On Green Dolphin Street (27 page)

Mary had received a call from Dolores in Washington to say that her father was trying to reach her, and so unusual was it for him to resort to the telephone that Mary feared that it could only be bad news. She calculated that it would be a little late for comfort in London, but if her father
had thought it important enough to call, then she should risk disturbing them.

Her mother answered. The sound of her voice was otherworldly. Mary stood by a picture window, framed by potted palms, looking down toward the Pacific. High in the almost cloudless sky she could see the vapor trail of a silently ascending airliner; at her feet was the polished wood of the floor, reflecting the even Californian sunshine. In her ears was Elizabeth’s voice, a little tired, sometimes echoing or delayed, but bearing its essential load: her brisk and habitual indifference to her own comfort; the minor friction of historic rules and remembered battles from Mary’s childhood; but above all a comforting partisanship, the fussing, unconditional flow of a mother’s love.

It was eventually Mary’s father who, after various inquiries about the children and inconsequential pieces of news about London, revealed that Elizabeth had been back to see her specialist. He reported that the cancer had spread and was now inoperable; they could do much to limit the pain, but she would die within a few months.

Mary replaced the receiver and breathed in deeply. She had no desire to weep or rail against what was happening. Her mother, after all, was still alive. Nothing had yet changed.

Frank received no call from Mary the following day, so telephoned her the morning after. She explained what had happened and he tried to offer his condolences. He found it difficult, recognizing that in some ways, for all that he felt for her, he scarcely knew Mary. He was relieved that she did not take advantage of his vulnerability on this point; it would have been easy for her to vent a little constricted emotion at his expense, to indulge a petulant self-righteousness about how Frank had never even met her mother. But she took his sympathy graciously, as though Frank were the family’s oldest friend, and he admired her for it.

“By the way,” she said, “Charlie wants to speak to you.”

“Frank? Did you hear about Johnson?” Charlie sounded sober. “Apparently Kennedy’s offered him the vice presidency.”

“But he’s already offered it to Symington.”

“I know. Perhaps he wants to have two.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Unprecedented, I think. He’s sent Bobby to persuade Johnson to turn it down after all.”

“Jesus, I should go,” said Frank. “But I can’t get past security at the top of the elevator.”

“He has a private lift. Ask the blond girl at the desk.”

“What’s the suite number?”

“Hang on. It’s … 8315. You going to go?”

“I might as well try.”

Security in the Biltmore Hotel had slackened in the chaos, and Frank found it easy enough to reach the bedroom of number 8315, which acted as a waiting room to Kennedy’s office, housed in the sitting room beyond. Periodically, a woman Frank heard referred to as Mrs. Lincoln came in and out of the office; through the open door he briefly glimpsed both Kennedy brothers, Sargent Shriver and John Connally talking and waving their arms; one of them was invariably on the telephone.

There were six others waiting in the bedroom, including a perspiring man with a cigar who called Mrs. Lincoln “Evelyn, honey,” but was referred to by her only as “Senator Bailey” in return. Frank made his request to speak to the candidate. He was sure he would be rejected, but it was helpful to him to be this close to what was going on; Mrs. Lincoln said he would have a long wait and told him to help himself to a glass of water. Pierre Salinger appeared from the corridor and went through into the office without knocking; a few minutes later he stuck his head around the door and said, “Four o’clock in the Bowl downstairs. The announcement. Tell the press.”

Mrs. Lincoln reached for the telephone.

“Bobby can’t get Lyndon to unaccept,” said the senator with the cigar, smiling widely.

“What do they tell Symington?” said Frank, presuming on the emergency of the moment to join the conversation uninvited.

“Nothing,” said a third man, standing with his ear to the office door. “Symington knew all along that Jack’d have to ask LBJ. He told me so.”

The traffic of people through the suite continued for another hour. Voices were occasionally raised, but Frank sensed also a comic edge to the commotion; many of these men and women would have no finer moment than this, no time at which they would feel more wanted or more usefully alive.

At five to four Mrs. Lincoln stood up portentously and coughed. She opened the door to the office again and for a moment there was silence as the occupants looked out. Kennedy sat behind a desk in his shirtsleeves, leaning back with his hands behind his head; he was smiling. Really, thought Frank, the panic over the identity of the potential vice president was morbid when Kennedy himself was so young.

A few moments later, they filed out of the sitting room, and those in the bedroom stood back to let them pass. Kennedy smiled at them as he went through, followed by his brother, Shriver and Connally. They were all straightening their ties and jackets, pulling themselves up importantly as they strode out over the patterned carpet.

“We’re going down to the Bowl,” said Salinger. “It’s Johnson.”

Frank followed the men down the corridor to the elevator, stepping aside to avoid a room-service wagon that had been left outside number 8309, with a half-eaten hamburger and a glass of untouched ice water with the Biltmore’s corrugated paper cap on top of it.

Chapter 13  

T
he farther the van der Lindens’ hired Citroën DS traveled into the western parts of Brittany, the more the aroma of pâté, apples and baguette was exhaled by the soft crimson upholstery; each time the hydraulic suspension leveled out a rut, it released into the car the memory of the picnic purchased from the boucherie-charcuterie in the village outside Rennes. The fierce brake was nothing like the spongy pedal on the Kaiser Manhattan, and Louisa and Richard complained at the way it catapulted them into the back of the bench seat in front when Charlie touched the sensitive button with his foot. Mary periodically withdrew the red Michelin guide from the glove compartment as she guided Charlie through the more tangled town centers, hoping that a “
TOUTES
DIRECTIONS
” would come to her aid. Forward to her was always north, and she had to twist the fat red book around so that they were traveling up the page at all times—a maneuver that she tried to conceal as far as possible from Charlie’s sideways glances.

