Lockwood and Julian, over this long period of time when they were almost never out of each other’s company, entered into each other’s mind. They became the two working parts of a single organism. Caroline, meanwhile, was having her babies, living (as she afterwards told Julian) at second hand through the slow rise of her children to the powers of speech and thought, and meanwhile watching the climb of Lockwood to the head of affairs. It was only very late that she realized that Julian had been absorbed by the President.
She could not live with the symbiosis after she saw that Lockwood was the stronger of the two parts—the ideal host for whom Julian had been searching all his life. She had imagined that it was Julian who was the real person in the relationship, that Lockwood was the star and Julian the writer-director of the great film that was their life. Caroline believed, of course, that she had created Julian before Julian created Lockwood. She had given him his ideas. The defection of Julian’s spirit to Lockwood was a worse crime against their marriage than adultery.
She told Julian to choose: Lockwood or his marriage. “But, my God, Caro, I can’t,” he replied. “I won’t. Lockwood is the best human being who’s ever been elected President of the United States. For a quarter of my life I’ve done nothing but work to help him get where he is. So have you. You’ve always wanted the world to change in a certain way, to become more decent. This man will make the necessary changes.” They had their conversations now in the sitting room, not in bed, and Caroline, drinking a whole martini at a swallow, had replied, “Nothing changes. Ever.”
She never raised the subject again, and Julian went on with his work.
Soon after Caroline confronted Julian, there was a White House evening to thank the theatrical people who had helped in Lockwood’s campaign. The administration was still only a few months old, and the good feeling about it had not yet begun to dissipate. A popular singer who had raised a great deal of money for Lockwood begged an invitation for a man called Leo Dwyer. He was a rich novelist who was said to get his lurid plots and characters from gossip magazines and from what he overheard at parties in Beverly Hills. “You’ve got to do it for me, Julian,” the singer said, “otherwise that God-damned midget will put me in his next book.”
Leo Dwyer turned out to be a jovial man with an enormous curly head on a flyweight’s body. He wore a maroon tuxedo made of a luxurious material that Caroline later reported to be vicuna. Julian seated Leo at his own table, and introduced him to the President. Julian urged his wife to dance with the little man, and she stayed with him on the dance floor all evening. As a youth, Leo had been an instructor in a dance studio. When he moved to music, as when he talked or used a typewriter, there was nothing ridiculous about him.
Within a week, he and Caroline were having an affair. Within a month, Caroline asked for a divorce.
“Leo wanted to be here with me to play this scene; he thinks he’s doing you a great injury by stealing me,” Caroline said. “I thought he’d better not be, in case you did think so, and decided to hit him. He’s more my size than yours, you know.” Caroline wore a faint smile as she spoke, and Julian returned it. She hadn’t had his full attention when she started speaking, and she was almost all the way through her speech before Julian had realized what she was saying. He was used to hiding his reactions, to give himself time to avoid mistakes in doing Lockwood’s business. “I’ve lived with you all these years without hitting you, Caro,” he said; “Leo Dwyer is in no danger.” Caroline took Julian’s glass out of his hand and made him another martini; he thanked her for it, in his usual quiet voice, when she brought it back to him.
Caroline gave him the full details of her romance with Leo. “I felt a thrill for him on the dance floor, he has a body like a jockey, Julian—imagine what a change that was for me,” she said. “Leo’s the first lover I’ve had since we’ve been married—does that astonish you?”
It did not. Julian himself had never accepted any of the women who had offered themselves to him on many, very many, of the hundreds of nights he and Lockwood had traveled the country together. He knew it was possible to stop feeling desire for one person, even a person one loved, and transfer the desire to another, renewed and intensified. His mother had not even gone to another man, but to solitude.
Julian didn’t ask Caroline for an explanation, but she wanted to invest the moment with ceremony. “I told you before, Julian, that you’d disappeared into Lockwood and what that meant to me; you chose what you chose; and that’s all right,” she said. “Now I’ve chosen too. I don’t want anything from you, not even the children; I couldn’t protect them. I want to be by myself, with Leo, as much as possible for the rest of my life. With my parents, at school, in the Movement, in politics down here, even at home since I had Elliott and Jenny, I’ve been in a crowd. …”
She went on giving details, all unnecessary. Julian knew what she felt. She had never kept anything from him from the moment they met. He felt very tired and a little drunk; emotion and gin mixed badly in him. Watching Caroline—her gestures, the lifted shoulder, the hair pushed back from the eye with her tiny hand on which his mother’s diamond glittered—Julian felt the long years of her wifehood, of their oneness, emptying out of him. It was a physical sensation, as in that hour after he crashed in the Gulf of Tonkin more than twenty years before. Caroline’s happiness, her glow of satisfaction as she freed herself from him, seemed right to Julian. But he felt the loss. As Caroline was inflated by joy, something left his own person, pumping out of a wound he couldn’t see. He could bear the pain, it was never so bad as one feared, but he knew he’d never get back what he was losing, that he’d never again be quite as he had been before.
