Grape Juice

Albert Ritchie, Premier of Maryland, came into the drawing room at five to eight like a man arriving at his own party, though it was not his party and he knew it.

He was a tall handsome man of fifty with a fine head of grey hair and a fine set of teeth and a dinner jacket that fitted him exactly, and he crossed the room to the Governor-General with both hands out and his eyes already alight, and Pershing understood within a minute what La Guardia had meant on the train. Everybody liked Ritchie. You could not stand in front of him and not like him. He made it seem as if liking him were your own idea, and a good one, and the two of you had arrived at it together.

“Your Excellency. Ritchie. We’ve met, at the levee. You won’t remember.”

“I remember.”

“Then you have the better memory of the two of us, because I remember only that you didn’t smile, and I thought, there’s a man who knows what a levee is for.” Ritchie laughed. “Welcome to the Free State.”

“The Province of Maryland,” said Tull, from the hearth, mildly.

“The Free State of Maryland, Wesley. Everybody calls it that.”

“Nobody calls it that but you, Albert.”

“Then I shall go on calling it that until they do.” Ritchie turned back to Pershing with no loss of warmth at all. “Wesley and I have this argument every time we’re in a room. It’s very good for us. It’s the only exercise Wesley gets.”

Tull smiled at him with real affection. Pershing, who had commanded men who hated one another and men who loved one another, had not often seen two men who did both at once with such complete good temper, and he was not sure he understood it.

The room filled. It filled with the Superintendent of the Academy, a Rear-Admiral with a red face and white hair and a wife in lavender who called Pershing General twice and was not corrected, because she was the Superintendent’s wife; with the Mayor of Annapolis, who was a small nervous man who sold insurance; with three members of the General Assembly and their wives; with the Methodist minister from the chapel on the circle, a young man with a stiff collar and an Adam’s apple; with the Rector of St Anne’s, an old man, tall and stooped and quiet, with a white fringe of hair and the face of somebody who had buried most of the people in the room’s grandparents and remembered them all fondly. With a reporter. The reporter was from the Baltimore Sun, and his name was Aldridge, and he was a sandy man of thirty with ink on one cuff who stood by the bookcase holding a glass of lemonade and looking at everybody in the room as though they were a page he would have to fill by eleven.

And with La Guardia, who came last, in a dinner jacket that he must have been wearing in the year he was elected and had not been introduced to since, with his black tie a little crooked and a red carnation in his buttonhole that nobody else had thought to wear.

“Your Honour,” he said to Tull, and shook his hand. “Mrs Tull.” He bowed over Mrs Tull’s hand, rather well. “General.”

“Governor-General.”

“I keep doing it.” La Guardia looked round. “Who’s the kid with the notebook?”

“The Sun,” said Ritchie. “I asked him.”

“You ask everybody.”

“I like a full table.” Ritchie put a hand on La Guardia’s shoulder, which he could do without bending, because La Guardia came up to about his third shirt stud. “Fiorello and I are old friends, Your Excellency. We sat together on the delegation to the Tariff conference. He talked for eleven days. I’ve never been so well entertained.”

“You never listened,” said La Guardia.

“I never needed to. I got the gist from the volume.”

And the room laughed, and a gong sounded in the hall, and Mrs Tull came and took the Governor-General’s arm.

---

Bramwell had a great talent for seating. Pershing saw that at once. He was at Mrs Tull’s right, at the head of the table, with the Superintendent’s wife on his other side and the Rector beyond her, and opposite him across the roses was Ritchie, at Tull’s end, and between them, down the long table, the whole order of Annapolis had been laid out like a well-dressed line: the Admiral, the Mayor, the members of the Assembly, the minister, their wives, all where they should be and none of them next to anybody they disliked, so far as Pershing could tell. Warren was halfway down on the left, between the minister’s wife and a member of the Assembly’s daughter, who was about fifteen and had already asked him whether he had met the King. Bramwell himself was near the foot, between Aldridge and a widow, where he could see the whole table and nobody would think he was looking.

La Guardia was in the middle on the right, directly across from Warren. He had been put between the Mayor and the widow. In the first five minutes he had found out what the Mayor’s insurance company paid on a house fire in Annapolis and what it paid on one in Baltimore, and had told the Mayor that the difference was a scandal, and the Mayor had agreed, nervously, because it was.

And at the far end of the room, beside the sideboard, standing, in his brown suit, with his leather case under his arm, was Spratt.

He had not been given a place. He had been offered one, Pershing gathered, by Mrs Tull, at the foot of the table, and had declined it on the ground that he was present in his capacity, and an officer in his capacity did not sit. He stood with his back to the wall and his eyes on the table and did not move, except once, when a footman went past him with a decanter, and his eyes followed it the length of the room and back.

