I had come to invite Candace to lunch. If I was going to be an errand boy, at least I would get a good meal out of it.
She was still on the phone, haranguing the White House press secretary about why the Sun was being charged for a hotel room in Paris during a presidential trip there the previous week, when our correspondent had stayed with his uncle. Those were the sort of issues that editors had to worry about. She kept making silly gestures as she talked, sticking her finger down her throat and holding her nose.
As she talked, I took a seat on the couch. Unlike my office, this one belonged to a real newspaper person. On one wall was a certificate from Columbia University announcing that she had won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting, for a series of stories a few years back about foreign bribery. On a far wall was a collection of the press passes she had received from the various lunatic militias she had covered in Lebanon during the early 1980s—little slips of paper covered with Arabic scribble, each graced with her picture. She looked remarkably beautiful in these simple photos—her windblown hair tacked down with barrettes, her eyes shining back fearlessly at the camera; her face cool and serene in whatever bunker or basement cavern had served as a makeshift studio. Candace had a look of pure indifference, a certainty that nothing could diminish her beauty, a look that she had used to intimidate a thousand would-be suitors. It had been captured by these Lebanese thugs and stapled crudely to their laissez-passer.
The one incongruity in the room was the picture in the silver frame on her desk. It was of her father, Dwight Ridgway. The photograph had been taken just a few weeks before he gave up the last pretense of coping. It was a composed, patrician face—that was what made the hints of disorder so striking. The tie was knotted precisely against the button of his white shirt; the steel-gray hair was combed in that easy, automatic way of WASP men—perfectly in place. But there was a wild look in his eyes, the look of a man who had been to the abyss—seen the absolute worst about himself—and returned, inwardly disfigured. There were other marks of stress on that face too—the severe creases on either side of the mouth, the sharp lines drawn across the forehead, the deep circles under the eyes—signs of a sleeplessness so profound that no drug could trick him into unconsciousness. It was a face that made you wonder: What had gone so wrong with his patrician life that he was left like this, staring out hollow-eyed at his daughter?
When Candace finally put down the phone, she saw me studying the picture. I was lost in my own imagining of who he had been, what road he had traveled to get to that place. She looked pleased that I had noticed the portrait and been reminded of the vortex that had shaped her life. But she was uncomfortable too. This was a newspaper office; our vocation was the little truth, not the big truth.
“What brings you over here?” she asked. “You’re supposed to be in Lifestyle, with the creative people. This is an idea-free zone.”
“Bacon just went bonkers in my office. He thinks Galvin is wrecking the newspaper. He wants you to go talk with Sandy, get him to back off on some of his new ideas. Bacon thinks it will help.”
“I hate this!” she said. “What should I do?” She found Bacon’s assumption that she had special leverage over Galvin insulting, even if it was true.
“Have lunch with me. The rest is too complicated. We’ll go to a fancy restaurant. I’ll buy.”
“Ouch!” she said. “I can’t today. I promised my mother I would stop by to see her. But I’d love to run up your expense account another time.”
“I’ll come with you to your mother’s house,” I said rashly. “I’ve never seen what it looks like. Never met your mother. It would be part of my education. The Savant needs to know everything about Washington.”
She was pleased that I wanted to visit her mom, just as she had been pleased to see me looking at the photograph of her father. But she wagged a cautionary finger. “It won’t be very interesting. My mother is seventy-eight years old. She’s not much of a conversationalist, especially with people she doesn’t know.” I said I didn’t mind. Anything was better than talking to my new colleagues about the fall TV schedule.
BETTY RIDGWAY LIVED IN an old stone mansion in Georgetown, just west of Wisconsin Avenue and a few blocks from Candace’s own house. The cobblestone street looked to be a hundred years old; the ancient streetcar tracks were still embedded amid the stones, making driving treacherous. The house itself was gray and forbidding, but as with so many of these Georgetown houses, it concealed a vast, bright garden that had been lovingly tended. Mrs. Ridgway was in her sitting room; a small fire had been laid by her maid. (Somehow, she had kept enough money through her widowhood to afford a maid, but that was the true secret of the WASP elite, wasn’t it?—the preservation of capital.) She had her feet up on a stool and was reading an Agatha Christie novel. It was a scene that might have occurred just this way at any time over the last fifty years. That was another thing I envied about the WASP elite: their utter imperviousness to time and fashion.
