On Green Dolphin Street (35 page)

Mary hated the people at the funeral, the old colleagues and friends with their good intentions and fond memories; the walking sticks of the elderly were not inconvenience enough for their continuing possession of life. She had been persuaded to believe that at someone’s death their true worth would be made clear to the world, that a summing up of their life would officially value and appreciate all that they had been, leaving them secure in history’s esteem.

Yet in the church off Primrose Hill, where people shuffled in from the rain over the tiled floor, shaking umbrellas, exchanging stoical pleasantries, there was no final reckoning, no true audit of the soul. Elizabeth’s brother looked tired; her oldest friend could not be there. The eulogy, delivered by the senior partner at her medical practice, was inadequately prepared and dull. The mourners trudged out, many of them declining the invitation to return for lunch on the grounds that they had trains to
catch, dogs to feed, work to do; Mary wanted to stop them and send them back inside, sit them down and lecture them, to ask if they could not see how terrible and unfair was this thing that had happened. Instead she played the hostess at her father’s house, dispensing casserole and wine, lightly accepting offered consolations, but embarrassed by the terrible meekness of the old people, who were powerless to stop the disaster that was coming for them as well.

Frank kept his head down as the debate proceeded, scribbling notes, then hammering at the typewriter. He would leave the opening paragraph till last, in case something dramatic happened, but he already had a draft of it: “The first televised presidential debate, which took place in Chicago at 8:30 p.m. CST last night, was a genteel affair with no clear winner. Vice President Nixon had the edge in such policy debate as took place, but Senator Kennedy, by sharing a platform with the senior man and not being outgunned, showed himself a worthy candidate. He laid to rest any doubts on the ‘experience’ question.”

Frank barely had time to glance at the screen, but when he did, he saw Nixon talking about what he called “the Whydowse,” implying that he had spent much time in its offices and corridors, while Kennedy looked on, head to one side, half smiling, as though slightly puzzled by his opponent, but hugely indulgent of him.

When Frank spoke to Rewrite in New York, they showed the surly lack of interest that was their house style, asking “How’re you spelling that, bud?” after any proper name, until Frank bluntly reminded them that deadline was approaching.

On the monitor in his room, unseen by Frank as he scribbled more notes on farms and taxes, Nixon wiped sweat from his chin. As the television reporters asked their prepared questions, Kennedy addressed himself grandly to the watching nation, while Nixon talked at his opponent, accumulating small points at his expense.

Kennedy gazed into Frank’s room, statesmanlike and detached, from the unseen monitor, while Nixon’s sweat glands poured out invalid excrescence
through the streaked Lazy Shave of his hospital-reduced jowls. But Frank did not see him; he saw only his own fingers as they smacked the chrome-ringed
qwerty
and
hjkl
through the paper and carbons onto the rattling inky platen of the Smith-Corona.

“Drink, lady?” said Ray. “It’s on the house.”

“Thank you,” said Mary.

As Ray took away her glass and brought a new one, she looked back at the screen, where the debate was coming to an end. Kennedy looked extraordinarily composed, she thought, for the pursuer, the junior partner. She could never understand why he was considered so handsome, with his pudgy face and narrow eyes weighed down by permanent bags, but he certainly looked elegant, whereas poor Nixon looked like a clerk who had been pulled out of his office late at night to stand in a police line.

The broadcast ended and she had caught no sight of Frank. He had promised to be back in New York the next day, so there was only the night to pass, she thought, as she went out onto Park Avenue.

Back in her hotel room, she telephoned Charlie at Number 1064.

“When you comin’ home, Mrs. van der Linden?” said Dolores. “Mr. van der Linden, I don’t know where he is, but he’s not lookin’ good. He tell me not to worry, but I tell you his hands is shakin’ when he goes to work in the mornin’.”

