America America (21 page)

“Ah,” I said. “So you do plan to go?”

“To college? Of course.”

“Well, I was worried.”

“Why?”

“I guess I thought you always took your own path. In everything.”

“God, Mr. Sifter,” she said, “why would you think that?” And although the same enigmatic smile teased her lips, I realized she wasn’t kidding at all.

P
ICTURE ME:
a resolute young man but quiet. Nineteen years old. I have no money for clothes but I wear an old suit vest over my shirt because Holly thinks it makes me look serious. I’m tall and thin, and my hair, like everyone else’s, comes almost to my shoulders. Other than the vest, my only affectation is an old Sears pocket watch, whose chain I finger when I search for words. Holly looks up at me expectantly when I do. No one besides my mother has ever listened this carefully to what I have to say. For over a year now we’ve been sleeping together. The world recedes. We can’t believe our good fortune. In the top of my bureau drawer I keep one of my old shirts that she likes to sleep in, and in the morning if she’s not in my room—she’s the only person I’ve met who wakes earlier than I do—the first thing I do is rise and smell its collar. Sometimes there’s a note in the pocket. We’re taking two classes together, a history lecture and a seminar on European politics; in that one, Holly is the most diligent student in the room—she seems to have read more than the professor. After class, we go for a walk, and the world then is not much more than distant sounds. I still think about my mother nearly every day, and she seems somehow to be there with me most acutely on these walks. I look over at Holly next to me and am aware of something. Her words and the way her hand touches me on the shoulder or the arm. We follow the edge of campus, staying in the greenery behind the track and the baseball field. She talks about Henry James’s
The Portrait of a Lady
, or why Schopenhauer despised Hegel, while I nod thoughtfully and look for weak spots in her argument. I’m not exaggerating—this is the way we are. The shouts of the track team drift past. When I stop to look at the leaves of a bur oak she stops alongside me, and when I tell her that these are the grandest of God’s trees she takes a leaf and sets it in her pocket. My mother would have done that, too. We kiss a little under the boughs. Then we walk on talking about philosophers. She wears a denim dress and another of my old shirts, the cuffs folded to her elbows. Her eagerness and grace are apparent to me in every step she takes, but what I’m really beginning to notice is her determination. And for all of the intoxication and outlandish good fortune that I feel, I’m also, behind it, becoming slightly afraid. As we descend over the furrowed incline of pine needles and pale green forest grass, I feel that we are in a boat together, somewhere where nobody can find us. More accurate—I feel that she
is
the boat, and in my paling moments I sense we are a long way out to sea.

One morning that spring, I’m reading in the stacks of the library when from behind I hear a whisper: “Trying to get ahead of me?”

I haven’t heard her coming. My first instinct is to hide what I’m looking at, but instead I tilt my chair back and merely slide the books to the far corner of the desk. They’re a small armful of library-bound volumes that I’ve pulled from a single dusty row, all of them treatises on the American industrial magnates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The history class we’re taking together is on the westward expansion, and I know this is what she thinks I’m reading about; so I don’t say that what I’m really looking for is Eoghan Metarey’s name. She’s devoutly interested in almost everything, so why don’t I tell her that? Why, instead, do I lean back and kiss her? And when her eyes are closed, why do I reach across the desk to place my notepad over the books?

II

T
HEY WERE STATE POLICE.
I don’t know why, but they were. And that was a relief: the state police, at least up here, had always been friends of the Senator’s. I’d seen several of them before, in fact, at the big campaign parties and occasionally at the meetings, and I’d even parked a few of their cars. I knew their dark uniforms, the pleated shoulders and double-creased hat, the darker, velveteen stripe on the leg. The officer who questioned me was my father’s age. He leaned against the counter in the toolshed, put one boot up on a chair, and carefully took off his gloves. He gave me a long look.

“You’re familiar with the Senator, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How well would you say you know him?”

“Not real well. I drove him sometimes. Weekends, usually. But some other times, too. We didn’t talk much.”

He took a pad from his pocket. “And was there anything unusual about him that day?”

“Which day?”

“The one we’re talking about.”

“I saw him in the study for a few minutes in the afternoon. With Mr. Metarey.”

“Anything unusual then? Agitated? Strange?”

If my mother had been alive, I don’t know how I would have answered. Since the service, the Metareys had invited me up to the house every afternoon. “He seemed the same as always,” I said.

“Was he drinking?”

“Alcohol?”

“Yes, alcohol.”

“I never saw him drink alcohol, officer. Mostly coffee.”

“You drove Henry Bonwiller for—how long was it?”

“About six months, sir.”

“And you never saw him drink alcohol.”

Out the window, Gil McKinstrey was chiseling sheets of frozen mud off the Ferguson’s big rear tires. I was heading back to Dunleavy when the weekend was over.

“You never saw him drink alcohol?”

“No, sir.”

