by Howard Fast
Keep her on politics, Leonard said to himself.
“They want him to give up the road, you know,” she said.
“How can you be so sure?” Here he was, death crawling inside of him, and coolly manipulating the conversation to keep his brilliant sister from thinking about that death.
“I just know. All the winds blow in one direction at a moment. This is one of those lousy moments. Look! Look! Look!” They were driving on a section of the road where white lilacs grew. They were in late flower, half a mile of lovely blooms that breathed their scent into the warm air. “They’re so beautiful,” Elizabeth exclaimed. “I would want to be a lilac bush—just for a day or so. Lenny, do you remember reading a story called Mr. Sycamore, or some such thing, about a postman so tired of walking that he just planted his feet in the earth and grew into a fine sycamore tree. Let’s do that, Lenny, I’ll be a lilac and you’ll be a sycamore—oh, God, why am I talking so crazy, like a kid?—”
On the edge of tears again. Leonard, nipping it, said, “Come down to earth, Sis. What are you telling me? That they’re going to talk him out of that road he’s building?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Am I? Kiss my ass in Macy’s window?”
“No way. I always lose. I lost enough of these nutty bets to spend a whole morning kissing your ass in Macy’s window. You never said which Macy’s. Where would it be, New York? Then we got to make a trip there one day. Go straight to the manager. I’m Senator Cromwell’s son, this is my sister. Set ourselves up properly. She’s smarter than I am, and every time we make a bet, the loser kisses the other’s ass in Macy’s window. Right now, I have to kiss her ass in your—what window?” he asked Elizabeth. “If I remember right, it could be Seventh Avenue, or Thirty-fourth Street, or maybe Broadway too.”
“Whichever gets the biggest crowd.”
“In your Seventh Avenue window. I’m at least three hundred kisses behind. Let’s say two hours in your window.”
“Tell him it’s good for business.”
“What does he say?”
“He wants to know whether we’ll have media coverage. Come on, you really believe Gramps will cave in? He has the highest fuck-you level of anyone I’ve ever known. He’d toss the president out of his house if he thought anything the old thespian said was inappropriate.”
“Who knows. Maybe you’re right,” Elizabeth said. “I’m O.K. now. Anyway, it’s not caving in. Do you want me to drive?”
“No. I’m better off if I’m doing something, and what do you mean it’s not caving in? Of course it’s caving in.”
“You think of Gramps as being principled. He isn’t principled, Lenny. He loves nothing—”
“Hold on. He loves us. Jesus, Liz, you can see that. His sun rises and sets with us.”
“We’re his, the way he sees it. You can call it love if you want to. We’re like his homes, his yacht, his horses, but his center is power and money. It’s like this Jewish charade he puts on. Do you know how many non-Jews came into our family in the past two hundred years? We’re as Jewish as the Pope. But Gramps carries on like a first-generation immigrant Jew.”
“That’s true,” Leonard admitted. “It does give him status. There’s nobody else just like him.”
“So he won’t cave in. He’ll do whatever the moment requires for him to protect his silly empire.”
“I know. But I like him. He wants me to switch to MIT, and then go into the company. Can you imagine me an engineer?” Death had receded for a moment. Neither of them could hold firmly to the reality of death.
“Never,” Elizabeth said. “Suppose I said to him, Gramps, Lenny is a poet and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it?” Death broke through. Elizabeth burst into tears.
“Oh, no,” Leonard said. “Lizzie, love, we’ll be at the airport in fifteen minutes.”
“I know.”
“Will you please kill the tears, once and for all.”
“I’ll try, Lenny. Promise, promise.” She dried her eyes. “How do I look?”
“Wonderful. You always look wonderful.”
“You haven’t even looked.”
“I’m driving. Go on with that Gramps business. I never knew you went around shrinking people?”
“It’s not shrinking. It’s just looking and listening. I make a kind of game of it, ever since I was a kid and used to hang around Daddy’s office in Washington. When I was seventeen I heard Senator Bassington say to Daddy, ‘Cromwell, there are only two kinds of people around here, and they’re both sons of bitches. The difference is that half of them are our sons of bitches and the other half are their sons of bitches’—pretty stiff, huh?”
