Ex Officio Page 18

  “There’s no greatness in Harrison, Bradford, why can’t you see that?”

  “Possibly,” Bradford said, his voice colder than Evelyn had ever heard it before when addressed to her, “because I have more faith in my brother than the rest of you.”

  viii

  FRIDAY NIGHT, HERBERT JARVIS hanged himself. The body was discovered Saturday morning by one of the maids, who came white-faced and terrified to report it to Evelyn, who had been having a quiet breakfast upstairs with Dinah. “No,” said Evelyn, but it was yes.

  Bradford seemed as shaken as everyone else, when the news reached him, and it was Evelyn who had to take over the details. She dealt with the local police through the Secret Service men assigned to the house, who spent most of the morning on the phone to Washington before it was finally decided to keep the fact of the suicide private, and announce Herbert’s death as from natural causes.

  Dr. Holt—Uncle Joe—had been phoned early in the morning, and he came by private plane from Philadelphia to Hagerstown, where Evelyn had a car waiting to pick him up. He signed the perjured death certificate, and the body was taken away by a local undertaker sworn to secrecy, a man whose family and business ties with the Lockridges ran deep into the past of Eustace and who could therefore be relied upon to keep the truth to himself.

  Harrison and his family had planned to leave on Saturday, but now they would stay on till Monday for the funeral. Even the Simcoe girls seemed to be affected by the atmosphere in the house, and their screeching was infrequent and muffled. Patricia—the elder Patricia, Harrison’s wife, Herbert’s sister—was bitter and enraged. She blamed Bradford for her brother’s death, blamed him loudly and often, and refused to be quieted by Harrison or anyone else. The rest of the family was subdued and vaguely frightened.

  Bradford himself kept away from them, taking his meals in his office and alternating his time between that room and the back library. Whenever Evelyn had to see him about some detail, he was always into some book on John Quincy Adams: Samuel Flagg Bemis’s John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, James Truslow Adams’s The Adams Family, W. C. Ford’s seven-volume compilation of Adams’s writings, Bemis’s John Quincy Adams and the Union, and the biographies by John T. Morse and Bennett Champ Clark. He seemed remote when he and Evelyn talked, and made no comment about Herbert’s death.

  The funeral was Monday morning at nine. Bradford did not attend, and when the others returned to the house—they would be leaving for home after lunch—a maid told Evelyn that Bradford wanted to see her in his office.

  He was sitting at his desk, and he extended a folded sheet of paper toward Evelyn. When she took it he said, “Give that to Harrison. Tell him I’ve been on the phone and it’s taken care of. He should call that man in Sacramento tomorrow morning. He won’t get out of it without a little mud on his skirts, but he will get out.”

  “Thank you, Bradford,” she said, but he looked away from her, and his expression reminded her of the way he’d looked on the plane coming back from Paris. She went away to tell Harrison, who tried to restrain the expression of his joy and relief out of respect for his dead brother-in-law, but who couldn’t keep the wide joyful smile from spreading across his face.

  Bradford remained in his corner of the house and didn’t see them off. There was no bus this time, Evelyn having ordered three cars to take the family to Hagerstown, and she stood in the sunlight and watched them all clambering aboard, waiting for the opportunity to wave them goodbye.

  Harrison was the last to get into the car. “I want to thank you for talking to Brad, Evelyn,” he said, and took her hand. “If only Herbert could have waited it out. If only he hadn’t gotten so discouraged.”

  Evelyn considered telling him what he should have realized but obviously hadn’t, that it was Herbert’s death and not Evelyn’s talk that had induced Bradford to act. He’d needed a stronger push this time than Evelyn could give, and Herbert had done the job. But it would only confuse Harrison to point that out, so she said nothing, only smiled and accepted his handshake, and then stood waving until the three cars were out of sight.

  The house seemed huge, and echoing, and eerily empty. Evelyn could feel Bradford, tucked away in his office or the back library at the second floor rear, and she knew he would want to continue to be alone. And there was Dinah, who had been neglected these past several days.

