The Dinner Party (25 page)

“She's got you there,” Augustus said, “although I don't know what the devil she's talking about.”

“What are you talking about?” Justin wanted to know. “Pacifism?”

“Not exactly,” Elizabeth said.

“Are you and your brother incapable of an act of violence?” Heller asked Elizabeth.

“That's such a personal question,” Jenny said. “I think we ought to drop the subject.”

“Oh, Granny, it's all right,” Elizabeth smiled and patted Heller's hand. “I don't mind questions. Questions have become very ‘in' since you were a child. As for Lenny and me and violence—who knows? But I do like to
think
that neither of us are capable of it.”

“Too deep,” Winifred said. “Much too deep and provoking. When I was a kid, we talked of other things.”

“I'm sure you did,” Dolly said pleasantly. “On the other hand, it was a long time ago.”

“Do you agree?” Heller asked Leonard.

“Oh? Yes, I think I do.” He had come awake.

Dolly, watching her son, began to sense that something was wrong, terribly wrong. The threads that linked the two of them had suddenly become tangled; nothing was right, nothing that she could pin down was wrong, but the threads had become tangled. She glanced across the table to where the senator sat and felt that she saw her own fears in his eyes without knowing exactly what she saw.

The meat was being served. Delicious pink slices. She had forgotten that Leonard would not eat meat. It would have made no difference in the menu, but she should have remembered. Why was she so nervous? Why this talk of Buddhism and meditation?

“Delicious beef. Tender,” Heller said appreciatively.

“It's not beef. It's lamb.”

“I can't believe that,” Frances said.

“It's marinated and broiled, as you would do a steak.”

Frances would have gone on to the recipe and that might have kept her through the main dish, but the senator, realizing that she would have to monopolize Dolly across the length of the table, diverted her with questions about the Hellers' recent trip to the Soviet Union. Frances responded with a story of a rash that Heller had contracted on his visit. “It itched so, I'm afraid it gave our relations with Russia a turn for the worst. Webster says it came of their having no comprehension of what we mean by clean. It spoiled everything.”

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” the senator mused.

“Oh?”

“Nothing. I'm sorry?”

Jenny saved him with a compliment for Frances's clothes. At sixty-nine, Jenny with her height, her great mop of white hair piled on her head, and her dress of ivory-colored silk faille, was doing her thing as a doyenne of snobs. She had the equipment for a role she assumed only when she felt that Augustus was threatened, and her method of operation was to destroy with faint praise. Indeed, it was the only weapon she had—since beneath her shield of class lived a soft and sentimental person—and she used it sparingly. Her praise, dropped upon the tasteless dress Frances wore, was devastating. Frances lowered her eyes, mumbled a word of thanks and then brought her lips together tightly. Jenny was enveloped in guilt.

At the other end of the table, Heller pressed Elizabeth. “About this meditation thing, if it does all you say it does, it sounds like a dangerous thing.”

“In what way?”

Heller studied her keenly. Was she playing a game with him, this slender pretty girl? He smiled and said that it might wreak havoc in the armed forces.

“But soldiers don't meditate,” Elizabeth assured him. “So you have nothing to worry about.”

Both the senator and Dolly were listening, Richard straining to hear Elizabeth's soft voice from where he sat at the other end of the table. Even MacKenzie, who was pouring the Lafite-Rothschild, paused to listen.

“How do you know that?” Justin demanded. Elizabeth was seated between Heller and Justin.

“It's very simple. If they meditated seriously, they wouldn't be soldiers, would they?”

“Vietnam is full of Buddhist pagodas, but they fought like devils.”

Elizabeth shrugged. “I don't imagine the fighters came from the pagodas.”

“And I've heard that story about Helms and Ginsberg,” Justin said. “I don't put any stock in it.”

Heller, who had tasted the wine, held up his glass. “Suppose we talk about something civilized—namely wine. It's splendid, Richard. What is this red wine, if I may ask?”

MacKenzie exhibited the bottle, and Heller nodded. “Splendid.”

“You're a connoisseur, Mr. Secretary,” Dolly said.

“Hardly. But it is part of the job.”

“I think it's brilliant. I have only the vaguest sense of the difference between a good wine and a bad wine.”

“No need to apologize. It's a matter of little importance. But tell me, Mrs. Cromwell, how do you feel about your children's profession of Buddhist belief?”

“I never regarded it as belief. It's the way they are. I have no complaints.” She glanced at Leonard, who had put on his plate a spoonful of flageolet and another spoonful of spinach.

“I'm not very hungry, Mom.”

“Please try to eat,” she whispered.

“Sure.”

Augustus lifted his glass and proposed a toast. “To our two eminent guests and the land they rule!”

“Come off it,” Justin growled.

“I drink to the land,” Heller said, and after he had tasted the wine, “not to an old friend's sour sense of humor.”

Not funny by any means, the senator reflected, and what is the old devil up to tonight? He's rehearsing for something.

For moments he had forgotten or put aside or shunted into the area of disbelief the fate of his son. His mind had done one of those curious tricks and directed his concentration toward the wit and poise of his children; thrust back into reality, he felt the tears beginning in his eyes. He hid for a moment behind his napkin, but when he looked up he realized that Dolly was staring at him and that she had missed nothing. He was transparent. He always had been. It was a rotten habit for a politician.

“What land would that be?” Augustus asked, grinning. “El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatamala? Trouble with my sour sense of humor is that it's not shared by the fifty states. My sense of humor, I mean. If it were, Webster, you and your pals would be laughed out of existence.”

“That's uncalled for,” Justin remarked, his tone treading the thin edge of anger.

