America America (31 page)

But this is conjecture, and thinly supported, I admit, and I get beyond myself. What’s more important to record is that early that spring Henry Bonwiller began to refashion his public bearing. He began withdrawing to the upper rooms of the estate rather than ambling in his garrulous way among the staff; he began sending minions again to the press briefings instead of appearing himself; and he began to stay away from the daily campaign-wide meetings in the downstairs offices or the speech rewriting sessions in the living room. A new order of access had appeared among the staff as well. Clarence Chase had set up a desk in the anteroom at the base of the stairs, and anyone who wanted to see Henry Bonwiller now, or even Liam Metarey, had to go through him first.

It was under these new conditions that at the end of the month the campaign threw a different kind of party. It was a two-day affair this time, and the guests were fewer in number, but the preparations were more painstaking than I’d ever seen; even a boy like me understood that the men and women who arrived for it were not just the ordinary, moneyed supporters who’d been at the other events, but the particular few that the candidate was considering for jobs in a new administration. In my time at the Metareys’ I came in proximity to any number of famous and powerful figures, but I’d never been among so concentrated a group of them as I was over those two days. George Meany was there, and Carl Stokes, and Averell Harriman, and Senator Kennedy and Senator Mansfield and even Senator Humphrey. So were Arthur Schlesinger and Betty Friedan, and the famous young journalist David Halberstam, who’d just written a book called
The Best and the Brightest
, which Glenn Burrant had told me to read. G. V. Trawbridge was in the crowd, too, and I assume now that both men must have agreed to take everything on deep background. I saw Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Shirley Chisholm, also, and even though now I can remember all these names and faces so clearly, the truth is that on the afternoon itself all but Trawbridge and Humphrey and Kennedy had to be pointed out to me, either by Christian or Glenn Burrant or Mr. Metarey. But I can also say that without any prompting I sensed instantly that there was a new sort of stature in the room. And I must also say that I’ve never been, and I don’t think I’ll ever be again, among any group at any time in which every hope and ambition is heightened to such an extent by the proximity of such an exquisite victory.

But again, that’s not why I tell this bit. Because of our location near two great lakes, the spring rains around Saline are famously torrential, and that was what they were as the gathering approached. On Friday evening the sky turned gray to the northwest and proceeded to empty itself unrelentingly all that night and the next day. It was as heavy a downpour as I’ve ever witnessed in my life. Gil McKinstrey and I had to open the drain culvert on the fly ponds so that the water wouldn’t crest the berm onto the lawn, and we’d gone out at night to rescue a whole flock of sheep from a neighboring farm who’d climbed to the higher ground around the Lodge Chief Marker. But the rain wasn’t a particular problem for the campaign party itself, and it even lent a certain air of excitement to it, with the vast thunder rumbling in over the water and the many vivifying flashes in the night. The only one who seemed to mind was Breighton, who could be heard whinnying and stamping in his stable until Gil McKinstrey went out to put something in his feed. For most of the visitors it was nothing but a regional oddity, and I suspect it only added to their striking impression of the Senator’s home country. Most of them were sleeping at the Excelsior, anyway, and being driven around in limousines hired from Buffalo, and the event itself was really a series of dozens of smaller meetings, all of them held in the row of rooms at the end of the downstairs hall of the estate, or occasionally in the library. One hardly even had to carry an umbrella. But on Sunday at noon Henry Bonwiller was scheduled to give his closing speech under the outdoor tent, and when I showed up that morning to prepare the chairs for the audience the rain still sounded like a bucket of gravel being poured out onto the roof of the work barn.

How much of all of this—of political power, of personal fortune, of the outcome of a life—can be attributed to chance, I’m in no more position to say than anyone else, but around eleven that morning a scrap of silvery light appeared over the lake to the west, and a short time later—at the exact hour, in fact, that the Senator was scheduled to make his way into the crowd under the tent—the clearing migrated over the property. Sunshine filled the air and the lawns sparkled suddenly like beds of jewels. You could sense a feeling of awe then, even among this educated and powerful crowd, and you could sense something more, too—a particular feeling that we had all been chosen. There were giddy remarks and plenty of jokes about it—God was a Democrat, and so on—but really, you couldn’t help thinking it signaled something. Henry Bonwiller ending up speaking to an afternoon that looked like the world’s first afternoon, and sure enough, as soon as he finished, when he was still moving among the small groups in the parking circle and on the front porch of the estate, the clouds moved in again from the west, the hole of light closed, and the rain poured forth once more.

Later that evening, long after the last guests had departed, I decided it would be a good idea to check the drainage pipe behind the fly pond, to make sure it hadn’t silted closed. The light had just gone down, and as I was crossing the short, earthen dam there in the steady rain I came across what I took to be an injured animal lying in the mud at the bottom of the berm—my mind went to the flock of sheep Gil and I had found earlier on high ground. As I reached the middle of the crossing I saw it more clearly in the darkness and heard it grunting quietly. At first it lay still, but when I turned on my flashlight it began to struggle, kicking its legs as though it was stuck in the deep swale of mud and making a harsher sound, as though I might be a predator; and it was only as I came closer down the steep side of the hill and trained the beam on it through the thick rain that I realized it was something else, not a sheep at all. At first this was all the sense I could make of it.

