Undertow

by Warren Adler

  “But my story tells the truth.”

  “Only from your point of view.”

  “It is the truth. And you know it is the truth.”

  “It’s exasperating,” Chalmers said.

  “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Chalmers.”

  “If it’ll help you understand, I’ll answer anything.”

  “Do you believe the senator’s denial?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how can you cover it up.”

  “I don’t intend to cover it up. I intend to ignore it.”

  “That’s just as bad. In fact, it’s worse.”

  “Not considering the options. How do you get rid of the president?”

  “There’s got to be other men.”

  “Name one.”

  “It’s not important. The president is only dangerous if you have lost all faith in the system. If we haven’t any self-correcting institutions in our society. If we have no ethical men, then to hell with us. We’ll go the way of Greece or Iberia or Rome.”

  “Pie in the sky,” Chalmers said.

  Ernie could see that he was getting testy now. He also knew that his own moment of truth was coming and with it a rush of all the old images, the white charger down Main Street, the great sea of human touching that he found in Woodstock, Hank Petrucci’s funeral, the still-standing target. He felt it begin to wobble, felt the press of the bullet against the very middle of himself, felt the giving way—

  “There must be something wrong with me,” Ernie said, “I haven’t got the capacity to persuade you. I truly believe that you are wrong. If the truth can destroy a man, what good was he in the first place? We need leaders for whom the truth is a goal, a weapon to be used to root out the lies, all the false pretense—”

  “You amaze me, Ernie. You absolutely amaze me.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re so—so overzealous. So naive. You want to be a martyr? Who the hell are you to set yourself up as the final judge of what is true and what isn’t true?”

  “The man’s a liar.”

  “A harsh judgment.”

  “If it was a question of the other side, the president, you’d have a fleet of reporters looking under every rock.”

  “Hell, Ernie, you know I’m right about the president.”

  “I’m as frightened about his potential actions as you are.”

  “So you agree.”

  “There may be a hundred different ways to observe some phenomena. Maybe a thousand. Maybe a million. But, Mr. Chalmers, there is only one truth. In the long run, the truth is irreducible. Start excusing one lie, and more have to follow.”

  Chalmers got up from his chair and stood looking out the window into the city room.

  He peered into the huge room. More than a hundred reporters, editors, photographers, copy boys, clerks, and secretaries worked feverishly to reduce the day’s events to words, to perception, to analysis.

  “This newspaper is my life. The responsibility is heavy, Ernie. You don’t know what it means to carry such a burden.”

  Ernie watched him. What the hell was he struggling with? It all seemed so clear. He let it pass. He sensed that Chalmers was at war with himself, in need of talking it out. The editor was not interested in dialogue.

  “The point is that all men are frail. Someone has got to protect the weak. There are larger issues that must be considered. You’ll find that out when you grow older. You’ll be more tolerant, accept more frailty. Everyone has an Achilles’ heel. Even you, Ernie.”

  “The truth is still the truth, Mr. Chalmers.”

  “Ernie,” Chalmers looked at him fiercely, “why can’t I make you see it? This whole business is a compromise. All life is a compromise.”

  Ernie thought, “Is this the time to make my stand? Is this the time to put my own life on the line and put principle before expediency? Cop out! Make out!” Chalmers’ self-righteousness was goading him over the brink. He hadn’t intended to be Horatio at the bridge. He was frightened now.

  “Forget about personalities, Ernie. Look at the larger issues. Unfortunately the system makes it impossible for us to choose between saints. The men we get to choose from have already made their compromises. If we demanded perfection of them, there would soon be no one to choose from.”

  “It’s not a question of perfection, Mr. Chalmers. Ethics. Standards. Those are the real issues. If we demanded perfection, then maybe we’d get it. Instead, we get ignorant men, illiterate in most things except mass manipulation. Experts at mass hypnosis. We should put our trust in intelligence, in knowledge and honesty. If we used that as a yardstick, we wouldn’t get the Jameses, or men like the president; we’d get Jeffersons.”

  Chalmers was silent. He looked out at the city room again.

  “You’ll be convinced only by experience.”

  “Nothing will convince me.”

  A telephone rang on Chalmers’ desk. He picked it up, answered perfunctorily, and then hung up.

  “Ernie, I haven’t really got time to give you all the reasons why I am rejecting your copy. But it’s my decision to make. I’m rejecting it. I’m sorry you don’t understand.”

  Ernie felt a lump grow in his throat. He knew his hands were shaking, and a hot flush bathed his neck in sweat. I’m not heroic, he told himself. He had worked hard to get this job, in small town papers, then New York, and now, right into the heart of the matter, where he wanted to be. A film of tears muddied his vision. He swallowed hard, fighting back the tears, tears of rage and impotence. “I think you’re full of shit Chalmers,” he said, conscious that it had come out as a screech. “Who are you to make judgments about truth? Who are you to tell people how to think? You’re the same as they are.” Then tears obscured his vision of Chalmers and he could only turn and leave.

