A Family Trust

by Ward Just

  Amos Rising, always there. I am twenty-three now and really remember him only vaguely I remember him very well physically, the busy eyebrows and the big belly, but less well in other ways. There are isolated incidents, the train and the contents of the desk drawer, but not the whole life—or the whole man. Seven years dead now, he’s forgotten by everyone except the old-timers. In the memories of the old-timers he’ll live forever, a permanent standard of conscience. And of course they believe “the I has never been the same since.” So if you want to know why the Midwest is as it is, its landlocked sense of inferiority and rejection coupled with an equally strong sense of virtue and destiny, you could do worse than study the editors of its newspapers and the geography and climate they live with, the one even and the other extreme. That motionless, level, fertile place; nothing round, no curves; mature, not ripe ...

  He asked, “Did it?”

  “Did what?”

  “Did the revolution come to Dement?”

  She laughed and said, “No, of course not. Not if you mean workers heaving paving stones at Sheriff Haight’s tanks. But it isn’t the same, either. It isn’t any better, I don’t think. I’m not as close there now ... as I was.”

  “It’s a wonderful story. Would your father tell it the same way?”

  “No,” Dana said, “I don’t know how he’d tell it. Not that way, though. My father is not an introspective man, never was. Everyone in my family is one of a kind.” She laughed. “Unlike other families, of course.”

  He was silent a moment, lost in his own thoughts. “I can’t imagine it, growing up inside a newspaper family. It means the family lives every day with the news, getting it, writing it, printing it. Or not printing it. Literally living off the news, as an army lives off the land—”

  Dana smiled. She did not remember it that way. She remembered sitting at dinner, listening to her parents talk, and then the ringing of the telephone. A sour look passing between her father and mother, and her father rising to answer the phone. And his return to the table; someone wanted a story kept out of the newspaper. A divorce, usually, or an arrest for drunken driving. They had tried to telephone Amos and he was unavailable so they called his son. I know your father would never approve publication of a purely private matter such as this ... Her mother shaking her head. Her brother asking. Who is it? What happened? And the subject changed.

  He said, “When you think about it, it isn’t so different from New York. Allen Dulles or somebody calls up an editor of the Times and asks him to withhold a piece of information. ‘it would not be in the national interest to publish this.’ And the editor always says, ‘Of course.’ Just like your father with the drunken driver.”

  “Except Daddy sometimes said no.”

  “Welt, it would have to be truly in the national interest,” he said with a smile.

  “Is that true? What Dulles does?” She was surprised, she’d never heard of that.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “And they’d withhold?”

  “Of course they’d withhold.” He moved his legs languidly, stretching them in the grass. “My God, if it’s a question of national security. It’s a question of the country. Editors are patriotic, like most other people.”

  “I guess so,” she said.

  “So.” He looked at her, nudging her foot with his own. “So you’ve followed in the old man’s footsteps after all, it’s very heartwarming—”

  “I have not,” she said, indignant.

  “Well, what do you call what you’re doing?”

  “Not that,” Dana said. She sat up straight. “Not by a long shot. What I do is completely different, my own work. I’m not electing anybody to anything and wouldn’t if I could, The farthest thing from my mind, nothing farther. I would never get involved in anything like that, never,”

  “Um,” he said.

  She said, “You’re way off on that.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It so happens I don’t believe in patterns in families,”

  “No,” he said. “One can see that. Of course not. Everyone in your family is one of a kind, unique ...” He held up a two-inch-thick pile of paper, long sheets secured by a metal clasp. “What do we call this?”

  “I edit books,” she said. “Now I am editing your book, to the extent that you will let me. That has nothing to do with what he did, nothing at all.”

  McGee stretched his legs again. “I see.”

  “I am not a newspaper editor or publisher,” she said evenly. “I work for a book publisher, from whom I take orders. I am not interested in running the city of New York. Withholding military secrets. Even in selecting the next state’s attorney. I edit books. Fiction, except for you. For you I’ve made an exception. Noah said to me, ‘We’re in a lot of trouble with the McGee. The old fella is confused, needs help—’”

  “Who, me?”

  “‘—needs help with the organization. Too much between the lines,’ Noah says. Needs help in leading the reader. Making sense.” She began to laugh. “Of his distinguished career.”

  He rolled over on his stomach and put a blade of grass in her mouth. “I sort of touched a nerve there, didn’t I?” He watched her smile and shrug. Then he touched her forehead, drawing his finger down to the tip of her nose. “You’ve really done a job on that thing.” He pointed to the manuscript lying between them. “Really, I mean that. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a writer.”

  She nodded, pleased, and took his hand. Then she said what she always said, “All the material was there.”

  “Between the lines.”

  “Some of it’s still between the lines.”

  “Mn,” he said.

  “We’re going to have to bring some of it up to the surface. More is between the lines than ought to be. And some of it isn’t even between the lines.” She sat up, facing him now, brushing her hair back in a nervous gesture. “It’s going to hurt the book. And it’s not going to do you much good either.”

