The Garden

Ritchie asked for a quarter of an hour at half past seven, and asked for it properly.

He sent a note up by the footman. It was on the Premier’s paper, with the Province’s arms, and it was written in a fast, slanting, confident hand, and it said that the Premier of Maryland presented his compliments to His Excellency the Governor-General and would be grateful for a quarter of an hour before the Ball, at His Excellency’s convenience, in the form of an audience, on a matter of the administration of federal law in the Province, and that he would be in the garden.

Pershing read it twice. Then he took out his pencil and wrote on the bottom of it, At eight. In the garden. J.J.P., and gave it back to the footman, and the footman went down.

“He can’t ask you for an audience,” said Warren from the doorway. He had come along the corridor with his towel round his neck to see who the note was from, which he had no business doing. “Can he? You’re not his. You’re the King’s in the capital. Mr Tull is the King’s here.”

“He can ask for anything he likes.”

“Do you have to give it?”

“No.”

“Then why are you?”

Pershing considered this. It was a fair question and he did not have a fair answer.

“Because he asked properly,” he said, which was true, and was not the reason.

---

The garden at Government House went down from the back of the house in three terraces, each a little lower than the last, with brick steps between them and box hedges along the edges and roses on the walls, and at the bottom, beyond the lowest terrace, a brick wall with a wooden door in it, and beyond the door the backs of the houses on Duke of Gloucester Street, and their gardens, and their washing, going down toward the water. There was a sundial on the middle terrace. There was a magnolia on the top one that must have been as old as the house, enormous, its great waxy flowers open in the evening and its scent lying over the whole garden like a hand.

Ritchie was waiting under it, in his dinner jacket for the Ball, with a cigarette he put out as soon as he saw the Governor-General on the steps.

“Your Excellency. Thank you.”

“Mr Premier.”

“Shall we walk? I find I can’t say anything sitting down. It’s a defect. They tell me it’ll be the death of me in the House of Delegates.”

They walked. They walked down the steps to the middle terrace and along the box hedge toward the sundial, slowly, side by side, the tall handsome man in his dinner jacket and the upright one in his dark suit, and the light was going gold and long across the garden and the roofs below, and somewhere down in the town a band was tuning up for the Ball.

“I’ll be short,” said Ritchie. “I know you like it short. I asked Bramwell.”

“Everybody asks Bramwell.”

“He’s the only man in your household who tells the truth to people who aren’t you,” said Ritchie. “It’s very useful. I’d hire him tomorrow.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Your Excellency, I’m not going to ask you to do anything. I know you can’t. I’m not even going to ask you which way you are, because I know what you’ll say, and I know it’ll be true, and I don’t want to hear it. I want you to ask me what you ask the Minister of Justice.”

Pershing looked at him.

“I know what you ask him,” said Ritchie. “Everybody in public life knows. You ask him three things, every time, in the same order, and he hates it, and he comes out of Government House with a face like a wet Sunday and spends a week finding the answers so he’ll have them the next time. Corruption. Selective enforcement. And the burden on the courts and the local police.” He smiled faintly. “I want you to ask me.”

“You are not the Minister of Justice.”

“No. I’m the man in Maryland who knows the answers.” He stopped by the sundial. “Ask me, Your Excellency. In the form of an audience. Then I’ll go to the Ball, and you’ll go to the Ball, and we’ll never speak of it again.”

Pershing stood beside the sundial in the gold evening light and looked down at it. The gnomon threw a long shadow across the bronze plate. Somebody had engraved a motto round the edge, in Latin, which he translated without wanting to: I count only the sunny hours.

“Corruption,” he said.

---

Ritchie did not hesitate.

He did not consult a paper. He did not have one. He spoke in a level, unhurried voice, walking again now, slowly, along the box hedge toward the steps down to the lowest terrace, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the gravel, and it was the voice, Pershing thought, of a man who had been a very good barrister before he was a politician and had never quite forgiven himself for giving it up.

