The Annapolis Line

The programme for June Week ran to eleven pages, and the Governor-General read it twice before the car had cleared the yards.

He read it the first time for the order of events and the second time for the mistakes. There were three. On page four the Superintendent’s reception was given as beginning at half past four and ending at four. On page seven the band of the Academy was to play at the presentation of commissions “and also at the presentation of commissions”, which was a typesetter’s echo and nothing worse. On page nine his own name appeared as His Excellency the Governor General, without the hyphen, which was the error that Pershing minded, though he could not have said why, and would not have said it if he could.

He took a pencil from his waistcoat and put the hyphen in.

“Sir,” said Bramwell, from the seat across the aisle, “I have a clean copy.”

“This one will do.”

“It has pencil on it now, sir.”

“It has a hyphen on it now.” Pershing turned to page ten. “Where is the hyphen in yours?”

Bramwell looked. Hollis Bramwell had been his private secretary for three years. He was thirty-four, a graduate of Howard and of the Treasury, and he had a way of looking at a page that made the page feel it had been caught. He looked at page nine for a moment and then took a pencil from his own waistcoat and put the hyphen in.

“Thank you,” said Pershing.

“Sir.”

The car was a private one, coupled to the half past seven from the New Westminster terminal, and it was hot already. The windows were down. The capital went by in its June state, the brick terraces with their doors open and the women on the steps with fans, the dome of Parliament House going small behind them, then the yards, then the market gardens, then the long green nothing of the Maryland line, where the car began to sway and to sing on the wire. Pershing liked the electric line. It was punctual and it did not smoke. A train that did not smoke was a train that had considered its passengers, and he approved of things that had considered other people, so long as they did it quietly.

Across from him, in the seat facing backwards, his son was asleep.

Warren had been asleep since the terminal. He had been asleep, as far as his father could tell, since about the middle of May, when school had let him go and he had come home to Government House and discovered, as boys of sixteen did, that the day had more hours in it than anybody needed. He slept with his mouth a little open and his straw hat over his eyes and his long legs out across the floor of the car, so that Bramwell had stepped over them twice. He would be seventeen at the end of the month. He was already taller than his father, which Pershing had not been prepared for, though he had been warned of it by every relative they had left.

There were not many of those. There were enough.

Pershing looked at his son’s shoes, which wanted polishing, and decided to say so at Annapolis, and then decided not to say so at Annapolis, where there would be other people, and then decided to say so now. Warren was asleep. He said nothing.

“Sir,” said Bramwell. “Page ten.”

“I have read page ten.”

“The order of the commissions has changed. The Superintendent’s office telephoned last night after you had gone up. It is to be alphabetical and not by order of merit.”

“Why?”

“The Superintendent feels that order of merit invites comment.”

“It invites merit,” said Pershing. “That is why it is called that.”

“Yes, sir. I said that you would say that. He said that it was the custom of the Academy.”

“It was not the custom of the Academy when I was last here.”

“No, sir. It is a new custom.”

Pershing considered the window. A heron stood in a flooded field and did not move as the car went by, which he respected.

“Very well,” he said. “Alphabetical.”

---

They stopped at the junction for the Academy branch at a quarter to nine, and a good many people got off the train ahead of them, and a good many got on.

The junction was a platform, a shed, a water tower and a sign. It was the last stop before the line swung east for the river and the town, and in June Week it was where the whole of the capital that had not come down on Thursday came down on Friday: mothers in white with hatboxes, fathers in straw boaters with their jackets over their arms, girls in pairs with dance cards already in their bags, a man selling lemonade from a tin bath of ice, and a brass band of somebody’s, not the Academy’s, who had got off one train and were waiting for another and had decided to fill the time. They were playing the march from the hymn book that everybody knew, very fast.

Pershing watched it through the window. He did not like bands that played fast. A march was written at the speed of a man’s legs.

The door at the end of the car opened.

It opened inward, which it was not supposed to do, because the private car’s end door was locked from inside, and Pershing had seen Bramwell lock it. A man came through it backwards, with a suitcase in one hand and a hat in the other, talking over his shoulder to the conductor.

