America America (32 page)

“Of course we do. Or
I
do.”

“Then you’re unusual.” I went to the window, where the rain glittered in the streetlamps. “Editors felt they had to verify stories,” I said, looking out into the dusk. “
Before
they ran. There was a whole filtering process. Interviews. Witnesses. Sources. Checks. Rechecks. And the question—is this relevant? Is this
news
? It was still asked.” I turned back to her. “Believe it or not.”

“You don’t think it was relevant?”

“Of course it was relevant. But in those days all the papers had their own reporters. Not just the
Times
. They sent them out to do their own stories. It took a combined effort. And a combined effort takes time.”

She buttoned the duster and pulled the collar up around her neck. “So that’s what you think it was, Mr. Sifter?” she said finally. “Editors checking their own reporters’ sources?”

“As I said, Trieste—there was no Internet then. No Matt Drudge. No Daily Kos. No Andrew Sullivan. No blog-world.”

“Blogosphere, Mr. Sifter.”

“Thank you.”

“And that’s what you believe, sir? That’s what you think happened? It didn’t make it out because there wasn’t any blogosphere yet?”

“Truly,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Sir,” she said, pulling on her hat, “I don’t think you’re presuming enough conspiracy.”

T
HE FEELING IS GONE,
thank God, even if she knows inside that it’s just a temporary respite. For a day, she’s fine. But the following evening, sure enough, when she locks the three office doors and sets Mr. McBain’s outgoing mail in the box, it’s back. The stone. He might be meeting her that night or he might not. He’s going to call around eight from a pay phone. That’s all he’ll say. She goes home and heats up a can of tomato soup. At eight she turns on
Mannix
and watches halfheartedly. Then cleans the apartment. At midnight, finally, she goes to sleep.

That week, in desperation, she tells her mother: she’s seeing someone.
A married man
, she says, as if that’s the biggest part of the secret. They’re at a bakery where you can drink tea from a full pot. Her mother, who’s driven in forty miles by herself, is holding her cup and saucer up near her chin, the way she does, but when she hears this her breath catches and she sets them both down hard in the middle of the tablecloth. The spoon jumps. She says, “You have to gather your strength, JoEll, and leave him.”

JoEllen knows her mother is right, even if she hasn’t heard half the truth. Even if she hasn’t heard a tenth of it.
Gather your strength and leave.

But that’s not what she does.

Two nights later, she’s in the cabin at The Pines, and he’s finishing his sandwich. She says, “How come we don’t ever go someplace nicer?”

He sets down the sandwich and looks at her. She has surprised even herself.

The next day someone calls and tells her there’s a room for her at Morley’s Inn, in Saline.

In the afternoon she drives over. The room has a king-size bed with a bedcover striped in maroon and tassels that hang from the corners. There’s a chocolate on each pillow. She eats hers and takes his to give to him later as a surprise. This is more like it. A dark wood desk in the corner with pretty stationery in the drawer and a silver ice bucket sitting on a red leather coaster. This is much more like it.

But again that night he doesn’t show up until after eleven. By then, she’s nearly given up. He’s got to get home right afterward, too. She’s got nowhere to go herself, so while they’re still lying in bed she says, “How long can I stay here?”

“Long as you want, honey.” He stands up and pulls on his trousers. His shirt. Straps on his watch. “And you’re going to be part of the campaign now, too,” he says.

“I’m going to be what?”

“You’re going to be working on the campaign, from now on. Come to some of the meetings. Be seen with the staff. Out in public. You’ll get paid a little, too.”

She frowns at that.

“For the campaign work.”

“What will I do?”

“We’ll figure that out.” He pulls on his coat. “Someone will call.”

And that’s the way it proceeds. Someone does call. She goes to a couple of meetings in Islington, at a restaurant on the pier called The Swan. He sits across the table from her. Half a dozen other people are there, and a few others come and go. He smiles at her, nods, but that’s all. Someone gives her a steno pad and that’s what she does. She takes notes while they talk. It’s just dates. A speech at the Hilton. A speech at the Harvard Club. A ribbon-cutting at a horse track. She draws out a calendar and marks them all. But nobody asks to see it.

The stone’s not exactly gone from her gut, but almost. Sometimes she still feels it, not as bad, just a prick of cold somewhere in the center of her. But if she laughs a couple of times she can get it to go away. Back at Morley’s the room is always ready now, too, under the name
Annabelle English
. Now and then she thinks of her mother.
You have to gather your strength and leave him.
She’s not sure if she’s gathering her strength, but she doesn’t think so. Sometimes she’ll go to a campaign meeting, then come back into Saline to spend the night alone in the big bed. In the morning she gets a beauty treatment next door. That helps. The view from the window helps, too. The tree leaves and the fountain. The strolling couples. So does the bottle of Scotch in the silver bucket. They refill the ice when they make up the room. Then one day, putting away her coat in the closet, she finds a pair of new dresses hanging there—that’s a nice surprise—and when she opens the drawer she finds some new underthings, too. Pretty ones. That’s pleasant enough but the week after that she opens the closet again and there’s a fur stole on a hanger.

