American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Tonight was their first actual conversation in what seemed forever. Lance glared at his Rolex. Its hour and minute hands pointed at the eleventh and fourth markers while its second hand slowly denounced all of the markers in between. “Never mind the matter,” Lance said to Ramsey. “Must have misheard you.”

  From the bowl on their cocktail table he plucked a black olive. He popped it into his mouth and hulled the meat with his teeth. Once he had swallowed all that was edible, Lance pursed his lips, leaned back, and exhaled with force, launching the pit into flight through the lobby, over the heads of city councilmen and state senators brokering deals, over the shoulders of country singers and songwriters trading compliments, until it landed in the marble fountain, on the edge of which sat Harold Forster, the second oldest of the four siblings.

  His laugh lines deepened by a bemused smile, a smudge of rémoulade on the sleeve of his tuxedo, Harold did not notice the olive pit as it sank to the bottom of the fountain. He was focused on naming the ducks. All five of them circled the gurgling water. The itsy-bitsy one with a white ring around its neck he named Callie, and the one whose pretty little head was all black he named Suzette. The one that kept dunking under water he named Alma, and the one with spots on its beak he named June. Each of the names originated with the people Harold considered his best friends while growing up. At various times over the years Callie, Suzette, Alma, and June had been housemaids for his family.

  Now he just needed something to call the fifth duck. Although there was one more maid whose name he could use—his favorite of those best friends—Harold had been taught by his sister to never, ever think about her. It would be too much for him.

  To distract himself from the noise in the lobby Harold dipped his fingers into the cool water of the fountain. The feel of wetness reminded him of swimming as a child. Back then Ramsey used to tell him he was like a turtle, slow on land but fast in water, a comment to which Lance, if he heard it, would invariably respond that on land wasn’t the only place he was slow. Although he was still focused on the ducks, Harold knew, without looking, that the twins were sitting on a sofa not far away. His family often said that Harold had a compass inside him with any Forster as its interchangeable north. They thought his ability stemmed from a need for the safety of their presence, but in truth he kept track of his family so he could protect them. Because of this special skill, Harold wasn’t startled when the crowd at the Peabody unbraided at what he knew to be the approach of his mother.

  “Don’t touch those things, Haddy. You want to catch a disease?” Annabelle Forster said to her thirty-five-year-old son. “Don’t make me regret letting you stay up late tonight.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Annabelle’s stark black lace gown and porcelain skin moderated her effulgent blond hair and French-blue eyes. She clutched her slender wrist in the well-moisturized palm of her other hand.

  At the get-up-now twitch of his mother’s fingers, on which she wore only her wedding band and a modest diamond because, as the entire family knew, she considered excessive jewelry “low,” Harold stood for inspection. His mother ran her hands down the lapels of his jacket and resituated a stray lick of his side part. “Do me a kindness,” she said to Harold.

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me where I can find your brother.”

  “Which one?”

  “Monty.”

  “At the bar.”

  On the far end of the lobby, accepting clasps of the arm from people who’d donated to his campaign and from those he assumed wished they had, Monty stood in line for a drink. Some old woman, her gray hair shot through with teal, dress ten years out of fashion, and neck an avalanche of wrinkles, had spent the past five minutes arguing over the proper garnish for a sidecar. The wait didn’t bother Monty. He was too busy trying not to think of his best friend from the war, Nicholas Harrington. More than twenty years had passed since they first met. “Name’s Nicholas. These chaps call me Nick, but to my friends I’m Nicholas.” Monty could still remember the thrill he’d felt at the implication that he was immediate friends with Nicholas. He was meditating on those three syllables—Ni-cho-las, Ni-cho-las—when the bartender jarred him from his thoughts.

  “What’s your pleasure, sir?”

  Where only moments ago Montgomery had faced the back of the belligerent old lady, he now saw a clean-shaven, tan, dimple-cheeked man wearing a silk bow tie and burgundy sleeve garters. The bartender must have been in his midtwenties. A spit curl jutted like a broken bedspring from his shellacked hair, and a stray eyelash stuck like a comma on the edge of his jawline. The sight of his Adam’s apple caused Monty’s own to bob. “Not sure what I want. Any recommendations?”