Mrs. Ridgway reluctantly said hello to me. She had been looking forward to chatting with her daughter and had prepared a little cold plate for lunch—tiny lettuces and bits of meat that wouldn’t be enough for a bunny.
“My goodness,” she said. “You’re certainly tall.”
I lied and said I’d already had lunch, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She sent the maid into the larder to come up with something manly to eat, which turned out to be a cold, half-devoured joint of roast beef that was graying at the edges and looked to be a week old. The maid served it up just like that, on a big plate, with a knife and fork and some ketchup.
We all picked at our food. Candace tried to stoke up a little conversation by explaining to her mother that before joining the Sun, I had been editor of Reveal magazine and one of Washington’s social arbiters. Mrs. Ridgeway took a look at me and nodded severely. The notion that the stringy young man across from her had anything to do with society confirmed her worst fears. “Who are all these people I read about in Reveal?” she asked. “The Bernsteins and the Rubins and the Greens? Who are they?”
“They’re Jews,” I said. There was a long pause—very long—and I thought that I had blown it forever. But I saw Candace trying to suppress a chuckle, unsuccessfully, and suddenly she was laughing and so, incongruously, were Mrs. Ridgway and I. Hard to be sure who was the real anti-Semite in the group, but it didn’t matter. It broke the ice.
We talked for a few minutes about parties and charity balls. Candace mentioned a survey we had done once called “Bang for the Buck”—about how much it cost to put on each of the big charity events, and how little was left over for the underlying good causes. Mrs. Ridgway remembered it—had loved it, in fact, for it had confirmed her conviction that the balls were a fraud conceived by nouveaux-riches social climbers to get their pictures in Reveal magazine. I admired her frankness. If I had still been at Reveal, I might have tried to hire her as social editor.
After a few more minutes of this, and a dessert of thin, tasteless cookies, Mrs. Ridgway excused herself and retired upstairs. Candace seemed to think I had been a great hit. Old ladies like to be teased. You get so much piety at that age, it must begin to feel suffocating. You’re going to die soon anyway; why rush it?
I asked Candace to show me around the house. I wanted to understand how she had blossomed forth so full of life and color from this dry soil. She consented. I had breached the walls of the family fortress. The secrets of this prominent Washington family, as celebrated in its time as any in Georgetown, were open to my examination.
She led me to the room in the back of the house that had been her father’s study. It was lined on three sides with dark shelves of books, but the pallor was relieved by a large window that looked out onto the garden. The rays of sunlight seemed to catch the particles of dust and suspend them motionless in the air. “Daddy’s books are all still here,” she said. “We never touched them. Look around if you like.”
I walked to the shelves. It was the rationalist’s
emporium; a road map to the explainable world. The faith of a generation was lined up in neat rows. On the top shelf were the philosophers of history—the Durants, Toynbee, Gibbon, even Spengler—who told the story as a parable to instruct the present. To a man like Mr. Ridgway, the message surely was that the civilized world was like a trust fund; it could be squandered by imprudent heirs. Below that shelf were the memoirs of twentieth-century presidents and generals and secretaries of state. So many lessons there; so much to live up to. The collection seemed to stop at about 1965—he must have stopped reading history then, exhausted by the effort of making it.
Nearby, Mr. Ridgway had placed a more subversive explanation for the mess of modern life—the works of Sigmund Freud. I took his copy of The Interpretation of Dreams down off the shelf. The book was yellowed, but you could see that it had been carefully read—with pages turned down and notes in the margins. Farther along were popular works of sociology, which then as now ratified what people already suspected about life—The Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd, The End of Ideology. Snapshots of American self-awareness at mid-century.
