The Cool War

I

The day they came for the Reverend H. Hornswell Hake was his thirty-ninth birthday, and his secretary, Jessie Tunman, had baked him a cake. Because she liked him, she had only put two candles on it. Because she was Jessie, she dumped it in front of him with a scowl. “That’s very kind of you, Jessie,” he said, eyeing the coconut frosting he couldn’t stand.

“Yeah. Better eat it fast, because your nine o’clock people are getting out of that kiddie-car of theirs right now. Aren’t you going to blow out the candles?” She watched him do it. “Well, happy birthday, Horny. I know you’d rather have chocolate, but it gives you blackheads.”

She did not wait for an answer, but closed the door behind her.

Naturally she had caught him stripped down to his shorts, doing his barbells in front of the mirror. Now that he had stopped exercising he was freezing; he quickly put the weights away, pulled on his pants, drew lined boots over his sweatsocks and began to button his shirt, covering the great network of scars that curved under his left nipple. By the time his first counseling people showed up he was sitting behind his desk, looking once more like a Unitarian minister instead of a jock.

Another marriage down the tube if he didn’t save it. It was a responsibility he had accepted long ago, when he took the vows at the seminary. But time didn’t make his job easier. He greeted the young people, offered them birthday cake and got ready to hear their complaints and accusations one more time.

Hake took all his ministerial duties seriously. Counseling he took more seriously than most. And of all the kinds of problem-solving and support his congregation asked of him, the kinds involving marriage were the hardest and the most demanding. They came to him for marriage counseling, bright-faced, with a youthful, sophisticated veneer covering their tender, terrified insides; and they came to him again later on, most of them did, with the frayed look of anger and indigestion that went with divorce counseling. He gave them all the best he had.

“I really love you, Alys!” Ted Brant yelled furiously.

Hake gazed politely at Alys. She was not responding. She was staring tight-lipped into the corner of the room. Hake repressed a sigh and kept his silence. That was half of counseling: keeping your mouth shut, waiting for the about-to-be-married or the considering-divorce to come out with what was on their minds, really. His feet were cold. He reached down inconspicuously and rearranged the afghan he had wrapped around them.

A knock on the door broke up the tableau, and Jessie Tunman peered around it. “Sorry,” she said urgently, “but this seemed important.” She left a note on the glove table and closed the door again, smiling at the young people to show that she was not really interrupting.

Horny shook his feet out of the afghan and padded over to look at the note:

A man from the Internal Revenue wants to talk to you right away.

“Oh, God,” he said. His conscience was as clear as most, which is to say not all that clear. Not that he expected to have any real problem. But he was used to having non-problems that turned out to be interminable annoyances. One of the good things about being a clergyman was that so much of what people spent money on was, for you, deductible: the house larger than a single man really needed, justified because so many rooms were used for church purposes, like counseling and wine-and-cheese parties; the occasional travel that he liked so much almost always to attend seminars, church conventions and professional courses. But the bad thing about that good thing was that, when you had so much deductible, you had to spend a lot of time proving it.

Ted Brant was looking at him now, with the expression of a man conscious of a grievance. “I thought this session was about the ruin of our marriage.”

“It is, Ted, it is. I’m sorry for the interruption. Still,” he said, “actually it comes at a good time. I want you to try talking to each other privately about some of the things we’ve discussed. So I’m going to leave the room for ten minutes. If you don’t know what to say, well, Alys, you might go on with what you think about sharing the cooking: that was a good point you made, about your feelings about a dirty kitchen. Don’t ever apologize for feelings.” He pointed to the wine decanter and the coffee maker. “Help yourselves. And have another piece of cake,”

In the anteroom Jessie was cranking the mimeograph machine, counting turns: Shhhlick, shhhlick, shhhlick. She paused to say, “He’s waiting for you in his car, Horny.”

“In his car?”

“He’s kind of a funny guy, Horny. I don’t like him. And, listen, the heat’s gone off again. I went down and switched over to methane, but there’s no pressure.”

“The coal man said he’d come today.”

“He never comes till late afternoon. We’ll be icicles by then. I’m going to have to use the electric heater.”

Hake groaned. The power rationing made life difficult when winter hung on to the end of March, as it was this year. The electric company had installed a sealed fuse on the main. It was not supposed to blow out short of thirty amps, but the fuses were not all that accurate. If one did blow out, they had to wait for a repairman to come from the company, shortly to be followed by a cop with a summons for power-piggery. Hake said, “If you have to, you have to. But turn off some lights. And go in and turn off the heater in the study. There’s enough animal heat in there anyway.”

