The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “We were just talking,” Wilson explained, conscious of Willard’s shrinking head and shoulders. With two sons out of college and out of his tool chest, his sock drawer, his tie rack, and his bank account, he had little patience with someone else’s gamy little problems, but the error had been his, not Willard Fillmore’s.

  Mrs. Polk was waiting for them in front of her house.

  “Now you say goodbye to Mr. Wilson,” Mrs. Fillmore instructed as she left the rear seat, turning to her son, who still hovered near the front door he’d slammed closed with all of his rebellious strength.

  “Yes, m’am,” Willard said eagerly. Sedition was in the bright little eyes and some NCO club slur was forming itself in the quick little mind, but then his mother moved in suspiciously behind him, brought back by the false octave in her son’s enthusiastic reply, and he seemed to change his mind. “Goodbye, Mr. Wilson,” he said, and sped off like a scalded cat toward Mrs. Polk’s new bronze station wagon.

  “That boy’s a handful,” Mrs. Fillmore declared, retrieving the yarn cap from the front seat. “This here traveling around has got him all jarred loose.”

  “I suppose so,” Wilson said, trying to ignore the small denim-clad rear end that was so energetically mooning him from the back window of Mrs. Polk’s station wagon.

  4.

  Ed Donlon was only half Irish, but he had a certain Irish charm which many women found seductive. He was a prodigious drinker, raconteur, and philanderer, could quote Yeats and more obscure voices by the hour, especially when he was in his cups, and had a sexual vitality that neither alcohol nor advancing middle age seemed to have dulled. He’d grown up in a sedate Victorian house in Trenton, New Jersey, surrounded by maiden aunts, grandmothers, and older sisters, he and his father, a patent lawyer, the prisoners of a spinsterish sisterhood he wasn’t to escape until he was sent off to Princeton at seventeen. He’d been taking his revenge ever since, he’d once told Haven Wilson. They’d known each other for years. Both had been lawyers together at the Justice Department, both in the criminal division, where they’d shared an office. Donlon had moved on to the Agency as deputy counsel and had ended his government career as an assistant secretary of defense. He’d attempted to persuade Haven Wilson to join him at the Pentagon as his senior deputy, but Wilson had remained on the Hill, more interested in returning eventually to a senior position at Justice. In the late seventies, Donlon had left the Pentagon after a policy dispute and joined a small but prestigious Washington law firm. Wilson had the impression that he didn’t work very hard, kept comfortable hours, and had been drinking and whoring even more voraciously since his wife had left him.

  It was a little before one o’clock as Haven Wilson climbed into the front seat of Donlon’s BMW 2002 and the two men drove out through Fairfax into the Virginia countryside. Donlon was dressed for the country in gray flannels, a tweed hacking jacket with elbow patches, and red-soled walking shoes. Only the ascot was missing. He was smaller and a few years older than Wilson, but his thinning chestnut hair was barely touched by gray and his fair-skinned, robust face was uncreased by worry. In his company, Wilson sometimes felt as dull as the paint on a bus-station door.

  The rain had vanished and the wind had grown colder. The gunmetal sky held the first premonition of winter. On the way out, Wilson mentioned the problems he’d been having with the California woman who wanted to buy Grace Ramsey’s house. Ed Donlon was her lawyer, Grace Ramsey the best friend and former college roommate of Donlon’s wife, Jane. But Donlon had washed his hands of it once he’d turned the house over to the Virginia brokerage.

  “She doesn’t care about money, I’m not going to talk to her about money, her New York lawyers won’t talk about money, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I don’t care about these people from California, she doesn’t care about these people from California, and if they won’t meet her price for the house, then she doesn’t care. She didn’t put the price on the house, a broker did, and it took me six months to get her to agree to put it on the market. Grace is strange, flaky. She floats around in a world of her own. Too much money, which is maybe why George drank himself to death.”

  The road narrowed to a single lane and they drove past rolling unkempt fields and abandoned farms, ruined silos and tumbled barns awaiting the developer’s bulldozer.

  “This California woman wants to talk to her,” Wilson persisted.

  “Grace won’t talk to her.”

  “To you, then.”