“No, I’m sure you’re right,” he was saying, “I’m sure you’re absolutely right, and I’ll write to the company and tell them you were right, and you can tell them I said so, but I’m in now, and the train’s moving, and you wouldn’t throw a Member of Parliament off a moving train in front of the Governor-General, would you, because that’s the kind of thing that gets into the papers.” The train was not moving. As he said it, it moved. “There you go.”

The conductor said something that ended with the word sir and did not sound like it meant it, and the door closed.

The man turned round.

He was short. Pershing’s first impression of him was of shortness, and his second was of width, and his third, before the man had said another word, was of noise that had not yet been released. He was perhaps forty. He had black hair that had been brushed flat and was rising again of its own accord, a round face, a wide mouth, and eyes that were already looking at everything in the car at once, the green plush and the brass lamps and the decanter of water on its bracket and the two men in dark suits and the long boy asleep under a straw hat, and were enjoying all of it. He wore a black suit that had been good once and a black hat, very wide in the brim, that he was holding against his chest like a man about to sing.

“General,” he said.

“Governor-General,” said Pershing.

“Governor-General.” The man put his suitcase down in the aisle, where Bramwell would have to step over it. “La Guardia. East Harlem. We’ve met.”

They had. Pershing remembered it the moment the name was said, the way he remembered roads. A reception at the House, two winters ago, a long room full of members who wished to be seen speaking to the Governor-General and members who wished to be seen not speaking to him, and in the middle of it a short loud man who had come straight up and told him that the pension for the widows of the air service was being paid four months in arrears in New York and asked what he intended to do about it, and when Pershing had said that the question was for the Minister, had said, “I know it’s for the Minister, I asked the Minister, I’m asking you so you’ll ask the Minister,” and walked off before he could be answered. Pershing had asked the Minister. The pensions had been paid. He had not thought about the man since.

“Mr La Guardia,” he said. “This is a private car.”

“I know. That’s why it was empty.” La Guardia sat down. He sat down in the seat beside Warren’s, facing backwards, opposite Pershing, so that their knees nearly touched, and he put his hat on his own knee. Warren did not wake. “I was in the third car back. There’s a family in the third car back with six children and a parrot. I’ve got nothing against a parrot. I was a consular agent at Fiume, I’ve been on boats with every kind of animal God makes. But this one only knows one word and I don’t think the children taught it to him.”

“What is the word?”

La Guardia told him.

Bramwell, across the aisle, looked carefully at page ten.

“I see,” said Pershing.

“So I came forward.” La Guardia looked round the car again with the same expression of uncomplicated pleasure. “This is nice. Is this yours, or the Crown’s?”

“The company’s.”

“Lent to the Crown.”

“Hired by the Crown.”

“At what rate?”

Pershing looked at him.

“I sit on the Estimates,” said La Guardia. “I can find out. I’m asking you so you’ll know I’m going to.”

“Mr Bramwell,” said Pershing, “what is the rate?”

“Fourteen pounds, sir, for the day, there and back, with the attendant.”

“Fourteen pounds,” said La Guardia. “That’s a fair rate. That’s a very fair rate. I’ll say so.” He seemed genuinely pleased about it. “You going down for the Academy?”

“I am presenting the commissions.”

“I know. It’s in the paper. I’m going down for the Academy too.”

“Are you presenting something?”

“I’ve got a constituent in the class. Boy named Abramowitz. His mother cleans offices on Lexington Avenue and his father was killed at a place I can’t pronounce and you probably can. Kid got in on the competitive examination, top of the list in the city, and the Academy wrote to me to ask if I was sure he was the boy I’d nominated, because they had expected a different kind of name. So I’m going down to watch him get his commission and shake his hand in front of anybody who wrote that letter.” He smiled. “And because it’s June, and Annapolis is nice in June, and the House rose yesterday, and if I go back to the flat I’ll only write letters.”

Pershing found, somewhat to his surprise, that he had nothing to say against any of that.

“Abramowitz,” he said. “Under the new custom he will be first.”

“What new custom?”

“Alphabetical.”

La Guardia laughed. It was a high, sudden, delighted laugh, much too big for the car, and Warren woke up.