  “Mn,” he said.

  “Mn, yourself.”

  “Well, I know it and it can’t be helped.” He smiled at her, looking up into her eyes, “I will take my basic text from our distinguished man of letters, Mr. Amos Rising. It’s an edited reality and it can’t be any other way.”

  “Why did you want to write it in the first place? I mean want to so badly,” She asked the question softly, hoping its softness would lull him into a direct answer.

  He thought a moment. “Because I thought there was enough interesting stuff. And I could hint at the other. I just wanted to get it down, even as hints. I guess,” he said, touching her arm. “I wanted something on paper, even something imperfect or anyway not quite whole. Because it’s all coming out someday, in some form, and I want my own record.”

  “Even hedged.”

  “Even hedged,” he said. “It’s better than no record at all.”

  “What’s there is tantalizing.”

  He lit a cigarette and pulled the wine bottle from the cooler and filled both their glasses. “Yeah.”

  “I mean really tantalizing.”

  “Well then?”

  “It’ll sell like crazy to your people. People who have a real interest and understanding. But it won’t sell generally and a lot of ordinary readers are going to be, frankly, baffled.”

  “But you’ll publish.”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “It’s publishable, more than publishable. In the first place it’s literate, which most memoirs aren’t. And commercially, your name guarantees a certain sale. As I say, to people who have a professional interest and I suppose there’s a small”—she smiled—“general public. Ike’s hotshot boy ambassador.”

  “Wunderkind, please.”

  She sipped the wine, cold on her tongue. “Right. And we could get lucky, Some book-review editor might assign the thing to someone who can read between the lines. A little guesswork here and these,” She made a face; that part of the business did not interest her. “But I don’t t
hink so. You see, what’s here ... the raw material. If you’d just fill in the blanks a little, just a couple of blanks.” She looked at him, knowing she was losing her point. “A little more about Hungary. Just a bit more information about Albania. Perhaps not quite so much about the agricultural failures in—when was it?”

  “Nineteen fifty-seven.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very important, the point being—”

  “No doubt. But you understand. This is just a reader’s opinion. My guess is that the U—2, is worth more than a long footnote. Perhaps—two footnotes? The second one could explain the first one.”

  He began to laugh. “Mn.”

  “But-it-can’t-be-done.”

  “No,” he said.

  “This-is-highly-classified-material-which-might-damage-the-national-interest.”

  “Well put.”

  “Well, it could have been a barn-burner.” She clinked glasses with him. “A book of the month, the whole kit and caboodle.” Then, “You said it’II all come out someday and you want your own record. Why do you want your own record?”

  “Oh,” he said. “For you. For me.”

  “Your kids?”

  “Them, too,” he said.

  “Will you tell me about it sometime?”

  He nodded. Yes.

  “But not for a while.”

  He shook his head. She hated to let it get away but she had no choice. He wasn’t yielding any more today than he yielded yesterday or last week. She believed in her heart he was making a mistake; he was too cautious and circumspect. He still thought of himself as a diplomat. She could only guess at his reasons, though instinctively she sympathized with him. That was her trouble; she always saw all sides to all questions. And God knows she understood the principle of edited reality and keeping chaos at bay. She understood the impulse to protect the center at all costs. But it was disastrous for an author to begin his career with a compromise. Of course he wasn’t an author in the strict sense of the word; he was a lawyer who had become a diplomat and was now a lawyer again. She touched his cheek, then ran her hand over his temples. “You’re going to be prematurely bald.”

  “We all are, the entire family. All McGees. It’s a pattern. An inherited characteristic. All McGees are alike.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Balls.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. Those as well.”

  She said quickly, “I wish you’d come back with me, just this weekend. You can make an excuse. Just two days, we’d be back on Monday.”

  “Can’t,” he said. “The land’s too flat.”

  “You could use some flattand.”

  “Gives me claustrophobia.”

  “And Belgrade didn’t?”

  He thought, You kid too much. He said, “No, in Belgrade it was the jitters.” He looked at her hair, pale red where the sun’s rays hit it, and at her fine legs and ankles, and the thin gold chain around her right ankle. He lifted it with his fingernail and scratched her ankle and she put her arms around his neck, pulling him to her. She muttered, “It isn’t such a bad feeling.” He didn’t know what she meant, what idea she had in mind. She said, “The jitters.” She rolled over on top of him, her arms strong around his neck. She smelled of grass and sweat and tasted of wine. He tickled her back with a long blade of grass and she moved closer to him, shuddering against him. He slipped his hands inside her bikini, her bottom warm and slippery to his touch. She unhooked her bra and let it fall away, then knelt above him. He kissed the inside of her thighs and she sighed, moving, leaning over him now, her long hair covering his face. He kissed the underside of her breasts and she craned her neck, breathing hard.

