On Green Dolphin Street (39 page)

“Oh, I imagine so,” said Mary brightly. “Looks as though it’ll go on all night. The television just said the tide was starting to turn.”

“I hope not,” said Frank.

“Why? Do you want Kennedy to win?”

“I don’t want the wrong headline. You know, another ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ fiasco.”

“Who did you vote for?”

He was standing very close to her in the crowd; she could smell a faint aroma of toothpaste and bourbon on his breath as he leaned toward her and looked hard into her eyes. “That’s my secret. See you later.”

The cherry-and-white taxi was waiting outside. Within fifteen minutes Frank was going up in the elevator to his newspaper’s office on L Street, near the junction of 21st. There were a dozen people clustered around the television set, with cups of coffee, a few bottles of Michelob and some bags of potato chips balanced on the typewriters and littered across the desks.

Frank had already written eight articles for the next day’s edition, though five of them were in the B-matter pile—a ten-page alternate section on the winning candidate, giving details of everything he had done or said since infancy, except in the matter of his love affairs, on which the paper was silent. He had also contributed to an editorial that welcomed Nixon (or Kennedy) and pointed out that although it had been a close race, the paper had always believed that Kennedy (or Nixon) would ultimately prevail.

Frank took a beer from the fridge and joined the group in front of the television, which reported that Kennedy was only two votes short of victory in the electoral college.

“Where’s Cordell?” he said.

“He’s at Joe Alsop’s,” said Maria, the office manager. “He’s written his piece and he’s not coming back. That kid in Illinois called. Said it’s in the bag for Kennedy.”

“Hmm,” said Frank. “Depends how many Daley can make up in Chicago. What’s happening in California? Has Scott called?”

“Yup. He’s says it’s stacking up for Kennedy.”

“So it’s all over then?”

“Yeah, provided Scotty’s right. They’re not that far into the count yet. And, Frank, you need to call Bill Stevens in New York.”

Frank dialed the number. “Hey, Bill. How’s it going?”

“Pretty good. I’m fighting off Bob Levine, who wants to go with ‘Kennedy Elected.’ ”

“How long can you wait?”

“Forty-five. What’s happening there?”

“Everyone’s watching TV. Anything from Ike?”

“No. Red’s still hanging on there. Says Ike’s fuming at Nixon for screwing up. And at Kennedy for buying votes.”

“Sounds nice. You need any more from me?”

“Any more from you, Frank, and you’ll have written the whole goddamn paper. We just need to hear from Scotty one more time.”

“Why isn’t he in L.A.?”

“Because he’s one perverse son of a bitch. He thinks he can read the poll quicker there. He knows someone. Also he’s pissed that we asked Julie Pereira to cover Nixon when you pulled out and—”

“I did not pull out, Bill, I—”

“Okay, okay, Frank, I need this line now. Call back in one hour.”

Frank smiled as he replaced the receiver. He had never heard Bill Stevens enjoying himself so much. He took another beer from the fridge and helped answer the phones; he too began to feel elated by the process that was taking place. He liked the idea that the spread-eagled states, for once, made up one country; that the young man in San Diego punched the same ballot as the old woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He had felt this about his country when he went to train at Fort Benning in Georgia, where, for the first time in his life, he heard a New England accent. In the Pacific jungles he had experienced the federal unity with painful keenness, when his life depended on the speed of reaction shown by men from Detroit, Maine or Alabama. In peacetime he tended to forget about these places.

He had voted for Kennedy in the end, even though he distrusted him. People said he roused their Democratic ardor less than Adlai Stevenson, that he was too cold, too rich and too dispassionate. Frank felt all this to be true, but thought he saw in him also some gambler’s fire, which appealed to him. He felt that Kennedy, through his experience in war and
his chronic illness, was familiar with extreme choices and would not fail to risk everything if he believed that that was the only way in the Russian troubles that lay ahead. Nixon, he believed, for all that he admired his mastery of detail and pitied him his awkwardness in the world, was a coward. Now that victory for Kennedy was so near, Frank found his journalist’s indifference begin to give way to the thrust of elation.

An hour later he again called Bill Stevens, who told him they were going with the front-page headline “Kennedy Elected.”

