by W. T. Tyler
Now he heard luggage bumping up the stairs, whispers, sly laughter. Then low voices and the clink of glasses. The ceiling was dark. What strange constellations were wheeling overhead? He strained to listen. A creak of bedsprings? He sat up immediately. Still more? Now a bed banging. He flung the covers aside and leaped out. Two’s company, three’s a carousel.
Wait for me!
“Don’t be baroque.” Jane reacted angrily, escorting him back down the stairs from Brian’s old room, where he’d discovered them making up the bed she intended to occupy for the time being.
A prisoner again in his own bed, he’d expected her to lock the door behind her this time. She didn’t.
He was disappointed.
12.
Nick Straus had gone to see Leyton Fischer that snowy evening to apologize. It was a sad house. A faint musty odor hovered on the air—old furniture, old rugs, old brass, old memories—a melancholy interment watched over by this waspish caretaker with his sprained right foot in a ski sock. He’d slipped on the icy curb outside that morning and painfully twisted his ankle. The rooms of the first floor were unused, the furniture protected by white dust covers. Fischer led him to the large study at the back of the house. The bay window looked out over a dark rear garden. Bookshelves lined the walls, a small mound of coal glowed cherry red in the fireplace beyond the brass fender.
“I came to apologize,” Nick told him. “I’m sorry to have involved you in this and I came to apologize.”
“You needn’t. I understand—certainly I understand. The time had come, I suppose.” Fischer’s gray hair was damply combed and he wore a dark blazer and an ascot.
“I simply wanted to bring a few absurd facts to official attention.”
“Of course; don’t apologize. Would you like a cocktail, maybe some sherry?” Decanters of sherry and port sat on the nearby table, both less than a quarter full. A small puddle of wine lay next to a nearby glass with a drop of liquid in the bottom.
Nick declined.
Fischer didn’t repeat the offer. He refilled his glass with a trembling hand. More drops leaked to the table. “I probably should have left years ago—after ’62. The truth is it’s been terribly lonely since Celia died.”
He sat down in the leather chair nearby, opposite Nick. They sat in silence for a minute. “The truth is it won’t matter what you did. The people you intended it for are incapable of dealing with these problems, intellectually incapable. In the end this nation will get exactly what it deserves.”
Nick watched him drink and then put the glass aside.
“The moral equivalent of an enlightened foreign policy would be a Beethoven string quartet, I suppose. I once put it to them in those terms.”
“To them?”
“In 1962, during the Cuban crisis, when I was working in the basement of the White House, the NSC. We were trying to orchestrate—that was the word we were using”—he smiled wanly—“‘orchestrate’ our response to Khrushchev’s missiles in Cuba: Navy, Air Force, Army, the remnants of the Cuban brigades, British, French, NATO, and so forth. This is what I told them. I said it required a sensitivity, moral as well as intellectual, that was quite beyond these crude instruments available to us. I said this at a meeting in the White House situation room. A subcabinet official lifted his finger and pointed at me. ‘From now on, you’re for it, and I don’t want to hear another word.’ He didn’t. After the crisis, I was sent over to State. I’ve kept my silence ever since.”
“I didn’t know that,” Nick said. “I’m sorry. I should have.”
“There’s no reason you should have known,” Fischer said, with a trace of annoyance. “Please don’t be pious, Nick. The course we’re setting for ourselves will end in disaster. There are people other than yourself who know this. I’ve known it for twenty years.”
A rosebush tapped against the bay window at Leyton Fischer’s back, moving with the blowing snow. A gardenia in final bloom with drops of water on its petals floated curiously in a silver bowl on the table in front of the window, like some offering to someone departed. Nick heard the wind trapped in the courtyard.
“… bankruptcy or catastrophe, that’s where it will lead. The treasury exhausted, the economy broken, that’s where they’re taking us. Withdrawal will follow, total withdrawal to these shores; it’s inevitable. We’ll be out of Europe in four years.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that.”
“It’s the stupidity you despise—the dullness, the mediocrity, the arrogance.” He looked away suddenly. “That’s the rage that grows. That’s what you feel. Someone once said of Carlyle that his rage was such that only the end of the world would consume it. That’s what one feels. If it were to happen, I would have absolutely no regrets, none whatsoever.”
“There are things that might be done,” Nick suggested.
“What? Nothing. It’s too late. We can no more change the situation than we can change medieval Europe.” He got to his feet, hobbled about a table, and stood at the bookcase on the far side of the fire. “Our knowledge of medieval Europe will tell you.” The book for which he was searching was too high to reach. “It’s based upon chronicles written by churchmen,” he continued, limping back to his chair, “by ecclesiastical sycophants whose belief influenced every fact they collected and every Latin sentence they wrote.” He refilled his sherry glass. “Now, of course, the view of medieval Europe as devoutly religious is indestructible, not because it’s true but because the documents by which we know it were written by those who believed it, who wanted others to believe it, and who were incapable of believing anything else. The same can now be said of the modern world about us—Soviet, Chinese, third world. We in Washington study a popular text written by barbarians.…”
It was the malice Nick found so ugly, the venom of all of those years. “I didn’t know you felt that so strongly,” he said after a minute.
