The Plan

He found his son in the garden at five, sitting on the edge of the sundial with his shirt off and his feet in the dew, and his neck and his shoulders and his arms the colour of a raw ham.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said Warren, before his father could say anything. “It’s like lying on a stove. I came down to be cold.”

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

Pershing looked at him in the grey light. The burn had blistered in the night, as Dr Kemp had said it would. There were blisters on the back of his neck and across the tops of both shoulders, small and clear and shining, and the skin round them was hot to look at, and his son was sitting very still on the sundial with his arms held a little away from his body, the way men sit who have been hurt and are trying not to touch anything.

Pershing went back into the house.

He went through the hall and down the passage to the kitchen, where nobody was up yet, and found a basin and filled it from the cold tap, and found a clean towel on the rail by the range, and a second, and came back out into the garden carrying the basin in both hands, very carefully, the way Ruark had carried the cup up Maryland Avenue, and set it down on the grass by the sundial.

“Sit forward,” he said.

Warren sat forward. Pershing soaked the first towel in the basin and wrung it out, not much, and laid it across his son’s shoulders and the back of his neck, very gently, and Warren drew in his breath through his teeth and let it out again, slowly, and his shoulders came down half an inch.

“Better?”

“Yes, sir.”

Pershing soaked the second towel, and waited, and when the first was warm he took it off and put the second on, and soaked the first again. He did it without speaking. He had done it before, a long time ago, for other men, in other places, in a great deal more heat than this, and he found that his hands still knew how; that the wringing was a particular movement and the laying on was another, and that the whole of it had a rhythm, like a march, and that there was nothing else in the world while you did it.

“Dr Kemp said whisky,” said Warren, after a while.

“Dr Kemp’s prescription is in my pocket.”

“I know. I was only saying.”

“Cold water will do as well.”

“Will it?”

“No,” said Pershing. “But it will do.”

---

The garden grew lighter. The magnolia came out of the dark, and the box hedges, and the roses on the wall, and the sundial with its Latin motto, which caught the first of the sun along its edge, I count only the sunny hours. Somewhere in the town a church bell began, not St Anne’s, a smaller one, further off, ringing for an early service. A blackbird sang on the wall.

“Sir,” said Warren.

“Yes.”

“I have to tell you something.”

Pershing took the warm towel off and put the cold one on. “Go on.”

“I promised I wouldn’t.” Warren stared at the grass between his feet. “Last night. On the boat. After Mr Spratt’s launch went away. Mr La Guardia and Captain Tyler and I were sitting on the cabin roof, and Mr La Guardia was very low, because of the mast, because he’d been up there and seen the house and it was only water, and he said he was out of ideas. He said Maryland had beaten him. He said it was the first time in his life a Methodist had beaten him and he was going to have to stand up in the Commons on Tuesday and say Maryland keeps the law, and they’d put it on the front of the Courier, and he’d never live it down in East Harlem.” He paused. “And Captain Tyler said, Well, there’s always church.”

Pershing’s hands, wringing the towel over the basin, did not stop.

“Captain Tyler said that on Smith Island they had grape juice at communion, because they were Methodists and wouldn’t have the other in the building. But the Church of America has wine. Real wine. It’s in the Act, he said, it’s the one thing the Act lets alone, because they couldn’t stop the King’s own church from having communion. And he said his grandmother was Church of America before she married his grandfather, from Crisfield, and she used to say the only drink she ever took in her life was at the rail at Easter, and she looked forward to it all year.” Warren looked up. “And Mr La Guardia sat up. He sat up like he’d been shot. And he said, St Anne’s. And then he said, eleven o’clock, first Sunday, because he’d seen it on the board outside when he walked past on Friday. And then he said, you can see the house from the door, because he’d stood on Church Circle on Friday night looking for places, before the dock, and the door was open because the man was fixing the hinge, and he’d looked up School Street through it and seen the porch.” Warren swallowed. “And then he said, I’m Church of America. He was confirmed at Prescott, in Arizona, when he was twelve, when his father was bandmaster at the fort. He said he hasn’t been to communion in about four years, because he’s always working on a Sunday, but he’s still confirmed and they can’t refuse him. He said, Clause one, served, handed to the party by another person, and drunk. Clause two, intoxicating liquor within the meaning of the Act, lawful or unlawful. It’s lawful. It’s the most lawful drink in Maryland. And it’s within sight. And the Rector hands it to you.” Warren stopped. “And then he laughed for about five minutes. Captain Tyler had to hold him on the roof.”

Pershing put the cold towel on, and took up the warm one, and dipped it in the basin, and wrung it out.

“And he made me promise not to tell,” said Warren. “Because you might tell Mr Tull. Because you’re the referee and you have to be fair.” He looked at his father’s hands. “And I promised. And I’ve told you anyway. Because you’re my father and I can’t not.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

---

Pershing did not say anything for some time.

He sat on the edge of the sundial beside his son, in the early sun, with the basin at his feet and the wet towel in his hands, and looked across the garden at the wall, and the wooden door in it, and the roofs beyond going down toward the water. He thought about the Rector of St Anne’s, an old man in shirtsleeves on his own step with a broom at five o’clock the previous morning, saying, gently, I suspect somebody will think of it before Sunday, and I would rather you heard it from me. He thought that the Rector had been right, and that he had heard it from the Rector, and that he had known it, since a quarter past six on Saturday morning, and that he had said nothing about it to anybody, and that he had not, until this moment, asked himself why.

He knew why. He had known since the garden, last night, at the bottom, by the wall.

He thought about Tull.