  Her legs were very heavy as she went upstairs.

  2

  ROBERT PRATT SAT AT the typewriter and tried to ignore the call of the August sun outside his window. The air-conditioner kept this second floor study cool, but just beyond the glass summer beckoned, a sunny August Sunday that wanted no one indoors. His one concession to the season was the bottle of beer beside the typewriter on his battered desk, but the bottle too kept distracting him from the paper he was writing.

  He re-read, for the tenth time, the last sentence on this page: “America is moving inexorably toward a Fuehrer, possibly by the end of this decade, certainly by the end of the century.” Did he actually believe that? Not as surely as he’d made it sound, though he did think the erosion toward an omnipotent leader was well under way and would only with great difficulty be stopped in time. Still, in any case, it would be best to copper his bets a little; he changed the period at the end of the sentence to a comma, and added, “Unless unforeseeable changes take place.”

  Yes. Now to the subject of the piece: “Eugene McCarthy was probably our only chance for a Fuehrer from the left. With his apparently irreversible defeat, the political left has reverted to its usual rudderless structureless condition, and left the field open for a Fuehrer from the right. The dangers in, say, a successful George Wallace are self-evident, but what are the dangers in a takeover by a Fuehrer from the left?”

  Robert took a swig of beer and studied the typewriter moodily. What are the dangers? For that matter, what are the dangers in speculation built on speculation built on speculation? If it were really possible to guess what sort of President a man would be, who would have voted for Lyndon Johnson? The concept of Eugene McCarthy as a Fuehrer from the left rested on such an array of interlocked suppositions that Robert felt himself afraid to take a deep breath, for fear the whole conceit would collapse like a vampire in the sun.

  It was Elizabeth Lockridge who should be writing this article in the first place, most of the ideas in it having been generated by her, starting with that ride down to meet Bradford Lockridge three months ago, when Robert’s complacent pendulum theory had decided her his political education urgently needed to be brought up to date. The number of dinners he’d shared with Sterling and Elizabeth since then were uncountable, but at all of them the scene was the same; gentle Sterling watching in quiet amusement while Elizabeth and Robert argued their way through the last decade of American politics.

  And slowly she had convinced him of the truth of most of what she believed, though he had ultimately taken her beliefs one step farther, adding his own twist of interpretation and coming up with the idea of the Fuehrer from the left. She it was who had convinced him that the American people were weary of freedom, made nervous by it, ready and anxious to give over their liberties to a man strong enough to demand them, but it was he who pointed out that the same weariness and nervousness were evident on the increasingly radicalized left, which had in 1968 turned to McCarthy not so much as a political alternative as a messiah. “And a messiah,” he’d said, “is simply a Fuehrer we agree with.”

  Elizabeth had not agreed, had argued that McCarthy was not a man to allow himself to be used that way, and Robert had replied that he doubted McCarthy would have been given the choice. The whole concept of a Fuehrer from the left remained too contradictory for Elizabeth, however, and at that point they had bogged down, perhaps permanently.

  But out of it all had come this article. Although his position as Sterling Lockridge’s nephew’s chum made the teaching profession’s dictum of ‘publish or perish’ not very compelling in Robert’s case
, he did try to produce at least two articles a year for the historical journals, one written during the summer and the other during the Christmas recess. This one, relating to material less than a decade old, would probably be more controversial than his previous pieces, essays that he himself had termed “marching in place,” but some journal somewhere would surely make room for an article that raised the concept of a Fuehrer from the left.

  The dangers. “Had McCarthy been nominated and elected in 1968,” Robert wrote, “his most vital first move would have had to be to determine his successor, since it seems inescapable that McCarthy himself would not have survived his first term of office. His death—his martyrdom, as it would with justice have been called—would undoubtedly have caused the death of the American electoral process as well, as his increasingly radicalized and isolated governmental apparatus would have been forced to a widening abrogation of liberties for the sake of public order.