“What did Dad say?”
“He said, ‘You’re wrong.’ I was in the next room, so I couldn’t hang around and listen to the rest, but that’s what he said.”
“Score one for the senator.”
“Tell you something, Lenny. Up at school, a bunch of us got interested in the Sanctuary thing. Do you know about it?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been interested in much lately, not much of anything.”
“All right. I’ll try to sum it up. You know what’s been happening in El Salvador with their death squads. In the last few years, they’ve murdered almost forty thousand people who opposed the government in one way or another, so thousands of men and women and children have fled from El Salvador and gotten up here to the States. Immigration has been picking them up and sending them back, which is like a death sentence. Then a few of them were given refuge in a church. That’s where the Sanctuary thing started. Other churches and synagogues joined in, until there were hundreds of these Sanctuary churches through the west—something like an underground railroad. The government got very upset about this, and they took a man from El Salvador whom they had the goods on and who they could send back if they wished to, and they paid him and wired him with a tape recorder and sent him into a little church in Arizona as a spy and witness.”
“You’re kidding,” Leonard said.
“Oh, no. This is fact, the New York Times and all that. Now, the church people are on trial, in a Federal court in Tucson, and they can be sent to prison for five years. Well, you know the way it is at school, and the kids get to talking about it, and this really bowled us over—you know, this kind of thing can’t happen here. And then here’s Liz, with her daddy a United States senator.”
“Oh, no. You didn’t promise anything, did you?”
“I’ll tell you what I did. We would get batches of material, because we were all chipping in with money to send to Tucson, and I would pick off the best of it and send it on to Daddy.”
“And?”
“Well, I just don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t mentioned it to him, but then why is he willing to have those deplorable two from the administration at our house? They want to see Gramps. Well, why didn’t Daddy say, you want to see him, invite him to your place? But instead, Daddy went out of his way to set up this dinner party.”
“Liz, the ins and the outs don’t hate each other. They play footsie under the table. It would calm the senator’s nerves to be buddy-buddy with the other side.”
“No way. No good reason. He’s no saint, but he’d never play the double agent. Never!”
“Mother loves a dinner party. She’s wonderful at it.”
“Not enough. No. Daddy has enough failings, but down there in that squirrel cage, he knows his way around. He really does. I’ve watched him. Now Congress isn’t in session. But even if it were, it would take weeks to push a bill through that would help those church people. The whole thing is a cheap frame by the administration, and my guess is that Daddy feels that if he can get the terrible two to the dinner table in our home, and feed them nice and talk to them nice, he might just get them to call off the prosecution.”
“Could they?”
“In a minute.” She reached over and took Leonard’s right hand from the w
heel and pressed it up against her lips for a long moment, and then she said, gently, “He’s a good person, the way things are measured in this stinking world, and you have to tell him, and he will die in his own way a thousand times, so please, Lenny darling, try to love him a little.”
“Jesus, I love him so much already,” Leonard cried. “Why can’t he just once be a father to me?”
TEN
Do you know, there is something wrong in this house today,” Ellen MacKenzie said to her husband, who was polishing dry and shining a set of champagne glasses. “There is something dark and sad.”
“I am dark,” Mac said, “and you are making me sad and sorrowful.”
Ellen bristled. “How?”
“You are a pessimist. You always been a pessimist. I am an optimist.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“O.K.—O.K., woman. Spell it out. What is dark and sad?”
“Vibrations.”
“I wish,” Mac said deliberately, “that I was one of them niggers could put his wife on the bed, ass up, and give her a dozen of the best.”
“You ever use that filthy word in here again, I’ll give you a dozen of the best.”
“Vibrations. Vibrations. God help us. Furthermore, you used that same word right here this morning.”
“That was different. God won’t help you, because you don’t have a sensitive bone in your body. You are Boobus Americanus.”
