by Ward Just
All this transpired before Ned Ayres’s arrival in the capital. But stories about that time were still told, and told fondly, as part of the golden age, gone now but very well remembered. Naturally Monica had another slice of that life. She stood at the window of Ned’s apartment and pointed to Dupont Circle, the jewel of the capital’s roundabouts, crowded with automobiles and a few pedestrians rotating on an enormous wheel. There were no roundabouts in New York, and if there were roundabouts in Chicago, Monica had never heard of them. Something European about the roundabouts, thanks to Monsieur L’Enfant. Of course the wheel had exits, but make a careless change of lane and you could be there, well, forever.
Monica said, Most people who had lived through that in Washington said that the Kennedy years were the happiest in their lifetimes. Cheap sentiment? No. They were sincere. The capital was alive in a way it had never been before or since. It was a privilege to work in the government and a privilege to write about it. A privilege to have been there. But now, for some, it was time to go home, retreat to Shaker Heights or Cambridge and look for a second act.
Monica had explained all this as a prelude to her announcement that she was going abroad to Cyprus where her parents were stationed. Ned was startled. His first thought was that Monica seemed to think that the world was something you got out of the way of, e.g., dreary Nicosia. Monica told him she believed she was losing herself in Washington, as if the capital were an insatiable organism that had to change form in order to thrive. Monica was bookish, too, so Ned was not surprised when she described the city as “one of the dark places on earth,” Marlow’s remark at the commencement of Heart of Darkness. A resident had to embrace darkness, yearn for it, be fascinated by its mystery, and by mystery she seemed to mean the capital’s many secrets. Monica was spare, a little over five feet tall, twenty-four years old, lovely rather than beautiful, a magnetic smile when she chose to use it. She had energy to burn. Monica found Ned most appealing when he talked to her about Herman, which he did often at her urging, wry anecdotes that turned into dapper satires. To Ned, monotonous Herman was far distant. Yet at times it seemed close enough to touch.
When Monica went away to visit her parents in whatever billet they had been assigned, she felt estranged from them and disengaged from Washington. She was neither here nor there. She received news that her new book of essays, Rock Creek Park, had two gratifying advance reviews. The subject of the collection was Washington, and she knew now that she was temporarily burned out so far as the capital was concerned. She needed to be provoked by wherever she was living. That was what inspired her prose. She had to be part of it and at the same time wary of it, hence her weekend work at the newsmagazine. But she had squeezed that for all it was worth and now needed something different. Her idea was to fly to Cyprus and return as soon as possible to the United States, Kansas City, where she was born and where her grandparents still lived. She asked Ned if he wanted to come with her to Cyprus, beautiful island, meet her parents and take a sail around the eastern Med. When Ned said he could not break away she did not press the matter, and that seemed to disappoint him. She thought Ned did not have an adventurous spirit, if adventure was defined as getting out of the rut. Ned liked his rut as a stamp collector liked his albums. No need to move from the den. So she would fly to the island solo and return to Kansas City solo and meet up at once with her grandmother. Some material there, she thought. In Kansas City there would be no discussion of the Kennedy glam, years back now. She remembered a park on the fringes of downtown; that was where she would take an apartment, see how things thrived in Kansas City. Her grandmother was in her eighties but still in the pink, as she liked to say, full of stories about the old days, meaning the Depression and the war. Kansas City had long since won Monica’s heart, an affectionate loyalty. Kansas City was modest, a good place to dwell for a while, find fresh material—well, she had the material, but it had to be excavated like ore. The Kansas River was picturesque, or that was how Monica remembered it. She was not a small-town girl. She was a small-city girl, an entirely different circumstance. She remembered her monthly luncheons with her father when she was a little girl, always at one of the downtown hotels, her father confiding in her, disclosing his plans to join the Foreign Service. We’ve got to bring Mom along on this, he said, because she’s not convinced. Her father talked about living in the wide world for a change and wanted to enlist Monica in the effort. My agent provocateur, he said, and laughed. It turned out her mother had no reluctance, as she explained during one of the shopping expeditions in downtown Kansas City.
