by D. W. Buffa
“Everything built eventually crumbles. Monuments made to last forever mock us with our vanity and turn to dust. The only thing that will be remembered is the example passed from one generation to the next, not so much of what we did, but of why we did it and who we were.”
And with that, Browning turned quickly and took the ambassador by the hand. “Thank you for allowing me to come,” he said with an air of finality. He stood for a moment, facing the cameras; and then, as quickly as he had arrived, he left.
The noise of the crowd again engulfed the room, everyone eager to make some remark, some observation that would be remembered and later repeated. Gisela Hoffman, who had moved in front of me to get a clearer view when Browning arrived, jotted something in a notebook and then turned around.
“Browning is an old friend?” she asked, certain she was right. “I read the speech and what he said about you. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’re visiting the vice president. How long will you be in town?”
“Just a day or so.”
Her eyes stayed on me as if she were waiting for the question she knew I was going to ask.
“Would you like to have dinner while I’m here?”
She started to smile, but before she could say anything I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Powell from the Secret Service telling me it was time to go.
“Is there… ?”
Gisela wrote a number on a page of the small black notebook, tore it out and folded it in half. “You can reach me at home,” she whispered into my ear.
I followed Agent Powell through the crowd. At the entrance, I looked back, hoping to catch a last glimpse of her before I left. She was talking to a tall blond man in a dark blue suit and she seemed quite upset. I reached inside my pocket and ran my finger across the surface of the paper on which she had written the number where she could be reached. I wondered if I should call.
I tumbled into the backseat of the waiting limousine. Under a reading lamp, Browning had his eyes on what looked like a briefing book. When the door shut behind me, he closed it on his lap and fixed me with a rueful, friendly smile.
“I haven’t done any supermarket openings yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s next.” He leaned his shoulders against the corner of the cushioned seat. “What did you think of that place? What did you think of him?”
Browning’s chin sank onto his chest. That wistful look I had seen so often twist the shape of his mouth was there again, the promise of something he could not wait to tell.
“It’s astonishing, the effect we have on others. We’ve become so powerful that it becomes enormously important just to be seen with us. This afternoon they sent over the text of the ambassador’s remarks, what he was going to say by way of an introduction. Ten typed pages! And the language! It read like one of those speeches the conquistadors used to make when they claimed new lands for Spain! He would have pulled it out and read it if I had given him half a chance. I felt a little guilty doing it—stopping him like that—but not as bad as I would have felt if I had had to stand there for twenty minutes listening to him talk.
“Anyway, it’s over.” A sparkle came into his eyes. “I saw you talking to Gisela Hoffman. Be careful. She’s a dangerous woman.”
“Dangerous?”
“She’s charming and beautiful. What could be more dangerous than that? She’s married; but they’re getting a divorce. He was there. He’s also a journalist. Works for a different German paper. He saw the two of you together. He didn’t seem to like it.”
“You noticed all that?”
A bland expression, just this side of boredom, covered his face. “After you’ve said the same thing in court a couple of thousand times, do you really think about the words?”
The limousine crept along, the motorcycle escort silent, all the lights dim, doing nothing that might attract attention. A few minutes later, we left the public street and headed up a private drive, passing through an iron gate where an armed sentry stood guard. There was silence everywhere, the hushed, anxious silence of people listening, watching, waiting for what might happen next. The house was close now, the covered porch caught in the headlights of the car. Browning turned away from the side window, but he did not look at me. He drew further into himself like someone rehearsing in his mind a scene that had been played more than once before, a scene that was never pleasant, but a scene that might with proper management be kept within tolerable bounds and, if not that, at least kept mercifully short. I began to feel a sense of panic, a wish to be anywhere but here. If it had been anyone else— some other former friend of mine I had not seen in years—if I had been anywhere else than in the vice president’s official car hundreds of yards inside what for all intents and purposes was a military zone, I would have made my excuses—pled the press of other business or my own fatigue—and gone my separate way. I was becoming more uncomfortable, more ill at ease the closer we got. There was no mistaking that stern, set look in Browning’s eyes. It told me all I needed to know, and far more than I wanted to learn, about what had happened, not just to Thomas Browning, but to his wife.
The limousine came to a halt. The door on Browning’s side began to open. He hesitated, then pulled it nearly shut. He leaned toward me, clearly at odds with himself about what he should say.
“Joanna hasn’t been well lately. Nothing serious,” he added, sensing my reaction. “Nothing that can’t be handled.”
It seemed a strange way to describe an illness.
We entered the front hall of the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the vice president since Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller to the job after Nixon resigned the presidency and Ford took his place. No one thought it either noteworthy or surprising that someone as rich as Rockefeller did not want to live in the modest circumstances of his predecessors in an office to which, it is safe to say, he had never aspired.
The first thing I noticed was an enormous dining room on the left with a table that could easily seat eight people on each side. Much of what happened in the vice president’s office during the day was discussed and decided around this table at night. Opposite the dining room, on the other side of the spacious front hall, was the living room, with sofas and soft, comfortable chairs scattered all around. Through the open door I could see out the windows to the porch beyond. The lamps were still burning, and the few pieces of white wicker furniture that were visible were bathed in a ghostly yellow light.
