America America (23 page)

“You read her whole cookbook?”

“You know,” he said, “I kind of liked it. Just sat down one evening and read it.”

“It’s hard to picture, Dad.”

He pinched a fingerful of salt and dropped it into the pot, then sat down on the stool by the stove. “What else am I going to do?” he said, reaching the top off another pan. Two pork chops were sizzling in it, like a pair of Africas. “And I brush ’em with her sauce.”

“Brown sugar and canned tomatoes.”

“That’s right. And a little garlic.”

“She used to can the tomatoes herself.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’ll be doing that.”

Back in the dining room, he served me, then walked around the table, set his own pork chop and string beans on the plate, and sat down. “Those are her roses, too,” he said.

I touched the vase. “I saw them, Pop. They’re very nice. They’re beautiful. Who are they from?”

“From
her
actually.”

I looked at him.

He put his napkin on his lap. “From your mother.”

He was arranging everything around his plate in the predictable way he does, as though preparing to solder a pipe, moving his glass close to his right hand, straightening his spoon and his knife.

“Say that again, Dad.”

He looked out the window. “She just bought them herself,” he said. “For no reason. Day before it happened—sweet woman. Just to have them. Bought the vase, too. Funny. I was thinking about it the other day. She was starting to do things like that. Your mother, the lady who reused paper towels.”

“Doesn’t seem like something she’d do.”

“Never bought a bouquet in her life, that woman. But that day, she did. Roses.” He lifted his glass of water. “To her,” he said.

“To Mom.”

“We love you, Anna,” he said. “We’ll always love you.”

“We do, Mom. I love you.”

Then he cut into his pork chop. I cut into mine.

He lifted his fork. “Oh, well,” he said.

“It’s all right, Pop,” I answered. “It’s going to be all right.”

T
HE NEXT PRIMARY WAS
in New Hampshire. Henry Bonwiller was returning to Aberdeen West now to confer with his aides and practice his new speeches for there and for Florida, which followed. This was mid-February now. The Senator’s speeches were generally written by different men in the campaign, including a couple of professors from Harvard that June Metarey would pick up every Friday morning from Boston, in Aberdeen White, and drop off again on Monday; but I happen to know that some of his most famous words were written by Liam Metarey himself. One afternoon I came into the library and found him sitting at his portable typewriter by the window, looking out over the land. I went about restocking the liquor cabinet. “What do you think of this?” he said, glancing up at me. “We live alongside too many canyons of failure.” He cleared his throat.

“I like it, sir.”

“We live alongside too many canyons of hate.” He cleared his throat again. Then he smiled, a little sheepishly. “Now is the time to cross them. Now is the time to cross them, on bridges of hope.”

That line, of course, became Henry Bonwiller’s famous “Bridges of Hope” address, probably the most stirring speech he ever gave, delivered in a husky baritone to a crowd of fifteen hundred antiwar marchers in Manchester, New Hampshire, on a damp, windy afternoon a little more than a week later. He had a cold that day, and it put a thread of exigency into his voice that sounded like Roosevelt or Jack Kennedy, or even Martin Luther King. A perfect note of restrained urging in a voice that was sometimes just a whisper. The country’s second primary was less than a month away.
We shall go forward together, over this great land and over these great bridges. We shall go forward together, my friends—we shall go forward as one.
The crescendo of the crowd rolling over the final words. The hand rising in victory. It may sound like demagoguery now, but in those days it didn’t. Even from the evening news you could tell that something had changed. And I’ll say, too, that it was the first moment I let myself believe that we were going to win.

After that, when I came into the library with firewood or the newspaper sticks or a bottle of Scotch, I would sometimes find Mr. Metarey at his typewriter. He’d look up and read me a line or two of his prose. He was no doubt proud—I think he somehow always thought of himself, despite his station, as a farmer or a mechanic—and he was probably also amused at the odd turn in his life; but I also like to think that he was trying to show me that someday I too might be capable of such invention, that I too might write the words a formidable man would utter. That I might even live in such a world, in fact, on my own merits. Even in the midst of the most frantic, hopeful month of the campaign, I think that this was at least a tiny measure of his thought. In the living room, where two dozen full-sized armchairs had been set up in rows, he made a point of calling me in now to sit among the advisors, mock audiences who listened to the Senator go over his lines. Sometimes Henry Bonwiller practiced them a dozen different ways in succession, changing the inflection here and there, or the order of the phrases. He was an actor, like all politicians, but he was a poet, too—he understood the melody of words.

After Iowa, the campaign had grown in size: the new staff were defectors from other candidates, mostly from Humphrey and Jackson. The Metareys rented fifteen more rooms for them at the Excelsior Hotel in Islington, and I was driving there now sometimes five times in a weekend. Every time I turned into the entrance drive of Aberdeen West, I nodded at the Secret Service agent who was now sitting there on the other side of the road in a dark Mercury Montego, and after I let out the new staff at the circle and parked the car in the garage, I glanced up to the staircase landing to see if a second agent was posted at the tall Palladian window that looked out from the center of the house over all the grounds. This meant that Henry Bonwiller was inside.

