America America (43 page)

“Mrs. Metarey, is everything okay?”

She looked at me.

“With Mr. Metarey,” I said.

“Oh, Lord!” she answered, and she nearly shrieked with laughter. “Please go enjoy yourself now.”

Please go enjoy yourself.
I must say it seemed even stranger from a woman who had comported herself the way she had in the library just a short time before, with what I assumed was the FBI. But I think she must have somehow felt the same lapse in decorum that the rest of the crowd had. To tell the truth, so did I, and this was what at last allowed me to leave off. I moved the pallet of chairs against the side of the porch and walked inside the front door of the house. I also suppose that I knew then without doubt that it was all ending.

Inside the entry, the great capitalist and his canary gazed down at me from the wall. Their two sets of darkly reconnoitering eyes. I tilted my head and stared back. I’d never bothered to look at the whole canvas, I realized. On the table next to Eoghan Metarey’s elbow stood a glass of ice water coated with a glinting skin of condensation—the painter’s fabulous skill evident in the tiny shining droplets that were nothing more, I saw when I moved closer, than perfectly executed half-moons of gray. I noticed for the first time, as well, that a handful of coins lay almost invisibly among the knots of the table, and that the mantel in the background held an ornately prepared fish on a china plate.

But what was a strangely acute disappointment at that moment was that it had all become commonplace for me. I thought of the onlookers I’d seen earlier in the day, who’d been staring in frank amazement.

For some reason, then, I decided to go upstairs. I’d climbed those steps a hundred times, but now I tried to do it like a newcomer. Like a man fingering the heft of one of the sculpted ashtrays. Christian’s room stood directly at the top of the landing, and when my knock wasn’t answered I went in and closed the door behind me. I looked carefully around. The bed was covered in its sea-blue Turkish spread, stitched in gold, and on the ledge of the wainscot sat her row of votive candles and her pair of carved African figurines, of a man and woman kneeling. Through the panes of the French door I looked out at the stone porch where we’d kissed a few times, under the limbs of the great pin oak whose spring leaves were newly unrolled—small, pale versions of the elegantly tipped hands that in the summer tapped her window. I crossed finally to the glass and opened it. My memories seemed so distant.

It was from there that I heard the sound of Aberdeen Red. First the revving of the engines, then the softening, then the second revving as it made the turn onto the runway; in a moment the double wings appeared above the trees. They leveled off and then banked to the west, heading toward the lake. There was something elusive in June Metarey, I realized, just as there was in Christian; something that fled when you tried to understand it. But Clara was nonetheless her mother’s daughter, just as Christian was her father’s, and I had the first inkling then of what I know now from experience—that not only are our parents buried cryptically inside each of us, but that we are buried just as cryptically inside each of them, and that we may look in either direction to see the secrets of our children and of ourselves.

The plane was heading out over the Shelter Brook woods, the wings so low over the hilltops that here and there they vanished into them completely. She was making a line for some distant landmark. How did such freedom not confound a person? If I were Mrs. Metarey, where would I go? To New York City? To Montana? To Canada? Of all the privilege I’d encountered in that house, and of all the magnificence of that world, this was the purest, perhaps, and the one that has remained the most thoroughly foreign to me. There was nothing stopping her from anything. There was nothing stopping any of them.

Soon the fuselage was only a dark hash mark in a wafer of white sky at the horizon. But there, just where it would have disappeared, it banked suddenly upward, then leveled again, and I stayed at the window long enough to understand that it had turned back. Now it was heading toward us again. All along the contours of the land, the woods had come into leaf, and the canopy was a sea of pale green darkened only by the undulations of the hills and the long, leading shadow of the plane. I realized that I’d never seen it fly this late in the afternoon.

I stepped back into the hallway. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what kind of family June Metarey had come from, and as I glanced at the long rows of pictures hung on the walls there it came to me that she might have been heading back to her own people. This might have been where she was going, until she’d changed her mind at the horizon and turned the nose toward home again. As I made my way down the corridor toward the library, I looked carefully at each one of the photos—photos that I’d passed dozens of times on my trips upstairs with newspaper sticks and drinks and firewood. What I saw now was that they all seemed to be of the Metarey clan; I found none of June Metarey herself as a child—I was searching for what might look like a ranch out west—and none of what might have been her own family. I remembered suddenly her words in the library about Eoghan Metarey—who was her relation only by marriage—words of such fierce reverence that until that moment, I realized, I’d thought she’d been speaking of her own father.

