by Ward Just
George said, "Come on, Senator. Get it over with."
No one was watching more closely or listening more acutely than young Axel Behl, still inconspicuous in the shadows. His father was almost close enough to touch, and then he turned from the window with an expression as confused as his son had ever seen; and he never saw it again. The senator looked around, blinking; the light caught his hair and turned it white. His hair seemed to rise in coils. He made as if to say something, and when no words came, he shook his head and strode from the room with no backward glances except to look with loathing at the crescent-shaped scar on the wall. Curly was left with the earpiece hanging in dead air.
Constance slapped her card on the table and called loudly for old John, but everyone was listening to Curly's soothing voice, My goodness, Adolph was here just a moment ago, he must have stepped out, but don't you worry, he's on board one hundred percent as we all are, though naturally he wishes things had been handled differently. You know how these things are, when you expect one thing and get another, naturally there's irritation. But the hard feelings will pass...
Curly turned his back and spoke privately, and then his high-pitched laugh ended the conversation.
"Let's open the Champagne, John," Curly said.
"Yes," Constance said brightly. "Let's do."
When John arrived with a tray of glasses and three unopened bottles of Champagne, the company was silent, each man pondering Adolph's refusal to put things right. Was it an act of conscience? Vainglory' Simple anger? Perhaps he did not trust himself to speak, seeing betrayal on all sides. Perhaps all of the above, and perhaps none. Perhaps it was his dislike of the swampy weather in Washington, where any blockhead could make a rose grow. But his behavior was as out of character for him as it would have been for his great hero, Henry Adams. Not to mention Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest soul. This was not the first time in his long life in politics that a man had broken his promise and gone back on his word, so great are the temptations of public office. In politics the rewards of victory are tremendous. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of victory, because in politics runners-up don't count. The journalist's "gallant effort" reads nicely, but no one in the business cares about it.
Judge Aswell sighed. "Well, that's it. Adolph has decided to burn his bridges and ours too while he's at it. Our nominee's a vindictive bastard, likes his loyalties undivided, likes to scorch the earth when they're not. I can't imagine what got into Adolph. Has he lost his mind?" The judge turned to Curly Peralta for confirmation, but Curly was giving none. He only shook his head sadly while watching old John wrestle with the Champagne's wire and foil. His loyalty was to his old friend, no matter how badly the friend had mishandled the brief. Of course that did not mean that you went to war. The enemy of your friend had many friends who were also your friends, and the stakes were not small.
"He let his emotions rule," George Steppe said coldly. "And now he has to live with the consequences. The problem's his to solve. Trouble is, we all have money in the pot. What did you say to the Man, Curly?"
"The usual," Curly said.
George nodded decisively. "That's the way we do business in this house," he said to a murmur of agreement. "When a decision's made by our leader, we unite behind him. We make the call of congratulations and we promise our support because tomorrow is more important than yesterday. If we don't like the decision, we can quit. We can join the other side. We can sulk. But don't expect to be forgiven."
George Steppe's ringmaster's moustache flared, and Axel knew that he was in the presence of an impresario; the show went on, no matter what. He knew also that for his father tomorrow was not more important than yesterday. Probably for him it was the reverse; the sum of all the yesterdays equals tomorrow unless you believed in miracles. He surely didn't expect to be forgiven. Axel understood then that his father could be humiliated and that the insult was not political; it was personal. They had rejected him, and so he would leave the field and return to his Behlbavers and his butterflies and his committee chairmanship in the Senate. Of course he would redeem his bleak promise of revenge "without haste but without rest." Axel knew also that his father had tried to cross the Rubicon, and it was the wrong Rubicon. In any case, he was alone in his distress.
Old John opened the Champagne at last, turning the corks with his fingers so that they made no sound. The bottles were sweating and fuming at the mouth, the aroma of Champagne mixed now with eau de Cologne and bath soap. The women had assembled silently in the doorway, their faces as impassive as any jury's. They glittered with ornaments—necklaces, earrings, silver combs in their hair. The men waited patiently until the women were served, old John delivering the glasses one by one, finally to lone Peralta and Constance. Then they helped themselves, and still no one spoke.
Constance motioned for Axel to join her. She put her arm around his shoulders, the company startled at how much they resembled each other, black hair center-parted, eyes that seemed chiseled from the same black stone. Constance raised her glass and smiled grimly.
"A toast to my son, Axel. To Axel, next in line. To Axel on his birthday."
Everyone drank and sang one disorganized chorus of Happy Birthday, the men suddenly subdued.
Then Curly Peralta stepped forward. With a sharp look at Constance, he said, "To the nominees of our party, the next President and Vice President of the United States."
The men drained their glasses. Curly threw his into the fireplace and took another from the tray on the sideboard. The others followed suit, except for Constance, who neither drank nor broke her glass, yet stood in such a way that no one doubted who presided at Echo House.