Tull would be at breakfast at half past seven. He would be at the head of his own table in a grey suit with his Bible beside his plate, because he had the lesson at chapel at eleven, and he would be eating porridge, because he ate porridge every morning of his life, summer and winter, as his grandfather had at Taylor’s Island; and he would look up when the Governor-General came in, and beam, and say Good morning, Your Excellency, the last day, the last day, with complete and unclouded happiness, because Maryland had kept the law for a day and a half, and he had poured the only cup that had come near him on Mrs Brice’s azaleas, and he had no idea at all.

And Pershing could tell him.

He could go in to breakfast and sit down and say, Your Honour, I think you should know that Mr La Guardia intends to take communion at St Anne’s at eleven o’clock, within sight of this house, and that under clauses one and two as I have written them I will be obliged to find that he has been served a drink. He could say it in front of Mrs Tull and Bramwell, plainly, at the table, the way he said everything. And Tull would go white, and then pink, and then he would go to the Rector, or to the Premier, or to Spratt, and something would be done: the doors would be shut, or the service moved, or the chalice withheld from a man who had not been to the rail in four years, or Tull himself would stand on the church steps in his grey suit and plead with La Guardia not to do it, with tears in his eyes, as a Christian; and La Guardia would not be served, and would stand up in the Commons on Tuesday and say that Maryland kept the law, and it would be on the front of the Courier, and Tull would have won.

Nothing in the card prevented it. Nothing in his office prevented it. The referee was not a party, but there was no clause anywhere that said the referee must keep a secret, and every instinct he had, every habit of forty-five years of service, said that when you knew a thing that one side did not know and the other did, you said so, to both, plainly, and let them make of it what they would.

He looked at his son’s burned back.

He thought of nine cannery hands behind a packing shed at Cambridge with a coffee pot, and three of them in the House of Correction at Jessup for ninety days, and their employer at the head of his table eating porridge, and not knowing.

He thought, I will not tell him.

It was not a large thing. It was not an act. It was the absence of one, and it was the only thing in the whole of the weekend that he did, or did not do, for La Guardia, and he knew as he decided it that it was not nothing. He knew that he would remember it. He knew that he would have to account for it, to himself, in the room on the garden, at night, and that he would not be able to account for it entirely, and that he would do it anyway.

“Sir?” said Warren.

“You did right to tell me.”

“Are you going to tell Mr Tull?”

Pershing wrung out the towel.

“I am the referee,” he said. “If there is a question, I answer it. Nobody has asked me a question.” He laid the towel across his son’s shoulders. “Sit still.”

Warren sat still. He sat very still, for a long time, with the cold towel on his neck and his father beside him on the edge of the sundial, and the sun coming up over the roofs of Annapolis, and the blackbird on the wall; and then, without turning his head, very quietly, as if he were talking to the grass, he said:

“You want him to win.”

Pershing did not answer.

“It’s all right,” said Warren. “I won’t tell anybody. I’m good at it now.”

---

At breakfast Tull said, “Good morning, Your Excellency. The last day. The last day,” with complete and unclouded happiness, and Pershing said, “Good morning, Your Honour,” and sat down, and ate a kidney.

Tull was eating porridge. His Bible was beside his plate. He had a slip of paper in it marking the lesson, which was from the fourth chapter of the Epistle of James, and he read it aloud to the table between mouthfuls, because he liked to practise, in his soft voice: “Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow.” He looked up, beaming. “Very apt, I always think. For June Week. Nobody knows what will happen on the morrow.”

“No,” said Mrs Tull, at the other end, buttering toast, “nobody does,” and she looked down the table at the Governor-General, once, with nothing in her face at all, and went on buttering.

Bramwell, at the side, read the Sun. It had come up from Baltimore on the early car, and it had on its third page, under a photograph of two men in a crowd on a lawn each holding one side of a bucket, a headline that said FEDERAL MEN AT ODDS IN ANNAPOLIS, and beneath it a column by Mr Gus Aldridge describing events at the State House on Saturday evening at some length and with evident enjoyment, and ending with the sentence: The Governor-General, who has been invited to referee the dispute between Mr La Guardia and the Lieutenant-Governor, declined to comment, as did the bucket. Bramwell had folded it so that the photograph was on the inside. Pershing noticed this, and noticed that Bramwell had seen him notice it, and neither of them said anything.

Warren came down at a quarter to eight in a soft collar, which was all he could bear, with his face pink and his neck wrapped in a damp white silk scarf of Mrs Tull’s, and sat down, and ate four eggs, and did not look at his father once.

“Master Warren,” said Tull, kindly. “Your poor neck. Will you be able to come to church?”

“Yes, sir,” said Warren. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“That’s the spirit. The Rector will be so pleased. St Anne’s, at eleven.” Tull turned to Pershing. “We shall walk down with you to the door, Your Excellency, and see you in, and then go round to the chapel. Hester says you don’t need us to. But I should like it. It is only proper.” He smiled. “The last day. And Maryland has kept the law.”

“It is not midnight yet, Wesley,” said Mrs Tull.

“No, my dear. But it is Sunday. Nobody does anything wicked on a Sunday.” Tull went back to his porridge, and his Bible, and his lesson, and read under his breath: “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

Pershing ate his kidney.

He did not look at the window. He did not need to. He knew exactly what was through it, down School Street, between the two old roofs: a spire, and a clock, and a red brick wall, and a west door which the man had finished mending on Friday afternoon, and which would, at a little before eleven o’clock, because it was June and the church was an oven by half past, be propped open with a brick.