Tune Every Heart and Every Voice

"How Goes It?" Webel said, standing at the bar.

"Nighttime, nighttime," Eddie said, mournfully, serving Webel a cup of black coffee.

It was 2:30 in the morning, but there were still more than a dozen people in the bar. There were a few couples in the booths; near the beer spigots a tall, youngish man sat talking in a low voice to a girl with chopped black hair and green wool stockings; two or three industrious drinkers stared into their glasses, hunched into their overcoats over the damp mahogany; John McCool, wearing a wrinkled corduroy jacket and a lumberjack's red-and-black-checked shirt, sat alone at the small table near the entrance, drunk and doodling on the menu. Webel had said hello to McCool when he came in and had looked at the doodle. It was a picture of a football player with three legs and seven or eight arms, like a statue in an Indian temple. "The best elements of East and West," McCool had said thickly. "Ambition, speed, brutality and fair play, allied to multiplicity of means and the denial of the material and degrading limitations of the natural world."

Webel had given McCool back his doodle, without further investigation. McCool was a good scene-designer and a bad painter and after a few drinks his conversation was likely to be gloomy, oblique and difficult to follow.

"Nobody ever goes to sleep in this town," Eddie said. He surveyed his customers with loathing. He had to stay open until four every morning anyway, but he lived in the hope that one night his bar would be empty by two o'clock and he could close early with a calm conscience and go home and sleep. He had the face of a man who worried more about sleep than about the Russians, the Democratic Party, death or love. The bar was on West 46th Street and was a hangout for actors and theatrical people in general, who didn't have to go to work until eight o'clock at night, if they had to go to work at all, and who shared the profession's enduring revulsion to daylight. "How many cups a coffee you drink a day, Mr. Webel?" Eddie asked.

"Twenty -- thirty a day," Webel said.

"Why?"

"I don't like the taste of alcohol."

"Do you like the taste of coffee?"

"Not much," Webel said, lifting the cup.

"There you are," Eddie said. He swabbed the bar to one side of Webel sorrowfully. "Nobody makes any sense these days."

"Eddie," called the man who was sitting on the stool next to the girl in green stockings. "Two gibsons, please, if it's not too much of an imposition."

"Imposition," Eddie muttered, still swabbing the bar. "Do you get the sarcasm? Gibsons at 2:30 in the morning. Who drinks gibsons after midnight? Fairies, alcoholics and exhibitionists. I tell them to their faces." Without looking at the man who had ordered, he poured the gin and vermouth into the glass, shoveled in the ice and stirred savagely.

"Glacial, if you don't mind, Eddie," the man said. He had a lofty, good Eastern-school accent that was sometimes hard for Webel to bear, especially this late at night. The man's clothes, narrow and proper, matched the accent, and Webel, who looked like a dressed-up truck driver or a Marine top sergeant on furlough, no matter what tailor he used, found himself disliking the man's clothes, too.

"Eddie," the barman muttered, whirling the drink around in the glass. "Everybody thinks he has the right to call me Eddie."

"Who is he?" Webel asked in a low voice.

"Some television jerk," Eddie said, plopping in onions. "Madison Avenue. They're invading the West Side now. It's chic, some dame mentioned the joint in Vogue. Or maybe it's just the population explosion. The baby boom is driving th'upper classes into the Hudson." Gloomily, he moved down the bar and served the gibsons.

"Excellent, Eddie," the man said, tasting his drink.

Eddie grunted, accepting no largess. He rang up the charge on the cash register and stuck the slip in a puddle on the bar under the elbow of the girl with the green stockings. "Sinclair," the girl was saying, "you should have seen Dom-inguin at Dax. He cut four ears. The faena with the second bull was absolutely chilling. And he killed recibien-do."

Holy God, Webel thought, is there no escape? He drank his coffee in one gulp and burned his tongue.

"Mr. Holstein," John McCool called to Eddie from his table, "another whiskey, please, and two more menus."

Eddie served McCool and gave him his menus and glowered at the couple in booth number three, who had been holding hands over two bottles of beer since one o'clock. Eddie came back to Webel with a fresh cup of coffee, steaming hot. He watched Webel sip at it, the expression on his face a mixture of fascination, disbelief and disgust. "You mean to say," Eddie said, "you can go home and go to sleep after all that coffee?"

"Yes," Webel said.

"Without pills?"

"Without pills."

Eddie shook his head wonderingly. "You must have the constitution of a infant," he said. "Of course, you got a hit running on 44th Street, I guess anybody can sleep with a hit."