“The Baltimore district of the federal enforcement service has six agents,” he said. “Four are working. One is in the Union Memorial Hospital with a bullet in his thigh, which he received on the Patapsco in April from a man he had not been paid to leave alone. One is under investigation, as Mr Spratt told you yesterday on the porch, because he has a house at Gibson Island and a Hupmobile and a wife with a fur coat, on forty-two pounds a quarter. Of the four who are working, I would put my hand in the fire for Spratt and for one other. The remaining two I would not put my hand in a bowl of water for. In the Baltimore police, which is the city’s and not mine, I would estimate that one man in three on the waterfront beats is taking money from the trade, and one sergeant in two. The sums are not large. A pound a week. Two. They have families. The service pays them less than the trade does to look at the harbour and not see it.” He paused. “That’s corruption.”

“Selective enforcement.”

“In the last twelve months,” said Ritchie, “the federal service in this Province has made four hundred and eleven arrests under the Act. I have the list. My office keeps it, though nobody asked us to, because the arrests come to our courts. Of those four hundred and eleven, three hundred and sixty were men. Of the three hundred and sixty, two hundred and ninety were dockers, labourers, watermen, cannery hands or domestic servants. One hundred and eighty were Black. Seventy were foreign-born. Eleven were women who sold beer by the glass out of a kitchen in Fells Point to the men off the boats. Not one, Your Excellency, not one in four hundred and eleven, was a man with a cellar.” He walked on a few paces. “Wesley’s own cannery at Cambridge. Nine of his hands were taken last August, out of the quarters behind the packing shed, for a still the size of a coffee pot that one of them had made out of a copper boiler. They were fined fifty pounds each, which is a year’s wages, and three of them couldn’t pay it and did ninety days in the House of Correction at Jessup. Wesley doesn’t know.”

Pershing stopped walking.

“He does not know?”

“His manager paid the fines of the other six out of the wages fund, and docked them, and didn’t tell him, because he knew what it would do to him.” Ritchie stopped too, and turned, and looked back up the garden at the house, at the lit windows, at the porch where Tull would be standing in an hour in his tailcoat with his wife on his arm, ready for the Ball. “He’d go to the Assembly and say so. He’d stand up and say that his own men had been fined a year’s wages for a coffee pot while his friends in the capital drink claret in their dining rooms, and he’d say it was wrong, and he’d mean it, and he’d lose his office. He’s the most honest man in Maryland. That’s why nobody tells him anything.” He looked at Pershing. “That’s selective enforcement.”

The light was going red now in the west, over the roofs. The band down in the town had stopped tuning and was playing something slow.

“The courts,” said Pershing.

“The federal court in Baltimore has two thousand six hundred and forty liquor cases waiting to be heard,” said Ritchie, “and two judges, and one of them is seventy-eight. The provincial courts have no jurisdiction under the Act and so they hear nothing, but they hear everything that comes of it: the assaults on the waterfront, the shootings on the Patapsco, the blinding, Your Excellency, the men who’ve gone blind on wood alcohol in a back room in Highlandtown, eleven last year, and the widows who come to the Orphans’ Court with nothing. And the local police.” He made a small movement with his hand. “In 1923, as Mr La Guardia told you on the train, the General Assembly repealed the Province’s own enforcement statute. I brought the bill. It passed by sixty votes. Wesley gave it Assent, because I advised him to and he does what he’s advised, and then he went home and was sick, his wife told me, actually sick, in the basin. Since then no officer of the Province has been permitted to enforce the Act, and none has. The whole weight falls on six men, four of them working, two of them honest. That’s the burden.”

He stopped.

The garden was very quiet. The magnolia breathed out over all of it.

“There,” said Ritchie. “You’ve had your audience. I’m sorry it was so long. I’m told you hate that.”

---

They had come down the steps to the lowest terrace, and were standing by the wall at the bottom of the garden, beside the wooden door. Beyond it the backs of the houses went down in the dusk toward the water, roofs and gardens and washing lines with shirts on them, and between the roofs, much lower, the harbour, the masts of the boats at the City Dock with their lanterns being lit, and beyond the harbour, beyond the dark bulk of the Academy, the river, wide and grey and full of the last light.

Pershing stood with his hands behind his back and looked at it.

He had asked his three questions. He had been answered, with figures, which was how he liked to be answered, and he had no further questions, which was how an audience ended. He had nothing to say. A Governor-General who had asked a minister what the law was costing did not then tell him what to do about it, and Ritchie was not his minister, and there was nothing to do about it that was not already being done, wrongly, by people with more right to do it than he had.

He thought about nine cannery hands in the quarters behind a packing shed at Cambridge with a coffee pot.

