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or rather, he was the very man who had in the man's office three or
four times told him that the chief was busy, was travelling, desperately
sick, or was otherwise not available. Bradshaw rather envied the
shameless tactics of this bureaucrat, but with Chinese delicacy, by
now instinctive to him
in
San Rafael, he avoided mentioning this odd
circumstance. So, too, did the health expert.
In any case, Senor Orquienz was again in charge of matters. He
was treated with a special deference in the establishment, though not
apparently merely as a good customer, for he gave Bradshaw quickly
to understand that that sort of thing was not his "speed" at all. No,
for his part, he preferred as, of course, businessmen did
in
the United
States, as did Bradshaw himself he conveyed with a smirk, to "play
the field"--one of his less dated idioms. A smart man, he insisted,
neither got himself married, nor denied himself what was going. What
was going, by his own account, was a great deal.
"One for Kinsey," Bradshaw thought as Senor Orquienz went
on with his improbable narrative, which must have covered every
nubile girl in San Rafael, not to speak of more expensive affairs in
New York. Bradshaw was fond of beer, he was too young to have
had his taste for it spoiled by prohibition, and the beer of Orizaba,
even when bottled, is probably the best made in this hemisphere. He
lapped it up. It had a tight, dense head in the big glasses, its surface
aroma was of cream cheese, and it did not wash around the back
teeth with a carious, arsenical aftertaste, like the American beers for
which Senor Orquienz expressed a preference on the ground that
their vast sales established a patent superiority. On the tide of this
beer Bradshaw's mind became diffused, happy and muddled. He
thought happily of the German brewers (the good Germans!) who
had set up their vats and bred their yeast lines below the snowy crest
of the noble Orizaba, ignoring wars One, Two or Three.
He was curiously elated, and because of this, his industrious New
England mind set about justifying his happiness. Somehow, helped
by the brew of the guiltless, exiled Germans, he composed the ma–
terials of the moment into what, if sober, he would have called a
synthesis.
Everybody is basically O.K., he told himself. Suppose this fel–
low does want a world that liberal people have learned to despise,
it's an improvement, at that, on what went before-the soldier perse-
