The Shadow Cabinet (60 page)

“Is this not a public house?” he asked, eyes drawn to some ribald face, satyr or goat, he wasn't sure, cropping glass bottles along the mirrored shelf behind the bar. His hat was on crooked, his tie caught on one shoulder, like an epaulet.

“I mean, look at the poor guy, would you?” someone pleaded.

The bartender gently obliged, removed the glass from his hand, and guided him out the door. He made no protest. He couldn't focus his eyes. With careful dignity, he fell across the bank of snow at the curb and into the street. He hadn't seen it and now that he did, sat atop it, blissfully breathing in the cold, dark air. He stood up at last, eyes stung bright by the cold. He found the middle distance—a familiar sign down the hill—and made for it. The world had come back into focus—joyous world, magnificent world. He was amazed. Skiers slid by gracefully, couples walked hand in hand, a snowball sped over his head and vanished into the night, like a meteorite.

At the entrance to his street, a small car without chains or snow tires was stuck in a drift at the curb. Four hefty female college students were straining against the rear end, trying to push it free into the downhill lane. Gallantly he moved to their assistance. In the darkness there was confusion for a moment as the driver and one of the pushers changed places. In the melee he found his hands pressing heroically against two soft plush fenders in ski pants, his right thumb dangerously near that crevasse—

“
Hey!
”

The car was mercifully free. So was he. His street was dark, the snow drifting down.

Old lecher with a love on every wind
.

He moved with dignity, erect and graceful. Disasters had been avoided, humiliations adroitly sidestepped. He had a precise notion of who and where he was, himself, Edward Donlon, this vast hovering presence extending over Alpine Washington from Bethesda to Alexandria, seeing all, forgiving all. Crossing an icy patch near his front gate, he lost his balance momentarily but didn't fall. Perilously close, though. No one had seen—only Bishop Berkeley and himself.

At the top of his porch steps, he said adieu to the evening, his consort, bowing, then leaning forward to blow his breath back into the air. Still leaning forward, he slowly drank it in again, as if drawing this entire intoxicating evening into his lungs for safekeeping until tomorrow evening at seven, when, from this same porch, he would blow it out and resume his pilgrimage. The effort left him dizzy.

He struggled on the porch to find his door key. The key was inserted but the door swung open, unlocked, and he moved into the familiar warmth of his front hall. A pair of matched leather bags stood alongside the staircase.

Grace Ramsey's?

The lights in the front room were on. So was the lamp in the small hall between the dining and living rooms. He heard an oddly familiar voice, a woman talking—not the housekeeper's Maryland nasality, not Grace Ramsey's secretive murmur, but a sharp, incisive voice. He moved on, through the living room.

“I think he just walked in—wait a minute. Ed? Ed, is that you?”

He stood looking into the small lamplit hall where Jane stood, telephone in hand. She looked very tall, very elongated, somehow thinner. Her hair was cut short. She wore a gray tweed suit and the hall reeked of strong cigarette smoke.

“Yes, it's Ed. He looks snockered. Are you snockered, Ed? I'm talking to Greta in Old Lyme.”

She held out the phone, but he didn't know what to say. He felt like Tom Thumb, fallen into the milkmaid's churn.

“Yes, I'm afraid he's sloshed, too shocked to say a word. The weather's absolutely atrocious, as I said. I was delayed out of New York for four hours and we flew into Baltimore, of all places. I despise flying anyway and my angst level was absolutely poisonous. I couldn't cope. Fortunately my seat companion helped—a doctor, totally nonthreatening. I could let myself go without feeling victimized.…”

What barbaric intruder was this?

“… no psychic massacres yet. Yes, he just walked in and we haven't talked. He certainly looks nonvindictive, but you can't tell what kind of wormwood his thyroid is secreting.…”

He listened woodenly, without the strength to remove his coat. She watched him as she talked on. “Yes, Grace met me at Baltimore—she hired a car. She's been
so
supportive in all this.…”

She was whispering now, her back to him. Wizened and old, he'd shriveled like a sea orchid, brought up from the depths. He was still standing there when she hung up. She took off his hat, then helped with his coat, stripping it from the back, the sleeves turned inside out and pulled off from the rear, like a straitjacket. She led him across the room and up the steps.

