by Mark Helprin
The Senate was an august and prestigious body like no other, and Dewey Knott had not only won entrance but risen to lead the majority. His suite of offices was the most impressive (even if, compared with Freddy’s various studies, libraries, and galleries, it was little more than a broom cupboard); his the longest limousine; and his the biggest staff. It meant nothing. He was his father’s son, and that was the place—next to his father—where his heart was and he wanted to be. Whereas most politicians consumed privileges like fish feeding on minnows, Dewey had them mainly for keeping himself from too deep a despair. His feeling that he had no business there, and that he properly belonged as an employee in a grain elevator or in a school as an assistant custodian, was what enabled him to harvest the votes of such people, was what made him, to the extent that he was, a great man, and it was what, as he heard his own polished heels click across marble floors in towering halls, kept him alive.
Never in a million years would he have thought to resign from the Senate had Freddy not suggested it, pulled a spike from his gum, and given him the speech with which he could do it gracefully. “I’m gonna do it,” he said, shocking Finney as they rode in the pre-dawn to Dewey’s restored boyhood home, where there was now a sauna and a squash court, and, next to the squash court, a garden court in which Dewey’s caretaker grew squash, which was Dewey’s favourite vegetable. “Dot’s gonna have a mammoth, but that’s okay. It’s understandable. It’s her rice bowl, too.”
“Forgive me, Senator,” Finney said, impressed no end at Dewey’s decisiveness, “but you aren’t usually as quick in your decisions. Are you sure? It’s astoundingly risky.”
“Yeah, I know, but this dentist guy’s real smart. I didn’t know, but he figured it out. It’s easy to see once you do.”
“What is?”
“If I win, I won’t be able to stay in the Senate. If I lose, I’ll be thrown from the leadership post like something that went bad in the refrigerator. Having lost twice in a row, like my father, I wouldn’t be able to bear staying on. You know, he lost the farm twice, and each time he was offered a job at the Huebner place, which was real big and had irrigation pumps, so they could grow things even in the dust. Didn’t take it. That’s why I’m so thin. Didn’t eat. I might as well go early and make a virtue of going. What’s the speech like?”
Finney looked at the speech, which was in Freddy’s royal handwriting on the back of four manila X-ray sleeves. It wasn’t a long speech. Dewey stared out the window and let his eyes tumble over Siliphant in fraying light. It was going to be a day of rain, he could tell, though none of the press corps had a clue. He could feel the huge black clouds building and the vertical rivers of air as they began to flow. Siliphant was good in the summer rain, when each house seemed like a boat floating down the Missouri with a light burning on the mast.
Finney finished reading, and dropped the X-ray sleeves on his lap. He seemed preoccupied.
“Whadja think?” Dewey asked, turning to his chief of staff. When Finney looked up, the tears that had welled in his eyes streamed down his face.
“Uh-oh,” said Dewey.
AT NOON THE NEXT DAY, two hundred people and a thousand reporters assembled in Siliphant’s town square to listen to Dewey as he spoke from the courthouse steps. They were there because they knew they had a story. Either Dewey would be his usual self, in which case the story would be the fall of Dewey Knott, or he would continue in the vein of his exceptional performance the night before, in which case the story would be the rise of Dewey Knott. It was a natural drama that five hundred television cameras would document for viewers everywhere, even in Tazerbo at the verge of the Rebiana Sand Sea. If Dewey had suddenly and inexplicably been granted erudition, wit, and charisma as well developed as if he had been the cross between an Oxford don and a British field marshal, it would be a miracle, and rightly the world loves miracles as it loves nothing else.
All bets were intensified by the rain, which provided an adagio as background and focussed attention on Dewey, who was not so good at competing with long views, blue sky, and wind-stroked wheat undulating in the sun. The black-and-whiteness of the clouded scene said to generations that had risen by the hearths of colour television that here would occur something old and authentic, that it would be simple, direct, and sincere. It would be genuine history, as in the low-production-value film clips of the lost early days of the century.
And so, with most of the ponytails tucked under rain hats, and hundreds of black umbrellas shielding hundreds of lenses, Dewey began to read his speech. He knew well that, in his parlance, he had to hit the ball “under the fence” at Yankee Stadium, and was certain that he would not be able to do it. Never in his life had he given a good speech, much less a great one. So wedded was he to Mushrom’s pap delivered in a monotone that made a buzz saw sound like Mozart that he had come to see it as a virtue. Anything else, because he could not do it, was fakery and showmanship, somehow effeminate, and inappropriately European. He recoiled from rhetoric that took on a life of its own, and mocked it as “a string of ten-dollar words.” His speeches were laden with the words freedom, liberty, justice, great, and Gotham. Of late he had added caring, compassionate, diverse, future, and change. Finney told him that he would find none of these in Lachpoof Bachquaquinnik Dess Moofoomooach’s speech, and that the best thing he could do would be to read it fresh and awkwardly, hearing it for the first time as he spoke.
“That’s crazy,” Dewey had protested. “Who is this Lachpoof guy? Isn’t he a dentist? What is he? He fixed my tooth. I don’t get it.”
