Changing the Past (35 page)

Kellog had at last been conclusively eclipsed by his wife, and nobody was more pleased than he. For some time now, weary with many years of the emotional problems of strangers, he had been looking forward to retirement but had never before found the proper pretext. He had been reluctant to quit simply because he was old enough, sufficiently prosperous, and bored with his work: any public confession as to those negative motives would repudiate the advice he had consistently, over the decades, given his callers. Though in many incidentals the proper response was No, a winner always said Yes to the big question posed by life, namely, was it worth the effort? A man, and nowadays a woman as well, should not be without a purpose so long as he could breathe.

With Annabelle's nomination, Kellog had a new job. He would play an active role in supporting her in whichever ways he could best be used. Over the years he had acquired a devoted following that was perhaps even large enough to make a difference in a very close election. FCC regulations would of course prohibit him from injecting political exhortations into his own program, but if he retired as psychologist to reemerge as the eloquent partner of his wife and drum-beater for her in airtime paid for by her party, most of his flock could probably be counted on to favor the presidential nominee of his choice. After the election (which it was realistic to assume Annabelle would win, the other side having haplessly chosen an old man who had in fact already once been defeated in a run for the same office), Kellog could certainly make himself useful around the White House and also write the book for which he had long been begged by leading publishers.

But as the campaign heated up and each poll gave Annabelle a greater lead than the last, the other side, desperate, resorted to the smear. The son's failings no longer remained unknown to the world at large. Nor could Neil keep his nose clean even for these few months: stopped for drunk driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, he took an ineffectual swing at the trooper and thereby provided the top item on the nightly news. Kellog's own background was revealed as though it were shameful, with his pre-radio occupations and his previous marriages now presented as verging on the sleazy, as respectable as they had been: somehow wholesale hardware was made to sound like selling stolen merchandise from the tailgate of a station wagon. Next the hyenas got hold of the story of Annabelle's affair with the judge, and did their best to imply that it was she who had in effect invalided, then killed, his wife.

Crudest of all were the revelations about poor tormented Phoebe, who had seemingly made progress during her early course of treatment, but then, not long after her mother received the nomination, slashed her wrists with a broken water glass and bled to death before she was found. But the extraordinary fact remained that after weeks of mudslinging Annabelle continued to widen her lead in the polls. And by 11:30
P
.
M
. on the night of Election Day the networks projected her as the clear winner. She had been elected to be the first woman president of the United States. That a man whose humble beginnings had been in wholesale hardware could go on to acquire celebrity in a field of which he had known nothing at the outset and learned on the job, and finally to become First Gentleman of the land could happen only in America—a point he made many times in public between November and January, for he was everywhere in demand as a speaker.

Snow fell in Washington on the fifteenth of January, but by the twentieth the weather was unseasonably warm. Annabelle took the oath of office in a navy blue silk suit with a white blouse and a single string of pearls. Owing to the rise in temperature, she wore no outer coat. Erect with pride, Kellog stood just behind her as she put her hand on the Bible extended by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

As if to furnish a punctuation point, a single shot was heard just as the new leader of the free world completed the oath. Annabelle fell to the floor of the platform, shot through the heart. She died in the ambulance.

The assassin, who had somehow inserted himself amongst the television cameramen by the use of forged credentials, seemed in a coma when first questioned by the Secret Service, but in time he came around to state that his intended target had not been the first female president. He was simply inexperienced in aiming a powerful handgun. He readily revealed his motive: he had made twenty-seven telephone calls to Dr. Kellog's program with a purpose of discussing his lifelong impotence, but had never succeeded in getting through. He now expressed great regret for killing the new Chief Executive, for whom he had in fact voted, but he had no remorse for aiming at Kellog.

Kellog was benumbed. That the course of history might be changed by some nut with a gun and a personal grievance was not without precedent, but the bystander is not likely to have anticipated his own role in such an event. After years of providing free and public counsel to anybody who called him (and could get through), he rarely encountered any applicant with a strong sense of individual responsibility. They all expected someone else to look after them: if not an agency of government, then at least a radio psychologist. This was more than a national problem.

But what was peculiarly American was that the person who started out in wholesale hardware, went on to become a star on the airwaves, and married a woman who would be elected president, could have his life changed as dramatically in the negative way, but much more quickly.

Now that he would never live in the White House, Kellog decided to conclude another life.

V

“B
Y
NOW
I should no longer be amazed, but I am,” said Walter Hunsicker. “Kellog showed no emotion but self-pity when his wife was shot down in cold blood.”

“I thought she was the president,” the little man said sourly. “Here as elsewhere you persistently confuse personality with publicity. No wonder none of your alternative lives has been satisfactory, though all were successful enough, bringing you money, celebrity, excitement, even a certain power or anyway access to it. But I find it significant that you did not make
yourself
president, nor as a writer did you present yourself with the Nobel Prize, and as a performer you did not become a Dean of American Comedy, acquiring a fortune in real estate and playing golf with successive Chief Executives…. There was always something about you in each life that was not quite what it should have been. Perhaps it was a basic lack of imagination. But then you never had much enterprise in your original existence.”

Hunsicker rallied. “At least I never was ashamed of myself! Of course, I didn't take many chances. We always waited till we could see our way clear financially to take the trip to Europe, buy a house, have a child…. We even did them in that order.” He was, after all, a rational man who relied on cause-and-effect, a moral man who could not dispense with principles. “What was wrong with the alternative lives is that they were essentially false. I wasn't any of those people, for the reason that at any time I had the power to quit being each of them and become someone else or return to the original me. That's not life. Life is taking your medicine. That's not reality.”

