FENSTEMAKER ROUSED HIM AT eight with awful exhortations, a compound of biblical wisdom and Hill Country homily. Roy groaned and looked out through the window at the quiet surface of the lake, wondering about the hour. There were no fishermen in sight, nor had the water-skiing contingent from the college arrived.
“Jesus …” Roy said. “What’s the time?”
“How long, America, O how long,” Fenstemaker was babbling.
Roy turned round the face of his clock, blinked in the harsh morning light and groaned again. Fenstemaker badgered him mercilessly. Roy protested: “I’m a sick man, Governor … I had three hours sleep night before last; I gave blood yesterday; I got in late again last night … this morning … I’m getting a nervous tic …”
“You get over here in an hour?” Fenstemaker said. “I got somethin’ important … How soon you get over here?”
Roy said he would come as soon as he had strength enough to shave and dress. “I’m sick, Governor,” he said. “I got the neurosis.”
“You tie your shoelaces?” Fenstemaker said.
Roy said maybe he could.
“You’re all right, then,” Fenstemaker said. “Psychiatrist friend mine says man’s not really disabled emotionally till he gets up in the mornin’ and can’t decide which shoe to pull on first …”
Roy gave assurances he would get to the Capitol sometime before noon.
“Bring your friend,” the Governor said.
“Who’s that?” Roy said. For a terrible moment he thought the Governor was going to start in on the business with Ouida.
“That Willie,” Fenstemaker said. “Bring that Willie person. I got somethin’ for the both of you.”
Then the Governor rang off with characteristic abruptness. Roy got slowly to his feet, washed, shaved, fed his cat, and ate a bowl of cereal. He tore off the cereal boxtop for the Fielding boy and listened unhappily for a moment to the sounds of fun and games commencing on the lake.
Willie’s offices were in a semi-abandoned building several blocks from the college. It was a large frame structure put together during the war to house Navy V-12 personnel. There was good reason to doubt whether it could ever again survive another national emergency, but efforts were being made from time to time, very much in the manner that building construction progressed in Mexican towns, to restore it for use as office space. A new stone veneer rose halfway up the front; window screens were being repainted and striped linoleum laid along the first-floor hallway. Brightly colored asbestos paneling was used to partition off the ground-floor rooms. There was no way to reach the second floor from inside: only half a stairway hung from its fractured supports, leading up to nowhere. Willie’s guests had to climb the fire escape outside.
Willie worked alone in the unimproved quarters upstairs. He had the whole upstairs — a space roughly the size of a basketball court — the dark floor littered with waste paper, cheap newsprint, candy wrappers, beer cans, soft drink bottles, and numerous pasteboard boxes on which the word FILES had been drawn in black crayon. There were also three enormous, new and shining metal garbage cans. Willie had a single desk, a typewriter and stand, a makeshift worktable put together with sawhorses and thick plywood, an ancient wicker chair, a broken-down sofa, a clothestree, a leather ottoman, a fading, partially collapsed beach umbrella, a phonograph, and remnants of what appeared to be an army shelter half. A smell, an inexpressible something compounded of commercial detergents, sawdust, new paint and rat droppings, clung to all the upstairs.
Willie had secured these offices through a rental agent friend, an ex-pipefitter who had not yet got over his uneasiness from deserting the labor movement. The agent had recommended the building to Willie’s sponsors, advising that work on the newspaper could be conducted in the upstairs space free of charge until such time as the newspaper became a moneymaking proposition or restoration of the upper half of the building was resumed. The likelihood of either seemed infinitely remote at this time.
Roy climbed the fire escape and found Willie bent over his desk, talking with the young man from the college, Kermit’s friend, named Jobie. Roy sniffed the incredible air of the loft and said hello.
Willie looked up, nodded, and went on talking to the boy. “You make some persuasive points …”
“I know the prose is rather splendid,” Jobie said, “but the content — do you think it really says something to the common man?”