It had also become a regular part of my job to make sure that the south library was prepared for his meetings. That room, with its laddered shelves and high, tightly paned windows, had the prettiest wintertime view of the entire grounds—much of what later became the Shelter Brook Set-Aside, cast in the varying shaded layers of deep snow among hills. The south library was where the inner circle liked to convene now for their weekend conference—Liam Metarey, and Larry O’Brien from the Democratic National Committee, and Morlin Chase’s brother Clarence, and Tom Watson, Jr., and Dorner Flint from IBM, and Branch Martin from Lockheed, and sometimes Glenn Burrant or a couple of the other trusted reporters. Once I even saw Vance Trawbridge himself, leaning steeply forward in an armchair a good distance outside the circle, sipping bourbon and writing in a notepad that his face nearly touched. The Senator himself sat in the center chair, his jacket off and his tie undone and his long legs stretched out before him. Every Saturday I brought up a bag of sandwiches from the kitchen, and I restocked the liquor.

The news had just come out that the country’s budget deficit was going to be the biggest since World War II, and now the Democrats had something fresh to take at the president. On evening news shows all across the country, Henry Bonwiller let Nixon have it. He intoned from the steps of the estate while forty reporters sat in folding chairs on the lawn in front of him, taking notes. Lights from the network cameras cast him in a steely shine that looked forbidding if you were standing in the yard but warmly domestic—as though he were speaking in front of a hearth fire—if you saw it on TV. The plan that week was that the Senator, no matter which questions he was asked, would make the same two points over and over: that the economy was drifting with no helmsman in sight; and that the new budget numbers—$25 billion in deficit—would in no uncertain manner bring the country to its knees.

The polling men liked it. So he said it all again the next week in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then in Manchester and Plymouth and Whitefield. Nixon announced that he planned to end forced busing in the schools: the Senator countered that this would doom the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. It was not just a choice about schools but about the ethical bedrock of the culture. This, too, resonated. He said it in Concord and Conway and Newport, and then again the next morning in front of the news cameras that were hooked into the power feed from a utilities trailer that was parked now permanently on the stone patio behind the work barn.

And in Keene and Walpole and Ossipee, Edmund Muskie was doing the same thing. And on the courthouse steps in Pierre, South Dakota, and in every hamlet north of Nashua, New Hampshire, so was George McGovern. The newspapers reported it everywhere. So did the TV: Nixon was vulnerable.

Three weeks before New Hampshire, John Mitchell resigned as attorney general and took over the president’s campaign. That’s when we first heard rumors of what would become their attack campaign in the weeks before the election:
acid
,
amnesty
,
and abortion
. There was a flurry of activity at the estate and an all-day meeting. Aberdeen White was taking off now every morning. I heard some of what was said. The plan was changing. Senator Bonwiller was to ignore the president now and focus on Muskie. The president had every Democrat jabbing at his flank, but we had only one rival we needed to think about. Muskie was the man we had to beat. After that, we would take advantage of what the others were doing to Nixon. I heard that again and again as I moved in and out of the rooms, carrying drinks and newspapers and telegrams: “Focus on Muskie,” they said to one another. “Focus on Muskie.”

T
HE
S
PEAKER
-S
ENTINEL
, like all local dailies, gets a good share of its leads from tips. Some come by letter, some by e-mail—although these days even senior citizens are savvy about their Internet anonymity—and most, just like in the old days, come by phone. It’s a quaint aspect of a small-town newspaper office, that the phone still rings all hours of the day and night. In the morning, I’m the one who logs the messages. Partly because I’m the first one in, and partly because I still hate the thought of missing anything big.
Esther Harnett is using Burdick’s dumpster for her trash.
That’s the kind of tidbit I’m usually writing down in the tip book with a cup of cooling coffee in my hand.
Are you aware how many parking tickets Gene Short hasn’t paid?
Now and then we get a few more interesting ones, but they usually don’t pan out.
Officer Stanley takes money from business owners—you’ll see if you follow him.
(We did: he wasn’t, at least not that we saw.)
Blue Crest Hills doesn’t have grip bars in their bathrooms.
(That one was true. Our reporter found any number of violations.)
Brent Nasser from Roosevelt is going to be an NFL placekicker.

This last one, with a front-page picture of the kid in his silver and green Loggers uniform, produced our bestselling paper of the year.

That’s the fight we face.

We also subscribe to the wire services, just like any other paper; but if the story’s within a certain radius—which for the moment still includes Albany—we cover it ourselves. You won’t find many local dailies that still do that. Most of our board thinks this gives the chains an economic leg up on us—and it very well might; but the alternative is worse. The circulation we hold against Gannett and McClatchy and Murdoch wouldn’t be half of what it is now if our own reporters didn’t get the bylines. People in Saline want to see the names they know.

And our sources would dry up, too. That’s the other part of it.

Because Henry Bonwiller is from the area, we still get two or three calls a year about him, as well. I’ve got to think that most of these callers are pranksters. But nonetheless I’ve also got to think that they’re a fair barometer of the residual anger that to this day the man continues to stir. I suspect the ones who take the time to phone are part of the steady trickle of tourists who still come through Carrol County to see the landmarks of a senator’s downfall. In fact, there are a couple of B&Bs now that do well enough just housing and feeding these pilgrims. Maybe they’re only history buffs.