Mary picked at a loose thread on the bedcover. “I’ll be back on Wednesday. I’m taking the after-lunch train. Tell Charlie I’ve booked that restaurant he likes, near Dupont Circle, for dinner. I’m paying and—”

“Another thing, that lady telephoned from England. From the kids’ school. She wants you to call when you have the time. She says it’s not urgent, but she sounded—”

“All right. I’ll call tomorrow when—”

“And your papa called. He sends his love.”

“Thank you, Dolores.”

Mary replaced the receiver.

There is a battle going on for my soul, she thought, and I cannot just give it to the highest bidder. I have an interest in it too; I am player as well as arbiter. In Frank I have found something beyond me, beyond my understanding; this is where some irreducible core of me is destined to be, even if not in this life.

She took out the notebook in which she had begun to write her memoir, her novel, whatever she had most recently called it. There were about thirty pages of reflections and straight narration; there were also descriptions of the places she had been and—she had to concede—slightly incoherent accounts of her state of mind.

There were brief notes of dreams as well, though she dreamed the same thing night after night: that she was lifting her mother in her arms, carrying her weight and laying it down softly—on a bed, in a car or in a grave. Her mother was alive, but Mary’s momentary delight at this discovery was dashed when it turned out that Elizabeth was also dying, always dying, never well again.

She wrote in her book, “I have a duty to many people and somehow I will discharge it. I have a duty also to some continuing part of myself. I have discovered this essential identity through my feeling for Frank because that emotion has ripped open my self-protective layers. I see now what I am. It’s not a question of ‘happiness.’ I don’t value my own more—or much less—than anyone else’s. It’s something more urgent than that, and more lasting; it’s a question of being faithful to an essence.”

She scratched a few words out: it was not right. She wanted to elevate the dilemma above the mundane distinction between selfishness and altruism, but the words on that higher plane were hard to find.

She tried from a different angle. “I’ve heard people talk of the agony of moral choice,” she wrote, “the anguish of life-shaping dilemmas. Well, I feel agony and anguish all right, often at the same time, so they make me tremble (though not weep). But I have never had much sense of choice. To have him, be with him, see him, be part of him is a natural imperative, because in some way he is me, my inner self. It’s not just him that I yearn for when I call. It’s myself, my previous life, my next life.

“So in fact there is surprisingly little choice. The possibility of not calling does not exist.”

When Frank had finished writing his article, he telephoned the desk in New York to see if they had any queries and, once given the all-clear, went back into the studio where many people he had not seen before were thronging excitedly about the platform. The reporters who had listened to the debate outside had gathered to compare notes, while most of Channel 2’s employees seemed to be joining in the party.

Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s swarthy press secretary, was pushing through the crowds with a euphoric smile, trying to reach Don Hewitt on the other side of the studio.

“It’s a triumph,” he said to anyone who would listen. “We never dreamed it could go this well. The polls are giving it to us by two to one.”

“But, Pierre, on the tax issue—”

“Forget the tax issue. Jack came here tonight as the underdog and he leaves as the front-runner. Nixon’s got it all to do.”

“Didn’t you think Nixon scored some points later on when—”

“Did you see the way the guy looked? Did you?”

“No, I got it through the audio feed.”

“He looked terrified, like a rabbit in the headlights. He was sweating. It was Jack who looked like the vice president. Nixon looked like someone being interrogated. And then that reporter Vanocur got him with that question, you know when Ike was asked if Nixon had come up with any policy idea in eight years as veep? And Ike said, ‘Give me another year and I might think of one.’ Vanocur sank his chances right there.”

Frank stayed close by. He discounted most of what Salinger was saying as wishful thinking; it was quite clear to him that Kennedy had scored no decisive points in the debate. On the other hand, something was worrying him.

Bob Finch, Nixon’s campaign manager, was giving an interview on the other side of the room in which he also claimed victory for his man,
pointing out that the vice president had scored on the questions of farms—Jack Kennedy had clearly never visited a farm except to canvass support in Minnesota—on schools, on subversion and on the question of a candidate’s age. All this was true, Frank thought, but there was no smile on Finch’s face.