Who was this person?

At the landing, catching the warm wind of some gentle fragrance, he clumsily tried to embrace it, but a firm knee backed him away.

“Don't be archaic; this is strictly a cooperative household. Grace has been warning me for weeks you were tottering on the brink, but I had no idea it had gone this far. Your breath is absolutely atrocious.”

He leaned backward, looking up, but reeled, losing his balance. Jane held him under the arms. Still he looked up.
Grace Ramsey, a spy in his house?

It was true. She was there, standing at the banister on the third floor, looking down, hovering over the stairwell like the Queen of the Night, come to safely return this house, this home, this family, to her fairyland cuckoo kingdom.

“Yoo hoo.” He waved feebly, moving his fingers.

She helped him up and led him into the second-floor bedroom, where she helped him undress. He ignored the pajamas she'd found for him and crawled into bed in his undershorts. “I'm going to stay and help you, but you've got to cooperate,” she said. She paused at the door. “Do you want me to leave the light on?” He didn't answer and she went out, shutting the door behind her.

He'd heard their whispers and recognized their conspiracies since he'd learned to walk, wakened to their morning intrigues and fallen asleep to their nightly plots—he the only son in a Victorian house where every room was filled with the echo of feminine strategies. A cook in the kitchen, a laundress in the basement, two spinster aunts on the third floor, a grandmother in her front suite, four sisters with bedrooms side by side on the second floor. They planned the luncheon menu over breakfast, the dinner menu over lunch, his tea dance partners, social responsibilities, barber, and yard chores over dinner, when his father's place was often empty. His father preferred to work late in his downtown law office by then, near a private club, and spent the passive weekends of his middle age locked away in his downstairs study rereading Prescott, Thoreau, and P. G. Wodehouse, or listening to his Bix Beiderbecke record collection or the afternoon Phillies games to escape that shrill incessant attention of a nine-woman household.

Young Donlon had been their prisoner instead—seventeen bloody years of it until he'd escaped to Princeton, where he'd disguised his rebellion by conquest and seduction. But after each possession, each solitary victory, one more remained. Yet he'd fooled no one. They had suckled him, coddled him, bathed him, clothed him, tutored him, taught him, fed him, fondled him, fucked him, and now they would claim him. He was theirs once again, as he had been all the time. A woman upstairs, a woman downstairs, a woman with his gin bottle—he was a prisoner of the sisterhood.

Now he heard luggage bumping up the stairs, whispers, sly laughter. Then low voices and the clink of glasses. The ceiling was dark. What strange constellations were wheeling overhead? He strained to listen. A creak of bedsprings? He sat up immediately. Still more? Now a bed banging. He flung the covers aside and leaped out. Two's company, three's a carousel.

Wait for me!

“Don't be baroque.” Jane reacted angrily, escorting him back down the stairs from Brian's old room, where he'd discovered them making up the bed she intended to occupy for the time being.

A prisoner again in his own bed, he'd expected her to lock the door behind her this time. She didn't.

He was disappointed.

12.

Nick Straus had gone to see Leyton Fischer that snowy evening to apologize. It was a sad house. A faint musty odor hovered on the air—old furniture, old rugs, old brass, old memories—a melancholy interment watched over by this waspish caretaker with his sprained right foot in a ski sock. He'd slipped on the icy curb outside that morning and painfully twisted his ankle. The rooms of the first floor were unused, the furniture protected by white dust covers. Fischer led him to the large study at the back of the house. The bay window looked out over a dark rear garden. Bookshelves lined the walls, a small mound of coal glowed cherry red in the fireplace beyond the brass fender.

“I came to apologize,” Nick told him. “I'm sorry to have involved you in this and I came to apologize.”

“You needn't. I understand—certainly I understand. The time had come, I suppose.” Fischer's gray hair was damply combed and he wore a dark blazer and an ascot.

“I simply wanted to bring a few absurd facts to official attention.”

