Freddy and Fredericka

by Mark Helprin

  A person of this nature is not partial to dancing, if only because, in his eyes, things that move—rising dust, falling water, rampant horses—tend to still or slow. He is too contemplative to dance. But Fredericka had come a long way into Freddy’s world, and he thought it would be ungenerous not to reciprocate. Just as certain things had unfolded for her, so they did for him, in the dentist’s office that now was theirs in Siliphant, Nebraska, in a fire of prairie heat.

  They had an old gramophone—a Victrola—that played 78s and took a while to warm up. But when it did and its vacuum tubes glowed strongly, Freddy put on a ballad sung by a woman long gone, a gentle, measured progression in a minor key. When Freddy took Fredericka in his arms and they waltzed slowly across the room, time stopped within the sheltering vault of this music. Their slow turning built around them a chamber in which they found themselves beneath an imagined deep blue dome in which was embedded a cloth of gently shining stars. And that was of little moment compared with the dishevelled, heat-curled fall of Fredericka’s hair, her wise and tender expression, and the great trust that had arisen between them. Who was this woman who had become so wise, sagacious, and true? She was easily as wonderful as the transcendent combats of which he had dreamt from his earliest and most despondent childhood, and she was not a dream.

  NOT LONG AFTER the dance with Fredericka that in Freddy’s memory would always be bracketed by white curtains moving on the wind and lifted on the air as easily as doves, there was a different kind of dancing in a hotel in Omaha. The dancers were young women in white cowboy hats, tasselled white boots, and sequined bathing suits that sparkled violently in red, white, and blue. They moved in perfect synchrony to a thundering beat and the enticing clash of cymbals. In light so bright and music so overwhelming, they were white hot, an Omaha Niagara, and they were dancing for Dewey Knott. But Dewey Knott himself did not dance, and neither did Dot. Dewey Knott did not dance, however, in a different way than Dot Knott did not dance.

  Dot Knott did not dance because she was as shy as a little girl, and when asked to dance, she would explode in cascades of nervous laughter that conveyed very strongly not only amused embarrassment but an all-encompassing fear and panic that wrenched her soul. Everyone knew that to make Dot Knott sweat all you had to do was to ask her onto the floor, and since day one, Dewey Knott’s political opponents had sent operatives to his fund-raisers to ask Dot to dance.

  But, for Dewey, not dancing was quite different. When he was alone in his office and had just won a primary or another term, he would put on music and dance with such unmitigated fury that it made the paroxysms of voodoo look like Calvin Coolidge at nap time. He would prance across the floor, jump on his desk, put on hats, throw things in the air, writhe like a snake, and howl like an owl. On the rare occasions that Dot stumbled upon this, she would say, in great distress, “Oh, Dewey!” and leave the room. But it didn’t discourage Dewey. Risking that C-Span had placed a hidden camera in his Capitol rooms, he would hop and jump the whole long length of marble in the reception area. He may have been crippled in politics by his senseless honesty, a true love of country, and the oratorical skills of a Popsicle, but he could dance the pants off anyone in Washington.

  Never, never, never, however, in public. His ability to experience ecstasy in dance was none of anyone’s business. Perhaps his hesitation honoured an ancient Nebraskan taboo brought to the grasslands by the wagon trains. Perhaps it was simple modesty. Whatever it was, Dewey Knott would not dance in public.

  Dewey had found the strength to go against the conventional wisdom, and had been inspired to eschew public display, in an essay someone had clipped for him from a theological journal, an essay about public dancing and Western morals—the author of which had just learned to dance in the town where Dewey Knott had been pulled from his mother’s womb and slapped on his behind so that he would take his first, magnificent, shocking breath of air, upon which followed his last decisive cri de coeur.

