The Shadow Cabinet (44 page)

“I was thinking about going out to the country.”

“Lucky you. I suppose I'll stay cooped up in this hotel room. Numero seven eight one, I wear it on my back; my nightie too. Ten years to life, that's what the judge gave me.” She laughed self-consciously.

“That's no way to spend the weekend.”

“Yeah? Any suggestions?” He didn't know what to tell her and stood in awkward silence. She spoke first. “If you get any, give me a call. I'll be here.”

“I'll do that,” he said.

Betsy was in bed when he reached the house in McLean, but still awake, her voice strange. He turned on the bed lamp and sat down next to her. She turned her head away.

“What is it?” he asked, touching her shoulder. She shook her head without answering. “I know it's something.” He thought she'd been crying. She rarely cried, but when she did always concealed it from him. “Come on, tell me.”

She didn't answer. On the bedside table under the lamp was a letter from their son Paul in Oregon. He read it as he sat on the bed next to her. Paul had quit his newspaper job and was now playing the banjo in a pickup band he'd been sitting in with on Saturday nights. Like the other band members, he was working in a fruit-packing plant, and he'd moved in with the lead guitar player and his girl friend to save money. He had fifty dollars in his bank account.

“Is this it?” he asked. “Is this what you're upset about?”

She didn't answer, still turned away from him, her face hidden from him in the shadows.

“Betsy? Come on, let's talk about it.”

But she still didn't turn and he sat there stroking her arm and shoulder, the house dark and silent below. He didn't know how long he sat there at her side, but gradually the present gave way to the past and the figure lying silently on the bed was Betsy twenty-two years earlier, lying in another darkened bedroom, racked by the first pains of labor, her husband sitting helplessly at her side then too, aware for the second time in his married life of how absolute was the physical distance that separated them. Paul was her last-born, the birth that had given her the most pain. In labor she'd been alone, as she was alone now in the second-floor bedroom. Her body had given up another, leaving hers behind, an agony Wilson hadn't shared, and this was still her legacy, twenty-two years later.

“It wasn't just Paul's letter, was it?” he asked, still touching her forehead, but she was sleeping by then, and watching over her silent figure, he felt the same inconsolable desolation that had come to him so many years ago as he watched her unconscious form being wheeled into the delivery room.

7.

Despite sunny predictions, the November Saturday remained cold and overcast. The cold front that was to be drawn away like a winter eiderdown from the Virginia countryside stalled in place. The weatherman's television maps and satellite imagery, so reassuring the night before, glowing into suburban living rooms like Prospero's magic, had been in substantial error. The President had canceled his weekend at Camp David; a launch at Cape Canaveral had been postponed for two days; but at a village firehouse an hour from Washington toward the Shenandoah, the November rummage sale was being held, rain or shine, to benefit the volunteer fire department. The paint was scaling from the old clapboard dormers; the roof leaked. A cabin on Rag Mountain had burned to the ground in late October when a four-inch pumper hose ruptured.

In a suede jacket and plaid skirt, Betsy Wilson wandered curiously among the outdoor tables set up in front of the firehouse, looking at the old depression glass, the ancient bottles, old cutlery, and brass wall fixtures brought from local attics and basement cupboards for the semiannual sale. She carried a small pumpkin under one arm. From each pocket of her suede jacket stuck an ear of hard yellow corn still in its stiff husk. She'd bought them from the third-grade table at the far end of the display, not because she knew what she was going to do with them but because she'd found the small, shy salesmen there irresistible.

Wilson trailed after her, carrying a jug of hard cider. He watched as she stopped at a table of more expensive merchandise and picked up a silver candle snuffer with a wooden handle. Two gray-haired women in tweed jackets and hunt-country hats were standing at the end of the table, identifying antique silver in their browsing voices. He saw Betsy watching them curiously, studying their coats and their shoes, the antique snuffer forgotten. Turning, she saw him and rolled her eyes hopelessly.

“It's nice,” she said as they returned to the station wagon. “A nice town; money too, but nice. Old money, I suppose. Why didn't we bring my car? This car's disgraceful, Haven.”