Maria opened a bottle of Four Roses and the dozen people in the office, whatever they had voted, drank to the new young president out of paper cups from the water dispenser. Then the telephone rang again.

It was the kid from Illinois saying the state was now too close to call.

Frank hung up. “Illinois,” he said. “You know it was in the bag? Guess what. It’s out of the bag.”

“Shall I call New York?” said Maria.

“It’s too late,” said Frank, as the telephone went again.

A young sub-editor on the other side of the office reached it first. He listened and nodded without saying anything. Eventually he put his hand across the mouthpiece and spoke to the room, “It’s Scott from San Francisco. California’s now running neck and neck.”

“I’m leaving,” said Frank. He scribbled the telephone number at 1064 on a piece of paper and handed it to Maria. “This is where I’ll be if anyone needs me.”

There were three cabs on permanent call outside and Frank took one back to the van der Lindens’ party, which had degenerated in his absence. There seemed, despite the lateness of the hour, to be more people there than before. In among the crowd Frank saw Charlie slumped on a sofa, raging incoherently at the television screen. The woman with the orange beads, whose name he had not caught, was standing beneath the stairs passionately kissing a man that Frank was fairly certain was not her husband. Duncan Trench and the Irish diplomat stood in exactly the same positions as before, though both seemed to have blurred with the passage of the hours, becoming disheveled and inconsequential, as though each was struggling to remember why Trench was still jabbing his finger
against the Irishman’s chest. The sitting room was filled with half-eaten plates of food and packed ashtrays, but from behind Charlie’s improvised bar Dolores was still doggedly pouring quantities of liquor over ice she shoveled from a plastic garbage pail beneath the table.

As Frank accepted a tumbler of bourbon, it occurred to him that he too was drunk, a state which did not excite in him Trench-like aggression, or despair like Charlie’s, but made him wonder where his hostess might be.

He walked through to the kitchen. There was no one in there among the debris, but as he turned to leave, the door to the backyard opened and Mary came inside.

“I was just getting some fresh air,” she said.

“You okay? Feeling a little …” He raised his eyebrows.

She smiled. “Mmm. I don’t know how it happened.”

“Liquor is how it normally happens.”

“And you?”

“Me too. It’s been a long night. And we still don’t have a president. I think I’d better step outside as well.”

Mary stood aside to let him pass.

“No,” he said, taking her elbow. “I think you need to sober up some more.”

They walked down to the end of the grass, where they could see the rusty children’s swing dangling in the darkness. Mary felt her heels sink into the lawn; her step was a little uncertain. They turned and looked back toward the house, where the kitchen window was orange and steaming.

Frank sighed. “A big night for America,” he said.

“Yes.” Mary looked across the fence, over the trees and into the darkness of the rudderless capital. “Are you excited?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I feel the world has stopped.”

Frank took her head delicately between his large hands. “Your beautiful hair,” he said. He touched her lips, her very three-dimensional lips, with the tip of his tongue.

“When will we know?” she said.

“Tomorrow. Sometime. That’s today now, I guess.”

They stood for a moment, her body pressed in against his. When she closed her eyes the earth turned too fast, and she opened them again to see his eyes so close to hers in the darkness that she could make out the sharp lashes and the marks of the faded freckles beneath them.

“I love you,” he said.

“Too much.”

She leaned against the frame of the swing and felt his hands on her hips as she had felt them in the press of the hallway some hours before. That had been a prefiguring, a shadow of this moment, but she did not know if this one was more real. His hands went slowly up her thighs, lifting the skirt with practiced care. She sighed again, but kept her eyes open for fear of the spinning world; and she liked to see his struggle to contain his desires beneath civilized movements; she liked the sense of her power over him of which it was evidence. He stood up tall and kissed her on the mouth at the same time that his hand slid in between her legs, so that her gasp was stifled in his mouth. She squirmed in his grip, but he would not release his mouth or hand and her movements intensified the pleasure of captivity.

“Not here,” she said, pulling back her head at last.

“It’s too late.”

He sat on the child’s swing and guided her hand to his belt, then to his lap; then he took her face once more in his hands and pushed back the hair behind her ears. “Go on,” he whispered into one of them. “The world’s stopped after all. Go on.”

