Jailbird

Walter F. Starbuck, a 64-year-old former government bureaucrat, sits on a stripped cot in a federal minimum-security prison in Georgia in April 1977, waiting to be released. He is penniless and friendless, having served two years for his minor role in the Watergate scandal. He periodically claps his hands three times, involuntarily completing a vulgar song from a Harvard stag party.

The novel opens with a prologue narrating the fictional Cuyahoga Massacre. On Christmas morning in 1894, sharpshooters and guards at the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company in Cleveland opened fire on striking workers and sympathizers, killing 14 people. Alexander Hamilton McCone, the shy, stammering younger son of the factory's owner, watched the slaughter from a bell tower. The trauma turned him into a recluse whose only friendship was with Walter Starbuck, the son of his cook and chauffeur. McCone taught the boy chess, changed his family name from Stankiewicz to Starbuck, and promised to send him to Harvard.

At Harvard, Starbuck became a communist during his junior year and co-edited a radical newspaper called The Bay State Progressive. During his senior year, he had an affair with Mary Kathleen O'Looney, his circulation manager, whose mother had died of radium poisoning at the Wyatt Clock Company. When McCone arrived unannounced and discovered Starbuck's radical life, he left in speechless fury, ending his patronage forever. Starbuck abandoned communism after the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939. His past did not initially harm his career: He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and landed a job in President Franklin Roosevelt's Department of Agriculture.

In 1945, Starbuck was sent to Nuremberg, Germany, to oversee logistics for the War Crimes Trials. There he met Ruth, a Jewish Viennese concentration camp survivor working as an interpreter. She was emaciated, polyglot, and deeply pessimistic about humanity, yet irresistibly vivacious. They married in 1946, and their son, Walter Jr., was born in Wiesbaden, Germany.

In 1949, testifying before a congressional committee at which young Congressman Richard Nixon was a principal interrogator, Starbuck named several former communists, including Leland Clewes, a State Department official and former friend whose marriage to Sarah Wyatt, a woman Starbuck loved, had ended their friendship. Starbuck considered the communist connection trivial, but Clewes denied it, was convicted of perjury, and went to prison. In 1953, Starbuck was fired from government. His son grew up ashamed, changed his name back to Stankiewicz, and became a book reviewer for The New York Times. In 1970, Nixon gave Starbuck the meaningless title of special advisor on youth affairs. When the Watergate scandal broke, Starbuck went to prison. Ruth died, and their son blamed Starbuck, refusing to speak to him again.

On his last morning in prison, Clyde Carter, the prison guard and third cousin to President Jimmy Carter, escorts Starbuck through release. Dr. Robert Fender, the prison's only lifer, a veterinarian convicted of treason for harboring a North Korean spy he loved, gives Starbuck a going-away gift: He has had Starbuck's cigarette-burned Brooks Brothers suit invisibly mended. Outside, Cleveland Lawes, the Black chauffeur of a limousine belonging to the RAMJAC Corporation, a massive conglomerate, offers Starbuck a ride to Atlanta. From there, Starbuck flies to New York and checks into the Hotel Arapahoe, a decrepit flophouse near Times Square.

He had visited the Arapahoe once before, in 1931, when McCone sent him to take Sarah Wyatt to dinner at its famous restaurant. During the meal, Starbuck accidentally tipped the violinist 20 dollars instead of one. In the taxicab home, he broke down and confessed that he was a chauffeur's son, half-Polish and half-Lithuanian, a puppet of McCone. His honesty transformed them into close friends. Sarah later became a nurse, was radicalized by poverty, joined the Communist Party, and pulled Starbuck in with her.

In 1977, the Arapahoe's restaurant has become a pornographic theater. The night clerk, Israel Edel, holds a PhD in history but cannot find better work. In Starbuck's bottom drawer are seven incomplete stolen clarinets, which he never reports.

The next morning, walking along Fifth Avenue, Starbuck spots Leland Clewes: bald, shabby, now an unsuccessful matchbook salesman. Clewes greets him warmly, saying prison tested and strengthened his love for Sarah. A shopping-bag lady standing nearby screams Starbuck's full name and grabs his wrist. She knows details only someone from his past could know. Starbuck realizes she is Mary Kathleen O'Looney. He hugs her and weeps.

Mary Kathleen says she still believes in the revolution and that everyone wants to cut off her hands. She leads Starbuck through Grand Central Station to a hidden iron door, then down into a vast abandoned cavern where she secretly lives. She guides him through a tunnel into the stainless-steel crown of the Chrysler Building, where The American Harp Company keeps its showroom. When Starbuck mentions interest in clarinet parts, the elderly salesman, Delmar Peale, secretly calls the police.

What Starbuck does not yet realize is that Mary Kathleen is Mrs. Jack Graham, the legendary reclusive majority stockholder of RAMJAC. After Starbuck abandoned her at Harvard, she hitchhiked to Kentucky and eventually married a mining engineer named Jack Graham. Her fingerprints, will, and personal effects are stored in her basketball shoes; anyone who obtained her hands could sign documents controlling the corporation. She told Starbuck her identity on an elevator, but he did not hear.

The police arrest Starbuck for the stolen clarinet parts. At the station, he is placed in a padded cell and forgotten for eight hours without food, water, or a toilet. He breaks down completely. Meanwhile, Mary Kathleen telephones Arpad Leen, RAMJAC's president, and orders him to rescue Starbuck with the best lawyer in New York and make him a vice-president. She provides a list of other people who showed Starbuck kindness, ordering that they too receive vice-presidencies.

The lawyer who arrives is Roy M. Cohn, famous as the former chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during McCarthy's anti-communist hearings. Cohn gets Starbuck out and into a limousine, where Clewes and Edel are already seated. At Leen's penthouse, each person receives a vice-presidency within RAMJAC's subsidiaries. In a private meeting, Leen becomes bizarrely deferential, having concluded that Starbuck must be Mrs. Jack Graham in disguise. Starbuck corrects him, and in that moment realizes the truth himself. He tells Leen he knows Mrs. Graham well, borrows a pair of shoes, and goes to find Mary Kathleen.

Starbuck descends into the cavern beneath Grand Central Station. He follows a trail of blood to a toilet stall. Mary Kathleen has been struck by a taxi and refused medical attention. She is dying. She tells him to look in her left shoe: Her will leaves RAMJAC to the American people. She thanks him for hugging her and says she knows he was born without a heart but tried to believe what people with hearts believed, making him a good man just the same. She dies.

Starbuck conceals Mary Kathleen's identity, hides her will in a safe-deposit box, and has her buried under her maiden name. Leen makes him executive vice-president of RAMJAC's Down Home Records Division. For over two years, Starbuck lives lavishly, telling Leen that Mrs. Graham is satisfied. But a deputy sheriff in New Jersey, curious about the unusual surname on a crypt, traces the fingerprints and discovers the truth. The will surfaces, and RAMJAC is dismantled by the federal government. Starbuck faces prison again for unlawfully concealing the will.

At a farewell supper party hosted by Leland and Sarah Clewes, attended by the people Mary Kathleen elevated, Starbuck's estranged son and family are brought down from their apartment upstairs. A recording of his 1949 congressional testimony is played. When asked why the son of immigrants treated well by America had been ungrateful to the economic system, Starbuck's recorded voice gives the same answer his hero Kenneth Whistler, a Harvard-educated labor organizer, once gave a judge: "Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir" (306).