No one urged him to change his mind.
After they’d been introduced all round and the weather had been deplored, Grandison Whiting asked Daniel what he had thought of the harpsichord. Daniel (who’d been expecting a genuine antique, not a modern reconstruction built in Boston forty years ago) replied, guardedly, that it was nothing like a piano, that the touch, and the two manuals, would take some getting used to. What he’d said at the time, to Boa, was “Weird”; what he hadn’t said, even to her, was that the Steinway grand was as far beyond his ken as the harpsichord (or as the harp, for that matter), just as weird, in the sense of being wholly and unsettlingly beautiful.
Then Boa’s sister Alethea (in a white dress as stiff and resplendent as the table napkins) asked him how, in the wilderness of Amesville, he had managed to take piano lessons. He said he was self-taught, which she must have suspected was less than the whole truth, for she insisted: “Entirely?” He nodded, but with a smile meant to be teasing. She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks. Daniel wondered if she weren’t actually the more interesting of the two sisters: interesting as an object, like some dainty cup with flowers painted on it in microscopic details, or like an armchair with golden legs carved into watery shapes, with that same eggshell elegance, the same intrinsic, unhesitating disdain for boors, bears, clods, and paupers like himself, which Daniel found (somewhat guiltily) arousing. Boa, by contrast, seemed just another person, a contender in the sweepstakes of growth and change, who sometimes would pull ahead of him, sometimes fall behind. No doubt the family money was in her blood as much as it was in Alethea’s, but its effect on her was problematical, whereas with Alethea it was as though the money had blotted out everything else: as though she were the form that money took translated into flesh and blood — no longer a problem, just a fact.
Alethea went on, with wonderful aplomb considering that no one seemed interested, about horses and riding. Her father listened abstractedly, his manicured fingers patting the tangles of his fantastic beard.
Alethea fell silent.
No one took the initiative.
“Mr. Whiting,” said Daniel, “was it you I spoke to earlier, when I was at the gatehouse?”
“I’m sorry to have to say it was. Candidly, Daniel, I hoped I might just wriggle out of that one. Did you recognize my voice? Everyone does, it seems.”
“I only meant to apologize.”
“Apologize? Nonsense! I was in the wrong, and you called me down for it quite properly. Indeed, it was then, hanging up the phone and blushing for my sins, that I decided I must have you come to tea. Wasn’t it, Alethea? She was with me, you see, when the alarm went off.”
“The alarms go off a dozen times a day,” Boa said. “And they’re always false alarms. Father says it’s the price we have to pay.”
“Does it seem an excess of caution?” Grandison Whiting asked rhetorically. “No doubt it is. But it’s probably best to err on that side, don’t you think? In future when you visit you must let us know in advance, so that we may shut off the scanner, or whatever they call it. And I sincerely hope you will return, if only for Bobo’s sake. I’m afraid she’s been feeling rather… cut-off?… since she came back from the greater world beyond Iowa.” He raised his hand, as though to forestall Boa’s protests. “I know it’s not for me to say that. But one of the few advantages of being a parent is that one may take liberties with one’s children.”
“Or so he claims,” said Boa. “But in fact he takes all the liberties he can, with whoever allows it.”
“It’s nice of you to say so, Bobo, since that gives me leave to ask Daniel — you will allow me to call you Daniel, won’t you? And you must call me Grandison.”
Serjeant snickered.
Grandison Whiting nodded toward his son, by way of acknowledgement, and continued: “To ask you, Daniel (as I know I have no right to), Why have you never had that terrible apparatus removed from your stomach? You’re quite entitled to, aren’t you? As I understand it — and I’ve had to give the matter some consideration, since officially I’m on the governing board of the state prison system — only convicts who are paroled, or who’ve committed much more… heinous crimes than yours—”
“Which isn’t,” Boa hastened to remind her father, “any crime at all, since the court’s decision.”
“Thank you, dear — that’s exactly my point. Why, Daniel, having been wholly exonerated, do you submit to the inconvenience and, I daresay, the embarrassment of the sort of thing that happened today?”
“Oh, you learn where the alarms are. And you don’t go back.”
“Pardon me, um, Daniel,” said Serjeant, with vague good will, “but I’m not quite following. How is it that you go about setting off alarms?”
“When I was in prison,” Daniel explained, “I had a P-W lozenge embedded in my stomach. The lozenge is gone, so there’s no chance of my blowing us all up accidentally, but the housing for it is still there, and that, or the traces of metal in it, is what sets off alarms.”
“But why is it still there?”
“I could have it taken out if I wanted, but I’m squeamish about surgery. If they could get it out as easily as they got it in, I’d have no objections.”
“Is it a big operation?” Alethea asked, wrinkling her nose in pretty revulsion.
“Not according to the doctors. But—” He lifted his shoulders: “One man’s meat…”
Alethea laughed.
He was feeling more and more sure of himself, even cocky. This was a routine he’d often gone through, and it always made him feel like Joan of Arc or Galileo, a modern martyr of the Inquisition. He also felt something of a hypocrite, since the reason he’d kept the P-W housing in his stomach (as anyone who thought about it would have known) was that as long as he was still wired for prison he couldn’t be drafted into the National Guard. Not that he minded being or feeling hypocritical. Hadn’t he read, in Reverend Van Dyke’s book, that we’re all hypocrites and liars in the eyes of God? To deny that was only to be self-deluded besides.
However, some molecular switch inside must have responded to this tremor of guilt, for much to his own surprise Daniel started to tell Grandison Whiting of the corruption and abuses he’d witnessed at Spirit Lake. This, on the grounds that Whiting, being on the governing board of the state’s prisons, might be able to do something. He developed quite a head of steam about the system of food vouchers you had to buy just to keep alive, but even at the height of it he could see he was making a tactical error. Grandison Whiting listened to the exposé with a glistening attentiveness behind which Daniel could sense not indignation but the meshing of various cogs and gears of a logical rebuttal. Clearly, Whiting had known already of the evils Daniel was denouncing.
Boa, at the close of Daniel’s tale, expressed a hearty sense of the wrong being done, which would have been more gratifying if he hadn’t seen her through so many other tirades in the Iceberg’s classroom. More surprising was Serjeant’s response. Though it amounted to no more than his saying that it didn’t seem fair, he must have known that he would be flying in the face of his father’s as-yet-unexpressed opinion.
After a long and dour look at his son, Grandison Whiting brightened to a formal smile, and said, quietly: “Justice isn’t always fair.”