  “I won’t talk to her. If I talk to her, I’ll have to talk to Grace, and I’m not going to talk to Grace about money. I’ll talk to her about religion, poetry, buggery, whatever, but not about money. Never.”

  “So what am I supposed to tell these California people?”

  “What you’ve been telling them. Listen, Grace stayed with us in Georgetown for two months after George died—two goddamn months. It was like living with someone out of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jane used to say. Then she left this painting behind. You know what it was? A bloody Matisse; I’m not kidding. For the house, she said—for the room and the house. It belongs there. When George was drying out in North Carolina a couple of years before that, she stayed with us for six weeks. Six weeks. That’s when I learned—she won’t talk about money, doesn’t know anything about money, and doesn’t care anything about money. For her, it doesn’t exist. So after George died, that house sat empty up there on the Potomac because she refused to think about that house and money—for three goddamn years. So her New York lawyer and I finally got her to sit down and talk about that empty house. It was like a séance, a séance with a Ouija board—that’s the way that New York lawyer and I had to talk to her. She wasn’t even there in the same room with us. You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?”

  “No,” Wilson admitted.

  “Well, you won’t—not until you meet her. She doesn’t live in our world.…”

  The landscape had changed. The fields were cultivated and the pastures closely grazed within board and stone fences. Old stone and brick houses, circa 1780, lay within boxwoods and azaleas at the end of oak- and cedar-lined lanes.

  They had lunch in Middleburg, at a stone inn off the main street. The cellar restaurant was darkly paneled under a beamed ceiling, like a rathskeller, but the old pine tables, the copperware, and the hand-painted hostelry and ironmonger signs were early American. In the rear, a few tables and booths were arranged around an old brick fireplace where a few logs smoked without flame, but the room was acrid with unventilated kitchen smells and they returned to the front room, where a tall young woman showed them to a table. She didn’t look like a rural waitress and Donlon noticed her immediately. She wore a cardigan, a flannel skirt, and boat moccasins; her dark hair was tied in pigtails.

  “I’ll bet she’s got a college degree,” Donlon said, watching her return to the end of the bar for menus.

  “Probably,” Wilson said, looking the other way. Two middle-aged women in flowered dresses and garden club hats sat at a nearby table drinking daiquiris. A young couple in riding boots and identical hounds-tooth riding jackets leaned with their heads against the wall at a side table, talking softly.

  “Sure she has.” Donlon’s smile brightened as she came back to the table.

  “Something to drink?” she asked. Wilson guessed she was in her early thirties. They ordered martinis on the rocks.

  “What was it in?” Donlon asked agreeably. “Psychology, sociology? Maybe history?”

  “What was what in?”

  “Your degree. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a teacher.”

  “Psychology—psychology and English lit, but that was a long time ago. What made you ask?”

  “Intuition. You’ve probably got a horse.”

  Wilson looked away, embarrassed. Asking a waitress in Middleburg if she had a horse was like asking a skiff owner in rubber boots on Chesapeake Bay if he was an oysterman, but to his surprise the waitress seemed flattered. “Three,” she s
aid, smiling.

  “Not Appaloosas, either.”

  “No, not Appaloosas.”

  She went back to the bar. “I told you,” Donlon said, invigorated. “A thoroughbred.”

  “What time’s McVey expecting us?”

  “Anytime after lunch. He suggested lunch, but that’s no good. The afternoon will be long enough as it is.” His eyes still lingered on the young waitress standing at the end of the bar. “She’s not bad. What do you think?”

  Wilson studied the menu, trying to ignore him. If the waitress had been flattered by Donlon’s guess that she kept horses, she was naive enough for anything. The menu specialties were hand-lettered in a flowery, amateurish script, some in French, and the improvised handicraft made him suspicious. “This is your neck of the woods,” he said. “What do you recommend?”

  “Something quick.”

  Wilson put the menu aside. “What’s McVey want to talk to me about?”

  “Discuss some problems,” Donlon said vaguely. “He’s been in bed with phlebitis; no visitors, no small talk. That means he’s pumped up. He just bought some professor’s library from Johns Hopkins and has been reading his way through it, the poor bastard. He gets goddamned lonely. When I talked to him on the phone, he wouldn’t let go.” Donlon looked up as the waitress put the drinks on the table. “What’d the cook get his degree in?” Donlon asked.

