Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  And now in this evil thing he held in his hand, this apparent crudity—which he suspected was probably a very clever parody of crudity—she had suddenly found it all spelled out with a brutal clarity that could not be evaded. Someone had entered those areas after all: it said so on this piece of paper, and though he knew she must have spent many anguished minutes trying not to believe it, she had ended by not being sure, for the one thing she did know for certain was that she never had. No wonder her first reaction had been to leave; the wonder was that she could possibly be brave enough to come back and face him. But he knew numbly that she would, for he understood, now that it was too late, a little of the depth of her love for him which, in her nervous, awkward, unhappily emotional way she had tried for so long, with so little success, to show.

  When he heard her enter the house he touched a match to the carefully smudged paper and watched it burn down to ashes on the red-tile floor. Then he got up and went inside, closing the door to the sun porch behind him so that no word of their conversation could drift out into the gently golden afternoon. He felt a physical pain, as though he had run a great distance, climbed a great mountain, just escaped drowning—or, perhaps, was just about to drown. He squared his shoulders and held his head high, though he was so terribly tired and sick and unhappy that he did not know how long he could keep from collapsing. He heard her in the kitchen, and after a moment she came out and joined him in the living room.

  “It was good of you to come back,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, not looking at him, “I couldn’t let you get your own dinner. You probably wouldn’t know how.”

  “I probably could have managed,” he said, “but it’s better with you here.”

  “Is it?” she said, looking at him from swollen eyes. “Is it really better with me here?” She gave a shaky little laugh and sat down in a chair across the room from him. “I’ve never really been sure.”

  He started to protest and then dropped it.

  “Oh, beloved,” he said instead, “I am so sorry you have had to be subjected to this.”

  “Well,” she said with a forlorn attempt at bitter humor, “I guess that’s politics.”

  “I guess it is,” he said, “but I should have been able to protect you from it somehow.”

  “How could you have,” she said, “once—once—it was done?”

  “You believe it, then,” he said. Mabel tried an ironic smile, but it didn’t work.

  “The note I got was—rather specific,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “Well, there’s no need for anything but honesty between us now. It happened: it happened. Long before I ever met you, long before I ever entered public life, long ago when I was in the war. In Honolulu in the war, just like the man said. People go off the track sometimes, under pressures like the war. That’s what happened to me. I went off the track. I hope you can believe that, too.”

  “I do,” Mabel said slowly. “I guess.”

  “Never before,” he said, “and never since. You’ve got to believe it, if we’re to come through this at all.”

  “I can’t understand how you could—how you could do such a horrible thing,” she said.

  “It didn’t seem horrible at the time,” he said honestly, “and I am not going to say now that it did, even to you. But I have lived all my life since being as good a man as I could, to make up for it. I think,” he said with a sudden bitterness, “that gives me the right to a little charity now.”

  “I’m trying to be charitable,” she said brokenly, “except that—”

  “Except what?” he asked in the same bitter way. “Charity isn’t divisible. You have it or you don’t. Except what?”

  “Except that I don’t know whether it was just the war, or whether—whether you might have done it anyway,” she said, and began to cry, abrupt, racking sobs that hurt him terribly. “I don’t—mean that—the way it sounds,” she said between them. “But you’ve always seemed so—so closed-off from me, somehow, and I haven’t been able to get through. I just haven’t been able to get through.”

  “Beloved, beloved,” he said. “That hasn’t been the reason. Oh, you must believe me. It hasn’t been the reason, ever.”

  “Then it must be me,” she said in a voice of utter desolation. “That’s the only thing left, so it must be me.”

  “No, it hasn’t been you,” he said desperately. “You’ve been a wonderful wife and mother and helpmate and I don’t know what I could have done without you. I don’t know what I will do without you,” he added in a tone as desolate as hers, “if this doesn’t work out.” He started to stand up to give his words greater emphasis, but he found that his legs weren’t working very well just then, so he remained seated. “Whatever failure there has been,” he said firmly through the gray haze of tiredness that filled the world, “has been my failure, and it hasn’t been yours in any way at all, Nor has it had any relation to anything I did in the war. It’s been my failure to be as good a husband and father as I should have been.”

  “You’re wonderful with Pidge,” she said, more quietly, and the name of their daughter seemed briefly to invoke a fragile calm upon their conversation.

  “Well,” he said, “all I can do is promise to do better, I guess. It seems a feeble foundation, but I suppose many a marriage before ours has been rebuilt upon it. I’m sorry, as I said, that you have been subjected to this, but I hope you can realize the pressures I’m under right now. I hope you will come back and—and help me. I need you to help me.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, beginning to sob again. “I just don’t know what to do. If I could only believe that—that you really belonged to me, and that I—I really belonged to you, then maybe—But I don’t know,” she said, and she gave him an anguished and searching look. “How can I ever be sure again?”

