America America (27 page)

“It was
The Union Leader
,” said Mr. Metarey from the TV. He changed the channel again. “The Manchester
Union Leader
.”

“They say Jane Muskie smokes and drinks and tells dirty jokes. Ha! Ha! Ha!” He bumped me on the shoulder with his Scotch glass, then took a drink. “Well who doesn’t?” he bellowed. “And now look at what the guy does.” He turned to Liam Metarey. “You found it yet?”

“Still looking.”

On the screen now, a commercial was ending. Then David Brinkley came on. This was NBC.

“Jesus Christ almighty God,” said Henry Bonwiller, and he pulled me by the arm until I was right next to him in front of the TV. “Watch this, boy.”

The picture is muffled by snow—not by static, but by real snow, which is falling heavily in Manchester that day. Edmund Muskie is standing on the bed of a truck in front of the
Union Leader
offices, where, as the snow swirls around him, he proceeds to defend the honor of his wife against William Loeb, the paper’s publisher.

“He’s talking about the drinking and the dirty jokes,” Henry Bonwiller said, bumping my arm again with the glass. “That Loeb’s a son of a bitch, all right. Worse than the rat-fuckers who feed him. But if I know Jane Muskie, he’d better talk faster.”

“Shhh,” said Liam Metarey. “Here it comes.”

Then in the middle of it, as David Brinkley begins to narrate, Senator Muskie suddenly appears to break down. In the thickening snowfall the picture is hard to discern. The camera moves in closer. He’s recovered now and is shaking his fist in the air, but then it happens a second time: he convulses for a moment, and at this point there’s no doubt—he’s crying.

On national television.

“Come on!” Henry Bonwiller nearly shouted. “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He does it again, boy. Keep watching.”

And he does. One week before the primary.

“Get the Scotch, Liam! The good stuff!”

“It
does
look promising for us, Henry,” said Mr. Metarey.

He turned to me. “
Promising?
That horse been rode hard and put to bed wet. That’s the end of him, son. Right there.” He ran his finger across his throat. “Period. End of poem.” He rose and slapped Mr. Metarey on the back. “Let’s have a drink to this fine day of hunting. Give the boy a drink, Liam.” He pulled a bottle of Glenlivet from the cabinet and poured a glass. “Here!” he said. “Do not go gentle into that good night!”

“I don’t think Corey’s ever tasted Scotch.”

“Nonsense,” said Henry Bonwiller. “It’s all I drank at his age!”

“To President Bonwiller, then,” said Liam Metarey.

“To President Bonwiller,” I repeated, holding up my drink.

“Oh, I like that!” he roared. He raised his own tumbler of Scotch to the ceiling, then followed it with his eyes, like a man having a vision. “To President Bonwiller,” he said softly. Then he lowered his arm, and at that moment—as though instead of a glass in his hand, he’d been holding a wand—phones began ringing all over the house.

T
HAT NIGHT,
after I’d finished setting up the chairs for the morning press briefing—even though I suspected most of them would go empty—I came outside to fetch my bike and found Liam Metarey in the garage. He stood leaning forward under a solitary lamp, grinding a set of skew chisels on a pedal wheel. It was late, probably close to midnight.

“You warm enough for a ride in the snow?” he said without looking up. “Take one of the riding coats. If you want.”

“That’s okay. I’m used to it.”

“Well, be careful then.”

I stood by the door for a moment. I was feeling bold. “I guess the football bounced our way,” I said.

“Oh, it did,” he answered. He began to pump the pedal underneath the machine and the sharpening wheel started up, rising to a steady note as it gathered speed in the quiet garage. “It did, all right,” he said. “Bounced right up into old Henry’s hands. Things are looking a little better from here. You get those chairs out?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Going to need a few more tomorrow, I’d bet. Or day after tomorrow, at least. When they get back from Muskie’s funeral.”

“I hope so.”

He dipped one of the chisels in water and took its measure against the whirling stone. “Funny thing is,” he said, still not looking at me, “our men didn’t do that.”

“Do what, sir?”

“Plant that baloney story about Jane Muskie,” he answered. He pressed the chisel into the wheel and sparks flew away into the dark garage. “The president’s men did that,” he said. “Looks like somebody on their side’s working for
us
now.”

A
QUIVERING, LIGHT-INKED HAND:

Oh, Corey. You probably think I’m crazy, inviting you like that and then not showing up. (But you didn’t even call!) (Oh, I don’t know, even if you did call I can’t say what I would have done.) Things! Things! Things! Things are just so stupidly hard for me. I wish I could just shrug them away like everyone else. But instead I’m stuck in a bowl of glue, thrashing all around.

