Dr. Hale Is Quite at Ease

A fortnight later a note came to Pike's office on State Street in a hand he knew, and it asked him to dinner on the following Thursday at seven. Pike wrote back one line accepting, and on Thursday he left the office at half past six and took a car across the river.

The Hale house was stone, three stories, set back behind a low wall on Kirkland Street, with a yard that in summer was the greenest on the block and in November was a rake and a heap. The house had been in the family for a hundred years and had been kept up the whole time by somebody else's money and somebody else's work, and it looked it. To the side, where the yard narrowed toward the lane, there was a low building of brick that had once been a foundry and had been hollowed out and rebuilt and had been a laboratory for as long as Pike had known Hale. Inside, the front hall had a fireplace that was always lit and a floor of dark flagstone and a coat of oak cabinets along one wall that Pike had admired for twenty years without ever learning what was in them.

Oscar Diaz took his coat. Diaz was a heavy man with gray at his temples and a way of moving that was slower than he was, and he had run this house for nineteen years and had also kept the laboratory in order, and Pike had never once heard him volunteer a sentence that was not necessary.

"You are late," Diaz said, in the voice of a man who did not mind.

"Ten minutes," Pike said.

"Everyone is here," Diaz said. "He is in the dining room."

There were eight at the table, counting Hale and Pike: a retired judge, a physician who had been a resident with Hale a very long time ago, the treasurer of the college, a publisher, a man Pike took to be in insurance, and a younger man who said almost nothing and turned out to be the judge's son. Hale had a genius for this, Pike thought. He collected men of a certain kind; every one of them was respectable in the way a good building is respectable, without decoration, and every one had known Hale for a decade or more.

Hale sat at the head.

He was in his late fifties and he looked ten years younger on a night like this. He was tall and well made and his face was smooth and open, and there was nothing in it that a stranger would have looked at twice except to think that here was a man who had slept well. He had a way of putting his head a little forward when he listened that made a man feel quoted. He poured the wine himself. He had opinions and gave them away freely and never made you pay for one. Pike had heard other men say of Hale that he was one of the best men they knew, and they had meant it, and they had been right about everything except the thing that mattered.

The dinner was long and the food was good.

Hickory smoke came into the dining room at the edges, and the wine went around twice, and Hale kept the table turning like a man with a wheel in his hand, giving the judge a subject and the physician another and drawing the quiet son out at exactly the moment the son was ready to be drawn. Pike had watched him do it for twenty years and had never once seen him fail.

It came near the end of the meal, over the coffee, and it came out of a question the physician asked.

The physician had asked Hale what he was working on.

Hale set his cup down. He looked at the table for a moment with a small private smile, the way a man does when he has been waiting for a question and has decided to answer it honestly.

"Separation," he said.

There was a general quiet. Somebody laughed.

"Separation of what," the judge said. "You are not a divorce lawyer. I know the divorce lawyers."

"Not that kind," Hale said. "Though it is not so far off. I have been working on the separation of things that are generally held to be one thing. That is all I will say, and I will only say that much because I have had too much of this wine." He lifted his glass an inch and set it down. "The interesting part is not that it can be done. The interesting part is that when it is done, both of the pieces are still there. Nothing is lost. Most people, when they think of the removal of a thing, think of the thing being gone. That is not what happens. The thing is not gone. It is displaced."

The physician laughed and said something about a good bottle being displaced into a man's liver.

Hale smiled and let it pass, and the table moved on, and the talk went back to the building on the wrong corner and to a matter of the college's money, and within a minute Hale was the host again and the room was easy.

But Pike had been watching him, and for about two seconds Hale had stopped being the host, and in those two seconds his face had done something Pike could not name. It had not gone pale and it had not gone hard. It had gone still, in the way a room goes still when a machine in another part of the house starts up, and it had held for the length of that machine's first turn. And then it was gone. Pike drank his coffee and said nothing and did not look at Hale again for the rest of the meal.

The guests left at a quarter past ten.

Pike contrived to be the last one. This was not new. It had happened many times over the years; it was one of the small arrangements of Hale's life that the dry lawyer stayed after the others when the wine was done and the voices were down, and Hale had come to expect it and to like it, and he liked it, Pike thought, for the same reason his other guests liked it, which was that a man of Pike's sort costs nothing and takes up no room and is restful in the way an empty chair is restful.

Diaz cleared the last of the glasses and went down the hall, and the two men sat at opposite ends of the fireplace with the fire burned low and the room gone amber.

For a while they said nothing. That was another of the arrangements.

"I have been wanting to speak to you, Adrian," Pike said at last. "You know the will."

Hale had been looking into the fire. He did not look away from it, and yet Pike watched the temperature of the room change. It was small. It was a thing you would have missed if you did not know the man, and Pike knew the man.

"My poor Warren," Hale said. "You are unlucky in your clients. I have never seen a man so troubled by a piece of paper. Except Paul Acker, of course, who was troubled by my habits of thought, which is a different sort of trouble." He turned now and smiled at Pike, and there was nothing wrong with the smile except that it had arrived a half second late. "I am an old fool and I make you carry my follies. Forgive me. What about the will?"

"I never approved of it," Pike said.

"You have told me so."

"I am telling you so again," Pike said. "I have been learning something about a young man named Cal Voss."

That did it.

The face across the fire went the color of the ash under the grate. It was not a flinch and it was not a start and there was no drama in it at all. It was as though someone had reached into the room and turned a dial, and the big handsome man in the chair had gone gray to the lips, and there had come a darkness around the eyes that Pike had never seen there and would remember.

"I do not care to hear more," Hale said.

His voice was quiet and even and it had something under it that Pike had not heard in twenty-six years.

"This is a matter," Hale said, "that I thought we had agreed to drop."

