The Tears of Autumn (3 page)

“Why not? They sure as hell don’t trust Washington anymore.”

“What was Nhu like at the party?”

“Polite. I didn’t ask him to his face what he was planning. Wolkowicz didn’t like that.”

“Screw Wolkowicz. All he wants to do is clean out was-tebaskets.”

“Well, he’s expected to know everything that happens in Vietnam,” Christopher said. “He doesn’t see any sense in the things I do, running people like Luong. It upsets the police liaison. In a way, he’s being logical. What good is building democratic institutions to Wolkowicz? Diem and Nhu don’t like it, and they know who’s doing it.”

“What about Luong?” Webster asked. He drained his glass and held it out to Sybille to be refilled.

“Nhu is going to pick him up and kill him. They’ll torture him a little first for appearances’ sake.”

Webster stared at Christopher for a second, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did you warn him off?”

“I was instructed not to,” Christopher said.

Webster put his glasses back on his nose and resumed reading.

Sybille brought them another drink. “It surely is difficult for me not to overhear some of the things you two say to each other,” she said. “Paul, do you want to play tennis with me tomorrow?”

“I’m going to Rome tonight.”

Sybille raised her hands in protest. “But dinner!” she cried.

Christopher told her that his plane didn’t leave until two in the morning, and Sybille went on with what she wanted to say as if he had not spoken to her. He wondered how Webster had found a way to propose to her; Sybille sometimes answered questions a day or a week after they had been asked.

“You don’t know what a coup you’re going to witness,” she said. “Tom has invited Dennis Foley, the President’s
right-hand man.
And I remembered that Harry McKinney is out of town, so I asked his lovely wife, Peggy, who thinks
she’s
the counselor to the embassy instead of her husband. Peggy thought that about herself even when we were at Sweet Briar together. It’s going to be a treat, Paul.”

Webster put Christopher’s report into his briefcase and locked it. “Foley’s brother and I used to put the shot together,” he said. “The brother’s all right. I don’t know this one.”

“You’ve been to lots of meetings with him all week,” Sybille said. “The entire embassy has been meeting with him. Foley came to Paris to tell de Gaulle who’s really running the world. President Kennedy thought he ought to know—only de Gaulle won’t give Foley an appointment. Wonderful JFK! Oh, that man is so sexy. He squeezed this little hand when he was here with the First Lady and I said, ‘I, too, think you’re absolutely irresistible, Mr. President.’”

“What did he say to you, Sybille?”

“He said, ‘How nice to see you,’ and sort of flung me down the reception line toward Jackie. Then she said the same thing and flung me again. They shake hands like a couple of black belts.”

Webster grasped Sybille’s chin. “Sybille,” he said, “let’s not have any of this Southern-belle chatter when Foley gets here. He doesn’t know you.”

“Oh, we’re all going to be very respectful, Tom. I do think this administration has raised the whole tone of American life. Why, Peggy McKinney has been reading Proust in the original French and learning the names of all those new African countries. She says the people of Zimbabwe want rice and respect. I always thought they wanted money.”

“Sybille, how about making this your last martini?” Webster said.

“I have to do something while you and Paul talk about betrayal and torture.”

“We don’t enjoy it,” Webster said.

“Oh,” said Sybille, “I think it makes you happy enough.”

4

Dennis Foley, arriving with Peggy McKinney, did not have the air of a man who expected to have a good time. He nodded to Sybille and to Christopher when he was introduced, but did not offer to shake hands. Foley was a bony man who had played basketball in college, and he had still the manner, self-aware and faintly contemptuous, of the athlete. He had a habit of touching his own body as he talked, running a hand over the waves of stiff black hair on the back of his head, unstrapping his large gold watch and massaging his wrist. His eyes, pale blue with tiny irises, looked beyond the person with whom he was conversing. His face, which changed color rather than expression when he was pleased or annoyed by something that was said to him, was roughened by acne scars. Foley wore a two-button suit with a tin PT-109 clasp on a Sulka tie. Like President Kennedy, he drank daiquiris without sugar and smoked long, thin cigars. He had been talking to Peggy McKinney when he arrived, and he moved her across the vast room, away from the others, to continue the conversation. As Sybille and Christopher watched, Peggy lit Foley’s cigar for him with a table lighter.