  He felt then as though the world had ended, and that even if it weren’t entirely official yet, they would notify him presently. Now he was dead inside, himself, and those who had wished to destroy him had achieved their purpose. He had never fainted, but he came as close to it as he ever would right now as the room seemed to spin and his wife with a sudden cry of despair and contrition said, “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” and ran to him.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said again through her sobs, “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t.”

  But her husband did not answer as he held her in his arms, staring out upon the gentle twilight and absently stroking her hair while she clung to him and cried as though her heart would break, as his already had.

  After that time began to dissolve and the world no longer seemed to have much light or dimension. The golden day, the golden season, had vanished somewhere into night and he did not know whether it would ever return for them. Mabel did stay, and in a tremulous phone call to Beth she requested the return of Pidge, who was presently delivered troubled and upset but valiantly managing not to cry. Beth came in and kissed them both and deliberately stayed for a while, ignoring their ravaged expressions and chatting firmly about ordinaries until she began to perceive what seemed to be a relative calm returning. And somehow, so tenacious is the human animal and so capable when necessary of withstanding what seem at the moment to be the most completely devastating and destructive blows, calm actually did return and it actually was genuine—or genuine enough, at least, for Mabel to put together some kind of a meal for him, which he barely touched, and for them both to give Pidge her bath with a determined attempt at lightness that sent her to bed, though still troubled, not quite as uneasy as she had been. He said he wanted to watch the COMFORT rally and Mabel decided she would go up early to bed, trying not to cling to him too desperately again as she kissed him good night. He sat down before the television set to watch the junior of his two mortal enemies perform.

  It was, for twenty-five minutes of it, a standard performance, notable principally because the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce had managed to draw a surprisingly large crowd.
The National Guard Armory was full to overflowing, an estimated 5,000 more were standing outside listening to the proceedings through loudspeakers, and had he been in a condition and a state of mind to appraise it with the political shrewdness he used to know before his world began to collapse, he would have considered this highly significant of the mood of worry and indecision in the country. Washington was not a town for big rallies or violent enthusiasms, everybody there had seen too much history parade by to get very excited about it, and the tides of national policy, ever-shifting, produced a lively interest but very rarely the type of fanatic concern that COMFORT fed on. Nonetheless, the crowd was there, the proof of it was fully visible on the little screen, and when Senator Van Ackerman and the nominee entered together the mood was unmistakable. There was a roar of insensate sound that must have caused shivers in all rational men who heard it, and upon the man who knew he might be about to be offered up as victim it struck with a chilling impact that did not diminish even though he knew Fred was far too clever to make as crude an attack as he had threatened. He would be offered up, all right, but in this place and before a national audience, it would be smoothly done. The alley brutality that had shattered his home would not be visible here, for Americans, telling each other constantly that politics was a dirty business, did not dare let themselves realize that upon occasion it could actually be that dirty. That would really upset them; and while they liked to be clever about their own shortcomings, they did not like to be upset by them. Senator Van Ackerman would not upset them.

  He introduced Bob Leffingwell, who got an enormous cheer; he spoke glowingly of the President, who got another; he dwelt for several minutes upon “the very real threat, yes, the very real threat that the Soviets may at this very moment be on their way to the moon, there to seize upon and establish over us a military advantage that could put this great Republic even more deeply in peril than she already is”; he gave them the line they were waiting for—”As for me, I had rather crawl on my knees to Moscow than die under an atom bomb!” and the roar without sense, without reason, without sanity, flooded forth again; and finally he turned to the Senate of the United States and the decision it would soon be called upon to render on the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell. If, that is, the “inexplicable, inexcusable, unforgivable opposition of the senior Senator from Utah can be removed from the path of this great man!”

  Once again this brought the savage, animal roar that came through the machine like a blow, and he went on in a slow and emphatic voice. Only now he held a white paper.

  “I have here in my hand,” he said, and he held it up for them all to see, “the means to do it.” He waited for them to subside while the cameras swung back and forth across the hall, recording its excitement in a hundred straining faces.

  “I will not tell you about it tonight, my friends,” he said, and there was a sudden disappointed “Oh!” which he quickly caught up, “but I will say this: it is documented proof that this paragon of virtues who has set himself up to fight the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell is not a paragon of virtues at all. Oh no, my friends, not at all!” He paused dramatically and in the house in Spring Valley a member of the national audience braced himself with a sort of sick defensiveness against what might come next. “He is not morally fit to lick Bob Leffingwell’s boots!” Fred shouted with a sudden, explosive, fanatic vigor. “He is not morally fit, period! And I have the proof!” He held the paper aloft again as the crowd, somewhat hesitant, somewhat doubtful, but under the whiplash of his own obvious excitement, gave him growing applause. “I cannot tell you here, my friends,” he said, “much as I would like to do so. But I urge you to read what I have to say in the Senate on Monday. There in that great forum where this pretender of moral virtues presumes to sit”—and where, his victim reflected bitterly, he would be protected by legislative immunity and could not be sued or silenced, except by a claim of personal privilege it would be an admission to make—“there, I will tell you exactly how morally unfit he is. And I will show the Senate the proof and the country the proof and the world the proof! And we will remove him from the path of Robert A. Leffingwell!”