“Your room is on the second floor. Your things have been brought over,” Browning explained.
At the end of the hall, directly opposite the front door, a wide spiral staircase led to the two upstairs floors. Above the landing, three steps from the floor, on the wall next to the staircase, a series of ledges and shelves contained exact replicas of artillery pieces employed in some of the country’s earliest wars. A mischievous grin crossed Browning’s lips.
“When Gore was vice president, they were filled with shofras. You know what those are? Neither did anyone else—except the people by whom he wanted them noticed. A shofra is the ceremonial horn of a ram—what the Jews blow on to announce the high holidays. Gore picked them up in Israel.” Browning sighed with weary resignation. “I think he must have spent every day he lived here thinking about money: how to get it, how to spend it, how to make it work.”
On the second floor he walked me to the far end of the hallway and showed me my room. My suitcase was sitting in the corner. All my clothes had been hung up. Browning sat down on the edge of the bed, bouncing on it twice to test the mattress.
“Not bad,” he said with the same grin I remember from the first day I met him, when he tried both beds before insisting I take the one he had found to be marginally better. “If you need anything,” he added with a nod toward a telephone on the table next to the bed.
After I got out of my suit coat and removed my tie, I went over to the window and looked out. At the bottom of the long curve of the drive, I could see the iron gate and, beyond that, in
the far distance along Embassy Row, the garish lights from the embassy still burning through the night.
I was supposed to meet Browning downstairs for a drink. I had just entered the hallway when I heard the first muffled shouts. I started to turn back, but I didn’t feel like hiding in my room, trying to guess when it might be over. With rapid steps I made my way down the hallway to the stairs. With each step down the staircase, the sound of the noise subsided. The library, or study, was to the left of the staircase as I descended, behind the living room, facing onto the same yellow-lighted porch. Shutting the door behind me, I began to pass the time, examining the titles of books.
The white built-in bookshelves, circling around the fireplace and climbing halfway to the ceiling, were filled with volumes, some of them quite old.
“There is no other library like it in America.”
I had not heard the door open. Browning’s voice was calm, collected, with that same unblemished affability that made you feel so much at home. With a book in my hand, I looked at him over my shoulder. His manner was no more changed than his voice. Whatever had happened upstairs was over, forgotten, filed away with a kind of ruthless efficiency, the way he must have taught himself to move from one thing to the next. He had no time to question anything he had done, or to think too far into the future; he could not afford the luxury of feeling sorry for himself or, I imagine, for anyone else.
“Books on the vice presidency, on the men who have held the office—they’re all here. Bad enough you have to be vice president; you have to read about it, too,” he remarked with a jovial glance. He handed me a drink. “Scotch and soda—right?” He picked a book at random off a shelf near his desk and held it at arm’s length, squinting for a moment before holding it toward me so I could see. “Burr, the novel by Gore Vidal. At least it’s well written, even if he didn’t get it right.” A second thought, a kind of reconsideration, registered in his eyes. “Though he came a good deal closer than most of these…” He threw a disdainful glance at the shelves on the distant wall. “Most of this stuff was written by academics who never knew a public man, much less led a public life.” It was an odd turn of speech. He caught the slight uncertainty in my eye. “It’s the way the British used to talk—and write. Public men—wealthy aristocrats who took part in politics, who were elected to Parliament from districts they as good as owned, who formed governments—the men who ran the country. They used the phrase to distinguish themselves from the lazy bastards who only wanted to hang on to their country estates and indulge their taste for private pleasures.”
He had not changed out of his dark suit, though he had unfastened the top button of his shirt and loosened his tie. He stood in the middle of the room, running his fingers through his thick reddish brown hair. A pensive expression spread across his mouth.
There was a clattering noise, growing louder, coming closer. The door flew open and a woman with hollow eyes and a desolate grin, a woman I barely recognized, burst into the room. Laughing wildly, she fell into my arms, repeating my name over and over again. I held her, listening to her tell me how glad she was to see me, how glad she was I had come, as I tried to pretend that she had not changed and that she was still the same Joanna I remembered and that she was not dead drunk.
Browning quickly pulled her away and led her back upstairs.
“It’s the pressure,” he explained when he returned. There was no trace of embarrassment, nothing even suggesting an apology for the way she had raged at him or the way he had answered back. He might have been describing a minor malady, something that cured itself with a good night’s sleep.
“There’s a lot in this business,” he went on, attempting to shrug it away with indifference. He took a drink from a glass of something he had poured for himself. “Especially now.
“Joanna’s had too much to drink,” he said, determined that this would be the final word. He got up from behind the desk, stared for a moment down at the floor, and then, with a methodical look, slowly raised his eyes until his gaze met mine. “She does that. Fairly often, to tell you the whole, unvarnished truth. It keeps her company, I suppose,” he said, his voice growing faint. “It’s how she tries to cope.” He bent his head, a wistful expression in his eyes. “It’s better when we’re in New York. She hates it here; hates the life—all the posturing, all the pretense. But she does what she has to, goes to all the things she’s supposed to, says all the things she should. Tomorrow she’ll be fine. It will be as if nothing happened.”