“It's a bad road where we're going.”

“How far away is it?”

“Just a couple of miles.”

He drove away from the village and they turned off the state road onto a secondary lane that meandered through pastures, rolling fields, and woods. She sat looking out the window silently. He turned into a gravel road and she looked at him suspiciously. The gravel road ended abruptly at an old fence with a rusting
For Sale
sign nailed to the top beam. “Is this it?” she asked.

“Almost.” He got out, opened the gate, and then drove through, but fifty yards beyond, the muffler and differential began to ring out against the exposed rockbed and he slowed to a stop. “We won't make it like this. We'll have to walk.”

He'd last seen the farmhouse in the spring, when the real estate agent had driven him out in a four-wheel-drive jeep. A tenant farmer had occupied it at the time, but the family was gone now and the road was overgrown.

The wind was fierce on the exposed hillside, bothering Betsy's dark hair. He saw her shiver as she pulled up her collar. “Maybe it's too cold for you?” he called from the other side of the car.

“No, I'm fine.” She shivered as she drew on her gloves. “What on earth happened to all that sunshine the weatherman promised?”

“Aborted, like the launch at Cape Canaveral. Maybe Pennsylvania's got it.”

“The weathermen are supposed to know.”

“He's just an expert. Weather trajectories go crazy like everything else. Maybe this one blew up on the pad, like the Pershing II launch.”

She wound a scarf around her head as they walked. “So now the Republicans are responsible for the weather too.” She moved carefully down the overgrown road, trying to avoid the tangle of thorn and thistle, dried now, the blooms long scattered. “Is this a real country house we're going to see or is it a Tidewater country house?”

“The real McCoy; no plumbing.”

“I should have known,” she said with a smile. “Carter country.”

They climbed a hill between two apple orchards and emerged at the front of the farm itself, a hundred acres of rolling pasture and cropland fenced in front with locust, black with age. The deserted farmhouse lay in a grove of old maples overlooking a secluded valley. Once a log cabin, it had been added to over the centuries and covered with stucco at the turn of the century. A stone chimney lay at each end of the steep tin roof. The front and rear porches had fallen off. An old tin heating stove, bottomless hulks of gasoline cans, and the headpiece of an iron bed lay rusting in the weeds to the side. A mattress had been left behind near a rear shed where a pickup truck stood, its tires and engine gone. “
Haven,
” Betsy muttered, but he'd stopped under the maple trees, head cocked, eyes not moving from the house. She watched as he turned to look back over the secluded valley and the dark-blue shadow of the mountains along the horizon. “When did you first see it?”

“Last spring,” he said. “A farm family was living here, it was raining, and the real estate agent wanted to leave before we got stuck. Then the tenant farmer didn't much want us around, either.”

“What else haven't you told me?”

“Nothing I can think of.”

He wanted to see the interior, but the doors were locked. He found an old board and prodded the windows until he found a sash he could raise, and they climbed in. The interior was dark with shadow, the smell of the old fireplaces as palpable as smoke. Their breath showed on the raw air. The old pine floors were uneven and had settled with the foundations along the outer walls. Chipmunks and mice had left acorns and persimmon seeds near the kitchen baseboard.

“It would take an awful lot of work,” Betsy said, cautiously exploring the rooms. “Do you mind if I tell you something?”

“No, go ahead.”

“I don't think you could live here, not somplace this remote.”

He didn't answer, kneeling on the hearth as he inspected the chimneys. She watched him silently and then, as if conscious of her words, turned to the window to look out over the side meadow. “That isn't to say it wouldn't be a perfect weekend house. It's a lovely view, isn't it?”

They climbed out the window and she stopped to retie her scarf, still looking back at the house. “I think that's where Paul gets his ideas, more from you than me. As the youngest, I think it was harder for him.” She stood in silence, still contemplating the house. “I think that's why he went all the way to Oregon, to do something on his own.”

“I think that was part of it.”

She turned. “What's down there?” She looked past the old maple tree behind the house, toward the rear meadow. “What's that?”