Monica told Ned she wanted to settle down for a while, and that meant leaving Washington. The way she said it put Ned in mind of a bad debt. Better to settle now than settle later, because interest was compounding. He was distressed, being forced to revisit his familiar problem. In order to pursue the romance he would have to reevaluate his own life and work, and this he was disinclined to do, at least just then. He was not truly interested in the things of his own life, preferring the lives of others. Monica’s life, her “material,” was infinitely more interesting than his own. He had no material. He edited material. At bottom Ned Ayres did not wish to compromise, and was not compromise the essence of married life? Or of any life shared with another. Married life had many virtues but compromise was always in first position, after the children had been put to bed. Now and again during his infrequent evenings alone he wondered if he would remain a bachelor, if that suited him in a way that a beard suited some men’s faces and not others’. Hemingway. Lenin.
When Ned saw her off at Union Station—it was typical of her to travel by train, American scenery unspooling before her eyes—he was unable to find words. When she kissed him goodbye she had never looked lovelier. She was elated. Her mind was made up. She was traveling to the Med. Then she was going home.
She said, Ciao, Neddy. Stay well.
He said, You’re unforgettable.
She said, No, I’m not, and gave a soft laugh.
Monica looked at him fondly. His shoulders sagged, his hands in his jacket pockets. Monica had used his slouch in Rock Creek Park, a pedestrian among the trees and the graves beyond the trees. Come to think of it, she had used his features in several of her essays, his crooked smile and Roman nose, his broad shoulders. That was the piece about men and cemeteries. She had invented a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. The piece followed him on his rounds in Rock Creek Park, pausing at one gravestone and then another. She had him summing up, staring into the future. When he read it he did not recognize himself, although he liked the cadence. She had dedicated the book to him, Mister N. A. He was pleased at that. They had had such good times together. She never believed that they were permanent. His mind was always on his work, and she had to admit the same was often true with her, too. The difference was the difference between always and often. He allowed himself to be disturbed at any time if there was a crisis in his newsroom, one a.m. or five a.m. There were three people in their affair, themselves and the one on the telephone, Mr. Deskman. Standing at the window holding the phone, Ned reminded her of Buffalo Bill in e. e. cummings’s great poem, riding a watersmooth-silver stallion . . . She thought he was fundamentally out of reach. So she knew that things could not continue as they were and Ned would never change. She had always felt safe with him. He had never mistreated her. She was not sure she was doing the right thing, traveling to Cyprus and then to Kansas City. She cared for her work as much as he cared for his, and perhaps that was the difficulty. Someone would have to yield, and it would not be her and it would not be him. Ned Ayres did not show the usual signs of fierce ambition, but they were all there, buried. In her darker moments Monica disdained the news, a kind of outside agitator. The mission that ruled his life and, by extension, hers. So here she was at Union Station ready to board the New York train. Nicosia, then Kansas City. She put her hands on his shoulders.
He said, Will you at least write?
I’m a bad correspondent, she said. But I�
�ll send you a postcard of the harbor at Kyrenia. Little tiny harbor, one of the gems of Europe. If you think of Cyprus as Europe. Some do. We’ll see. Then she turned her face from him, realizing how cold she sounded. He did not deserve that. She said, Of course I’ll write. Let you know where I am. How things are going.
I wish to God you’d stay here.
He was not certain she heard his voice, so soft. The train was already in motion and she swung up the stairs like an acrobat and then she was gone. He noticed that she had had her hair cut, short on the sides and in back. He knew a makeover when he saw one. Ned turned and walked away into the heat of a Washington summer.
Ned missed her. He received one postcard: the Kyrenia harbor, as promised. He sent two letters in return but did not hear from her again. Mutual friends said she was back in Kansas City, loving it, at work once more. Then she, too, receded in his memory, as Elaine had done. His fortieth birthday came and went. The newspaper won two Pulitzer Prizes that year, causing the publisher to give him a block of stock as a reward. Ned discovered he was mildly rich, rich enough to afford a European trip in the grand style or something expensive at one of the Caribbean resorts. Neither appealed to him so he took a week on Mackinac Island, a quiet place that bored him, in part because he was alone. He had found a new girl, Angela Borne, but she was unable to get time off. Mackinac had what was said to be a nineteenth-century ambiance, horse-drawn buggies and the like. Most everyone there had small children in tow.