  But he could not make his views known to the public. Had he simply stated the case from his heart, where it lay, he might have rocketed in the polls and cut the president’s lead in half. And had C-Span actually had a camera hidden to record his hops, his shaking, his spinning, his leaps into the air and onto his desk, he would have eaten up the forty-point lag and pulled way ahead. But he didn’t know this, and even had he known it he wouldn’t have taken the risk, and even had he taken the risk he would have delayed so long and prepared so carefully that he would have danced stiffly and self-consciously, killed the whole thing, plummeted in the polls, and lost the election without carrying even Siliphant.

  What was the point of fighting when you were forty points behind? The point was in the fight itself. He refused to give up, he was so dogged, because he was an honest man who had chosen a dishonest way of life and, out of a sense of honour, patriotism, and obligation, he had slogged through that life, hating its every falsity, and hating himself when it overtook him. Losing was, therefore, the kind of punishment that purified him and restored the balance of honour that he needed to survive. He was grateful, then, for every form of distress. President Self had no idea of anything except that he had to be powerful and adored. Dewey understood that having power and being adored was, as Dewey himself would have put it, “a bucket of shit.” He was in it for the suffering.

  That evening in Omaha, in front of a thousand Nebraska Republicans, Dewey Knott, or George Washington, or Cleopatra, or whoever he was, intended to give a defining (which he pronounced deafening) speech to rescue his gangrenous campaign. True, he had already given half a dozen other deafening speeches to rescue his gangrenous campaign, and each had only made things worse, but they had been written by his former chief speechwriter, Campbell Mushrom, which meant that each ended in the phrase, “With liberty and justice for all.” And each described Senator Knott as a “mild-mannered legislator,” who had come to “Gotham by the Potomac,” from “a far-off place, to serve the American ideal.”

  Most of Dewey’s advisers loved this approach and thought it made Dewey seem truly extraordinary and heroic, or, as Campbell would say, “like a man of steel.” But Dewey looked at the polls, and canned Mushrom, although Russel Haverstraw, who replaced him, wanted to exult in his new position, and hired Campbell back as a luggage carrier for Dot’s valises, a very cruel thing not only because he had to be strapped to the top of the car but because the things he carried were very heavy, which endangered his heart and made him sweat a lot, which plastered down his waterfall of immense curly black hair into two page-boy halves as big as tennis rackets, which caused him to look like a wretched medieval varlet, or, from the perspective of the Secret Service helicopter above the motorcade, and because Mushrom was six feet six, a horribly scrawny deer or some sort of extra-terrestrial moose.

  The new speech was to be unlike all others. It was written for delivery in Siliphant, where Dewey’s heart supposedly was. As everyone in the United States knew, Dewey’s heart was on K Street. But, like the contents of reliquaries, politicians are given the benefit of the doubt, for reasons of state and because one of the sustaining fictions of American life is that beneath the shifting scenery that has replaced his soul a politician has bedrock that can be detected by watching him on television as he walks through his hometown with his jacket off.

  He was supposed to deliver the speech in Siliphant, but he refused: “Omaha. Nobody knows Siliphant. Omaha’s big. Got a bigger auditorium.” That’s all he would say, and no one could sway him. But Siliphant was his hometown, not Omaha. People associated Omaha with dainty octogenarian trainers of animals, nuclear weapons, and big bloody cuts of beef. Siliphant, by contrast, was Americana. The shots they had of Siliphant, always with at least one corner emblazoned with the passionate colours of the flag, went so well with ersatz Aaron Copland music that the film editors had to put Saran Wrap over their mixing controls lest their tears short-circuit their efforts. It had to be Siliphant. The speechwriting team almost went on strike. After all, they
had produced this masterpiece only for a particular setting. “Nope,” said Dewey, “Omaha.”

  The newsmagazines and networks hired professors and political commentators to figure out why, and they came up with all sorts of reasons. By giving the speech in Omaha, Dewey was putting the Russians on notice, just as one of their leaders would be sending the same rudimentary signal were he to give an important speech from the epicentre of their ICBM fields. It was the candidate’s way of asserting himself without any possibility of misinterpretation. (The proponents of this interpretation did not concern themselves with the fact that the speech was to introduce Dewey’s proposal that Medicare cover cosmetic surgery for exterminators.) Others claimed that he was making a statement about the quality of transience in American history, Americans’ lack of roots, the near but decisive distances between kith and kin, hearth and home, and hell and high water.

