America America (45 page)

“Oh, I see what you mean, Dad. Yes, I know that.”

He looks down at the floor of the car. “Mr. Metarey gave you things I couldn’t, son. I understand that. He was a better father than I could be.”

I shut off the engine. “Dad—is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know, Cor. And it’s okay with me. We’ve all come out better for it, haven’t we?” His eyes rise to mine. “And I know you did things for him in return—for Henry Bonwiller. For both of them, I’m talking about. I know you did things—I don’t know exactly what.” He stands again and turns.

“What, Dad?”

“Well,” he says, looking back for a moment just before he walks away, “Henry Bonwiller was the best friend the working men of this country have ever had.”

B
Y THE FOLLOWING
S
ATURDAY,
when Mr. Metarey’s funeral was held, a high fence had been built around the crash site. The NTSB had arrived within half a day of the accident, three men in a government car who spent a couple of hours with their Polaroid cameras in the acrid-smelling wreckage and then drove back to Buffalo. Later that morning, Glenn Burrant showed up, his flip-back reporter’s notebook in his hand. From the barn I saw him sitting on a toolbox next to the destroyed plane as the hired carpenters nailed in the last of the fence boards in front of him. Then he straightened his tie and walked back to the house. He was still pale when I opened the door of the Corvair for him that afternoon, as he was leaving. “Never thought it would end like
this
,” he said softly, climbing into the driver’s seat. He looked as ashen as any of us.

“Nobody did,” was all I could think of to answer.

That day there was all kinds of somber activity on the estate, and I, like the rest of the staff, had come in to help. But I don’t think it was until that evening that Gil looked up from a box he was taping shut and said, “You know, has anybody seen Churchill?”

I think of that dog, too. I think of Mr. Metarey’s hand on his eager head.

I think of Liam Metarey who had no training in aviation but could build an engine from parts. I think of Liam Metarey who had directed the great instruments of his father’s fortune, who had lifted the weight of that fortune into the next realm of influence and station. Of Liam Metarey who could break a horse and use a tap and dye as well as any man in Carrol County, who could rebuild a set of valves and pistons in his barn. Of Liam Metarey who had given me a good many of the great gifts of my life and to whom I shall remain indebted forever. He was a man—like his father, I now believe, and like his younger daughter—a man for whom the poles of grandiosity and despair had come loose from their yoking. Like many other men of such achievement. Yet he was unfailingly kind to me. No matter what happened.

His generosity foreshadowed his end in a way that seems obvious now—for who else gives away so much? And I like to believe that his last moments were not shot through with fear but with calm, even if they were darkened by the fierce calamity of his intent. I don’t think Henry Bonwiller, or JoEllen Charney, or anything about the turn of events were the causes of his demise but merely the tools of it, which, as I consider him, I realize he had always sought, at greater and greater altitude, with all the energy of his mind, over all the days of his reign. Such a great man was he for tools.

I think of him all the time. To this day.

Henry Bonwiller, of course, spoke at the funeral. And I think it was this large but plain gathering, more than any understanding of his own deeds or any flight from the brutal turn of the campaign, that prompted him finally to do what he did. He was a monstrously armored man—how could he not be?—but that does not mean he was impregnable. The service was simple. Four men to bear the coffin—Gil McKinstrey, two of Mr. Metarey’s cousins, and Andrew, who had flown home again on leave—and just two speakers, the minister and Henry Bonwiller, who had gone on from Chattanooga to Raleigh-Durham the day after the crash, but then canceled the trip to West Virginia. He stood before the assemblage at Trinity Episcopal Church in Saline and bowed his head.

The nave was full to standing and still dozens of rows of folding chairs were lined up outside the open doors. He lifted his tired face to the crowd and spoke about how long he had known Liam Metarey, and what a trusted friend he had been. I know some of those in the audience were reporters—they were not officially welcome, but they came anyway, Glenn Burrant among them. My father was there, too, of course, sitting beside Mr. McGowar—the second time in my life that I’d seen them together in their suits. So were hundreds of townspeople. Henry Bonwiller didn’t go on for long, and he was so moved—or perhaps he was just so expert a showman—that he abandoned his oratory and merely spoke in a gruff monotone into the microphone, barely above a whisper. His voice carried out through the nave and onto the grounds where I was standing. I wanted to be behind everybody, for some reason. To see them. Or maybe so that they could not see me. Andrew and Christian and Clara sat together with their mother at the front, and even from outside the church I could see them lined up in the pew. I had to turn away.