  “The cook? I’m not sure. Why?”

  He handed her the menu. “When in doubt, take the familiar. I’ll have the corned beef sandwich.”

  “You don’t trust us,” she said.

  “Make mine roast beef,” Wilson said.

  “He’s English,” Donlon explained.

  “And you’re Irish, I suppose.” She took back the menus with a smile and strolled away, this time more slowly.

  “She’s not bad at all,” Donlon said, watching her hips as Wilson studied the worm holes in the old pine, trying to decide whether they were made by an auger or a Civil War beetle. He drank his martini in silence. Donlon waited expectantly.

  “What’s wrong with Appaloosas?” she asked as she brought the plates, not waiting for Donlon’s opening sally.

  “Nothing, except you don’t quite look the type. Someone tried to interest me once.”

  “But didn’t.” She was bolder now, her shoulders back as she arranged the plates.

  “It’s not much fun,” Donlon said. “You spend your weekends being dragged around at the end of a horse trailer.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “My pastures are empty,” Donlon said shamelessly. Wilson found himself trying to read the legend on a sporting print half a room away.

  She laughed. “Really? That’s a shame? Where?”

  “The valley of the Shenandoah,” Donlon said sadly, as if it were a refrain from a Confederate campfire song. Donlon had a two-hundred-acre farm in the valley with an old prebellum house he and Jane had been restoring, but he hadn’t been there since the death of his only son, Brian, over a year ago. Wilson was the only one who visited the place. “The high shoe country,” Donlon continued. “Do you know Yeats?”

  “A little,” she replied, surprised.

  “‘Huntsman Rody, blow the horn,’” he said in a Gaelic lilt. “‘Make the hills reply.’ But Rody couldn’t blow his horn, only weep and sigh.” Smiling mysteriously, he drank from his glass while the waitress watched. The two women in flower club hats were studying them. Wilson felt like crawling under the table. “Do you know it?” Donlon asked. “‘The Ballad of the Foxhunter’?”

  “No, but it sounds very sad.”

  “It is. How about another drink, Haven?”

  “No, thanks, one’s enough. For both of us.”

  Looking sadly at Wilson, Donlon said, “‘The blind hound with a mournful din Lifts slow his wintry head.’” Then, to the waitress: “He says no. Sorry; maybe next time.”

  They finished their lunch. The young woman returned and stood talking with Donlon for a few minutes. Her name was Nancy.

  “You never quit, do you,” Wilson said as they crossed the street to the car. The day had grown darker and the wind was sharp against their faces.

  “If I quit I’d be dead. Anyway, she wasn’t bad.”

  It was always the same with Donlon. His taste in clothes, clubs, and friends was subtle, fastidious, even a little archaic, but his eye for women was indiscriminate. One seemed to have no relation to the other. Secretaries, restaurant hostesses, cocktail lounge waitresses, even a bag girl in a Fairfax supermarket once when they’d been on their way to the farm—they were all fair game for Donlon, who was constantly on the prowl, not for immediate success but for an eventual one. Two, three, maybe four visits, and then on a rainy night, business slow, the customers’ faces grown dull, the talk monotonous, the feet tired, Donlon would be there, arriving alone near closing time. Women bored or lonely with their own lives found his more seductive; they brought him alive as well; but to Wilson there was something sad about it. It was hard to tell Donlon’s age now—he might have been forty-five or fifty-five—but in a few years the mystery would be gone, the adulterous intent more nakedly revealed by the wrinkled neck, the dab of hair color, or the denture lines around the mouth. And one evening in a bar or restaurant after too many drinks, he would betray himself to a woman happier or more independent than she had any right to be in Donlon’s bachelor book; she would react, humiliating him in front of a few late customers, and that would be the end of the Ed Donlon he had known. He wondered who would be left to pick up the pieces.

  They drove west for three miles and turned down a narrow lane sunk in a deep roadbed dug out by centuries of carriage and wagon travel. A few miles beyond, they turned into a narrower secondary road that gave way to gravel as it meandered along a wide creekbed. Stone fences lined the verges, grown over with Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and honeysuckle.

