Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  But it hadn’t been. Not her idea, anyway. That was the summer he was twenty-six, and the marriage lasted two years longer, ending in June three years ago, nine days shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, twenty-seven days shy of their sixth wedding anniversary.

  It ended sloppily, which was unfortunate. But Kit, though she needed a strong man, was not strong enough in herself to strike out on her own. She’d had to wait until there was someone to take Robert’s place, and he had turned out to be another faculty member, married, with five children. He and Kit had a semi-clandestine affair going for several months—it seemed to have required the under-cover collaboration of half the faculty at one time or another—but at the end of the school year that became unsatisfactory, and they wrote notes to their respective spouses and headed for New York.

  The man came back that September, rejoined his wife, and was still teaching at Lancashire. Kit never came back at all. From New York she went to Nevada for the divorce, then home to Atlanta, and the following June married an executive of Delta Airlines.

  As for Robert, the sense of failure that had been growing in him since college reached its fullest flowering when Kit left, and he’d been living with it ever since. In the three years since, he’d had no involvements with other women, he’d continued to live on alone in the small rented house he and Kit had shared in town, and he had made no plans to do anything ever with his life but go on teaching history at Lancashire University.

  It was at the time of the divorce that he first got to know Sterling at all well. Previously, there had been little social contact between them, partly because of the differences in their ages and stations, but also because Robert had to a great degree avoided Sterling, plagued in this way too by his sense of failure.

  But with the campus scandal of Kit’s departure, Sterling had sought Robert out, and what had begun as a tentative meeting between strangers faced with a difficult social problem to be straightened out had soon deepened into friendship. Sterling too was a solitary man, though it didn’t seem to be a sense of failure that did it in his case. What it was Robert didn’t know, only that he and Sterling seemed to comprehend something in one another, some kinship that had nothing to do with familial relationships. They could relax with one another.

  Now Robert thought of Sterling as his closest friend. The two of them lunched together frequently on campus, as often as their schedules permitted, and in fact they had just come back from lunch today when their comments about the protesters herded into the parking lot had led to Sterling’s offer to arrange a meeting for Robert with ex-President Bradford Lockridge.

  Now Robert said, “I’m sure he has better things to do than explain himself to a history teacher.”

  “Quite the contrary,” Sterling said. “If I know Brad, and I do, he’d enjoy every minute of it.” Then he glanced in sudden concern at Robert, as though belatedly realizing he might be pushing into areas where Robert would prefer to be left alone, and he said, “Of course, it’s up to you. If you want, I can ask him. If not—” He shrugged, to mean that it wasn’t important.

  Next month I’ll be thirty-one, Robert thought. It wasn’t an entirely irrelevant reflection. “Why not?” he said aloud. “If he’s willing to risk it, I certainly am.”

  ii

  SATURDAY WAS HOUSECLEANING DAY. All week the little five-room house on South Donnally Street was allowed to go its own way, accumulating dust and dirt, garbage and unwashed laundry, while Robert saw to his classes and corrected assignment papers, drank beer with his few bachelor faculty friends and sat up too late watching television, and by Saturday the house was always a complete mess. So Saturday was housecleaning day, and by late afternoon the house was always bright and clean and neat again. Except during football season, when the job took two days, all the odd moments available between the televised weekend games.

  But this wasn’t football season. This was May 12th, and one of the softest and warmest springs in memory, and Robert did his housecleaning today with every window flung wide.

  He was on his knees in the bathroom, de-ringing the tub, when the phone started to ring. He looked at the green cleanser suds all over his hands and grimaced, of half a mind not to answer at all. But there’s something about a ringing telephone that very few people are strong enough to ignore, so Robert sighed, rinsed his hands under the running cold water, and heaved himself to his feet.

