by D. W. Buffa
CHAPTER 8
For what must have been hours I lay awake. I saw Annie sliding through the Plaza suite, that same wistful look upon her mouth and eyes. I heard Thomas Browning in that low, unhurried voice, doling out benign encouragement to someone tense with insecurity about something—school, a girl— something they thought would make or break their life and that Browning somehow knew would pass. I saw his eyes move toward Annie, while she floated across the room, looking back just long enough to catch his glance, hold it, touch it… let it go. She was in love with him. I seemed to know that now. Perhaps not the way he must have been in love with her, with that desperate all or nothing feeling, willing to sacrifice every hope, every ambition for the chance to be with her; but as much as her free soul would allow. He would have left, dropped out of school, turned his back on the sworn duty of his life. He would have gone with her anywhere and never thought he had sacrificed a thing. He would have been that rancher with his own healthy brood. I knew that now, knew it in that way you sometimes do when you have known something all along, but have kept that knowledge a kind of secret from yourself. Perhaps it was Joanna; perhaps I had cared too much about her to think that she had ended up in a marriage in which she would always be in some sense second best.
Whenever it was I finally fell asleep, I slept like a dead man and did not awaken until the morning was half gone. I showered and shaved, and as I stared at myself in the mirror tried not to think too much about whether time had treated me with the same cruel indifference with which it had left the marks of its passage on Joanna’s once young and beautiful face. I had seen pictures of her in the papers, and a few times on television I had heard her talk, but those had been staged appearances in the proper light, usually from a distance and seldom close up. If she had ever been anything but completely sober, it had never shown.
As I leaned closer to the mirror, I seemed to notice a slight increase in the number and depth of the lines about my eyes. I rubbed a dab of skin balm into my face and the color deepened into a healthy, reddish glow. I began to feel better. I slipped on a crisp, fresh white shirt and a clean blue suit and picked out a cheerful tie. On my way out, I stopped at the window. Buried under a large, floppy hat, a man mounted on a riding mower traced long, parallel paths across the rolling green lawn. The air was turgid, gray, hot and humid, threatening rain. I left the room not feeling quite so good.
The hallway was silent, but then, from somewhere in the distance, behind one of the closed doors, came the low humming noise of a vacuum cleaner. At the bottom of the long, spiral staircase I hesitated, not sure what to do. I listened, but except for the muted vacuum above, there was nothing to hear. I walked toward the front door, stopped at the living room and peered inside, then turned around and entered the dining room. A doorway led to the kitchen, but that seemed vacant as well. The study had the advantage of familiarity. I decided to wait in there.
Rooms, like people, have their moods. The midnight shadows on a lamp-lit wall create a different effect than the flat even dullness of a gray-covered sun. The massive dark desk that had gleamed hard and shiny like some late restored antiquity was old, worn, scarred, marked with years, decades, of pen strokes, left beneath the official important papers on which they had been made. It was the inadvertent record of the endless repetition of written and rewritten words; words started, words stopped, words thrown away, a new sheet of paper placed where the old one had been, a second followed by a third, then a fourth, attempt.
There was a sudden commotion as the front door swung open and the house was drowned in a sea of voices. I moved away from the desk and began to examine more closely the photographs that I had barely noticed before. My eye had just settled on a picture of a man in his sixties with intelligent eyes and a firm, but forgiving, mouth.
“Phil Hart.”
Startled, I turned around. Browning was standing in the doorway, his reddish brown hair windblown in a dozen different directions, his blue eyes curious and alert.
“Have a good sleep?” he asked, gently taunting me as he dropped into the chair behind the desk. “I had a seven-thirty meeting. Now there’s a meeting here,” he said, tossing his head toward the hallway through which he had just arrived. “Then I’m off. I’m giving a speech at noon, another one at three. This evening I’m somewhere, and somewhere else later tonight.” He let both arms fall from the sides of the chair and rolled his head to the side.
“Phil Hart.” He spoke the name with a kind of eager exuberance, as if I had just mentioned some mutual long-lost friend. “Interesting face, don’t you think? Served eighteen years in the Senate; died a week before the end of his last term. They named the third Senate office building after him; did it while he was still alive. First time a major public building in Washington was named after someone still alive. The vote to do it passed the Senate ninety-nine to zero; only Hart abstained.”
A look of nostalgia swept across Browning’s eyes. He sat forward in the chair.
“Hart was such a modest man, there were people who thought that when he heard what the Senate was going to do he might try to stop it. The night before the vote, someone on his staff suspected he might and put a note on his desk pleading with him not to do it. The next morning she found a note on her desk. He said he wasn’t as modest as she thought and that he could not be more delighted at what the Senate was going to do. He wouldn’t vote for it himself, you understand… ,” added Browning. He smiled hard to keep himself in check, and then, laughing at his own embarrassment, made an awkward gesture with his hand.
“They did that in the summer, and the day after Christmas he was dead. I went to the funeral. Half of Washington was there. Three of his closest friends in the Senate—Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie, and Eugene McCarthy—were sitting together in the center section about a dozen rows ahead. Kennedy was on the aisle, and I could see him as plainly as I can see you. The tears were pouring out of his eyes, and his face was all red. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so distraught.