  “He likes his privacy, doesn’t he?” Wilson said.

  “It’s his freedom.”

  They drove across a narrow stone bridge, past a gatehouse with a shake roof, where a wooden sign—Boxhill Farm—hung from the eaves. The gravel road climbed between two stone fences lined with shaggy cedar trees. Black Angus grazed along the flank of the hill. They passed a pond fringed with dry cattails, an old springhouse and a few weathered loafing sheds, and climbed the slope toward the distant hill where the tall stone manor house stood in a grove of oak, maple, and pine facing west toward the blue-gray haze of the Shenandoah. The road was paved within the second cattle guard and the hilltop partially enclosed by English boxwood that showed their age in the ragged yellow growth at the base of the trunks.

  Donlon parked the BMW in an asphalted parking area in front of a three-car garage. A mud-splattered Dodge station wagon, a Jaguar sedan, and a farm truck loaded with cordwood were parked in the open area.

  “This is hunt country, so don’t ask about the horses or you’ll get the tour,” Donlon warned as they climbed the stone steps toward the flagstone walk. Down the slope behind the rear terrace Wilson saw a stone guest cottage, a greenhouse, and a stable. A chestnut stallion was being unsaddled by a stablehand in the open door. The fields beyond were cross-fenced and held a dozen grazing thoroughbreds. “We’d be here all night.”

  As they approached the stone house, Wilson could smell the faint acidity of the ancient boxwoods and the sharp tingle of wood smoke. Rhododendron, azalea, and holly trees concealed the front of the house. A girl in riding jodhpurs and hacking boots reached the flagstone courtyard as they did, climbing the walk from the other direction. Her cheeks were flushed and she carried a suede jacket over her shoulder. Despite the chill, her arms were bare. “Hi,” she called. “You just get here?”

  “Just now,” Donlon said. “Jennifer, isn’t it?”

  “Sure, just like last time. He’s been waiting for you.”

  She opened the paneled white door under the fanlight and stood aside. “He’s probably in the back study behind the library, where he usually is. Don
’t tell him you saw me; I’m not supposed to come in this way.”

  Wilson followed Donlon into a warm, dim interior fragrant with wax and wood polish. A gray-coated houseman, as small as a groom or jockey, stood just inside the door. As they passed in, he moved the door closed behind them, pausing finally to peer out at Angus McVey’s granddaughter, who was still outside, struggling with her boots. “Come on, Fletcher, give me a break,” she said. “I’m late.”

  He didn’t move, looking at her lugubriously. The thick gray hair was parted in the middle and dipped down over his forehead on each side, like gull wings. Beneath the alcohol-coarsened nose he wore a full handlebar mustache. Wilson had the impression he’d just stepped from behind the bar of an 1890 Bowery saloon or the daguerreotype of the original Abner Doubleday baseball team. Under the gray cotton jacket he wore a white shirt without a collar. He was small and gnarled, but the hand closing the door was larger than Haven Wilson’s.

  “Come on, Fletcher,” Jennifer called. “Be a pal. I’ve got my boots off now.”

  He relented, opened the door a crack, and peered out. “Last time.”

  “Last time,” she promised.

  He swung the door open and she slipped in, ran lightly across the hall, carrying her boots, and up the staircase.

  “This is Haven Wilson,” Donlon said.

  Fletcher nodded mutely and led them back along the center hall below the staircase. “He’s been waiting,” he said. The ancient pine floors were lustrous and unmarred. Wilson fell in behind Donlon, keeping to the beige runner. Above the chair rail, the white paneled wall held a half dozen brown ancestral portraits, one of whom, Wilson thought, bore a surprising resemblance to Edward VII. On a small cherry table at the rear of the hall was a mounted brass hunting horn under glass.

  As they crossed through a rear sitting room with white sofas, white chairs, and a deep-pile carpet, Fletcher broke the silence. He was wearing old white tennis sneakers and moved like a cat, without a sound. “Haven’t seen you since the Crofton Cup.” His head seemed to float through the dimness. “Had one at Charles Town the other night,” he continued, opening a heavy white door. “A sure thing.”