These Dreams of You (18 page)

B
ob says, “I was the one . . . not born with gifts. I was the one about whom people said, This is a boy without gifts. I wasn't the son meant for anything, I was never meant to be the great man. Runt, they called me, sissy they said. Mama's boy, what shall we do with him? Not born with gifts, I had, uh, only my will. My brothers and sisters were born with gifts, then one by one they were gone and left no more shadows in which to hide. No longer were their gifts for me to serve, when I no longer was a middle brother but the oldest . . . when I was left by default then I made out of my will what I could. You know, most of my life,” he says nodding at the house in the distance, “I would have beaten any man who said or hinted that my father had anything to redeem,” and up until he says it, Reg wouldn't have imagined this small man beating up anyone; but now he can. Bob turns to Reg. “Sooner or later you have to see the sins of the father for what they are. Your Mr. Churchill understood things more clearly. It doesn't mean I don't love my father. It doesn't mean I didn't spend my life trying to make him as proud of me as he was of my brothers and sisters.” He looks back at the house. “I do worry if tomorrow is a mistake.”

R
eg says, “Look here, is this about Jaz being a colored bird?”
“Giving a speech to some students,” says Bob, “but, uh, I'm not sure what to tell them—I don't think there's much I
can
tell them,” in his high nasal voice, “and the government doesn't want me coming. I mean
their
government but mine too, I suppose. Will I only succeed in giving the white government a, a . . . an excuse to arrest black Africans? Am I only making trouble? Do I become the . . .
rationale
by which more blacks are oppressed, beaten, brutalized? Is this about my damned ego? Is this one more test I put myself to, for which other people pay the price, as my brothers paid the price for my father? I keep going over the speech. Taking the anger out. Putting it back in.”

“What is it these students want from you, then?”

For the first time tonight the hair-trigger altar boy becomes all of a piece with his sad burning eyes. “I don't believe one man changes everything,” he says, “maybe no one man changes
anything
, least of all me. I'm an
accident
. But I believe there are times when even men who aren't great must find a way to try and do great things. People think I'm afraid of nothing when the truth is I'm afraid of everything, and not so long ago I vowed before a God I love and trust a little less than I used to that I would do all the things I'm afraid of, because I do believe anyone can change part of something, and that part of something changes something else, and soon the ripple in the lake is the wave on the beach.”

A
t Olympic Studios off Baker Street the next day, the session starts late. The band spends most of the morning and early afternoon waiting outside in a van for another session to finish; Reg and Jasmine don't speak. He tries to tell her about the conversation under the Wimpy overhang in the downpour, but she doesn't want to hear about it.

Once in the recording studio, there's further delay over the tuning of the guitars, and discussion about replacing a whistle in the song's middle-eight with a flute. Because there's no time left, the session is necessarily brief, two takes, the second in the can. “You changed one of the lines,” Jasmine complains to Reg and he explains, “Made it a bit our own, yeah?” and she says, “Yeah, well, the bloke who wrote it has this funny idea the song is his.” She's bitching about everything today, thinks Reg.

N
ear the end of the session, she ducks out of the studio and stops on the way home at the pub below the Ad Lib, where Jonesy buys her a drink and she's stunned by the BBC interview on the telly above the bar. “Bloody hell,” she mutters into her glass, staring at the screen.

“Hey,” says Jonesy, remembering the night before, “isn't that . . . ?” How can I be so dim? she thinks. And I'm studying to be a bloody journalist. “Doesn't really look like that in real life, does he?” Jonesy says. “A lot older in real life.” A week later over a cup of tea, she reads in
The Times
an article about him in South Africa.

T
he article describes him arriving at midnight at the airport outside Johannesburg to no state reception whatsoever, the government having decided to ignore him. Because no one representing the government is there, the airfield is stormed by hundreds of black South Africans to greet him. A few days later at the Cape Town university where he's scheduled to speak, the government cuts the speaker cables; he speaks anyway—“It's from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief,” he murmurs, barely audible, “that history is shaped”—stumbling through his address in his high nasal whisper, to silence that precedes the thunderclap of ovation. He rides in the backseat of an open car, recalling for those few reporters able to cover the story, the vast majority having been denied credentials and travel papers, an image that leaves them unnerved. In defiant response to that image, he stands in the backseat rising from the sea of black faces that grows from day to day and town to town.

H
e faces down protesters who claim to base their views on Judeo-Christian beliefs by asking how they can be certain God isn't black. He walks through black villages and the immense crowd doubles, triples, multiplies in what seems unquantifiable exponents; he shakes every black hand that never before has been offered a white hand that didn't have in it a stick.

