The Henderson Equation (24 page)

Worse still, Stock had developed a penchant for buck
chasing. He was picking up large lecture fees, and it was obvious in his
columns that he was on the take for causes that could meet his price.

It was one of the problems of the business that the
syndicated columnist, unlike the employee of a newspaper, had the freedom to
choose his subject matter and, therefore, the freedom to espouse, to favor, to
condemn at will. Many, like Stock, maintained life-styles that matched their
bloated self-image. Unfortunately, in the context of today's world Stock's
black face gave him a measure of protection, vested him with arrogance. One
could not forget that Washington was a black city.

From the moment his eye caught the name "Henderson"
in Stock's first paragraph, the message was telescoped. Stock had been
recruited for Henderson's counterattack, an obedient soldier, doing his bit for
money or favor. There was a massive conspiracy afoot, he was alleging, to
discredit Henderson, here cast as the blacks' friend, which was, of course,
politically accurate. Henderson had at one time courted black affirmation, was
anointed by King and, when it was fashionable, was in the forefront of the
civil rights movement. Of late, however, he had been backing off; there was
even the somber hint of an anti-busing stance as he tried to move rightward
over the thin ice. Nevertheless, the Stock column, Nick saw, was a clever
weapon to select at this moment, and few would see through it.

Although he worked in a building next door to the
Chronicle,
Stock was hooked in by extension. Nick looked for his number in the
Chronicle
telephone book, began to dial, hesitated, then hung up. He wanted to be sure
that he held no anger, that he was cool inside. He wanted his reactions to be
pointed, unemotional, steady. Was the evidence of Stock's column conclusive?
Why was he so trusting of his judgment today? He picked up the phone and dialed
Stock's extension. The arrogant coolness of a receptionist's voice responded.
Without having ever seen her he could picture the woman, good-looking, sexually
enticing, and white, a kind of intimidating symbol of black mastery.

"Whom shall I say is calling?" the cool voice
asked. He was tempted to say something sarcastic but held back, answering
traditionally. Stock's voice came on resonant, carefully modulated in the
phone's speaker.

"I think your column's full of shit, Gordon,"
Nick said.

"It wouldn't be the first time, Nickie baby,"
Gordon said good-naturedly. Obviously he thought Nick was joking. It seemed a
clue to his lack of knowledge of any counterattack, as if he had been merely a
pawn himself. After all, Henderson was a
Chronicle
favorite. Who could
suspect that such a column would not pass muster?

"And I'm not going to run it." There was a long
pause.

"Are you serious?"

"Deadly."

"You can't do that."

"Yes, I can." There was a clause in the contract
with the syndicate allowing the paper to reject whole columns at its own
option.

"I don't understand."

"It's a Henderson plant, transparently self-serving, a
piece of pure puffery. More than that, it's patently dishonest."

"That's a crock."

"It may be. But I'm not going to run it."

"I think you've flipped, Nick." He could hear the
snicker of bravado. "It's the Israel thing. I knew it. You're too damned
frightened to call me on that one, so you rap me on this." Nick let the
shot pass. He could almost smell the Arab oil money through the telephone and
he'd heard about the poker games with the Arab ambassadors in which Stock had
won huge sums of money.

"I know all about the poker games, Gordon."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Stock spluttered,
his temper rising.

"I wouldn't go to the barn on that one."

"You're out to get me," Stock said, "and I
know why."

"Why, Gordon?"

"I can tell every time I shave."

"Don't push it, Gordon."

He could feel Gordon's retreat. Losing the Washington
Chronicle
exposure would be a serious blow to Stock's prestige. Nick knew he had him by
the short hairs and enjoyed the exercise of his power, the release of his timidity.

"You're making a mistake, Nick."

"I make them every day." He hung up, feeling
good. There was a partial truth in what Stock had said, he knew, and yet he
could honestly tell himself that it was no challenge to his objectivity. He had
never killed a Stock column before and was fully prepared to accept the
pressure that he knew would come. He wondered whether Stock, in his first flush
of anger, would cry censorship by the
Chronicle
in a future column. He
knew that Stock was too smart to challenge him, although he would fight back.
The strategy was predictable: a call to Henderson, who would call Myra, and the
battle would be joined, wide open now, steel on steel.