“What? What on earth is Boobus Americanus?”
“Mencken.”
“What’s Mencken?”
“That other gentleman coming tonight, Justin, the man from the state department, I asked the senator was there anything special about his needs we should know, the senator called him Boobus Americanus, which is something this Mencken said. Put the glasses on the table there.”
“So I’m that,” Mac said thoughtfully. “How come, if I’m so stupid, I got two kids who are smart.”
“My genes.”
“Well, you are one smartass fox, I got to admit. What time do I go to the airport for the VIPs?”
“No time. The Justin summer place is about twelve miles away, and they’ll be driven here. What I want you to do is get down the Federal plates, the ones with the blue and gold stripe and the eagle in the middle. We got nineteen of them, but tonight we want only eleven. They’ll be place plates.”
“We ain’t used them maybe two years.”
“They are too precious. One hundred seventy-nine years old, according to Miss Dolly. She decided to make them a gift to the White House, because the way the Levi’s got them was a gift from—oh, what is his name?”
“Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson.”
“How do you know that?”
Mac shrugged and spread his hands. “Anyone knows that.”
“Well, if you break one—”
“You ever see me break a dish?”
He was grinning at her, fondly, and she said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you are trying. Trying. And don’t you dare put them in the dishwasher. Just wipe each one off gently with a warm-water cloth.”
“Yavo, mein Führer.”
“Oh, get out of here.”
There was a tapping on the door of the senator’s study. “Come in,” he said. Dolly opened the door and came into the room, and for a moment stood waiting, her whole manner hesitant and even apologetic. The senator’s study was a comfortable room, a tufted leather couch, a pair of deep leather chairs, paneled walls, two excellent paintings, one a Thomas Eakins of boys swimming naked in a creek, and the other an unusually large George Inness Hudson highland scene, a gift from his father-in-law. There were also two Audubon bird prints, a gift from Dolly out of her inheritance. Her great-grandfather had a full folio of the bird prints, and on his death in 1890, the prints were divided among his children. Eventually, eight of the prints came to Dolly. Six hung in various rooms of the house and two were in the senator’s study. The rich rose and ivory Chinese rug gave a glow to the study. Dolly loved the room. She had put it together herself, picking up the rug when she and Richard were in Hong Kong, and finding the Eakins at an auction in London, and bidding for it and getting it at a wonderful price because he was American and not too desired then—before Eakins jumped to six and then seven figures.
The senator, who had been gazing out of the window, turned as she entered. He was such a big, good-looking man, Dolly thought, well, not exactly good-looking, his nose too heavy, his face too wide, but casually handsome in light gray trousers and a black golf sweater.
“You’re very angry at me, aren’t you,” Dolly said.
“No—”
“I say awful things. I have a terrible temper.”
The senator shrugged. She hated to have contention in the house when the children were home and even more so when her parents came. He had never been fully aware of Dolly or able to understand her movements and motives. At best, he was aware of her devotion to order, propriety, indeed to conservatism; on the other hand, in Washington, she despised the conservatives she met socially, their manners—or lack of manners—their taste, their gauche and naked drive for power, the furniture in their homes, the way they did their hair, their use of overpriced jewelry, their impassive, nonregistering faces whether she spoke of the clean, pure influence of the Shaker movement on American art or the fact that Sam Houston could quote the entire Iliad by heart. They were without history, ruling a country whose past was not simply a mystery but a handful of myths pasted on haze and confusion; and the senator could never be entirely sure that her devotion to his party was not simply a part of her contempt for the other party.
“I’d like you to help me,” she said. It was as close to an apology as she could get, not an apology for what she had said but only for the manner in which she had said it. “The seating?”
He nodded.
“Oh, you’re not speaking. Is it one of those days?”
“I’m speaking. Of course I’ll help you. But the seating’s a small matter.”
“After lunch—I’ll still have so much to do. If you could spend some time with Mother and Father?”
“Sure.”
“And maybe get to talk with Leonard. That would be so good, Richard. He’s seems so sad—I think there is something dreadfully wrong.”
