America America (38 page)

“In your opinion.”

“I guess I never saw him drive.”

He wrote.

“What’s his mood been like then?”

“Same as ever.”

He looked at me.

“Optimistic,” I said.

“That’s good. Optimistic.”

Again, he wrote.

“You ever see him drink?”

“Did I?”

“That’s what I’m asking. I heard you never saw him drink.”

“No.” I looked ahead. “I didn’t.”

He smiled. “That’s good, too, isn’t it? You never saw Henry Bonwiller take a drink.” He snapped the pad closed. “That’s all I need then. At least for now.”

He set the pad in his breast pocket, then rose and moved to the door, hitching his pants on his hips. “You can get back to the vehicle,” he said.

As soon as he was gone, I set to work again with the bucket and sponge. Then I brought out the wax. I vacuumed the seats and the carpets, and on the visor I clipped a new booklet of toll coupons. Then I went outside to the top of the driveway and scanned the grounds. From there I saw him in the side pantry, his blue suit in a chair now next to the window, across from Gil McKinstrey.

When I returned I went through the car. There was a badge in the glove box. It said
U.S. Secret Service—Department of the Treasury
.

Later in the afternoon, I walked over and stood below Liam Metarey on the front steps of the house as we watched the newly shining Mercury make its way up the driveway into the trees.

“Flashlight and a wool cap in the glove box,” I said. “Some antacids. A badge. Secret Service.”

From the top step, he glanced down at me. “Secret Service?” he said. “Is that right? Not FBI?” On his face a rueful smile flickered.

“No, sir. No papers, either. Nothing about you or the Senator. Coffee cups and receipts and that kind of stuff under the seats, that’s all.”

“Thank you, Corey.”

“Just the spare in the trunk,” I went on. “Couple of flares.”

He looked back up at the entrance road, where a spot of light from the windshield was all that was visible now, moving through the trees. Then he touched my shoulder. “Well,” he said, “good job, anyway.”

He looked at me solemnly.

And even now, I have a clear memory of the insignia on that badge—five points surrounding a hexagon within a hexagon, and the script in blocks. But it wasn’t until almost two decades later, when I was writing for a paper in Boston, that I came across a fact that I should have remembered from high school: the Secret Service works for the president.

F
ROM THE ROAD
one afternoon on the way out to visit Dad I saw that the cranes had finally begun to move.

“Great,” he said, when I arrived. “Let’s go see.”

“I’m talking about the cranes over at the Metareys’, Dad. Over at Aberdeen West. What I told you about the other day on the phone. They’re building a mall out there. Remember?”

“I know what you’re talking about. Let’s go have a look.”

Even driving there was a challenge. There’s traffic in that direction now starting two hours before the afternoon whistles, made worse by the repetitive shoring and widening of the highway, which of course only brings in more traffic. At the Steppan-Saline exit, we pulled off the road. A Starbucks drive-through sits there now next to a Comfort Inn, and a truck plaza with a Hardee’s at one end and a Mobil, a Citgo, and a BP at the other. When I was a kid, there was just one station in town, the Esso. I stopped at one of the new ones to put in a few gallons and to give Dad a little time to acclimate. He sat in the car reading his poetry anthology.

The rumble of idling big rigs filled the air. In front of us was the orchard where they’d found JoEllen Charney’s body, not all that long ago; but now you couldn’t see anything to tell you that fruit trees had once stood there or that a beautiful woman had come to her end among them. All you could see were parked cars and beyond them parked trucks. The boulders that Mr. Silverton’s great-grandfather had hoisted out of the ground with a horse team and chain so that he could plant his Spartans and McIntoshes—stacking the great slabs upright in his own, small Stonehenge—had long since fallen over or been knocked flat and dragged away.

Over the trees, the crane booms were close in sight, foreshortening and then lengthening as they turned. There were two of them, both working at a good pace but neither one moving steadily enough to be swinging a wrecking ball. To stall a bit, I tried counting the traffic on the cloverleaf behind us, but this was futile. I counted just the big rigs instead, and even that number was overwhelming. In the old days, the Metarey property reached all the way to the road here, ending at the trees and the apple stand, which was financed by a cash bucket hanging from a post. Now the highway tolls are counted by an electronic eye, and the interstate shoots past a half-dozen towns, some of them small cities, that weren’t even plowed when I was a boy.

We drove the last few miles in silence. As we approached the turnoff to the Metareys’ drive, Dad finally put down his book and said, “You can’t argue with the logic,” as though he’d been paying attention since we’d set out. He swept his hand across the suburban panorama.

“No,” I said. “You can’t.” There was a new traffic light for a subdivision across the highway, and we waited to turn. “But get ready anyway.”

“I’m ready,” he said.

