2
The bailbondsmen of Cincinnati, Ohio, eat their lunch across the Ohio River in what is now an enormous restaurant a mile south of Covington, Kentucky. Called The Grace and Favor, its name sounds like an English pub, but it bears no resemblance to one. Built in the early twenties, it has had several avatars: speak-easy, night club, gambling casino; briefly a dance hall during the big-band era and then a roadhouse when that style went out after the war; a night club again in the fifties until the public had learned by heart on television the songs and routines of the stars who appeared there, then a sort of caterer’s hall where the Jews of Cincinnati bar mitzvah’d their sons and sprang for the enormous weddings of their daughters; a place where the Republican Party sponsored $1,000-a-plate dinners and the Democrats $25- and $50-a-ticket closed-circuit viewings of rallies staged in Hollywood and New York, with a cash bar available — until, in the mid-sixties, it finally became a restaurant, though it had always had a kitchen, food being a necessary concomitant of such places, prepared to serve at a moment’s notice the high roller’s steak and the gunman’s lobster.
Probably because of its various incarnations, The Grace and Favor enjoyed a certain geisha ambiguity: no matter what its function at any given moment, there were always people around who remembered when it had had another; who saw a dance floor where the tables and banquettes now stood, or remembered the crap tables and chemin de fer and roulette where the dance floor used to be; who could still see the queer metallic aisles and pews formed by the rows of slot machines; who could conjure up through the altered walls and windows and raised platform (which was once space sunk feet beneath the ordinary sea level of the surrounding room) prior configurations, where coppers’ bullets, shattering mirrors, might have brought seven years bad luck had not the management seen to it that no such continuity was likely in the place’s chameleon transitions. But no one, save the émigré English gangster who built it and who was now an old man, had witnessed all of it, though some, even some here at the long table reserved for the bondsmen, had been there at the beginning. There had been lacunae. They’d had to leave town, perhaps, or been called to war, or suffered strokes; one thing or another had taken them away at a time when the establishment was undergoing one of its many transformations. Now, in perhaps its most effete phase, as a restaurant for Cincinnati businessmen and clubwomen, it did its biggest business at lunch. (It was genuinely immense. Its main room alone could handle 500 diners without giving the appearance of crowding them.) The new Interstate Federal Highway that led across the new bridge that spanned the Ohio River and actually provided it (since advertising is banned along federal highways) with its own broad grass-green reflecting sign (“Grace and Favor ½ Mi.”) and exit ramp (no one, not even the most cynical of the bondsmen, knew how this had been finagled, though the speculation was that perhaps one of those $1,000-a-plate dinners had made it possible) made it as accessible as any restaurant in Cincinnati.
The bondsmen came in taxis, five or six to a cab, and rubbed their loud, heavily padded, sports-jacketed shoulders — they dressed in a sort of mid-fifties style, like customers in delicatessens on Sunday mornings — with the furred shoulders of the clubwomen and sober-suited buyers from the downtown stores. The London broil for $1.50 was a specialty. It was what they all ate, the distinction in their appetites if not their characters apparent only in the way they wanted it prepared and what they chose to gulp it down with.
The Phoenician was not with them today, and since word of Ehrlinger’s joke had already been leaked, some of the bondsmen were disappointed that he was not there to take their ragging. None made any comment, however. This was not their usual social gathering. It was a new departure, more or less a formal business meeting, scheduled weeks ago. They had never had a business meeting and were a little uncertain how to begin. In the trade all their adult lives, these were men who had never tired of the infinite eccentricity that came their way, who by the simple process of constant witness had become expert raconteurs, sheer access to “material” democratizing any differences in imagination and delivery chat might once have existed between them. They looked around the table at each other, their glance finally settling on Lester Adams, a tall, speckled, taciturn bondsman in his seventies.
Adams had got into bailbonds in the thirties when his farm was taken from him by the banks. He had come to Cincinnati to look for work and found $100 in the street on his first day in the big city. He was on his way to the courthouse (his small village of Bend, Ohio, had no jail, though it had a J.P. who functioned also as a law enforcement officer and Lost and Found service) to return it, carrying it openly in his hand because he had never seen such traffic before and was a little afraid he might be run over by a truck and the money found concealed on his person and people would wonder what a simple, destitute farmer like himself was doing with a hundred dollars cash in his pockets. He was looking for the Lost and Found, which was, he reasoned by analogy, in the immense courthouse. He waved the bill in front of him as he came down the corridors, snapping it like a flag of safe passage, the ostentation of the gesture only slightly less painful to him than his fear that people might think he came by it wrongfully, until he was stopped by a lawyer who was looking for a bondsman to put up $75 bail for his client.
The lawyer, who had seen Adams waving his money, touched his sleeve to get his attention. “Bondsman,” the lawyer said, and Adams, thinking the man had said “Bendsman” and that it was a question, immediately answered “Yes.” The lawyer explained his client’s circumstances and Adams, who hadn’t followed a word of what the man was saying but who was chagrined not to have recognized a fellow townsman, thought: In the big city not a whole day and whole night and so shook that I not only don’t remember this feller though we come from the same village but don’t even recognize that he looks familiar to me, and nodded in agreement to everything the lawyer said, figuring out only as the lawyer went on and it was too late, and that it was his own pleasant nodding that had made it too late, that his old friend seemed to want to borrow seventy-five dollars of the farmer’s found hundred to help out a friend of his own — possibly, Adams imagined, another fellow Bendsman. When the lawyer’s client was produced, he thought: Yep. I’m in worse trouble than I thought, for this feller don’t look no more familiar to me than the first. Not in the big city a whole day and whole night and already I can’t remember nobody. Spoiled, he thought, cursing himself, spoiled rotten, bigger headed ’n a sow’s belly.
So he was already prepared to turn over the hundred dollars to the lawyer and the twenty-five dollars change to the Lost and Found as soon as he could get away from him and find it when the lawyer said, “What about the form?”
Adams shook his head sadly. “Ain’t got no farm. Lost the farm.”
“Never mind,” the lawyer said, “I’ll be right back.” He was as good as his word. In a few moments he was back with a piece of paper. “This’ll do,” he said. “I got it from the clerk. Here. Sign.”
And though Adams couldn’t read very well he could write his name all right — wasn’t that how he’d lost the farm in the first place? — and he imagined that this was something to do with the loan, it not seeming at all strange to him that in the big city, where everything else was turned around, it was the lender who should fix his name to an IOU rather than the borrower. Then he saw that it was going to be all right when the lawyer’s client signed too. “When do I give the seventy-five dollars?” he asked.