Many years later Axel Behl told the story to his son, Alec, then a teenager. Old enough to appreciate the stakes. Old enough to grasp the ironies, as Axel said. The moment was morbidly apt. They had walked across the street from Echo House to Soldiers Cemetery and were standing before the stele that announced B E H L, a rose sculpted above the name, and below it an inscription in German, Goethe's Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient. Constance's selection, it went without saying; she had outlived the senator by five years, dying alone in the Observatory on the eve of Hitler's march into Poland.
Axel leaned heavily on his cane as he spoke. Alec was looking at him strangely, and he guessed that his right eye was drooping, the long scar on his face livid. His voice had risen, too, and he was sweating. He reached to massage his ruined knee and continued softly, "She was fierce, fiercer than he was. When she died I was out of touch. I'd been sent to Lisbon on war business. Curly Peralta handled the arrangements, and I didn't learn the circumstances until much later."
"I hardly remember her," Alec said. What he did remember were unforgiving eyes and a sarcastic tongue. She seemed to believe that life had let her down badly. Sylvia, his mother, called her a connoisseur of misfortune.
Axel reached with his cane to dislodge a bit of lichen on the stele. "So there I was in the famous Observatory, a shadow witness to how grown men behaved at a private moment of betrayal. I was invisible except when my mother, God bless her, proposed her toast. The king was dead, long live the king. And this much was true for me: in some unconscious way I chose my career that night, not the precise function but the form of it, where I would place myself in the scramble to the top of the tree. Meaning the government, because that's our family's milieu. That's what we do. That's what he did, that's what I do, and you will, too, when the time comes. We don't know how to do anything else."
And it had made them all so happy, Alec thought but did not say.
"Why, you were born the night Frank Roosevelt was nominated. Your mother likes to tell the story that when I called from the convention floor and the nurse said you'd arrived, I didn't ask whether you were a boy or a girl. I had to tell your mother about the five ballots and how California caved and what a great day it was for the nation. You know the story, a family joke."
Axel paused, out of breath. He
took a tiny vial from his coat pocket, tapped a pill into his palm, and swallowed it dry. He sighed and bit his lip. Someone had wandered within earshot. In a moment the intruder was gone, and Axel spoke again.
"You're in it for the long haul. You give your loyalty to the state, don't you see? Nothing else matters. You know what the Stalinists say. Let them starve! Let them starve! The last two left: alive will be communists for life. That's it exactly."
Alec said, "Your face is awful pale. Are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water?"
"My father disappointed us all, quitting as he did. And it was his own fault entirely. So inside the Observatory at Echo House that night I knew that I never wanted to be dependent on a promise that could be withdrawn over a telephone line—sorry to put it like this, Axel old boy, but I've made other plans, no hard feelings I hope, and let's stay in touch. I never wanted to learn the mumbo-jumbo and say that everything was fine when it wasn't fine. I suppose in that way only I am my father's son. I intended to be in the tree with my own juju. And I guess that's how it worked out, good for them, good for me. You know the story about the expert mimic? The one with the repertoire of a hundred voices in a dozen languages and in due course he forgot his own voice. He forgot what he sounded like and couldn't remember even in his dreams at night."
Alec said, "Dad, your face—"
"You never knew this, so I'll tell you now. Constance was determined that I take my father's place in the Senate, and when the time came put forward my own candidacy for President of the United States. She bought a little farm in Maryland so that I'd have a State to run from. That was her great dream, the ambition that would cancel her husband's lust for second best, the disaster that brought such shame on Echo House. And until that night in the Observatory, her dream was my dream, too."
"Honestly, you don't look well."
"But I've sold the farm, so you don't have a State. You'll have to make your own plans."
Alec was silent.
"You know about the Rubicon, Alec. It's only a little stream, even when Caesar crossed it. Only a few yards wide and a few feet deep, so narrow :n places you could jump across. The Rubicon makes the Potomac look like the Amazon." Then Axel threw back his head and laughed loudly, tapping the stele with his cane. "Do you know what she gave me that night for a birthday present?"
Alec shook his head. He had no idea. His father was sputtering with laughter, his face ghostly white except for the livid scar. He reached to touch the stele, tracing the engraved rose with his fingernail.
"A pretty little nineteenth-century print," Axel said. "Not rare. Not valuable. You've seen it many times. It's in the Observatory next to Sylvia's merry satyr. A pastel, Constance's dream come true: the doge's palace at Venice in the early morning sunshine." And then Axel's smile vanished and he added, "The next day my father gave me his most prized volume, a signed first edition of Democracy. Some day it'll be yours."
PART I
1. The Girl on the Bicycle
AXEL BEHL and his son dined alone on Thanksgiving Day, 1947. Sylvia Behl had vacated in August, living in Europe, people suspected, though no one knew for sure except possibly Axel, and no one dared ask him. Sylvia was gone. Sylvia was a closed subject. She had written no one, not even young Alec; at least that was the rumor, and people who knew Sylvia believed it. She was a woman who burned her bridges.
