they could read the stories of a typical Middle Western editor—written from London, while the fire bombs fell and the ack-ack drummed. Remember?”
“Sure,” she said. “My husband was alive—then.” He ignored that human dating of the occasion. “I went because, by God, I’m an editor. Because I knew what the papers reported was the truth. Because I thought an editor, an American editor, was obligated to help the American people face facts. I still think so!”
“Even, Coley, if it means you commit newspaper suicide?”
He rocked forward in his chair and began, delicately, to straighten and align the objects which comprised his desk set: clock, calendar, pens, pencils, inkstand, paper cutter, memo pad, the engraved paperweight given him by the YMCA Newsboys Club.
He said, “Sure. Even if it marches me off the stage.”
“You think it’s right?”
“I think anything else is wrong. Dead wrong. And almost everybody is wrong. I was on the edge of that conclusion a long while back. Weeks. I reached it when good old Hank Conner came in tonight. Besides”—he turned and smiled at the big woman—“who knows? Minerva Sloan has brains. Lots of brains. The arguments in that editorial make plain common sense. She won’t listen to them; she won’t read them in the places where they’re appearing. In her own paper, though, she’ll have to read them!”
“You think you can change the mind of Minerva?”
“Stranger things have been accomplished.”
“I better get to my typewriter.”
He watched her go—the magnificence of her hair—the absurdity of her make-up—the splendor of her bosom and hips—the fantastic smallness of her high-heeled shoes. His blood stirred and he half rose.
“Old ass,” he said of himself, aloud.
Just before daybreak, remembering he’d had no dinner, he went down to Court Avenue and Fenwick and had pumpkin pie and coffee at the Baltimore Lunch. Some raggedy women, charwomen from the tall buildings, were sliding trays along the vast cafeteria’s silver rails. A man—perhaps a once-respectable man—a bum now. One of his own reporters. A young girl in a yellow evening dress, a too-young girl, for the hour, with a disheveled college boy, slightly drunk. The white-dressed people behind the glass counters and steam tables looked sleepy.
He went back up in the lonely elevator and watched dawn invest the cities.
Life returned to the great building, where it had not quite perished in the long night. The presses, underground, shook it a little. Doors slammed. Elevators hummed at intervals. It didn’t sleep, quite. And as the light increased, the tower became a tympanum that vibrated in tempo with the increasing traffic down below.
When the sun cut deep into the man-made canyons, throwing aside the rectilinear shadows of the buildings, shining on windshields, bus tops, palisades of glass windows, he knew Minerva would be awake. She would be ringing for her maid. Getting coffee and a folded copy of the morning paper which she owned. Making phone calls to executives who would try, by alert rejoinders, to pretend they, also, greeted every daybreak with all snoring put aside, eyes open and a message to Garcia avidity for the new day’s commands. Coley knew.
His phone rang. “Lo?”
“This is Minerva Sloan.”
“’Morning, Minerva. How—”
“You’re fired, Coley.”
He put on his hat and coat when he went out that time.
3
Gossip can have good uses. It is deplored because its uses are so often opposite. They depend on who does the gossiping; through idle talk, the well-disposed sometimes find out about the hidden sufferings of others and go to their aid—or they learn the degree of temptation that resulted in a sin and so forgive the sinner. Without gossip, indeed, life would be dull and much of its subtle business would remain unfinished. It has, however, a poor reputation amongst conscientious people; they usually inhibit impulse if the material in their minds seems of a gossipy nature.
Silence can be unfortunate. If, before Chuck’s departure for the base in Texas, his father had let drop the fact that Beau Bailey had asked him for a loan of five thousand, Beau’s life might have been changed. For Chuck might then have reported noticing Beau, slugged and furtive, as he emerged from a shady building in The Block. Those two facts, if they had by chance come out at the dinner table, might have led Mrs. Conner to express certain observations and opinions she had kept to herself. They were, first, that Charles had returned to service in a concealed but very deep depression, second, that the newspapers had published a picture of Lenore and Kit Sloan and that Lenore didn’t seem very happy in the photograph, and third, that Beau was drinking more than ever while Netta, surprisingly, was going around like a cat with the canary well down and the feathers lapped clear. Nora, then confessing her innocent eavesdropping, could have confirmed what Charles had not disclosed and her mother only suspected: Lenore and Kit were, indeed, resuming an interest, Such, at any rate, were the facts and observations at the collective disposal of the family.