---

Warren woke up the way he always had, all at once and in the middle of a sentence that was not there. He pushed the hat off his eyes and sat up and found a stranger next to him and his father opposite and looked from one to the other.

“Are we there?”

“We are at the junction,” said Pershing. “This is Mr La Guardia, the Member for East Harlem. My son Warren.”

“How do you do,” said Warren, and shook hands, and then, because he was sixteen and had been asleep, “Are you the one who brought the dog into the Commons?”

“It wasn’t my dog,” said La Guardia. “It was a constituent’s dog. It had been bitten by a police horse. I was making a point about the horses.”

“Was it a good point?”

“It was a very good point. Nobody listened to it. They all listened to the dog.” He looked at Warren with interest. “How did you hear about that?”

“It was in the Courier. My father reads the Courier at breakfast and leaves it on the table and I read it after.”

“Does he read the bits about me?”

“He folds them over,” said Warren, “so the bit about you is on the outside.”

Pershing, who did this, and had not known that anybody had noticed, looked at the window again.

“Well,” said La Guardia, “that’s very fair. That’s fairer than the Courier.” He turned to Pershing. “General, your boy’s a reader.”

“Governor-General.”

“I know. I know. It’s the moustache. You can’t sit opposite that moustache and not say General. They ought to put a notice up.”

The car swung east. The line ran down through pine woods now, and sand, and the light changed, and somewhere ahead there was a smell, faint and then less faint, of salt and mud and tide that Pershing had not smelled for a year and found he had been waiting for. The Severn was beyond the trees. He could not see it yet. He could feel it in the way the air had become heavy and soft.

La Guardia talked.

He talked about East Harlem, about Italians and Jews and Puerto Ricans and Irish on the same block and how they voted and why, about a fire on 116th Street the week before in which nobody had died because the fire escape had been mended, and about the fact that the fire escape had been mended because he had gone to the landlord’s office with a photographer. He talked about ice: about what ice cost a family in a tenement in June, and what it cost the man who sold it, and what the man who sold it had to pay to a man in a car before he was allowed to sell it at all. He talked about the price of a doctor. He talked about the air service, briefly, and about Abramowitz’s father, whom he had not known, and about the mothers on his block who wrote to him every year on the day their sons had been killed, to make sure he had not forgotten the day.

“I write back,” he said. “Every one. It’s the only letter I’m any good at.”

Pershing said, “Yes.”

It was one of perhaps eleven words he said between the junction and the river, and La Guardia seemed content with them. He was not a man who required answers. He was a man who required to be heard, which was not the same, and Pershing, who had spent his life among men who required neither, found it strange and not entirely unpleasant to sit opposite one who required so much and asked for so little.

Then La Guardia said, “And the Act.”

Warren, who had been half asleep again, opened his eyes.

“What about the Act?” said Pershing.

“Oh, you know about the Act.” La Guardia waved a hand. “You signed it. I mean you didn’t sign it, Taft signed it, but you’ve signed a hundred things since that make it work. I don’t blame you for that. You do what the Minister tells you, that’s your job, I’d do the same in your chair, I’d be terrible at it but I’d do it.” He leaned forward. “I’m talking about what it is. Do you know what it is, in East Harlem? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a tax. It’s a tax on poor people, paid to crooks, collected by the police. A man on my block can’t buy a glass of beer for his supper. He’s never been drunk in his life, he works on the docks, he wants a glass of beer with his supper, like his father had and his grandfather had back in some village where they’ve been making it since the Romans. He can’t have it. It’s a crime. A judge on Park Avenue has a cellar with four hundred bottles in it, laid down before 1920, and that’s lawful, because the Act doesn’t reach what you owned before. So he drinks, and the docker doesn’t, unless he pays a man in a car, and then the police take a cut from the man in the car, and the docker pays three times what his father paid for beer that’s half water and might be poison, and if they raid the place it’s the docker they arrest. Not the judge. Never the judge.”

“The law is the law,” said Pershing.

“Is it?” said La Guardia. “Where?”

“Everywhere in the Realm.”

“Not in Maryland.”

Pershing looked at him.

