The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  They cut back to the talking head.

  Today, in Portland, Maine, Lizzie Buchan’s mother reacted angrily when reporters tried to interview her on her doorstep.

  The camera cut again, and there I was, getting out of my car, looking hassled and frightened and very pissed off, and then that young aggressive woman shoving a microphone in my face while a cameraman pressed in close behind. And when she asked me that question, “How many abortions before this one did you sanction?” I shouted, “How f****** [they inserted bleeps here] dare you . . . ,” looking rather crazed.

  Remember that movie where someone gets one day of their life replayed over and over again? Watching this clip was like entering that repetitive universe—especially as it was played again on the two a.m., three a.m., and four a.m. newscasts. Sometime after the five a.m. news I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew, it was 6:48 a.m. and my cell phone was ringing. I answered in a completely groggy state.

  “Bad moment?” Margy asked.

  “Fell asleep on the bed fully clothed,” I said.

  “At least you got a little sleep . . . which is a good thing. Because all shit has broken loose. Turn on Fox News at the top of the hour. Then flip on your radio to the local Clear Channel affiliate—you know, the station that Ross Wallace broadcasts on,” she said, referring to a rightwing talk jock who was popular among the rednecks of the northeastern seaboard.

  “I think it’s WHLM,” I said, sounding half awake. “I make a point of not listening to Ross Wallace.”

  “Well, turn it on after you watch the news . . .”

  “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Then listen to it on the car radio. I’ve already heard the segment—and as he tends to repeat things, I’ve no doubt that he’ll use it again around seven twenty-five . . . he’s that predictable.”

  I jumped off the bed, stripped off all the clothes I had slept in, hurried in and out of the shower, and dried myself while standing in front of the television.

  The item I was waiting for was ten minutes into the broadcast—by which time I was dressed and brushing my hair, having already called the concierge and asked him to have my car brought up from the hotel’s basement garage. It took me a moment to realize that the anchorman had changed since last night.

  In an intriguing new development in the Elizabeth Buchan case, a recently published book by Chicago radio talk-show host Toby Judson reveals that when he was a student radical and on the run from the FBI in 1973, he had a brief affair with Elizabeth Buchan’s mother, Hannah, the wife of a Maine doctor who was out of town when the affair took place. What’s more, Judson contends in his book that Hannah Buchan drove him into Canada to help him evade arrest.

  They cut away to a clip of Tobias Judson, sitting in front of a microphone in the radio studio where he broadcast. Though I’d seen a recent photo on the cover of his book, his plump, balding middle-agedness shocked me. And I felt such instant revulsion that I had to force myself to look at him. He spoke in a low, soothing voice, oozing unction and false decency.

  I am very upset that Chuck Cann decided to reveal the identity of Hannah Buchan. It was never my intention that her identity become public knowledge—and I feel genuinely sorry for the publicity she is receiving, especially given the horror of her daughter’s disappearance. Like everyone, I am praying for her safe return . . .

  I bet you are, asshole.

  The film cut away to . . . now this made me jump . . . Margy, of all people, standing under the awning of her apartment building in Manhattan, looking very pale and wan, though her eyes were ultrasharp in the glare of the television lights. Under her was superimposed the subtitle: Margy Sinclair. Hannah Buchan’s Spokesperson. There were four boom microphones overhanging her head as she read, in her usual loud, no-bullshit voice, “This is a prepared statement from Hannah Buchan. ‘I have read Mr. Judson’s book with shock and disgust, because it is so full of lies and distortions . . .’”

  She then gave the short sound-bite version of my statement in the press release, acknowledging the affair and also vehemently denying that I drove him to Canada of my own accord. “‘Mr. Judson blackmailed me and left me little choice but to do what he demanded . . .’”

  She ended with my statement that I regretted the pain I caused my family and, owing to the strain of my daughter’s disappearance, I would not be making a public statement at this time.

