is forced to ask him about the bribe and Mortimer Littlepaugh's suicide.
The judge admits that he did take the bribe, and accepts responsibility for
his actions, saying that he also did some good in his life. He refuses to
give in to the blackmail attempt.
Jack goes back to his mother's house, where he hears a scream from
upstairs. Running upstairs, he finds his mother sobbing insensibly, the
phone receiver off the hook and on the oor. When she sees Jack she cries
out that Jack has killed Judge Irwin--whom she refers to as Jack's father.
Jack learns that Judge Irwin has committed suicide, by shooting himself in
the heart, at the same moment he learns that Judge Irwin, and not the
Scholarly Attorney, was his real father. Jack realizes that the Scholarly
Attorney must have left Jack's mother when he learned of her afiair with
the judge. In a way, Jack is glad to be unburdened of his father's
weakness, which he felt as a curse, and is even glad to have traded a weak
father for a strong one. But he remembers his father giving him a chocolate
when he was a child, and says that he was not sure how he felt.
Jack goes back to the capital, where he learns the next day that he was
Judge Irwin's sole heir. He has inherited the very estate that the judge
took the bribe in order to save. The situation seems so crazily logical--
Judge Irwin takes the bribe in order to save the estate, then fathers Jack,
who tries to blackmail his father with information about the bribe, which
causes Judge Irwin to commit suicide, which causes Jack to inherit the
estate; had Judge Irwin not taken the bribe, Jack would have had nothing to
inherit, and had Jack not tried to blackmail Judge Irwin, the judge would
not have killed himself, and Jack would not have inherited the estate when
he did--so crazily logical that Jack bursts out laughing. But before long
he is sobbing and saying "the poor old bugger" over and over again. Jack
says this is like the ice breaking up after a long, cold winter.
Chapter 9 Summary
Jack goes to visit Willie, who asks him about Judge Irwin's death. Jack
tells the Boss that he will no longer have anything to do with blackmail,
even on MacMurfee, and he is set to work on a tax bill. Over the next few
weeks, Tom continues to shine at his football games, but the Sibyl Frey
incident has left Willie irritable and dour as he tries to concoct a plan
for dealing with MacMurfee. In the end, Willie is forced to give the
hospital contract to Gummy Larson, who can control MacMurfee, who can call
off Marvin Frey. Jack goes to the Governor's Mansion the night the deal is
made, and finds Willie a drunken wreck; Willie insults and threatens Gummy
Larson, and throws a drink in Tiny Dufiy's face. Tom continues to spiral
out of control. He gets in a fight with some yokels at a bar, and is
suspended for the game against Georgia, which the team loses. Two games
later, Tom is injured in the game against Tech, and is carried off the
field unconscious. Willie watches the rest of the game, which State wins
easily, then goes to the hospital to check on Tom. Jack goes back to the
offce, where he finds Sadie Burke sitting alone in the dark, apparently
very upset. Sadie leaves when Jack tells her about Tom's injury, then calls
from the hospital to tell Jack to come over right away.
Jack goes to the hospital, where the Boss sends him to pick up Lucy. Jack
does so, and upon their arrival they learn that the specialist Adam Stanton
called in to look at Tom has been held up by fog in Baltimore. Willie is
frantic, but eventually the specialist arrives. His diagnosis matches
Adam's: Tom has fractured two vertebrae, and the two doctors recommend a
risky surgery to see if the damage can be repaired. They undertake the
surgery, and Willie, Jack, and Lucy wait. Willie tells Lucy that he plans
to name the hospital after Tom, but Lucy says that things like that don't
matter. At six o'clock in the morning, Adam returns, and tells the group
that Tom will live, but that his spinal cord is crushed, and he will be
paralyzed for the rest of his life. Lucy takes Willie home, and Jack calls
Anne with the news. The operation was accomplished just before dawn on
Sunday. On Monday, Jack sees the piles of telegrams that have come into the
offce from political allies and well-wishers, and talks to the obsequious
Tiny. When Willie comes in, he declares to Tiny that he is canceling Gummy
Larson's contract. He implies that he plans to change the way things are
done at the capital. Jack is taking some tax-bill figures to the Senate
when he learns that Sadie has just stormed out of the offce, and receives
word that Anne has just called with an urgent message.
Jack goes to see Anne, who says that Adam has learned about her
relationship with Willie, and believes the afiair to be the reason he was
given the directorship of the hospital. She tells Jack that Willie has
broken off the afiair because he plans to go back to his wife. She asks
Jack to find Adam and tell him that that isn't the way things happened.