  Behind him the grass of the lawn gave way to sand, green suddenly to white, and the blue of the ocean beyond. A man and a woman were strolling at the edge of the surf, arm in arm, laughing; their heads moved in harmony. He kissed her again, one eye on the couple walking on the beach. He wished they would turn toward the lawn, though they would be unable to see him and Dana. He and Dana were below the low rise where the lawn met the sand and of course there was the castle. This most extraordinary castle, there was nothing else like it in the world anywhere. It had four turrets and a crenellated battlement and a moat, though the moat was dry. Any architect would be impressed by the irregular fenestration, the openings alternately round and square. They had tried for water, and had dug the moat two feet deep; but water could not be found at that depth. He reached over his shoulder and put his finger through one of the round windows. She moved to look, then stretched and put her own finger through the adjoining window. Her naked breasts touched the grass, her sun-tanned skin smooth and alive against the green. The pads of their fingers touched and then she began to scratch him lightly with her nail. She concentrated as hard as she was able, watching their two fingers touching. Gently they widened the windows until they each had two fingers inside. Four fingers astride and moving. She thought it was a just-bearable agony, and after a moment they both began to laugh. Then she moved away from him and lay on her back, eyes closed. He kissed her closed eyes and. she moved the palm of her hand lightly on his back. Her loose hair was spread out in a fan on the grass, a sun-burst matching her bikini.

  He looked at her and touched her mouth, as slippery as porcelain. The wind was freshening and her skin was no longer wet. But her body had not lost its tension. The breeze swept the blond hairs on her forearm, ruffling them. Her eyes were turned slightly away from him, aimed over his shoulder at the sea. The beach was deserted now and he could see small whitecaps and a sloop farther out. She rose slowly and extended a hand to him. His breath caught, muscles everywhere contracting and sinking slightly, awed by her flowering vitality. A swim before dinner, she said. A swim together, She pulled him up and they walked around the sand castle and down the dune to the water.

  THE BEACH HOUSE belonged to his father. They’d used it every weekend for a month, driving out from the city on Friday night and returning on Sunday. It was remote, a three-room cottage with an incongruous patch of lawn leading to the dunes and the beach. Arriving at last light they’d immediately race to the sea and swim together, washing away all traces of New York City. Then she’d cook dinner, usually wearing nothing but her bikini bottom, and they’d dine on the deck, watching the stars and each other and making every kind of love with words and gestures. At those times she would tell him everything about herself, her life came tumbling every which way from her memory and he would listen, rapt. He could draw anything from her; she loved confiding in him, a man who invited confidence, his eyes never wavering and his emotions always at perfect pitch. Telling her own stories, she found herself funnier than she ever thought she could be, and forgiving. Talking to him, she began to understand her family; who they were and who she was and what they all believed in. They would straddle the bench at the edge of the deck, facing each other; finishing a story she would begin to laugh and put her hands on his face, watch him smile and say something wry, and they would collapse into each other. Then she wanted to swallow him up, have him inside her forever, his body filling her inside, warming and consoling and loving only her.

  Later, in the big bedroom, windows open to the sea, they would lie naked in the darkness and explore each other. She was not experienced with men and had never before loved a man in stillness without limits of time or circumstance. They were unhurried in the beach house, talking and making love often until dawn; then rushing from the room across the sand to the water, golden at sunrise. Things surprised her: She had been in some way blind and insensible, her emotions guarded. She felt herself open wide. The first night she touched him she was astonished, smiling first, then laughing softly with delight. She had thought always of men’s dimensions, their size. But touching him she did not think of that at all. She had turned to him and whispered, “It’s so heavy.” And he too had laughed; no woman had ever expressed it to him that way before,

  She supposed he invited confidence because he withheld so much himself She found hi
m mysterious in the best possible way, the result (she was sure) of New England reserve and a disorderly childhood and the career he had chosen. She could not imagine him discussing her with anyone, any more than he discussed himself. What they had was private between them. She believed her life was secure with him, like a rare book with a bibliophile or a painting with a connoisseur. And he desired her. in her life she had not known passionate love. He desired her with a ferocity that frightened her until she equaled it. She was enchanted, discovering this man by inches as she discovered herself.

  In many ways they were worlds apart. His father was a New York lawyer. His mother had died when he was five; there were no memories of her. McGee lived in Boston, around the corner from his wife and their three children; he and the wife were separated. She told him if he went overseas for Eisenhower she would leave him, and she was true to her word. In New York on weekends, he would stay with Dana. in her apartment and they would explore the city together. The man she’d been seeing before McGee took her to plays and art exhibits and she’d come to know and appreciate the city’s cultural life. A Beethoven quartet gave as much pleasure as “Milenberg Joys.” McGee had little taste for the theater and none for music. Instead he took her to the fights when there was a good one or to the movies, usually a foreign-language import. It surprised her that he liked the fights and after the first one she found she didn’t mind them. The ambience was hot and colourful and exciting to her. McGee was wonderful to be with and New York all she had imagined. They always went to Shor’s alter the fight to watch the Broadway sports and their women. McGee said he was not “in love with” violence but understood the various techniques of boxing, and enjoyed watching professionals.