"It helps," Webel said. He was the (continued on page 119)Tune Every Heart(Continued from page 57) company manager for a musical that had opened two weeks ago and that looked good for a run of three years.

"You know, Edgar Wallace," Eddie said, "he killed himself with tea. The writer, Edgar Wallace. His doctor said, You are tanning the interior of your intestines, Mr. Wallace, with all that tea, you are drinking yourself to death, but he kept on, like you with your coffee, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I don't mind at all, Eddie," Webel said.

"Maybe you ought to get married, Mr. Webel," Eddie said. "A man who drinks all that coffee."

"I have been married." Webel said.

"Me, too," Eddie said. "Three times. What am I saying? This hour of the night, a man says the goddamnedest things. I take it back."

"Oh, Eddie." It was old narrow-shoulders again, the man the girl had addressed as Sinclair, lifting a long white hand. "Have you got two bottles of drinkable Chablis I can take with me?"

Webel watched Eddie's face with interest. The greenish midnight pallor vanished and in its place rose a hearty, ruddy, flamelike glow, giving Eddie, for the moment, the complexion of an English gentleman farmer who rode to the hounds three times a week. Webel had never seen Eddie looking so healthy.

"What was that, Mister?" Eddie asked, keeping his voice under control with some difficulty.

"I wondered if you had a couple of bottles of white wine I could take home with me," Sinclair said. "I'm going down to New Haven tomorrow for the game and we're picnicking near the Bowl and it'll be a bore scrambling around looking for a wine shop in the morning."

"I got some Christian Brothers white," Eddie said. "I don't guarantee it's drinkable. I ain't tasted it."

"Throw them into a bag, like a good fellow," the man said. "We'll just have to make do."

Webel burned his tongue again on his coffee, as he watched Eddie scowl down into the refrigerator chests and come up with two bottles, which he put in a large brown paper bag, and set on the bar in front of the man and his girl.

"By the way, Eddie," the man said, "who do you think is going to win tomorrow?"

"Who do you think?" Eddie asked, his voice edgy.

"Princeton," the man said. He laughed easily. "Of course, I'm prejudiced, Dear ..." He turned to the girl and touched her arm lightly. "I'm a Princeton man, myself."

What a surprise, Webel thought.

"I think Yale," Eddie said.

"Lux et veritas," John McCool said, from his table near the entrance, but nobody paid any attention to him.

"You think Yale," the Princeton man said, mimicking Eddie's proletarian Third Avenue accent just enough to make Webel think with fleeting approval of revolution and the overthrow of all established orders. "I'll tell you what I'll do with you, Eddie, since you think Yale. I'll make a little wager. I'll wager the price of these two bottles of wine that Princeton wins."

"I don't gamble my liquor," Eddie said. "I buy it and I sell it."

"You mean you're not prepared to back your opinion," the Princeton man said.

"I mean what I said," Eddie turned his back on the man and rearranged some bottles of Scotch behind the bar.

"If you're that eager to bet," Webel said, "I might be able to oblige." He hadn't thought about the game and he didn't follow football very closely and he was not a gambling man, but at the moment he would have bet on the Republicans if the Princeton man had said he was a Democrat, on Johansson if the man had come out for Patterson, on Peru against Russia, if the man had expressed his preference for the Red Army.

"Oh," the man said coolly, "you might be able to oblige. That's interesting. Up to what amount, might I ask?"

"Any amount you like," Webel said, grateful for the musical on 44th Street that permitted him gestures like this.

"I suppose $100 would be too steep for you," Sinclair said, smiling gently.

"Actually not," Webel said. "Actually I find it rather piddling." Hit or no hit, he didn't really feel like losing $100, but the man's voice, assured and supercilious, drove him blindly on into extravagance. "I was thinking of something more important than that."

"Well," Sinclair said, "let's keep it on a small, friendly basis. Let's say $100. What odds do you offer?"

"Odds?" Webel asked, surprised. "It's an even money game."

"Oh, my dear fellow," said the Princeton man, pretending to be amused. "I'm loyal to the old school and all that, but not to that extent. I'll take two and a half to one."

"All the papers make it an even money game," Webel said.

"Not the papers I read," the Princeton man said, inferring by his tone that Webel undoubtedly read only crooked tip sheets, true-confession magazines and pornographic tabloids. Sinclair took out his wallet and dug into it and brought out two $20 bills, which he laid on the bar. "Here's my money," he said. "Forty dollars to your hundred."

"Eddie," Webel said, "have you got an evening paper here? Let's show this fellow."