"What I heard was abominable," Pike said.

"It can make no difference." Hale put a hand up, not for silence, for time. He looked, suddenly, like a man doing arithmetic in his head that he did not want to show. "You do not understand my position, Warren. You never have, and I do not blame you for it. My position is a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking. I want you to hear that plainly. There is no sentence you could say to me tonight that would change a thing about it, and there is no sentence I could say to you that would not make it worse."

"I am a man to be trusted," Pike said. "You know that better than you know most things. Make a clean breast of it, in confidence, and I will get you out of it. Whatever it is. There is very little I have not seen behind one door or another."

Hale looked at him for a long moment. And for that moment the gray went out of his face and something else came in, something warmer, and Pike understood, with a small cold clarity, that the affection on the other side of the fire was real. That was the part that made it hard. The man meant it. Whatever else Adrian Hale had become, he was still fond of his old friend, and the fondness was not a trick.

"My good Warren," he said. "This is very good of you. I cannot tell you how good. I believe you entirely, and I would trust you before any man alive, and before myself, if it came to a choice. But it is not what you suppose. It is not as bad as that." He smiled, and the smile was dry and a little tired. "And to set your mind at rest, I will tell you one thing, and one thing only. I want you to have it. The moment I choose, I can be rid of Cal Voss."

He said it the way a man says the name of a street.

"I give you my hand on that," Hale said, and held out his hand, and Pike, after a second, took it. The grip was warm and firm and entirely steady, and Pike let go of it and sat back and did not know what to do with his own face.

"Then choose it," Pike said.

Hale shook his head, very slightly.

"You see," he said, "that is the trouble. You think the choosing is the easy part." He got up and went to the sideboard and stood with his back to the room and did not pour himself anything. "It is a private matter. I am asking you, as an old friend and as the man who holds my paper, to let it sleep. Do not go looking for the young man. Do not go digging in the lane. Let it be. I will handle it. I am handling it."

"You are handling it," Pike said.

"I am."

There was a silence. The fire moved and settled. Somewhere above them a floorboard spoke, which would be Diaz going about his rounds.

Hale turned around. He had his hands behind his back and his face was calm and he had made some decision while he was looking at the wall.

"But since we have touched on it, and since I hope it is the last time," he said, "there is one thing I would like you to understand, and one thing I would like you to do. I take a great interest in that young man. A greater interest than you would credit. I know you have met him. He told me that he was rude to you, and I was sorry to hear it, and I am not going to defend him, because I cannot. But if I am taken away, Warren, I would like to have your word that you will see he is dealt with fairly. That he gets what is owed him. I think you would give it, if you knew everything, and it would be a weight off my mind. I am asking you to take this off my hands."

"Off your hands," Pike said.

"Off my hands," Hale said. "That is the whole of it. Let it be a thing you do for me later, and not a thing we argue about now."

Pike sat and looked at the fire.

He had practiced law for thirty years, and the discipline of it was this. When a man asks you for something and the asking does not fit the thing asked for, you do not tell him what you think. You note it. You put it in the file. A client who is afraid of a document asks about the document. A client who is afraid of a person asks about the person. Hale was not afraid of the paper in Pike's safe. Hale was afraid of something with a name and a key, and he was standing in his own front room with his hands behind his back, asking his lawyer to promise to be kind to it.

"I cannot pretend that I will ever like him," Pike said.

"I am not asking you to like him," Hale said. "I am asking you for what is right. Only that. And only for my sake, and only when I am no longer here to ask."

Pike got up. He was aware of his own body in the way a man is aware of it when he has been sitting too long in a warm room and the night outside has gone cold.

"All right," he said. "I promise."

Hale let out a breath that he had been holding for longer than Pike had realized. It was a small sound and it was not relief, or it was not only relief. It was the sound of a man setting something heavy down on a table.

They stood in the hall and Pike put on his coat and Diaz brought his hat. Hale walked him to the door himself, which he did not always do, and stood in the doorway with the light behind him and the cold coming in.

"Thursday was good," Hale said. "Come again soon. Not for a while. Soon."

"Good night, Adrian," Pike said.

"Good night, Warren."

Pike walked to the corner and waited for a car that took eight minutes to come, and stood the whole time with his collar up, looking back once at the house. The front windows were dark except for the one in the room he had just left, and in that window there was nothing to see. The lane ran behind the property, on the far side, and he could not see it from the corner, and he found that he was thinking about it anyway, the way a man thinks about a step he did not take.

In the car, going down the long street toward the river, Pike went over the evening the way he went over a contract, looking for the clause that did not fit.

There were two. The first was a remark about separation, made over coffee to a room of respectable men, and it had been strange, but a man in a warm room with wine in him is allowed to be strange, and Pike would have filed it and forgotten it.

The second was not strange at all. The second was the sentence Hale had said with his hand out and his voice steady, the sentence about being rid of Cal Voss whenever he chose. Pike had heard a great many men lie in his life, in the careful way that men lie, and he had learned that the tell is never the shake in the voice. It is the shape of the sentence. A man who is lying about a thing he has done tells you he did not do it. A man who is telling the truth about a thing he cannot stop doing tells you that he could stop, if he chose, and then he does not choose, and he asks you, standing in his own doorway, to be kind to the thing he cannot stop.

The car came down off the bridge and into the traffic on the other side, and Pike sat with his hat on his knee and did not look out the window.

He had the young man's address in his pocket and had not used it yet. He thought about the card and about the words on it, in that fine hand, ask for me, and he thought about the promise he had just made, and about the fact that a promise made to a man in a warm house on a Thursday night is the easiest thing in the world to make and the hardest thing in the world to keep, because the man who asked for it had asked in the wrong voice and had asked for the wrong thing, and neither of them had said so.