Every day he telephoned the paper for the latest news and gossip. He might as well have been in Cyprus without Monica. He spent much of his time reading Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a savage satire of the mid-nineteenth-century Paris press. Hilarious, shrewd, perhaps overdone. Ned put Lost Illusions aside and bought a thriller, one of John le Carré’s books, and found it engrossing. Le Carré was wonderful with atmosphere. Ned had the idea that a skilled novelist could bring something special to the newspaper, used strictly as an atmosphere man, someone to describe the feel of things and leave the quotes to a reporter. Well, not such a good idea. The reader wouldn’t know where he was, the real world or a made-up world. Ned was sitting in a rocking chair drinking tea on the porch of his hotel. The newspaper was a bad place for a confusion of realms. Readers had enough trouble distinguishing between the news pages and the editorial pages. A novelist would glue it up for good. The idea was appealing, though, something fresh. Fresh as paint, as his mother liked to say. When the waiter arrived to see if he wished more tea, Ned said no and returned to Washington the next day.
He celebrated his return by taking Angela Borne to the symphony—wonderful orchestra seats, the secretary of the Treasury on Angela’s left, the Berlin Philharmonic playing Mahler’s Sixth, von Karajan conducting, a fine dinner later at the Occidental. And so to bed.
One autumn day in the election year 1976, Ned was in his office reading obituaries in the evening paper when he saw a two-column headline at the bottom of the page along with a studio portrait.
MICHAEL ARDMORE, 77
WRITER, SPORTSMAN
The obituary revealed nothing that Ned did not know except the “sportsman” part. It turned out that Michael was a celebrated fly-fisherman, celebrated enough that Sports Illustrated ran a profile of him, the profile most flattering. Ned remembered Michael’s enormous hands and wondered whether fly-fishing had anything to do with that. Doubtless not. He remembered sitting in at an interview of a boxer in Indianapolis and how surprised he was at the boxer’s hands, so small, almost dainty. Ned looked again at the obit. The cause of death was not given. He remembered that he had promised to tell Michael the story he had described as “factual enough.” Another time, Ned had said, and they had parted on empty Michigan Avenue, the hour near midnight. They were both filled up with whiskey. Ned wished he had known about the fly-fishing. Ned himself had been a decent fly-fisherman in his youth, not that the Daggett River ever yielded much and what it did yield was inedible. But Ned had not fished in years, and he recalled now how much he liked the aesthetics of it, the circular flight of the fly, the unwinding of the line, the violence of the strike. There was no violence on the Daggett. The strike was more like a pinch.
Michael Ardmore was a thoughtful man, sure of himself. He had said, Trust your material. The atomic clock. Good advice when you were making things up, exploring possibilities, a typewriter the mother of invention. Michael Ardmore’s findings didn’t work in news, the material in doubt until verification. Never trust it from the beginning. Always remember: the first version is wrong. Not always. Almost always. Michael did not understand this concept. He did not value it. Well, he would understand it all right. But verification was irrelevant to him. He was his own verification.
“Factual enough” was the concept that interested Michael Ardmore.
Such a disturbing story, an off-the-rails story that asked forgiveness all the way around. That would be the long view, the sympathetic view, and far from universal. The story was published when young Ned Ayres was city editor of the Herman paper. Acting on a telephone tip, the reporter Gus Harding had learned that a well-known and well-liked businessman named William Grant had done jail time when he was nineteen, armed robbery of a gas station in Moline, Illinois, a Mississippi River town. The station attendant was badly beaten, “savagely” according to the police report. William Grant was swiftly caught and swiftly tried and sentenced to six years at Joliet, and when he was paroled he disappeared.
