For my money, Zimburger should not only have been penned up like a dog, but shot like a mad one. How Sanderson tolerated him I couldn’t understand. He was never anything but gracious to Zimburger, even when it became obvious to everyone else that the man should be strapped up and rolled into the sea like a sack of waste. I guessed it was because Sanderson was too much a public relations man. I never once saw him lose his temper, and in his job he was saddled with more bores and bastards and phonies than any man on the island.
Sanderson’s view of Puerto Rico was very different from any I’d heard at the News. He had never seen a place with more potential, he said. In ten years it would be a paradise, a new American gold coast. There was so much opportunity that it staggered his imagination.
He got very excited when he talked about all the things that were happening in Puerto Rico, but I was never sure how much of his talk he believed. I never contradicted him, but he knew I didn’t take him quite seriously.
Don’t give me that crooked smile, he would say. I worked for the paper — I know what those idiots say.
Then he’d get even more excited. Where do you get this superior attitude? he would say. Nobody down here cares if you went to Yale or not. All you are to these people is a low-life reporter, just another bum from the Daily News.
This business about Yale was a grisly joke. I had never been within fifty miles of New Haven, but in Europe I discovered that it was much easier to say I was a Yale graduate than to explain why I quit after two years at Vanderbilt and volunteered for the draft. I never told Sanderson I went to Yale; he must have got it from Segarra, who undoubtedly read my letter to Lotterman.
Sanderson had gone to the University of Kansas, then to Columbia’s journalism school. He claimed to be proud of his farm-belt background, but he was so obviously ashamed of it that I felt sorry for him. Once when he was drunk he told me that the Hal Sanderson from Kansas was dead — he had died on the train to New York, and the Hal Sanderson I knew had been born the moment that train pulled into Penn Station.
He was lying, of course. For all his Caribbean clothes and his Madison Avenue manners, even with his surfside apartment and his Alfa Romeo roadster, there was so much Kansas in Sanderson that it was embarrassing to see him deny it. And Kansas was not all that was in him. There was a lot of New York, a little of Europe, and something else that has no country at all and was probably the largest single fact of his life. When he first told me that he owed twenty-five hundred dollars to a psychiatrist in New York and was spending fifty dollars a week on one in San Juan, I was dumbfounded. From that day on I saw him in a very different light.
Not that I thought he was crazy. He was a phony, of course, but for a long time I thought he was one of those phonies who can snap it on and off at will. He seemed honest enough with me, and in those rare moments when he relaxed I enjoyed him immensely. But it was not often that he dropped his guard, and usually it was rum that made him do it He relaxed so seldom that his natural moments had an awkward, childish quality that was almost pathetic. He had come so far from himself that I don’t think he knew who he was anymore.
For all his flaws, I respected Sanderson; he had come to San Juan as a reporter for a new paper that most people thought was a joke, and three years later he was vice president of the biggest public relations firm in the Caribbean. He had damn well worked at it — and if it was not the sort of thing I had much use for, I had to admit he had done it well.