“I see.” He swung his foot down from the chair. “I hear you’re an Indians fan,” he said.

“I guess I am.”

“Mostly Yankee guys around here.”

“I guess so.”

“What do you think of their chances?”

“Of whose chances?”

“The Indians’.”

“Well,” I said. “They lost a hundred and two last year.”

He let out a small laugh and put away the pad. “Mistake by the Lake,” he said, shaking his head.

“You can say that again.”

He shook it another time. “They need pitching, is what they need. Another Feller. You’re too young to remember Feller. A Feller and a Lemon. I’m from outside Sandusky. Only been up here ten years.”

“They need hitting, too. Another Shoeless Joe. And I know all about Bob Feller, sir. And Bob Lemon.”

He smiled.

“Might be other officers asking you these same things,” he said, carefully putting his gloves back on. “You know? You gonna answer them how you answered me?”

“Of course, sir.”

He stopped in the doorway. “So he seemed his usual self and wasn’t drinking—least not that you know of.”

“No, sir.”

“That’s all the questions I got for you then, son.”

“A
ND NOW YOU WISH
you’d answered him differently.”

“No. I don’t necessarily think I do.”

“Does that mean you really don’t think he did it?”

“Ah,” I said. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.”

“Well, let me ask you this,” I said. “If he
did
do it, how do you think he could have kept on going the way he did? How do you think he could have kept on operating? He didn’t show the least bit of remorse. Not that I ever saw, anyway. Wouldn’t it have changed him? Wouldn’t it at least have slowed him?”

“From the way you describe the man, sir, he was—I guess you could say, egomaniacal.”

“He was a politician.”

“And that’s one of the job requirements.”

“All you can really say, Trieste, is that the whole thing never made it to a courtroom. You can wonder about the reasons. But one of them might be that they’ve never been able to build a case against him.”

“Another might be that he had a lot of friends.”

“He had a lot of enemies, too.”

She considered that. I took out my half sandwich. Skinless chicken breast. Mustard, no mayo. That morning at the QuickStop I’d bought a chocolate-pecan brownie, too. It sat there at the bottom of the bag, like a cyanide capsule.

After a time, I said, “All I mean is that no matter what kind of man he was, no matter how great an actor he was, he still would have shown something. Don’t you think? Maybe not remorse, but what about guilt? What about fear?”

“Fear of what?”

“Fear that it would catch up with him. That everything was going to end.”

“So you’re saying that because he didn’t seem afraid and because he didn’t show any remorse, you don’t think he had anything to do with it?”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m not saying that at all.”

“Then what are you saying, sir?”

“That perhaps he didn’t
remember
having anything to do with it.”

She turned and looked out the window.

“Oh, please,” she said. “How could he not remember?”

“When I saw him at the house he could barely walk. It took him all morning to sober up.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Trieste,” I said, “have you ever been drunk?”

“Not
that
drunk.”

“Well, it happens. It happens all the time.”

“I guess I didn’t think of that,” she said finally.

“And I have no idea if it’s true, just like I have no idea if any of this is what actually happened. But I do think it’s a possibility.”

She took out her own lunch—a cup of homemade maple yogurt and a sliced peach—and set it up neatly on the desk. Inside the bag I fingered the brownie in its plastic wrap. She was watching me.

“Go ahead and eat it, sir.”

“I’m trying not to.”

“I know.” She smiled. Then she started to eat. After a moment she said, “May I ask you about something else, Mr. Sifter?”

“Of course.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Why?”

“Yeah. I’m just a kid.”

“An unusual kid.”

“Thank you. But why?”

“Senator Bonwiller’s gone.”

“And you can clear your conscience?”

“My conscience doesn’t need as much clearing as you think. He did a great deal for people like you. How old’s your dad, did you say? Fifty?”

“Fifty-two.”

“Then you might not even be here if he hadn’t been elected to the Senate.”

“You mean what he did about Vietnam?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“And you might not be here, either, sir.”

“I was too young for the war. I was lucky.”

“I’m talking about what he and Liam Metarey did for your father, sir. Not to mention for
you
.”

O
NE SNOWY WEEKEND,
Holly and I went up to New York City to see the ballet. In those days, they played two shows on Saturday, and the early one was discounted for students. We took the train in, and in what had become a small blizzard we walked uptown toward the State Theater. The snow had quieted everything and the city was in a meditative mood. Traffic was light—on Broadway barely a cab moved—and the usual boisterous commerce of the west side had vanished. The storm was windless but an endless column of feathery snow descended steadily between the buildings. I couldn’t see more than half a block. By the time we reached Forty-fifth Street, businesses were closing their doors. Soon it became obvious that there wasn’t going to be a ballet. But we went on anyway. Holly was wearing a hat fringed with rabbit fur and had pulled the lapels of her coat up around her cheeks. Still, I could see the eagerness in her step, and between the two flaps of wool I watched her face. She looked beautiful.