“Of course; don't apologize. Would you like a cocktail, maybe some sherry?” Decanters of sherry and port sat on the nearby table, both less than a quarter full. A small puddle of wine lay next to a nearby glass with a drop of liquid in the bottom.

Nick declined.

Fischer didn't repeat the offer. He refilled his glass with a trembling hand. More drops leaked to the table. “I probably should have left years ago—after '62. The truth is it's been terribly lonely since Celia died.”

He sat down in the leather chair nearby, opposite Nick. They sat in silence for a minute. “The truth is it won't matter what you did. The people you intended it for are incapable of dealing with these problems, intellectually incapable. In the end this nation will get exactly what it deserves.”

Nick watched him drink and then put the glass aside.

“The moral equivalent of an enlightened foreign policy would be a Beethoven string quartet, I suppose. I once put it to them in those terms.”

“To them?”

“In 1962, during the Cuban crisis, when I was working in the basement of the White House, the NSC. We were trying to orchestrate—that was the word we were using”—he smiled wanly—“‘orchestrate' our response to Khrushchev's missiles in Cuba: Navy, Air Force, Army, the remnants of the Cuban brigades, British, French, NATO, and so forth. This is what I told them. I said it required a sensitivity, moral as well as intellectual, that was quite beyond these crude instruments available to us. I said this at a meeting in the White House situation room. A subcabinet official lifted his finger and pointed at me. ‘From now on, you're for it, and I don't want to hear another word.' He didn't. After the crisis, I was sent over to State. I've kept my silence ever since.”

“I didn't know that,” Nick said. “I'm sorry. I should have.”

“There's no reason you should have known,” Fischer said, with a trace of annoyance. “Please don't be pious, Nick. The course we're setting for ourselves will end in disaster. There are people other than yourself who know this. I've known it for twenty years.”

A rosebush tapped against the bay window at Leyton Fischer's back, moving with the blowing snow. A gardenia in final bloom with drops of water on its petals floated curiously in a silver bowl on the table in front of the window, like some offering to someone departed. Nick heard the wind trapped in the courtyard.

“… bankruptcy or catastrophe, that's where it will lead. The treasury exhausted, the economy broken, that's where they're taking us. Withdrawal will follow, total withdrawal to these shores; it's inevitable. We'll be out of Europe in four years.”

“I'm surprised to hear you say that.”

“It's the stupidity you despise—the dullness, the mediocrity, the arrogance.” He looked away suddenly. “That's the rage that grows. That's what you feel. Someone once said of Carlyle that his rage was such that only the end of the world would consume it. That's what one feels. If it were to happen, I would have absolutely no regrets, none whatsoever.”

“There are things that might be done,” Nick suggested.

“What? Nothing. It's too late. We can no more change the situation than we can change medieval Europe.” He got to his feet, hobbled about a table, and stood at the bookcase on the far side of the fire. “Our knowledge of medieval Europe will tell you.” The book for which he was searching was too high to reach. “It's based upon chronicles written by churchmen,” he continued, limping back to his chair, “by ecclesiastical sycophants whose belief influenced every fact they collected and every Latin sentence they wrote.” He refilled his sherry glass. “Now, of course, the view of medieval Europe as devoutly religious is indestructible, not because it's true but because the documents by which we know it were written by those who believed it, who wanted others to believe it, and who were incapable of believing anything else. The same can now be said of the modern world about us—Soviet, Chinese, third world. We in Washington study a popular text written by barbarians.…”

It was the malice Nick found so ugly, the venom of all of those years. “I didn't know you felt that so strongly,” he said after a minute.

“Why should you be surprised? You think as I do. Why do you suppose I kept telling DIA that you were their man when they were looking for an absolutely reliable Soviet analyst?”

“I've often wondered.”

“I knew your views were mine—a kind of double, able to do things I couldn't. That in a moment of utter madness, your judgment could be relied on.”

“I'm sorry then, Leyton.”

Fischer still watched him disapprovingly. “You've always faced the same problems as I, the same prejudices. For others, my private and personal views have always been a problem. You learn to hide them. What choice did I have?”