by Ward Just
They sat on the long bench beside the magnolia. Alec occupied the Adirondack chair.
"To Axel." Lloyd Fisier rasped, raising his glass.
"Rest in peace," Avril Raye said.
Sylvia asked. "What do you remember right now, Harold?"
"Lenin's squint," Harold said, his voice soft in the darkness. He reached to touch Lloyd on the arm, but when he spoke again it was to no one in particular. "I remember when Lloyd and I and Axel went to visit that Russian, filthy little flat somewhere near the Montparnasse cemetery. The Russian kept talking about Lenin's squint. Millions dead, a revolution made, and the thing he remembered most was Lenin's squint."
"We tried to recruit him," Lloyd said.
"We paid him some money and all we got for it was Lenin's squint."
They were silent a moment.
"I just saw a shooting star," Lloyd said.
Harold rose stiffly and moved awkwardly to the table, where he spooned caviar onto toast, careful to add a sliver of onion. "It's Axel, telling me to shut up about the exiles. I can't remember why."
"The source," Lloyd said.
"He fell away from the party," Harold said. "A lot of them did, the old Reds. Hard for them to ignore the terror in front of their eyes, friends murdered or sent to the Gulag. They lost the center of things, their reason f or being. The ones who escaped the trials went into exile to write their memoirs and their poems, trying to recapture the way things were supposed to be. They had plenty of life left but nothing to do with it except remember."
"Americans don't go into exile," Lloyd said. "Except tax cheats."
"I went to Nantucket," Sylvia said.
"You're different," Harold said.
Sylvia laughed and began to stroll around the croquet court.
"I don't know where we'd go, Lloyd," Harold said. He filled his glass and the other glasses, staring into the sky as if the shooting stars held the answer. "We're so high here, the heavens are in sight. No city glare. It's like being in Montana."
"It's why I always hated the Observatory," Sylvia said from the lawn. "I could never see the stars, only the glare of the buildings and monuments. On a clear night it hurt my eyes."
"I liked it," Alec said.
"I knew Kerensky and didn't like him," Lloyd said. "Terrible windbag. He shouted at people. He thought the only reason you didn't agree with him was that you couldn't hear him. So he shouted all the time. To the end of his life he thought he was the sole legitimate head of the Russian empire. He emigrated to Australia and bored the bejesus out of them. Died in nineteen-seventy, but the truth was his life ended when he left Russia. God, they loved their country. Loved her to death."
"I'm not going anywhere," Harold said.
"Happiest days of my life," Lloyd said.
"This town," Flo said. "Either you're born to it or you're not."
"Everyone here is from someplace else," Alec said.
"Except you," Flo said.
"I always preferred London," Lloyd said.
"Axel loved France," Harold said, his voice breaking. He fumbled a moment, then reached to take Lloyd's hand and the two old men sat in the darkness, holding hands like lovers.
"Paris," Wilson said softly. "There was a time when I knew the order of battle of the French Army better than I knew our own. I lectured once at St. Cyr on Falkenhayn's artillery strategy at Verdun. The cadets gave me a standing O. I was so proud. I wanted to go to the embassy as military attaché. I knew some of our musicians who were living in Paris and there was a singer I was sleeping with." He paused to listen to the piano, ragtime Piaf. "She was from Martinique, wonderful voice. Sang at a little place near Sacré Coeur. But they had other ideas for me and of course at that time they didn't want Sambo anywhere near the Faubourg-St.-Honoré. Embassy Paris was my ambition in those days, and I didn't see any reason why I couldn't go back as ambassador, once I'd done the things they wanted me to do. And now I couldn't afford it. And I couldn't get confirmed if I could afford it. A lot of water under my bridge, Alec."
Alec poured Scotch nto his glass and drank, the liquor spicy as it went down. He looked for Sylvia, but she had vanished.
Wilson helped himself to the foie gras. "You should go. Alec."
"Yes," Avril said. "Get out of Washington for a while, Washington's dead."
Alec hesitated. Unlike everyone else he knew, he had no sentimental thoughts of Paris. He had no friends in Paris and his only memory was of the Hôtel-Dieu in the afternoon. If he went to Paris, what would he do there?
Wilson said, "What do you think, Flo?"
"Alec couldn't get confirmed either."
"Of course he could, if we made an effort—"
But the President's wife did not reply, only sighed and smiled a neutral smile. None of them would ever leave, not her, not Harold or Lloyd, not Alec, not Wilson, not Avril Raye. They were bankrupts in debt to the same hard-hearted creditor, the one who never took no for an answer. "That isn't the way we do things," she said mudly. "You know that, Wilson. You of all people."
Alec said, "What would happen to Echo House?"
But the others were occupied with their own thoughts, and the question went unanswered.
"Another shooting star," Flo said.
Harold pointed skyward as a star vanished. They were silent again. In the neighborhood somewhere a dog barked, and when Alec looked up he saw a vague fluorescent glow and fireflies and beyond the fireflies two slender shadows cheek to cheek. He imagined they were the golden couple come to eavesdrop, their first rendezvous since the anonymous year 1947. The shadows moved fluidly here and there, touching and then breaking apart and becoming one and unally flickering, flames with insufficient oxygen, then evaporating altogether, back to wherever they had come from. Washington had always been populated by ghosts, and now Alec knew that his father was present over his shoulder, delivering another interminable lecture about the nation's promise. He raised his eyes and saw a curtain move in the upstairs study, the silhouette behind it unmistakable. She was looking at the pictures and turning the pages of the scrapbook, trying to reclaim what had once been hers, or understand what it was about Aquitaine, 1944. Alec raised his hand, motioning for her to join them. But the curtain closed decisively into place as Avril murmured something incomprehensible in French. The silhouette vanished. The fluorescence in the sky expired, for there was nothing more for the cameras to photograph. Harold and Jack began to reminisce again; Wilson and the President's wife were tête-à-tête, out of earshot. Alec sat back in his chair, his eyes on the windows of the upstairs study, waiting for the curtain to move once more. This was the house he had inherited and the life he had made and he could not rid himself of either one; he guessed he had another thirty years to live.