“An old barn, back in the trees. A pond too.”

She wanted to see them. They walked down the slope to the pond, overgrown with willow, silver maple, and wild cherry along its fringes. Duck down floated on the dark surface, and a few curls from preened tail feathers lay at the water's edge. As they moved around the pond a green heron took flight, pumping its wings lazily as it circled back toward the woods. They continued in silence down the slope along a broken stone fence. The wind had risen, bending the tops of the towering sycamores, as white as bone against the dark, ragged clouds overhead. From deeper in the woods came the creak of the tall timber. She moved against the wind along the stone fence, eyes exploring the hillside and the low-flying clouds.

“Strange,” she said as they paused at the edge of the woods on an outcropping of rock. “Strange but lovely.”

“What?”

“The weather, this, everything.”

“It's the cold front moving through,” he said.

“They loved the country so,” she said, looking away. “I wish they could be here, both of them. They'd love it, Paul especially—”

“It'd be a place where they could come,” he said.

“It could be, couldn't it? That's nice to think about, but what about the weeks in between?” They walked on up the hill. “Being a McLean widow is easier than being a Shenandoah widow.”

“I might open a law office nearby.”

She seemed to smile. “No, you couldn't. You'd be miserable, the way Nick Straus is. Washington's your life, not rural Virginia.”

“Not anymore.”

She nodded. “We'll see,” she said.

8.

“A friend from the Bureau, an old pal,” Buster Foreman confided in a bright whisper over the restaurant table. “I'm hitting fungoes with him Friday afternoon down at his office—bouncing the questions at him, he's poppin' 'em back. Then we move to this Irish bar down the street. He gives me an earful.” He looked enormously pleased, Wilson thought, and why not? He was back in his element.

A bright autumn sun painted Pennsylvania Avenue outside and the light-blue haze lying over the streets and sidewalks, crowded with the noon-hour exodus. Except for the chilly wind pushing swift, broken clouds over the rooftops, the day seemed almost springlike. They sat on the balcony of an Italian restaurant. The downstairs was crowded, shrill with lively voices and noisy busboys rattling dish carts. A tableful of World Bank employees in front were celebrating someone's transfer.

“He gives me the name of this old investigator at the Labor Department to fill in a few details,” Buster continued. “I go see him this morning. The guy's down there raking leaves, just sitting there in this office, nothing to do, eating his heart out. That's where the investigation started, the special investigation unit at Labor, but the FBI took it over, a jurisdictional dispute.”

“We're still talking about Caltronics,” Wilson said.

“Still Caltronics. I find out how this Caltronics went big time, a couple of multimillion-dollar contracts for two big insurance companies out West, one in Arizona, the other in Nevada. Caltronics took over the whole operation—financial management software, accounting, claims processing, the whole bag. They set up the systems, designed them, taught them, and walked out—some real big money.”

The waitress had returned and stood behind Wilson, who hadn't seen her. Buster ordered for him. “Bring him a tall frosty, like mine; his pacemaker just went on the fritz.” She left the menus behind and went away.

“How long ago was that?” Wilson asked.

“Three, four years, maybe,” Buster said. “But what happens is no one's satisfied with the systems. They keep redesigning the software, sending people back, all kinds of cost-plus contracts. For Caltronics, the billings are really adding up, maybe triple the original contract. It's real expensive for this one insurance company in Arizona. It's got a liquidity problem, it's being squeezed dry. You beginning to get the picture?”

“Maybe. Go ahead.”

“Someone's siphoning money out,” Buster said. “So that's the first thing, someone's bleeding this insurance company dry and Caltronics is helping them do it. The second thing is who's behind these insurance companies. A couple of big West Coast unions got behind both of them. They handle their group life insurance, health and welfare premiums, their pension plans, the whole bundle, so now we're talking about even bigger money—a cash reservoir like Hoover Dam. What's that mean? You've got kickbacks and payoffs to handle, the money that gets funneled back to the local business agents and welfare fund trustees. But that's just the small stuff. Sound familiar?”