Heller, older and wiser than William Justin, grinned back at Augustus and reminded Justin of the old movie called
The Virginian
. “Not when he says it with a smile, Bill. You remember the film? Was it Gary Cooper? I think so. The bad guy insults Cooper.” He glanced around the table inquiringly. Augustus's speech had stopped all other conversation.

“‘When you say that, smile,'” Elizabeth said sweetly.

“Oh?”

“The late show. That horrible little box lets our generation live two lives.”

“And at the same time, young feller,” Augustus said to Justin, “it propounds the virtues of the Republican party. We can say our piece and never ripple the water. A Democrat wouldn't dare come out and say we run and own Central America, body and soul. No, sir! He'd be denounced as a Communist, tuck his tail between his legs, and run like hell.”

The long moment of silence that followed was broken by Winifred Justin who said to Augustus, “But if that's the case, Mr. Levi, and you are not teasing all of us, which I am sure you are, I mean teasing the lot of us, but if that is the case, where does virtue lie?”

“With a well-bred woman. Where else could you find it?”

Jenny, doyenne to the table, the enduring wife of Augustus Levi, shook her head to still the waters. “My dear Mrs. Justin,” she said, being one who saved first names for either servants or those she considered her equals, “you must not take my husband seriously. He enjoys shocking people.”

“But I must take him very seriously,” Heller said lightly. “I've known him a long time.” He turned to Leonard suddenly, “And don't you take him seriously? How about that, Son?”

Leonard hesitated, and for a moment the senator thought he would make no response whatsoever. Then he said, smiling slightly, “Gramps and I had a different relationship. He used to carry me, or get down on his knees to play with me, and steal candy for me behind Mom's back—but do you know, sir,” pausing, “we never talked about murder.”

“Murder?”

“Of course, it's only my point of view,” Leonard said apologetically. He wanted to leave it there.

“Why would he talk to you about murder?” Frances Heller wondered. “Unless it's another joke?”

“No, I didn't mean it that way. I was thinking.…” He faltered, as if he were confused.

“Go ahead, Lenny,” the senator said softly.

He bent his head for a moment, then looked at Heller and said, “I meant politics and war—I mean to me, the taking of a human life is an act of murder.”

THIRTY-THREE

I
n the kitchen, MacKenzie, sotto voce, was berating Nellie. “Serve left, remove right, serve left, remove right—can't you understand, you silly girl? This is your right hand, this is your left hand.”

“I know. I know which is my right hand. But the corners—”

“I know about corners. I don't give a spotted catfish about corners. You serve left, you remove right.”

“Oh, leave the poor child alone.” Ellen handed Nellie a silver boat of hot bread. “Check the bread.” And when Nellie had departed, she said to her husband, “If you didn't have such hot pants for that child, you wouldn't be putting her down all the time.”

“She's no child and my pants are cold as ice right now.”

“That'll be the day. How is it going in there?”

“Interesting. Smooth so far.”

“Go check the wine again. Don't just stand here with your teeth in your mouth.”

“The old man, Gus, he just put down the secretary of state like Mohammed Ali did it to all challengers in his good time.”

“Mac, get back in there. I'm not going to tell you again.”

The fourth bottle of Lafite-Rothschild had emptied itself through MacKenzie's careful pouring, and Frances, unexpectedly, was allowing her knee to tip toward the senator. Knee to knee, she asked him what he had seen of the theater in New York. Richard was schooled in that diplomatic book of procedure that says that one never knows what one can do for whoever, or what whoever could do for one, and therefore one does not reject a knee. Ignore it, but don't reject it; and meanwhile explain that you rarely get to New York.

“In London,” Jenny put in, “we do the theater with ferocity. But of course Gus does everything with ferocity. In New York, somehow, we don't operate that way. New York is different.”

“And it does come to Washington sooner or later,” Frances said.

Richard Cromwell accepted the general condition at his end of the table with equanimity. There had been times when the senseless chatter would have irritated him; now it was meaningless. There were no more small irritations, only the dark horror that had overcast the day; and Jenny, who sat to his left, was never an irritation. Early in his marriage to Dolly, when Jenny had been in her forties, a great, strapping, high-breasted woman, he had engaged in sexual fantasies about her, and even though his delicious lusts were unrealized, they added to the charm he displayed toward her. Jenny loved him for this and would hear no word against him, possibly sensing his mood and finding a response in herself for the unthinkable. Jenny was pleased by his tolerance for Frances Heller; not that she liked Frances, but it did give Richard points in Jenny's image of him.

Justin, on his fourth glass of wine, and finding Elizabeth unresponsive, stirred the little snakes that had taken residence in his mind so long ago, and asked Elizabeth whether, in the light of what had been said, Leonard had registered for the draft? He was not drunk. Justin did not become drunk in the usual manner, slow, funny, foolish. In fact, he did not become drunk at all, only more unpleasant.

“I haven't the vaguest idea,” Elizabeth said. “Why don't you ask him?”

Justin glanced at Heller, who pursed his lips and shook his head slightly.

“Question?” Leonard asked across the table.

Stepping in with the first thing that leaped to mind, Dolly said, “I was amazed the other day to hear the president quote poetry.”

“Did he?” Heller said.

“Well, hardly the greatest poet. Robert W. Service as a matter of fact. An odd little poem called
The Cremation of Sam Magee
. He had memorized it, for some reason.”

“Nothing wrong with his memory,” Augustus snorted. “He'd memorize the dictionary and read it as his State of the Union address if someone put it in front of him.”

Justin was set to react in anger, but the secretary laughed and reminded Augustus of the eleventh commandment.