The community understood. Sylvia was beautiful and high-spirited and, after 1944, Axel was neither. He admitted to Billie Peralta that his life might not be worth the effort it took to live it. However, the understanding did not include sympathy, for Sylvia was a handful, sharp-tongued, temperamental, opinionated, and slow to fit into the milieu. In fact, it was generally agreed that she had never really tried, an awkward situation all around, because everyone was so fond of her gallant husband. And the boy was a standout, the sort of well-mannered intelligent boy who was a pleasure to have to dinner. The community tended to take the long view and concluded that Sylvia's desertion was probably for the best. A Washington homily fit the situation: "That which must be done eventually is best done immediately."
So this was the first Thanksgiving without Sylvia, and a desultory affair it was, despite the best efforts of the kitchen staff; but since they were French the meal had a saucy quality that owed more to Périgord than to the federal city. After preparing dinner, the servants had been given the evening off, leaving only Axel and Alec at home, picking through the spicy dinde with its tangled collar of green beans and au gratin potatoes and pureed mushrooms and foie gras; but no stuffing or cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie or the creamed onions that were Sylvia's specialty. Father and son sat in silence, listening to the clock tick.
Axel had turned down half a dozen well-meant invitations from friends to come up to New York or down to Middleburg or The Plains. In early October he had had another operation on his back and was still in pain. That operation had not been a success any more than the others had been. The surgeons at Walter Reed remarked that he was very fortunate to have such a high tolerance for pain; he thought they would kill him in their heroic efforts to keep him alive. So this was the last operation, permitting him the dubious consolation that he would not have to be cut again; in that one sense the operation reminded him of his marriage. And the boy bravely insisted that he would rather be alone at Echo House with his father than with friends, whose kindly concern he found embarrassing, particularly since no one would mention his mother's name. He was not in the mood for another family's feastly hilarity with its specific rituals like charades or Monopoly. And the table conversation would be politics, everyone expected to contribute, whether they had anything to say or not; and God help you if you got a fact wrong, the number of congressional districts in Iowa or the identity of the governor of Kentucky or the number of Reds in the French National Assembly. So at six in the evening Alec found himself toying with his food, moving the potatoes around the beans and the mushrooms around the dinde, thinking about the long train ride back to school in Massachusetts two days hence. His father had offered to fly up to Boston so that they could have Thanksgiving at Locke-Ober with the Aswells, but the boy had said no thanks to that, too, not wanting to trouble his father. The last operation had left him looking haggard and frail, in no condition for a three-hour journey in an airplane. And it was bitter cold in Boston.
Candle wax was dripping on the tablecloth, and the boy moved to reposition the candles, which had begun to list. The dining room was warm and the silence oppressive. He thought he might slip out for a movie, since his father would surely retire early. There were war films playing on a double bill downtown, leathernecks assaulting a Pacific island. That would surely take care of the rest of the evening, leaving only Friday and Saturday before departure on the crowded midnight train to Boston. He glanced into the oval mirror over the sideboard and saw his father's face, gaunt in the flickering candlelight. His father looked colorless and insignificant in the vastness of the room. His head was thrown back and his eyes were closed, but he wasn't dozing, because his lips were moving and he was massaging his lower back. Framed in the mirror, Axel Behl's white face had the dour aspect of a seventeenth-century Dutch portrait; and the artist was no friend.
"Can I get you something?" the boy asked. "More turkey? Mushrooms?"
His father waited a moment before replying, in a dusty voice, "Pour me a glass of whiskey, please."
The boy went to the sideboard and poured whiskey from a decanter into a glass, looking again into the mirror, his own face up close and his father's in the background, flickering yellow light all around. He handed the whiskey to his father, who took a sip and set the glass carefully on the table.
"Pretty awful, isn't it?"
"It's not so bad," the boy said. "It's a French Thanksgiving."
"I asked Billie Peralta to tell them what to do and how to do it, but Billie doesn't speak French very well and Jacques wouldn't've listened anyhow. He only listened to your mother. Reluctantly." Axel sighed, leaning forward
to massage his back. Little beads of sweat jumped to the surface of his forehead. "I suppose we should have taken Billie up on her offer, gone out to Middleburg for turkey And charades after."
"This is fine," the boy said.
"I hate charades," his father said.
"So do I."
"She would have been thrilled to have us, though. She likes to take people in. And she never liked Sylvia."
"I know," the boy said. He ate a mouthful of turkey.
"She said Sylvia's bite was worse than her bark."
Alec nodded, not knowing where his father was headed with this conversation but dreading it.
"Washington's hard," Axel said. "We all know each other so damned well and everyone has a past with everyone else. You either fit in right away or you don't, and if you don't you never will."
"She said she missed London," Alec said. "But I don't know what the great difference is. They both have a river and a legislature and the men wear hats."
"The difference is." Axel paused. "Heat."
"I like Washington," Alec said loyally.
"Maybe your taste in cities will change."
"Not mine."
"Well, you're young. You can keep your powder dry."
"She used to say that Washington was dry. She said it was a dry bath. What did she mean by that?"
"She thought that Washington was old. London was young. Sylvia always took a contrary view. She liked to turn things inside out. We Behls are attracted to women who turn things inside out. Trouble is, it's not a quality that wears well, long term. It's tiresome." Axel took another sip of whiskey, holding the glass to the candlelight and looking through it.