Before Caroline left, she and Julian had one last dinner with the Lockwoods, who slipped through the media cordon to come to the house in Georgetown. Lockwood brought wine from the White House stock, and Caroline and Polly Lockwood cooked the dinner, Caroline having come down from her parents’ apartment in New York for the occasion. The meal passed in silence, and by evening’s end the women were showing signs of tears.
They had been friends, and they had made Lockwood and Julian friends. Polly had lost babies in her young womanhood, and she loved Caroline’s children. She spent long afternoons with them and long mornings with Caroline, and the cupboards were filled with toys that Lockwood himself had brought on Christmas and at birthdays. Caroline had shown him her sweet side always; if Jenny and Elliott were all Polly had for grandchildren, Caroline was all Lockwood had ever wanted as a daughter: pretty and mild and bright; she played the piano for him, the plaintive mountain songs he loved to sing. They all knew the friendship had broken when the marriage broke.
Leaving, Lockwood kissed Caroline on the lips. “Godfrey,” he said, “I’m crying too. Julian is the only one here who knows how to keep a dry eye. It must be those fancy schools he went to.” Two Secret Service men stood in the small hall with them, faces blank, eyes unfocused: they had to be watchful only in public moments. It was too late to return to New York that night, so Caroline slept in the guest room. The next morning, before she flew to Santo Domingo for her divorce, Julian carried her bag downstairs and found her in the hall, making some last adjustments in her appearance. Seeing him behind her in the mirror, she smiled and, still the unselfconscious wife, lifted her skirt and fixed a twisted stocking. Julian smiled too, at her solemnity that he had always loved so much, at her impatience with her own prettiness.
He wanted to kiss her, but he knew she wouldn’t permit it: Caroline was an honorable woman, committed now to Leo Dwyer, whom she was going to meet in Las Vegas two days hence for a wedding among his friends. Caroline and Julian never even shook hands again, and that morning, after half a lifetime of incessant questions and speeches, she left him without uttering a word.
7
For a long time, Julian was content to be alone. His Sundays with the children gave him pleasure, and now that he did not have to engage in long conversations with Caroline in the evening, he
took up his father’s practice of reading to the children at bedtime, and he read them the same books. Elliott liked Kim and The Jungle Books well enough, and Jenny, having outgrown poems about Christopher Robin, listened impatiently to these stories, leaning against her father’s, shins in her bathrobe while Elliott lay in bed, his eyes fixed on his father’s face. Their favorite novel was Little Big Man, and Julian read it twice, starting over as soon as he had finished. He was never late coming home when he was in Washington; he and the children dined together every night. Most nights, he returned to the White House after they were asleep. When he was away, he telephoned. The Secret Service was always with Elliott and Jenny, watching.
By the time Emily came into the house as Julian’s new wife, the children knew her well; she had been their father’s only female companion for more than a year. Emily was a journalist, and a gifted one. She wrote profiles for the Style section of The Washington Post, long pieces filled with information about the eccentricities of famous Washingtonians. She specialized in what she called invisible men—quiet presidential assistants like Julian.
Emily had been introduced; she, too, was the granddaughter of one of Elliott Hubbard’s friends. Julian agreed to an interview, thinking that the ordeal would take no more than an hour. But Emily was a leech—she dogged Julian’s movements, waited in his office, asked him to dinner, startled him with intensely personal questions, all the while scribbling in a pad. Emily had been described as an admirer of Lockwood’s, but during her investigation of Julian she kept her political feelings hidden. She asked him about his sex life: “You’re never seen with girls since your divorce. Why?” Julian, tired of her questions and tired of her despite her lovely physical being, replied, “Miss Barker, to be frank, most of the women available in Washington are your age; and girls your age are about as memorable as so many New Yorker covers.”
Emily printed the quote and it created a little storm. “My idea was to make every other female under thirty too angry at you to give you the time of day,” explained Emily. Like Caroline before her, she chose Julian, seduced him, herded him by her dependency into marriage. After they began sleeping together, she followed him to Maine, where he had accompanied Lockwood on a political trip. At a party, Julian paid attention to a woman his own age, small and dark and taut, as Caroline had been. Someone told Emily of the resemblance between this woman and Julian’s ex-wife. Emily coaxed him into her rented car and started a violent quarrel. Weeping and shouting, she drove through a guard rail and over a high coastal bluff. The car turned lazily over and over with their bodies suspended inside it by safety harnesses, headlights sweeping through the limbs of pine trees, the radio playing Chopin. Emily’s tawny hair lifted and opened like that of a girl swimming; her wet eyes turned on Julian with longing. She made no attempt to protect her face; her hands instead reached for Julian. They landed, uninjured, in a clump of pines, the motor still running, Emily’s feet pressed convulsively on the brake. They were upside down, hanging side by side in their seat belts. Emily uttered a deep sob. “That’s as close as I ever care to come to dying for love,” said Julian. They were married a month later.
Julian’s children, used to having strangers in their lives, made room for Emily with no fuss. Julian kept their routine as it had always been; Emily became a part of everything except the Sunday morning outings. At dinner, she told them stories of her interviews, and she and Julian vied to make the children laugh with their accounts of the most eccentric interview of the day.