But you, especially you—you must understand. How long did it take you to get over it all? Or have you? I don’t think I ever will. Who are all the lucky people who can control what their minds think? Are you one of them? Who are all those lucky people with their hand on the switch? You’re probably sitting there in some smoky coffeehouse with someone special and have to hide this note. Sorry! I probably shouldn’t send it. (I guess you’ll see I did! Beware good intentions.) But at least I wanted to say sorry for not being there after you took the trouble to come up. Clara said she was out on the roof with you looking at the city. I love that view. It reminds me of Paris with all the gardens and water towers on the roofs. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies! Remember? She said you looked nice.

Please give me another chance.

Xo,

—C

H
ER FIRST MEETING WITH THE
S
ENATOR
is at a nightclub. In Hapsburg. Thirty miles away. She doesn’t tell her friend about it this time, and this time she takes her own car instead, a white Gremlin that she washes and vacuums and fits with an air freshener before she leaves. She brings three minis of vodka to calm herself; she has one in her driveway and the second, followed by a breath mint, just before she gets to the club, where she finds him waiting for her in his car in the lot. Of course it’s a Caddy. They never go into the building. They drive around instead and he’s friendly and calm and authoritative—not as formal as she thought a senator would be—telling her about the rock mines that used to be in these hills and the possibility that IBM would be coming up here to build a plant on the old site. Then they come out on a reservoir and he stops the car. It’s a warm night and it’s a convertible but he doesn’t open the top. She wouldn’t want him to anyway. But he takes a flask from the glove box and offers her some, which she takes even though she’s had the two minis already, and then he takes a little himself. This is a senator, sitting across the seat from her. He has a wife—she’s looked it up.

“Sing ‘Danny Boy,’” he says softly.

Well, how did he know that! But when she finishes she’s almost sure his eyes are wet, and think how that feels. He moves across the seat and half-sings “the summer’s gone and all the roses falling” himself, in that voice that might as well be coming out of the radio, it’s so honey-colored where it plays in the lower registers. She adds the harmony.

“You’re good,” he says. “They teach you that in Optimists’ Chorus?”

“How did you hear about that?”

“A little bird told me.”

It all feels like a bubble she’s watching glint in the sun. She doesn’t have the last mini until she’s driving home.

After that, they meet a few more times, for rides like this usually, with a stop at the end at a motel; and soon they give up the rides and just start meeting at the motel. She drives the Gremlin. Mostly it’s a place called The Pines, a set of hideaway cabins in a grove off the road near Islington. He arrives an hour or two later in various different cars and sometimes now he has a driver with him—she can see him through the slit in the shades, a tall Negro in a chauffeur’s cap half-sleeping five feet from their window. There’s always something to drink, either Scotch whiskey or wine, and he likes to bring a sandwich with him and eat it when they’re finished, even though she never has anything herself. At this point she still can’t imagine eating in front of him.

Then there’s a day, maybe three weeks into it, when he says to her, “That bastard Leftwich is going to run for my seat.” When she looks it up later she can’t figure out how to spell the name but she gathers her nerve and asks the librarian: Louis Lefkowitz is the Republican attorney general of the state. And sure enough, she starts seeing his name in the paper. She starts seeing it all the time—
New York Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz
—and it’s a funny thing but she feels like she has an enemy now. The surprise is that she likes it.

Their
enemy.

After that Henry Bonwiller starts talking to her about all kinds of things, about who’s going to get money for a shopping center project and who’s going to be indicted, about what the teachers’ union is going to get in their new contract and about remodeling Kennedy Airport for a new kind of superplane. And he stops asking her to sing. He does his talking when he first arrives, pacing back and forth in the little motel cabin as though he’s trying to walk and talk his way from one world into another. She lies on the bed listening carefully. After a while he sits down next to her and has another drink. Then he reaches up and loosens his tie by yanking it.

Right after he’s climaxed, he has a habit of falling asleep. But only for a few minutes. When he wakes up, he eats his sandwich, gets dressed, and goes. Once the driver had to knock on the window. He had a vote in the Senate the next morning.

A vote in the Senate!

Then comes the day he tells her he’s thinking of something big. Later, after he’s dressed, he says he’s not just thinking it, he’s going to do it.

“What?” she says.

“Be president.”

“President of the
United States
?” It slips from her mouth before she can stop it, like a dog running out the door.

But he laughs! He thinks it’s charming. “No, president of the choral society,” he says, and takes her hand to swing her around in a little jig. When they sit down finally on the bed his mood changes and he tells her an extraordinary thing. She can’t decide whether it’s just a speech or something he really feels. Something he tells
only her
. He says, “I’m doing this for the black man and the Latino man and the American Indian. For the working people like your father and all the other fathers who send their boys to Southeast Asia for no reason anybody can explain to them. Just out of their goodness and their faith in the country. For the unwed mother in Chicago who’s raising her sister’s kids, too, who gets by on a welfare check and five swing shifts a week at the Uniroyal plant in Gary. Those are the people I’m going to help. Those are the people I’m doing this for. Those are the ones.”