“Of all the tributes written, all the things people said, the most moving was a speech given on the Senate floor by—you simply won’t believe this, but I swear it’s true— Strom Thurmond. You could read for years through the Congressional Record, go down the list of five or ten thousand roll-call votes, and I don’t know that you would ever find more than half a dozen on which they had ever voted the same way, and yet Thurmond revered him. Imagine! Strom Thurmond, who led the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention in 1948; who promised segregation today, tomorrow, and forever before George Wallace was old enough to talk; who voted against every major piece of civil rights legislation for almost the next fifty years; and Phil Hart, the liberal’s liberal, the floor manager for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the act that put a federal guarantee behind the right to vote and changed the political complexion of the South. Impossible, isn’t it? But true. Thurmond loved him. They all did, all those southern segregationists the rest of the country reviled. And do you know why? Because he treated all of them with unfailing courtesy and respect.
“There’s a Hart story that you won’t see written in any book. The Voting Rights Act was coming up. Richard Russell, the senator from Georgia—one of the other Senate office buildings is named for him—was presiding over a meeting of the southern leadership in the Senate, trying to figure out the legislative strategy of the other side. In the middle of the meeting, the telephone rings. It’s Phil Hart. He’s the floor leader for the bill, and he tells Russell exactly what he is going to do. Amazed—but perhaps not entirely surprised—Russell hangs up the phone, tells the other southern Senators what he’s just been told, and then, in that ultimate southern compliment, looks around the room and remarks, ‘And that was a gentleman.’”
Browning raised his head. A cunning look entered his eyes.
“Some people might think Hart had been naïve; others might think he was just trying to be fair. He was trying to be fair all right, but not just for the sake of
fairness. This was not some game where it didn’t matter if you won or lost, only that you played within the rules. This was going to change everything—and everyone knew it. Hart understood—I’m not sure how many others did; I doubt any of the liberals did—that even if you had the votes, it wasn’t enough to win. You had to win in a way that left the other side some dignity in defeat. If the South was going to accept defeat, they had to know they had been given every reasonable consideration. It was exactly a hundred years since the end of the Civil War; it was not going to be another hundred years—not if Hart had anything to do with it— before the races treated each other with respect.
“There was another reason as well,” added Browning. “The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was James Eastland of Mississippi, and nothing got through that committee the chairman did not want. The real mystery is why Eastland, who could have stopped the Voting Rights Act with nothing more than a word, let it through. The answer, I think, is that Phil Hart asked him if he would. The bill got through the committee, and when it came to the floor, where all the southern senators would vote against it in what they knew, and had accepted, was a losing cause, one of them delivered a speech that attacked Hart by name. Someone started to rise in Hart’s defense, but Hart held him back, explaining that it had all been prearranged. A little verbal abuse from a senator playing to the folks back home was a small enough price to pay for that same senator’s quiet refusal to do anything more than cast a single useless vote to stop it.”
Browning glanced at the black-and-white photograph. “It’s the only picture of a public figure I keep in here. Hart kept only one picture as well. You know whose picture it was? James Eastland of Mississippi.”
Browning got to his feet. “I keep that picture because it reminds me of what people—even people in politics—can be.” His eyes grew hard, calculating and even, I thought, vengeful. “I keep it to remind me that not everyone is like Connally and Walker and the rest of that crowd who think that government is the enemy and that the poor can take care of themselves.”
His chest rumbled with laughter. “See?—Only one person in the room and I feel compelled to make a speech!” He started toward the door, glancing over his shoulder at Hart’s picture. “Another story you’ll never read about…”
He stopped, came back, sat down at the end of the leather sofa. He appeared to meditate on something grave.
“You remember Reynolds,” he said presently. “What a miserable bastard he was.” There was another pause, not so long, but in a way more profound. He raised his eyelids and revealed a scornful look. “You remember what he did.”
It was not that I thought the offense less serious, or in some way more forgivable, but I had in what was perhaps the desperate comfort of a last illusion decided that if you did what Reynolds had done, you would always live with the knowledge that whatever you might later achieve was based on a fraud. Reynolds was a cheat, and because of that, his life was a lie. Reynolds did not matter. I had long ago dismissed him from my mind. I said this in no uncertain terms to Browning. In reply he gave me a look that told me he wished it were true.
“Unfortunately, that cheat, that liar, is the swing vote on a five-to-four Court. He hates me with a passion. He knows I fought his nomination, that when I heard what the president—it was Connally’s idea—was thinking, I tried to get it killed.”
“Did you tell them what he did at Harvard? How he cheated his way through?”
Browning broke into a broad, rueful smile. “That would have made them even more certain they’d found the right man for the job.”
The smile faded from his lips. “What could I have done? Told them we all knew he cheated, but no one had ever proved it? Proved it? No one had ever accused him of it; not in a way that left an official record. All I could say—and I said this—was that there was some question whether during his long career he had always been honest in his methods. Of course, it all got back to him. He knows what I meant and he hates me for it. He hated me before, me and you and everyone else who knew. He hates us because we know, and I think he hates us even more because we’ve never told.”