"I am not interested in what some poor hack of a sports writer dreams up in a drunken stupor," Sinclair said. "I know the teams. Both coaches are friends of mine. I assure you, my dear fellow, I am being most generous in taking two and a half to one."

"Eddie," Webel said, "do you know a bookie we can get hold of at this hour to quote the odds?"

"Sure," Eddie said. "But it's a waste of time. It's been the same all week. Six to five, take your choice. That's even money, Mister."

"I never have any truck with bookies," Sinclair said. He started to put his money back in his wallet. "If you didn't intend to bet," he said frostily to Webel, "it would have been wiser to keep quiet in the first place." He turned ostentatiously toward the girl, presenting his back to Webel. "Would you like another drink, Dear?"

At this moment, McCool, who had been bent over his drawing, seeming to pay no attention to the conversation, looked up and said in a loud, clear, carrying voice. "Look here, Brother Tiger," he said, "I'm a Princeton man myself, and I say that no gentleman would ask for two and a half to one on this game. The odds are even money."

Silence enfolded the bar, frigid and palpable. Sinclair put his wallet away deliberately and turned slowly to regard McCool at his table near the entrance. McCool had his head down again and was placidly drawing on the menu. The expression on Sinclair's face was shocked, mildly disbelieving, amused and tolerant, all at the same time. It was the sort of expression that you might find on the face of a liberal clergyman who had been invited to dinner by a group of his parishioners only to discover that a striptease was in progress in the center of the room.

"Excuse me, Dear," Sinclair said to the girl in the green stockings. Then he walked slowly, with dignity, toward McCool. He stopped a good four feet away from McCool's table, making his halt look like a prophylactic measure, keeping him safely out of the invisible aura that only he was fine enough to sense as it emanated from the region inhabited at the moment by McCool.

McCool drew contentedly, his head down. He was almost completely bald on top and he had a fringe of red hair above the ears and a long, aggressive jaw covered with a russet stubble. For the first time Webel realized that McCool looked just like the pictures of the Irish laborers who had been brought over in the 1860s to build the Union Pacific Railroad. Webel didn't blame Sinclair for being surprised. It took a bold leap of the imagination to conceive of McCool at Princeton.

"Did I hear you correctly, Sir?" Sinclair asked.

"I don't know," McCool said, without looking up.

"Did you or did you not say you were a Princeton man?"

"I did." Now McCool looked up belligerently and drunkenly at Sinclair. "I also said no gen'lman would ask for odds. Just in case you didn't hear that correctly."

Sinclair made a slow semicircle in front of McCool, examining him with scientific interest. "So," Sinclair said, his voice edged with aristocratic skepticism, "you say you're a Princeton man?"

"I say," said McCool.

Sinclair turned toward the girl at the liar. "Did you hear that, Dear?" Without waiting for an answer, he wheeled back to face McCool. His voice now was rich with the scorn of a prince of the blood in the presence of a plebeian impostor caught in the act of trying to crash the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. "Why, Sir," he said, "you're no more of a Princeton man than ... than ..." He looked around him, searching for the most extreme, the most ludicrously impossible comparison. "Why you're no more of a Princeton man than Eddie here."

"Hey, wait a minute, Mister," Eddie said, displeased, behind the bar. "Don't make any more enemies than is absolutely necessary."

Sinclair ignored Eddie and concentrated on McCool. "I'm interested in your case, Mr.... Mr.... I'm afraid I didn't catch your name."

"McCool," said McCool.

"McCool," Sinclair said. He made the name sound like a newly discovered skin disease. "I'mafraid I don't know any family by that name."

"My father was a wandering tinker," McCool said. "Going up and down the bogs, with a song in his heart. It was the family business. It kept us in luxury since the 11th Century. I'm surprised you haven't heard of us." He began to sing The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, off key.

Webel watched with pleasure. He was delighted that he had decided to come into Eddie's bar instead of going home to sleep.

"You still insist," Sinclair said, breaking into McCool's musical croaking, "that you went to Princeton?"

"What do you want me to do?" McCool said irritably, "strip and show you my black and orange tattooing?"

"Let me ask you a question, Mr. McCoolm," Sinclair said smoothlym, with false friendliness. "What club did you belong to?"

"I didn't belong to any club," McCool said.

"Aha," said Sinclair.

"I have never recovered from the blow," McCool said. He began to sing The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls again.

"I can understand your not having belonged to a club," Sinclair said genially. "But even so, I imagine, you could tell me where the Ivy is or Cannon. Couldn't you, Mr. McCool?" He leaned slightly toward McCool's table, inquisitive and sure of himself.

"Lemme see ... lemme see," McCool mumbled. He stared down at the table and scratched his bald head.

