America America (14 page)

By the time the library opened at seven in the morning, I’d already spent an hour with my books in our room. On my way out the door I would shake Astor’s shoulder to wake him, then pass by the cafeteria for a slice of toast on my walk to the stacks. I had a half hour then before the first-period bell rang, and this bit of time was my only indulgence of the day. I would sit by the window and read from the shelf of newspapers that was kept there, as outside on the grounds the school began to come to life before me. The teachers with their briefcases, hurrying on the paths; the delivery men at the cafeteria doors; my classmates in their rowdy flocks. There was something in all this that gave me peace, somehow. And something in reading the papers that allowed me to think I had a hand in a distant world; that I was beyond everything here.

Every Monday, Glenn Burrant would publish his political column in the
Courier-Express
, and two mornings later that column would appear in the Dunleavy library. On Wednesdays I felt a particular anticipation as I crossed the empty quad, not only because the week was finally tipping toward its end, but because Glenn’s column so quickly carried me to that distant world. The
Courier-Express
was a liberal paper, and Glenn was allowed to cover the issues of the day with remarkable latitude. My first September at school, he editorialized on busing, on the peace marches, and on the Attica prison riot, and at the end of the month, he updated his summary of the Democratic candidates. That article, of course, almost seized me with excitement.

At Dunleavy, classes started at seven-thirty and went until four-thirty, so I didn’t have time to read more than a single paper each morning; but because of the long school day our vacations were long, too—five weeks at the turn of the year, another two in midwinter, and a summer break that began in May. I’d encountered this charitable schedule one night early on when I looked through the school calendar, circling every vacation. It was a surprise and a relief—I well remember the feeling—and about the only optimistic bit of news I found for myself in those first, whirling weeks.

My days were like nothing I’d ever known. Our morning block of classes went until nine-thirty, followed by a half hour’s break in which most of the students, by school tradition, went to the dining hall for donuts and coffee. But I went back to the library instead. From ten till twelve-thirty, we had our long period, and then lunch. I took my plate and went up to our room. From one-thirty to four-thirty we had math and science, and at quarter of five was sports. I played soccer, and when practice was over we were given another half hour’s break before dinner. I was able to spend most of that time with my books. And after dinner was when I truly began my work. All my life I’d not needed much sleep, and it was not uncommon for me to look up from my books and see the watchman’s lantern outside our window as he made his sweep of the dormitory doors at two in the morning.

When I look at Trieste Millbury today, of course, I see my own past; but I also know that I was different from her. She has a gift—some fortune of gene that has endowed her with both a hard head and a hard intelligence, and she feels no pull, at least none that I can see, toward the conventional comforts. Ease. Plentitude. A bit of luxury. I was, and still am, far from that. My head may be as hard as hers but my intelligence—and by that I mean whatever small power I have to see things for myself—is diminutive in comparison, and the quality of mind that allows her to think so fiercely—ambition, I would call it, of an intellectual kind—is only sputteringly apparent in my own consciousness. Which is to say, I have since my first days at Dunleavy been a learner—and an eager one—but she, already, is a discoverer; and the discoverers are the ones who shoulder the burden. I’ve been happy enough myself for most of my life reading the well-trod classics of my generation, and I’ll readily admit that the thought of a glass of wine with my wife on our back patio, where on most afternoons we can watch our downhill neighbor sweeping the deck around his swimming pool, is generally sufficient to get me through a day. I suspect that such bourgeois rewards are nothing to Trieste; but still, I do believe I once felt what she now feels.

In class I spoke only when I had to—and even then with my plaguing hesitation—but it wasn’t long before the faculty realized that I could be relied upon for an answer. This wasn’t what I wanted, of course, because it brought attention. So I responded with as few words as I could and tried to acknowledge as little as possible any compliments my teachers gave me in class.

“Man,” Astor said to me one night, “you’re a mystery. You know that?” He was lying in bed, almost asleep, and I was studying at my desk.

“How’s that?”

“Like, if I knew all those answers—if I knew
half
of ’em—you wouldn’t be able to shut me up.”

“You know a lot more than you think, Astor.”

“That’s a cool thing to say, man”—he yawned—“but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m just passing the time. I’m a waste of a bed.”

“You’re the most popular guy in our class.”

I heard him turn over.

“But you, man…” he said, his voice fading. “You
love
to study.” He bunched his pillow under his head. “You’re like some mysterious monk,” he mumbled, and then in a few moments he was snoring.

At that point in my life, I have to say, this was exactly what I wanted people to think.

Yet such were the overwhelming sensations of my earliest days that it was not until a Saturday afternoon midway through November that I looked out the window at a boy carrying a duffel bag into the gym and realized I’d forgotten all about the gift Mr. Metarey had handed me. Astor was at a football game and I’d been studying in the room. I set down my trigonometry book. Out the window beyond the buildings I could see a group of kids playing lacrosse, jabbing their sticks in the air and sprinting between the sidelines. I went straight to the closet, opened the bag, and took out the package from where it lay folded in my ironed sheets.

Later, after I was married, and even after we’d had our daughters, I would become familiar with such moments, moments in which the world seemed to withdraw and yet at the same time to grow closer. Listening to the clack of the lacrosse sticks and the shouts of the players, along with the occasional rumble of the work vans that were going and coming on the gravel drive, all the while holding my forgotten present from Liam Metarey, I was struck both by my remove from the commerce of that place and at the same time by a certain peace in somehow being part of it. It was close, I suppose, to what I felt reading the newspaper. On the other hand, perhaps it was just one of the few hours all month in which I wasn’t reckoning with being an outsider; or perhaps it was merely the package itself in my hand, which seemed to carry with it a measure of Liam Metarey’s own being, or at least of the generosity he’d always shown me.

