Taft 2012 (8 page)

T
he Snow was falling at full speed—a great, fat, wet Cincinnati snow—by the time the car arrived at Rachel’s house. For some reason, this sudden onset of winter energized him. As Taft stomped his shoes on Rachel’s front step, he almost regretted having to enter the bright warmth that radiated from her open door.

That same warmth, however, wasn’t coming from Rachel. She’d grown increasingly terse and withdrawn as the blocks melted away and the car drew closer to her home. Taft didn’t know why and didn’t dare ask. He was the last person to pass judgment on the tempest of another’s soul, so long as that tempest harmed no one. But he swore, as she led him through the door of her house, that Rachel would rather she were inviting the Abominable Snowman to eat Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Or to
eat
her family.

“Um, please take off your shoes, Grandpa,” she mumbled absently as she closed the door behind them. “You can leave them here.”

Take off his shoes? Was this some religious observance? He
shrugged and followed her lead, then hung his coat and hat on a hook on the wall nearby. Meanwhile Rachel seemed to be steadying herself for something—like, say, an oncoming train.

“Are you all right? You seem a little … out of sorts.”

She smiled a weak smile. “Sorry. It’s just that … Oh, never mind. Let’s just get this over with. Trevor! Trevor, honey, we’re home.”

“Coming!” Taft had to admit he liked his great-grandson-in-law already, from his voice alone. Strong, deep of timbre, full of character. Rachel had told him briefly that her husband was a lawyer, but she didn’t dwell on it, and she’d shown him no photos. No matter. Here he came around the corner, tall and broad shouldered and beaming and …

And black.

Taft stared. He could almost feel the air curdle around Rachel, who stood next to him, wound as tightly as a spring. This was why she’d been vague about her husband. She’d married a … an African American. Things had changed since 1913, and for the better. The sitting president was black. But this … He didn’t know what to think. Mixed marriages had not been unknown in his own time, of course. And he was in favor of them, though polite conversation would rarely edge toward such a subject. But his own family. He knew what he
should
feel: nothing but happiness for Rachel. But as this emotion flashed through his mind in that split second, so did another, less charitable one. Taft wasn’t proud of it. But there it was, as bitter and nasty as a clove of garlic dropped in a sauce.

Trevor must have seen the apprehension in Taft’s eyes, and in Rachel’s. Just as he rounded the corner, he halted, a smile frozen on his face. It began to harden. The air was thick with a tension that made Taft’s arm hair stand on end.

A second passed. Then another excruciating, interminable second. A bead of sweat trickled down Taft’s face.

Someone say something
, his mind screamed.

“Grandpa!”

All of a sudden, a child’s voice broke the silence like a hammer through museum glass. From behind Trevor’s legs came a little girl, her skin almost as dark as his, her hair in beaded rows and a doll in her hand.

Not just any doll. As the girl ran to him, Taft saw it was a miniature, stuffed-toy version of
him
, complete with a puffy belly and a fuzzy mustache.

He looked at Trevor. He looked at Rachel. He looked at the girl. What could he do? As she ran toward him, he bent down and scooped her up. Her tiny limbs flailed against his great girth. As he picked her up, she hugged him.

It was quite possibly the most wonderful thing he’d felt in his life.

TAFT SAT BACK from the dinner table. He was perfectly content, and the turkey couldn’t take full credit. Granted, it wasn’t exactly a turkey they’d eaten that night; as Rachel and Trevor had described it, the delicious meat they’d devoured along with their mashed potatoes and gravy and yams wasn’t a whole turkey at all, but an Fulsom TurkEase, a last-minute replacement they’d been forced to buy after the local grocery had run out of real birds.

“Really, Grandpa, we try not to eat so much processed junk,” Rachel explained as she passed the cranberries. “But sometimes, in a pinch, what else can you do?”

Abby—all three and a half feet and six years of her—piped up. “They showed us a video in school. They make this stuff with smushed turkey. The bones and everything. They make pink toothpaste out of turkey and then color it with turkey color.”

Taft looked at the forkful that hovered a mere inch from his
open mouth. “Oh, really? That’s quite an imagination you have, little one! Back in my day, President Theodore Roosevelt passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. Things like that aren’t allowed to make it to market.”