Henry Bonwiller finished his eulogy by taking a folded sheet from his breast pocket and reading aloud the Auden poem “Museé des Beaux Arts,” which I still read now, every year, on Liam Metarey’s birthday.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry—

He looked out at the audience. Many of us were weeping. Presently, his lips clenched, he nodded, turned to the coffin, and saluted it. Then he returned the folded sheet to his coat pocket and spoke the rest from memory:

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

For a moment he stood straight, as though to gather himself. Then he leaned down to the microphone and whispered, “I shall seek no higher.”

Even the reporters, I think, thought it was just another line in the poem.

ELEVEN

I
DON’T KNOW EXACTLY WHEN
it happened, but sometime during the winter of my senior year at Dunleavy, Glenn Burrant disappeared from his job. The summer before, after Mr. Metarey’s accident and the end of the campaign, I’d stopped reading the paper, nearly altogether, and I didn’t start again till my last semester was almost over. Once more I was rooming with Astor, and I was still going back to Saline occasionally on weekends—to be with my dad, mostly, even though he said he didn’t need me. Frankly, the events of the preceding months had shaken my resolve, and any number of times that year I felt that I might quit school. It was only my loyalty to my mother and my gratitude to Mr. Metarey, I think, that kept me there.

And yet at the same time, and especially with my mother gone from the house on Dumfries, I’d also begun that year to think of Dunleavy as my home. Or at least I’d begun to feel as comfortable there as I did on my weekends back in Saline. I didn’t have as many friends as Astor did, but I wasn’t an outsider anymore either, and I found that there was something at school that I enjoyed now each day: soccer, European history, singing, the long Friday evening meal when the freshmen performed their skits for us in the dining hall. In November, Nixon had been reelected by the second largest landslide in history.

Other things about me were changing, too. My grades were still good, but I no longer felt the need to be at the very top of my class. I slept in now till seven-fifteen, waking when Astor’s alarm went off and hurrying to class with him, and at night I sat around sometimes with a group of our friends instead of going by myself to study. I watched TV for my news, whatever glimpses I could catch between the cartoons and sports that were always playing on the set in the commons. In my desk drawer, I still kept my well-creased copy of Vance Trawbridge’s “A Bonwiller Presidency,” but it wasn’t until the waning days of March, when the new grass was making its first push through the winter blanket, that I found myself in the library stacks again, standing, for the first time in a long while, at the rack of newspapers.

It was a Wednesday, and Monday morning’s
Courier-Express
had been placed neatly on the top shelf. I didn’t really have much desire to read Glenn’s work anymore, but I opened to the editorial page anyway, out of some old habit. His column wasn’t there. That stopped me, somehow. The library kept only a month’s supply of back issues, and I went to them; but it wasn’t in any of those Monday papers, either, and it wasn’t in any of the other days’. That’s when I realized he’d been fired.

“Why do you say fired?” Trieste asks.

“His column was gone.”

“He could have just gone on to a bigger paper.”

“But he hadn’t,” I say. “I just knew it.” We’re in the newsroom, late on a fall evening, and she’s getting ready to leave again. This has become the time we talk.

“If
I
said that I just
knew
something, Mr. Sifter,” she answers, taking the duster from its peg, “you’d send me home.”

“But I did. I just
knew
.” I look over my glasses at her. “Call it reporter’s instinct.”

She examines me. Then she says, “Which is, of course, merely saying that you thoroughly understood the issue.”

“Maybe.”

“Was he fired because of what he knew?”

“That’s all I can guess.”

“Come on. You told me the
Courier-Express
was such a liberal paper.”

“Henry Bonwiller was a liberal candidate.”

“Why didn’t Glenn Burrant just publish his story somewhere else?”

“Because things were different then. He couldn’t just put it up on his blog. And he wasn’t the kind of guy who could just walk into any newsroom and get a job. He smelled like a dill pickle.”

She laughs at this, but only for a moment. “But they knew his reputation, didn’t they?”

“They knew it up here.”

“And too many people up here are grateful to the Metareys. Is that it, Mr. Sifter?”