  XXXVIII

  Get out of Philadelphia before ten, the adage goes, or you’ll never get out again. There is something so desperately colorless about this town, so enormously soul chilling that it seemed a perfect setting for the funeral of Marlena Jackson. Dark clouds hung low over the city and a cold drizzle added to the gloom. The Lear jet, thankfully without Max aboard, had traveled through the night fighting a strong headwind. We checked into an airport motel about 4:00 A.M., and staggered out into the morning at 8:30. We had hired a car. Now we listlessly crawled into it, still tired, suffering from jet lag, looking the worse for wear. All except Don. His recuperative powers were, as usual, beyond human comprehension. He was cheerful, energetic; and yet, there was none of the normal banter and light talk that might have accompanied a trip under different, normal, circumstances. Karen, who had barely spoken, seemed immersed in a deep state of depression. We had left Barnstable and Christine on the Coast to take a commercial flight back to Washington.

  Back at the office, the staff was apparently working at a feverish pace to keep abreast of how the press and television stations were reacting, capsulating the information and feeding it to Davis, who was, undoubtedly, on the phone all night. From all initial reports, he reported as they drove, the television speech was well received, very well indeed.

  “Apparently the liberal press is willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. There are skeptics, of course, but they’ve been blunted. The Chronicle had an interesting editorial.”

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “In a nut shell—patience and absolution, a kind of ‘there but for the grace of God’ piece. It was very compassionate, very understanding.”

  “Good old Chalmers,” Don said. “A truly fair man.”

  “We’ll owe him one on that one.” Davis said. “Kind of narrows our options. He won’t let us move too far over to the right.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Don said, looking pained as the car rolled deeper into the depressing greyness of the city.

  All in all, Davis’s report indicated that Don was indeed getting the benefit of the doubt. Some opposition papers were stubbornly indifferent. But, in
general, the prognosis was guardedly optimistic, according to Davis. Even that conclusion seemed a concession by him. What we were seeking from the beginning appeared to be coming to pass, perhaps sooner than expected, a plateau from which we could build upward. God, I’m beginning to sound like Davis. Upward to where? To credibility. To believability.

  The church where Marlena’s funeral was to be held was one of those converted synagogues abandoned or sold by the Jews on whose turf they had been established. Then the blacks had come co-opting the cavernous structures for their own gods. The Stars of David, unerasable, were visible on the stained glass windows. The church, appropriately, considering the decoration, was called the Zion Baptist Church. Davis, who had carefully traced the route on a road map before we had left, maneuvered the car through the crowd of mourners which spilled over beyond the sidewalk in front of the church. The police were working hard to keep away the curious onlookers who had gathered, as if on signal, across the street from the church. Don was hunched in the center of the back seat, hiding his head from view. This was, indeed, the last ordeal, the last chapter in the nightmare, the obligatory ending.

  Faces, black and white, peered through the car windows, searching for Don. He was, after all, the superstar of the funeral.

  “Goddamned faces,” Don said with irritation.

  “It’s the last major hurdle, Senator,” Davis said as his eyes searched the crowd. “It simply must be done. It would be perceived as callous to have stayed away. Unfortunately, we have no control, except over ourselves.”

  That meant, in Davis’s shorthand, control over facial expressions, posture, dress, words and aspect, the emphasis on aspect was essential. Appear the way you want to be viewed. Be your own media.

  Finally, someone recognized Don and pointed into the car.

  The crowd, like some liquid mass of heated molasses, shifted its position to get a good look at him. Davis jumped out of the car, opened the back door, and Don followed him into the rain. The Philadelphia police made their way to where we stood and wedging ahead of us into the crowd, brought us slowly into the church. Flashbulbs popped like flickering matches in a dark arena, blinding us momentarily. The catcalls of the photographers came at us from the din. Don’s face was somber; Karen was somnambulistic. The four of us took our places in the middle rows of the church. People turned and gaped. We were a conspicuous white glob in a sea of black faces.

  Mr. Jackson sat in the first row opposite the closed coffin. We could only see the back of his grey head, short cropped and bowed. The mood, both physical and spiritual, was black, with the especially bleak grey costumes of the black mourners enveloping the gathering like smoke.

  “We’ve got to get a picture of the senator with Mr. Jackson. It would make a great study shot at graveside,” Davis whispered. All photographers were being kept outside the church although I spotted at least two taking nonflash shots of the scene and, when they could, the senator’s face. Suddenly, the organ music stopped abruptly and the pastor mounted the pulpit. The church was stilled for a moment. Then, like a Greek chorus, black voices erupted individually at intervals. Each was like some primeval cry of pain.

  “Lawd.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  I found myself trying to picture Marlena’s water-corroded body within the closed wooden coffin. What had happened to us within the last few days was so beyond the periphery of our understanding, that even this funeral seemed like something one might have stumbled upon by walking through Alice’s looking glass. What the hell were we doing here?

  The pastor’s words droned on. It was difficult to make out what he was saying. The idiom was different, the inflection foreign to my comprehension. I felt sorry as hell for Marlena, sorry for me, sorry for all of us. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry for myself mostly. In spite of the urge, no tears came.

  The congregation burst into song, the old spiritual, “Go Down Moses.” It washed over us like molten lead, burning my skin. Was this the time one questioned the meaning of one’s life? I felt a shock wave of self-pity. They would piss on my grave. Who would? Who would even take the trouble to make the acknowledgment?