Each rally becomes so large as to leak into the next until it's as if the entire country is a rally. For everyone who sees him, the astonishing courage of the small shaking man with the limp handshake who said to Reg, “People think I'm afraid of nothing when the truth is I'm afraid of everything,” has about it the force of revelation. “We felt small and meaningless,” the article quotes one of the student leaders, a young woman Jasmine's age, “and he's the only man to come tell us we're not alone. He has reset the moral compass.”

Over the next year, pursuing her studies in London and continuing to work for the record company, she keeps the
Times
article as it makes its folded way from one textbook to the next.

S
he doesn't forget the night she met him. She follows his career and speeches back in his own country, alert to any mention in the press of a return to London. In the fall of 1967 she applies for a visa and quits both her job and school, and flies to New York, remaining forty-eight hours before she catches a train to Washington, D.C.

As a low-level secretary and receptionist, she has worked on his staff for three months before he notices her. By then the Washington office has sent her back to the New York office, and over the course of those three months he brushes past her desk twice, even nodding at her routinely without recognizing her. Then the third time something he can't place breaks his stride as he passes, before he keeps going. The fourth time, he stops and stares at her.

Almost puppyish he cocks his head, studying her. To her irritation, having been in his company a couple of hours in London and felt no intimidation, now she's a bit terrified of him. “You're new?” he says.

“About three months,” she says. “I was put on staff in September.”

Then he remembers: It's her accent, she realizes. “London,” smiling the small smile as he walks away, “you were angry at me.” A week later Jasmine sits at her desk daydreaming about Christmas trees and spending her first holiday abroad when the woman who hired her calls her into a cubicle. “Just how settled are you here?” says the woman.

“What do you mean ‘here'?”

“New York.”

Jasmine shrugs. “Fancy getting a proper little Christmas tree.”

“Get a proper little Christmas tree in Washington. They want you back down there, maybe for a while.”

B
y ten o'clock that night she's back in Washington. For a few days she's doing the same work that she was in New York. On the weekend she takes the train back to pack the rest of her things and hasn't been in her flat twenty minutes before the phone rings. “What are you doing here in New York?” says the woman who hired her, on the other end of the line.

“Sorry?”

“Didn't I tell you to get down to D.C.?”

Jasmine says, “Right, well, I came back to get the rest of my thi—”

“They're looking for you down there.”

“I've been there all week.”

“The senator was looking for you this morning,” huffs the woman, slightly irate. “Get back there this afternoon.”

“On a Saturday?”

“You know, this isn't a normal job.”

J
asmine returns to Washington that afternoon. She goes to the office and finds it closed. “But where is everyone?” she says to somebody passing in the corridor of the Senate building. She returns to the office the next day, Sunday, and it's still closed; she reports Monday morning. Making no effort to hide her pique, she says to her immediate supervisor, “What was the rush, then?”

“How's that?” He has long red hair and glasses and isn't much older than she is.

“I'm trying to move my belongings. Half of me still is in New York.” She storms back to her desk and half an hour later the supervisor comes over. “He wants to see you,” indicating the door over his shoulder, down the carpeted hall. She walks down the hall and knocks at the door and, when she doesn't get an answer, opens it anyway.

L
ater she'll realize he's not as small as he seems. Standing upright to his full height, he comes within a couple inches of six feet. But now behind his desk, the chair he sits in yawns as if to swallow him.

Everything sags from his eyes to his clothes. His coat is off and his tie barely tied; his shirtsleeves are rolled up and she's surprised that his arms are distinctly hairy. He wears dark rimmed glasses that she's never seen on him. He swivels slightly in the chair eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream, a man who once arrived at his own swearing-in for a job by sliding down the White House banister. In the last few years he's grown old too fast, bowls of ice cream at odds with the black cloud he brings everywhere he goes.

J
asmine isn't sure whether he answered when she knocked and she didn't hear, or he just didn't answer. She feels like she's been standing in the doorway several minutes—though she knows it can't have been that long—before his gaze wanders from whatever he's fixed on in the air before him.

Except for the swirl of papers on his desk and the children's drawings tacked to a cork bulletin board over his shoulder, his office is no more settled than her apartment in New York, though he's been here not three months but three years. In any event it's not the space of someone planning to stay long. He swivels back and forth a bit manically, brooding at nothing she can discern; his hand holding the ice cream spoon, with his sleeve he brushes the forelock of his hair from his face. “I hear you're, uh, still upset with me,” he finally says. He points at a chair on the other side of the desk from him and she takes it.