“And too many were in the Senator’s pocket.”

She closes the buttons on the duster. It’s a fine evening, but as the nights have grown colder now she’s taken to wearing it every day, rain or shine. “What do you think he
knew,
then?” she says.

“I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know if it was something about Anodyne or something about JoEllen.” I look at her. “Or even something about the president. But I think he knew something. I think he’d gotten inside somehow. He was a very good reporter, you know. Not just because he did his research, but because he had the ability to imagine what it was like to be his subject. Remember what he wrote me? That every man is his own hell?”

“That’s Mencken, too, sir. I looked it up.”

“Very good, Trieste. The thing is, I don’t think he meant it about himself. I think he meant it about Henry Bonwiller. Or sometimes I think Nixon.”

She’s standing at the door now. “Or Liam Metarey.”

“Possibly.”

We’re silent while she finds her bicycle key in her waist pack.

“Either way,” I say, “it shows that he could put himself in someone else’s existence. That’s the way he worked. What he found out about those faked letters to
The Union Leader
—that was even before Woodward and Bernstein.”

“And
that’s
why he was fired?”

“It’s all a guess. The Bonwillers’ reach was long. But the president’s was long, too.”

“Have you tried to find him?”

I consider whether to answer this. Finally, I say, “I
have
found him, Trieste.”

She sits down again, at a desk by the door. “You have?”

“He’s living in Ottawa. He’s a retired high school history teacher.”

“Have you gotten in touch with him?”

“No. He knows who I am and what I do. If he’d wanted to get in touch with me, he would have done it a long time ago.”

“I see,” she says. She rises again.

“Nothing will bring JoEllen Charney back.”

“Yes, I know.” She looks at me. Then she steps through the door, walks slowly down the stairs, and is gone.

That spring at Dunleavy, I wrote Glenn another letter, but it was returned as undeliverable. And at Haverford, whenever I was in the library, I took to reading newspapers again—the bigger ones, like the
Globe
and the
Post
and the
Times
—hoping, as some small part of my thinking, that I would one day find his byline. But I knew—I just
knew
—what had happened. And years later, when I was a newspaperman myself and the Internet was first emerging, when news reporting had begun its tidal shift, I began to look again, this time through search engines. But it wasn’t long before I understood that these, too, would turn up nothing. Whatever Glenn Burrant knew—whatever he’d discovered about JoEllen, or Anodyne, or Nixon himself—whatever it was, he’d decided to walk away with it.

T
HESE DAYS
C
LARA STILL SPENDS
a fair amount of time trying to rehabilitate her father’s name. I have to say, I admire her perseverance but for a long time was surprised by it. She’s methodical at the task. Every time the question of Liam Metarey’s part in the scandal is dredged up, she’ll write to
The Plain Dealer
or the
Globe
or the
Inquirer
proclaiming his innocence, and whenever a new book comes out, she’ll write again, this time to the literary supplements, and she’ll visit the author lectures in Cleveland and Buffalo and sometimes Albany to make her points in the question-and-answer periods afterward. She goes to all the fund-raising dinners for the state Democratic Party and makes the rounds there in support of her father’s reputation, as well. It’s not what you might have predicted.

If a man shall begin in certainties, he shall end in doubts.
That’s the accurate quotation: it’s Francis Bacon. I happened upon it recently in a history of Enlightenment Europe. But Clara if nothing else proves the obverse: for she hasn’t ended in doubts. How was I to know that the girl who burned her father’s toolshed and jumped off his boat, the girl who seemed to be trying her best to derail his fortunes and interpose herself into the most serious of his aspirations would then devote the material energy of her middle years to bestowing an unlikely knighthood on his name? How was I to know that my wife would be the most fervent defender of a family that she had mocked and bucked against so much of the time I knew her?

Or perhaps I did know. Perhaps we both did.

Liam Metarey remains a mystery to me to this day. I knew him for what he seemed to be in the eyes of a sixteen-year-old boy who had never even earned a living on his own. In retrospect I understood almost nothing. Was he kind to me? Always. Was he honest with me in his dealings? Overwhelmingly, yes. The miscalculation he made was a miscalculation principally of loyalty, I think now, less to a man than to a cause, and when he made it I can only think that he was envisioning the greater future for many more than just himself. And there is the matter of his own past, too, which was an entirely foreign thought to a boy my age then. What was it like to have taken the mantle of that great family, taken it from a man as vicious and single-minded as his father? A man not poor and then rich, but both together at the same time, rich and poor, all his life, just the way Liam Metarey was. But unlike the son, the father was merciless all through it. Was the mercilessness the lesson the son finally took? The lesson that in the end failed him?

