Ex Officio Page 21

  “No,” Robert said.

  “Because,” she said, “because it isn’t right for me. Because it isn’t the job, it’s to be somebody else, it’s to be somebody who could take that job, whose life is simple enough and whose options are plain enough and who isn’t locked to a grandfather and a baby and a, a, a status, a code of behavior that just, just stifles, stifles you until you could, until you—”

  She was quivering, her voice had gotten steadily louder and shakier, she was about to either scream or cry, and more to contain her than anything else, to limit the explosion, like a Marine falling on a hand grenade, Robert reached out both hands and pulled her in against his chest, holding her tight against him, their knees entangled in the shift lever, her head buried in the crook of his neck and shoulder. “All right,” he said, softly.

  “Oh, God,” she said, muffled. But it wasn’t a scream, and it wasn’t a prayer. It seemed mostly a cry of relief. How long, he wondered, had she been bottling this thing up?

  She never did cry, though she trembled violently for a minute or two. He held her tight, neither of them speaking, and Robert became aware of a munching sound behind his head, nearby. He couldn’t think what it was at first, and he couldn’t turn to look, but all at once he remembered her horse, still standing there beside the car, waiting to be called on. And having a grass break in the meantime, from the sound of things.

  The trembling lessened gradually, then stopped altogether, but Robert didn’t yet let go. The position was beginning to be uncomfortable, mostly because there was nowhere sensible to put his legs, but he stayed where he was, holding her, both arms around her and pulling her in close, his right hand spread against the back of her head, feeling the soft hair and the oddly vulnerable skull as he held her close against his shoulder and neck. He could feel her breath warm and moist on his throat, and a pulse in the side of his neck was beating against her cheek. His arms were aware of the femaleness of the body he held, but that was only a disturbing counterpoint to his main concern, which was how to ease her embarrassment once she had herself under control again.

  She was going to be embarrassed, he was sure of that. The illustration she had chosen in explaining to him her objections to her grandfather’s plans had turned out to be too close to the bone. Without either of them realizing it, she had opened a locked door deep inside her mind, and out had come the true intolerability of her life.

  She should do something. What? He didn’t know, it wasn’t up to him to know, but something. Move to a city somewhere, New York, or if that wasn’t far enough move to San Francisco. London. Anywhere. She had money, or she could get money from Lockridge, which was the same thing. Move. Hire a nurse for the child. Do something.

  “I’m all right now,” she said, the words muffled but very calm. She pulled back gently, waiting for him to release her, which he did. Then she sat far over on the other side, not looking at him, looking out at the woods to her right instead, giving him only a one-quarter view of her face as she said, “I’m sorry, I’ve been under a strain. We had a death here just two weeks ago, and now this Congress business—”

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Oh, God, yes,” she said, but faintly, without the force the phrase deserved.

  Robert glanced to his left, at the ruminative chestnut, and said, “What about your horse? Will he find his own way back to the stable?”

  She turned in surprise, apparently having forgotten about him. “Oh. No, I’m afraid not, not Jester. He really isn’t very bright, he’d just fall down a ravine somewhere or something.”

  “Ride him back,” Robert said. “I’ll come after you.”

  She hesitated, and he could see that she would like to come with him, but wasn’t sure if she hadn’t made too much of a fool of herself in front of him. “Come on,” he said, “I could use a drink myself. And I have no appointments to keep.”

  “No one at home?”

  “No one but me. And I’m out.”

  She hung fire an instant longer, and then gave a decisive nod. “All right,” she said.

  v

  IT WAS A STRANGE setting for autobiography. Evelyn had wanted to avoid stopping anywhere in Eustace, where she would be recognized, so they’d driven on up to Metal and turned left on 75, and midway between Metal and Richmond Furnace they’d found this place, a low square building with white aluminum siding and skimpy windows framing neon beer signs. There were a pickup truck and an elderly Dodge parked on the gravel beside the building, and behind it they could catch a glimpse of water. “Conococheague Creek,” Evelyn said, and when he asked her if that wasn’t the same one she’d showed him on Lockridge’s property back in May she said, “No, that’s the Conodoguinet.” At his expression she laughed, the first crack in her wall of tension.

  Inside, there was a three-sided bar forming a square in the center of the room, with an interior wall on the fourth side. On the left and right walls were booths, while to the front were games; shuffleboard bowling machine to the left, pinball machine to the right. The rest rooms, with canine identifications, were at the rear, Pointers at the extreme left and Setters at the extreme right. Four men in work clothing, three of them wearing hats, sat at the bar around on the left side, discussing with the bartender a local bowling league.

  Robert led her to a booth midway down on the right, and remained standing after she was seated. “What would you like?”

  She considered. “A vodka sour, I think.”

  He bent forward and lowered his voice to say, “I don’t think this is the place for mixed drinks.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, I should have thought of that. Do you think he’ll have tonic?”

  “We can try.”

