I was not in love with Rosie Garrett, of that I was certain, and yet I had been to bed with her at least a dozen times since that night in August, and had felt that same guilt described by the French corporal, felt a less understandable guilt for meeting with her now, as though we were lovers when in my heart we had never been anything like, when in my mind whatever had happened between us was already finished. I reached under my coat and fumbled in my vest pocket for my watch, clicked it open, studied it, snapped it shut angrily, and looked off at the orange-yellow flames searing the afternoon darkness. I had been driving since eight this morning, driving first through a Chicago gray with the threat of a storm as I went from store to store, and then driving out to the mill to chock on several shipments that seemed to have gone astray, and then driving all the way back from Joliet in what had become a fierce snowstorm. I was irritated now, and tired, and feeling foolishly guilty for an affair that had hardly ever been.
She came up behind me and gently looped her arm through mine, and smiled, her face wet with snow, her black fur hat crowned with white, I could remember her smile in the automobile that very first time, and in the stilling heat the strains of “Avalon,” too long ago, too tenuous a bargain to hold me to now.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, “the trolleys are all...”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“You must be frozen, Bert. Shall we go somewhere for coffee?”
“No, I don’t think we should take that chance.”
She turned to me and looked into my eyes, and nodded, and said, “All right, Bert. Can we at least sit down?”
I dusted one of the benches free of snow, and we sat side by side, Rosie with her hands in her black muff, I with mine in my pockets. We might have been strangers, and I suppose we really were.
“You sounded so desperate on the telephone,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine...”
“Well, I’ve got to talk to you,” I said.
“Nancy knows, is that it?”
“No. No, she doesn’t.”
“Allen doesn’t suspect a thing, if that’s what you’re...”
“No, that’s not it, either.”
“You look very handsome,” she said, “with all that snow in your hair.”
“Thank you. Rosie...”
“Yes, Bert?” she said, and brushed a snowflake from her cheek and then turned to me again. She knew what was coming, of course, they always know, women, there are sensors they possess that reach out and delicately probe, touching the core of the matter long before it is broached. Her face took on a pinched protective look, poor Rosie, poor dear Rosie married to a jerk and seeking God knew what from me. I wanted to say Rosie, please understand that I don’t want to hurt you, please understand that there’s a time to choose, dear Rosie, and this is that time for me. I can’t continue, Rosie, unable to look my wife in the eye, fearful that each time she says “Pardon?” she is questioning a fresh lie, I can’t do this to her, because I love her dearly. Forgive me, please, for taking what I took from you, and for turning it aside now, for seeming to spurn it now, I don’t want to hurt you, I truly don’t. But Rosie, please understand that there’s a way of life I cannot follow and yet remain the man I once hoped to become, still hope to become. Rosie, I wanted to say, please know that I can’t commit to this, I can’t give to it the energy or devotion it demands, it would destroy me, it would take whatever's good or real or honest in me and crush it forever. Rosie, I wanted to say, please understand. Rosie, I wanted to say, but she already knew, she looked at me with a small sad smile on her painted mouth, her black fur hat tilted precariously on her head, covered with a crooked crown of snow, she looked at me and waited for me to kill her.
There is only one way to say goodbye.
“Rosie,” I said, “I want to end it.”
I dreamt that night that I addressed a thousand deaf Indians in full battle regalia.
I dreamt that I mounted a platform, carrying a bass drum and a harmonica, and held up my hands for silence, and then hit the drum three times in succession and blew a sustained chord on the harmonica and held my hands up once again. When I began speaking, I spoke clearly and distinctly because all the Indians were deaf and had to read my lips — all of them were lip readers, so to speak. And since I had talked to them many times before, and since each time they had been fooled by my bass drum and harmonica into thinking I was only a song and dance man, I wanted to make absolutely certain that this time they understood me.
I dreamt that they watched me silently as I began to speak, their arms folded across their beaded chests, faces impassive, feathers rustling slightly in the wind. The sky behind them was blue, the platform rose from the center of a vast plain that stretched beyond me and the gathered Indians. My fine feathered friends, I said, I know that I am not one of your highly exalted paper tycoons whose every uttered syllable dears your normally clogged eustachian canals, I know in fact that my own beginnings were humble indeed, for where did I start if not with pulp, where I had to talk loud and talk fast to be heard over the pounding of the drum barker, where if not there? But listen to me, I dreamt I said.
Please, I dreamt I said.
Oh, I know that you have seen me standing here before you on many a previous occasion and perhaps you thought I was trying to sell you fraudulent medicine in glittering bottles, though I tell you now in all honesty my offers were sincerely made, and whatever small ills and tiny ailments I hoped to cure seemed terribly important to me. And should you now, my gathered tribal brothers, should you now fail to recognize the elixir because of what you once erroneously thought to be snake oil, well — the loss will be mine, of course; I am exposed alone to the angry wind here. But the loss will be even more seriously yours.
There was suddenly in my dream an enormous bonfire shooting sparks to the Chicago night, and more Indians dancing about it holding signs that read HARDING-COOLIDGE and chanting “We Want Harding, We Want Harding,” while white men stood beyond the circle of light proscribed by the flames and jeered and taunted, “Harding is a nigger, Harding is a nigger!” I held up my hands for silence while everywhere around us the white men passed their leaflets surreptitiously into the crowd, black type flaming against the orange and red of the fire:
When one citizen knows beyond the peradventure of doubt what concerns all other citizens but is not generally known, duty compels publication.
The father of Warren Gamaliel Harding is George Tryon Harding, second, now resident of Marion, Ohio, said to be seventy-six years of age, who practices medicine as a one-time student of the art in the office of Doctor McCuen, then resident in Blooming Grove, Morrow County, Ohio, and who has never been accepted by the people of Crawford, Morrow and Marion Counties as a white man.