  “But who would be able to follow McCarthy, aside from another McCarthy, to be gunned down in his turn and followed by another doppelganger, and another, indefinitely? To make one of the obvious choices, to hand the reins to a Weimar Bolshevik like Allard Loewenstein, would simply be to form a caretaker government to await the truly strong man who would of necessity then emerge from the far right.”

  Robert stopped again, drank some more beer, and studied that last paragraph. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the specific references to Loewenstein, who was a living human being, not a chess piece, and therefore more complicated and in many ways more politically valuable than his two-word summation suggested. That was why Robert preferred to work with happenings remote enough for all the participants to be long since dead; with a living man, it was too possible to see oneself in his place, reading this essay.

  He made the change in pen, so that the clause in question was altered to read, “to hand the reins to one of the Weimar Bolsheviks surrounding him.” He also disliked that sort of vague phraseology—Paul O’Dwyer, for instance, now became by implication lumped under a definition that Robert didn’t believe applied to him at all—but of the two evils vagueness was lesser to nastiness.

  He looked over at the clock on one of the bookcase shelves, and it was just after two-thirty. He’d been at this now since before one, and he’d done three pages. Was that enough for the first day back? Second day, really, since he’d actually left Acapulco on Friday, but yesterday he’d spent the daylight hours with details—letters and laundry, that sort of thing—and in the evening he’d gotten drunk.

  Yes, it was enough for today. He pushed the chair back, grabbed the beer bottle by the neck, and left the study, crossing the hall at the head of the stairs and entering his bedroom, dim and cool, shades drawn, air-conditioner running, where a tactile memory of Kit suddenly struck him as violently as if she’d left him only yesterday.

  He avoided the bed, sitting instead on the wooden chair in the corner, where he tilted the bottle against his mouth, draining it, and then stared moodily at the unmade bed, remembering when.

  Kit had never been able to understand why his favorite time for making love was in the middle of the afternoon, and he hadn’t bothered to try to understand it then himself, but since then the idea had grown on him that what he’d been doing was playing at being a child. Children love to form tents of their sheets in bed, crawl under, and pretend to be on a desert island or a Saturn satellite, and it was exactly that impulse he’d been striving to follow with Kit, crawling into bed with her at one or two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun pale as cream on the drawn shade, the whole room the shadowed color of the sheet he’d pull up over their heads, murmuring, “Let’s stay all afternoon, all afternoon.” But she never would.

  It was sexual encounters with other women that invariably brought back those hornet-sting memories of Kit’s slick belly slithering on the sheet, the supposed antidote never serving to do anything but cause a relapse, a freshened attack of the disease. Because it was still Kit who figured in his sexual hungers, and not all the schoolteachers in Youngstown, Ohio. From Youngstown, Ohio; in Acapulco.

  He went somewhere every summer, and it was always the same. This summer he’d gone to Acapulco, and it had been the same. In summer the world outside the borders of the United States teems with American schoolteachers, out to find their own antidotes, and only finding one another. They are the slightly plainer sisters and brothers of those young men and women who worry about odoriferous breath on television. Neither handsome nor ugly, they are adventure’s equivalent of a bland diet. Every summer Robert promised himself he would not go among them to scratch his annual itch, and every summer he broke the promise, and this third summer in a row he had done so yet again.

  He’d never been to Acapulco before, but it looked sufficiently like places he had been that it didn’t distract his mind for more than the first few hours. On the evening of the first day he met a girl from Seattle, due to leave at noon the next day. They spent the night together, and her stretch marks told him she had an interminable story to tell, if he showed the slightest sympathy, or even curiosity. He showed neither, having made that mistake in the past, and waved goodbye to her at the airport the next morning feeling strongly the nervous relief that follows a close shave.