“What can you lose?” Finney had asked.
“We closed a gap of forty points, that’s what we can lose.”
“No, Senator, Lachpoof closed a gap of forty points, and if Lachpoof can do that in half an hour, you should read his goddamned speech.”
“Why? It made you cry. What if everyone cries?”
“I cried because, in all my career, it was the first political speech that has passed through my hands that is both beautiful and true. Isn’t that what Keats said is all you need to know?”
“Keats? The party chairman of Nemaha County? What the hell would he know? I think I’m going nuts. I never want to see that Lachpoof guy again. He really bothers me. He does. A speechwriting dentist who knows all about military technicalities and the history of diplomacy? Why can’t I see the speech?”
“Because you’ll fuck it up,” Finney said, most uncharacteristically. He never spoke like that, because he was raised in a family where no one ever spoke like that except when assembling a gas barbecue.
Dewey looked at him in amazement. “Can’t we try a focus group before I deliver? It’s important. Lots’a planes have been landing at the airport. I even saw a Japanese one. I even saw one with a picture of an Eskimo. Eskimos are coming to Nebraska to hear me give this speech, and I can’t even look at it?”
“No,” said Finney, and he meant it.
So when Dewey began to read, he was as grave as the slate-grey clouds that glided above him, and sure that he could never fulfil the heightened expectations. His idea of triumph was to win the South Carolina primary with a surprise buy of airtime. He melded little things like this into a magic political carpet that made him a leader. To be tested in speech, like Lincoln or Churchill, was not done any more by anyone, much less Dewey Knott, the monotone son of Siliphant, “the aluminum-tongued orator of the Platte,” and proud of it. His manner, therefore, was curious and delicate, as if he were reading the report of an autopsy. This was notably different from his normal football-rally, tub-thumping style, and even before he had said ten words—and they were all simple words, Anglo-Saxon in origin—the commentators in their studios or on the spot signalled to the audience, in expressive silence, that, yes, indeed, this was a different Dewey Knott.
The speech was a declaration of love for America, with Fredericka present in every word but invisible to anyone but Freddy, who had fallen in love with her and his former colony simultaneously and c
ould not in his heart of hearts completely separate the two. Just as Liberty, a woman in flowing robes, symbolised the country, so that country symbolised the woman with whom he had fallen in love. She had brought to him, in his middle age, the excitement of youth. Everything now seemed new and saturated with energy.
Thus, what Dewey Knott read, with uncharacteristic expression and emotion flowing from him readily and naturally, was a song in which were memorialised the things Freddy had seen—from the preternatural blue of the great inland seas that Americans modestly call lakes, to the sweet smell of evergreens near a rail bed on a mountain curve in the spring sun. Freddy had put into the speech the wake of the barge on which he had ridden down the Mississippi; the bone-white monuments of Washington rising from green water-rich land in spectacular heat and waves of elemental colour; and the greatness even of little Siliphant, that sat on the prairie like a boat sea-anchored on an open undulating ocean. On summer afternoons in Siliphant, the wind came up and rattled the sun-drenched leaves of the oaks and cottonwoods, turning up their white and silvered undersides in hysterical palsy, as if to accompany the grass on the prairie as it moved in sinuous waves. No dancer could dance more beautifully than the grass rising and falling as far as the eye could see.
He spoke of these, and stated for Dewey, more or less, that neither the Senate nor any power of politics could distract him from them; that these elemental things were all he needed to sustain him now and forever; that the ground—the land and the people—from which the structure of governance had risen was of a higher value, interest, and attraction than governance itself; that he asked plainly to lead, because he was in no need of it, being enraptured of the foundations from which the art of governance had been gratuitously separated. Therefore, he would resign from his leadership post in the Senate and from the Senate itself, and go forward toward the presidency having thrown down everything but what was pure and ideal.
Freddy captured the spirit of this in ringing perfection, for he was, after all, a royal prince who sought his kingdom by paradoxically and truthfully abjuring it, and it was only after he had lost his position and fallen low that he had learned to love. He had written this up, translated for Dewey, knowing, from having walked it, the path Dewey would have to tread. Freddy had always had a way with words, but these words were like the narration of a soldier who has just returned from battle, and they held the country for a long and reflective moment. Nonetheless, Freddy would have had no idea what the fuss was about. It was the language he used to direct his valet, or praise a particularly fine example of Begonia, mixed in with a bit of Shakespearean rhythm, some elegiac tone he had picked up at funerals, a ribbon-cutter’s forward-lookingness, and his purely factual observations on both policy and the beauty of the country. It was a good speech, but the reaction was due to the fact that politics are madness, and even if one does not know it, a country in electoral season experiences flares of lunacy like the great storms that sometimes march across the golden surface of the sun.
Still, it was indeed a triumph for Dewey, who skyrocketed in the polls. The president had no idea what to do now that Dewey had become an original. The things Dewey was doing and saying came from the man himself, instantaneously, without study, conference, or script.