"You'd really be proud of me, Charlie," he caught
himself whispering, remembering the exact moment when he had said it before.

He had just been appointed Assistant City Editor of the New
York
News
and had, almost at once, after McCarthy had broken the news as
a barked decree, sat down at the typewriter and dashed off a letter to Charlie.
It did not occur to him that there was any illogic in his reaction, feeling
that, after all, Charlie had first claim on the outpouring of joy on his good
fortune. Hadn't it been Charlie who had planted the seed at the beginning? The
Kerryman thing had somehow stuck in McCarthy's brain, a first unerasable
impression that had provided a bizarre kinship, however inaccurate.
Mysteriously, doors had opened and Nick and McCarthy had found the magic
denominator that cuts across the demarcation of age.

When the letter had been posted, Nick called Margaret, now
at home with Chums, who had arrived, both unexpected and unwanted, viewed by
Margaret as a vicious attack on her person. It had been an intrusion of
traumatic proportions more like an accident during a vacation, the sudden drop
of a ski lift on the way to the summit, the capsizing of a sailboat on calm
waters. She had gotten the results of the rabbit test while they were both in
the office. He could see the answer in her drawn paleness as she had walked
toward his desk in the city room, a beaten figure on the verge of hysteria.
Seeing her coming, he had risen and walked toward her, then led her quickly to
the elevator and the late-afternoon coolness of Shanley's.

"I can't understand it," he had whispered, after
bringing two Scotches from the bar and urging her to sip one. She tried taking
a big gulp, then spat it back into the glass, gagging.

"I'd like to curl up and die," she said, wiping
the edges of her moist lips. "I knew this would happen. I knew it."

"We took precautions," Nick said.

She looked at him with unmistakable contempt.

"You can't play around with biology," she said.
"We've been taken."

"I hadn't meant it to happen," he said awkwardly,
feeling stupid and platitudinous. The predicament seemed a cliché. Why does she
not feel joyous? he remembered himself thinking, feeling both love and
compassion for her and a yearning for this thing that they had created.

"You talk of it as if it's the end of the world,"
he said. "I do love you, remember, and being married wouldn't be exactly a
tragedy. You see, you can't fight City Hall." He put a hand over hers and
squeezed it. Talk of love seemed to soften her.

"And I love you, Nick. It's just that I'm not prepared
for this. It comes as a shock."

"For both of us. You know I'm part of this deal."

"You're a man," she said helplessly. He knew what
she meant.

"We could get married and hell, you could work up to
six months, maybe more. Then take leave and come right back to work. Women have
been doing that for years."

"You just don't understand, do you?" she said.
"It's a setback, an illness, a biological curse. The men who hand out
promotions, who decide who shall rise and who shall fall, equate having babies
with housewifery and motherhood. Actually it's a black mark against me on the
record."

"I don't believe it," he lied, searching his mind
fruitlessly for examples.

She tried sipping the Scotch again, sucking it in through
clenched teeth. Turning, she searched the deserted bar. The big bartender was
polishing glasses.

"I want an abortion, Nick."

He watched her flickering eyes, misted now, the look of a
trapped animal.

"I think I have something to say about that," he
said. From the moment of their suspicion, when her period had not come, it had
been alluded to, and he had laughed it off. But it had set off an inner
turmoil, as if they were discussing the murder of someone they loved. He
wondered if it were the ego inside of him crying out to be validated.
Certainly, he knew, it was not a moral position. In the end, he had pushed it
from his consciousness, unable to find two sides to debate. Now that he was
confronted with the reality, he could only summon indignation, annoyance at her
callousness.

"I won't hear of it," he said, envisioning going
up sleazy corridors in foul-smelling tenements, having her soft white body
abused by an unshaven doctor with trembling fingers. It was not an uncommon
image for the times, he remembered later, feeling, long after Chums had been
born, that he, too, had been trapped by chronology. Perhaps, after all, Chums
in her embryonic state was listening, had heard the discussion of her possible
execution.