“Why should you be surprised? You think as I do. Why do you suppose I kept telling DIA that you were their man when they were looking for an absolutely reliable Soviet analyst?”
“I’ve often wondered.”
“I knew your views were mine—a kind of double, able to do things I couldn’t. That in a moment of utter madness, your judgment could be relied on.”
“I’m sorry then, Leyton.”
Fischer still watched him disapprovingly. “You’ve always faced the same problems as I, the same prejudices. For others, my private and personal views have always been a problem. You learn to hide them. What choice did I have?”
“I understand that now.”
“I was a conscientious objector in ’41. My parents were Quakers. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Being Jewish, I suppose you’ve faced it all your life,” Fischer continued, and Nick Straus could think of nothing helpful to say. “I mean in the sense that your very existence is a problem, as it were,” he resumed randomly. “For others and for yourself. But wherein yours was inherited, mine was acquired,” he added, and then sipped from the glass. “You have no idea of the anguish in accepting such a burden. On the other hand, one should never look on suffering itself as proof of moral superiority. I dislike that kind of smugness,” he said. “Intensely. If that were the case, the barrios of Latin America would be full of saints, wouldn’t they?”
In that veiled look and that fatuous question, Nick Straus perceived the ugly truth about Leyton Fischer. He despised him, but he felt no anger, only pity. As in fact they are, he thought in reply. “I didn’t realize you were Catholic,” he said.
“Yes, shortly before Celia—”
He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“Yes, I understand. But in these times, I sometimes think everyone’s existence is problematical.”
“I was thinking more of uniqueness,” Fischer said dryly.
Nick Straus heard a breath from a tomb, the chilling exhalation of a mind that had long ceased to exist, unique the way an extinc
t nebula might have once been unique, now only a cold white fog on a dark photographic plate.
He crept down the narrow street in the light snow, invisible in the darkness yet touching his face and powdering his woolly shoulders. Because of the treacherous streets and the abandoned cars, he’d left his automobile across the river in Rosslyn. It was almost seven. As he began crossing the bridge, he heard the sound of a plane descending through the darkness overhead, but could see nothing, not even its navigation lights.
He hesitated. Was this to be the night an inbound jet lost its navigation beam and smashed into Key Bridge, a flaming Ferris wheel, Nick Straus the only pedestrian casualty? The conversation in Leyton Fischer’s rear study was so bizarre that it might have been a warning. He continued on. The river flowed under him, dark and invisible. As he approached the center, a sanding truck churned slowly by, following a snowplow, and the walkway vibrated oddly under his feet. The wind had died down, but his steps grew more cautious.
How could it be that those so capable, so intelligent, so decent, so alive to feelings in their friends and families, in a scrap of bureaucratic prose, a few bars of music, or lines of sentimental verse they treasured, could be so indifferent to the pain and degradation of so much of the life that shared this planet? How could it be? How could they commit themselves to barbaric strategies that promised so much more? How could it be that they could so hypocritically treasure their own personal anguish, like Leyton Fischer, as if it were some exquisite proof of their moral superiority, like a Renaissance masterpiece hung in the privacy of their study and only to be enjoyed there? Was moral sensitivity a private art gallery only the rich could afford, a novel by Proust only the intellectual could understand?
He looked back over the city as his steps slowed. The evidence was everywhere. One had only to look to see, to read to understand. Where is it all going, this madness? Where is it taking us? The offices were empty now, like the corridors, the committee rooms, the secret caucus chambers. The rituals were suspended—the bustle, the ceremony, the self-important routines, the thousand daily decisions that sustain each day anew and end it as they ended the last, no nearer, no farther, the promise always the same.
His footsteps had slowed to a stop. A second plane lumbered overhead; the wind was in his ears. Snowflakes dissolved against his cold cheeks.
Now he didn’t move. I’m not asking for miracles, he heard himself saying. I’m not asking that you reveal your mysteries so even the blind can see. I’m not asking for divine messengers or television miracles, some mysterious spacecraft descending on this city so that we can all recover our sense of the miraculous. I’m not asking for these things. All I’m asking is for some small sign that all this matters to you.
He had stopped at the center of the bridge. The wind was still in his ears. The snow flurries had diminished, but he didn’t notice. The cold was cruel, but still he waited. A moment passed, then another, but he continued to wait, looking back over the city.
Nothing. He heard nothing, only the wind. He moved away, ashamed, no longer sure whether the wetness in his eyes was from the wind, the snow, or something else; but then the reply came.
Consider the imagination as it must be, it said.
He stopped, head lifted, frozen in place, waiting.
Consider the imagination as it must be, it continued, not unique in one man but alive everywhere, unique in all—friends and enemies, those who suffer, those who don’t. Consider the imagination as it can only be in all its immensity, here and everywhere. Consider that and now tell me what miracle you want performed.
But he had nothing more to ask. The curtain of snow had lifted, the lights had everywhere brightened, as if from the descent of some radiant galactic vessel, and its miracle was there, spread out before him in the winter night.