Well.

She’s not sure what mink looks like. There’s no tag but it’s lined with black satin. She slips it on, the satin cool on her neck. She lets it hang over her shoulders and runs her hands over the fur, then quickly touches her breasts underneath. In the mirror, she says
Annabelle English
. She’s pretty. It almost surprises her.

And for a couple of weeks, it gets her through. That and the name and the underthings, the way she looks with one shoulder wrapped in fur. The Scotch, too, and the campaign meetings, and the hotel staff who move noiselessly about their chores. There’s a dignified quiet to the place and an evening light, like a nunnery. The desk clerk uses the name once himself—
Evening, Miss English
—before he stops saying anything to her at all. On the corner of his lapel he wears a tiny crucifix. Then someone calls at the apartment and says she shouldn’t check in anymore, just go straight up through the restaurant. There’s a stairway off the bar. It’s a steakhouse, and he’s meeting her there every Tuesday and Thursday, lunch with two other aides who show up late and sit at the table with them for a little meeting before he gives her the nod and she goes back up the rear steps to the room. Sometimes it takes him another hour. She sits at the edge of the bed, listening for his steps on the carpet. Practicing a certain kind of smile.

Daytimes he’s rushed but talkative. Nights, he’s quiet.

One of those nights, maybe two weeks later, they have more to drink than usual and she puts on one of the new dresses, but all of a sudden there’s the stone again inside her, bigger than it’s been—she tries to give a little laugh but it doesn’t work—and abruptly she lets the stole drop from her shoulders. “This feels so dirty,” she says suddenly. For some reason she thinks of the desk clerk. His folded hands. “I feel like I’m doing something wrong.” She can feel the drink pulling her along. A string around her wrist. “It’s not wrong what we’re doing,” she says, moving up close to him, “is it?”

“That’s silly, honey. We’re just doing what human beings do.”

“Any human beings?” she says.

“Yeah.”

He’s tying his shoes. The fur is near him on the carpet and he gathers it without sitting up, hangs it over the chair. Then double knots the laces.

“Or
us
especially?” she says. “You and me?”

He looks up. “All right,” he says. “You and me.”

“Mmmm,” she says, moving next to him.

“I’m going to have to be traveling a lot coming up.” For some reason he says this now. “That’s what happens in a campaign.”

T
WO
S
UNDAYS LATER,
the cover story of
The New York Times Magazine
was written by G. V. Trawbridge. The first paragraph:

T
HE GREAT PRESIDENTS
have won the job not so much by campaigning well as by appearing at the right moment in history. Abraham Lincoln arrived in a capital city soon to be threatened by Stonewall Jackson’s advancing artillery. Franklin Roosevelt arrived in one littered with the burned tatters of the routed Bonus Army. Henry Bonwiller, as powerful a figure as has ever sought this great office, seems poised to arrive in one worn nearly under by the sad tide of Vietnam.

The cover itself was a photograph of the Senator in his Washington office, standing halfway in front of the flag.

The title: “A Bonwiller Presidency.”

One of the new hires, not knowing Liam Metarey, tacked the picture up to the bulletin board in the downstairs library, and I have to say it was a proud moment for me. But I also knew Liam Metarey well enough by then that I had a good idea of what he would think when he saw it. And I was right. I wasn’t standing very far away when he walked past, yanked it down, and crumpled it loudly in his fist. And on the way out the door he dropped it into the trash can.

You can imagine what I was feeling. At that age I would have followed Liam Metarey anywhere on earth, but when that article appeared I’d felt, for the first time since the campaign had begun, somehow significant, as well—that I’d done something that not just any kid from Saline might have done. I secretly understood that my actions had had bearing on those salutary words being written by G. V. Trawbridge, and that I’d finally made some contribution, however indirect, to Henry Bonwiller’s campaign for president.

In the evening, as I was straightening up the downstairs foyer, I plucked the crumpled sheets from the trash and stuffed them into my pocket. And at home that night I smoothed them flat again and folded them to fit my wallet.

“A
ND DIDN’T THAT BOOK
change your opinion about the old robber baron?”

“About the what?”

“About Eoghan Metarey.”

“Oh. Most people wouldn’t call him that, Trieste. Not around here, at least.”

“Actually I thought I was being charitable. I’ve heard a whole lot worse.” She was smiling again. This time, the secretive one. The unopened bud. “And I’ve known that story all my life.”

“You knew about the mine accident?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess you’re hanging around at different lunch counters than I did at your age.”

“We make our own lunches, sir. We don’t go to lunch counters.”

“Well, my dad and I used to. And at the ones we ate at, you weren’t going to hear that kind of story. At least not when I was a kid. If my father knew about Eoghan Metarey’s history, he certainly wasn’t going to tell me. And I seriously doubt he even did. That accident happened in Canada. Those were Canadian miners. Folks in Saline didn’t read newspapers then. Certainly not Canadian ones.”