“Maryland,” said La Guardia, “is the wettest province in the Union. Everybody knows it. Baltimore never shut a bar in its life, it just put a curtain over the window. Maryland repealed its own enforcement statute in 1923, so there’s no provincial policeman in the whole place who’s allowed to care, and the federal service has six agents for the whole of the Bay. Six. I’ve got the figures. And the Lieutenant-Governor goes around telling everybody that Maryland keeps the law.”

“Does he?”

“He’s famous for it. He says it at dinners. He’s a nice man. He’s a very nice man. He cans tomatoes. He’s a Methodist and he’s never had a drink in his life and he believes it, every word, he believes Maryland keeps the law, because nobody has ever offered him a drink in Maryland, because he’s the Lieutenant-Governor, and who’s going to offer the Lieutenant-Governor a drink?” La Guardia sat back. “Somebody ought to.”

“Mr La Guardia.”

“I’m not saying I’m going to.”

“I did not suppose you were.”

“I’m saying somebody ought to.”

The trees ended. The river was there, all at once, wide and brown and silver in the sun, full of boats: sailboats and launches and the long low workboats of the Bay with their raked masts and their single great sails, and beyond them, on the far shore, the town, red brick and white wood climbing a hill to two points, a dome and a spire, with the grey walls of the Academy along the water to the left like a fortress somebody had put down by mistake in a garden.

Warren was at the window. “Which one’s the State House?”

“The dome,” said Pershing.

“And the spire?”

“St Anne’s.”

“Where’s the Lieutenant-Governor’s house?”

“Between them,” said La Guardia, before Pershing could. “On the circle. You can see it from the State House steps. You can see it from about half the town, if you know where to stand.” He put his hat back on. It made him shorter. “It’s a nice house. I’ve been to dinner there. Grape juice.”

“Grape juice?” said Warren.

“In the decanters. In crystal. With a toast.” La Guardia picked up his suitcase. “Tonight, too. He gives a dinner to open June Week. Did they not tell you?”

Pershing looked across the aisle.

“Page two, sir,” said Bramwell, without looking up. “Eight o’clock. Government House. The Lieutenant-Governor and Mrs Tull. Black tie.”

“I know it is on page two.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was asking whether Mr La Guardia was on page two.”

Bramwell turned to page two and read it again, to be sure, though he did not need to.

“No, sir,” he said. “He is not.”

“Oh, I’ll be there,” said La Guardia cheerfully. “Ritchie asked me. The Premier. He asks me every year. He says it’s to annoy the Lieutenant-Governor, but I think he likes the company.” He stood up as the car slowed on the bridge, and swayed, and put a hand on the brass rail above Warren’s head. “You’ll like Ritchie. Everybody likes Ritchie. That’s his whole problem.” He looked down at Pershing with the same uncomplicated pleasure he had brought into the car. “General.”

“Governor-General.”

“I’ll see you at the grape juice.”

He went out through the end door, which did not lock behind him, because it had never locked, and Pershing understood, sitting in the heat with the programme on his knee and his pencil in his hand, that it had been opened from outside before he came through it, by a conductor who had been given something to do it, and that this was what La Guardia had meant by the price of things.

He put the pencil away.

Warren was still at the window, looking up the hill at the town.

“I like him,” Warren said.

“He talks a great deal.”

“You let him.”

Pershing considered this. It was true, and he did not know why it was true, and he did not like not knowing.

“He has a constituent in the class,” he said.

“Abramowitz,” said Warren. “First, now. Because of the new custom.” He turned from the window and grinned at his father, which he did not do often enough, and then put his hat back on. “Is it really grape juice?”

“I expect so.”

“In crystal?”

“I expect so.”

“With a toast?”

“Warren.”

“I’m only asking,” said Warren, “so I’ll know.”

The car came off the bridge and into the town, slowly, between brick houses with white doors and window boxes and people on every step, and at the station on West Street there was a band, the Academy’s own, playing at the proper speed, and a line of midshipmen in white, and a short round man in a grey suit and a grey Homburg standing in front of them all with his hand already out and his face already shining.

“The Lieutenant-Governor, sir,” said Bramwell.

Pershing put the programme in his breast pocket, where it would stay, and stood up.