Emily kept her own name for professional purposes, but few did not know that her husband was Julian Hubbard. She wanted no reflected power. Nor did she want the bother of being guarded. She went about the city and did her work without escorts. Jenny worried about her. Shots had been fired twice at Caroline, and Julian’s life had been threatened times without number. Jenny had been with him once, riding her bicycle along the towpath while Julian and Elliott ran in the early morning, when the Secret Service, loping ahead of them, discovered a man with a machine pistol lying in ambush, and shot him dead. The children saw his body. Julian made no attempt to shield them, there was no use in it. They lived in an age of terror; powerful men like Julian were kidnapped and tortured and killed every day. To be murdered by a fool who knew you only from photographs was a very modern fate, one that Elliott and Jenny had always known about.
Julian was saddened by the things that Jenny knew. She had lived her whole childhood as a fugitive because of her father’s position in the world. How could she realize that there had once been a time when money and influence, and especially political power, made people safe? All of Jenny’s life the reverse had been true. She and her brother, huddled near the little fire of political decency that her father and President Lockwood had lit, were surrounded by a ring of beasts, snapping and growling just beyond the feeble light. Terrorists and kidnappers were as much a fact of Jenny’s existence as death by typhoid and tuberculosis had been a hundred years before for the girls who went to work at Jenny’s age in the Pittsfield mills. Julian’s father had put that linked image—Jenny and the doomed mill girls—into Julian’s head; the old man had liked the symmetry of it. Julian did not. He feared for his child in a world where madmen thought that he was the madman for trying to keep the ideas of order and justice alive and working. In his heart, Julian was not sure that he and Lockwood and the others who believed as they did could succeed in the end. But he was sure that Lockwood was almost the last wholly sane man in politics.
Sometimes Julian spoke of these things to the children. Ideas didn’t interest Elliott very much, but Jenny’s little face, framed by her mother’s sable hair, shone with solemn intelligence. She loved music and flowers (her room was full of plants). She had formed the habit of going to vespers at the cathedral, where she went to school. “I like the stony smell of the church,” Jenny explained to Julian. Now he went with her whenever he could; though he was no more a believer than he’d ever been, he, too, liked the atmosphere of the cathedral, its emptiness.
There was in Jenny something that reminded Julian of his spinster aunts and great-aunts, all of them dead now. Of all the people he had ever known, only his aunts and Jenny had accepted Julian for what he was, and loved him uncritically. Jenny, like these ancestresses who had lived among potted flowers and cats and photographs in old dark houses emptied by the deaths of their parents, saw him with absolute clarity. Jenny could never have the life that the aunts had had; yet Julian wished that she could have known, for a little while at least, their innocence. Julian remembered these women as shining with intelligence and modesty, as never being at a loss for the right English sentence, as treasuring the things that belonged to the family—the mills equally with teacups, brought home in the China trade by ancestors whose names and voyages they knew by heart.
In spite of all that she knew that they could never have known, Jenny was like Julian’s aunts, as passive, and as alert, as Emily Dickinson. Caroline had seen this too, and fought against it. When one of the great-aunts died, a particular favorite of Julian’s, he and his father listened after the funeral to a long harangue by Caroline about the dead woman’s wasted life: she had been all the things that offended Caroline—a virgin, a lady, a Christian; even a Daughter of the American Revolution. Caroline’s speech was really addressed to Jenny, then six years old, who was seated with her mother on a sofa in the house on 93rd Street.
At last Elliott Hubbard held up a hand. “You must bear in mind, Caroline,” he said, “that Julian’s Great-aunt Ella was born in a time in which it was not considered bad form to have good manners. If you were dead today instead of Aunt Ella, and she were sitting there in one of her changeable silk dresses, she would say the only thing she ever said about you, because it was a good thing—that you have beautiful eyes and a love for Julian that’s wonderful to see. Then she would have made tea, and begun calling you ‘dear Caroline.’ The dead were always dear to Ella; their faults died with them.”
Sometimes, listening to Je
nny read or watching her as she patiently practiced a difficult run at the piano, or seeing her eyes dance as she listened to foolish talk but kept her peace, Julian would fancy that the shade of one of the aunts had passed into the little girl. It was they who had taught Julian what to love in women. Who would teach the man who was waiting for Jenny?
8
Patrick Graham returned from the Near East on a Saturday night, and the next morning Julian woke at dawn as usual. He dressed himself in old corduroys and a faded Yale sweat shirt, the last one made of pure cotton he had ever been able to find; he and Elliott and Jenny were going for a hike in the woods that morning. As he laced his boots, the light on the speaker phone blinked—it had no bell. The automatic recording device was on, and Julian pressed the key of the machine to listen to the incoming call without having to answer it. It was always possible that Lockwood was calling, and if he was, it was important; the President knew that Sundays belonged to Elliott and Jenny, and he had intruded only half a dozen times in all the years he and Julian had been together.
The Better Angels Page 8
