Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

“Say,” I said. “That’s a really good idea. Juries love to hear little tidbits like that. That way they don’t have to spend a lot of time convicting you. They can probably be out of the jury room in under ten minutes.”

Murdoch laughed.

Mean Mike Hardin said, “See, I told you he was an asshole.”

SEVEN

SINCLAIR LEWIS HAD WRITTEN, and not as uncharitably as memory has it, of their fathers and grandfathers. I know stuff like this because at the U of Iowa I took my major in English and my minor in pre-law.

Lewis called them boosters, by which he meant that they promoted themselves, their communities and their country with the relentless fervor of marchers in a Fourth of July parade. They believed, and took as their secular religion, a former president’s statement that “The business of America is business.”

Fine and dandy. Not anything wrong with that. The trouble was that they defined themselves, their communities and their country in pretty restrictive ways. You needed to be the right color, the right religion and the right political philosophy to be their friends and to share in their success.

In this case, the four men sitting in Ross Murdoch’s den had inherited modest wealth from their fathers and had doubled or tripled that wealth all by themselves. They were bright and savvy men. They had served in the big war or in the Korean war, one of them in both, so you sure couldn’t question their very admirable patriotism. Two of them had their own airplanes; one of them ran a Canadian resort as an escape and a side business; and one of them wanted very much to be governor. What always surprised me was their bitterness and anger, which they rarely expressed when they were sober. But I’d been Judge Whitney’s uneasy and self-conscious guest at the country club a few nights and had stood at the bar with men very much like these. In their cups, they sounded as if they were the most oppressed minority in the country. Their world was coming apart. The colored athletes at the U of Iowa were sleeping with respectable white girls. The goddamn Japs were starting to flood the free markets with low-priced trash. The State Department wanted American farmers to share all their agricultural secrets with these little countries that would turn around and undercut American crop prices. Rock-and-roll was mostly queers and horny Negroes who belonged in prison just on general principles. Edward R. Murrow, who’d always been a troublemaker, had taken up the cause of Mexican farm workers and so now the big farmers had to worry about a federal agent hiding behind every tree. And, despite all the warnings from Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, you had a Catholic in the White House who was probably on the phone to the Pope three times a day.

Part of their boozy unhappiness had struck me as sheer age. You saw some of it in the blue collar taverns where I drank and belonged. I wasn’t idealizing them. They had plenty of their own prejudices and rages. But then it didn’t sound as if all the world was conspiring to overthrow them. They were men lamenting all the girls they should’ve screwed — God, if I’d only known then what I know now — and usually imaginary chances they’d had to invest in this or that scheme to become millionaires overnight much as Jackie Gleason tried to become every Saturday night as “Ralph Kramden,” the working-class fool with a heart of embarrassing but endearing dreams. They wanted to be young and virile again; they were worried their kids were going to be cut in the next bunch of layoffs at the plant because their seniority was so low; they were melancholy that as much as they loved their wives and their wives loved them there just wasn’t that spark there any more, You shoulda seen her when she was nineteen, McCain, at the swimming pool in Jackson Park. She’d walk out into the sunlight and the guys would just cream their jeans right there. Right on the spot. Cream their jeans. And I was one of ’em. And she picked me. Me!”

But generally there wasn’t the rage, the rancor I found in the booster class. The workers had simpler and thus less frustrating hopes—they just wanted their kids to do better than they did and to be safe and to not get in any trouble with the law or nothing like that. But the country club men—they had dreamed far larger dreams and saw evidence everywhere that it was all going away for them.

“So you’re suggesting what exactly?” said Mike Hardin. Third string guard at a small liberal arts college in New Hampshire. His law office covered with framed photos of himself in his football days. He was the preferred lawyer of the wealthy in this part of the state. And for good reason. He was smart and wily and commanded a courtroom with an easy grace I could only envy.

“Mike. You’re a lawyer. Listen to what you’re saying.” I said this after fifteen minutes of listening to several nit-wit alternatives to just calling Cliffie.

“Don’t give me any lectures, McCain. You’re nobody, I mean in case you hadn’t noticed.” He had one of those taut, angular faces that reflected perfectly the mood of the moment.

“For God’s sake, Mike,” Ross Murdoch said. “You’re nobody and I’m nobody—we’re all nobody.”

“I’d forgotten how humble you are, Ross,” Hardin said. “But I guess that’s why you’ve always been morally superior to the rest of us.”

“Shut the hell up, Mike,” Gavin Wheeler said. Wheeler was in his forties, looked sixty. He was always dressed in a three-piece suit, the assumption being, I guess, that the vest hid his enormous belly. He was bald and had the largest hands I’d ever seen. He’d been a wrestler at the U of Iowa and a damned good one. He’d seen the future as soon as he’d come back from the big war. He and a rich cousin had started four TV stations. They now had ten stations here and in Missouri and were very, very rich. “We acted like a bunch of stupid bastards when we agreed to bring her out here. I still can’t believe we did it. But we did and now she’s downstairs—dead. Listening to McCain here—we’ve been kidding ourselves. We’ve made things a lot worse for ourselves already. We’ve waited a whole day to call the law. But I’m throwing in with McCain. I say let’s call Cliffie now and salvage what we can of it.”

Peter Carlson had a yacht on the Mississippi, a twin-engine Bonanza at the Cedar Rapids airport, and a Hugh Hefner pad in Chicago. He divided his time between running his stock brokerage and gossiping. You couldn’t pass him on the street without him stopping you to tell you something nasty about somebody you knew. And if he didn’t have gossip, he always had his scorn. He had one of those smug, imperious temperaments that intimidated you through its malice.

“I just want to say one thing,” Carlson said. He was a slim, short, preppy-looking man who always managed to work in the fact that he’d graduated from Yale. That is, if you’d managed to miss the enormous Yale class ring on his finger. If the Yale Alumni Association had recommended Yale tattoos, I’m sure he’d have one his forehead. “Think of our wives, think of our kids, think of our parents when this hits the newspapers and the TV sets. Our lives are over. No matter who killed her and put her down in that bomb shelter. Our lives are over no matter how it turns out. We’ll always be the four civic leaders who set up a woman—let’s face it, a very high-priced whore—in an apartment so we wouldn’t have to travel very far when we wanted a little nookie on the side. Are you ready to face that?”

Mike Hardin half-leaped from his chair and started pacing. “Face it. We’re screwed either way we go.” He made huge frustrated fists of his hands. He wanted to rip something apart. If I’d been in his situation, I’d have reacted the same way. He walked over to the window and looked outside. Nobody talked. A grandfather clock in the corner made the only sound.