"Say in relation to the Pyne Library," Sinclair said. "Or Holder Hall."

"I'll be goddamned," McCool said. "I forgot. I got out before the war."

Now Webel was annoyed with McCool. The Princeton Dramatic Club invited McCool down to lecture to their members almost every year, and even drunk as he was McCool should have been able to remember where Prospect Street was.

Sinclair was smiling loftily now, pleased with his brilliant cross-examination. "Let's skip that for the moment," he said magnanimously. "Let's try something else. Let's try Old Nassau, for example. You've heard of Old Nassau, I imagine?"

"Sure I've heard of Old Nassau," McCool said doggedly. Plainly, he was ashamed of his performance on the examination about the clubs.

"That's the song that starts, 'Tune every heart and every voice, Let every care withdraw ...' Does that ring a bell, Mr. McCool?"

"I know it," McCool said sullenly.

"I'd be interested to hear you try to sing it," Sinclair said. "That is, if the other patrons of the bar don't mind?" He turned and smiled, mannerly as a butler, in the direction of the bar.

"Just keep it low," Eddie said. "I don't have an entertainment license."

"Now, Mr. McCool," Sinclair said kindly. "We're waiting." Helpfully, he hummed a few bars of the song.

"Tune every heart and every voice, Let every care withdraw," McCool began, droning tunelessly, "uh ... Let ... something ... uh ... with something ... uh ..." He shook his head disgustedly. "Hell, I haven't sung it for 20 years."

"You mean you don't know it?" Sinclair asked with false amazement.

"I forgot it," McCool admitted. "I'm loaded. So what?"

Sinclair smiled widely. "I'm going to tell you something, Mr. McCool," he said. "In all my experience, I have never known a Princeton man who couldn't sing every word of Old Nassau right up to the day he died."

"Well," said McCool, "now you know one."

"You're a faker, Sir," Sinclair said. "I'll bet $1000 that you're no Princeton man and never were one." The last part of the challenge was addressed to the room at large. Sinclair, certain that he was on sure ground now, was making up for the embarrassment he had suffered in front of his girl in the discussion about the odds on the football game. He stared triumphantly at Webel.

Webel took a deep breath. This is too good to be true, he thought deliciously. It's a dirty trick to play, but this sonofabitch is asking for it. Webel took his checkbook out of his pocket and put it down on the bar, with a smart little slapping sound. "Sinclair, old friend," he said, "you've got yourself a bet. One thousand dollars that says John McCool is a graduate of Princeton."

Sinclair glared at Webel, surprised, immediately shaken. He took a new tack. "What school did you go to?"

"I'm an outcast and a social leper," Webel said. "I went to Lehigh. But I'm writing out my check for $1000. If you haven't your checkbook on you, you can use mine. Eddie here'll hold the bets. Won't you, Eddie?"

"With pleasure," Eddie said.

Webel took out his fountain pen and opened it and held it poised over the checkbook ceremoniously. "Well?" he asked Sinclair.

Sinclair was beginning to pale. Webel's promptness and something in the tone with which Eddie had said "With pleasure," had unnerved him. He looked uncertainly at McCool again and his thought processes were easy to follow as he felt the trap closing in on him. McCool did not look, sound or smell like any Princeton man that Sinclair would like to acknowledge as a collegiate brother of his, and the fact that McCool had not come up with the name of a club and didn't know the location of Club Street or the words of Old Nassau, should have been, by all ordinary standards, crushing proof that McCool was lying. But times were changing; a Democrat had been elected to the White House, society was in flux; this was after all a low theatrical bar, little better than a slum saloon, where he, Sinclair, had no business coming in the first place and whose patrons might turn out to be anybody, including graduates of Princeton. And $1000 was a lot of money, even on Madison Avenue.

"Well, Sinclair," Webel said cruelly, "I don't see you writing out your check."

"Put your pen away, old man," Sinclair said. The words were meant to be offhand and dismissive, but the voice was shaky. "I'm not betting. This is not the sort of thing one bets on." Ignoring McCool, he strode past Webel to the girl at the bar. "I think it's time for another drink, don't you, Dear?" he said loudly.

"I think everybody in this bar heard you offer to bet $1000 on a simple question of fact," Webel said, determined to make the man suffer. "What's changed your mind, Sinclair?"

"It was just a rhetorical turn of phrase, actually, old man," Sinclair said. "Two more gibsons, please, Eddie."