But Dewey himself didn’t know what to do next. These were not his words and this was not he, or as he would have said, him. He was, in his view, defrauding the American people. No matter that when he had read a Mushrom speech the Mushrom-like expressions hadn’t been his either. If he did things artificially, spoke other people’s words, calculated, and it didn’t work, it was forgivable. A thief who never takes anything cannot be said to have sinned, and that was what, in his eyes, Dewey Knott had been doing all his life: stealing without taking. And, as he might say, now Dewey Knott was not doing it. His fraudulence was a success, and he felt honourably guilty.
The major journalists were not content to believe in Dewey’s sudden transformation, and pressed him in public and private for the name of the ventriloquist. At first, swayed by Finney’s logic—“Did you ever, once, credit Mushrom? Why credit Moofoomooach?”—he skilfully abstained from answering. That was easy, his stock-in-trade. If someone asked him a question about, for example, nuclear weapons, he could effortlessly divert the line of questioning to chronic disease in gerbils, interstate piano moving, turtle protection, etc. But it was a torture for him to avoid the question of authorship, because he was fundamentally honest. So, only hours after the speech, when in Siliphant the press swarmed and agitated as if awaiting visitors from another world, and as the instapoll numbers pushed Dewey into the stratosphere, Dewey cleared his conscience. He was sitting with the dean of the print journalists, who, without a single word, had put Dewey on the rack.
He and Dewey were drinking bourbon. Dewey was sweating, and he was not. Dewey was squirming, trembling, suffering. It was like the story of Dr Faustus, and the journalist knew, that, with no action on his part, the truth was pecking more and more rhapsodically against the inside of Dewey’s egg and would soon tumble out, as it did.
“I didn’t write the speech,” Dewey said, immediately feeling a few demons flee his soul. “Nope. Didn’t. Didn’t do the Nightline thing, either. That’s the truth.”
Finally, the journalist spoke, as delicately as if he were carrying nitroglycerine with his voice. “Who did, Senator?” he asked so quietly that it could hardly be heard.
After a pause in which Dewey decided to take the real plunge, he said, “Idoh know. God, Idoh know. This Lachpoof guy. This Moofoomooach. Says he’s a dentist. Got a real beautiful wife. Right here in Siliphant.”
The next morning, the vast press contingent that had swelled Siliphant into a kind of First Amendment boil learned from The New York Times that the new force behind Dewey Knott was a dentist and his wife with the unfathomable name of Moofoomooach. Now, this was a story, and had Siliphant in fact been a boat it would have capsized as virtually everyone in town raced toward the side of town where the dental office was situated, but the eminent journalist of the Times had already been there and gone.
In the house where the miracles had transpired were dental books and equipment. Food was in the refrigerator (what the hell was Bovril?). Everything was sparklingly clean. But no one was there, no Moofoomooach, no tall athletic dentist, no exquisitely beautiful dontist. They had been there, as the locals were glad to attest, but they had gone, and no one, not even Dewey Knott, knew where.
FLASH FIRE
THOUGH THE SUN was not directly visible, Freddy could tell their direction of travel by the light behind the clouds, but he had neither map nor watch, and could only approximate a guess as to how fast they were rolling west-south-west. Then again, neither did they care. They had no place in particular to go and no schedule to keep. The empty boxcar was clean, the doors wide open, the air sweet, and they had escaped from Siliphant before dawn.
Back in Siliphant—crowded with politician and the press—time, deadlines, meaningless manners, tight ties, and invasive cameras were everywhere. Those who had arrived in chartered planes or helicopters, in large rented automobiles, or in buses with dressing rooms, had positions to keep and defend. Every moment of their lives was spent building the bulwarks that kept from them the peaceful anonymity Freddy and Fredericka now enjoyed, knowing that neither a single question would they answer nor into a single lens would they blink.
They sat in the south-facing doorway. In the distance, thunderstorms swept to the east in cliff-like formations, their lightning palsied and golden against black cloud. This was to the saffron yellow of random swales a painterly adornment worthy of Giorgione, but Giorgione had never seen the American Plains with their banks of purple thundercloud in long easily moving fronts of a hundred miles or more. To this royalty of nature was added music from the rolling of the wheels and their perfectly timed syncopation as they crossed small gaps in the rails.
“I have the map only partially by memory,” Freddy said. “It’s easy to know th
at Nebraska sits on top of Kansas, and that given our direction we should be heading toward and across the western part of Kansas and into Colorado, but the scale is hard to understand. I wish I had a superimposition of, say, Watford to Luton, so I could have a sense of time and distance.”
“What about Malmesbury to Crudwell?” Fredericka asked. “We cycled that once.”
“We did?”
“Viscount Ellesmere and I.”
“I didn’t know you saw him,” Freddy said, displeased. “He looks like a pig.”
“No he doesn’t, he’s very handsome. He has quite small ears.”
“Did you kiss him?”
“Of course I kissed him. He was my boyfriend.”
“Wait,” Freddy said, with an abrupt movement of his hands that signalled her to be silent. He listened.