That is just a guess on my part, of course, but it is a guess that Clara agrees with. Her grandfather died before she was born, and so I will never know the true nascence, the story of the ruthless American pioneer, the man who brought forth such a powerful family the way one brings forth a machine, a lever that multiplies its force as it swings into the new century and the new world. This new world was the America of coal and electricity and the great steel railroads, where hard work and tightly lashed ambition and what today we might call unchecked avarice created the first royalty in a new land. That’s the lineage Liam Metarey was born into, and it’s the lineage that produced that one decision, I think, made in some kind of panic perhaps, but nonetheless made, one snowy afternoon thirty-five years ago.

It’s also the lineage that our own children will carry. And I wonder all the time how this will play out. I see it over and over again in my wife’s letters to newspapers and in her unflagging arguments at dinner parties. There it is again, the reach of families like hers, the solid wall against the onslaught. But I must say I respect it—I respect it greatly—in Clara, and sometimes I think it is evidence of the very wound that makes me love her.

I wonder sometimes what she might ever have seen in me, a boy who in another life might have strived for nothing more than a living wage and weekends. But I suppose the answer to this, again, is that I am like her father. Which is in a way saying that my own father was like hers, and that this is how we recognized each other. Her family produced the great patriarch, and now with each generation, as Trieste might say, we regress closer to the mean. How wistful it makes me feel that I cannot see our girls’ futures. How I long to know they’ll be all right.

Francis Bacon, I might add, was no stranger himself to this kind of longing—this yearning to know the future that’s long been the alchemy of the educated class. It was his tough-minded obsession that finally pulled England into the Scientific Revolution, after all, and his methodology that still guides us today. But I doubt he was any more in love with the physical world than Liam Metarey himself was, nearly four technological centuries later; and this remains a testament to the man I knew. It was Liam Metarey who pointed out to me that the squirrels eat the acorns of the white oaks as soon as they find them, but that they bury the acorns of the red oaks to dig up for winter. A wonderful bit of fact, and one I’ve never found anyone else to know—although if you stand in a field like one of the Metareys’ old ones for any length of time in late autumn, you’ll see immediately that it’s true. Liam Metarey had noticed it entirely on his own, simply by watching. And I’m grateful that my children have in them the history of a man like that. Francis Bacon—the first scientist—would have liked it, too.

I suppose Bacon meant what he said in terms of human inquiry—his revolt against Aristotelian logic, England’s general religiosity, and the suppositions of the early investigative scholars—but it applies to human beings, too, doesn’t it?
If a man shall begin in certainties, he shall end in doubts.
It explains my wife; and Christian, too, probably; and Liam Metarey; and my father, for that matter. I never got the chance to find out about my mother, I suppose; but it probably explains me, as well.

Not long ago, Clara decided to invite Dad, Mr. McGowar, and Trieste over to the house for dinner. She’s good that way, her sense of social groupings, and though I wouldn’t have foreseen the combination myself, I realized as soon as all three of them were in my car that she was right. For one thing, there aren’t many dinner parties outside of Manhattan or a nursing home where not a single guest drives. So they had that in common, at least. In the backseat of the Camry, Trieste took out her own pad—her
Speaker-Sentinel
reporter’s notebook—and wrote out questions for Mr. McGowar. Though as far as I know he can barely even read, this delighted him. I’m not sure how she knew to do it, other than her eccentric gift for people, and I imagine she had to keep the words simple; but if I know Trieste she managed to ask about half a century of cutting rock, about his childhood in Carrol County, about the Great Depression, about the first set of indomitable years for the Yankees, and about the ins and outs of water-cooled saws—all in the time it took us to drive from my old neighborhood to my new one. And that was only a start. In the mirror I could see Mr. McGowar’s grin like a slice of yellow melon. And Dad was obviously enjoying the fact that the two of them were conversing behind him; it left him alone next to me, in this case to make some progress on
A Tale of Two Cities
.