  He was still a tall man, and he was heftier now than in his football-playing days, and when he stood up he filled the small bathroom the way he filled every room in the little house. He had a strong, commanding, self-confident look that didn’t jibe at all with his self-image. He’d started wearing his brown hair in a crewcut in the Army, when long hair was the style, and now with crewcuts proliferating on campus it looked as though fashion had circled all the way around to meet him. Unfortunately, the short hair styles had their political implications just as had the long, and there were those who now took it for granted on seeing Robert that he was a Bircher, which bothered him a bit, but not enough to change his hair style.

  He trotted now across the hall and into the bedroom, drying his hands on the front of his T-shirt, and picked up the phone beside the bed. “Hello?”

  The voice was instantly recognizable as Sterling. “Robert? We’ll be there in about five minutes. Are you ready?”

  For just a second his mind was a blank, and then a chute opened inside his head and the trip to meet Bradford Lockridge came popping out into the open.

  For God’s sake, he’d forgotten all about it! Monday there’d been the apparently casual conversation with Sterling, and Bradford Lockridge had been mentioned, and Sterling had offered to arrange a meeting between his brother and Robert. On Wednesday Robert had been surprised when Sterling said, at lunch, “Well, it’s all set.”

  “What’s all set?”

  “We’re driving down Saturday to see my brother. You and Elizabeth and me. Saturday’s all right, isn’t it?”

  He’d said sure, Saturday was all right, and Sterling had said he’d come by for him about eleven, and now here it was about two minutes to eleven on Saturday and he’d gotten out of bed this morning without a thought in his head. It had just been a normal Saturday, the usual routine. The plan to meet a former President of the United States had gone straight out of his mind.

  “Uh,” he said. He half-turned and sat down heavily on the bed.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I’m a little slow today. Could you give me ten minutes?”

  “Of course, of course. Elizabeth isn’t really ready yet anyway.”

  “Fine. Ten minutes.”

  Robert hung up, and at first he just sat there, stunned. From this position he could see himself in the mirror on the closet door, and didn’t he look like something to go visit celebrities with. Stained T-shirt, ripped and paint-smeared and generally filthy Army fatigue trousers, and white tennis shoes without socks. He looked sweaty and dirty, and he was sweaty and dirty.

  Ten minutes. He ran for the bathroom again, shedding clothing on the way.

  iii

  THE TRIP, ALL IN all, took an hour and a half. Their route skirted every town along the way, so that once out of Lancashire they didn’t see another populated area until they arrived at Eustace, which turned out to be a surprisingly sleepy little town that obviously hadn’t allowed the international fame of one of its citizens to alter its style and pace. Robert sat forward as they drove through town, his elbows on the seat back, and said, “Take away the automobiles and you could make a movie here and call it 1925.”

  Sterling, at the wheel, chuckled and nodded, but Elizabeth said, “That’s better than calling it 1984.” At sixty-two, five years younger than her husband, Elizabeth was a tall and straight and slender woman, her face very little lined, her hair gray but well-cared-for, her mental faculties and political impatiences intact.

  Robert looked at her grim profile in some surprise. “Do you really think that’s a possibility?”

>   “More and more every day,” she said, and turned to glance at him; he saw her eyes take in his crewcut.

  “I’ll grant you we’re on a swing away from liberalism,” Robert said, “but it’s only a swing. The country is heading for conservatism again, but sooner or later the pendulum will start back. It always does. America has always had its Know Nothing party, and it’s always had its Abolitionists.”

  Elizabeth’s expression was cynical. “The right-wingers want to stop the clock entirely, you know, and one of these times they’ll make it. Then the pendulum won’t come back at all. That’s what Orwell was talking about.”

  “I don’t see it happening,” Robert said. “I know the political history of this country, and the whole story is summed up in the pendulum swinging between left and right.”

  “The reason I worked for Eugene McCarthy,” Elizabeth said, “is because he was the only man in public life to stand up and say that kind of thinking was fuzzy-headed and dangerous. Complacency will do more harm to this country than a full-scale atomic attack.”

