Free Bech at Bay by John Updike Page A

circumambient traffic.
    “Yes, Mr. MacDeane?” Amory Henry MacDeane was a historian, an avid chronicler of the dowdy, unsatisfactory stretches of national government between Jackson and Lincoln, when the United States, its founding successfully consolidated, ineffectually sought a compromise that would hold the South in the Union without giving everything, including all the West, over to the fiery proponents of black slavery. MacDeane, the son of an Ohio Scots-Irish factory owner, had several times abandoned the halls of academe for those of Washington, where he had advised Democratic administrations in their own compromises as they sought tocontain Communism without engaging it in nuclear war. MacDeane knew Russian, French, German, and Italian, and had acted as ambassador to several ticklish, demonstration-prone countries; he wrote his histories and memoirs in elegiac Victorian periods imbued with the sadness of realpolitik, this consideration always balancing that. Bech admired him, as an intellectual who had willingly dirtied himself with decision-making in the realm of real, as opposed to coveted, power. Now he was old, over eighty, and scoop-faced, with a mustache the same faded tint as his gray skin, and lived in New York only because he had lost the way back to Ohio, the vanished Ohio of his youth. He spoke in quavery, fine-spun sentences. “The difficulty of obtaining nominations, so that the functioning membership of the so-called Forty is actually thirty-four, of whom the meagre quorum I count here as seven, eight with the president, leads me to wonder, Mr. President, if our beloved institution, so benignly conceived and pleasantly housed, is not perhaps destined to join those other institutions whose historical moment is past. One thinks, on a far larger scale of course, of the Grand Army of the Republic, so mighty and influential in its time, and the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. There is no disgrace in death,” the old diplomat went on in his faint, husky, but still superbly controlled voice. “The disgrace comes in prolonging life with artificial and unseemly means.”
    “I agree,” Isaiah Thornbush announced from the end of the row, with uncharacteristic brevity. His position surprised Bech. Izzy soaked up honors and loved clubs; Bech had always rather despised him for it.
    Eric Von Klappenemner, tall and bald and with a piercing flutelike delivery, said, “Oh, all my friends, it’s so
bor
ing,they say they don’t want this and they don’t want that, they don’t want oxygen and they don’t want electronic resuscitators or whatever they are; I say to them, Why not? I want it
all
! Oxygen and IVs and bloody livers and bone marrow and all of it! What’s the purpose of science, if not to prolong human life?”
    “Klappy, you’re so
greedy
!” Amy deLessups flirted. How did so addictively heterosexual a woman, Bech wondered, view a homosexual like Von Klappenemner? Fondly, it seemed. As a fellow caster of the pearl of oneself before male swine.
    “It’s not
me
, it’s not any senseless
hun
ger for my personal existence, there’s nothing I’d like better than a good long afternoon
nap
, a nap that never ends, it would be
splen
did. It’s what I can still
give
people, all that beauty and majesty still locked up in me—suppose Beethoven had thrown it all in after that rather piffling Eighth Symphony; we’d have never had the glorious
Ninth
!”
    Von Klappenemner had reached that stage of mental deterioration when verbal inhibitions lift, though the old habits of syntax are still intact. He had been, with his gleaming head and those curling Nordic lips spouting wicked drolleries from beneath his Saracen curve of a nose, a universal charmer; now the dimming solarium held, like a sound-swallowing baffle of nippled black foam rubber, the hush of his charm falling on deaf ears. The melody was still there, but the body’s aged instrument could no longer play it. Bech felt he