In their absence at school the children had both grown: Louisa’s cotton dress was halfway up her thighs and Richard had to leave the waistband of
his shorts open. They had developed new enthusiasms and a new argot in which to express them. Mary found that she could no longer follow everything they said—their references to school rituals, peculiar teachers and apocalyptically embarrassing events. They had withdrawn from her a little; they had developed the “independence” of which the school prospectus boasted, though it looked to her more like a survival reflex. They had been through some sort of cold fire together and had the sardonic shorthand and stoic intimacy of old lags.

The holiday had had a tense and lowering start when they went to stay with Mary’s parents in Regent’s Park. Elizabeth made every show of normality that she could manage, and the children appeared not to notice that she spent most of the day in bed. Mary was both proud of their tact and resigned to their youthful self-absorption; they played familiar games in the London garden, climbing a half-fallen elder tree, dressing up in their grandparents’ old clothes from the loft and leaving behind them a trail of plastic toys that crunched beneath adult feet. The atmosphere in the house was that which people call “life suspended,” Mary thought, though really it was death, not life, that had been temporarily held at bay. When it was time to say good-bye, Elizabeth’s brisk fortitude gave no indication of the fact that it was likely to be the last time that she would ever see her grandchildren. Mary did not know whether to stress the gravity of the occasion to Richard and Louisa or whether they already knew quite well but had decided not to make a fuss. So the good-byes passed off normally, with no more than an extra pressure of the hand, a slight prolonging of the hug, a lingering wave to vision’s end from the backseat of the taxi to suggest that it was more than a routine
au revoir
. Only people in their wretched middle age had to face the truth, Mary thought; the slipped responsibilities of the old and young were hers alone to bear.

It was growing dark as they approached their French destination. Mary had found an advertisement in the London
Times
that promised a roomy traditional house with the seaside, tennis and fishing nearby. They had previously taken holidays in hotels, but the state of Charlie’s finances made it impossible. He would not have gone on vacation at all, had not
the illness of Mary’s mother made a trip to Europe inevitable; even the price of an empty house, where they would shop and cook for themselves, was unsustainable until Mary had the idea of inviting another family to share it. The Renshaws were going to Nantucket, and the only European friends of which they liked both partners had already made plans; but Lauren Williams, who had never been to Europe, was enthusiastic, even when Mary stressed how primitive it would be. Her husband—whose name, Mary reminded Charlie, was Vernon—was amenable, and the deal was done. Through someone at the French Embassy, Lauren conjured up a teenage girl from Vannes, who would act as mother’s help. The apparent size of the garden convinced Charlie he would have to spend no more than the duration of meals listening to Lauren’s animated reminiscences of people he had never met and what they said to people he had never heard of.

Charlie was tired after his day at the wheel and the children’s listless bickering had made his nerves shrink and tighten; their raised voices and sudden squeals cracked like rim shots on the drum of his ear. He had swigged only once from the bottle at lunch for fear of falling asleep, and now he wanted to lay himself down in cool sheets with a pitcher of iced wine at his side, with a window overlooking the orchard through which a cool breeze would mingle with the exhaled smoke of a Pall Mall cigarette. Since most of the villages had similar names, Saint Brieuc, Saint Brion, he and Mary had taken to pronouncing them in an excessively anglo-phonetic way to avoid confusion. Once, on honeymoon in Italy, such games had seemed a comic way of sharpening the excitement; to Charlie, with his smashing headache, they were by this time an indispensable shortcut to deliverance.

The Citroën slid out of one more rocky town, and Charlie prayed it was the last limp hôtel de ville tricolore he would see recede in his wing mirror as, a mile or so later, they found themselves at an unmarked crossroads. It was almost dark, and Mary had to open the passenger door to shed some light on the map.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said.

“That’s no good to me,” said Charlie. “You’re the navigator. You have to know. I can’t do both.”

Mary glanced across at him in the dusk. “Don’t be cross with me, darling. It’s just impossible to say. We should have brought a bigger map.”

Charlie inhaled tightly and made an effort to be genial. “From my time as an infantryman, in the course of which I have to say I was lost for almost two years, I would say it’s definitely that way.”

He pushed the column shift into first and swung the car decisively to the right. Mary read from the owner’s directions: “After about half a mile, you will come to a farmyard with a small stone calvary by the roadside.”

“ ‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part,’ ” said Charlie.

“What?”

“Wilfred Owen.”

“ ‘Follow the cart track till you come to a grassy triangle.’ ”

“ ‘In this war he too lost a limb.’ ”

“ ‘If you come to the boulangerie, you have gone too far.’ ”

“I never go further than the grassy triangle.”

“Daddy! There it is.”

Charlie slowed down and switched the headlights to full beam. In addition to its hydraulically pumped suspension, one of the peculiarities of the car was that its headlights were directional: by use of the steering wheel, Charlie was able to wash the Breton countryside with shafts of bright illumination. Beneath a chestnut tree, they picked out the figure of a hanging Christ.

“The girl’s a genius. Let’s go.”

“ ‘… for two hundred yards, being careful to avoid the ducklings which—’ ”

“To hell with the ducklings.”

“ ‘… past the gate posts, then pull in at the second entrance.’ ”

The rough stones of the farmyard crunched beneath the Citroën’s sedulously leveled entrance; Charlie switched off the engine, and the big car sank to its knees as the suspension hissed away. The children’s good humor was restored at once as they clambered from the back and ran
round the house to look for a way in. The key to the front door was eventually discovered beneath a pot; Mary occupied herself with the children’s clothes, while Richard and Louisa sprinted over the wooden landings. Charlie went in search of liquor.