  Sterling, humor in his voice, said, “Robert, for God’s sake don’t get her started now. She gives poor Brad enough hell every time they meet as it is, for not bringing peace on Earth during his administration.”

  “If any one man on the planet could do it,” Elizabeth said fiercely, “it’s the President of the United States. He’s the only one with anything approaching the power, the public attention and the prestige. I’ve told Brad that before, and I’ll tell him again. The hour is too late for politics as usual.”

  “See what you’ve done,” Sterling said, looking at Robert in the rearview mirror. “On your head be it.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be good,” Elizabeth said. “It’s too late for him now, he’s missed his opportunity. I’ve told him that, too, more than once. Besides, this is Robert’s day. I promise I won’t hog the conversation.” She turned to smile at Robert, who smiled back, and the car slowed.

  Looking out through the windshield, Robert saw that they were now on a gravel road surrounded by trees, and that just ahead was a chain-link fence with a gate closed across the road. An elderly man in a gray uniform without markings was just coming out of a small shack beside the gate. He peered at the car, and evidently recognized either it or Sterling, because all at once he began huge pantomime nods and waves, during which he stumped to the gate and slowly swung it open.

  Robert said, “What if we were kidnappers? Or assassins?”

  Sterling said, “He has a gun and a telephone. And there are Secret Service men up at the house.”

  Elizabeth shook her head, smiling, and said over her shoulder to Robert, “It’s only Bradford up there. The moment has passed for all that, too. No kidnappers, no assassins any more.”

  iv

  THEY HAD LUNCH IN a second floor room overlooking the orchards, with the Tuscarora Mountains for a backdrop. They were six at table.

  Bradford Lockridge sat at the head of the table, with Robert to his left. It was Robert’s first experience of being in the same room with a face completely familiar but heretofore seen only in photographs or on television, and he kept being surprised that he recognized the man.

  Bradford Lockridge had a strong face, big-boned and square-jawed, almost an American Gothic face, and a long broad body to go with it. His hands were surprisingly gnarled and knobby, the hands of a farmer rather than a politician, but he moved them gracefully, he moved his entire body in a way lighter and more delicate than his appearance would suggest. The familial resemblance between him and Sterling, now sitting opposite him at the foot of the table, was very close, except that all of the features that were strong in Bradford were softer and more gentle in Sterling.

  To Lockridge’s right, opposite Robert, sat Howard Lockridge, Sterling’s older son. It had been a surprise to Sterling and Elizabeth to find him here, and they’d explained to Robert that Howard was Bradford’s editor on his memoirs. He’d brought down the galleys on Bradford’s new volume, The Temporary Peace, and though he tried to be gracious about it, Robert could tell he wasn’t pleased at having his work interrupted this way. He’d managed twice before lunch to tell Robert that the book was running badly behind schedule, as though Robert wouldn’t be tongue-tied enough as it was.

  To Robert’s left sat Elizabeth, enjoying life as usual, even enjoying her son’s badly dampered irritation and once or twice poking quiet fun at him for it, winking at Robert to make him willy-nilly a co-conspirator. And completing the table, sitting opposite Elizabeth and catty-corner from Robert, was a woman who looked to be about thirty, named Evelyn Canby. She’d been introduced as Bradford Lockridge’s granddaughter, and Elizabeth had explained in an aside that Mrs. Canby’s husband had died something over a year ago in Southeast Asia.

  Mrs. Canby also had a daughter, a little girl named Dinah who’d just turned four last month and who was a solemn quiet little child who’d been brought in for introductions and then ushered right back out again. Usually Robert professed himself relieved that his marriage to Kit had produced no children—their emotional attitude toward one another had never stabilized sufficiently for them to feel secure about adding such a volatile third element—and of course he was right to be relieved, since the split would have had to be much more complex and un-final if there had been a child to consider, but on those rare occasions when he was introduced to a young child he invariably found himself totting up his own years—thirty-one next month, thirty-one—and thinking that the time to start a family was fast slipping away.