Rachel glanced at Trevor and laughed.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No, Grandpa. It’s just that … things aren’t quite as clear-cut. As much as I hate to admit it, food-industry lobbyists spend millions every year making sure companies like Fulsom get to do whatever they want. I’m working on passing a bill right now that—”

“Oh no, Rachel.” Taft grinned and shoveled more of the succulent future-turkey into his mouth. “We’ll not talk politics over the Thanksgiving dinner table. Things can’t be that bad! After all, here we all are eating this wonderful meal. Let’s find something else to discuss.” He winked at Abby. “For instance, what this young lady might want for Christmas.”

Abby’s smile showed a missing tooth that only made her that much more adorable. At first he didn’t see it, but now it was evident: she was a Taft all right, from her eyes to the set of her forehead. He looked at Trevor and Rachel, and pride practically oozed from his pores.

“I’d like another Grandpa doll, please. A bigger one, so I can bring it to show-and-tell.”

“Why settle for a homunculus when you have the real thing?” He thumped his chest. “Bring me to class. I’ll be your show-and-tell.”

That set Abby off into gales of giggles. When she calmed down, she excused herself and wandered into the next room. Next to her empty seat sat Kowalczyk, eating with his head down, as if looking at no one might somehow render him invisible.

“Kowalczyk, my good man! How goes your meal? You’ve hardly said a word since you got here. Is everything well?”

Kowalczyk nodded tersely and kept eating.

Then it struck Taft: here it was, Thanksgiving Day, and Kowalczyk was stuck in a stranger’s house, far from his own family, technically on duty even as he nibbled diffidently at a pile of stuffing.

“Tell me, Kowalczyk. Have you had a chance to talk to your own family today? If you need to excuse yourself …”

Kowalczyk looked up sheepishly from his plate. “No, thank you. That’s not necessary. I don’t … well, I don’t have a family exactly. I’m not married, and my folks passed away a few years back. You’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little overwhelmed at all this family stuff.”

“Overwhelmed? Please. I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say you’re more than welcome to consider yourself an honorary Taft for the duration of the holidays. Rachel, Trevor, what say you?”

Trevor lowered his napkin. “Of course! From what I hear, you and Bill were fast friends anyway.”

“Indeed,” bellowed Taft, “the man shot me!” The table erupted in laughter. “Thank the stars Kowalczyk has lousy aim, otherwise you might be eating
me
right now for dinner!”

At that moment Abby’s voice came from the direction of the living room. “Grandpa, come here! You’re on TV! You’re on TV!”

They left the table and went into the living room, where Abby sat, her finger pointed at the television. “I told you so!”

On the screen was the image of a man—a stout man, alarmingly so—wearing a shoddy false mustache and beaming like an imbecile. He looked worryingly familiar. And, indeed, words then appeared over the picture: PRESIDENT KANE. Taft raised a quizzical eyebrow at Rachel. “And who is this?”

She sighed. “Well, you were going to see it eventually. That’s Orson Welles.”

“And that signifies what, exactly?”

Rachel took a deep breath. “In the forties—the 1940s—Orson Welles was a filmmaker who wanted to make the greatest movie American cinema had ever seen.
Would
ever see. He wanted to fictionalize the life story of a man, a tragic larger-than-life man, who scaled the very top of the ladder of society only to fall apart and lose everything. Through this man, Welles figured he’d be telling the story of America—indeed, of the whole modern human race—in miniature.”

“And this man … this man was me?”

Rachel coughed. “Uh, no. It was William Randolph Hearst.”

“Hearst? That rapscallion? That rogue? That sorry excuse for a journalist? Why, he practically started the Spanish-American War single-handedly! Not that Teddy, in retrospect, ever seemed to mind.”

“Well, that’s the thing. Despite the fact that Welles’s star was on the rise, no movie studio would touch the project. Nobody was willing to piss off the owner of the world’s biggest news empire. Welles wasn’t going to use Hearst’s name, of course, but it wasn’t going to be a secret that the movie was about him. Finally, though, someone agreed to finance the film—on one condition.”

Taft sighed. “That Welles base his story on someone even more reviled and ridiculous than Hearst. Namely, me.”