Jack spends the day trying to track down Adam, but he fails to find him.
That night, Jack is paged to go to the Capitol, where the vote on the tax
bill is taking place. Here, Jack greets Sugar-Boy and watches the Boss talk
to his political hangers-on. The Boss tells Jack that he wants to tell him
something. As they walk across the lobby, they see a rain-and-mud-soaked
Adam Stanton leaning against the pedestal of a statue. Willie reaches out
his hand to shake Adam's; in a blur, Adam draws a gun and shoots Willie,
then is shot himself by Sugar-Boy and a highway patrolman. Jack runs to
Adam, who is already dead.
Willie survives for a few days, and at first the prognosis from the
hospital is that he will recover. But then he catches an infection, and
Jack realizes that he is going to die. Just before the end, he summons Jack
to his hospital bed, where he says over and over again that everything
could have been difierent.
After he dies, he is given a massive funeral. Jack says that the other
funeral he went to that week was quite difierent: it was Adam Stanton's
funeral at Burden's Landing.
Chapter 10 Summary
After Adam's funeral and Willie's funeral, Jack spends some time in
Burden's Landing, spending his days quietly with Anne. They never discuss
Willie's death or Adam's death; instead they sit wordlessly together, or
Jack reads aloud from a book. Then one day Jack begins to wonder how Adam
learned about Anne and Willie's afiair. He asks her, but she says she does
not know-- a man called and told him, but she does not know who it was.
Jack goes to visit Sadie Burke in the sanitarium where she has gone to
recover her nerves. She tells Jack that Tiny Dufiy (now the governor of the
state) was the man who called Adam; and she confesses that Tiny learned
about the afiair from her. She was so angry about Willie leaving her to go
back to Lucy that she told Tiny out of revenge, knowing that, by doing so,
she was all but guaranteeing Willie's death. Jack blames Tiny rather than
Sadie, and Sadie agrees to make a statement which Jack can use to bring
about Tiny's downfall.
A week later, Dufiy summons Jack to see him. He offers Jack his job back,
with a substantial raise over Jack's already substantial income. Jack
refuses, and tells Tiny he knows about his role in Willie's death. Tiny is
stunned, and frightened, and when Jack leaves he feels heroic. But his
feeling of moral heroism quickly dissolves into an acidic bitterness,
because he realizes he is trying to make Tiny the sole villain as a way of
denying his own share of responsibility. Jack withdraws into numbness, not
even opening a letter from Anne when he receives it. He receives a letter
from Sadie with her statement, saying that she is moving away and that she
hopes Jack will let matters drop--Tiny has no chance to win the next
gubernatorial election anyway, and if Jack pursues the matter Anne's name
will be dragged through the mud. But Jack had already decided not to pursue
it.
At the library Jack sees Sugar-Boy, and asks him what he would do if he
learned that there was a man besides Adam who was responsible for Willie's
death. Sugar-Boy says he would kill him, and Jack nearly tells him about
Tiny's role. But he decides not to at the last second, and instead tells
Sugar-Boy that it was a joke. Jack also goes to see Lucy, who has adopted
Sibyl Frey's child, which she believes is Tom's. She tells Jack that Tom
died of pneumonia shortly after the accident, and that the baby is the only
thing that enabled her to live. She also tells him that she believes--and
has to believe--that Willie was a great man. Jack says that he also
believes it.
Jack goes to visit his mother at Burden's Landing, where he learns that she
is leaving Theodore Murrell, the Young Executive. He is surprised to learn
that she is doing so because she loved Judge Irwin all along. This
knowledge changes Jack's long-held impression of his mother as a woman
without a heart, and helps to shatter his belief in the Great Twitch. At
the train station, he lies to his mother, and tells her that Judge Irwin
killed himself not because of anything that Jack did, but because of his
failing health. He thinks of this lie as his last gift to her.
After his mother leaves, he goes to visit Anne, and tells her the truth
about his parentage. Eventually, he and Anne are married, and in the early
part of 1939, when Jack is writing his story, they are living in Judge
Irwin's house in Burden's Landing. The Scholarly Attorney, now frail and
dying, lives with them. Jack is working on a book about Cass Mastern, whom
he believes he can finally understand. After the old man dies and the book
is finished, Jack says, he and Anne will leave Burden's Landing--stepping
"out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."
CATCH-22
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