The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Horace wondered if Philindros knew, after all his years with Horace, that he might not be able to trust him absolutely where Horace’s family was concerned. Horace had only lately realized it, with a shock, himself.

  5

  Julian, gazing through the Plexiglas porthole of the helicopter as it lifted from the South Lawn after Patrick Graham’s broadcast, might have seen Graham’s angry figure in the window of his office if he had looked for it. But he had no thought of Patrick; Julian, instead, looked westward toward Georgetown. The first cold rain of autumn fell on Washington. The streets, as the helicopter left them behind, glistened in the wetness, and so did the numberless trees of the city. Because there were only two bright pools of light within it, one at the Capitol and the other at the White House, Washington seemed more than ever like a city in a forest. Julian, straining his eyes, tried to pick out the roof of his house on O Street. He knew this was impossible, the helicopter was flying away from it and the dripping leaves hid everything; but Emily was in the house.

  Lockwood spoke to him. Julian went back to him. The President sat with his head against the pillowed leather of his chair, strapped in and protected by armor plating as the Secret Service insisted. Lockwood asked the time. Then he said, “Patrick wasn’t so bad. What did you think?”

  “Better than I hoped; his blood was up.”

  “You did well to hold him off for such a long time, Julian. It’s September. I’ll only have to talk about it for two months.” He smiled; he looked very tired. “Patrick’s turned out well; that’s all your doing. I used to wonder what you saw in him. You’ve got your father’s eye for the right man.”

  Lockwood’s voice was weary. He had drunk three glasses of neat bourbon while watching the Graham Show. His eyes closed and he went to sleep.

  Julian was riding only as far as Andrews with the Lockwoods; from there they would take a small jet to Kentucky and he would return to the house on O Street. It was Friday—the whole weekend lay ahead, dead news time; a cooling period. The press secretary had been left behind to deal with the clamoring reporters who would be outraged by Patrick’s scoop. Lockwood had scheduled a news conference for the following Monday—soon enough to keep the initiative, late enough to let some of the first shock of his confession on the Graham Show dissipate.

  Polly Lockwood had been holding her husband’s hand. He uttered a sudden loud snore and twitched in his shallow sleep. Polly gently disengaged her hand and crossed the carpeted floor of the ship to Julian. She staggered as the craft pitched in the turbulence, and Julian leaped to his feet to assist her. Her round body was very soft under his hands; Polly had grown plump, but she had the vestiges of her darling girlhood looks and the open small-town manners of a girl everyone had always liked. One imagined her as a cheerleader, as the homecoming queen; in fact she had been at Concord and Radcliffe; she had met Lockwood in Cambridge, when he was a ragged law student. Her bankrupt father wouldn’t let her marry her hillbilly at Live Oaks, as she had wanted, during the last week that he owned the place. Elliott Hubbard had given her away in the college chapel. Two days before, in Kentucky, she had killed a horse putting it to a jump she knew it couldn’t make; everyone in the hunt knew why.

  Polly took Julian’s hand in both of hers—no pressure, just the gesture. “Is there anything I can do for Emily?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s slept a lot since it happened; the doctor gave her pills.”

  “She’s not alone?”

  “She’s wanted to be. But, no—not today. Caroline’s been with her.”

  Polly’s face opened in surprise. She seldom saw Julian outside his work since Caroline left; Emily was just too young to be her friend.

  “I didn’t know Caro was here.”

  “She’s come to collect the Pumpkins.” Julian made the old joke with an effort: Polly had always called Elliott and Jenny “Pumpkin” when they were small, and she still did so; she and Jenny had long telephone conversations, and they saw each other still—afternoon tea upstairs in the White House.

  “I wish I’d known,” Polly said. “I never see her since she went off on that boat.”

  “Nobody does. She and the children are flying to Buenos Aires. Leo’s anchored there. They just have time to get to Antarctica by its springtime. The icebergs are supposed to be a great sight.”

  “I should think they would be. Leo must be very rich.”

  “Well, he keeps writing those books. Caroline likes the life—the two of them alone most of the time, except for the crew. I don’t know where the children would be safer. Terrorists don’t have submarines, at least.”

  Polly let go of his hand. “Caro left no scars on you at all, did she?”

  Julian shrugged. “She and I were never enemies. For Caro, that was something. The only other non-enemies she ever had, besides the children I think, were you and Frosty. And now Leo. You know her. She does as she wants. Why shouldn’t she?”

  Polly, nodding, patted Julian’s hand. “You have a lovely girl now,” she said. The helicopter made a steep turn and Lockwood woke. He gave a startled look, then realized that they were landing and closed his eyes again.

  Polly said, “Getting over this won’t be easy for Emily. She’s so young, and she wanted a child so.” She turned her face away; she didn’t want a reply from Julian. She leaned across the aisle as the helicopter settled towards the earth and said something in Lockwood’s ear. He put a hand on her cheek and nodded.

  Polly gave Julian’s hand a final squeeze and debarked, surrounded by her Secret Service men. Lockwood sent his guards away; they went nervously, and Julian saw them standing close by the dull green body of the helicopter as they waited for the President to emerge.

