“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I just realized he took the major general’s case,” he said. “Can’t you picture his disappointment?”
“Yeah,” Marcia said, and finished her drink.
3
Monday, April 3
It was irresistible. You could try to be skeptical about it, even cynical, but it remained irresistible. And Thorne had not become accustomed to the curious, somewhat discreet sense of power, the odd hush of history, that hung over the place. His own office was tiny, tucked away at the end of a corridor, but even when he closed his door and sat behind his desk he could feel the vibrations of the building, as if the center, the Oval Office, were the heart of a web from which all the strands were being spun. It wasn’t as if he were familiar with that particular office, since he had been inside it only once and had talked directly with Foster only once, but the sensation—from the moment of passing the guard, showing your pass, entering—remained the same.
He had once tried to explain all this to Marcia. But so far as politicians, especially presidents, were concerned, she was a committed cynic. It’s all greed and fear, she had said. What you think is the reverence of history comes down to the crummy business of getting your ass reelected.
It was more than that, he had tried to say.
It was much more. But he had begun to feel foolish in front of her. He had dried up. Just don’t let it go to your head, kiddo.
When he got to his office on the morning after the burglary, the newspapers had already been stacked on his desk by Miss Grunwald, who came in at some ungodly hour and who took some perverse delight in staying as late as she could at night. Fiftyish, her gray hair dyed purple, she had survived the comings and goings of administrations. She dated as far back as Eisenhower. Then she had been a junior secretary in the typing pool, a mere stenographer. Now she was Bannerman’s own private secretary and, in that capacity, she was virtually the assistant chief of staff.
She didn’t like Thorne; nor did Thorne have any special affection for her. She was a martyr, a complainer, she always worked harder than anybody else and for small thanks. In her eyes was the light of some profound belief in a sacred mission: that of keeping the White House running. He knew it gave her a personal pleasure to have the morning newspapers on his desk long before his own arrival at 7:30. It was a task she could easily have delegated but didn’t.
Thorne took his jacket off, hung it on the back of his chair, took out his notebook, and began to go through the newspapers. The secretary from the adjoining office, Sally Winfield, came in with his coffee.
“What’s new in the news?” she asked.
Her regular greeting. He watched her set the coffee down. She was a skinny, pretty girl of about twenty-two who thought it was “a riot” to work in the White House. It was said she had slept with someone over in Justice, who repaid the favor by recommending her for this position.
“More of the same,” Thorne said. He was opening an advance copy of Newsweek. There was a long article critical of Foster’s handling of the economy. Inflation, unemployment. The same old song. He didn’t even bother to abstract it because he had sent it up before and Bannerman himself had called to suggest he might save himself the trouble of such summaries unless—as the great man put it—it was something “bright.” He flipped through Newsweek, marked an article about the proposed price rises in steel, then opened The New York Times. A critical article on the op-ed page: “Does Foster Understand Black Africa?” He cut it out, put it to one side, read the letters. Foster sometimes liked to look at stuff from correspondents: the compliments from Out There. I’m delighted to see we have a president strong enough to stand up to the OPEC countries, one of them began. He began to snip it out; it would make the Old Man happy.
His telephone rang. It was Farrago, the press officer. Droopy Max, the corps called him; his sartorial inelegance had prompted the name—floppy bow ties that belonged to the dark ages of the polka dot fad, pepper-and-salt tweeds of the kind you might only encounter these days on the bodies of retired missionaries.
“You got the summaries?” Farrago asked.
“Just about,” Thorne said.
“Lazy fart,” Farrago said. “You guys that live in sin misdirect all your energies.”
Thorne put the receiver down, and picked up the Star. Joseph Donaldson’s syndicated column regularly machine-gunned the administration. It has sometimes crossed my mind that our president’s secrecy in government, despite all the fanfare and hype about openness, is almost a match for the furtive machinations of his near-namesake in South Africa. Take the recent strange decision to cut $3.3 billion from the defense budget.… Thorne finished reading, skimmed the Post, then called Sally Winfield back when he was ready to dictate.
She sat with her slate-gray dress hitched up her thigh; her small breasts were always highlighted by tight sweaters that suggested to Thorne some atavistic longing for the fashions of the late 1950s. He watched her take shorthand and listened to the sound of his own voice droning … Campaign promises … trust … already broken.… When he had finished it was already 9:30 and Farrago was on the telephone again.
“Quit fucking around, Thorne. Bannerman’s been chewing my ear off.”
“She’s typing right now,” Thorne said.
“Is it true she can turn out eight words a minute if she’s really hammering?” Farrago hung up.
Thorne walked into the adjoining office and watched the girl type. On a wooden stand beside her desk there was a bottle of nail polish, a nail file, two apples in a plastic bag.
“You better hurry it,” he said.
She looked at him lazily: “It’s not my fault if it’s late, is it?”
He shrugged and went back to his own office. He stood at the window and watched a Secret Service agent playing with his walkie-talkie, moving along the edges of the lawn and muttering into his device. Overhead, a helicopter with the Air Force seal came into view. Thorne saw it hover a moment and then go out of sight.