“Oh, no, no. You worry too much about the kids. They both look wonderful.”
“How can you say they look wonderful. Do you ever really look at them?”
“Dolly,” he said tiredly, “if it were another day, I could take off to my office or whatever. Today I have to be here. Can we sidetrack this quarrel before it becomes irreversible.”
“I don’t want to quarrel with you.”
“All right. I’m not an insensitive idiot, Dolly. I know there’s a wall between Leonard and myself. I know I built it. I don’t know how, but I made it, and I don’t know how to climb over it.”
“Why don’t you forget about walls and just go to him.”
“Yes,” he said, recalling the times he had tried. You don’t just forget about walls. They remain. “I’ll try.”
When she defeated him, when she touched the nerve that deflated him entirely, leaving a tragic and lost man, a frightened man that the world never saw—then she would be filled with remorse and compassion, finding in this stressed, overweight middle-aged man someone that she had fallen in love with so long ago, someone more than just a memory.
“You mentioned the seating,” he said.
“Oh, yes. Well, I do need help. I had no idea he was bringing this Jones boy home with him. And now that he’s here—”
“Of course.”
“Time was we could feed the kids in the breakfast room,” she said, almost wistfully.
“What do you know about Jones?”
“He’s Leonard’s classmate at Harvard. Jones loves what he’s doing as much as Leonard hates it. Leonard’s in law school only to please you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Don’t turn everything back on me, Dolly. I
asked you about the black boy, Jones.”
“Oh, Richard, I’m sorry. Why do I do it? I don’t know. About Jones—try to remember his first name, Clarence. Leonard thinks he’s brilliant. Graduated cum laude. Very poor background. Did it with scholarships and such.”
They had left the senator’s study now and were walking toward the dining room.
“Good voice and good speech,” Dolly went on. “I think Leonard mentioned that he’s from North Carolina. I’m not worried. Be a good thing for our guests to break bread with a plain black kid who isn’t some overstuffed Uncle Tom on show for the voters.”
“It won’t hurt.”
“I told Leonard that it was black tie, and he didn’t mind. He has an extra white jacket for Clarence, and they’re about the same size. But the seating …” They were in the dining room now.
The dining room, as with the rest of the house, had been decorated by Dolly. She had decorated and furnished the entire house as, according to her lights, a house should be furnished and decorated. In Dolly’s case, that meant a time frame between 1750 and 1820, and for the most part pieces produced in Philadelphia, New York, or Boston—with just an occasional intrusion from Great Britain. Other people might decorate differently; that was all right for others. The rich gray-mauve toile above the chair rail, the gleaming white woodwork, the mahogany table, the brass candle chandelier, and the twelve chairs, made in Philadelphia in 1793 in the style of Queen Anne, all of it sitting on a properly threadbare Persian rug, the walls exhibiting a group of American primitives that were a gift from her grandmother—this was proper and right for Dolly. “In Mother’s world,” Elizabeth had once explained to a friend, “nothing ages, nothing changes, nothing is new. It’s wonderful but also ridiculous.”
Richard Cromwell simply accepted it with appropriate reverence. To marry a rich woman is not as simple or as easy as some believe, and Richard Cromwell found himself in a foreign land where only the language was familiar. Only grifters, conmen, and out-and-out bums marry rich women and fall into it like a letter into a mail slot, using and spending with the pathological ease of middle-European noblemen; the senator was none of the above, and he had never made an easy adjustment to his wife’s money or style of living. A teller in a midwestern bank, his father brought home a slowly increasing paycheck that started in the ’thirties at twenty-seven dollars a week. His whole boyhood had been skimped: shoes or new trousers, chopped meat or Spam, a movie for the family or medicine. Real poverty is formless, shapeless, chaotic, and the one good fortune of the senator was that he had a mother who was a rock of discipline and organization, and she had relentlessly fought and rejected the chaos of poverty. In many ways Dolly was like his mother, but at the opposite end of the social spectrum; that was why he had married her, not for her money.