  Lockwood got out of his seat and, in a queer gesture, held out a hand to Julian to help him to his feet; as if the younger man had been enfeebled by some sudden seizure. Lockwood up to this moment had said nothing to him at all about Emily or the loss of the baby; Julian had told him nothing about it.

  Neither Julian nor Lockwood could stand fully erect in the cabin and they stooped, face to face, while Julian waited for the President to speak. Lockwood’s eyes, when he lifted his face a bit, shone with sympathy. He put his hands on Julian’s shoulders.

  “You go on home now,” Lockwood said. “Give Emily my love.” From some lost glen in his ancestry of child-loving mountain folk, the President drew forth what he said and did next.

  “It’ll be all right after a while, honey,” he said; and kissed Julian on the forehead.

  6

  Julian found the children’s luggage piled in the hall when he got back to O Street, and from the living room heard Caroline’s voice and Emily’s. Music from two record machines floated down the stairs; Elliott and Jenny were playing their tapes as they waited to say good-bye to him.

  In the living room, he kissed Emily and said hello to Caroline. The women had stopped speaking abruptly as he came through the door.

  “I must say your father’s pictures make a difference to this room,” Caroline said. “They look larger here, and you’ve put better light on them.”

  The women were together on one sofa. Julian sat on the other and stretched his legs. He made a face; Caroline and Emily exchanged a look of understanding: Julian always did that at the end of the day, before he had a drink, as he remembered his body for the first time and his war wounds gave him pain.

  “We watched the Graham Show,” Caroline said. “Frosty was marvelous. I wonder what the reaction will be.”

  “I’ve no idea.” Julian pointed at Caroline’s empty wineglass; she’d given up spirits after she left him. Now she shook her head no even to another California Chablis.

  “Caroline thinks there’ll be a storm,” Emily said. “Everyone will be disillusioned—but then nobody will be able to live with the idea of Frosty Lockwood as a murderer….”

  “A murderer?”

  “I don’t know what else it’s called. Anyway, then—you finish it, Caroline. I can’
t put it back in your words.”

  “After a while, everyone will be like Patrick, He was horror-struck when I saw him in New York at the convention.…”

  “He told you then?”

  “Patrick has always told me things I didn’t want to hear. He was horror-struck a month ago, but now he’s finding reasons to admire what Frosty did. He’s a bellwether if ever there was one.”

  “Dominant male, Emily calls it.”

  Caroline patted Emily’s hand, lying on the cushion between them. “Whatever. The Lockwoods of this world aren’t supposed to do such things. Therefore, in the end, no one will believe Frosty did do it—or if he did it, they’ll believe he did it to save the world. Any jury on earth, if there were a trial, would hang him for premeditated murder. But there’ll never be a trial, and he’ll make the ten-best-loved list of all time. If he’s bad, what are we, having trusted and loved him so?”

  Caroline got up, a fluid motion. She looked not much different than she had looked more than twenty years before at Elliott Hubbard’s Christmas party; she shook her heavy hair back with the same gesture.

  “May I call the kids? We’ll have to go if we’re going to make the plane.”

  Julian started to speak. Caroline held up both hands in mock surrender. She had heard all his warnings before.

  “We’re taking four Secret Service men.” She named them; they were all good. “Bob Hanna is coming as a tutor, so they’ll be miles ahead of everyone in school when they get back. Leo’s got the best pilot for Antarctic waters that money can buy; and he’s been cleared for security to a fare-thee-well—Jack Philindros did that for me.”

  It was Julian who surrendered now. Jenny and Elliott clattered down the stairs when Caroline called; it seemed natural to hear her voice, roughened by a lifetime of argument—such a great sound to come out of so small a body—flying up the stairs again. While Julian kissed the children good-bye, he heard Emily and Caroline murmuring behind him. To his astonishment, they hugged each other fiercely and kissed.

  “Everything will be fine, you’ll see,” Caroline said. Julian went to the car with Caroline and the children, all of them screened by the broad bodies of the security detail. A misty rain had begun to fall again.

  Emily was sitting on the stairs when Julian came back in. She was pale—paler than Caroline had ever been after any of her abortions. After the first one, when they were still in school, Caroline had treated him to a big meal in Little Italy; only afterwards, as they clinked glasses when the Spumante had been poured; did Caroline tell him what she’d done that day; in Caroline’s mind, in those times, abortion had been a joyous political act. Of course, they had never shown Caroline the baby.

  Julian sat down on a stair lower than Emily’s, and kissed her. When he’d stripped the bed the morning after she lost the child, there had been no more blood on the sheet than the little spot left, all those years ago in the slovenly New York apartment, by the loss of Caroline’s virginity.

  “You and Caroline seem to have got on.”

  “She knows a lot. Do you know what she really said about Lockwood? She said he was safe because he had your brain, there’d been a transplant years and years ago; and you and Horace together were too smart for Mallory, or anyone.”