We came up the driveway, which had been thickly graveled for the heavy machinery, drove beneath the sycamores, and emerged between the familiar stone gates.

“Oh, God,” he said.

I swung the car sharply over onto the shoulder.

“Jesus.”

Everywhere on the property, the oaks lay across the grass.

The cranes were swinging back and forth above them, gray shapes dangling from their grapplers like the severed legs of elephants. On the ground, front-end loaders were using scoops to roll gigantic sections of tree up the sloped lawn into pinch harnesses, where a pair of men would fasten the hooks and the safety, and then the crane would roar and lift into the air.

“Oh, God,” he said again.

“Oh God is right.”

The booms took turns skimming their cargo over the front porch and then the grass lot where I used to park cars, and finally up the old driveway toward the stone gates where Christian and I used to sit in the mornings. Beyond us, trucks were idling in a row and another crew was guiding the wood down into them. Two trunks took up the width of a flatbed, and three filled its length. The drivers then lurched into gear and drove out beneath the sycamores.

“I thought you said he preserved it.”

“He did, Dad. Not all of it, though. They sold this part years ago, before Clara and I were married. You know that.”

“Sold it to a preservationist, I thought.”

“Guess the preservationist must have sold it to someone else.”

The air rumbled with diesel engines and whined with chain saws, which other men in lift buckets were using on the limbs that remained. I’d guess there were at least fifty oaks down. But dozens of others were still standing. Workers were heaving the smaller branches into a chipper, and the chipper was spewing its waste into a covered dump truck that in a few minutes sped off down a different driveway, this one through the woods to the east. I could trace its path from the cloud of dust hanging above the trees. In a moment, another had pulled up.

“I’m sorry,” said my father.

“Mr. Metarey used to check the bark on every one of them. Some of them were twelve feet around.”

He closed his window.

“He treated them like people,” I said.

“I know,” he answered. He glanced sideways. “I remember digging underneath the big one.”

I closed my window, too. And I must say, for a moment as we sat there with the hellish scene taking place almost quietly before us, I actually felt a return of the place’s magnificence. Without the sound, the balance of the battle seemed to change. The great house still stood, though the paint on the trim was coming off in long strips and a breach had appeared in a corner of the porch roof, below Mr. Metarey’s old study—probably from one of the cranes. It was strange to see the long south wall in such unvaried light, its face deprived of the stippled shade that had cooled it in three different centuries; but the fact remained that the house was still there. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say it looked defiant. And with so many trees down, the land around it looked only more immense, as though it could absorb this insult, too—just a passing turn of luck—and still prevail.

“All things must change to something new,” Dad said then, “to something strange.” He shook his head. “I just happened to be reading that.”

“Who is it?”

“Longfellow.”

The great dappled sycamores over the barrier drive still hadn’t been touched, nor had the deep woods around them except where the new construction road had been cut; these woods were maple and Scotch pine, and the Scotch pine still hid the interstate. The cranes roared and the shadow of their swinging arms crossed over the knoll in front of us, the lifted trunks casting their own dark gashes as they glided above what had been the wide, bluegrass lawn where Henry Bonwiller had held his press conferences. My father had only a stony look on his face—I couldn’t tell whether it was his old reserved feeling or his newfound anger—but I myself had to wipe my eyes. I’m well aware that the world must change. But I had to wipe them anyway. Dad looked away. Behind the house a trio of skid-loaders was making fast work of the long berm that had once shored the fly pools. And as I watched, a bulldozer crept up to Breighton’s dilapidated horse barn, where Christian and I had first kissed more than thirty years ago. It tested it with its shovel—a strangely delicate gesture—and then pushed it over in a heap.

I drive a new-looking Camry, and of course in a few minutes one of the foremen approached. I think I might have recognized him—a kid from a year ahead of me at Roosevelt—and I think he might have recognized me, too, but with the tears on my cheeks and with what was taking place before us, both of us were embarrassed. I lowered my window.

“I guess you know you can’t sit here,” he said quietly.

S
ENATOR ACCUSED!
That’s what the
New York Post
said.

The
Daily News
was pithier:
BYE-BYE, BON
!

The
Times
followed its own scoop with
BONWILLER CAMP STUNNED BY REVELATION.
And
The Wall Street Journal
, whose headline writers would never have been mistaken for friends of the Senator, was already looking ahead:
DEMOCRATS SCRAMBLE TO REPLACE BONWILLER.

B
UT
H
ENRY
B
ONWILLER WASN’T
going to let them. The next afternoon, he put out a statement:

The recent press allegations about the tragic death of a devoted worker in the Bonwiller for President Campaign, Miss JoEllen Charney, are a fiction. When the facts are known, Senator Bonwiller will be completely exonerated. In the meantime, Senator Bonwiller continues to fight for working men and women, women like Miss Charney herself.