  They cut back to Judson, looking smug in front of the studio microphone. The off-camera reporter asked, “And how do you answer Hannah Buchan’s charges that you blackmailed her into being your getaway driver into Canada?”

  I can understand Hannah’s anger at being exposed in this unjust way, just as I can appreciate her guilt. Because, God knows, I suffered tremendous guilt at my actions over the years—until I was able to admit my wrongdoing and move on. But for Hannah to repudiate the fact that she did offer to drive me into Canada, well, denial is a very human and understandable emotion. But the truth can never be denied—or evaded. I committed a crime. I fled the country—and so missed my country, and felt so guilty about what I had done, that I came back and faced the music. I urge Hannah to come clean about her role in this incident, as I have done.

  Cut back to the talking head in the studio:

  A spokesperson for the Justice Department said that they were currently investigating Hannah Buchan’s role in Tobias Judson’s 1973 flight from justice. Judson himself returned to the United States in 1980 and turned state’s evidence against other members of the Weathermen organization. He received a three-year suspended sentence for harboring wanted criminals. Besides being a Chicago talk-radio host, Mr. Judson has recently been appointed to President Bush’s National Commission for Faith-Based Charity Initiatives.

  I wanted to scream and shout and put my fist through the television. But I didn’t have time to engage in such actions, as I had a class to teach in just under twelve minutes. I grabbed my briefcase and raced out the door. Downstairs, before heading out the door, I ran over to the guy at the front desk and said, “I’d like to keep the room for another day, and could you get housekeeping to please pick up the clothes I left on the floor and have them dry-cleaned for tonight?”

  I charged into my waiting car, cranked it up and sped off, hitting the scan button on the radio until I found WHLM. It was now 7:22 a.m. As Margy had predicted, the item came on three minutes later. I had only heard Ross Wallace once before—and knew that he was an ex–Boston fireman who played the shock jock card every morning on some big megawatt station that broadcast from Washington to the most northern reaches of Maine. He promoted himself as “A Loudmouth Conservative in a Ninny Liberal State.” That tagline boomed out of the car radio as a commercial break ended and he came back on the air.

  Now here’s a down-and-dirty development to that down-and-dirty Boston story about super-yuppie woman banker Elizabeth Buchan, who just couldn’t take no for an answer when her married doctor lover ditched her.

  This grubby little tale now gets even grubbier. Because it turns out that Ms. Buchan’s mommy was a onetime sixties radical who helped her revolutionary lover make a break for the border . . . even though she was married to someone else at the time.

  He then went on to give a breezy, Ross Wallace–sarcastic summary of the entire story. When he reached the end of it, he said:

  Now, folks, the moral of this story could best be summed up as: like mother, like daughter . . . because affairs with married men seem to be standard operating procedure in the Buchan family. But, for me, what’s most amazing about this story is that, in the other corner, you have Toby Judson—who, back in those crazy amoral years of free love and burning the American flag, believed in the violent overthrow of our way of life. But what happens? He runs away to Canada, and after a couple of years in that French-speaking socialist playground that dares to call itself our good neighbor to the north, he suffers a massive crisis of conscience. He has what is known in the Good Book as a Pauline conversion on th
e road to Damascus, and he realizes not only that he is all wrong about his brand of revolutionary politics, but that he also did wrong to his country. So he does the right thing. He contacts the FBI and says he wants to give himself up—and he comes back to the U.S. of A. and he faces the music. He is arrested, he’s charged with his crime. And to show that he wants to make full amends, he tells the Department of Justice that he will testify against his two comrades who killed those innocent security guards while attacking Our Way of Life.

  And thanks to Toby Judson’s testimony—in fact, due solely to him, because he was the only prosecution witness—those two dangerous radicals are serving life in a federal penitentiary.