He sat down behind his desk, put his feet up. Later, the provincials would start to come in. The Old Man always liked to know what was happening in the sticks and would read the summaries before going to bed. But the pressure’s off, Thorne thought: it’s off for a while. He closed his eyes, tried to relax. He could hear telephones ringing, the persistent clatter of IBMs, voices from the corridor. At times he found himself struggling with a sense of some weird incongruity, moments of uneasiness when he wondered what he was doing in this place at this particular time and where, in the long run, it might all be leading. If somebody had told him a year ago that he would be working in the White House he would have consigned this prediction to a category of things that included belief in a flat earth, the notion that the moon was made of Gorgonzola, and the idea of coming one fine day to love the poetry of S. T. Coleridge.
There had been two blurry years at Harvard doing law: what could you say about that? Humdrum: anathematic to him—the stifling weight of legal judgments, the dust of dilapidated precedents. It was followed by the obligatory year of doing Europe in a VW bus; a drifting time, a fragile existence at best, one day shading pretty much into the next. There was a lack of adhesive, of a glue that would hold the experiential things together. And what he had come to realize, almost as something of a shock, was that he needed an epoxy of some sort to keep the passages of time together in a purpose.
A purpose.
He went to the window. The Secret Service agent, as though he anticipated an outbreak of demons, a plague of protesters, appeared to be crouching in the shrubbery, his face turned in the direction of Penn Avenue. Thorne watched a moment; the raincoated figure stood suddenly upright and moved off in long exaggerated strides.
Journalism, he wondered: what had attracted him to that?
He had done the upstate New York newspaper bit—funerals, flower shows, Eagle scout awards, graduations, weddings: the minuscule events that were finally sandwiched between the ads that paid for
the paper. He remembered long hours, bleak snowy winters, a dreary sense of a system enduring in a vacuum. Where was the outside world? the real world?
His telephone was ringing.
It was Duncannon, one of the legal aides, suggesting a lunch. Thorne declined. He knew the nature of these lunches, the floating conspiracies, the tiny struggles for position, for power, for the opening that would suggest a foothold on the Way Up. He put the receiver down and thought: What am I doing here? What part do I have in the whispers in the men’s rooms, the quiet words in nearby restaurants, the confidences—both false and true—that are exchanged in the mess?
What indeed?
You had to be ambitious to make it around here; you had to want it badly, you had to hurt for it. Where the hell do I fit in this scheme of things? he wondered. Where do I fit? where do I go from here?
He had been in Albany, doing some press work for the Democratic Party, when Max Farrago had called. Out of the ether. It’s basically a scissors-and-paste deal, Farrago had said, but keep in mind that it’s White House scissors and White House paste. It was a tough thing to decline: the only thing that mystified him now was why he had been singled out. His father, of course—the recommendation of some old family friend, some power broker, whom he had never been able to identify. Even the dead, he thought, don’t necessarily lose their touch.
He sat behind his desk again and idly picked up the Post. He leafed through the inside pages.
And there it was.
There it was.
An inside page, lower left column, no more than a couple of dark inches of type.
He read it once, twice, a third time.
Then he picked up his telephone and called Marcia.
She answered yawning, still half asleep.
“Did you see the morning paper?” he asked. “My old warrior apparently killed himself in a swimming pool at a motel.”
She was silent for a time. He could see her stretched across the bed, the telephone in her hand; he could feel her fumble for something to say. What do you say? he wondered. Suicide by drowning. By drowning, he thought. Major General Walter F. Burckhardt had had a long and distinguished career in the Air Force. He picked up his scissors in one hand and thought: Do people choose that as a way out?
“I’m sorry, John. Was there family?”
“It mentions a wife somewhere,” Thorne said. Drowning: what kind of fucking sense did that make?
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He mumbled something, hung up, snipped the item from the newspaper. Why? Jesus, why? Why did anybody want to kill himself? Loneliness, despair, the end of a long line of rejection, intolerable humiliation, dishonor—were any of these applicable to Burckhardt? He saw a small middle-aged man at a funeral. A handshake on a rainy dying day. A clap on the shoulder, a touch. Gentle, solicitous, sincere. Of all things, sincere. Ben Thorne was a great man. It was misty, uncertain, the intangible web of a memory. You step to the edge of the pool, then what? Do you jump in? or do you walk the steps at the shallow end and just keep on strolling? What state of mind? Christ almighty, what state of mind?
And the wife, the wife he had never seen. Had she been with Burckhardt in the motel? Had she discovered him lying in the pool?
He shut his eyes: a man floating in the fake aquamarine of a pool, a corpse drifting through filtered chemicals, what condition of the heart, what poisoned state of mind, what emotional disintegration, spiritual decay—madness?
It’s vital I see you, John.
Vital, he thought.
Well: it couldn’t be vital now, could it?
He fingered the clipping and looked at the photograph of his father that hung near the window. It was a stern portrait taken some months before the senator’s death. The eyes were humorless, lifeless, the expression in them numb and at the same time vaguely inquisitorial, as if the man had spent his life asking questions to which he knew there were no answers. It wasn’t the man Thorne remembered. He had been upright, moral, qualities that might have been tedious in themselves, but they had been offset by a sense of humor.