  And what would they do on your grave, old senator, boyhood friend, fighter against fate, a chosen person. You who sit there so stoically, holding yourself together with what extraordinary cement. Would a lone horse come clumping down the street, the clickety click of its horseshoes echoing in the hushed tunnel of people? Would your body bump along in the caisson, pulled by six matched stallions to lie in state in the rotunda, enshrined, immortalized by historians, your name on the world’s lips? And all the flags at half-mast!

  Was that what Don was thinking now? Does each person imagine his own funeral at someone else’s. His face revealed nothing of his thoughts. Somewhere along the line, ambition, a kind of madness, had staked claim to him. It was a madness. I knew that now. What did anything matter beside the vision, with appropriate sound effects of the clickety click of the lone horse in the hushed streets and all the flags at half-mast? God, I want them to remember that I was here, that I came this way once. Could I be superimposing my own misplaced ambitions on his? Was this what kept me locked into his shadow? How many of us walk in the shadow of other men? The sun never streaks across our forms to throw a moving shadow of ourselves along the pavement. All power to the king. God save the king. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Lord on earth. Smile your favor upon me. All make way. His lordship comes.

  Marlena, Davis, Barnstable, Karen, Christine, and all of us, dead and alive, were nothing, in the face of his all-engulfing, all-powerful ambitious fury. All things were justified. No, he did not kill Marlena. Only after her death did he kill her, by denying her existence as a loving person, as someone who felt and hungered. Nothing, nothing at all, must survive in the wake of his ambition, a politician’s sad, sick, frenzied, awe inspiring, cymbal-crashing ambition.

  I felt anger. I felt shame. But I knew that I had long ago lost the will to rebel. I could find no options. Self-loathing is such a destructive emotion. There was nothing left but to dismiss it, tamp it down, like the earth that would soon over Marlena’s coffin. Who would know I ever came this way?

  Suddenly we were standing up. Six black pallbearers slowly carried the coffin through the center aisle followed by the abject figure of Marlena’s father. As he passed our row, he raised his head, his eyes flickering in angry recognition beneath his grief. Then the coffin passed and Mr. Jackson moved out of the church.

  “That man hates my guts,” Don whispered.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Karen said quietly, a trifle loud. It was the first time she had spoken all morning.

  “I really feel for that man,” Don said.

  “You feel for nobody.” It was Karen again.

  “Cool it, Karen,” Don hissed.

  “You bastard,” she said. “You filthy bastard.”

  Don looked at me helplessly, raising his eyes in an attitude of exasperation. It was obvious now that Karen was not in control, on the verge of hysteria.

  “Karen, this is not the time or the place,” Don whispered.

  “I hope you rot in hell,” she said. Her energy seemed suddenly spent by the anger of her outburst. She sank back into silence.

  The procession filed down the aisle, emptying out row after row in disciplined fashion. Don managed a faint smile to faces that turned toward him. As our row filed into the procession and into the entrance, flashbulbs began to pop. The crowd surged around us once more. We were carried forward slowly by its momentum. In the street, the rain was falling in a steady mist. The crowd had grown during the service. People were hanging out of the windows waiting to get a glimpse of Don. I noticed that he had tried to grab Karen’s hand in the crush, to pull her along. She twisted free. Her lips were tight.

  The police had left our car parked along the curb. When they spotted us, they formed a wedge again, shoving people aside, as they led us to the car. We got in and locked the doors while the police kept the area cordone
d off.

  It was a strange scene. Our car was jammed in a sea of people and cars, like a dust speck in an air bubble. Curious faces bent down trying to get a glimpse of us, poking their heads under the elbows of a tall policeman who stood in our field of vision.

  “We need a picture with the senator and Mr. Jackson at graveside, preferably with Mrs. James—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish.

  “Can’t you just keep quiet,” Karen said, exploding. “Can’t you just stop talking. I’m sick of it all. I’m sick of this whole thing.” She began to sob hysterically, her shoulders shaking. Don tried to hold her as I tried to shield her from the view of the crowd.

  “Come on, Karen,” Don said. “Just hold on.”

  “Bastards,” she sobbed, beating her fists into her knees. “You bastards.”

  I saw Don’s eyes in the rear view mirror. How was he measuring the scene? To the spectator, perhaps, a grieved woman. Was she a friend of the deceased? Who would suspect she was crying for herself?

  Don’s face had become ashen.

  “Karen, this is nonsense. You’ve got to pull yourself together. A lot depends on it.” His appeal sounded genuine enough.

  “You are all bastards,” she cried again. The pounding on her knees had ripped her stockings.

  “Goddamn it, Karen,” Don exploded, “cut this shit out and cut it out right now.” He grabbed both her wrists and held them in a tight grip. She helplessly tried to release herself. We knew he was hurting her. Her face became distorted with pain. She screamed. He held a hand over her mouth. “You’ll ruin me, you goddamned bitch,” Don shouted. Then, he released one of his own hands and slapped her hard in the face. The shock of it quieted her as she slumped backward in the seat whimpering. I could see his red fingermarks spread across her cheeks.