  Now I don’t know about you, folks, but my definition of a man is someone who can face up to his mistakes—who can say, “I got it wrong! . . . I love my country and I got it real wrong!” Which is exactly what Toby Judson did. And since returning to this great land of ours and taking his punishment like a man, Toby Judson has flourished. Our friends in Chicago know his voice on the air every morning. His friends in the Church of Christ know him to be a highly committed Christian who has done Trojan work coaching their Christian Little League team. And George W. Bush knows him to be a dedicated member of his team prying good works from the slimy hands of liberal charities and giving them to the churches . . . where they belong.

  Now compare and contrast Toby Judson’s willingness to face the music with Hannah Buchan’s actions. Think about it, folks—you’re a twenty-three-year-old doctor’s wife in a small Maine town. Your husband has to rush out of town to attend to his dying father—and what happens next? Your ultralefty dad—Ms. Buchan’s father happens to have been one of the most notorious radical professors of the sixties—sends you one of his revolutionary comrades, saying he needs a place to stay while in Maine. Not only do you offer him a bed, you offer him your marital bed—and after two days, you tell him he’s the love of your life. Then—and folks, here’s where the story gets really nasty—when your lover announces he’s on the run for being involved in a political murder, what do you do? You offer to drive him to the French-speaking socialist paradise to the north—and just to really undermine everything you hold dear, you bring your baby son along.

  Now if there’s any further proof needed that the sixties and the seventies nearly witnessed the downfall of American civilization, this story is it. Not only did Hannah Buchan break her marital vows, she also broke the law. Not just any old law. A federal law. Not only that, but she also passed on her lax morality to her daughter. When it comes to raising your kids with the proper values, remember this, folks: they often repeat your mistakes. That’s certainly the case with Elizabeth Buchan. Even if she never knew about her mother’s affair, something in the way she was brought up told her: “It’s all right to do this. Because Mom did it.” And if I was Hannah Buchan’s husband right now . . . well, put it this way, I’m sure as heck glad I’m not her husband right now. But what I’d like to know is this: are you, Hannah Buchan, going to follow Toby Judson and face up to what you did? Are you going to say you’re sorry? Not just sorry to your husband for your betrayal of him, but also sorry to your country? Because you betrayed her too.

  And then he cut away to a commercial.

  I had just driven into the school parking lot as Ross Wallace finished his rant against me. It was a surreal experience, listening to someone pull you apart on the air. It was like hearing him talk about someone else—some abstraction who had little relation to myself.

  And yet, by the end of his rant, I was gripping the steering wheel so hard that I thought my knuckles were going to burst the skin. Like mother, like daughter . . . It’s all right to do this. Because Mom did it. If Lizzie was anywhere near a radio and heard this, it might just tip her over the edge. The cell phone began to ring. It was Margy. She sounded hypercharged, hyperstressed.

  “Did you see the Fox News thing?”

  “I did.”

  “And did you hear Ross Wallace?”

  “I did.”

  “Look, I don’t have time to commiserate right now, because this whole thing has gone crazy, but know this: there are plenty of ways we can—and will—respond. What’s more pressing is getting you to somewhere safe immediately . . .”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Where are you right now?”

  “Outside of school.”

  “Right, here’s what I want you to do. Call the principal now on your cell phone, and inform him you’re feeling unwell and you won’t be coming in for the day. Then get back to the hotel, tell the front desk that you need anonymity and that they should not tell anyone you’re staying there, and stay in the room until you hear from me . . .”

  “Margy, I have to teach a class now . . .”

  “Listen to me, hon. I just got a call from Dan. He was trying to get to your house this morning and found the place surrounded again. Then he drove to his office and discovered that a bunch of television crews were lying in wait for him there too. He’s at the hospital now—and very pissed off and upset, because someone from his hospital board heard the Ross Wallace item when it first went out at six twenty-five and was demanding an explanation . . .”

  Without thinking, I fumbled around in my bag, found my cigarettes, and lit one up.

  “Anyway,” Margy continued, “Dan wanted to know what he should do, vis-à-vis the press. And I told him what I’m telling you: stay indoors and out of contact. The thing with Dan is, he’s got three surgeries this morning. The press may be a pack of vultures, but they won’t storm a hospital. However, they will surround your school.”