He thought about Tull, sick in a basin.

He thought about a docker on a block in East Harlem who wanted a glass of beer with his supper, like his father had and his grandfather, and about a judge on Park Avenue with four hundred bottles in his cellar, and a Premier with four thousand in his.

He thought about the class of 1926, coming up the steps of the platform one after another in the heat with their lips not moving, Don’t let them stop it, sir.

He thought, quite clearly and for the first time, that he wanted La Guardia to win.

He wanted it with a force that surprised him. He wanted to see the short loud man in the black suit served a glass of something on the State House lawn, within sight of the King’s house, by the hand of the Premier of the Province, in front of the Sun and the class and the whole of Annapolis, and drink it, and turn round, and look up at the porch. He wanted Tull to stand up in the General Assembly on Monday in his grey suit and say, in his soft Eastern Shore voice, honestly, because he was the most honest man in Maryland, that Mr La Guardia had been right about the law. He wanted it so much that for a moment, standing by the wall at the bottom of the garden with his hands behind his back, he could feel it in his hands.

And he was ashamed of it.

He was not ashamed of the wanting. He examined that, briefly, and found nothing in it to be ashamed of; it was the conclusion of a man who had been answered with figures, and it was correct. He was ashamed of how much. He was ashamed that it had come up in him so fast and so hot, like something that had been waiting, because he had spent five years in an office in which wanting things was the one thing he must not be seen to do, and he had believed, until this moment, that he had stopped doing it. He had not stopped. He had only stopped looking.

He was the referee. He was not a party.

He took the card out of his breast pocket and looked at it, in the last of the light. Five. The referee is not a party. In his own hand. Written at the Lieutenant-Governor’s table with Bramwell’s pen, with the whole of Annapolis watching, and agreed by both sides.

He put it back.

“Your Excellency,” said Ritchie quietly, beside him.

“Mr Premier.”

“You’re not going to tell me which way you are.”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would.” Ritchie looked out at the river. “But I’ll tell you something. I’ve been in public life for fifteen years and I’ve watched a lot of men decide things, and I know what it looks like from the outside. You’ve just decided something. I don’t know what. I’m not going to ask.” He smiled, a little sadly, and took out his cigarette case, and did not open it. “Just don’t let it show at the Ball. Wesley notices more than you’d think. He’s honest, not blind.”

“The referee,” said Pershing, “will not let anything show.”

“No,” said Ritchie. “I don’t suppose he will. I don’t suppose he ever has.” He turned and looked back up the garden at the house, where the lights were on in every window now and the motor was at the front, and somewhere inside a woman’s voice, Mrs Tull’s, was calling up the stairs for her husband. “God help you, Your Excellency. I wouldn’t have your job for the whole of Baltimore.”

He went up the steps.

Pershing stayed where he was, by the wall at the bottom of the garden, for some time after, with his hands behind his back, looking at the lights coming on along the City Dock and the masts with their lanterns, until he was quite sure that his face was exactly as it had been at the letter A.

Then he went up to dress for the Ball.

---

Warren was in the corridor outside his room, in his shirt and evening trousers, with his collar undone and his tie in his hand and the towel still round his neck, waiting.

“Sir,” he said. “I can’t tie it. My neck.”

“Come here.”

Warren came. Pershing took the tie from him and turned up his collar, carefully, over the burn, and passed the tie round, carefully, and tied it, standing very close, as he had not done since his son was eleven and had gone away to school and learned to do it himself. The burn was very red. It went down under the collar on both sides. Warren stood still and did not wince, and looked over his father’s shoulder at the wall.

“What did the Premier want?” he said.

“An audience.”

“Did he get one?”

“He did.”

“What did you ask him?”

“What I always ask.” Pershing finished the bow and stood back and looked at it. It was very slightly crooked. He straightened it. “Corruption. Selective enforcement. The burden on the courts.”

“What did he say?”

Pershing looked at his son. Sixteen, nearly seventeen, taller than he was, burned the colour of a brick, in a tie his father had tied, with the place card and the programme and the prescription for his own neck all folded together in his father’s breast pocket, a foot from his face.

“He said yes,” said Pershing. “To all three,” and went into his own room to dress, and shut the door, and stood behind it for a moment before he turned on the light.