Rachel took Taft’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

He paced the carpet, trying to ignore the chatter from the television. “So this is my legacy? A … a freak disappearance and an unflattering movie?”
And the bathtub
, he couldn’t bring himself to say.
We must never forget the bathtub
.

“It was more than unflattering, Grandpa. To take revenge on the studio that interfered with his vision—at least, that’s how the speculation goes—Welles insisted he star in the movie himself. He gained a hundred pounds in six months, most of it thanks to booze.
And when he finally dressed as you and put himself in front of the camera, he was just a wreck. The story is a cartoon of your life, and he played your character as if he hated you personally—or at least hated that you were the unwitting symbol of his loss of artistic integrity. Not only did
President Kane
fail to become the greatest movie ever made, it went down as the worst. Welles never made another film, and he drank himself to death a couple years after its release. And—”

“And that’s how the world remembers me. As a footnote to a failed filmmaker.” His voice softened. “And even my family has been forced to carry that shame, all these years later.”

Rachel hung her head. “Grandpa, you have to know this. The Taft family retreated from the public eye, true. We never stood up and defended you the way we should have. Maybe that was understandable, and maybe it wasn’t. But here’s the fact now: you are here, and so am I, and blood is thicker than anything. Whatever you choose to do with the rest of this life you’ve been given back, I’m there for you. We all are.”

“Whatever I choose to do. That’s the question, isn’t it?” He stopped pacing. “Am I really part of this world? Of this family? Could I ever really be again?” Taft stood and stroked his mustache and patted his gut, full as it was with TurkEase and good old-fashioned Taft fortitude. His voice began to billow and rise like a sail filling with a sudden powerful wind. “Rachel, this long era of our family’s reticence and shame is over. I won’t allow my own mistakes and shortcomings to hamper you or your career any longer. What about the future? You’re already a congresswoman. Who knows what Abby can someday achieve. For your sake, for hers, it’s time the name Taft rang from the rafters once again.”

AS A WORLD TRAVELER at the advent of the twentieth century, Taft had suffered every imaginable manner of intestinal malady. Such was par for the course: goulash-induced bloating in Budapest, parasitic irregularity in Manila, and fleeting bouts of seasickness at all points in between. Even his own recent virgin voyage on an airplane had been less than idyllic.

None of these trials, however, had inured his innards to the violent, almost vengeful incontinence brought on by Fulsom TurkEase.

By the end of the day, everyone in the house—all stricken save for Abby, who was spared from stinking indignity by the grace of God, or at least the strength of her young and hearty constitution—lay about the living room, drained of fluids and good humor.

“That,” wheezed Trevor, his arms wrapped around his torso as if they were the only thing keeping his guts together, “is the last time we ever eat Fulsom anything. Let alone TurkEase.”

Rachel hushed him. “Don’t even
say
that word. You know what this is, right? Poetic injustice. Is there such a thing? Because that’s what this feels like.”

Taft laughed as audibly as his seemingly bruised insides would allow. “If anything, you’ve certainly convinced me of your cause. Back in my day, we were no strangers to bad food. That’s why Teddy passed his agricultural reforms in the first place. But it was supposed to get better.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Grandpa. We’ve made great strides in food safety and wholesomeness in the past century. Not all food manufacturers, even the big agribusiness conglomerates, are as bad as Fulsom. But things have taken a turn for the worse. Healthy food is readily available, but companies like Fulsom make it easier for people to get addicted, for lack of a better word, to fat and salt and genetically modified ingredients. Hell, I can’t even claim to be totally immune
to their marketing. I mean, I’ve been eating Fulsom TurkEase and Sausage Saucers and Chick-n-Liks since I was a little girl. With all the research I’ve been doing over the past couple years, I know better than anyone. I’ve never met the man, but my beef with Gus Fulsom is personal. I grew up eating his company’s products, and I still break down every once in a while and buy some of this, this … stuff.” She reached over and took Trevor’s hand. “We try our best to eat better, for our sake and for Abby’s. But every once in a while, we just get busy and wind up on the path of least resistance.”

Taft couldn’t help but be reminded of himself. There had been no Fulsom Foods in his day. But the way Rachel spoke about the lack of control, the surrender to impulse, the comfort to be found in the flavors of youth … these he knew. All too well. He thought of Nellie, and of the ways she’d tried to guide him away from temptation.