Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  They ran out of the rainstorm over mid-Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes before landing at Hagerstown. It had been raining there, but had stopped about half an hour before. It was very cold after the rain, a wet cold that cut right through to the bone, and Evelyn shivered as she walked across the tarmac beside Bradford from the plane to the car, another black Cadillac limousine, twin to the one they’d left at LaGuardia except that this one had a Pennsylvania license plate. The same number: BL-1. (During Bradford’s Presidency, the press had habitually referred to him by his three initials, BGL, Bradford Gregory Lockridge, but that was only a journalistic tradition, suffered by every President since Roosevelt with the sole exception of Eisenhower, who had a handy three letter nickname instead. Bradford himself never used his middle name nor its initial.)

  From Hagerstown it was a short thirty miles to Eustace, most of it north on Interstate 81, out of Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Then off 81 to Chambersburg and seven miles west on county 992 to Eustace. It was done and over in twenty-five minutes.

  And yet to Evelyn it seemed the longest part of the trip. The day was gloomy, Bradford continued silent and grouchy, and there was nothing to occupy her mind. She’d traveled this road a hundred times, and though much of the scenery was green and pleasant even at this time of the year, she had seen it too often to be intrigued any more. She was also impatient to see Dinah again, and to be home.

  Bradford was still absorbed in his work for part of the time, muttering to himself and making notes on a yellow legal pad, but as they neared Chambersburg he dozed off for a few minutes, which Evelyn didn’t notice until a dozen sheets of manuscript slid off the attaché case on his lap and fell to the floor amid their feet. She glanced at him in surprise and saw that he was asleep, head tucked back into the corner, mouth slightly open.

  She gathered up the fallen sheets, carefully opened the attaché case, trying to make her movements small enough and silent enough not to disturb him, and put all his materials away. She left the case on his lap, and then noticed that a little trickle of saliva was coming from the right corner of his mouth. She knew how easily that could happen when one took a daytime nap sitting up, and how embarrassed Bradford would be if he woke up and discovered he’d been drooling in his sleep. She took a tissue from her bag and gently patted his mouth dry. He moved slightly at the touch, but didn’t wake up, and after that there was no more saliva.

  The car’s rhythm changed when they switched from the Interstate super-highway to the two-lane blacktop county road, and the change awoke Bradford, who sat up blinking and swallowing and making faces as though he were tasting something foul. “I fell asleep,” he complained.

  “Just for a few minutes,” Evelyn told him. “I felt like falling asleep myself. This part is always so long.”

  “Where are we?” He squinted out at the cloud-dark day.

  “Just past Chambersburg. Almost home.”

  He looked at the closed attaché case on his lap. “Don’t tell Howard,” he said, “but I’m through with this for an hour or two.”

  “I won’t tell him,” she promised.

  Ten minutes later the limousine pulled to a stop in front of the house and they both got out. “Stiff,” Bradford commented, and stretched and yawned.

  “God, yes,” Evelyn said. “Let’s not go anywhere else for a year.”

  “You’re on,” he said.

  They walked up into the house, and he was limping slightly, favoring his right leg. “My leg must have gone to sleep,” he said.

  “I should have taken the case off your lap,” she said, immediately contrite.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’ll go away.”

  4

  ROBERT PRATT STOOD LOOKING out the window at the thin oval of picketing students in the main parking area. With the window closed and the air conditioning on, it was impossible to hear what they were chanting, so that except for the words on the signs what they looked most like was an advance publicity stunt for a circus or a movie or some such attraction. But the signs made it clear that this was serious business, which in some way made it more comic.

  Sterling must have been feeling the same, standing beside Robert and looking down at them, because all at once he murmured, “Poor things.”

  Robert looked at him in surprise, not expecting that sort of empathy from a man whose name was being so mistreated on signs twenty feet away, and saw that Sterling had made the comment more to himself than to Robert. He was looking out the window with a brooding, pitying, somehow sad expression on his face, as though watching something die.

  Which they were, in a way. The great student demonstrations of just a few years ago, the captured buildings, hostage deans, firelight marches, all the brave panoply of the bloodless revolution of the affluent young, had withered in a very short time down to this rump remnant: two dozen shaggy students shuffling in a long oval defined by gray police sawhorses. There were two ovals of sawhorses, forming a thick long letter O, with the protesters marching between the lines. Was it an accident that the oval of sawhorses was so much larger than the protesters available to fill it, making their ranks seem even thinner and more ineffectual than they were, or was it conscious police mockery?

  The police themselves were there in merely token strength: two uniformed and helmeted patrolmen leaning in boredom against the side of their car, one riot gun waiting negligently atop the car’s white roof in the sunlight. In that gun would be a lone tear gas projectile, and everyone participating understood that one movement beyond the permissible would result in that projectile being lobbed over their heads and into the middle of the oval.

  It had been nearly two years since tear gas had actually drifted across the Lancashire University campus.