  “I’m teaching the class, Margy.”

  “Now before you go all Joan of Arc on me, I promise you that, within an hour, the same crowd of reporters who are now around your house will work out that you’re not there and will have moved on to your school. So do yourself a favor and—”

  “Did Dan tell you where he spent last night?” I asked, interrupting her.

  “We really didn’t have time to go into that. But, hon, I’m imploring you . . .”

  “I’ll call you back after I’ve finished the class,” I said, then clicked off the phone.

  I gathered up my coat and briefcase, got out of the car, and walked with great haste toward the main entrance of the school, glancing nervously at my watch. I was five minutes late. I opened the door. The main corridor was empty. I raced up it, my heels resonating percussively on the linoleum. When I reached my classroom, I could hear my students being their usual rowdy selves. They quieted down as I walked in, tossing my coat on the back of the chair, opening up my briefcase, and scrambling for the copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, which I was supposed to be teaching. There was a low murmur among my students. I looked out at them.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  Jamie Benjamin, the class tough guy, raised his hand. I nodded.

  “Any chance we could smoke too, Teach?”

  That’s when I realized I still had a lit cigarette in my mouth.

  I tried not to act startled. I failed. I walked over to the window, stubbed out the cigarette on the sill, and tossed the butt outside.

  “Isn’t that littering?” Jamie Benjamin asked. There was a low rumble of laughter around the classroom.

  “Touché, Jamie. And since you’ve caught me out, let me repay the compliment by asking you to explain to the class the contemporary relevance of Babbitt.”

  “But it’s not a contemporary book. It’s all set in the 1920s.”

  “True, but surely you can find certain modern-day parallels between Babbitt’s situation and America today.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well . . . like if Babbitt was alive now, who would he have voted for in the last election?”

  “George W. Bush, I guess.”

  “You guess?” I asked.

  “No, I kinda know.”

  “And why do you know that?”

  “Because Babbitt was a conservative dick.”

/>   Big laughter around the classroom.

  “I think Sinclair Lewis would have agreed with you on that one. Does anyone else think that Babbitt was a conservative dick?”

  The class began to gain its own momentum after this—the kids relaxing into a reasonably animated discussion about Babbitt’s rigid, traditional, all-American values, and how the patriotic midwestern businessman whom Lewis was satirizing in his novel had plenty of 2003 parallels. This was what I liked best about teaching—when the students themselves took over the conversation and seemed genuinely engaged by the subject under discussion. Suddenly, I wasn’t trying to force-feed them educational stuff that they filed away under Boring. Suddenly they seemed interested in debating an idea, in having a point of view, in seeing that there was relevance to be found in literature. Suddenly I was far away from everything that was happening to my life in the world beyond this classroom.

  But then there was a knock on the door. It was the headmaster, Mr. Andrews. He hardly ever interrupted a class, but as soon as he walked in, I knew that he was aware of everything that had come out on the airwaves this morning. At the sight of him, all my students were immediately on their feet (he had everyone in the school trained well).

  “Be seated,” he said to the students. Then, nodding me to come over, he said, “We need to have a chat, Hannah.”

  “I’ve only got about five more minutes before the bell goes.”

  “Now, please,” he said. Then, stepping away from me, he turned to the students and said, “Please continue whatever you were discussing among yourselves. Mr. Reed will be here for social studies in ten minutes—and if I find out that there was any goofing off during that ten minutes, there will be trouble.”

  He turned toward the door. As I followed him, he said, “Bring your coat and briefcase, please.”

  Everyone in the classroom heard this. There was a long quiet moment when they all stared at me packing up my things. I looked up at them. They stared back—all of them suddenly nervous, unsettled. None of them knew what exactly was going on, though I sensed they knew I was in some sort of very deep trouble. I finished packing my things. I raised my head again and looked out at that sea of faces. I tried to make final eye contact with each of my students. Then I said, “Good-bye,” and followed Andrews out.