Poorhouse Fair Read Free

flight, the last and narrowest --tan unpainted stairs rising between green walls barely a shoulders'-breadth apart--led only to the cupola and alone led away from it, once this brief diagonal descent had been made, a man could easily thread unseen through the fourth floor--half of it the closed doors of the bedridden--to the rear stairs, and thus reach the out-of-doors, and sneak behind the pig buildings and along the edge of the west wall into the adjacent town of Andrews, where Mendelssohn was well-known as a daytime drinker. The altitude of the office assured that it would seldom be visited, except by Mendelssohn's subordinates, who understood him. Further, the view commanded from the cupola was inclusive and magnificent. From what Conner had seen in the coffin--the ponderous balding head, the traces of Jewishness in the vital nostrils and the smile the embalmers had been unable to erase from the lips like the lips of a gash long healed, the faint eyebrows, the unctuously, painfully lowered lids--Mendelssohn had in part thought of himself as God.
    Conner thought of no one as God. The slats of light from the east and south windows, broken into code by the leaves and stems of the plants on the sills, spoke no language to him. He had lost all sense of omen. Rising as early as Hook, he had looked at the same sky and seen nothing but promise of a faultless day for the fair. Young for the importance of his position, devout in the service of humanity, Conner was unprepossessing: the agony, unworthy of him, he underwent in the presence of unsympathetic people was sensed by them, and they disliked him for it. The ignorant came to him and reaped more ignorance; he had no gift of conversion. The theatre of his deeds was filled with people he would never meet--the administrators, the report-readers--and beyond these black blank heads hung the white walls of the universe, the listless, permissive mother for whom Conner felt not a shred of awe, though, orthodox in the way of popular humanist orators, he claimed he did. Yet there were a few --friends, he supposed. Buddy was one, the twin, tapping out budgetory accounts at his porcelain table in the corner of the spacious room. Frequently Conner could feel Buddy's admiration and gratitude as a growing vegetal thing within himself, fed by his every action, especially the more casual; the joking words, the moan over a tangled business, the weary rising at the end of the day to pour, out of a wax-paper cup, a little drinking water on the roots of the decorative plants--like the Venetian blinds, a post-Mendelssohn innovation. Moving in, Conner had found the office bare, drab, dirty, unordered: a hole where a tramp napped.
    "Conner? Hey, Conner." It was Lucas's habit to come half-way up the last flight and then shout, his voice highly acoustical in the narrow enclosure. Conner did not know how to correct him; there was no bell; he did not know how they did it in Mendelssohn's day, nor did Lucas, Lucas and his wife having entered the place a month after the new prefect.
    "Yes, George. Come on up." He frowned for Buddy to see and kept his hands on the piece of paper he had been reading, a letter from an anonymous townsperson. Buddy's hands ostentatiously rapped on, not compromising his noise for their visitor. The twin's brain in boyhood had been soaked in thrillers, and to him Lucas was the Informer, indispensable yet despicable.
    Indeed, that Lucas, in the midst of such general hostility, should be comparatively natural with him made Conner himself uneasy. The man perhaps thought he was winning kindness for his wife, though there was no evidence that he was; impartiality with Conner was a crucial virtue. By way of comment on his puffing, Lucas said, "A lot of stairs. You'd think you were hiding."
    Conner smiled mechanically, his eyes glancing to the letter; help not hinder, I myself, and rights leaped from between his fingers. He lacked the presence, however, to hold a silence. "Martha getting