“Yes … Yes …” Willie said, nodding, looking up at Roy for help. “I think it says a great deal.” Roy decided it was simply in Willie’s nature to be gentle on all occasions.
“Is it true you have a large number of, uh, working class subscribers?”
Willie nodded. He looked at the window for a moment, as if searching for the right words. “Yes …” he said. “The unions conducted subscription campaigns in all the locals.”
“You’ll use it then?” Jobie said.
“I imagine so,” Willie said. “It’s a bit long — forty pages — but —”
“Plus the footnotes …?”
“Yes … Well … We’ve got to be realistic about space. We’re necessarily limited to …”
Roy sat down in the wicker chair and read an old issue of the newspaper. He knew Willie would carry Jobie’s article in one form or another, possibly in installments of several weeks. Life for Willie had become a progressively desperate, never-ending struggle to get the pages of the little journal filled and sent to the printers. There was never any advertising that amounted to much: an occasional beer ad, an “institutional” endorsement from one of the unions, legal notices sent over from sympathetic lawyers. Those eight to twelve pages each week yawned at Willie like a voracious sea monster, a scavenger, swallowing up everything, meat and vegetables, gold and dross, whole or in part, whatever garbage and flotsam was washed close by. Roy sat in the wicker chair and turned through the pages, glancing over an article written by Kermit, the Mad Doctor, entitled Radical Pacifism — A Way Out.
Out of what, Roy was not able to determine on so brief an examination, but he did note that Willie had managed to stretch Kermit’s “monograph” over three pages, breaking up the gray spaces with line drawings clipped out of a 1934 issue of the old Scribner’s Magazine. He looked up, wanting to commend Willie as a newsman in the best tradition, but Jobie was still talking fiercely.
“You have an art critic?” the young man wanted to know.
Willie shook his head and said he had never exactly given any thought to the possibility of carrying art criticism. “But we’re certainly not bound by precedent,” Willie added. “You have anyone in mind?”
“You might want to look at some small things I’ve done,” Jobie said. “Lately I’ve been very much interested in the idea of the mot juste in art — have you ever thought of that? The painter striving much as Flaubert to arrive at …”
“Yes …” Willie said, jerking his head up and down.
Roy got to his feet and said: “That’s the wonderful thing about this newspaper …” Jobie looked at Roy, delighted. “It is a wonderful thing,” Jobie agreed.
“Any work,” Roy went on, Willie giving him a grateful look, “any work that is honest and genuine — anything of a special lyric or human quality, as primitive as it might seem to the academician, as bewildering as it might appear to the, uh, working class type, will nonetheless have great appeal to Willie as art … a folk art that is indigenous to the region …”
Jobie strode round the workbench, waving his arms. “That’s it! That’s exactly what I had in mind! There are some revolutionary things being done here … In the arts … This is a frontier … You won’t find such vitality in … anywhere else. This is where new things are being done. I have a friend experimenting with ceramic murals, using the native soils to produce a tile painting that will reflect not only the images of the region but its very fundament as well …”
“I hope you’ll excuse me for breaking in,” Roy said. “Willie and I have an appointment downtown.”
“I do some painting myself,” Jobie said.
“We’re supposed to be at the Capitol in fifteen minutes,” Willie said. He looked at Roy. “That right?”
“Though I’m normally a writer,” Jobie said. “I’ve had some shows.”
“It’ll take us ten minutes to get there,” Roy said.
“Of course sculpture is really the most exciting, the most plastic of …”
“Play the recorder?” Willie said suddenly.
“Pardon?” Jobie got his eyes in focus and looked at them.
“Clock’s out of order. You have the time?” Willie said.
“Nearly eleven.”
“We’ve got to leave.”
They climbed out of the window and walked down the fire escape, blinking in the sunlight, trying to keep their balance so as to avoid holding on to the metal railing which rubbed off, dusty and black oxidized, on the hands. They dropped the young man off near the college and headed the car toward the Capitol grounds.