She said virtuously, “I hate to disturb the young folks.”

“Sure you do.” What she said was the truth. She preferred to listen at the door.

He put a sweater on and went out to the porch. The winds were coming straight off the Atlantic, and either surf-spray or a drizzle was blowing in on him.

The rectory was a house a hundred and fifty years old, from the great days of Long Branch when presidents came up to take the summer ocean air (and died there, a couple of them). It was past those days now. The scrollwork on the wooden porch was soft with rot, and the Building Fund never seemed to keep up with replacing the storm windows and the tiles that flew off the roof every time the wind blew. At times it had been a summer home for a wealthy Philadelphia family, a whorehouse, a speakeasy, a dying place for old people, a headquarters for the local Ku Klux Klan, eight or ten different kinds of rooming house—and vacant. Lately, mostly vacant. The church bought it at one of those times because it was cheap.

Hake rested his hand on the rail for the chairlift, no longer used since his rebirth two years before, and clutched his scarf, looking for his visitor. Among the rubble of street excavation that seemed to be the chronic state of the roadway it was not easy to see all the cars— But then he saw it. No mistake. In a block sparsely lined with three-wheelers and mini-Volkses, it was the only Buick. And four-door at that. And gasoline driven. And it had the motor running.

Horny Hake had a temper, learned in the free and outspoken kibbutz where he had spent his childhood, where if you didn’t yell when you were sore no one knew you were around. He jumped down the steps, flung open the waste-fully heavy door, leaned in it and blazed, “Power pig! Turn off that God-damned motor!”

The man at the wheel threw away a cigarette and turned a startled face to him. “Ah, Reverend Hake?”

“Damn right I’m Reverend Hake, whoever the hell you are, and what’s this crap about my tax return?” He was shivering, partly from the wind and partly from fury. “And turn off that motor!”

“Ah, yes, sir. Of course.” The man switched off the ignition and began to roll up the window with one hand, trying to stretch to the open door on Horny’s side with the other. “Please come in, sir. I’m surely sorry about keeping the motor running, but this weather—”

Hake irritably slid in and shut the door. “All right. What about my taxes?”

The young man struggled to get a wallet out of his hip pocket and extracted a card. “My ID, sir.” It read:

T. Donal Corry

Administrative Assistant

Senator Nicholson Bainbridge Watson

“I thought you were from Internal Revenue,” said Hake suspiciously, turning the card over in his hand. It was handsomely engraved and apparently made from virgin linen stock: another kind of piggery!

“No, sir. That statement is, ah, inoperative at this point in time.”

“Meaning you lied?”

“Meaning, sir, that this is a matter of national security. I did not wish to risk exposing a sensitive matter to your associate, Ms. Tunman, or your counselees.”

Horny twisted around in the padded leather seat and stared at Corry. He began mildly enough, but his voice was rising as he finished: “You mean you came up here, stinking up the air in your big-assed Buick, got me out of a counseling session, shook up my secretary whom I can’t pay enough to afford to antagonize, scared me half to death that I was being audited on my tax return, and all you wanted was to tell me some Senator wanted to come up and see me?”

Corry winced. “Yes, sir. I mean, that’s about the size of it, Reverend Hake, except that the, ah, Senator is not really involved either. That too is inoperative. And he isn’t coming here anyway. You’re going there.”

“I can’t just take off and—”

“Yes, you can, Reverend,” the man said firmly. “I’ve got your travel papers here. Eight fifteen to Newark, Metroliner to Washington, get off in Maryland, as indicated— you’ll be at your destination at a quarter of one and briefing will be completed by two at the latest. Good-by, Reverend Hake.” And before Horny knew it, he was outside the car again, and that pestilential eight-cylinder motor had started up, and the car roared into an illegal U-turn and away.

“Are we in trouble, Horny?” Jessie Tunman asked anxiously.

“I don’t think so. I mean, I guess it’s only routine,” he said, roused from abstraction.

“Well, that’s good, because we’ve got enough trouble already. I was just listening to the radio. There’s a riot in Asbury Park, and the garbage men just went on strike, so there’s going to be methane rationing if they don’t get it settled by tomorrow.”