  But a child was such a complication. As witness Mrs. Canby herself. A pleasantly attractive woman, widowed for over a year, she had obviously made no effort yet to find herself another man—burying herself away in the woods here, for one thing, and wearing such plain clothing and sparse make-up and obsolete hair styling—and that was surely, Robert thought, because she had a child. Without Dinah to occupy her time and attention, where would she be now? In New York or Washington or Philadelphia, some urban center in the BosWash megalopolis, finding herself a man.

  Though that wasn’t necessarily true. He had no child to tie him down, he’d been divorced nearly three years now, and had he done very much yet toward finding another woman? Of course, the situation was different in his case, but still—

  “What do you think, Robert?”

  He looked up, startled, to see that they were all looking at him, and that Elizabeth had just asked him a question. A conversation had been going on around him while he daydreamed, but he had no idea even what the subject had been. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind was wandering.”

  “I said,” Elizabeth repeated, “that NATO today is totally useless, simply a drain of resources that could be better used elsewhere. That even by the time of Brad’s term NATO was nothing more than an appendix, not useful for any good purpose but perfectly capable of suddenly turning bad and killing us all.”

  What a rotten question! Robert gave her an aggrieved look, his face turned so his host couldn’t see, and then he said, “I don’t think it’s ever been that bad, really. I think it had two values, and probably still does.”

  Bradford Lockridge said, “What would those two values be, Robert?”

  Robert turned to see that Lockridge was amused behind his stern features. “Well, sir,” he said, “in the first place, NATO coordinated Western military policy, which was certainly a good idea. Each country was going to have its army and air force anyway, so it was safest to have a central control. Otherwise, one nation could have made a bad decision all by itself and dragged the rest of Europe right in after it.”

  “Right,” said Lockridge, nodding emphatically. “And what’s the other?”

  “Reassurance,” Robert said. He felt a bit nervous, talking global strategy with a man at Bradford Lockridge’s level, but if he just sat there silent all day he’d hate himself tomorrow, and that would be far worse. So he said, “The fact is, there never was a possibility for a Third World War, the atom b
omb made that impossible. War at that plateau is suicidal, and national leaders just don’t tend to be suicidal types.”

  “Hitler was,” Howard said sourly. Whether he was sour at the thought of Hitler, or at the thought of the time being taken from his galleys was impossible to tell.

  Robert nodded. “Yes, you’re right. But you can’t defend against a Hitler, anyway, there just isn’t any defense.”

  “One defense,” Bradford said, and waited till they were all looking at him before going on. But it was to Robert that he spoke directly: “A sound global fiscal policy,” he said. “If the Allies hadn’t bled Germany quite so greedily in the twenties, there would have been no Hitler at all. Money makes the mare go. Biafra was a dispute over oil fields, Vietnam a struggle for rubber plantations. Given a sufficiently sound and stable global fiscal policy, which has never yet happened on this Earth, life would become positively dull.” He smiled with one side of his mouth, and said, “Which takes us away from NATO. You said its other value was reassurance, and I’m not quite certain I understand what you mean by that.”

  Robert said, “Well, you’ve heard the old saying about military men always getting ready for the war they’ve just finished instead of the one that’ll come next.”

  Bradford nodded. “Not necessarily accurate, but frequently.”

  “Well, it isn’t just military men,” Robert said, “it’s almost everybody. When the Cold War built up, the people wanted reassurance, and the kind of reassurance they would most easily understand was in terms of the war that had just been won. That’s why there was so much interest in fallout shelters in the fifties. If the bombs did fall, they would destroy everything for fifty miles around and fill the air with lethal radiation for seven years, and everybody knew that, but what did they do? They pretended the problem was simply a bigger version of the London blitz, because that they could contend with. They could dig bomb shelters and change the term for them.”