The decanters went round. The tall glasses filled with dark red.

Pershing looked at his. It was very handsome in the candlelight. It smelled exactly like the jam his mother had made in Laclede in the summer of 1872, when he was eleven and the bank had not yet failed, and for a moment, absurdly, he was there, in the hot kitchen with the jars, and his mother was alive.

He put the glass down.

“You don’t care for it, Your Excellency?” said Mrs Tull.

“I am waiting for the toast.”

“Of course.” She looked down the table at her husband, who was talking to the Admiral with great animation about canning. “He will not be long. He likes to give it with the fish. He says it is the right moment, before people have eaten too much to stand.” She turned her head slightly toward him and lowered her voice, not much. “I am sorry about Mr Spratt. Wesley thinks it is a compliment to you.”

“I am sure it is meant as one.”

“It is meant as one. That is not the same as being one.” She ate a little soup. “He is not a fool, my husband. He is a good man who has never been offered a drink. It is a very particular kind of innocence. It can only be had in public life.”

Pershing looked at her.

“I have been offered a great many,” Mrs Tull said. “I am only the Lieutenant-Governor’s wife.”

The soup went. The fish came. It was rockfish, from the Bay, in a white sauce, very good. And at the far end of the table Tull put down his fork and rose.

---

“Your Excellency,” said Tull. “Mr Premier. Admiral. Ladies and gentlemen.”

The room quietened. Aldridge, by the foot, had his notebook open under the tablecloth on his knee, where he thought nobody could see it.

“I shall not speak long,” said Tull, who did not speak long; Pershing would give him that, then and afterward. “June Week is upon us. It is the best week in Annapolis, and Annapolis is the best town in the Province, and the Province, if I may say so in front of a Governor-General, is the best province in the Realm.” Laughter; the Admiral struck the table. “We are honoured beyond measure to have His Excellency with us to present the commissions. We are honoured to have the Premier, who is my oldest friend and my oldest opponent, and is not, I think, sure which he prefers.” More laughter; Ritchie bowed from his chair. “And we are honoured to have Mr La Guardia, who is not from Maryland, but whom we forgive.”

La Guardia raised a hand. “I’m working on it.”

“He is working on it,” Tull agreed, beaming. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a toast that I have given in this room for six years, and that I hope to give in it for six more. I give it in the glass you see before you, which is the fruit of the vine as God made it before man interfered, and I give it with pride, as a Marylander and as the King’s representative in this old Province. Please rise.”

They rose. Twenty-four chairs scraped. Spratt, at the wall, stood straighter.

Tull lifted his glass to the chandelier.

“Maryland,” he said, “keeps the law.”

“Maryland keeps the law,” said the room, more or less, and drank.

Pershing drank. It was very sweet. It was exactly the jam.

He was aware, as he lowered his glass, of three things at once, the way he had once been aware of three things at once on a ridge in Mindanao. He was aware that the Rector of St Anne’s, two places down, had raised his glass with perfect courtesy and not drunk from it, and had set it down with a look of gentle regret, as one sets down a coin one has been given in a foreign country. He was aware that Ritchie, at the far end, had drunk his straight off, like medicine, and was smiling into the empty glass at something private. And he was aware that La Guardia, in the middle of the table, had lifted his glass to exactly the height of everybody else’s, held it there through the whole toast, and then put it back down on the tablecloth, full, with a small precise click, and sat.

Everybody sat.

There was a silence of the kind that comes after a toast when somebody has not drunk it, which is not a long silence, and is felt by everybody.

“Mr La Guardia,” said Tull, kindly, from the end of the table. “Is it still the grapes?”

“No, Your Honour,” said La Guardia. “It’s the law.”

---

He did not stand. He did not raise his voice, which in La Guardia, Pershing would learn, was a sign of great seriousness, because he raised it for everything else. He sat with his hands on either side of his plate and looked down the table at the Lieutenant-Governor with the same open, delighted face he had brought into the railway car, and he spoke as if they were the only two men in the room, which made everybody else in the room lean in.

“I like you, Your Honour,” he said. “I want you to know that before I say anything else. I like you very much. You’re an honest man and you make an honest tomato, I’ve eaten them, they’re very good. But you’ve just stood up in front of the Governor-General and the Admiral and the Sun and said something that isn’t true. And you said it beautifully, and you believe it, and that’s what makes it worse.”

“I do believe it,” said Tull, without heat.

“I know you do. That’s the trouble. Maryland doesn’t keep the law, Your Honour. Maryland keeps a curtain over the window. There isn’t a street in Baltimore where I couldn’t get a drink in ten minutes. There isn’t a creek on this Bay that hasn’t got a boat in it that isn’t carrying oysters. The Premier knows it.” Ritchie studied the ceiling. “The Admiral knows it.” The Admiral studied his fish. “The man from the Sun knows it, he’s writing it down on his knee. Mr Spratt there knows it best of all, he’s got four men to stop it with, and one of those is in hospital.” Spratt did not move. “The only man in Maryland who doesn’t know it is you. Because you’re the Lieutenant-Governor. And nobody has ever offered the Lieutenant-Governor a drink.”