“Just trying to sort out where I'm supposed to be,” she says.

“You're supposed to be here,” he says.

“Good to know.” She adds, “I'm not always upset.”

“I remember,” he nods, “you did have a sense of humor. Mostly at my expense.”

“Well, sir, as I recall, you don't know Elvis Presley from Paul McCartney.”

“Yes, I'm sure anyone would find that uproarious. I know who Frank Sinatra is,” he points out with the ice cream spoon. “It's queer after that night,” he says, “for you to call me sir.”

“Doesn't feel proper calling you anything else.”

“Probably not,” he agrees, “not around here anyway. So I've, uh, been asking everyone the same question—practically, you know, stopping people in the street . . . ” He looks out the window toward the street.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what the question is?”

“Yes.”

H
e waits a moment, turns back to her and throws up his arms as if to say, Well? “Whether to run for president,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“Yes,” she repeats.

“Is that, uh, ‘yes,' as in, Yes you know the question that I'm asking everyone, or as in, Yes I should run?”

“Yes you should run.”

He takes off the black-rimmed glasses. “That was straightforward,” he allows, at once relieved and vexed.

“Do you fancy running for president?”

“Fancy it?”

“Yes.”

“Well,
that's
the question”—and now the kid in him swivels all the way around in the chair—“everyone asks
me
.” He stops before the window and the trees along the Mall in the distance. “Know much about presidential politics?”

“No.”

“Still studying . . . it was journalism, right?”

“Not in a while.”

“Still think politics is, uh, whatever it was you said that night? A waste of time.”

“I don't think I put it that way, sir.”

“Pretty much.” He glances at her over his shoulder. “What changed?” and she doesn't answer but, as if she did, he returns to the window. “Do you have family?”

“Dad more or less disappeared when I was young. Mum died three years ago.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

“A brother. Don't see him much either. He's older.”

“How much?”

“Eight years.”

He murmurs, “My brother was eight years older. I keep wondering what
he
would say but perhaps that doesn't matter—he thought everyone else should be careful except him. He wasn't careful.” The bowl of ice cream finished, he swivels back to put it on the desk. “No modern president's ever been denied the nomination of his political party. You have to go back to, who? Cleveland?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Truman was the most unpopular man in the damned country by the time he ran. The children of Franklin Roosevelt, the man who appointed him, tried to take away the party's nomination and give it to Eisenhower, who didn't even belong to the party. Eisenhower only saved the world—and they still couldn't do it. Theodore Roosevelt, most revered president since Lincoln, tried to take the nomination of his party from President Taft, who nobody liked and came in third in a three-man election,” he leans over the bowl on the desk, “and Teddy Roosevelt couldn't do it,” and stares into the bowl as though it's bottomless. “I need more ice cream.”

She says, “Times change?”
“Yes times change,” he agrees, “but the system changes last, after everything else. If I run, it will be Bad Bobby again. Ruthless Bobby. Everything that those who hate me have ever said about me, it shall all be true. Selfish Little Son-of-a-Bitch Bobby who can't wait to get back in the White House. Every damned office-holder of my party, which is to say those who control the party, will hate me because it will just complicate the hell out of their lives and their own political fortunes. And when people are for me, they won't be for
me
. They'll be for
him
.”

“You're wrong,” she shakes her head.

“On the other hand, there's Dante.”

“Dante?”

“Uh, ‘the hottest place in hell . . . ' etcetera.”

“Etcetera?”

“Is reserved for those who do nothing when faced with a moral choice.” He blurts, “Whatever I do, I need your help.”

“Right. Of course. I would be honored.” It sounds funny but she means it.

“Not
too
honored. I don't deserve that.”

She rises from the chair and at the door stops, the thought tripping her up. “Is it because I'm black? I mean, I don't know what you have in mind, do I, but whatever it is—?”

“How can you wonder that,” he says, “if neither of us knows what I have in mind?”

“I've never been all that conscious of that part of me. With these white woman's gray eyes, I suppose.”

“Ethiopia.”

She's impressed. “Did I tell you?”

“I don't remember.”

“Folks moved my brother and me when I was two—Dad was a med student. As I always heard it, the idea was eventually to come on over here. They got as far as London before they split up.”

“If we do this, remember to bring the angry woman with you. I'll need her.”

“I'm not an angry woman.”

“Bring the one with the sense of humor then.”

“I'll bring them all,” and with a start she's unsettled by how much he already looks like a phantom. “There's more than one.”

“Yeah? Try being
me
.”