It was bigger than a book, but lighter, and soft. I unwrapped it. Inside was a second layer of tissue, and when I opened this one I found a square of dark terry cloth, the same hunter green as the paper. A bath towel, folded tightly. The gloomy idea crossed my mind that this was some kind of insult, and despite my recent cheerfulness my thoughts went straight to Clara. She might as well have been standing in the room with me. I saw her skeptical eyes.

It wasn’t until I’d turned to the closet, though, to hang it on the hook, that I unfolded it and discovered that it wasn’t a towel at all, but a robe. A fine-looking one, in fact. I shook it out. It was long, with a belt and full sleeves tipped in leather, and a hood that drew with a cord. All of it sewn from some kind of rough, sturdy terry that I haven’t found again in all the years since.

But: a bathrobe. I was still puzzled. The duffel I could understand, and the fact that it had belonged to Liam Metarey himself—when he was living in these same halls—had immediately given it the qualities of a talisman. But a robe? Even if it was made of such fine cloth and its belt tipped in leather, even if I’d not opened it till now, under these circumstances of my first real ease, I have to say that its presence nonetheless set in my gut a stone of disappointment. And I still couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some reference in it to my own worthiness. Again I thought of Clara.

My wife tells me I overthink. I don’t think it’s possible to do that, but I do admit that my tendency has always been to go first to the dark interpretation. Sometimes I attribute this to my mother’s influence, despite her avowals of the opposite—for doesn’t insistent optimism imply what one is all the time combating? My father, on the other hand, was inclined by nature to see the world as benevolent, which is why a good-humored pessimism was the mark of his bearing in the world. I guess, when it comes down to it, that I ended up more like my mother. I was wrong about the bathrobe, as it turns out. But I don’t think I’m wrong about the other things.

II

The
Buffalo Courier-Express
Monday, January 17th, 1972

Police have released no new information concerning the body discovered over the weekend on the grounds of Silverton Orchards in Saline, pending an investigation. The frozen corpse, an unidentified adult female, was found early Sunday morning near a drainage ditch bordering Route 35 by workers making road repairs south of the Saline-Steppan interchange, according to sources. Anyone with information is asked to contact Commander Larry MacKenzie of the New York State Police Office in North Islington, or this newspaper. Nighttime temperatures over the weekend reached nine degrees below zero.

III

1972
WAS A YEAR OF CHANGE
for the Democrats. The Chicago convention in 1968 had left its bitter memories. Mayor Daley’s cops swinging truncheons in the crowds. National Guardsmen pointing grenade launchers off the Congress Street Bridge. But none of it would have mattered if it weren’t for the election results themselves: Hubert Humphrey, the candidate chosen by the party establishment, went down in a watershed drubbing.

301 to 191. That was the electoral count. The most lopsided since FDR and Alf Landon. Richard Nixon was in the White House. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were dead. The country was in the hands of others.

That’s the stage Henry Bonwiller walked onto when he started campaigning in earnest, late in that fall of 1971. As a senator, he’d made his share of enemies, of course, but from the very first he’d been able to win a crowd merely with the stirring note of his voice. That deep, woody cadence, like a cello speaking. It was this voice, I think, more than anything else, that suited him to the new politics. In 1972, for the first time in history, a candidate didn’t have to be likable in person: he just had to be likable on TV.

It’s easy to think it’s always been that way; but it hasn’t. That was the year the king-making was brought for the first time into public view. The historic moment. The primaries rather than the backroom deal. Not the party bosses but the people, now—especially the people from Iowa and New Hampshire—the people, now, would choose the candidate. It was a watershed change in the rules.

And the Democrats needed a new kind of man for it. Edmund Muskie of Maine was far from charming but he was straightforward in front of a camera; by early winter he had regained the lead. George McGovern, from South Dakota, was still on the periphery. George Wallace, who’d won 13 percent of the vote in 1968, was no longer a marginalized southern segregationist, and Humphrey himself, despite his first trouncing, was in the running. So were Eugene McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm, the long shots. And Scoop Jackson, who was convincing in person but didn’t have the charisma, in Liam Metarey’s opinion, for a national run. It was Muskie onto whom the country seemed to settle its hopeful gaze—stolid, serious Ed Muskie.

Lou Harris’s polling firm had been engaged by the Bonwiller campaign to find flaws in Muskie’s reach, and in the strategy sessions it was a given now that Henry Bonwiller could at best fight Muskie to a tie in the Northeast; but it was in the South, especially the urban South—Virginia and North Carolina and Georgia and Florida—where we might take him. That’s what I learned from my visits to the meetings upstairs when I was home from school, every other weekend or so. I wasn’t around often enough to do my regular jobs anymore, but I was carrying up drinks and hors d’oeuvres now to the strategy sessions in the library. It was Muskie that we had to get past. And it was Muskie that the campaign was going to focus on. You didn’t have to be around the estate long, especially as the vote in Iowa approached, before this paramount fact became clear.

O
NE AFTERNOON A FEW MONTHS AGO,
my wife and I were looking for garden supplies at the country outfitter in Islington Center when I stumbled across a sale on an oilcloth duster—the kind of raincoat worn up here at the horse farms and riding stables. It was the last of the smallest size, and the wet season was ending, so it had already been marked down more than once. I paid for it and slipped it into the car trunk, which was so full of flower pots and trays of budding annuals that I don’t think my wife even noticed.