“Oh, lord.”

“And I still can’t get any heat in here, and you’d better get back inside because I heard them yelling at each other a minute ago.”

Hake shook his head mournfully; he had almost forgotten about the marital problems of his parishioners. But they were far more rewarding than his own, and less perplexing.

He perked up as he went back through the door. “Well,” he said. “What have you decided?”

Ted Brant looked around the room and said, “I guess I’ll be the one to tell you. Alys definitely wants a divorce.”

That was a body blow; Horny had hoped he’d got them reconciled. His voice was angry as he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Alys. Are you sure? I don’t hold marriage as an inviolable sacrament, of course, but my observation is that people who divorce almost always repeat the same sort of marriage with new partners. No better, no worse.”

“I’m sure that’s what I want, Horny,” said Alys. The reddening of the eyes and the streaks of her makeup showed she had been weeping, but she was composed now.

“Is it Ted?”

“Oh, no.”

“Walter?”

“No. It isn’t Sue-Ellen, either. They’re all just as fine as they can be. But not for me. They’ll be happier with somebody else, Horny.”

Walter Sturgis gazed at her with eyes leaking slow tears. He was breathing heavily. “Oh, Horny,” he moaned. “I never thought it would end like this. I remember the day I first met Alys. Ted introduced us. They were recently married, just the two of them. I’d always liked Ted, but I just never thought of a plural marriage with him until I met Alys, so pretty, so different. And then when Sue-Ellen came along, we all fitted together. We proposed the day after we met.”

“Actually it was about two weeks after we met, dear,” said Sue-Ellen with some difficulty. She had been crying too.

“No, honey, that was after you and I met; I mean after the two of us met Ted and Alys. Horny,” he said despondently, “if Alys won’t change her mind I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll never find another girl like her. And I’m sure I speak for Ted and Sue-Ellen too.”

Long after they had gone Horny sat in the gathering darkness, wondering where he had failed. But had it been his failure? Wasn’t there something in the essential grinding, grim grittiness of the world that was destroying social fabrics of more kinds than marriage? The strikes and the muggings, the unemployment and the inflation, the jolting disappearance of fresh fruits from the stores in summer and of Christmas trees in December, the puzzling and permanently infuriating dislocations that had become the central fact of everyone’s life—wasn’t that where the cause was, and not in his failure?

But the failure felt like his own. And that was almost a pleasing thought. At least it was a useful one. He had been a minister long enough to recognize that any insight into guilt was a possible starting place for a sermon theme. He picked up the microphone, thumbed the switch and started to dictate before he realized the red operation light hadn’t gone on.

At the same moment Jessie Tunman opened the door without knocking. “Horny! Did you turn on your heater?”

He looked guiltily down, and there it was. Not glowing. But warm and clicking to itself from thermal strain.

“I guess I must have.”

“Well, you did it that time. We’ve blown the input fuse.”

“I’m sorry, Jessie. Well, the coal man will be here pretty soon—”

“But then the blower won’t work, because there’s no power for it, will it? You’ll be lucky if the pipes don’t freeze, Horny, and as for me, I’m getting a cold. I’ve got to go home.”

“But the church newsletter—”

“I’ll run it off tomorrow, Horny.”

“My sermon! I haven’t even started dictating it!”

“You can dictate it tomorrow, Horny. I’ll type it up.”

“I can’t, I have to go— I have to do something else tomorrow.”

She looked at him curiously. “Well,” she said, puffing her gray cheeks, “when you get up there Sunday morning maybe you can do a couple of card tricks. I have to go now, or I’ll be sick, and then I won’t be in tomorrow either.”

He watched her zip up her quilted jacket and transfer her spiral silver safe brooch from blouse to coat. As she was leaving there was someone at the door, and for a moment Horny’s hopes ran high—the man from the electric company? Maybe the coal man, maybe both of them together? But it was only the policeman with the summons for power-piggery.

“That’s your fifth offense, Reverend,” he smirked, blowing into his reddened hands. “Maybe I should just leave a couple of blank ones for you to fill out, save me a trip next time?”

Horny stared at him, a big, beefy man with a gay knot on the shoulder of his uniform jacket, leather bracelet at his wrist, American flag in between. He was not the kind of person Horny Hake looked to argue with. A hundred rejoinders rose to his lips, but what came out was, “Thank you, Sergeant. Sure is lousy weather, isn’t it?”