The Committee. Sterling Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ mean our marriage? No, I wouldn’t say so. Jack wasn’t seeing another woman, if that’s what you’re asking, and I sure wasn’t seeing anyone.” Showing her liquor a little now, she leaned over and touched Stall’s hand. “Although I’ve always had a secret fancy for you, Tom. Sorry, Maureen. I’m just feeling truthful today.”

      No, thought Stall, you’re lying.

      Maureen took it well. “That’s all right, Sarah. All the girls like Tom. He’s cute, is my Tom.” Unmistakable emphasis on my.

      Stall said, “Sarah, let’s get you home.”

      “Home? The party’s just getting started.” She looked around the bowling alley with the startled eyes of a woman who has just noticed how drunk she is. “Maybe I’ll bowl a few . . . what do you call them, a few rubbers, a few strikes, some pars, an inning? It looks like an interesting game.”

      Stall said to Maureen, “I’ll drive Sarah in her car. You follow in ours.” He lifted Sarah by her elbow.

      She pulled away from him with a dignified flexing of her tennis muscles. She stood looking defiantly at him, then at Maureen, and then a sad gravity took her limbs and her shoulders fell. “All right,” she said, “home. More gin rummy with Maddie. The bottle of rye’s only half-empty.”

      Stall walked her to her car where she stood at the driver’s door digging into her purse for her keys. When she found them, she said, “I’ll drive. I told you I want to drive drunk.”

      “Not this drunk,” Stall said gently, and held out his hand. He was going to stand firm even if she made a scene. She looked into his eyes and there it was, that come hither he had seen a few times before, though never aimed at him.

      “Okay, Tommy.” Her voice was girlish and flirtatious. She handed him the keys. “You drive.”

      Maureen came out of the bowling alley stuffing money into her purse. She had paid and tipped.

      Stall drove the Leaf’s Buick to their house in the fashionable Duckpond area of Gainesville. It was an old Florida bungalow from the thirties, with the neat lawn and shrubbery you would expect of Jack and Sarah Leaf. Stall pulled into the driveway, waved his good intentions to Maureen who had pulled in behind him, and got Sarah Leaf out of the car.

      On the way to the front door, she said, “I guess Maddie’s gone home. I don’t see her car.”

      Well, Stall thought, somebody’s driving drunk.

      He unlocked the front door and followed Sarah Leaf inside. The house was as he remembered it, except for the faint smell of bourbon and the casseroles piled on the kitchen counter. Sarah pointed at them. “Too many for the fridge. I had to leave them out. Would you like to take some home?”

      “No, but thanks. Look, Sarah, are you gonna to be all right? Maybe you should come home with us. Spend the night and we can talk more if you want to.”

      “Talk?” She gave him a bleak look. “What good is talk, Tom? Jack and I talked forever and it never did us any good.”

      All Stall could do was shrug. English teachers were men of words, and most of them thought talking did some good.

      Sarah Leaf opened a drawer beside the kitchen stove and pulled out an envelope. She handed it to him. “The medical examiner’s office gave me Jack’s clothes. They found this in his coat pocket. Go ahead, open it.”

      The envelope held a subpoena from the Johns Committee. The document commanded Jack Leaf to appear on August 25, 1958, to testify under oath before the Committee. Stall knew the answer, but he had to ask the question: “Why did they want to talk with Jack?”

      “They don’t like perverts. Jack was . . . I suppose the common term is homosexual. Jack preferred to call himself gay. It’s a British word, he told me. But really, Jack was . . . hard to define. He liked me . . . sometimes.” She looked up into Stall’s eyes like a little girl would look at her father. “And I loved him.”

      She went to the dining room table where two gin rummy hands were still laid out beside a pile of pennies. She picked up the bottle of Old Overholt and brought it back to the kitchen where she poured two straight shots and handed one to Stall. He pictured Maureen waiting outside. She was too polite to honk the horn, though she wouldn’t hesitate to come inside to see what was keeping her husband in Sarah Leaf’s house. When Stall didn’t take the glass from Sarah’s hand, she pushed it against his chest and let it go. He caught it, and she touched hers to his and drank. Stall drank with her. She looked into his eyes.

      “Jack liked me if I lay on my stomach.” She turned around and looked at him over her shoulder. “See this ass? Doesn’t it look a bit like a man’s?”

      Stall could barely choke the words out through the sudden lump in this throat: “It’s a very fine ass, Sarah. It’s an admirable ass.”

      “Jack went both ways, Tom. Some men are like that, and some women too, they tell me. His view of it was that the rest of us, who can’t go both ways, are missing out on, well, half the good things in life.”

      She finished her drink and put her fingers gently under the bottom of his glass and raised it to his lips, making him finish too. Like you’d do with a baby, Stall thought. And when it comes to talking like this, that’s what I am.

      “After I got used to everything I learned about Jack, I was just glad to have half of him. Oh, I worried about him. Some of the things he did, some of the men he met, were maybe a little dangerous, but I knew he was as careful as he could be, and I knew he wouldn’t hurt me if he could absolutely help it.”

      Careful? Stall’s throat burned from the whiskey, his stomach rolled with too much of it. Careful in a bus station?

      “May I take this with me?” He held up the subpoena between himself and Sarah Leaf, where it had the desired effect. Her eyes closed, and when they opened again, she was finished telling the truth. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t think it matters to anyone now. Do you?”

      Oh, it matters, thought Stall. If the newspapers get ahold of it, it will matter to you and your children.

      Even if the Committee moved on to other business, the papers would want to know why a man had killed himself. They wouldn’t stop spilling ink until they found out. And the reporters would become the tools of the Committee whether they liked it or not. Florida’s sodomy laws were clear. A man could go to jail for having sex with another man. He could go to jail for addressing his own wife from behind. But it didn’t have to go that far. A committee of the state legislature in open session could ruin a man in minutes and the press would cover every word of it.

      Stall said quietly, “Yes, I think it matters.” And you’ll think so too, in the morning. He tucked the subpoena into his pocket. “I’ll take good care of this. Don’t worry about it.”

      When he got to the car, Maureen moved from behind the wheel.

      “No,” he said, “you drive.”

      This was rare. She raised her eyebrows. “You two were in there for . . . ?”

      “She’s not in very good shape right now.”

      “So, did СКАЧАТЬ