Free Gay Place by Billy Lee Brammer Page B

all day?” someone yelled.
    Earle, coming closer, said: “Hotel room. Making plans for our little party over the weekend — all of you heard about it? The Egghead Invitational Mixed Doubles Tennis Tournament and Civil Rights Conference …” He broke off suddenly, noticing Ouida for the first time.
    “Hello, Earle,” Ouida said. Roy, sitting next to her, shifted in his chair and struggled against the temptation to rise and move off a few feet. He noted with relief that Giffen was on the other side of Ouida and had his arm draped round the back of her chair. Earle Fielding came directly over to his wife.
    “Hope you don’t mind, baby,” he said. “We’re planning this thing at the ranch — you think your parents would object?” It was as if he had been away from the city a few hours instead of several months. It was not until Ouida mentioned the advisability of bringing their son out to the ranch for the weekend that Fielding showed any emotion over his own return home.
    “Yeah … Yeah … You’ve got to bring the boy out,” he said. “I haven’t seen him in … Jesus … We’ve got to spend some time together, maybe go huntin’. I bought him the goddamdest deer rifle you ever saw …”
    “He’s too little,” Ouida said. “He couldn’t lift a gun.”
    “Yeah … That’s right,” Fielding said. Someone got his attention and he turned to talk to the others about the party. The folk singer started on the same song again.
    Earle Fielding stood with the others and talked about politics. He was a tall, big-shouldered man, slightly jug-eared but with a handsome college boy’s face. Once, people had talked about how he would be Governor in fifteen or twenty years, but that was when his marriage was sound and he was still unscarred in politics. A year ago he had resigned his seat in the legislature and was drunk for several months, leaving his wife now and then, moving into nearby bachelor apartments whenever there was trouble between them. Everyone agreed that he had “got hold” of himself recently. He was not tight in the middle of the day as often as before, and he had begun to travel a great deal, ostensibly on family business but nearly always checking in with local politicians over the country and making occasional speeches for one enlightened candidate or another. He had made many friends and secured these liaisons with large cash contributions. It was generally assumed that Earle would seek office again, something on a statewide level, or possibly land an appointive position in the party. He had been educated in the East, as had his mother and sisters, but his position was not undermined by the defection: the Fieldings were as sound historically as they were in business; their wealth could be traced back to the frontier.
    Earle’s father and uncles had been responsible during the 1930s for forcing through the legislature a series of anti-labor bills, and no one was more aware of the brutal social forces at work behind the legislation than Earle. Several years before, in college, he had sat through a series of lectures dealing at length on the labor laws of his home state and the manner by which they had been enacted, afraid to speak out in discussion period for fear he might be revealed as a member of the same robber-baron gang of Fieldings that had perpetrated such crimes against the people.
    Now it was Earle’s hope that he would have a personal hand in overturning these statutes. He liked, in addition, to make frequent attacks on the depletion allowance for oil, from which a sizable amount of his own wealth was derived. Earle’s conservative critics had not yet got around to denouncing him as a traitor to his class — they merely regarded him as a damn fool.
    “Where’ll we go ?” Huggins insisted.
    “Giffen’s?”
    “He’s got no whiskey. Only sherry.”
    “How about my hotel room?” Earle Fielding said. “They gave me a whole suite of rooms.”
    Someone laughed. “Earle owns