  He waved the paper again triumphantly above his head as the crowd burst into a last explosion of sound and the cameras panned again around the Armory, and the wildly waving COMFORT banners, in one last inspired shot on somebody’s part, filled the screen and faded out.

  And that, he knew with an exhausted certainty, was a promise Fred meant to keep.

  He did not know exactly what became of time, except that it passed. He sat alone in the living room and it got darker. He snapped on a light, automatically thinking the neighbors might wonder if the house were still too empty. Sometime around ten the phone rang and AP said apologetically out of old friendship, “Brig, I hate to bother you, but my office has asked me to find out if you care to make any comment on—” He said shortly, “I do not,” and hung up. In rapid succession UPI and the major newspaper bureaus did the same, and to them he said the same. There followed a period when there were no calls, and during it he wandered into the kitchen and, suddenly hungry, drank a glass of milk and ate several pieces of bread and butter. He knew this was not enough to sustain him after the day he had spent virtually without food, but as abruptly as he had become hungry he could eat no more.

  It was not so very long after that, probably around midnight, that the phone rang insistently and he finally went to the downstairs extension and picked it up. There came to him over long distance, from some point he did not know, a voice he had never thought, and never wanted, to hear again.

  “Brig?” it said, and somehow he found the strength to answer it calmly.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Brig,” the voice said, and he could tell that its owner was close to crying, “Brig, did you see that television program?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I saw it.”

  “It’s my fault,” the voice said forlornly.

  “What?” he said, and it seemed to him that there wasn’t so very much more that he could stand without going under.

  “They looked me up,” the voice said. “They traced me through the service—I stayed in until about six months ago—and when they found me I was—sort of down and out, and they offered me money—an awful lot of money, Brig. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I needed it and so—so I told them what they wanted to know. And then I signed it. And then they paid me.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me if you were hard up?” he asked, though it didn’t matter, for there was nothing to reverse what had been done, it was done forever. “I would have helped you. All you had to do was ask.”

  “Well,” the voice said, “you were married and settled and famous, and I didn’t think you would want me to—bother you.”

  “But I wouldn’t have let you starve,” he said. “Certainly I wouldn’t. I could have helped you get a job somewhere.”

  “Oh, Brig, I’m so sorry,” the voice said in a rush. “I didn’t mean—Brig, I never meant to hurt you. Brig—”

  He sighed. How old was he? How old had he been then? Eighteen, hadn’t he said? Somehow he had never thought of him as growing any older, and apparently he never had.

  “I know you didn’t,” he said slowly. “You did what you thought you had to do. That’s all I did, once. That’s all anybody ever does. You aren’t to blame, I’m not to blame, nobody’s to blame—except the war, maybe. And there’s nothing we can do about that now. Don’t worry about it. I’ll manage.”

  “Brig—” the voice said desperately.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Try not to think about it. I forgive you, and it’s all right. I’m going to hang up now. Take care of yourself.”

  “But I don’t want you to hang up,” the voice said like a little child.

  “I don’t want to,” he said, and he knew now at last in his loneliness and despair that it was true, “but I must.”

  And he did, though an instant later he lifted the receiver agai
n and said, “Wait!” But the line was dead, the impersonally buzzing dial tone was the only answer.

  How far he had traveled, he thought, since first he had heard that voice; how far, over land and over sea and through the forests of the heart, to come at last to face himself.

  He did not know how it was that he happened to be staring into the open drawer of his desk in the study, and he did not know what time it was, 2 a.m., or 3, or sometime thereabouts; but there was no doubt what he was staring at. It lay before him sleek and black and gleaming, carrying with it memories of boyhood days when it had first been given him by his father, of days during and after college and the war when he had taken it along as an auxiliary weapon for target practice on hunting trips. He took it out now and balanced it with a practiced ease in his hand, and suddenly he seemed to lose consciousness, the gray haze over the world became even thicker, he remained there motionless, unfeeling, unthinking, for he knew not how long. At last with an iron effort of the will he brought himself back from wherever he had been, put it quickly back in the drawer, and slammed it shut. “My God,” he cried out despairingly to the empty room, “what am I thinking?” But he knew with an implacable certainty from which there was no escape what he was thinking. It had begun by reminding him of childhood and youth, but it had ended by saying something quite different. He realized with a sick horror for which there appeared to be no help that he was a long way now from hunting in the Uintas and fishing along the Green.