Fairmont Hotel

The Fairmont Hotel becomes the setting for a celebration that changes character before it ends. Tom Keefer arranges and pays for a dinner there after Steve Maryk’s acquittal, presenting it as a double celebration: Maryk has been cleared, and Keefer has received a contract for his novel along with a thousand-dollar check. The gathering initially turns the verdict into a noisy collective triumph. But Barney Greenwald’s arrival and rebuke redirect the evening from congratulation to shame, and the dinner ends in a quiet that the party’s champagne and jokes cannot dispel.

A room hired for celebration

The celebration takes shape immediately outside the court-martial building, where Maryk and Greenwald are surrounded by jubilant well-wishers. Maryk’s mother clings to him, weeping and laughing, while his father stands beside her; the officers of the Caine join in the congratulations. Willie Keith capers and slaps backs as Keefer calls everyone to listen and announces dinner at the Fairmont Hotel. He says he has hired a room and is paying, tying the evening’s expense to his confidence in the success of his novel as well as to the relief surrounding Maryk’s acquittal.

The move indoors does not immediately quiet the celebration. Keefer names it a double occasion and boasts of the contract and check that arrived that morning. At the table, a huge cake iced in green and shaped like a book makes his literary success visible amid the rejoicing. Its title, Multitudes, Multitudes, turns Keefer’s novel into the party’s most conspicuous decoration. The setting thus holds two kinds of triumph together: the legal outcome for Maryk and the professional prospect Keefer has secured for himself.

The party’s exuberant performance

The officers make the dinner a public performance of release. Their noise and dancing outside the court-martial building draw the attention of sailors a block away. At the hotel, Keefer leads a toast praising Greenwald as the lawyer who defeated the feared Philip Francis Queeg, while the gathering drinks champagne and trades jokes. Several officers who joined the ship after its return and had never seen Queeg listen with wide-eyed wonder, laughing uneasily as they drink. Their reactions show how the story of the trial is already being performed for people who did not witness its central conflict.

Willie Keith shares the general exhilaration. He suspects that Keefer may not have acted manfully during the court-martial, but cannot know what happened: witnesses were not allowed to hear one another testify, and Maryk never spoke against Keefer. In the relief of the acquittal, Willie’s doubts have receded. The party’s comedy also depends on drink and excess. Harding staggers around, embraces people indiscriminately, and recalls that Greenwald once gave him his hat when he was sick. Keefer predicts that Harding will be sick again; Willie holds a silver celery bowl beneath Harding’s mouth as he pretends to vomit. The joke makes the officers roar, while Maryk’s parents remain puzzled. The Fairmont dinner gathers celebration, private uncertainty, and comic disorder into the same room.

Greenwald’s toast changes the evening

Greenwald arrives after the party is well under way, rumpled and unsteady. Keefer introduces him as the conquering hero and raises a toast celebrating the lawyer who, in his account, slew the dragon Queeg. The praise seems to confirm the party’s division of roles: Maryk is the acquitted defendant, Greenwald the victorious advocate, and Keefer the novelist who has arranged their celebration. Greenwald’s answer breaks through that flattering version of events.

He tells Keefer that he defended Steve Maryk because he came to believe the wrong man was on trial, and that defeating Queeg was the means he used to defend him. He resents having been pushed into that position and says he is ashamed of what he did. He also invokes a debt to Queeg, who had stopped Hermann Goering from harming his mother. Rather than accept the dinner or its wine, Greenwald makes his toast and throws his yellow wine into Keefer’s face. A little splashes onto Willie Keith. When Maryk starts to rise, Greenwald pushes him back into his chair, then offers Keefer the chance to settle matters in the lobby.

From triumph to silence

The officers’ response registers the reversal more clearly than any speech. They begin muttering to one another and glance sideways at Keefer as Greenwald leaves the room. Keefer laughs, dismisses Greenwald as merely drunk, and insists that the meal continue; no one meets his eyes. His attempt to restore the party’s earlier ease cannot recover the mood. Dinner is eaten rapidly, in a clinking quiet interrupted only by occasional low remarks. When Keefer cuts the cake, the applause is brief and dispirited, and the party breaks up after coffee with five unopened champagne bottles still on the littered table.

The Fairmont Hotel matters in the episode not through any description of its architecture or ordinary life, but as the bounded social setting in which the trial’s aftermath is made visible. A room hired for celebration becomes the scene of an unwelcome correction: Greenwald refuses the heroic part assigned to him and makes Keefer’s distance from the trial’s moral cost impossible to ignore. The untouched champagne and thin applause give the evening its final measure. Maryk’s acquittal remains cause for relief, but the dinner cannot sustain the uncomplicated victory its organizers intended.