“You ever see him make a speech like this?” Imber whispered to Guyan.
“Not like this,” Guyan said.
“He knows what he’s doing.”
Cubbin stood there for all of a minute, the spotlight gleaming on the silver hair of his bowed head. Slowly he raised his head and looked at the audience, raking it with his eyes until the auditorium was perfectly still.
When he spoke he made it sound like a whisper, but one that reached all the way to the back rows. He put a great deal of feeling into his tone, a mixture of contempt and bitter scorn:
“They say that I should quit my job and run.”
He paused and then repeated the line stronger, louder, and with even more scorn:
“They say that I should quit my job and run.”
Another dramatic beat, and then the blast:
“Quit, hell! I’ve just begun to fight!”
It brought some of them to their feet cheering and whistling, and those who didn’t rise pounded their hands together as much in anticipation of a good show as in appreciation for Cubbin’s declaration.
“I’ll be damned,” Guyan said. “What is it? Does he do it every time?”
“You tell him, Kelly,” Imber said.
“It’s a combination,” Kelly said. “I don’t think he knows he’s doing it really. He just knows that it works. Did you get those first two lines?”
Guyan glanced down at some notes he’d made. “Yeah. It’s really not much of a line when you read it: ‘They say that I should quit my job and run.’”
“‘Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane,’” Kelly said.
“Jesus.”
“Five feet to the line, iambic pentameter,” Kelly said. “But he doesn’t only steal the beat from Shakespeare, he also borrows from the blues. The first line of all real blues songs is usually repeated and if you think about it, they’re also iambic pentameter, or try to be.”
“Does he do it consciously?” Guyan said.
Kelly shrugged. “He’s been doing it as long as I can remember. I tried to analyze it for him one time, but he wasn’t interested. He said he just kept thinking up lines until he got one that felt right.”
Donald Cubbin spoke for fifteen minutes and was interrupted by applause twenty-one times. He sat down to a standing ovation that came from an audience that not only liked his speech, but that also wanted to thank him for not speaking too long. The audience was in such a good mood that nobody seriously objected when the $6,499 Chris-Craft was won by the brother-in-law of the local union’s secretary-treasurer.
20
In Washington’s Cleveland Park on September 10, a Sunday, Samuel Morse Hanks was seated in his kitchen, drinking coffee, and reading the comics to his daughter Marylin who had turned six the day before.
Sammy Hanks was reading the comics to his daughter because his father had never read them to him. When his father had died ten years before Hanks had not gone to the funeral. He sometimes thought that he probably would have gone if his father had taken the time to read the comics to him. But his father always had been too concerned with his own private misery to pay much attention to the needs of his son.
Samuel Morse Hanks, Senior, had spent his life teaching European and American history to the sons and daughters of the men who worked in the plants and factories of Schenectady when those plants and factories were open. Shortly after he had arrived in the town he met a girl who was almost as ugly as he and to whom he quickly proposed marriage, mostly because she had a job in a library. Samuel Morse Hanks, Jr., was born in 1933, inheriting his pickle nose and Punch chin from his father and his bad skin from his mother.
His mother had lost her library job as soon as she had married because the library had a policy of not employing married women. She had pretended to be surprised when she had been dismissed, although she had known she would be, but she had also known that nobody other than Samuel Morse Hanks, Senior, would ever ask her to marry.
The earliest emotion that Samuel Morse Hanks, Jr., could remember was anger. He had been an angry child because his parents were poor, ugly, and seldom spoke to him, or for that matter, to each other. The only way that he could draw attention to himself was by throwing tantrums. That sometimes won him a little attention, although not enough, so he increased the number of tantrums, but with diminishing results. The more tantrums he threw, the less attention his parents paid him, until they virtually ignored him just as they ignored each other.
Until he was fifteen years old, Sammy’s mother maintained what could be called a nodding acquaintance with reality. She cleaned the house sometimes and occasionally cooked meals, although she had a tendency to serve break fast at 6:30 P.M. and dinner at seven in the morning. She had become completely oblivious to her son’s tantrums, although he still produced them, but mostly from habit.
When Sammy came home from school on his fifteenth birthday his mother was sitting in a chair, motionless, staring without comprehension into what may have been the lower depths of some private hell. She was also completely naked.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sammy said and when his mother didn’t answer, Sammy threw a tantrum, a real beauty that lasted for nearly five minutes. When she didn’t even blink at that he took a blanket from his parents’ bed and threw it over her and then found her purse and stole all she had, eighty-seven cents, and went downtown to a movie.
When he came back that evening, his mother was still sitting motionless in the chair with the blanket over her. His father was listening to the radio, which was virtually his sole amusement and had been since 1933.
“What’s wrong with her?” Sammy said.
“I don’t know,” his father said.
“Maybe you’d better get a doctor.”
“She’ll snap out of it.”
Sammy shrugged and went to bed after fixing himself a peanut-butter sandwich. When he got up the next morning he found his mother in the same position except that there was now a large pool of urine on the bare floor under her chair.
“She’s pissing all over the floor,” he told his father.
The senior Hanks had shrugged. “Then she can clean it up.”
When Sammy came home that afternoon his mother had gone, but his father was already there. “What happened to her?”
“They took her away.”
“Away where?”
“To the insane asylum. She’s catatonic. An interesting case, the doctor said.”
“When’s she coming back?”
“I don’t know,” his father said. “Perhaps never. Do you mind?”
“No,” Sammy said. “Do you?”
“No,” his father said, “I don’t mind.”
Three weeks later Sammy Hanks was awakened shortly after midnight when his father tried to crawl into bed with him.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Just lie still, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“What do you mean lie still?”
“Just turn over and lie still; you’ll like it.”
Sammy Hanks didn’t know what else to do so he threw a tantrum. That didn’t prevent his father from finishing what he had started and when it was over he had giggled and told Sammy, “Thank you very much.”
By five-thirty that morning Sammy was packed. At five thirty-five he crept into his parents’ bedroom and stole his father’s wallet which contained nine dollars. He never saw his father and mother again, but if anyone ever mentioned his father, Sammy promptly threw a tantrum. He couldn’t help it.
Twenty-four years and four months later Sammy Hanks was sitting in his kitchen with his slender blond wife and his slender blond daughter, determined to do for them what his father had never done for him and his mother.
Sybil Davis Hanks had married Sammy after Donald Cubbin had made him secretary-treasurer of the union because he seemed to worship her, he had a politically acceptable job that paid well, and because it was time for her to get married and Sammy at least didn’t bore her. An additional bonus was the way that his dark ugliness provided a splendid setting for her blond beauty. Sammy had married Sybil because she was everything that his mother had never been.