Gus Harding learned that Grant’s name was in fact William Kelly. He had gone to court to legally change it, and it was as William Grant that he enrolled in one of the small Ohio colleges where he was given a full scholarship, having impressed the dean of admissions with his passionate interest in the writer Jack London. Like London, William Grant declared himself a socialist. He also claimed that at one time or another he had been a hobo, a hack driver in Boston, a lumberjack in Maine, a cowboy in Montana. All bogus, but enthralling to the dean. There was no biography like it at the small Ohio college, a student body composed mostly of farmers’ sons and lawyers’ daughters. If there was a socialist in the student body, the dean had never heard of him. Or her. Hobos, lumberjacks, and cowboys were also scarce. William Grant did not proselytize. His socialist sympathies were a private vice, an admirably adult way to go about things, as the dean observed when he recommended Mr. Grant for the scholarship. A remarkable young man, the dean said, another slice of the pie altogether. William Grant did very well at the Ohio college, dean’s list from the beginning, a mysterious figure on campus. He kept mostly to himself. Of course he was years older than most of the students. He had certainly been around. When he was asked to give one of the commencement speeches, he declined. He did not speak well and was self-conscious about his appearance. William Grant was then thirty-two years old, conspicuously tall with a rolling gait and a badly scarred face that he attributed to a forest fire in Montana where he had volunteered to join the mountain fire brigade. Perhaps the dean had heard of the tragedy, five dead in the blaze. He himself was fortunate to escape with mere burns. His biography, what of it he chose to disclose, was appealing to the lawyers’ daughters. Something dangerous about him. Something unpredictable. He was soft-spoken and discreet but could not disguise a certain dash. A man with a history, in other words. In later years he became a legend at the Ohio college.
It was as William Grant that he showed up one day in Herman and quickly made himself known. His rough appearance put some people off but his manner was quiet. He rarely raised his voice. Within the year he bought the men’s store on Benjamin Franklin Boulevard, retitling it William Grant Haberdashery. He stocked the shelves with up-to-date goods, clothing and accessories—though not too up-to-date because this was, after all, Herman. But his blue button-down shirts were a novelty, along with a nest of bow ties. Grant himself dressed down, an ordinary blazer and gray flannel slacks, the better to show off the Hart, Schaffner & Marx double-breasted suits in gray and dark blue. Judge Ayres was one of Grant’s first
customers, and a number of the town’s lawyers took note, and before long the haberdashery was a success. Grant’s signature innovation was to offer a free bright red bow tie to any customer who bought a suit. He called the ties Jack Londons. His private joke.
William Grant carried himself with authority. He impressed everyone as an experienced man who could take care of himself. Most everyone believed the forest fire story and no one guessed the truth: a knife fight at Joliet. Grant was good on the golf course and very good at the gin games later in the locker room. He rarely spoke of his past, his family, or his birthplace, and everyone assumed—well, he had taken some hard knocks. His manner discouraged inquiries. William Grant did very well in Herman and before long married one of the Elias girls. Their father was president of the First National Bank of Herman, certainly the richest man in town. Howard Elias’s firstborn daughter was a pretty girl named Leatrice. The entire town, or that part of it living on the east end of Benjamin Franklin Boulevard, watched the courtship, William Grant arriving at the Elias front door dressed in one of his Hart, Schaffner & Marx suits with the signature red bow tie and carrying a spray of yellow roses, bound for dance night at the Daggett Golf Club. Leatrice was devoted to her husband. In time they had two sons and any Sunday morning could be seen en route to the Congregational church, where the boys—Eugene and David—sang in the choir. Home again, William Grant changed into hunting clothes, fetched his Browning over-and-under, and was quickly out the door. His boys begged to join him but their father said no, this was his private time. When they were older they could join him. But not now. Private time meant what it said. His Sunday afternoons were sacrosanct, like church. A different sort of church, a stroll in the natural world, and if he was lucky they would have a brace of pheasant for supper that evening. Leatrice watched this Sunday-afternoon ritual with a benign smile. Her father was a hunter, so she understood. He knew all about hunting. Come along, boys, let your father have his afternoon. Why, we’ll go to the movies downtown. At that, William Grant sighed. He loved the movies.