  The bartender squinted at him in the manner of a gypsy reading tarots. “I’ve got just the thing.” He paused a moment for objections before making the drink.

  Despite his proficiency behind the counter, flipping a Boston shaker through the air and spinning a Hawthorne strainer in his palm, the bartender’s future was not in mixology. He would eventually gain one kind of exploitative success in Los Angeles, and then another when he moved to New York City decades later. On August 12, 1975, Knopf would pay him a reported six-figure sum for the memoir of his experiences scraping hundred-dollar bills off the nightstands of Cole Porter, James Whale, and Rock Hudson.

  “Give this a try,” the bartender said, pushing a glass toward Monty. “I call it a four-one-five.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Four parts gin, one part vermouth, five parts delicious. I’ll be having one myself when my shift ends in twenty minutes.”

  “Interesting.”

  Montgomery accepted the drink, whose ingredients sounded an awful lot like those of a martini, and walked back into the crowd, where he immediately encountered a swarm of glad-handers. The distraction was a welcome one. During the campaign Monty had grown used to his assigned role—that of the upstanding, honest family man, husband of a beautiful wife, father of a brilliant daughter—to the extent he now actually felt good when playing it. The cocktail didn’t hurt either.

  “Mr. Sparks, great to see you.” Sip. “How’s tricks, little man?” Sip. “Hi there.” Sip. “Likewise.” Sip. “Thank you.” Sip. “The beautiful Miss Holt.” Sip. “Hotcakes, pleasure as always.” Sip. “Who let this guy in here?” Sip. “Hello, Mother.”

  Those unblinking, dispassionate eyes, that surgical slit of a mouth: his mother was the person Monty least wanted to see. All the cheerfulness he had begun to feel, from politicking with the crowd and chatting with the bartender, withered in her presence. Still, taught from birth to be conscious of appearances, Monty kissed his mother on the cheek, its temperature in scale to her disposition.

  She had been unnervingly cold with him ever since the incident in Ecuador. On the train ride home, after she’d traveled to Quito alone to pay the $15,000 in blackmail, Montgomery’s mother said only one thing to him. “Your father can never know what you are.” Now, so many years after that train ride, Montgomery managed not to flinch when his mother again mentioned the one Forster whose approval mattered to him.

  “He wants to see you.”

  “About what?”

  “The senator showed up after all,” she said. “They’ve scheduled a meeting for tonight.”

  “When?”

  “Half past.”

  “Where?”

  His mother gave him a look, pursing her lips and tilting her head, that meant, You know your father well enough to know where.

  Montgomery arrived at the Presidential Suite two minutes after eleven thirty.

  He did not bother to knock. Two-storied and balconied, with taupe wallpaper filigreed in gold, the suite warranted its name, authoritative but warm, judicious in its opulence, democratically regal. Oil paintings overlooked a baby grand. Kaleidoscopic shadows from a spiral staircase scored the hardwood flooring. Silk drapes framed a view of the river. On the Chesterfield sofa next to a mahogany Bornholm clock, Houghton Forster was lig
hting a cigar for Edmund Ainsworth, a Massachusetts senator (D) in the Seventy-Sixth U.S. Congress.

  Even though both men were in their sixties, Monty’s father seemed younger than Senator Ainsworth, not only because of the senator’s gleaming bald spot and wrinkled sack suit, in contrast to Houghton’s thick gray hair and trim tux, but also because, whereas the senator had an air of complacency, Houghton had one of hunger. If a portrait of his father were to be painted at that moment, Monty thought as he wished both men a happy new year, the inscription would likely read, “There’s still more to be taken—H.F.”