The other leaned forward, the overhead light reflected through the strands of hair on his yellow crown. “Reality was what you wanted to escape from.”

“I was being a coward,” Hunsicker said. “I wasn't protecting anybody. I was denying life.”

The little man shrugged. “You have to admit you got everything you asked for, without condition, without fee, and you haven't had to accept the consequences of any of your choices. And you can carry away what you came with. Not a bad deal.”

No doubt a contemporary personage of this sort
would
talk like a used-car salesman, but what precisely had the “deal” been?

“You really don't want anything from me?”

“We've already had it,” said the little man. “You gave it a go, not once but four times. You've certainly strived. You've been an excellent participant.”

“The implication is that there are others to whom I can be compared.”

“Of course.”

“But,” said Hunsicker, “you aren't going to tell me who they are.”

“It's the only way to keep it honest.” The little man frowned. “But I can tell you this: you haven't disgraced yourself.” He pushed the chair back and stood up, extending a hand, smiling incongruously. “Sorry I had to be so sour while the process was under way. But you understand, anything else would have hardly been professional.”

Hunsicker did not really understand, but he was nevertheless moved. “Thank you,” he said, shaking the small hand warmly but being careful not to apply too much pressure, for it seemed frail. Now that he thought about the matter, he considered whether the little man was in the best of health, with that poor color and watery eye. “Thank you for giving me the strength to accept my lot.”

The little man frowned again. “Oh, no, you were given nothing! You may have lived a modest life, but you're affirmative.” He then freed his hand to gesture towards the shabby shop beyond the squalid office. “I feel I should explain why this place is perhaps overly grim. It's not just the budget, stingy as that is…” He showed embarrassment. “Perhaps it's foolish of us, but we simply could not bear being called vulgar.”

Enlightened, Hunsicker returned to the fate that, at too high a cost, he could have evaded.

H
E
SAT
in his car, in the home garage. It was dawn now, judging by the daylight that entered through the window over the work bench against the forward wall. Hunsicker had a certain gift for carpentry. He employed it only practically, for home repairs, but once had toyed with the idea of installing power tools and embarking on some more ambitious projects, handmade bedsteads and the like. As with most of his impulses, this one was the product of a book he had copy-edited, the last word on home workshops, written by a surprisingly articulate craftsman whose prose was superior to that of many foreign-policy pundits and biographers. All in all, Hunsicker held those who could
do things
in greater esteem than the commentators thereupon, among which latter company he had himself been a lifelong member—except for his modest talent at “shop,” which had first made itself known in his high-school freshman year, when he executed one of the earliest assignments, a simple wren-house, four sides and a slanted roof, with a proficiency that earned the instructor's commendation.

Had Elliot been at all attracted to woodworking, the garage would have been equipped with lathe, jigsaw, and whatever else was wanted—and it went without saying that the boy would have been no mere carpenter, but rather a cabinetmaker. Having never, even as a small boy, set limits for himself, Elliot naturally rejected those which others tried to impose upon him even if well intentioned. His father had learned that early on and never afterwards offended. Those who did were deftly set straight, but with such grace that they thereby almost always became close friends: e.g., Ralph Troutman, Elliot's first college roommate, who, taller and wider, was initially something of a bully with respect to the closets, lights-out time, and the rest, but came off second-best in the inevitable showdown, for Elliot had boxed with distinction in preparatory school. From then on, Ralph was a hearty friend, though he finally fell out of touch in later years when he was married and became a father…. Was that defection due to…? Hardly. Elliot had all sorts of married friends, and in the case of manv if not most, he was much closer to the wives than to the husbands. Hunsicker could remember worrying about whether Elliot might be going too far as a pal of Jim Randolph's wife, with whom he was for a while inseparable, with or without Jim, escorting Sally alone to horse shows, German opera, artists' retrospectives, especially when Jim was out of town on business, and driving away up through the country on antiquing excursions while Jim stayed home and napped on Sundays. In other words, Jim knew.

No doubt everyone did. Hunsicker of course lied to himself for years. After all, Elliot had had a series of supposed fiancées, all of them eminently qualified for the role, attractive, often extravagantly so, bright, charming, sometimes well-born, but also there were those young women who had risen beyond their origins, and indeed Elliot confessed he preferred that sort, perhaps with the implication that they shared his own experience. If so, Hunsicker could agree. Was it not the right thing that a child should exceed his progenitors? Elliot always did the right thing. He would do so now. He would die as well as anyone could. Extraordinarily, Hunsicker felt a sense of a kind of triumph, too private even for him to name it as such to himself. But it was there, within the anguish.

He left the car and for the first time, because, trailing him, it impeded the closing of the door, he realized that he had been under a blanket. Feeling a sudden chill now, he drew it around his shoulders and walked to the house.

He stayed in the kitchen and started to make the coffee, the lone exercise in this area that he did better than Martha, for he had remained that old-fashioned sort of husband who was ritualistically awkward when it came to the preparation of food. The secret with coffee was warming the pot before adding the water—if you could believe that. He doubted whether a blind taste test would have established any difference whatever, but it was one of those matters accepted as established principles in a family, and when you're a kid and visit elsewhere you are always at first taken aback when your friend's family displays a heresy: puts powdered sugar on French toast instead of syrup or calls a faucet a tap. Such houses always had an odd smell, not necessarily unpleasant, but notably different from that of your own, at first alien but, if you were a frequent visitor, eventually that of a friendly power, a kind of England where things are different from home but at least they spoke your language. He never had, in all these years, got that comfortable under the roofs of any of his relatives-in-law. It had been socially a step up for him to marry Martha, and none of her people ever forgot it.