The only thing Ben Thorne had never been heard to joke about in his life was the Constitution of the United States. He knew the document backward, forward, sideways, by heart. Thorne remembered how, as a child, he had been obliged to listen again and again to the historic background of the document … a memory burned into him like a cinder in his brain. The question-and-answer sessions. The quizzes. Who was the first postmaster of the United States? Who printed the Declaration of Independence? Why was Sam Adams not chosen to be a delegate to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention? Even now the names were imprinted in Thorne’s mind, indelible, heroes all to his father: Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, the giants Paine and Jefferson.
His father.
The slow demented dying of the man, the profound disintegration, the long and terrible nights of pain when it had seemed to Thorne that no one person should be allowed to suffer in such a way. Touching the cold hands, seeing the hollow cheeks, wiping saliva from the corners of the mouth with a handkerchief, listening to the monotonous, crazed monologues that had been prologues to dying. Christ: the death was a relief, the tears a release, the loss an end to anguish. I watched him, Thorne thought, I watched him die, I saw him go down, I saw a man I loved sink, a man who was at times a stranger, at times a friend, but always loved, always that. The old man.…
He turned away from the photograph. He picked up the clipping again. The fading of old warriors, he thought. The senator and the major general: what kind of young men had they been? What had they hoped for? What disillusionments had they lived through? A man walks into a swimming pool fifteen years after his close friend has succumbed to the misery of brain cancer. Finished, done with, over.
He put the clipping down. The garbled voice on the telephone had been trying to tell him something. And maybe, just maybe, if I hadn’t failed to keep the appointment, if there hadn’t been an accident on the freeway, the major general would be alive now. No: you can’t blame yourself. How could you predict the urge to self-destruction from a few hasty words on a telephone? You needed a special kind of clairvoyance for that.
He looked once more at the picture of his father, almost as if he felt the photograph were accusing him of something. He put the clipping in his wallet and sat without moving for a long time. Then, finally, he shrugged, made a phone call, and arranged a lunch date and a favor.
2
In the Sunday edition of The New York Times, which he looked at propped up against a Heinz ketchup bottle, Hollander surveyed the usual front-page despair. There was fresh evidence linking the CIA with insurgency in a South American republic. Communism and bananas, Hollander thought. An indefatigable combination. Sleep easy, America. There was a story about President Foster’s press conference of the day before. The American people deserve open government. We don’t want government by secret in this country.
He looked through the window of the restaurant into the street. A truck had stalled in the center of the road and irate drivers were banging their horns.
He turned back to the newspaper.
Photographs of the Martian surface. No apparent sign of vegetation. Tough titty, he thought. You spend millions to send some flimsy craft out there only to discover a Sahara with rocks. The taxpayer was John Sucker. We’re still receiving pictures, still analyzing the data.
Hollander doused his one remaining pancake with artificial maple syrup. The Russians were making noises in Africa while Amin was continuing to sever heads. The Cubans were discussing nothing, as usual, while supplying troops to cheapshit kingdoms in unlikely places. Without a sense of balance, Hollander thought, and a touch of humor, you could go whacko.
He drank some of his coffee, which tasted as if it were brewed entirely of chicory, and then he sat back and lit a cigarette. He watched the street again. The truck hadn’t budged from the center of the road and the driver was giving the finger to the motorists behind him. A waitre
ss loomed up at his table, a plain girl with intense acne.
“Everything okay?” she said. Her lapel badge said her name was Theresa.
“Just dandy, Theresa,” he said.
She smiled and passed on to the next table. Hollander looked at the faces of the other diners. There was a mindless quality to them all. They shoveled and chewed and swallowed. Sometimes you had to remind yourself that they experienced pain and sorrow and grief as well as joy and buttermilk pancakes. Only a humanist had the right to detest the species. He folded his newspaper over and wondered why it was so bulky. It could be reduced to a couple of sheets if it weren’t for Bloomingdale’s and Altman’s and all the others. He opened the book review section, flipping the pages to the best-seller list. He hated this: it reminded him he had a contract with a New York house for his memoirs. He hadn’t written a single page. He wasn’t likely to. He hated the idea of words as mirrors.
As soon as you write about yourself, he thought, you start to wonder who the fuck you are.
He closed the book review, finished his coffee, lit another English Oval. Through the window, across the parking lot, a neon sign said PANCAKE PALACE.
We meet in the most hideous places, Hollander thought.
He looked at his watch. It was almost ten. Myers would be in his little tent. Probably masturbating. Myers had the slightly gray, somewhat jaded look of the inveterate jerker.
“I’m late. Sorry.”
The man who sat down facing Hollander was tall, almost bald. What little hair he possessed was smeared with brilliantine and combed back flat and slick. He had long, anemic fingers. Hollander knew he could pass himself off as an undertaker. This way to the crypt, Ladies and Gentlemen. He wore a black coat that sparkled with raindrops.
“A few minutes,” Hollander said, and shrugged.
The other man studied the menu. “Is a pancake like a blintz?” he asked.
“Try it and see,” Hollander answered.
Asterisk Page 5