He went back to the Democratic side, where Salinger was in full flow, rebuking a reporter’s skepticism, still with a smile. “You think the guy in the bar in Madison, Wisconsin, looking up at some fuzzy Admiral TV set is going to give a damn about the fine print of the budget? He wants to see a president on his screen. He wants to see a man look confident, like a naval hero in World War Two, not some poor guy writhing and sweating up like that, all desperate to please. I tell you, mister, you just saw the next president of the United States walk out that door and his name is John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Frank went over to a huddle of reporters at the side of the room. They had all shared his own view of the proceedings, except those who had watched it on a screen, who believed that Kennedy had made by far the better impression.

Frank decided to go back to his room and read through what he had written to see if he should add or subtract a paragraph. He found Pierre Salinger coming the other way.

“Hi, Frank. How’re you doing? Enjoy the show?”

“Sure.”

“So. Whaddaya think? Show me your copy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What did you say about it? Let me have a look. The other guys let me see.” He began to tug at the carbon copies sticking out of Frank’s jacket pocket.

Frank looked at him steadily. “Fuck off,” he said.

Mary made dinner in Frank’s apartment the next night, linguine with scallopini, a dish she knew he liked at the Grand Ticino; afterward she
made zabaglione, protesting that without a copper pan it would not taste right. Frank had drunk bourbon all through the preparation of the meal and was in high spirits by the time it reached the table.

“I was worried,” he said. “I thought I’d screwed up until I read the others. Russ Baker in the
Times
, even Joe Alsop in the
Post
who thinks he’s the biggest noise on the Hill, they both called it a draw. You just couldn’t see how badly Nixon came across unless you watched it on TV.”

Mary smiled at him as she carried the food over to the table. Frank was in full flow. “Have you noticed, you can always tell a bullshitter by the way he introduces his own name into a story. Like Alsop, he says, ‘So the President called me at home and he said, “Joe,” he said, “I’m sorry to call you at home, Joe, but you’re the only man who can help.” ’ ”

He drained the straw-covered bottle of Chianti into their glasses and opened another one. “Come and sit here,” he said, when he had finished. He put his arm round Mary, as she sat poised on his knee, then slid his other hand up her thigh.

“Zabaglione,” she said, standing up and straightening her clothes.

Frank laughed. “I love the way you do that thing with your skirt.”

“What’s that?”

“The kind of shaking down the hem in that schoolmarmy way.”

He liked to watch her in the morning; even when she appeared fully dressed and on the point of leaving the apartment, she would suddenly lift the skirt to refasten a stocking or straighten the hem of the petticoat, then tug down the skirt itself again with a reproachful, wriggling movement. She could never be ready enough for the day, he thought, for all its eventualities. Mary, Mary: what was she expecting out there?

She brought the dessert to the table and stirred the pan over a candle.

“Just to make you feel you’re in one of those Village places you so dislike,” she said.

Frank stretched out his legs and watched her. It was a miracle that this woman had come for him from the other side of the world, from that antique world of England, kings and fog, and that they had found each other. He had not known what was inside his head until she revealed it to him.

He took their wineglasses into the bedroom where the warm air was pumped from the furnace hundreds of feet below them; it was hot enough for him to undress her without her having to reach for cover, and she let him take his private pleasures of her. For once, Frank felt sufficiently euphoric that no shadow hung over him, no knowledge that the indulgence of his feeling for her would end. The drink made him feel powerful, as though he could make love to her indefinitely; he heard her sigh and call out to him. Perhaps at last, he thought, he had touched the core of her.

He took her face within his large hands, the hands with which he had dragged himself, almost literally he sometimes thought, from boyhood, the hands with which he had fashioned himself a life; he raked his fingers through her hair, down to the skull, as his body filled hers. All the way, he thought, I will go all the way, till I find her; and with her head between his hands he too let out a cry, because he felt pity on her soul.

Chapter 17