  In fact, Dewey did leave Siliphant, and his heart was there no longer. But he remembered. He remembered his father and his mother, and his childhood and young manhood before he moved into the public eye. He didn’t want to use Siliphant to attain the presidency. Siliphant was a town, full (not so full any more) of good people. They could film it, because it was a public place. They could talk about it. Reporters could go there and ask people about how Dewey drank milkshakes or went to the graveyard on Halloween, but he himself would not go there, because, when he did, he was too moved by the past, and it knocked him akilter.

  Dewey was chatting with Dot and trying to eat his fourteen-inch-thick steak when suddenly he went white. Though his body locked, his hands grasped the thick linen tablecloth and began to bunch it up in folds, which knocked over a glass or two and moved the plates of some very important contributors.

  “Dewey?” Dot asked, in cold terror. “Dewey?”

  They didn’t know whether he was having a heart attack or required the Heimlich manoeuvre. Whatever it was, the most important thing, more important even than keeping him alive, was that the press had to be kept away. But two hundred television cameras stood nearby on their massive tripods, like the weapons of alien invaders, topped by blinding lights and manned on the dark side by liberals in ponytails, beards, and leather jackets.

  “Dewey?” Dot asked again, thinking that she might soon be a widow.

  Then he unlocked, gave a violent shudder, and reeled, except that he held the table and went nowhere. It had taken all his discipline to keep from crying out.

  “Dot,” he said, “my tooth. I must have an abscess or something. I don’t know if I can stay conscious. When I bit into that steak, it all came apart. My right upper molar. The jaw must be shot. Who the hell knows what’s in there.”

  “What about the speech, Senator? Can you give the speech?” whispered Haverstraw, a nasty preppy who wore tweed pyjamas. “Perhaps you oughtn’t to. You’re to rise in two minutes.”

  “I can do it,” said Dewey. “Bring me a can of Scotch.”

  “It doesn’t come in cans.”

  “Fill a Coke can, moron. That’s what we do in the Senate.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Been doing it for years. Why do you think the Senate’s like it is?”

  “I mean, that you want it now?”

  “No. Make it two cans.”

  “Birds?” Haverstraw asked, as a witticism.

  “Birds? Whadaya mean, birds? Get me two cans of Scotch. Hurry up. I’m dying.”

  Haverstraw sprinted to the bar, took two cans of Coke and a bottle of Scotch, stepped behind a curtain, and emptied the cans. Half the Fourth Estate—perhaps, therefore, the Second Estate—upon seeing two trouser legs and a cascade of foaming liquid coming down between them, came to the conclusion that Dewey’s chief speechwriter was very ill. Haverstraw got the Scotch to Dewey just as the lights dimmed (President Self had said, cruelly, that dimming had been invented in Dewey’s honour), the noise began to abate, and a spotlight anxiously searched the room. As a harsh amplified voice introduced “the Republican nominee, the senior senator from our own great state of Nebraska, the majority leader of the United States Senate, and the next president of the United States,” Dewey Knott imbibed two pints of Scotch like an elephant eating a peanut. Dewey wasn’t a drinker, and could not hold his liquor, but Dot guided him to the podium, her smile rigid and moon-like, every muscle in her body as tense as the spring of a mousetrap.

  She thought that all might go well if Dewey could complete his text before the alcohol was cleared from his pancreas, or wherever it went just before it screwed up your political career. But what she didn’t know, and every pickup-driving, backward-baseball-capped, pimply adolescent boy in America knows, is that Scotch from a Coke can is, as in his glory days Campbell Mushrom would have put it, “faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive.” By the time Dewey Knott grabbed the lectern to steady himself in the world that was twirling all around him, he felt able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.

