Sweet Land Stories (15 page)

Clearly, she didn’t.

But I think that can be stopped, he said. I think there’s a way to see that it doesn’t happen.

She was silent. Then she mumbled something that he couldn’t hear.

I beg your pardon?

Deport me, Agent Molloy. Send me anywhere. Send me to Devil’s Island. I’m ready. I want nothing more to do with this place. I mean, why here rather than anywhere else? It’s all the same, it’s all horribly awful.

Molloy waited.

Oh Lord, she said, they always win, don’t they. They are very skillful. It didn’t come out quite as we planned—we are such amateurs—but even if it had, I suppose they would have known how to handle it. I just thought maybe this could restore them, put them back among us. It would be a kind of shock treatment if they felt the connection, for even just a moment, that this had something to do with them, the gentlemen who run things? That’s all I wanted. What redemption for little Chrissie if she could put a tincture of shame into their hearts. Of course I know they didn’t give our gardener’s son the asthma he was born with. And after all they didn’t force his family to live where the air smells like burning tires. And I know Daddy and his exalted friends are not in their personal nature violent and would never lift a hand against a child. But, you see, they are configured gentlemen. Am I wrong to want to include you, Agent Molloy? Are you not one of the configured gentlemen?

Configured in what way?

Configured to win. And fuck all else.

Her Marine reached over and held her hand.

What do you think? Chrissie Stevens said. Am I making sense? Or am I the family disgrace my father says I am?

The both of them were looking at Molloy now. They made a handsome couple.

Would you like some refreshment, Agent Molloy? There’s a bell over there—they bring tea.

BACK AT HIS
desk in Washington, Molloy caught up on the cases that he’d left when the call came in about the dead child in the Rose Garden. One of the cases, a possible racketeering indictment, was really hot, but as he sat there he found his mind wandering. His office was a glass-partitioned cubicle. It looked out on the central office of lined-up desks where the secretaries and less senior agents worked away. There was a nice hum of energy coming through to him as phones rang and people went briskly about their business, but Molloy couldn’t avoid feeling that he was looking at a roomful of children. Certainly everyone out there was at least twenty years younger. Younger, leaner, less tired.

This is what he did: He put in a call to Peter Herrick at the Office of Domestic Policy and quietly told him, though not in so many words, that if the parents of the dead child were not released by the INS and allowed to return home, he, Molloy, would see to it that the entire incident became known to every American who watched television or read a newspaper.

Molloy then sat at his computer and composed a letter of resignation.

The last thing he did before he turned out the lights and went home to his wife was to write, by hand, a letter to Roberto Guzman’s parents. He said in the letter that Roberto’s grave might be unmarked but that he rested in peace at the Arlington National Cemetery among others who had died for their country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E. L. DOCTOROW
’s work has been published in thirty languages. His novels include
City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate,
and
The Waterworks.
Among his honors are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives and works in New York.

Also by E. L. Doctorow

WELCOME TO HARD TIMES

BIG AS LIFE

THE BOOK OF DANIEL

RAGTIME

DRINKS BEFORE DINNER (play)

LOON LAKE

LIVES OF THE POETS

WORLD’S FAIR

BILLY BATHGATE

JACK LONDON, HEMINGWAY,
AND THE CONSTITUTION (essays)

THE WATERWORKS

CITY OF GOD

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by E. L. Doctorow

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

The following stories were originally published in
The New Yorker
:
”A House in the Plains” (June 18, 2001), “Baby Wilson” (March 25, 2002), “Jolene” (December 23, 2002, and December 30, 2002), and “Walter John Harmon”
(May 12, 2003). Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2003 by E. L. Doctorow.

“Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden” was originally published in
The Virginia Quarterly Review,
Spring 2004 issue. Copyright © 2004 by E. L. Doctorow.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doctorow, E. L.

[Short stories. Selections]

Sweet Land Stories / E. L. Doctorow

p. cm.

Contents: A house on the plains—Baby Wilson—Jolene : a life—Walter John Harmon—Child, dead, in the rose garden.

1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title

PS3554.O3F58 2004

813′.54—dc22 2003058780

eISBN: 978-1-58836-406-7

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