I don’t know how June Metarey felt about all that had just happened with Henry Bonwiller. She was ambitious—that, I know. I would say that she was even more ambitious than her husband, and that because she was so finely tuned to that kind of yearning she understood better than anyone else its perils. But she was also not one to give up. She seemed to have lived, for reasons I will never know, so close to desperation for so long that I suspect its shade seemed not like the coming of night to her, as it must have seemed to Mr. Metarey, but merely the condition of the earth. Henry Bonwiller had overcome difficulties before. He had a formidable army of supporters: he could overcome them again.

But as the father now of daughters, I don’t think it would have been possible for Liam Metarey—whose girls were at the age my youngest is today—to be as sanguine.

At the entrance to the library, I paused, aware that Gil McKinstrey was probably wondering where I was. But still I wanted to go in. It was why I’d come inside, of course: to find Mr. Metarey. And to help him. But the tall, hand-carved double doors stood closed before me, and for the first time in all my days there I was afraid of knocking. What if he was still in there with the FBI? What if under duress he’d turned on the Senator? Or showed a side of himself that he never wanted me—never wanted anyone—to see?

It was my desire that stayed me. My desire to talk to him again. If an agent was in there, maybe Mr. Metarey would pass something on to me, to tell his wife or the Senator. Or perhaps he would say something outright about the situation. On the other hand, if he was alone, as I suspected he might be by now, and if he was relaxed enough even after all the events of the day, then maybe I would get to have another conversation with him. Perhaps he would say something about what had happened.

But sure enough, I became aware then of Gil McKinstrey’s muffled voice: “Corey!” he was calling. “Corey Sifter!”

I looked out the staircase window behind me and saw him on the gravel drive to the side of the hay gable. “Corey Sifter!” he called sharply. “Where in God Bless are you, boy!” He smacked his hand against his hip the way he did calling Breighton. Then he disappeared into the barn.

I knocked quickly on the door of the library, and when there was no answer I pushed it open. The room was empty. This was a disappointment, of course. But as I glanced through the windows at the hired hands moving all about the lawn, I was unprepared for how deeply the combination of disappointment and my own uncharacteristic evasion of work—as well as the fact that in the last few minutes I’d somehow understood the true magnitude of the family’s impending failure—I was unprepared for how deeply these things would strike me. I actually had to sit down. I pulled a chair to the center table.

On the blotter in front of me were a couple of used lunch plates and their wineglasses, and instinctively I began to gather them to take downstairs. Next to the plates was a pile of books. For some reason, I spread them on the table.

I became a newspaperman, as I said before, for reasons that most profoundly had their effect on me at Dunleavy and Haverford. At both places, I’d simply fallen in love with books—first off, with Mark Twain’s. But soon with Dickens’s and Dostoyevsky’s and even Hegel’s, and later with A. J. Liebling’s and James Agee’s and Jacob Riis’s and H. L. Mencken’s. And I think when I found these later ones I was hastened to them out of my powerful memories of both Glenn Burrant and G. V. Trawbridge. Yet there’s more to it than that. As time passed and my generation quieted, my acquaintances at Haverford eventually became businessmen and lawyers, just like their fathers; and some of them no doubt began to contemplate running for the statehouse then, or for Congress, or even for president. None of which I could ever imagine. I found out earlier than most about ambition—about real ambition—from my time at the Metareys’. And that’s another reason why I do what I do.

At the table, I began looking through the titles. As I did, I heard Gil McKinstrey call again. The sound of my name was faint but there was no mistaking the irritation now in his voice, and I rose and crept toward the window until I saw him standing beneath the hay pulley again. He was hitching up a pallet of chairs, and he called out another time, but he was looking the other way, toward the tent. At that moment, Aberdeen Red appeared above the trees, and I watched it bank above him and turn in the direction of the strip.