The American cultural rebellion was chronicled on his shelves too—the earthquake that produced Candace and me and our whole generation of pill-popping, free-loving miscreants. He had collected the literary harbingers of the great unzipping: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Lolita, Tropic of Cancer—in their risqué, banned-in-Boston first editions. Back then, Norman Mailer hadn’t even been able to say fuck in a novel about soldiers, so he’d had to write fug and fuggin over and over; and yet just a few years later, in the blink of an eye, he could write fuck and cunt and shit on every page. What had happened to sever the moorings so quickly? Mailer would be appalled at the thought, but the true liberators were probably the feminist writers shelved nearby—Simone de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy, Betty Friedan—who had opened the door on the humid hurricane.
Mr. Ridgway had left behind shelves of records too, collected near an old LP turntable. His favorites, to judge by the worn jackets, were the musical comedies of Rodgers and Hammerstein: Carousel, Oklahoma!, South Pacific—the music that taught his generation how to love and marry and grow old. He was a jazz fan as well, with some old recordings of Billie Holiday before she became a junkie, some early tracks by Miles Davis, a whole shelf of Dave Brubeck. I pulled one battered album down; it showed Brubeck and his band on tour out West, dressed in tweed jackets and baggy wool pants. I wondered if Mr. Ridgway had ever smoked marijuana—probably he had; probably he’d brought a joint up to the family house in Maine one summer and gotten high as a kite with the missus, and then had a delicious screw on the beach.
I was beginning to like this man. He had surrounded himself with the things that mattered, the guidebooks and testaments of the twentieth century. What had happened, to blow him so far off course?
Candace was sitting in an easy chair by the window, watching me watch what was left of her dead father. She never interrupted my exploration; quite the opposite, she observed carefully as I prowled the shelves and fetched the books. She could see that I was trying to solve the same puzzle she had been turning over in her head for the better part of thirty years.
“What happened to him?” I asked. I wanted to understand, now that I had seen his books.
“Vietnam,” she answered. That was a one-word shorthand, but there was more she wanted to say.
THE WAR DESTROYED DWIGHT Ridgway, and all of his friends. Candace had watched it happen, but she hadn’t understood it until many years later. They were like boys in a fancy convertible, driving as fast as they could—if they hadn’t been so sure of themselves, they wouldn’t have been going so fast. They hit a wall at a hundred miles an hour, and there was nothing left of most of them. Even the ones who walked away, like Mr. Ridgway, were destroyed inside. They never stopped bleeding. Those were the Vietnam casualties it was hardest to feel sorry for—the men who made the war. But their suffering was as real as that of the soldiers who never came home.
These were men who had never known failure; they couldn’t live with ambiguity or doubt or any hint of weakness. That was why their mistakes were so devastating—because they had believed they were invincible. They were the generation that had won the big war—how could they lose this little one? Mr. Ridgway thought he could outwork the problem. He would come home from the Pentagon each night, exhausted by his struggle to make it all work. He had a black limousine with a little flag on the front, which identified him as deputy secretary of defense. The chauffeur would carry his briefcase up the steps; Mrs. Ridgway and Candace would be waiting at the door. He would give his daughter a hug—so wearily, he barely touched her. Then he would walk straight back to his study and mix a cocktail. And he would drink for the next hour or so, until he didn’t feel so tired.
Candace wasn’t allowed in the room—Mother’s orders—so she would stand just beyond the door, peering in, trying to make her father smile. Sometimes he would be in a good mood and tell a funny story. But mostly it was black, black, black. You had to see it from the inside, to understand how much these men were hurting. The public saw steely bureaucrats with slicked-back hair and imperious manners. You had to see them at home, enveloped in the depression that was gathering around them, to understand that they were putting up a desperate front.