Eddie didn't move. "Mister," he said, "I been listening carefully. You caused a disturbance in this bar. You embarrassed a old customer. You offered to bet and you welshed. Now you order two gibsons." Eddie made this sound like the worst charge in the litany. "Let me make a suggestion. A gentleman in your position right now would do one of two things. Either he would cover this gentleman's check here" -- Eddie waved, indicating Webel, like an announcer introducing a prize fighter in the ring. "Or," Eddie went on loudly, "he would apologize."

"Apologize?" Sinclair said, sounding disagreeably surprised. "To whom?"

"To the gentleman whose word you doubted," Eddie said. "To Mr. McCool."

Sinclair looked over at McCool, who was happily doodling away on his third menu.

"Oh, come on now, Eddie," Sinclair said crisply, "let's have our drinks and forget it."

"You don't get any drinks in this bar until you do like I said," Eddie said.

"See here, Eddie," Sinclair said, "this is a public bar and..."

"Sinclair." The girl laid her hand soothingly on his arm, but her voice was cool. "Don't be any stuffier than you usually are."

"Listen to the lady, Mister," Eddie said grimly.

Sinclair lifted one of the bottles of wine out of the bag on the bar in front of him. He looked at the label and grimaced and let the bottle slide back into the bag again. Nobody said anything. "Oh, well," Sinclair said offhandedly, "if everybody's taking a little matter like this so big ..." He lit a cigarette deliberately and sauntered over to McCool's table. He stopped his prophylactic four feet away. "By the way," he said to McCool's bent head, "I'm sorry if I inadvertently offended you."

"Huh?" McCool lifted his head, squinting. "What did you say? Come closer, I can't hear you."

Sinclair went up to the table. "I said I'm sorry," he said, his face working under the strain of cowardice, embarrassment and lifelong bad faith.

"Tell him you take it all back," Eddie said mercilessly, from behind the bar. "Tell him you agree he's a Princeton man."

"Don't put words into my mouth, Eddie," Sinclair said snappishly, sounding suddenly like an old maid. "I'm perfectly capable of expressing myself."

"What'd you say, Mister?" McCool asked, looking blearily up at him.

"I was wrong," Sinclair said. "I'm now convinced that you're a Princeton man."

"You are?" McCool said, surprised.

"Yes, I am!" Sinclair was leaning close to McCool now, shouting into his face.

"Screw Princeton," McCool said. He reached up with both hands and grabbed Sinclair's lapels and shook the man vigorously. "And screw you, too, Brother." He shook him again.

Sinclair pushed violently against McCool's arms and only the fact that McCool's chair was backed against the wall prevented McCool from falling to the floor.

Happily, thinking, Oh, everything is working out too beautifully, Webel leaped across the intervening space and hit Sinclair on the jaw. Sinclair staggered, but didn't go down. Even more happily, Webel hit him again. This time Sinclair did go down. Immediately, on the floor, his impeccable clothes seemed shabby and out of style.

"That'll teach you to hit drunks," Webel said self-righteously, deeply pleased with Sinclair for having offered the opportunity to hit him.

Now Eddie was behind Webel, holding his arms, not very tightly. "The police, Mr. Webel," Eddie was whispering.

"That's all right, Eddie," Webel said calmly. "I won't hit him again." Eddie released his grip and Webel went back to his coffee at the bar.

Eddie helped Sinclair up roughly. "One thing I don't stand for in my bar is violent behavior," he said. "Pay up and get out of here."

While Sinclair was fumbling dazedly in his wallet and licking painfully at his cut and bleeding lip, the girl in the green stockings passed him, on her way out. "Call me tomorrow, Sinclair," She said, going through the door. "I'm going home."

Eddie took a bill from Sinclair's wallet and hustled him toward the entrance. "You're a disgrace, Mister, a disgrace," he said. "If you ask my honest opinion, I don't think you ever went to Princeton." He pushed Sinclair's hat and coat into his arms and hurried him through the door. When Sinclair had stumbled out into the night, Eddie permitted himself a smile. He looked down at the menu on which McCool was now peacefully drawing a Grecian temple covered with billboards advertising Brigitte Bardot movies. "That's very nice, Mr. McCool," Eddie said. "Very suggestive."

He went back behind the bar. He stopped and looked at the paper bag with the two bottles of wine in it. He permitted himself a stony chuckle. "Drinkable Chablis," he said. He put the wine back in the cooler and came up to Webel. "I'd like to buy you a drink, Mr. Webel," he said. "You're helping stop the invasion. You struck a blow for Democracy. What'll it be?"

"Coffee, Eddie," Webel Said.

"Coffee?" Eddie's face grew mournful. "Remember Edgar Wallace," he said. Then he went to get some fresh coffee.