  “Vodka and tonic.”

  “Done.”

  An island behind the bar served the function of a back-bar, lined with bottles and glasses, dominated in front by the cash register, and causing the bartender a long walk from the bowling league around to where Robert stood with one hand on the bar, waiting to give his order. Yes, he did have tonic—no, not Schweppes, a local brand, that’s all right—and he also had vodka. He seemed unsure what to charge once he’d made the drinks, and after some hesitation asked for a dollar thirty. The number was so patently arbitrary that Robert determined then and there to have a second round in this place, just to see if the bartender would remember it. He paid, and brought the drinks to the booth while the bartender strolled around the cash register and back to his conversation.

  “I needed that,” Evelyn said, and a minute later, “Sometimes I’m sorry I quit smoking,” and after another minute, “Isn’t it amazing how you can live in a neighborhood and not know half the places in it.”

  Robert reached out and put his hand over hers on the table top. He could feel it vibrating, like a tuning fork struck a long time before. “The vodka is supposed to calm you down,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have the feeling there’s more to come, and I don’t want it to be in front of you.”

  Neither did Robert. He said something that was supposed to be funny, but wasn’t, and then something that was supposed to be a casual conversation starter, but it wasn’t, and then all at once he was telling her about Kit. Which meant he was telling her about football, which meant he was telling her the story of his life.

  He liked to think afterward that he’d done it on purpose, told her his own troubles as a way of making her more comfortable about having revealed hers to him, and perhaps at a level below conscious thought that was true, but on the conscious level he was doing nothing more than take his turn. She had unburdened herself, or at least she’d started to, so now he was unpacking his own troubles.

  But whether he’d had a therapeutic intent or not, his true confession turned out to have been good therapy. She listened, she became interested, she asked questions and took his side and consoled with him, and when he was finished she told her own story, about her dead husband and her daughter and having never live
d on her own in her life and having no one left now but her grandfather, and how she knew it was past time for her to leave the nest and fly on her own, but how every year it became not more easy but more difficult. “I’m twenty-seven now,” she said, and he said, “I’m thirty-one.” Then they began to compare feelings and reactions and attitudes, and discovered that being widowed was essentially no different from being divorced, if the person who divorced you is now married to a Delta Air Lines executive, and that living alone in a five-room house was essentially no lonelier than living with relatives and servants in a thirty-room house, if the person you really wanted to live with was in none of the thirty rooms, and that having an occupation you didn’t care a rap about was essentially no emptier than having no occupation at all, and that the worst thing of all was not having anybody that you could really talk to.

  They were on their third round of drinks—the bartender had remembered, and Robert now suspected he’d written it down somewhere after the first round, in case the question would come up again—when Evelyn said, “It’s after six! I’d better call home.”

  He watched her walk to the phone booth—up front, in the corner beside the pinball machine—and once again he was aware of her as a woman. But he didn’t pursue the idea; there was no future in it.

  When she came back she said, “Everything’s all right. But I really have to get back soon.”

  “Do you ever eat dinner out? Not here, I know a place that isn’t quite so fancy.”

  She smiled, but shook her head. “Not tonight. Thank you. But Dinah expects me, I always read to her before she goes to bed.”

  “Ah.”

  “That makes me child-ridden, doesn’t it? But I don’t like to disappoint her, I’m the only one she has.”

  “You must go out sometime.”

  “If I do, I tell her ahead of time. She doesn’t even know I’m away from the house.” She looked at her watch again, but he knew the actual time was irrelevant. “I do have to get back,” she said.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “Today’s Monday. Your grandfather invited me back Friday to talk with him about this Congress idea again, and I said I’d come. That’s four days. Is that enough time to prepare Dinah for an evening without Mommy?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling.

  “Then we’ll have dinner.”

  “Fine.”

  vi

  “IN GERMANY BETWEEN 1918 and 1922,” Robert wrote, “assassinations by leftists numbered twenty-two, and by rightists three hundred fifty-four. (Peter Gay, Weimar Culture [1968], 20.) America’s experiences with political assassination have reflected the same rightward bias. Is it not a biologically sound evolutionary concept that a breed of left-wing radicals will sometime emerge for whom assassination is as valid a political methodology as it now is on the extreme right?”

  It was raining today. The slanted portion of the study ceiling was actually roof, on which raindrops were rapping funereally. This was Thursday, three days since his visit to the Lockridge estate, one day before his scheduled return, and the article was moving slowly, too slowly. Because it was Lockridge he was thinking of, not the speculative might-have-been future of this essay.

  What was he going to say to Lockridge tomorrow? What did he want to say?

  He wanted to say, “Go ahead.” Despite all, that’s what he wanted to say.