When I stepped back from the window again, to hide from Gil, I happened to notice that one of the books on the table was
The Jungle
, by Upton Sinclair, which Mr. Metarey had mentioned to me. And of course this only quickened my desire to see him. So I pushed aside the rest of the stack and picked it up in my hands—the very copy that now sits in my office, next to Mencken’s
Newspaper Days
—and then I moved across the back of the room toward the stand-up reading desk by the door. I only wanted to impress him. Or to be friendly with him somehow. To show him that I was in fact worthy of some portion of the generosity he had shown me. I opened the leather binding against the platen, and—just for a few moments—I began to read.

My back was to the window, then, when it happened, and I didn’t see it. I only heard it.

But I know now that such a sound is unmistakable.

First the quick, accelerating roar of the engine; then the mallet blow. The desk shook. Then: silence. The impact occurred in the second stand of oak and larch on the far side of the corral, a quarter mile short of the landing strip. I ran to the window and yanked it open. The plume of smoke was instant. A nefarious black twister surging straight up over the windless field. In a moment the spell of stillness lifted and was replaced by a soft crackling. And in another moment, by a pair of rapid explosions, one and then the other. Now the billowing cloud churned higher, broken suddenly by two leaping towers of flame that shot above the branches. “Gil!” I shouted. “It’s Mrs. Metarey!” I ran to the east windows and thrust them open. “It’s Aberdeen Red! It’s Aberdeen Red!” Then I ran the other way, out the door and down the stairs through the house, calling out. I could hear others shouting as well, but there was no answer, only more calls and the sound of the servants’ running feet, then one of the maids in the hallway saying she thought Mr. Metarey had gone into town. She picked up the phone on the wall and tried to dial but seemed to be overcome and collapsed into a chair. I ran into Mr. Metarey’s back-porch study to look for him, and into the first-floor conference room. Then I sprinted down the stairs toward the woods, shouting his name.

How do each of us come to understand what is never spoken? By what constellation of gesture and avowal, by what detail of comportment or tone do we discern the dark, inobvious intent of those around us? The earliest real words Liam Metarey ever spoke to me—“work will set you free”—returned to me with a shock when I came upon them again, six years later, on my first trip to Europe, and only suggested once more that our worlds—our lives—are not at all what they appear. That all of us, no matter how difficult this may be to accept, are merely marking a course set early in our days. June Metarey’s political shrewdness had carried her—had carried both of them—so very far, but her dismal prophesying, which seemed so basic to her character, was what turned out to be the truth.

The black plume was already spreading over the land. Within a few minutes, the lone fire engine from Saline sped through the gates, but when it drove down the embankment onto the wooded flats we found that the two-track was not wide enough to let it through. The firemen clamped all the hoses together into one and ran it through the woods. But still it wouldn’t reach. They shouted into their radios, even though it was obvious that nothing they could do would matter: by the time they reached the clearing, the plane was a roiling mass of flame and acrid black smoke that billowed over itself and flooded the sky. In the spreading gloom, the twin leaping spires of orange sent shadows dancing against the trees. The smoke kept pouring. A human being couldn’t even approach it—I know because I tried to. The oaks near the impact had been immolated, and the stinking cloud bellowed horrifically now from the center of its own clearing. Around it stood a circle of larches with their needles burnt off.

I stood thirty yards away. The smoke kept rising, a whole black mountain now that struck a ceiling above us and spread across the sky. The stench of gasoline and charred rubber was foul in the air. The light had already grown dusky, and soon it was like night. Every time I looked I knew I was seeing Mrs. Metarey’s obscenely hellish grave but at the same time I could barely turn away my gaze. There is no approaching that kind of horror. The scene seemed to be taking place behind a window of warped black glass, and in the throng of confusing figures and fleeting light I turned left and right. I think I was looking for Christian and Clara. I say I think because I really don’t know. It had occurred to me that my job now was to help them, but my mind had trouble seizing on a single fact, especially one like that. I just kept turning back to the roaring, churning center. That’s how a person reacts, I discovered. Or at least, that’s how I did.