“Observe his gestures, listen to his voice,” Sybille said. “He’s turning into a JFK. All these New Frontier people are like that, have you noticed? It must be some royal virus. The closer you are to the throne, the worse the infection. Poor Peggy McKinney—see how she’s trying to get everything just right? Way over here in Paris, all she can do is read Proust and take up touch football. She plays left end in the Bois de Boulogne every Sunday.”

Across the room, Foley nodded brusquely, as if Peggy had told him everything he was interested in hearing. He brought his empty glass to Sybille.

“This is quite a place,” Foley said. “How did you find it?”

“Oh, the French have this idea that Americans will rent
anything,”
Sybille replied.

Foley’s glance ran like an adder’s tongue over Sybille’s face and body, and a corner of his mouth lifted, as if he were rejecting a sexual invitation. “I’ll bet you’re the wittiest woman in Paris,” he said. “I’d like some soda water. Just plain, with an ice cube.”

Sybille took his glass and went to the bar. Foley turned to Christopher. “Webster tells me you’re just back from Saigon,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I understand you talked to Diem and his brother.”

“I saw them at a reception Nhu gave. It was more a matter of overhearing what they said to others.”

Foley took the glass Sybille handed to him and turned his back on her. “I’ve read some of your stuff in the magazine,” he said. “I had a feeling you were holding back. Don’t you write everything you know?”

“Usually. I don’t write what I don’t know.”

“Look, let’s cut the crap. I’ve got eyes—you work with Webster.”

“Do I?”

“I can confirm it in thirty seconds if I have to. You’re fresh from Saigon. You seem to circulate at pretty high levels out there. I’d like to hear your reactions. If they’re worth it, I’ll pass them on to the boss when I see him tomorrow,”

The others overheard. Webster fell silent and put a cold pipe between his teeth. Peggy McKinney’s face, as smooth as an ingenue’s, was suddenly alight with curiosity; though she saw his name listed in the front of a great magazine and read his articles, she had never believed Christopher’s cover story.

“The Americans are talking to themselves,” Christopher said. “The Vietnamese say that the U.S. is working up to a coup to remove the Ngos.”

“We know that the ruling family, and Nhu and his wife especially, are rabidly anti-American. What about that?”

Christopher shrugged.

“You think the U.S. government can work with a man like Diem?” Foley asked.

“Maybe not. He wants to stop the war and get us out of there. His brother is talking to the North. They have relatives in Hanoi, and Ho and Diem know each other from the old days.”

“That’s beautiful. Do you think we can countenance their talking to Ho Chi Minh behind our backs?”

Webster had begun to move across the room toward Foley and Christopher. Foley moved a step closer to Christopher, as if to prevent anyone stepping between them.

“They asked for our help,” he said. “We’ve committed our power. You suggest that we stand by, tolerate corruption and wink at what amounts to Fascism, and let the whole project go down the drain?”

“I don’t know that it would make much difference, except in terms of American domestic politics.”

Foley’s face had gone red. He tapped Christopher’s chest with a blunt forefinger.

“The freedom of a people is involved,” he said, “and that’s all that’s involved. If you think we’re holding on in Vietnam because we’re afraid of losing the next election, you don’t know a hell of a lot about John F. Kennedy or the men around him.”

“I’ve got no answer to that, Mr. Foley.”

Webster put a hand on Foley’s arm. “Sybille says dinner is ready,” he said.

Foley continued to stare into Christopher’s face. “What do you suggest we do out there?” he asked. “Nothing?”

“Sometimes,” Christopher answered, “that’s the best thing to do.”

“Well, buddy, that’s not the style any longer.”

Foley put his glass into Webster’s hand and strode into the dining room with Sybille and Peggy McKinney trailing after him.

5

At dinner, Foley’s mood improved. He entertained Sybille on his right and Peggy McKinney on his left with stories about the President.

“There are dogs and kids, great books and great paintings and good music all over the White House,” he said. “It’s human again, the way it must have been under Franklin Roosevelt. If I want to see the boss, I just go in. You know you’ll come out of there with a decision. The door is wide open on the world. He’s likely to pick up the phone and call some little twirt way down the ladder in the Labor Department. Imagine, you’re forty and gray-faced, wearing a suit from Robert Hall, and for fifteen years you haven’t even been able to get an office with a window. Then—
ring
and ‘Mr. Snodgrass, this is the President. What the hell are you doing about migrant workers today?’ It stirs up the tired blood.” Foley looked around the table at the smiles of his listeners.