  “So glad you could make it,” Houghton said with a tone that was decidedly not glad his son had cut matters so close. Montgomery wanted to say he’d gotten there as soon as he’d heard about the meeting, that maybe next time he should be given more notice. Instead, he apologized for his lateness and situated himself in a club chair across from his father. Such a dynamic was typical of them. At seven he had remained silent behind a stream of tears as his father took a switch to him for earning poor marks on a spelling test. At twelve he had gotten frostbite of the pinkie toe when his father ordered him to chop a load of firewood in the middle of an ice storm. “They say if someone is raised by wolves, they either develop sharp claws or get torn to shreds,” writes Rebecca N. Leithauser in “Fortunate Scions,” a discursive essay on the children of affluent patriarchs. “Montgomery Forster never developed claws, and luckily he was too big to get torn to shreds.” His notable size allowed for Monty’s only act of parental defiance. Although his father had forbidden him to enlist, saying he was too young, in terms of the law and plain common sense, to fight for his country, Monty left home late one night with that goal in mind. The recruitment officer had no doubt that a six-foot-two, one-hundred-ninety-pound young man was of proper age to join the army. So at fifteen years old Montgomery Forster became a doughboy. For most of his time overseas he exhibited the lack of aggression people from home had considered a permanent aspect of his character. He followed orders. He stayed quiet. He kept to the back. Then came the evening in April 1918 when a German sniper, after spotting Nicholas fifty yards away, relaxed his upper torso, squinted, exhaled, and clenched his trigger hand. Monty sought retribution a month and a half later in the Battle of Belleau Wood. “He killed more Germans than ten of us could have combined,” one marine said, concluding his assessment with an analogy that, if it had been on record at the time, might have given Leithauser second thoughts about her metaphor in “Fortunate Scions.” “I’ve never seen anything that savage. He looked like a rabid wolf out there.”

  In the hotel suite Monty declined a cigar and asked what he had missed. The senator said, “Your father was just telling me,” between puffs.

  “We were talking about going to war.”

  “The possibility of going to war,” the senator said. “Official stance is still no intervention.”

  “Fine, fine. But if your boys in Washington are right and Hitler does decide to make do with Poland, a piano will jump out of my ass playing ‘Who’d A-Thunk-It?’” Houghton tapped a hunk of cigar ash into a tray on the coffee table. “Never mind that for now. What I want to talk about are the reasons for going to war. As you may know, my son here, Montgomery, my firstborn, fought in the Great War. Boy was only fifteen when he enlisted.” Houghton tilted his head back to fill the air with a column of smoke. “The morning he left I shook his hand. I was damn proud of the boy. Tears came to my eyes, I was so proud of him. Tell the senator, Monty.”

  “Tears came to his eyes,” Monty told the senator, “he was so proud of me.”

  “The only day I was more proud of my son was the day he came home. He’d been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism. My question for you, Senator Ainsworth, is what allowed my son and all those other boys to fight so gallantly? Pride. Except this was not the pride of a father for his son. Somewhat the opposite. This was the pride of a man for his country.”

  “Brass tacks, Houghton. Why am I here?”

  “If our boys go to war again, we need to make certain they’re reminded, three times a day, of their pride in America. Three times. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Now, unless we plan on creating a Corps of Grandmas, have them baking apple pies by the boatload, I ask you, what product represents wholesome American values more than a bottle of PanCola?”

  Senator Ainsworth harrumphed. “Still doesn’t answer the question of why I’m here,” he said to both Forsters.

  In response to that and each subsequent question, Houghton adjusted the proportions of art and matter in his talk. Montgomery listened as his father tried to make himself plain. Two months ago at the family’s estate, Houghton told Ainsworth, he’d gone quail hunting with the quartermaster general. Aside from proving himself a damn fine shot, the general had suggested a few logistical tips, hypothetically speaking, on how to set up bottling plants along a front. The general expressed enthusiasm in the idea. More recently Houghton had heard from his man in Washington that there were rumblings of a new Senate subcommittee. Although the official purpose of the subcommittee would be “peacetime war efficiency,” specifically how to prepare the public for the rationing that might become necessary as international trade routes deteriorated, an unofficial purpose would be to plan for an “efficient transition” from peacetime to war. Included under that rubric was the preliminary drafting of contracts for supplies other than weaponry. Houghton told the senator that competitive lobbying during a crisis, for cigarettes and toilet paper, for shoe polish and chewing gum, would hinder more important preparations for the second Great War.