  In those two years, a lot had happened to the student protest movement, but it could all be brought down to two terms: diffusion and extremism. When the movement merely had the twin goals of international peace and racial justice, there was a certain amount of confusion and contradiction inevitable but not enough to destroy the movement entirely. But when the goals became more diffuse, and less morally secure, the effectiveness of the protest movement began to wane. And with diffusion came the steadily increasing influx of extremism, the movement being taken over more and more by nihilists who claimed to see no possible way to repair the inequities in American life except by destroying American life and hoping something better would rise from the ashes. This vague hope lost the movement much of its membership, as did the proliferation of causes. A student interested in racial justice tended to be discouraged when rallies were taken over by destroyers on the one hand and cultists for drugs or sex on the other.

  When the shake-out was done, there was almost nobody left. The truly concerned and productive students had retired from the fray and were back to concerning themselves exclusively with themselves, as had their predecessors of the fifties. The extremists, their power waning, had grown more and more shrill and provocative, and most of them by now were in jail for one thing or another, usually some symbolic and silly gesture of destruction. The twin touchstones of this group had become Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, with its suggestion of the purest revolutionary act being the blowing up of the Greenwich Observatory (the murder of time), and the trio of real-life revolutionaries who had, in the early sixties, actually attempted to blow up the Statue of Liberty.

  Who were left? The cultists, growing wilder and less relevant every year. Looking out now at the two dozen chanting shuffling protesters, Robert Pratt saw on their signs slogans for over a dozen different causes, LEGALIZE MARIJUANA said one, possibly the staidest of them all. FREE ABORTIONS demanded another, and a third cried out LET MY FAGGOTS BE. The Free Speech Movement was there, with its sophomoric acronyms, which had reached their peak at the very beginning, at Berkeley, a decade before, when the movement was known as Freedom under Clark Kerr, Kerr at that time having been president of the university. The struggle to put together words whose initials spelled something obs
cene had never come close again to attaining the beauty of that first slogan, probably because an obsession with obscenity so rarely has been found in combination with strong imaginative powers.

  Not all the signs declared for specific causes, however, some being more general insults, PIGS OFF CAMPUS, for instance, didn’t refer to student behavior in town but called on the police to leave the school. And ONE LOCKRIDGE IS ENOUGH was obviously meant to be insulting not only to Sterling, the president of Lancashire University, but to his older brother Bradford Lockridge as well, one-time President of the United States.

  Nodding at the bearded bearer of ONE LOCKRIDGE IS ENOUGH, Robert said, “Do you suppose he has any clear idea who Bradford Lockridge really was?”

  Sterling smiled and shook his head. “Since he was probably seven the year Brad was elected,” he said, “I beg leave to doubt it. But if you ever meet Brad, you’d better not use the past tense. He’s still very much alive, thank you.”

  “I think of everybody historically,” Robert said. “He lives not too far from here, doesn’t he?”

  “About a hundred miles. Near a little town called Eustace.” Sterling looked at him thoughtfully and said, “I could arrange for you to meet him, if you want.”

  Surprised, Robert said, “Could you really?”

  Sterling grinned and said, “I do have a certain influence.”

  It wasn’t a joke Robert could take well. He was always too aware in any case that it was his own influence, as the college roommate of a nephew of Sterling’s wife Elizabeth, that had gotten him his instructorship at Lancashire. His mediocre scholastic record and lack of a doctorate would have condemned him to something much farther down the scale than an Ivy League university if it hadn’t been for the accident of friendship.

  Robert Pratt was, in his own eyes, a failure. He’d started life as a spectacular success, and for a while it had seemed as though success were to be a permanent part of his equipment, but all at once a plug had been pulled and success had drained away and now there was nothing left—at least in his own estimation—but failure.

  The first success had been in track. He was tall and lean and fast, and as a high school freshman he had no trouble making the junior varsity as a runner in the intermediate distances. His sophomore year he made the varsity track team and All-City, and the football coach urged him to come out for football the next fall. He did, made end on the offensive varsity team, and was voted Most Valuable Player by his team-mates both his junior and senior years. In sixteen games in the two years he’d caught two hundred four passes, twenty-seven for touchdowns.

  The college scholarship offers came from everywhere. Robert took over twenty plane trips at no expense to himself, was shown campuses, dormitory rooms and team records, talked with coaches and admissions directors and football-playing seniors, and sat up nights leafing through the letters and the catalogs. (His high school scholastic record was average, just barely above a straight C, but no one cared much about that.)

  He chose his college for exclusively football reasons—it was a huge southwestern university almost always in the top ten, with any number of alumni in the pro ranks—and he chose his scholastic major for the same reason. He didn’t want physical education, that was too much like faking, and besides, his father had talked him out of it. “What if you don’t make the pros?” he’d asked. “Phys ed instructors are a dime a dozen, and it’s one kind of college degree that won’t do you much good in the business world. Pick anything else, Bob, from anthropology to zoology, and corporation personnel directors will simply accept you as a man with a college education. But pick physical education, and you mark yourself as brawn without brains.”