With a discouraged look, Browning got to his feet. He glanced again at the photograph.
“Years ago—it seems like forever now—Lyndon Johnson was president, and he put his great good friend Abe Fortas on the court. Earl Warren was going to retire. Johnson nominated Fortas to become chief justice.” Browning looked at me. “You remember all this? Then it was revealed that Fortas had taken some money—not much, twenty thousand or so—as an honorarium, some kind of expense…” Browning was moving now, pacing slowly around the room, hair slipping down the right side of his high prominent forehead. “Fortas had to resign from the court. Johnson wasn’t going to be beaten twice. He didn’t have the strength he had once had—Vietnam had weakened him; almost destroyed him, really. He had probably already decided he wasn’t going to seek a second full term. But he understood the Senate perhaps better than anyone ever had. He decided to give them a name they could not refuse. He was going to nominate Phil Hart to become chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.”
Browning stood still and shook his head, baffled and amused that someone had really done something as remarkable, as unprecedented, as what he was about to tell me.
“Hart turned him down. He thought about it. He made at least one call I know about to ask someone’s advice; but, yes—Hart turned him down. Chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and Hart said no. I don’t know why he did that. The first chief justice, John Jay, didn’t think the job worth having. He said as much when he quit. Then John Marshall took his place, and ever since then it’s become the dream of every lawyer, the obsession of every judge, and Hart said no. I think he had a certain definite sense about the limitations of his own powers: He would not do something unless he thought he could do it well.” Browning shook his head, sadly and with regret. “That of course is precisely the reason why he would have been a great chief justice, one of the best we’ve ever had. Strange when you think about it: In a city of such colossal egos, Hart wasn’t sufficiently vain.”
The glow of nostalgia in Browning’s eyes vanished, replaced with a look cold, hard, intense. “And now exactly the opposite situation is playing out in front of my eyes, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. Reynolds is on the court because Walker wanted him there, and Walker wanted him there because the chief justice is dying.” With a stern look that swore me to secrecy, Browning added: “Only a few people know. Cancer. He has maybe a year.”
I could not believe what I knew he was about to tell me. “Reynolds—chief justice?”
“Of course. They have the presidency; they want the court. Reynolds as chief justice is like having Arthur Connally over there. They’ll tell him what they want, and he’ll do it.”
There was one hope left. As soon as I said it, I realized how ludicrous it must sound.
“Other presidents have thought that. They nominated people they thought would vote one way who voted another. Earl Warren didn’t turn out to be the kind of chief justice Eisenhower thought he would.”
Browning nearly laughed. “Reynolds? Even if he wanted to do the right thing, he’d never be able to figure out what it was. Remember what Teddy Roosevelt said about Oliver Wendell Holmes?—That he had the ‘backbone of a banana.’ Reynolds has the eyes of a beggar: craven, cowardly, eager to please. Watch him sometime, the greedy look in those nervous little eyes when he’s introduced. His mouth starts to form the word Justice as if he has to hear it twice. His eyes light up like a match being struck. He loves the sound of it, the title, the fact that everyone has to call him ‘Mr. Justice Reynolds.’ He spent days training the woman who answered his phone to say it exactly right.”
Browning caught the look of skepticism that flashed across my eyes. “Days, I tell you.” A raised eyebrow acknowledged that if he had not known better he would have had the same reaction. “‘Mr… Justice… Reynolds.’ That was cr
ucial,” Browning explained, suppressing a grin. “That pause—that pregnant pause— after each word.” He cocked his head and gave me a puzzled, doubtful look. “The real mystery is why he did not add a flourish of coronets. I’m tempted to say it’s because he didn’t have the wit, but when it comes to advertising his own importance… No, it wouldn’t be because he didn’t think of it. He’s probably saving it, keeping it for later, when he becomes chief justice and can reserve it for himself.”
Certain he was right, he nodded once and then, vastly amused, shrugged his shoulders. “They play that flourish each time the president enters a room; why not the chief justice?”
He walked past me to the French doors that led out to the covered porch. He raised his arm and rested it against the corner of the bookcase as he stared through the glass. Seen in this attitude of repose, his hand was surprisingly graceful: a violinist’s bow would have fit perfectly within the grasp of the smooth, round fingers. His hands were too small to have played the piano with more than passable skill, but I could see them moving with the blur-like speed of a virtuoso the short distance of a violin’s strings. With a quarter turn, he leaned against the flat end of the bookcase and the casement of the door. He held his arms, loosely folded, across his chest, sunk in a single troubling and depressing thought.
“Reynolds has never been sick a day in his life. He could be chief justice for twenty, twenty-five years— maybe thirty. If that happens, and if I’m forced out—if they put the kind of man they want into the vice presidency, someone who can follow Walker with another eight years of welfare for the rich and laissez faire economics for everyone else—there may not be anything that can put this country back together. With Reynolds chief justice, and with the additional vote they pick up by filling the vacancy, they’ll have a permanent six-to-three majority. There won’t be any constitutional restraints on what these people want to do.”