  His second night he spent alone, possibly through his own fault, possibly not, but on the third day he met the schoolteacher from Youngstown, Ohio, a chipper practical girl whose only triste seemed to be the freckles on her nose. She had two roommates sharing her hotel room both also Youngstown teachers, so the rest of his week she’d moved in with him. She’d been by far the best of any of his summer episodes, delightfully cheerful, astonishingly free of morbid or mournful autobiography, and even fairly pretty on the two evenings they’d dressed for dinner. Her sexual repertoire was limited, and she resisted the idea of expanding it, but after all what could a teacher be taught in Youngstown, Ohio? Nor did it make that much difference. What they did have together was carefree and fun.

  But here came the backlash: Kit, stabbing him with sudden shards of memory as he walked unwarily, his head full of recent history on a different level. He’d slept in this room last night, and had felt nothing. But now—

  The phone was ringing. He roused himself reluctantly, both grateful at the interruption and moody at being dragged from his reverie, however painful.

  The voice was familiar, but in contradictory ways. “Hello? Is this Robert Pratt?” It sounded like someone he knew, and yet it also sounded like a voice he would know from movies or television or the radio, and the confusion between the known and the really known left him tongue-tied until the voice said again, “Hello?”

  “Yes,” he said. “This is Robert Pratt.”

  “This is Bradford Lockridge calling.” (Of course!) “I wonder if you’d have some time to spare tomorrow. If you wouldn’t mind driving down to Eustace for the afternoon.”

  He thought immediately of Mrs. Evelyn Canby. In the first few weeks after the arranged meeting with her he had planned to phone her, see if they might work out some sort of date or something, but he’d just never gotten around to it. The woman hadn’t really attracted him very much, in fact, and he’d only contemplated calling her because he’d thought it was expected of him. But she was too solemn, too dull. Another case of stretch marks, a sad life story just aching to be told. Gradually the time had gone by, until the day came when it was at last too late, when to call her now would be much more awkward than not to call, and with a pleasant feeling of relief he packed the incident away in a trunk in the attic of his mind and forgot about it.

  And here it was back in the living room. He had no doubt that ex-President Lockridge was matchmaking again—or still—and his desire was to keep away, but in the clutch he couldn’t think of a legitimate-sounding excuse, and did have to make some response, so in fatalistic irritation he heard himself say, “Not at all, I wouldn’t mind a bit. I have plenty of time tomorrow.”

  “Very good. Can you come for lunch? One o’c
lock?”

  “One o’clock. I’ll be there.”

  “Fine,” said Bradford Lockridge, and hung up.

  “Drat,” said Robert, and also hung up.

  ii

  EVELYN CANBY OPENED THE door herself, but instead of letting him into the house she came out and shut the door again behind herself. “Good,” she said. “You got here early. I was hoping you would. I’d like to talk with you.”

  “Sure,” he said. She was better-looking than he’d remembered. She was also behaving like someone with a secret. “Lead on,” he said.

  “Let’s take the path down by the pond,” she said, and set off without looking to see if he was coming.

  It took him a quick step or two to catch up, and then they walked side by side, out across the gravel driveway toward a stand of trees in front of and a bit to the left of the house. He looked at her set face curiously, but she clearly didn’t intend to say any more until they were well away from the house, so he contented himself with merely walking along beside her.

  This was a path he hadn’t been on during his other visit. It led directly into the stand of trees, through which he thought he could catch glimpses of sunlight gleaming on water. Probably the pond she’d mentioned.

  Today was another hot and sunny day, but with somewhat less humidity. And also with a change in sight; dark clouds massed low to the west, coming this way. Tomorrow or the next day, an August thunderstorm would stretch out across the land, but for today the sky was still mostly blue and clear.

  When they were pretty nearly through the trees, and he could see the pond reflecting the sky, she said, “Did he tell you why he called you?”

  He turned to look at her profile again. She was facing determinedly forward, and by her expression she wasn’t pleased. He decided the best thing was to tell the truth, since it was pretty clear none of this was her idea, so he said, “Not exactly. But I got the idea.”