  Well, there didn’t seem to be much chance of his failing to make the pros after graduation, but it wouldn’t hurt to be on the safe side, so Robert chose the second easiest major, history, with a specialization in American history. The scuttlebutt was that history was nothing but reading, and Robert had always been a heavy reader, so it looked to be a major that wouldn’t get too much in his way.

  Nor had it. History was fun, in a quiet way, and he got moderately good marks in his courses. He would have done better, but football was even more fun.

  Though not as much as in high school. The competition was fiercer here, he was no longer the big fish in the little pond. It was his senior year before he made first-string varsity, and even then his accomplishments were overshadowed by the other offensive end, an incredibly tall, thin, fast black boy who was also a star of the basketball team in the winter and the track team in the spring.

  Still, Robert was on the team, and he was ultimately first string tight end, and that seemed pleasure enough. It also got him Kit McGraw, a slender beautiful girl from Atlanta, two years younger than he and devoted to his every wish. Administrative permissiveness about co-ed housing hadn’t quite become popular yet at that time, but Robert and Kit managed to share a quiet apartment off-campus with no outcry from the college officials. Whether that was because they didn’t know about it or because of Robert’s football status he never did know for sure.

  There wasn’t very much pro interest when Robert graduated from college, but there was some, and he turned out to be the Boston Patriots’ twenty-seventh draft choice. With that for security, Robert and Kit married immediately upon Robert’s graduation, spent a three-week honeymoon in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and then Kit went home to her parents and Robert went off to training camp.

  And football stopped being fun. The pros weren’t boys any more, they were men, and team spirit—at least in training camp—came in a far second, after self-preservation. There were already two men on the Boston Patriots team who had the job Robert had been hired for, and one other rookie looking for that assignment, too. Before the season began, the four aspirants would be reduced to two, and Robert knew by the second day of training camp that he wouldn’t be either of the two. The men who already had the jobs were older and smarter and tougher than he was, and the other rookie was leaner and hungrier than he was, and Robert knew the only thing left to be decided was which of the four cuts would lop off his head.

  It was the next to the last, and by that time Robert was as nervous and miserable as he’d ever been in his life. His digestion was poor, his temper was short, and his depression was unrelieved by the fact that Kit, when she finally learned that he hadn’t made the team, was convinced that in some way he’d let them both down, that he could have made it if he’d only done something differently. The truth was that he wasn’t quite good enough, and he knew it, but Kit couldn’t accept that. He was good enough, she insisted, and he had failed only because of ineptitude in handling the situation.

  That was their first really violent fight, and if it hadn’t been for the Army their marriage might have ended right there. But the draft, which both the university and the Patriots had held at bay for him, now descended into the middle of their raging squabble, and with another separation looming up they decided to patch up their differences and be friends again. But not partners. From that point on, they never seemed to be moving quite in the same direction any more.

  Robert’s two years in the Army were spent half in various dusty camps in the United States and half in Vietnam. His football background got him assignment to Special Services, and his Vietnam tour was spent in an office in Saigon that coordinated USO shows and other entertainment packages. He and Kit got along much better via letter than they did in person, but they stopped getting along at all after his Army tour was over and there didn’t seem to be anything specific for him to do.

  That was when teaching first suggested itself, or that is to say, when it was first suggested to him by John Bloor, his onetime roommate in college and continued friend, to whom he confided his rootlessness and the recent lack of direction in his life. Bloor talked to his aunt, Elizabeth Lockridge, wife of Sterling, and if Robert wanted it a place could be made for him at Lancashire University. The GI Bill would cover him while he did his post-graduate work, and onc
e he had a masters degree there would be no problem finding him an instructorship.

  He took it, mostly because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. The troubles with Kit were continuing, and in fact getting worse, and he couldn’t really blame her. It wasn’t merely that she had married a football hero who had stopped being a football hero. She had married an exciting winner who had somewhere along the line lost his excitement and turned into a loser. He knew he carried a sense of failure around with him the way some men carry a sense of mission, or a sense of identity. It colored everything he did. It even induced him to become a history instructor at Lancashire, out of a conviction that there was nothing else for him to do.

  The two years of post-graduate work ground slowly along, and only afterwards did Robert understand that Kit had never accepted this as a permanent resting place. Robert had come to Lancashire prepared to spend the rest of his life here, whereas for Kit it was a campsite, a place to rest and catch one’s breath and decide what one was really going to do with one’s life.

  Her final disillusionment with Robert was really a long time in coming. He could remember her look of disbelief when he’d gotten his master’s and showed no inclination to spend that summer looking for something better to do with his life. “You’re going to stay here?” “Of course. That was the idea all along, wasn’t it?”