  “Which brings us to why you’re here talking to me twenty minutes before the clock strikes 1940. The only matter still under debate is who will chair the subcommittee. And I have it on authority that the choice will be none other than Edmund Ainsworth.”

  At those words Houghton put the heel of one leg onto the knee of the other, glancing at Montgomery without turning his head. So far everything had gone in accordance with their plan. Monty knew what the senator would ask next.

  “If what you say is true, and I’m not saying it is, but let’s assume for conversation’s sake it’s true,” the senator said as he perched his cigar in a crook of the ashtray, “then the first question that comes to mind, regarding your suggestion, is what incentive do I have to contract PanCola?”

  Houghton said, “Ever heard the old saying ‘An eye for an eye’? The same applies to favors.”

  “I’m listening,” said Ainsworth.

  “Someday my son here may very well be in a position of even greater power than his current one.”

  “Such as what?”

  “This isn’t the Governor’s Suite we’re sitting in.”

  The senator retrieved his cigar from its perch, saying, “Suppose you’re planning on buying that election, too,” before screwing it back into the ashtray unfinished.

  “You can only buy something,” Houghton said, “with what you’ve earned.”

  Since the beginning of the conversation Montgomery had considered it best to remain quiet. That was no longer the case. He could see his father was getting hot. It was understandable why. Montgomery knew that people such as Senator Ainsworth, a Boston Brahmin, considered themselves superior to the nouveau riche, of which Monty had to admit the Forsters were a part, even when those like Senator Ainsworth were no longer riche. Neither that hypocrisy nor his father’s anger, however, were the reason Monty decided to speak up. He just wanted to get out of the room sometime this decade.

  “Senator, all due respect, but nobody’s buying anything,” Monty said. “Johnson and I both ran honest campaigns, and when we’re inducted two weeks from now, it will be with a clean conscience. I’ll be second in line for a position that would put me in line for a run at the presidency. Understand? Fact of the matter is Paul’s not in the best of health.” Governor Paul B. Johnson Sr., “Champion of the Runt Pig People,” would die in office on December 26, 1943, shortly after which—and for an unre
lated reason, despite the headlines—Monty would tell his family he was going to “look for arrowheads” near the old barn on the Forsters’ estate. “But forget potential tragedies. Let’s get back to old sayings. Have you heard ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’? You won your last election by only ten thousand votes, and support from your constituency is even weaker now. Added to which, your indiscretions with one Polly Cheswick of Red Hook, Brooklyn, aren’t a well kept secret,” Monty said. “So it would seem, Bunny, you have a very itchy back.”

  If it weren’t for his father sitting there, the grin on his face so wide his eyeteeth showed, Monty would have immediately apologized. The bully was not a role he enjoyed. How could he have used Paul Johnson like that, a man who’d done nothing but right by him?

  Houghton, as though sensing the misgivings of his son, said, “Couldn’t have said it better myself.” He stood. “Tell you what, Senator. How about you take the night to think on it?”

  “I think that would be best.” Senator Ainsworth gained more composure with each step toward the door of the Presidential Suite. “Certainly is getting late.”

  “We’ve got you set up in one of the finest rooms in the place. You should have no trouble getting some rest,” Houghton said, one hand on the senator’s back, the other on the doorknob. “Know what I like best about staying in hotels? The chocolate on the pillow. Am I right? There’s just something so pleasant about finding your sheets pulled back, your pillows fluffed, and this little piece of candy to help you drift off to sleep.”

  “How true.”

  The door clicked shut. Houghton walked back across the room, sat down, and lifted an eyebrow at Montgomery. On arriving in his room, both father and son knew, Senator Ainsworth would find, placed on his pillow, $20,000 in cash. “Think he’ll take the turn-down service?” Monty said.