Dolores removed the smoking cigarette from Charlie’s hand as she slid his arm from her shoulder and dropped him onto his bed. She pulled off his shoes and rolled him over on his side. He seemed to be asleep already. Dolores went over to the window to draw the curtains. She paused for a moment to look out over the backyard, and at the end of the grass, next to
the children’s swing, she could make out two figures joined in some desperate embrace; but it was too dark to see who they were before, with a swish of cotton interlined material, they were gone.

Mary went back to the party, while Frank smoked a cigarette on the swing. He let it rock a little back and forth beneath his weight. The sense of exhausted gratification lasted only for a minute; by the time she had straightened her clothes and begun to walk away, he wanted more of Mary, to be buried in her body always: nothing else would do.

He carefully checked his belt, fly and shirt, ran a hand across his hair and straightened his tie. Back in the house, he went to the children’s bathroom on the upstairs landing and in the bright light above the mirror, above the plastic mugs and Donald Duck brushes, scrutinized himself more carefully for signs of the adultery. Down in the hall he called another cab and, while he waited, lent a hand with clearing up the wreckage of the sitting room. There were still a dozen or so revelers, listening to Frank Sinatra, drinking coffee or, in a belated attempt at moderation, beer.

The front-door bell rang. “Cab for Renzo?”

He kissed his hostess farewell politely on the cheek and shook hands with Edward Renshaw, who was also on the point of leaving.

“Good party,” said Frank.

“Absolutely,” said Edward. “A pity there’s still no outcome. ‘That each man holds his loved one near / The nation sleeps but cannot breathe / Its weak heart failing in the night.’ ”

“Sure,” said Frank, as he walked up the lit path of Number 1064. “And young Lochinvar is come out of the west. Or Boston, at least.”

Halfway back to his hotel, he told the cabdriver to stop.

“Go to the White House, will you?”

Frank paid the driver and stood outside, looking into the lit windows, where he pictured the anxious staff pacing the corridors while the elderly leader slept away his final night of heirless power. The army officer who had been his commander in chief, the fatherly golfer who had swung his
leg quite naturally over the side of the jeep, changed into a suit (without ever looking quite at home in it) and strolled into the White House … It was curious, he thought, that this ordinary soldier, rather than his brilliant or ambitious aides, the scholars, sharks and specialists, should have had the imperial glory, that in his round and dimpled face America had chosen to see itself embodied. Presumably he didn’t give a damn who followed him; secretly, he probably would have voted for Kennedy out of sheer irritation at the inauthentic, Godley-esque presence who had been beneath his feet for eight years.

Turning from the lit cupola, Frank began to walk through the cold and vacant streets of the capital. A feeling of despair enshrouded him. He had grown up with Eisenhower, then in the last months of the presidency his own sense of what was possible had drastically expanded. With the old guy went the limited dreams whose nourishment had once been enough. He went slowly up Pennsylvania Avenue to the west, a reverse presidential procession, toward the river; and on the bridge he paused and looked down for a long time into the water.

He thought of Roxanne, and Tilly, his Annamite girl, of whether they hated him or, perhaps worse, just shrugged at his memory. He felt alone.

Trucks and taxis occasionally went past, but he barely heard them. He could not seal Mary to himself; no flagrant act could force a union; no words could defeat the centrifugal force of love—away, always away, back into smaller particles, back into the darkness where he had dared to find it.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a gray-faced bum, a weary grandfather of the streets, asking him for money. Frank roused himself and felt in his pocket for a bill.

“Know who won the election, pal?” he said.

The man looked at him madly and backed away, muttering.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Frank.

He handed him a dollar and walked into Georgetown as the sun was starting to come up behind him, edging the dormant buildings with hopeless light.

Back at the hotel he slept for two hours in his room, then turned on the
television to discover that Nixon had conceded. He slept again, awoke, took a shower, shaved and put on clean clothes. It was ten o’clock when he walked out onto M Street to find some breakfast; he bought a copy of his own paper from a vending machine on the corner. It was a late extra edition that must have gone to press at about six, he calculated; the headline on the front page said, “Kennedy Apparent Victor, but Losing Votes in Two Key States.” He pushed open the door of a diner and breathed the fug of bacon, boiling coffee and fresh cigarettes.