It’s easy to come up with reasons why I later became a journalist. I wasn’t raised in an educated family but I was privileged with a fine education myself, and though my parents had little learning they both respected it, the way they respected any endeavor that required discipline. I was mentored by a man with unparalleled access to the world but who still somehow retained a sense of justice, and whose life was in large part measured by his gifts to the community—both traits, really, that define a journalistic career of a certain kind. Or I could say that Holly Steen, with the hunger and ambition of her learning, had something to do with my own commitment to a life of words and paper. I could list all those reasons, or I could as easily list the writers I first read at Dunleavy—Dickens and Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain—or the ones at Haverford—Hegel and Marx and Robert Coles; but the simple truth is that it’s more likely because of the moment that followed, in which I climbed down the waterlogged slope and saw that the figure at the bottom was not any animal but a man; and then, in another moment, that the man was G. V. Trawbridge. If I’d had time to think, I might have gone to fetch someone, but instead I pushed my way through the ankle-deep mud and lifted him in my arms.

Years later, reading his memoir, I found out that Vance Trawbridge was born with a deformity but that as a grown man he was struck with multiple sclerosis as well, and I read of all the difficulties he faced in his life—near the end of his career, he fell nearly every day and his hands were so weak he had to dictate everything with his failing voice into a tape machine. Though he doesn’t mention this incident at Aberdeen West at all, he does write that this was the period when the multiple sclerosis was first taking hold of him, and I imagine it was horrible when it happened. He must have slipped at the top of the berm.

By the time I found him he was completely encased in mud, and his thin limbs were shivering. But even soaked he was remarkably light, not much heavier than a child, and when I lifted him he laid his head back in my elbow the way a child might. His dark features looked up at me imploringly. He seemed only half conscious, and the cold of his body worried me.

I set off back up the slippery footing of the berm. It was hard to tell he was even clothed, so uniform was the mud that covered him, but as we walked the rain continued to fall steadily, and by some strange miracle it began to wash him, so that by the time we reached the surer footing of the gravel I could see his face and his oversized glasses, which still clung to their strap, and then the stripes of his seersucker suit, and by the time we were on the back lawn I could clearly make out the white of his shirt and the red of what I feared was a wound on his neck but that under the porch lights turned out to be his bow tie, pulled halfway around his collar.

It was June Metarey who met us on the steps. “My God,” she exclaimed. “What in God’s name—”

“I think he slipped.”

“Vance, are you all right?”

“I’m okay, June. Okay.”

I hadn’t, I realized, thought to speak to him.

“Thank you, Corey,” she said. “Bring him inside to the downstairs guest room and run and get my husband.” Then she took his dripping hand, and I’ll never forget what she said next. She said, “In the eyes of God, Vance, all of us are crippled.”

His head rose in my arms. “Thanks, June,” he said. “But
I’m
the crippled one. That’s the truth of it.”

By the time I got him through the door, Mr. Metarey and a couple of the maids were already in the atrium with towels, but probably none of them realized that I had found him nearly buried in mud, or that when I picked him up he was in as squalid a condition as I have ever seen a human being. By now, he was merely drenched. They probably saw him as unfortunate but also as a bit comical, the seersucker cloth clinging to his chest now and his large head made smaller and more timid, somehow, the way a dog’s is, by water. If anything, the event may have looked more like a blessing or a baptism than the shameful degradation that it must have been for him and that for some reason it will always be for me.

And yet somehow, I also think back on this moment as one of the essential turns of my life, that the shame of holding the great man in such a state transmitted a kind of duty and honor to me also, and that it committed me in my own far slighter way to follow in his path. And although it might sound far-fetched, I believe that something passed between the two of us in those moments, some acknowledgment of station and consequence and human obligation that is impossible to explain but that still has hold of me today.

He was taken to the guest room, and Mr. Metarey thanked me profusely and then sent me across to one of the cottages to shower and change into a set of Andrew’s clothes. But that night before I left I was called into the house again, where Mr. Trawbridge stood now in a newly pressed suit in the entranceway, looking as he always did, leaning on his canes next to Senator Bonwiller. I saw Clara in the dining room.

“So you’re the young man,” Vance Trawbridge said, when Mr. Metarey introduced us. “Thank you. You might have saved my life. I won’t forget your kindness.”

I was terribly self-conscious, in part because I could see Clara watching us, but I was still excited from what had happened and was only searching for something to say. The proper answer would have been “You’re welcome, sir” or “Very glad to help.” But instead I said, in my father’s affable way, “Consider it a gift from the campaign.”

There was laughter all around.

S
OMEHOW, THE
P
OST
-D
ISPATCH STORY,
like the
Tribune
story before it, failed to spread. I saw it nowhere else. Not in the
Times
, all that month. Not in
The Washington Post
or the
Courier-Express
. At the estate, I checked the
Chronicle,
the
Examiner,
the
Post-Intelligencer,
the
Herald Traveler,
and
The Dallas Morning News,
too. At school, I continued to check the
Post
, the
Globe
, and the
Courier-Express
. It wasn’t in the
Speaker,
or
The Sentinel
, either, and it wasn’t followed up in the
Post-Dispatch
or the
Tribune
themselves. It wasn’t in any paper I looked at—and I looked at a lot of them.

“They were waiting for the killing moment,” said Trieste.

“How do you mean?”

“They wanted to make sure the dagger went into the right man.” She was putting on the duster, getting ready to leave on a rainy evening.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “You’re presuming a lot of conspiracy.”

“Or not presuming enough, maybe. It should have been everywhere. Overnight.”

“Things were different then, Trieste. There were no computers. There was no Internet and no e-mail. Reporters used the phone. And teletypes. I don’t know if your generation understands that. I don’t know if your generation even knows what a teletype
is
.”