Poorhouse Fair Read Free Page A

her cake made?" he asked, clipping away minor words in embarrassment at being conventionally cordial.
    "She's fussing at something, I know."
    "You must be glad," Conner said, "that she's on her feet again." He felt this remark instantly as fatuous; of course Lucas was glad. Yet he had meant it well, and he felt irritation at the invisible apparatus that, placed between himself and any of the inmates, so scrupulously judged the content of expressions that were meant to be carelessly amiable.
    To his relief Lucas removed their talk to the plane of business. "They noticed their names on the porch chairs downstairs."
    Conner's heart tripped, absurdly. He should have given up hope of pleasing them long ago; it was enough to help them. Ideally, his dedication wore blinders, but he was too weak not to glance to the side for signs of approval. The sculptor has his rock and the saint the silence of his Lord, but a man like Conner who has vowed to bring order and beauty out of human substance had no third factor; he is a slave, at first, to gratitude. In time, he knew, this tender place grows callous; he had heard the older men whose disciple he was discuss, not entirely in joking, mass murder as the ultimate kindness the enlightened could perform for the others. "From your tone," he said to Lucas, "I take it their noticing should cause me anxiety."
    "Well, they're confused. They can't read your purpose."
    "Who is this they?"
    Lucas poked something small and wooden into his ear and made a face of pain, his clayey skin eroding in rivers suddenly.
    "You needn't name them," Conner added.
    "Hook and Gregg were the ones I heard talking about it."
    "Hook and Gregg. Poor Gregg, of course, is one notch removed from dementia. Hook is something else. Tell me, do you think Hook is senile?"
    "In the head? No."
    "Then there must be a rational cause that has set him against me."
    "Oh, he's not against you. He just talks on the first thing that comes into his mind."
    "And I'm always in his mind. What better friend does he think he has than myself? Hook's been here fifteen years; he knows what it was like under Mendelssohn."
    Lucas looked startled to be feeling the edge of an apologia that was, Conner realized, principally excited by the preposterous and insulting letter he had been reading. "He speaks real well of him," Lucas said, with an odd steadiness of his eyes. "I have no opinion; I came here after you."
    "Half the county home acres were lying fallow, waste. The outbuildings were crammed with refuse and filth. The west wing was a death trap. When Hook, last autumn, ate that unwashed peach, he would have died if Mendelssohn had still been in charge."
    "Doesn't anybody realize," Buddy interjected in his somewhat frantic boy's voice, "what Mr. Conner has done here? This home has one of the five highest ratings in the north-eastern sector."
    "I read that on the bulletin board. It makes us all proud." Lucas's hands went to the side of his head, and his face crumpled again. This over, he asked soberly, "But now what was the idea about the nameplates?" Dogged, flashed on Conner as an adequate summation of Lucas.
    Conner wondered if it were wisest to be silent. Words, any words, gave a person a piece of yourself. Swiftly, reasons marshalled against this unworthy impulse:
    You should not make shows of authority.
    Lucas, fat and blunt and coarse-pored as he was, soiling the order of this office and the morning's routine, deserved politeness, as one of the unfortunates.
    If Conner fudged, Lucas would convey the fact to the others.
    The question was not, as it seemed (so strong was Conner's impression this moment of defiance and ingratitude everywhere), an impudence to which there is no answer.
    There was an answer; everything Conner did he did for a reason; his actions were glass.
    His motives occurred to him; he stared at the shine on Lucas's taut hooked nose and then shot his gaze to the stripes of blue at the window, saying, "There have been complaints,