Mr. Ridgway traveled to Vietnam every few months, to talk to the generals and see how the war was going. He would usually stop off in Hawaii on the way back, and bring his daughter a necklace of flowers, or a muumuu. When he first got back, he was always upbeat—the generals would do such an incredible snow job. All they needed was a few hundred thousand more troops or a little more bombing or a new offensive—just a little more and the enemy would collapse. Mr. Ridgway wanted to believe it would work. They all did, fervently—they’d staked their careers on it. But after he’d be home awhile, and watch the casualty numbers add up week after week, he would begin to wonder. Doubt wasn’t permitted; they were all trying to act tough for each other. Mr. Ridgway would go to the funerals, as many as he could. That was part of his code, but it added to the pain.
And then, sometime in 1967, Mr. Ridgway and some of the others began to realize that it was a mistake. It wasn’t working. It was possible—likely—that they had sent all those boys off to die for nothing. It was that seed of doubt that began to make him crazy. Perhaps all of us have mental illness lying dormant within us, waiting for an extreme moment of stress that will set the poison free—to multiply like a mental cancer until it has destroyed our good sense. That was what began to happen to Mr. Ridgway. The tragedy of Vietnam tapped something deep and dark that must have been in him all along, and gradually the darkness enveloped him.
You had to have known him when he was well, to understand the devastation. Mr. Ridgway was one of those men who could do anything. He was a superb athlete who had lettered in three sports in high school, a scholar who delivered the Latin oration at his Harvard commencement, a man of natural grace and refinement who understood why a particular painting or piece of music was beautiful—and could explain it to his daughter. It was too much to say that Candace worshiped him, for she had an irreverent streak even then. But she had believed he could do anything. She didn’t truly understand how weak he was until he killed himself.
And yet there had been signs. That was what made it so painful for Candace, the sense that if she hadn’t been so caught up in her own world, she could have helped him survive. He had been drinking more. She would hear him, after she went to bed, bumping downstairs to get another scotch. He couldn’t sleep. Candace couldn’t know what his nightmares were like, but she would hear him cry out sometimes in the middle of the night. Mrs. Ridgway couldn’t take it. She moved out and made her own bedroom down the hall. She was embarrassed—that was the worst of it. She had lost faith in him, and he knew it. He would stay up even later, drinking and reading, and then get up the next morning and go back to work and pretend everything was fine.
After he left government in 1969,
he joined a foundation and tried to write a book. But he was a mess. His doctor sent him to the hospital, and it was only many years later that Candace realized he had been given shock treatment there. It was still a primitive form of therapy back then, not much beyond applying leeches to cure a fever. That was why he’d come back from the hospital so sad-eyed, barely able to recognize his own daughter. They had blown electricity through his head.
His collapse happened in slow motion. He took a mistress—a divorced woman who had an apartment in one of the big buildings on Connecticut Avenue. Like Mr. Ridgway, she had played tennis in college. People watched them playing together at the Chevy Chase Club and wondered what was going on. But even as a girl, Candace had thought she understood it. Her mother was getting older; she had taken a separate bedroom. Her father—in his up phases, at least—was still a youthful, handsome man. That was the official version. But really, he was going crazy.
CANDACE SHOWED ME THE room where he killed himself. We climbed the broad stairway to the second floor, and then a narrower staircase to the third floor. It was bright and airy up there; the sun beamed in through a skylight. A child’s room was in the front of the house, still filled with posters and dolls and glass figurines. It was Candace’s room. In the back was a smaller room—a sewing room, it appeared. The door was locked, but Candace opened it. Inside was a couch, a big easy chair and a window that looked out over the treetops. He liked to come up there in the afternoon, after he had stopped working. He would sit and read. He said it made him feel better.
It happened one day in the fall of 1971, when Candace was away at college. Mr. Ridgway walked up to that sunny room and hanged himself. He didn’t leave a note, but he left a Bible on his reading table, open to the passage in the Song of Solomon that talks about how love is stronger than death. He had scratched out the words. Mrs. Ridgway found him. She reached Candace at Radcliffe and told her that her father was dead. She didn’t say that he had committed suicide; she was ashamed. Candace learned the truth later that afternoon, from a stranger.
The Sun King Page 13