“The bureaucracy can use a little of that, believe me,” said Peggy McKinney. “God, how we’ve needed to bring brains and style back into the government. The embassy just
crackles
with ideas and energy.
De l’audace, et encore de l’audace,
—that’s what the foreign policy of a great nation should be.”

“Christopher was just telling me the opposite,” Foley said.

“Oh? Well, so many of Tom’s friends have to be cautious.”

“What do you mean by that?” Sybille asked, with her elbow on the table and her wineglass held against her cheek.

“Oh, Sybille, come along now. We all know about Tom’s friends,” Peggy McKinney said. “Is it true,” she asked Foley, “that the President putts when he thinks? I mean, does he really get out his putter and knock golf balls around the Oval Office? I think that’s so lovely, do say it’s true. I just devour all this gossipy stuff. You really don’t have to humor me.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve just spent a week listening to Couve de Murville. Believe me, you’re a welcome change,” Foley said. “Yes, the boss putts occasionally. He’ll do it at the damnedest times. The other day a couple of us came in with a recommendation. It was serious stuff. A decision had to be made—the kind of decision that would drive me, for instance, into agony. But his mind is like crystal. He’s right on top of everything. He knew the situation—
felt
it, if you will, better than any of us. We gave him some new information. He absorbed it. We gave him the options. He didn’t say a word at first. He got up, grabbed his putter, lined up a shot, and tapped it across the rug. We all watched the ball roll. Somehow—this will sound corny, but it’s true—we all suddenly saw that golf ball as the symbol of the fate of a nation. Not a very big nation, not our nation, but a nation. The ball ran straight into the cup. ‘Okay,’ said the boss. ‘Go.’ There’s never been another like him.”

Sybille turned to Christopher. “Paul has just seen a president out in Vietnam,” she said. “A
little
president. Do tell, Paul.”

“Oh,” said Peggy. “Diem or Ziem, or whatever his name is. Horrid man.”

“I’m interested,” Foley said.

“There’s not much to tell,” Christopher said. “I stood by while he talked to somebody else. Or, rather, listened. The other man was an American.”

“Who’s that?” Foley asked.

“Carson Wendell. He’s a Republican from California.”

“I know about him,” Foley said. “What poison is he spreading?”

“I don’t think you want to hear it, Mr. Foley.”

“Now I do,” Foley said.

“You may not like this,” Christopher said. “Wendell hates you people. He said Kennedy ran a dishonest, dishonorable campaign in 1960—lying about a missile gap that didn’t exist and inventing a USIA report that was supposed to show American prestige abroad was at an all-time low.”

“Losers have to have some excuse,” Foley said. “What else?”

“Wendell told Nhu that Kennedy wasn’t elected President —Nixon was. He claimed there’s evidence that votes were stolen in Illinois and a couple of other states where there was a very small difference in the popular vote. The Democrats are in the White House by fraud, according to Wendell. He was very circumstantial, citing numbers and precincts to Nhu.”

Peggy McKinney beat her fist on Sybille’s tablecloth. “I’ve never heard such slander,” she cried. “That man’s passport ought to be taken away from him! I mean,
Christ.
...”

Foley unwrapped a cigar. “What did Nhu say to all that?” he asked.

“Nothing. I had a feeling he’d heard it all before.”

Peggy McKinney opened her mouth to speak. Foley laid a hand on her arm. “People like Wendell and Nhu don’t count,” he said. “Power counts—and the right people are in power. I think we’ll stay in power for quite a while.” He grinned for the first time all evening, and sipped his wine. “In fact, if I can use one of the Republicans’ more famous phrases, I think Mr. Nixon can look forward to at least twenty years of treason.”

“Wit is back in the White House,” said Peggy McKinney with tears of laughter in her eyes. “Let’s drink to that.”

6

Sybille led her guests into the salon for coffee. Peggy McKinney stood with Foley, her feet placed at right angles like a model’s. She wore a pink Chanel suit, pearls, and a half-dozen golden bracelets on her right wrist. With her thin, nervous body and her bold features, she might have been taken for a Frenchwoman who had affairs. That, she told Foley, was the impression she had cultivated until the last election; the Kennedys had made her want to be an American again.