He turned to the side, staring at something only he could see; something that was as real to him as anything he could touch.
“Everything would have been different if Annie had lived.”
He lowered himself into the chair, grimaced with pain and immediately dismissed it as of no account.
“Twisted my ankle earlier tonight.”
“The foot?”
He tossed his head and emitted a quiet, rueful laugh. “I forgot—you know. Yes, the damn foot.” Annoyed with himself, he shook his head. “FDR—can you imagine what that must have been like?—Spends his life in a wheelchair, but every time you see him in public he’s standing up, looking like the healthiest, most vigorous man alive, standing there—walking, for God’s sake!—his hand on someone’s arm, moving those dead legs inside those steel braces; standing at a podium, holding himself up, his head thrown back at that jaunty angle, giving everyone the confidence to go on—first the Depression, then the war. And then they build a monument and what do they do? After all the pain and suffering, after all that heroic effort to rise above that awful paralysis?—They put him in a wheelchair and make it look as if he had been proud to be there! God, what’s happened to this country? Everyone wants to be a victim. You imagine anyone ever told Franklin Roosevelt they felt sorry for him?”
A knowing smile, a kind of secret, passed over Browning’s mouth.
“That’s what kept me going when I was a boy and they kept trying to fix my lame foot and, when they couldn’t, made me wear those boxlike shoes so I could walk like everyone else and no one would know. I kept reminding myself what Roosevelt must have gone through. If he could do that, what right did I have to complain or feel sorry for myself because of a little handicap like this? What everyone should know about Roosevelt isn’t that he was in a wheelchair, but that through sheer guts and determination he got out of it.”
On the desk a lamp with a green parchment shade threw light on a book, marked toward the middle with what appeared to be a scrap of notepaper torn from a pad. Browning’s hand strayed toward it, touched it, and then immediately drew away. A troubled expression came into his eyes.
“Do you remember Annie? How full of life she was? The way those dark eyes of hers were always laughing; the way you could hear the laughter in her voice? If she hadn’t come that day—if she hadn’t fallen—everything would have changed.” He seemed to concentrate on each word, as if what he wanted to say had to be said exactly right. “Or could have changed, could have been different. I would have married her, and none of the rest of this would have happened.”
I started to ask him what he meant, but he stopped me with an impatient glance.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have married her; maybe she wouldn’t have changed her mind about that. You remember Annie, what she was like. She always said she’d never get married, that if two people loved each other they should be together—but not forever, only ‘till love died.’” Browning smiled to himself. “Not ‘till death do us part,’ but ‘till love dies.’ She said it always did—love always dies—and said it with all the worldly certainty of the vast experience of her twenty-some-odd years. I wonder what would have happened to her—how she would have changed; I wonder if she would have changed at all.” He reached for the glass he had left on the far corner of the large mahogany desk. “I wonder if any of us really changes at all.”
He took a drink, and then, with both hands wrapped around the glass, held it in front of him, tipping it gently from side to side, w
atching the changing quality of the light reflected from the green-shaded lamp.
“Annie didn’t really want to be a lawyer. She wanted to go off to Europe—to Paris, or Florence—and study art. She thought it would be exciting, a different way to live; and if it didn’t work out… well, there would always be something else—become a rancher in New Zealand, or take up some religion in India or Tibet. You remember Annie. You remember what she was like.”
Browning tapped his fingers lightly against the half-hollow glass. “I would have gone with her—anywhere she liked.”
“You would have dropped out of law school with less than half a year left?”
“I didn’t have your drive, your desire to become a lawyer. I went to Harvard because I could use it as an excuse.”
“An excuse? From what?”
“From the company; from my grandfather; from the life that had been planned out for me from the day of my birth—an excuse from becoming the official guardian of the legend of the great Zachary Stern. Some people enrolled in law school because they didn’t want to go to Vietnam; I enrolled in law school because I didn’t want to go back to Detroit.
“Annie made me see that I was just running away and that I’d always be doing that—running away—until I decided that it was my life and that I could do what I wanted with it and that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought. Of course,” added Browning with the shrewd self-appraisal that had come only much later, “what I wanted was to do exactly what she thought I should. But she didn’t want me to do anything; she didn’t want me to be anything. She wanted me to be myself, and all I wanted was to be with her.” He put down the glass and stretched his arms high over his head. “I might have ended up on that ranch in New Zealand with a few thousand sheep and a dozen children, none of them born in wedlock because Annie—you remember Annie—did not believe in ‘till death do us part.’ Do you find that hard to believe?” he asked, placing his forearms on the desk as he turned and faced me. “That I would rather have wound up somewhere like that with Annie, living an anonymous life, than what’s happened —become someone who was almost president, and still might, someone with more money than he can possibly use, someone married to a woman who has given him two fine children, a woman everyone admires, a woman who has never told anyone that in her heart of hearts she wishes that instead of me, she had married you?”