  Emily had a feverish look in her eyes. She gave Julian a smart pat on the shoulder, as if he’d come off a football field after making a marvelous play.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “No. I want a shower.”

  Emily went up the stairs, walking gingerly with her legs apart, holding herself (Julian could see the muscles tightening) as if she feared the baby would fall out of her again. He went to the kitchen and made sandwiches and carried them up to the bedroom. Emily was still in the shower; she had bathed a great deal lately—scrubbing her body over and over again and washing her hair. When she came out, wrapped in a terry cloth robe, she didn’t speak until Julian took the napkin off the tray, revealing the sandwiches and two sweating bottles of beer. “I’m not hungry,” she said again. Julian took the sandwiches away, and ate his own, alone, at the kitchen table downstairs. When he returned, he found Emily where he’d left her, in a chair gazing at a painting on the bedroom wall; it was one of Julian’s mother’s canvases—distended blue shapes, billows of white, with a tiny aluminum sun, like a tinsel beauty spot on a dead face.

  “Would you like to go to bed?” Julian asked.

  “Sure,” said Emily. She lay down and closed her eyes at once.

  On Sunday, Emily accepted everything that Julian suggested. It was cool enough to have lunch in the garden. Julian made a salad and opened a bottle of rose wine. Emily nibbled the greens and sipped a little wine. She touched the petals of the late roses Julian had cut and put in a bowl at the center of the table. Her eyes were empty. When he spoke to her she answered with a shrug or a glance or a flutter of her narrow hand.

  After lunch, Julian wheeled a chaise lougue into the shade of an umbrella—a big colorful parasol with the name of a vermouth printed around its edge that Emily had brought to their marriage. With her hundreds of books, the parasol was her dowry. While she lay quietly, Julian in a chair beside her read aloud from a book he knew she loved. He read only the happy parts.

  At nightfall they went inside. Emily walked stiffly within the circle of Julian’s arm, but slipped away from him once they were indoors. The Secret Service people were keeping themselves out of sight.

  “Emily, you don’t want to talk? If not to me, to someone else? It might help.”

  Emily shook her head. She had no friend but Julian. For all her rapport with Caroline, she had never liked other females; she didn’t believe in their honesty. Her dreaming look, her gawky limbs, her startling way of reading people for what they were, made her a lovable woman; but they had made her a laughable adolescent. She had never forgot the wounds girls had inflicted on her. No man, she said, had ever done her harm. But they were violent and sly, and almost always sentimental. When she rejected them, it was because they thought that she was more than she was. Only Julian had perceived her true and plain.

  All afternoon Emily had struggled with a thought about Julian that she did not want to have. It rose toward the light at the surface of her mind like a predator coming up from the sea. Emily fled from it; but it rose again.

  At last it broke into view. Their baby had died because Ibn Awad had died. There was no intelligence in this. Emily knew that. No invisible force existed that punished murder by killing the thing the murderer loved. Still, at the moment the baby died, she had felt the connection. All the gates in her mind that had been sealed by education and logic, and by her love for Julian, crashed open at once. The long past of her sex passed through her like an electric current, all the fear and futility and terrible consequences that females had suffered because men loved ideas, and loved danger, more than they loved women.

  Caroline, when they were alone that afternoon, had explained. Emily had asked her why she had left Julian. She couldn’t blame her for her answer; she had heard enough about Caroline to know that she always told the truth.

  “Leave him?” Caroline had said. “Julian was never there. I loved him, so it took me years to realize it. Why do you think he’s such a true friend, such an honorable man, such a perfect lover? Julian doesn’t even want to live, my dear. He sees that everyone else wants to live, some of us desperately, and he’s polite enough to help us. But himself? He could die tomorrow with as little emotion as he showed when I went out the door. ‘Good-bye,’ he said, and gave me to Leo. If that was what I wanted, that was fine with Julian.”

  They had just watched the Graham Show. “But this,” Emily said. “He helped kill a man.”

  “For Frosty Lockwood. Julian will take the blame if he’s asked; I’m sure he’s already taken on the guilt.”

  “But he can kill.”

  “Of course he can. All of them can.”

  Shivering and clasping her own body in her arms, Emily got out of his bed. Julia
n was asleep. She took another pill and went to Jenny’s room. There, among the restful fragrances of childhood, she slept alone.

  7

  Horace never ate breakfast at Rose MacKenzie’s. To ration energy, the Lockwood administration had banned the heating of water after dark, so Rose’s sink in the morning was always stacked with foul dishes. Horace woke before her, and left as the sun was coming up.

  The city was empty at that time of day and it reminded Horace of the sweetest hours of his youth. Thirty years before, after leaving a girl, he would walk home past the open hydrants over the shimmering pavement, and with the light of dawn beyond its towers and the fresh smell of flowing water in the air, New York had been the best place on earth. Now there was no hot water at night to wash dishes, and no cool water at any time to sluice the streets.

  As he sauntered down Fifth Avenue, Horace passed two boys of about twelve who were killing a cat with a strangling cord on the steps of Saint Thomas Church.