“Nobody has ever needed to,” said Tull, “because there is no drink to offer.”

“There’s a drink to offer within a mile of this table.”

“Not within sight of it.”

He said it with such placid confidence that La Guardia stopped. Pershing saw him stop. He saw the idea arrive in La Guardia’s face the way he had once seen a staff officer realise, in the middle of briefing, that the map was upside down: a small widening of the eyes, a pause, a pleasure.

“Within sight of it?” said La Guardia.

“Within sight of this house,” said Tull. “I will go so far as Baltimore, if you insist. Baltimore is a large city. There are foreign sailors. I will not go further than Baltimore. But in Annapolis, Mr La Guardia, in the capital of the Province, within sight of the King’s house, nobody serves liquor. It is not done. It would not be done. It could not be done.” He opened his hands, as if to show there was nothing in them. “I would stake my office on it.”

“Don’t stake your office,” said La Guardia. “Stake your mouth.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll bet you, Your Honour.” La Guardia leaned forward. “I’ll bet you that before midnight on Sunday I am served a drink, a real one, not this, within sight of this house. And if I am, you stand up in the General Assembly, on the record, in the Journal, and you say that Mr La Guardia was right about the law. And if I’m not,” and here he smiled, very widely, “I’ll stand up in the Commons, on Tuesday, in front of the whole House and the gallery, and say that the Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland was right, and Maryland keeps the law.”

There was a pause.

Then the Admiral said, “By God,” and struck the table again, and the room broke.

---

It broke in every direction. The member of the Assembly’s daughter said, “Oh, say yes,” to Warren, who had not been asked anything. The Mayor said, “Oh, dear,” to the widow. The Methodist minister’s Adam’s apple went up and down twice and he looked at Tull as though Tull were about to be thrown to lions. The Superintendent’s wife said, “General, can they do that?” and Pershing said, “They can do as they like, ma’am, it is a private matter,” and knew as he said it that it was not going to be. Aldridge had stopped hiding his notebook. Spratt, at the wall, had opened his leather case and taken out a pencil and a small black book and was writing in it, steadily, without expression, like a man taking down the particulars of an accident.

And Tull, at the end of the table, looked at La Guardia with an expression of complete, untroubled, slightly puzzled kindness, as if he had been asked to bet that the sun would come up.

“Mr La Guardia,” he said. “I don’t bet.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re a Methodist.”

“I am.”

“So don’t think of it as a bet. Think of it as a demonstration. You say Maryland keeps the law. I say it doesn’t. We let Maryland decide. Two days. You watch me. I try. If Maryland keeps the law, I fail, and you’ve proved it, and you get to watch me eat my words in the Commons, which you’ll enjoy, everybody will enjoy it, the Courier will put it on the front page.” He spread his hands. “What have you got to lose, if you’re right?”

Tull considered. Pershing watched him consider. It took a long time and was entirely honest. He looked at the decanters. He looked down the table at his wife, who looked back at him with nothing in her face at all. He looked at Ritchie, who had his chin on his hand and his eyes half shut and was the very picture of a man trying not to laugh in church.

“Nothing,” Tull said at last. “If I am right, nothing.”

“Then it’s a demonstration.”

“It’s a demonstration.” Tull nodded, slowly, and then more firmly, and then he smiled, and there was something in the smile that Pershing had not expected, a kind of happiness, a man who has believed a thing for six years and is pleased at last to be asked to prove it. “Very well. Very well, Mr La Guardia. A demonstration.”

“Before midnight Sunday.”

“Before midnight Sunday.”

“Within sight of the house.”

“Within sight of the house.”

“And somebody has to hold the stakes,” said Ritchie, opening his eyes. “Somebody has to judge it. You can’t judge it yourselves, you’ll argue about every word for two days and then about the arguing. You need a referee.” He looked up the table, slowly, past the roses, to the head of it, with an expression of enormous innocence. “You need the one neutral man in Maryland.”

Every head at the table turned.

---

“No,” said Pershing.

“Your Excellency,” said Ritchie, “with the greatest respect, you are the only man here who has no opinion.”

“I have a great many opinions. I do not express them.”

“Then you’re perfect.”

“I am the King’s representative. It is not my office to referee wagers between the King’s other representatives and Members of his Parliament.”

“It isn’t a wager,” said La Guardia. “It’s a demonstration. He said so.”

“It is not my office to referee demonstrations.”