  As he gripped the helm and tried to calm the rolling seas, his supporters swayed with him out of something more than politeness: it was like a cross between a tennis match and a group of Girl Scouts singing “Kumbaya” at a campfire. The first thing he said was, “That’s why they write it down on little bieces” (he said bieces, not pieces) “of paper, so you can read it no matter what happens. It’s like the Constitution. It’s on paper, too.” He paused while his eyes swam fifty yards. “So you won’t forget it. Right?”

  “Right!” his audience shouted.

  Haverstraw called out, in a whisper, “Senator, just read the speech.”

  “No!” Dewey Knott shouted, with peculiar emphasis and emotion. But he was not answering Haverstraw, whom he had not heard, he was taking exception to his last statement. “It’s not like the Constitution, it’s like an insurance policy, that they wrote it down on a paper, and all it is, is a lotta little lines, that go this way and that way, and this way and that way.” He pointed quaquaversally with all his fingers. “Who did the writing?” he asked. “Who?”

  “Your team, sir,” said an aspiring new Mushrom from behind the lights and the ponytails.

  “Not my team,” Dewey answered, tremendously irritated. “It was the Fo . . . it was the Fo . . . it was the Fo-something. You know, they had those fishhooks, what was their name?”

  “The Phoenicians,” offered a really attractive brunette in a really low-cut dress, at a table dangerously near the front.

  “Yeah,” said Dewey, “it was the Phoenicians. Did they invent the telephone?”

  As the audience was almost as inebriated as Dewey himself, and the camera operators were stoned, no one except Dewey’s staff, Dot, and the rest of the world knew that anything was amiss. Haverstraw said, “Read the goddamned speech!” His career, too, was on the line.

  “Okay,” Dewey answered, saying, as he unfolded the paper, “I haven’t looked at this, this, whatever it is. I know I was supposed to. I was supposed to look at it. I’m always supposed to look at it, but . . . like a bad little bee, I don’t. So here goes.

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay. Here’s the line, up here. Ready? Three score and nine years ago, Dewey Knott was brought forth onto this continent by his parents, Askew and Lola. You see,” he said, “this illustrates why you should always use the serial comma. If you thought that you shouldn’t, you would think that I was brought forth by my parents, and by Askew, and by Lola, who were midwives or something. But if you did, and it was gone here, as it is, you’d know that my parents were Askew and Lola. See? Who wrote this? Did Mushrom write this? Where’s the crap about Superman? Or is that coming?”

  Way in the back of the room, Mushrom was moved almost to tears. He had been with Senator Knott for a quarter of a century, and in that time not once had the senator mentioned his name in public, and this was going out all over the world, even pre-empting soccer matches in Brazil.

  “No one ever called my father Askew. They called him Ask. When he heard Kennedy’s inaugural address on the radio—‘Ask Kno
tt . . . what you can do for your country’—he thought Kennedy was talking to him in jive. Let’s see,” Dewey said, turning back to the text. “Three score and nine years ago, Dewey Knott was brought forth on this continent by his parents, Askew and Lola. Now we are engaged in a great campaign, testing whether this Knott or any Knott so conceived can long endure. . . . What is this? Did Mushrom write this? This is the goddamned Gettysburg Address.”

  “No it isn’t,” Haverstraw said, standing up. “And I wrote it.”

  “Abraham Lincoln wrote it,” Dewey stated flatly.

  “He did not.”

  “Like hell he didn’t, you little shit.”

  “I resent that, Senator. The speech plays off the syncopes and the zeugmas of the Gettysburg Address, yes, and it is referential in homage to the Gettysburg Address, yes, but it isn’t the Gettysburg Address.”

  “Fuck you, it’s the Gettysburg Address.”

  “How could it be?” Haverstraw asked, his initial anger becoming panic as he was unable to sustain his indignation under a concentrated Dewey attack in front of so many television cameras. “Lincoln wrote it on the back of an envelope. Is that an envelope you’ve got in your hand? Is it? Is it?”