Part Six
1.
Shy Wooster believed there were two Americas—the public America and the private America. The events of public America were everywhere on conspicuous display—on television and radio, in films, newspapers, magazines, books, the Congressional Record, in the speeches of its European critics, and the comic book imaginations of its fanatical enemies, like Fidel Castro and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The private America was everywhere hidden—in small towns, in factories and office buildings, on farms, in the hollows of Appalachia, the scrub country of South Carolina, or the rubble of the South Bronx—in short, in all those places where the burden of intolerable lives wasn’t numbered by the Iranian hostage clock once kept by American television newscasters.
He believed, moreover, that there was little relationship between the two. This was his despair. He knew that whatever public America’s occasional triumphs—as in electing one of their own, a movie actor, as President—the balance would ultimately return to private America.
The public America, like the television commercials that simulated it, was one of surfaces—garish colors, predatory purposes, contrived emotions, vulgar self-confession, climactic moments, and theatrical success. The private America, he knew from his own youth in rural South Carolina, was one of habit, routine, work, self-absorption, and solitude. To vindicate its existence, public America spent much of its time snooping about trying to determine what private America was thinking.
But even then—in the public opinion poll, the statistical survey, or the marketing study—private America remained elusive. When a private American greets a political pollster on his doorstep, he immediately lifts his voice into a quasi-public register, the answer supplied by the question.
“It’s like looking through a keyhole at another eyeball peeking back,” he’d often declared when public opinion sampling was undertaken by one of Bob Combs’s foundations. He put no faith in them.
The public opinion pollster would tell you that Americans had opinions about Poland, El Salvador, South Africa, and every other country recently in the headlines, but Shy Wooster wouldn’t.
“Live and let live, that’s what they think, and anyone who comes up with a different answer is lying to you,” he would insist. “You get the draft going again to send American soldiers to El Salvador or Saudi Arabia and you’ll find out right quick what they think of both of them places. Not worth one American life, that’s what. Live and let live. The same reason everybody down in South Carolina got so riled up when all those out-of-staters come down to South Carolina back in the fifties. We weren’t minding their bus’ness, how come they all come down there mindin’ ours? I tell you why. It was our self-respect they was stompin’ on.…”
Security, privacy, self-respect.
In his political notebook, Shy Wooster had once written a few lines that, in his opinion, defined the character of this private America the opinion-tasters and poll-takers were all the time trying to seduce out from behind the screen door. The vainglorious bunting the politicians draped themselves in and the lofty abstractions invoked by the intellectuals—words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “human” or “civil rights”—meant no more than a Sunday school anthem to private America. It was as experience, not abstraction, that their values were defined, and what they expected of their political institutions was simple and direct.
Most Americans keep a Bible in their homes but they don’t go running to look up chapter and verse every time they think a neighbor is sinning against them.
Not many Americans keep the Constitution or the Bill of Rights handy to check up on what Washington’s doing but they don’t have to. They know sure enough what they want, just three things: security, privacy, and self-respect. When someone in Washington goes to messing up and they’re getting a little less of any of these three, they’ll know right away and then they’ll get mad.
Politicians, bureaucrats, jurists, and social engineers who tampered with American institutions in such a way that any of the three were in jeopardy did so at their own peril. Government intervention in private life, as in the case of forced busing, violated two of these canons: privacy and self-respect; gun control viola
ted all three. Welfare and free food stamps violated the workingman’s self-respect: he worked for the bread on his table, why not everyone else? The Vietnam yippies had also violated his self-respect, just as the Iranian mobs had violated the nation’s, for which Carter had paid the price.
And so it went in Shy Wooster’s estimation—over two hundred years of national experience embodied in just three simple words. Private America wasn’t interested in what it might be but in what it was, despite the clamor of those who insisted they be something else. Hardly enough to create an imperium or to lead a global crusade; not enough even to send a few battalions to El Salvador.
But enough so that when Shy Wooster saw the letter to Senator Bob Combs from the Mount Zion Reformed Baptist Church announcing its congregation’s forthcoming visit to Washington by chartered bus, he was troubled: his security, his privacy, his self-respect. Included among the visitors’ names was that of a Miss Bertha Jackson.
2.
On her last day in Washington, Rita Kramer appeared in Haven Wilson’s office, already in transit, her hair shorter, her luggage ready to be packed. Last week’s snow still lay in a gray batting along the curbs and walks. A winter dimness was in the streets and a surflike dolor in the dark sky rolling endlessly over the rooftops like the scud of the Atlantic east of Chincoteague or Hatteras, but the temperature was mild, a feathery autumn dampness in the air. Artie Kramer and the others had returned to Los Angeles. She was flying to New Jersey to spend some time with her relatives before she returned to California.
“Do you want to tell me voluntarily or do I have to drag it out of you?” she said as she sat down. “It was a joke right from the beginning, but I kept a straight face; so did you. So what did Peter Rathbone have up his sleeve, sending Artie here? Maybe Iran made a lot of us patriots all of a sudden, but that doesn’t mean we’re all going to be Secretary of Defense. So what was it all about?”