"It's my body and my life," Margaret had said,
her throat tightening, her voice sharply raised. He could see the bartender
turn briefly, then look away.

"You sound as if marrying me would be a stretch in
purgatory," he said.

Later, he had relived the moment again when abortion
emerged as a national issue, feeling the pain of it. He could never approach
his pro-abortion position without a nagging sense of guilt. Suppose they had
killed Chums?

Margaret had actually searched for an abortionist. He was
on the extension during the initial contact, the discussion revolving around
the details of money and place. Perhaps it was the voice on the other end,
furtive, gruff, cautious, that dissuaded them, or the screen of guilt which
clung to them like chewing gum, but the idea was ultimately rejected. Emerging
through tears and anxieties, sleepless nights, tender couplings, passionate
ecstasies, they finally decided on marriage. It took place in a simple ceremony
at City Hall, attended by Margaret's mother and father, awkward and bumbling,
holding back their anger. Later he had taken her to visit his mother in Warren,
Ohio, and it seemed better in the glow of familiar faces, piecrusts, and the
nostalgic odors of his old room, where he had insisted on their sleeping,
although his mother was willing to give up her double bed.

Chums, Charmagne, arrived with Charlie as absent godfather.
By then his involvement at the
Chronicle
was keeping him busy and his
telephone calls and letters were growing scarcer. They moved to Brooklyn after
Chums was born to be near Margaret's mother, who they assumed might be a
built-in baby-sitter, when Margaret was ready to tackle work again. Unfortunately
her mother developed phlebitis, which made it difficult for her to maneuver an
infant, and Margaret was forced to postpone the end of her sabbatical. That,
and the unaccustomed longish subway trip to Borough Park, once taken with such
delight, became a plague, compounded by Margaret's nagging and continuing
feeling of regret and entrapment. As if in compensation, Nick took to spending
more and more time in Shanley's where McCarthy's boozy Irish eloquence could
calm the troubled soul.

"She's my whore," McCarthy would say, pointing to
the building across the street. "Her ink was her perfume, and when it
wafted past my nose, my goose was cooked. No home, no children, no warm
fireside. Only her whoring ways." He'd shake a fist in the whore's
direction. "I'll beat her yet, the fickle, devious, black-hearted,
faithless adultress." Toward morning, as the bartender made his last
pourings, he would begin to rave and thrash his arms about. "Was this the
face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Come, Helen, suck forth my soul with a kiss."

Despite the thickness of his tongue, the lines always came
out crystal clear, an invocation of irreversible fate, as if it were the
ultimate explanation of McCarthy's hopeless entanglement. While others would
politely excuse themselves from McCarthy in his nightly cups, Nick felt drawn
toward him, fascinated by the never-ending articulation of his imagined burden,
as if the editorship of the country's most circulated newspaper were a disease
to be endured, its terminality ordained by supernatural forces.

"If you don't keep her petted, adored, indulged,
she'll turn on you like a viper. The bitch is never satisfied, a bottomless pit
of satiation. Throw whatever meat you can find in her maw and it leaves her
perpetually open for more. Her appetite never ends. She goes on, never
sleeping, always greedy, hungry for whatever garbage you can dredge up. And the
bitch has got no conscience, no conscience whatsoever. Give her half a chance
and she'll swallow you up and regurgitate the bones."

Years later, a mirror image had cascaded out of Charlie's
drunken mouth, the same allusions, linked, it seemed, by a love-hate
relationship with the same dissatisfied whore. And now him.

In the silent listening, the receptive ear, McCarthy had
apparently sensed some succor for his loneliness and perhaps it was
appreciation for this that prompted his promotion. Nick was actually
embarrassed by the quick change in his fortunes, since his befriending of
McCarthy was not rooted in his own ambition. He was, after all, content to be a
reporter, an observer, having achieved a pinnacle that was even then beyond his
dreams.