“Whose office is it?” said Ritchie. “Mine? I’m a party, I’d like to see Wesley lose, I won’t pretend I wouldn’t. The Admiral’s? He’d have the midshipmen out on it in an hour. Mr Spratt’s?” Spratt looked up from his book. “Mr Spratt would arrest us all. The Rector’s? It’s the Sabbath on Sunday. The Sun’s?” Aldridge grinned. “Your Excellency, there is nobody else.”

“There is nobody at all. It need not be refereed. It need not take place.”

“Your Excellency,” said Mrs Tull.

She had not raised her voice. She did not raise it now. But the table, which had been leaning toward Ritchie and toward La Guardia and toward the head of it, stopped leaning, and listened to her.

“They will do it whether you referee it or not,” she said. “You know that. You can see them. My husband has said yes and he does not unsay things, it is one of the reasons I married him. And Mr La Guardia has never unsaid anything in his life.” La Guardia bowed in his chair. “If you do not referee it, they will each referee it themselves, all weekend, out loud, in front of the Academy and the town and the newspaper. And on Monday each of them will say he has won.” She folded her napkin. “I would rather you did it. Somebody has to say what the words mean. You are the only one here who will say it and then stop.”

There was a long silence.

Pershing looked down the table. He looked at Tull, round and pink and happy, sure of his Province. He looked at La Guardia, short and dark and delighted, sure of his. He looked at Ritchie, who was not sure of anything and liked it that way. He looked at his son, halfway down on the left, who was looking back at him with the expression Warren had worn at nine, when he had been told that he might stay up for the fireworks if his father said so, and had known his father would say no, and had hoped.

He took the place card from in front of his plate. His Excellency the Governor-General, in copperplate, with the hyphen. He turned it over.

“Mr Bramwell,” he said. “A pen.”

Bramwell rose from the foot of the table and came the whole length of the room with a fountain pen, uncapped, and put it in his hand, and went back, and every eye in the room followed him there and back again.

“If I do this,” said Pershing, “I do it on terms. My terms. Written. Read out now, before the ice cream, and agreed by both parties. And once they are agreed nobody argues with them. Nobody. Not the parties and not the Premier and not the Admiral and not the Sun. If there is a question, I answer it. If I have answered it, it is answered.”

“Agreed,” said La Guardia.

“Agreed,” said Tull.

“Agreed,” said Ritchie, who had not been asked.

Pershing wrote. The room watched him write. It took him four minutes, and in four minutes nobody at the table spoke, and the footmen stood with the ice cream melting on their trays, and the only sound was the pen on the card and, once, the State House clock outside, striking nine.

Then he read it out.

“One. Served: handed to the party by another person, and drunk. Two. A drink: intoxicating liquor within the meaning of the Act. Lawful or unlawful. The referee will not rule on lawfulness, which is a matter for the courts.” He did not look at Spratt. “Three. Within sight of Government House: at a place from which Government House can be seen by the naked eye, without glass, in the light then prevailing. Any dispute to be settled by the referee standing at that place. Four. Before Monday: before midnight on Sunday, by the State House clock.”

He stopped.

“That’s four,” said La Guardia.

“There will be five.”

“What’s the fifth?”

“I have not decided.”

“Sir,” said Warren.

Everybody looked at him. He went red to the ears, but he did not stop, and his father, who had told him a hundred times not to speak at table unless spoken to, did not stop him either.

“Which Government House?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You live in Government House,” said Warren. “In New Westminster. That’s Government House too. If Mr La Guardia went home on Sunday and somebody gave him a drink across the road from ours, would that count?”

There was a pause. Then Ritchie laughed out loud, and so did the Admiral, and so, after a moment, a little helplessly, did Tull, and La Guardia looked across the table at Warren with an expression of the most profound respect.

Pershing uncapped the pen again.

“Three,” he read, as he wrote. “Within sight of Government House on State Circle, in the City of Annapolis.” He looked down the table at his son. “Thank you.”

“Sir.”

“And the fifth?” said Ritchie. “Come on, Your Excellency. What if the referee takes a drink himself? Is it his bet then?”

“The referee will not take a drink.”

“But if he did?”

“He will not.”

“If he did,” said La Guardia, who had seen something, “all bets would be off. Wouldn’t they? You can’t have the judge in the race.”

Pershing looked at him for a long moment. Then he wrote again, quickly, and read it out without looking up.

“Five. The referee is not a party. Should the referee himself be served, the wager is void.” He capped the pen. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Tull.

“Agreed,” said La Guardia.

Pershing put the card in his breast pocket, behind the programme. The footmen moved. The ice cream came. And down at the far end of the room, by the sideboard, standing in his brown suit in his capacity, Agent Spratt closed his black book on the particulars, and put it in his case, and fastened the case, with a small click that only the Governor-General heard.