  There was just something exciting about the whole idea of Bradford Lockridge running for Congress, the thought stirred him and he had to admit it. And of course he’d be expected to play a part in the campaign, that was clear enough, and possibly afterward, when Lockridge was in the House. He would be a member of Bradford Lockridge’s “team,” he would be one of the men working with the man who would have to be the most prestigious Congressman in the United States. That idea impressed him, to be on a winning team again, and he found himself very resistant to all argument against Lockridge making the race, though in his more dispassionate moments he had to admit those arguments were compelling.

  And when the time came, tomorrow, he knew he would have to say, “No.”

  He shook his head, and leaned over the typewriter again. “A direct action left-radical movement headed by a Fuehrer (that is, a non-democratically maintained strong individual leader) would be, almost by definition, messianic and absolutist. Such an authoritarian regime, by carrying liberalism beyond its leftward boundaries into radicalism, and solidifying its position by rigidity in posture and extremism in defensive action, would ultimately turn itself inside out and become a generally repressive dictatorship, indistinguishable from a tyranny whose origins were at the opposite end of the political spectrum.”

  The phone was ringing. Robert finished the final clause of the sentence, got to his feet, and strode across the hall and into the bedroom.

  “Robert?” A familiar voice, female, he wasn’t sure who.

  “Speaking,” he said.

  “This is Evelyn. Evelyn Canby?”

  “Oh, yes, Evelyn. Sure. How are you?”

  “I’m just fine,” she said, and sounded surprisingly happy. “Bradford asked me to call.”

  “He did?”

  “He’s changed his mind. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  No, it wasn’t. The sudden hollow in his chest told Robert just how much he’d been counting on the Lockridge candidacy in spite of all the rational objections. “Well, that was fast,” he said. “What happened?”

  “He just changed his mind,” she said. “I guess it was a combination of all the things everybody said to him, you and Uncle Joe and Mr. Orr. And me too, I guess. The fact that nobody at all thought it was a good idea.”

  I should have been more positive, Robert thought, even while he knew this was the best ending. Best for whom? “Well, I guess it was a tempest in a teapot, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “I knew he couldn’t forget himself for very long,” she said, with a hindsight confidence she hadn’t shown the last time. “About a week, that was all it took, and he got his perspective back.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” Robert said.

  “He wanted me to call you,” she said. “Actually, he would have called you himself but I volunteered. I took over the mission, really. He wanted to tell you you needn’t come tomorrow, since there’s no longer anything to discuss.”

  “Oh,” Robert said. And then, hurriedly, to keep it from sounding like the afterthought it was, “What about our date?”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” she said, too brightly.

  “What’s all right? You’ve got something else to do?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to drive all that distance just to—”

  It was hostility more than anything else that kept him from letting her let him off the hook. “It’s less than two hours,” he said. “And that was the main point of the trip anyway, wasn’t it? Dinner?”

  She hadn’t heard the hostility in his voice; he heard the pleasure in hers. “I’m flattered,” she said. “If you really want to—”

  “I insist.”

  “All right. Seven o’clock?”

  “Seven o’clock,” he said. “See you then.” And slammed the receiver into its cradle.

  3

  SHE COULDN’T GET HER hair right. A maid had come upstairs almost ten minutes ago to tell her Robert was here—and five minutes late at that—and here she still stood before the mirror, dabbing at her hair with increasingly nervous fingertips, every dab altering the silhouette, but never for the better. She held a brush in her other hand and alternately poked at her head with its bristles and its handle, none of it doing any good.

  Everything was taking forever today. She’d been irritable all afternoon, for no reason, even screaming at Dinah for some minor mischief, and then she’d had to take time away from dressing to soothe her guilt feelings by soothing the child. She had also kept switching back and forth among three dresses, and when she’d finally made her choice it turned out she couldn’t find the shoes that went with it. So that meant another
decision, this time among two entrants, neither of which she really wanted to wear. Then there were the eyelashes, which she hadn’t worn since Paris, and seldom wore in any case, and which this evening absolutely refused to go on right. She kept looking like a sketch Salvador Dali had done for fun.

  She wanted to cry, and she didn’t know why, which merely made everything foolish, so that in the end she wanted to cry because she didn’t know why she wanted to cry.

  All right. Enough. The eyelashes were approximately in place, the hair would apparently never look any better than it did right now, and the time was almost twenty past seven. She turned with panicky dissatisfaction away at last from the mirror, fighting down the desire to go on poking herself like some sort of reluctant clay into ever odder and odder shapes, and left her bathroom and bedroom to go to Dinah’s room and bid her daughter good night.

  Dinah was playing with her dolls, spread cabalistically around her. Evelyn cooed over her until she saw the little girl was only politely waiting for her to be off so she could return to her game. It was annoying to be more emotional than one’s four-year-old daughter, and that sudden annoyance—and the ludicrous self-image that came with it—did wonders for Evelyn, wiping away most of her nervousness and weepiness in one quick swipe, like a wet cloth over a blackboard.

  Robert was in the front parlor downstairs, doing nothing in particular. He got to his feet and walked toward her when she entered the room, saying, “Hello, there.”