America America (11 page)

I nodded.

“Dunleavy,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Aberdeen Red was marking off the corners of the landing strip now. We watched Mrs. Metarey make the final turn for her approach.

He smiled. “I guess that was silly of me. You don’t know what Dunleavy is, do you?”

“No, sir.”

He patted me on the shoulder again. “It’s a school,” he said. “Dunleavy Academy. You’ll know that soon enough. It’s a very fine and exclusive school. I went there myself. And so did Andrew—for his first couple of years, anyway. If you impress this fellow next week,” he said, “you’ll have a chance to go, too.”

“I will?” I bent to the grass and wiped my hands again. Aberdeen Red had distracted me. At first I thought he had said
task
. I’ve arranged a
task
for you.

“And don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll give you a few pointers before you meet with him. Just so you know what to expect.” He tossed another stone. “You certainly deserve it,” he added, “as much as anyone.”

IV

O
N A RAVISHING SUMMER AFTERNOON
in the second half of that month, with three TV cameras, a dozen radio microphones, and two rows of print reporters in front of him, and his wife and two teenaged sons next to him, Henry Bonwiller, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, announced to the country that he would seek the Democratic nomination for president.

Now, of course, the Senator is known for what happened later; but this was early on, well before Anodyne Energy or anything else, and I can only say that in the days that followed he seemed to light the air he walked through. When he arrived in the morning, I could see the staff standing at the windows to catch glimpses of him. When he walked in town in the afternoon, stopping for kids to pet Uncle Dan, a policeman had to keep the traffic moving.

His ring of influence immediately grew wider. Early in the summer, President Nixon announced that he was going to allow trade with Communist China, and not even a full day later, there was Senator Bonwiller speaking about it to CBS Evening News outside the Metarey work barn, where he and Eric Sevareid stood next to a new John Deere combine. And there they both were again that very evening, on my parents’ television set, while Mr. McGowar and my father watched from the living room couch and my mother looked in from the kitchen, a dishrag and a wet pot in her hands.

“China—” Mr. McGowar coughed. In his hands was an apple-sized hunk of quartz that he was cleaning with his handkerchief. “That’s—” He took a long breath. “That’s—” He coughed again. “—Trouble.”

“Nah,” said my father. “For the unions it’s great. Think of all those millions of Chinese.” He took a drink from his Pabst Blue Ribbon. “Buying our stuff. They’ll buy Deere and New Holland by the thousands.” He took another drink. “They don’t have that kind of thing over there, Eugene.” Then he whistled the opening of “Cockles and Mussels.”

Mr. McGowar looked pained but didn’t answer. He just waved one hand at the TV and with the other went on polishing.

“Hmm,” said my mother from the kitchen doorway, “you know, Senator Bonwiller’s a handsome man on camera. Did I see you for just a sec in the background, Cor?”

“No, Mom. You didn’t.”

At the end of June, the Supreme Court ruled that
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
could publish the Pentagon Papers, and President Nixon called for the arrest of Daniel Ellsberg, who immediately went into hiding. That Monday, Henry Bonwiller stood up on the Senate floor and called Ellsberg a national hero. He read page after page of the Pentagon Papers into the
Congressional Record
, recording for posterity that the government had bombed Laos and attacked North Vietnam and yet had denied both to the public. The Senate chambers were thrown into commotion and he was nearly shouted down. The incident didn’t make it onto the evening news but I knew about it because it was covered in the
Post
and the
Times
themselves, and in the
Courier-Express
, all of which I’d begun to read now on my own.

I’d been reading newspapers now, in fact, ever since the morning I’d met Glenn Burrant. In those days Liam Metarey subscribed to dozens of them, which I picked up for him every afternoon from the Saline post office and arranged on café sticks in the library. Since school had ended, I’d started full-time at Aberdeen West, and my last job every Friday afternoon was to bring all the old papers over to the Saline Public Library. But every day now, after I was done with my shift, I would sit down on the side porch and read one or two of them myself. They were still last week’s editions, most of them, because they had to be mailed to us; but I found that I consumed them eagerly. I liked it, somehow. This was a surprise to me, that I took this kind of pleasure from knowing about the world. Around my parents I felt I had secrets.

By then I’d also taken to watching for the arrival of Glenn Burrant himself, who’d been visiting the house almost every day since the news about the Senator. Anytime there was an important meeting now, or a position statement coming out, or an appearance by Henry Bonwiller, the yellow Corvair would sprint down the entrance drive, squeaking and bouncing on the gravel. Perhaps because of the proximity of the
Courier-Express
, Glenn obviously had a privileged relationship with Aberdeen West, and he was allowed to wait outside while the meetings took place. I’d made a point of letting him know that I’d read his article, and though he changed the subject I could tell that he was pleased. He would wave at me as I went about my work. While Liam Metarey and the campaign staff deliberated inside, Glenn would rest on the iron bench in the shade of the bur oak, one leg up beside him on the seat like a packed duffel; and when the meetings broke, he was first to get the scoop. I liked the way he stood when he was summoned—as though he were these men’s unlikely equal—pulling a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket and a pen from behind his ear as he labored up the three steps to the porch, pausing at the front door to stomp out his cigarette and then to comb his hair in the glass. Much of what impressed me was his brusque manner and how big he was—when he zipped his nylon Windbreaker it bulged like a sausage casing; but it was also because he greeted me with a conspiratorial intimacy whenever he gave me the beat-up old Corvair to bring down to the garage. No other adult took me in like that.

I’d been given the job of parking cars now, too. And among the cars that were appearing at the estate, the Corvair couldn’t possibly have been more of an aberration. It sprang up like a jack-in-the-box whenever Glenn stepped out of it, and the driver’s seat was squashed so flat I felt like I was sitting on the floor when I drove it. But even among all the Cadillacs and Lincolns and Mercedes-Benzes, Liam Metarey gave it a high priority. There was an order I had to follow when I brought all the cars out after a meeting broke up, and he asked me to always keep it among the first few that I delivered, its windshield washed and a new booklet of state toll coupons clipped behind its visor.

Glenn would accept my shutting of his creaky door with an elaborate flourish of his mitt-sized hand—the hand that wrote for the
Courier-Express
!—then crank down the window on the passenger side—his own was stuck shut—and streak up the curved driveway, the chassis listing to the left. At the bend under the sycamores, the listing would level off momentarily, and a split second later his cigarette would fly out the far window onto the gravel. I would walk up to collect it.

I mention Glenn not only because he was the one who first started me reading the newspaper, but also because he was as astute as anyone who ever knew the Bonwiller campaign, from inside or out. Yet I still don’t know how he figures in what happened. Was he in the end a friend to the Senator and to the Metareys? I don’t even know
that
. Or was he in fact a friend more to the truth—a moral man who, like many such men and women, gave little such impression? If I look too closely at all of it, in fact, the whole thing begins to shimmer—and Glenn Burrant, as much as anyone, remains a mystery. After all these years, I don’t know what I would have done if I had known, or at least suspected, what I think he knew.

But that house: it was irresistible. On the one hand, here was Henry Bonwiller, striding across the magnificent bluegrass lawn to a microphone set up on the great porch, while TV reporters milled in the drive: on the other, here was my mother, sitting at the kitchen table re-sewing the seams in my father’s work apron. Here she was, beating the rugs outside our back door or hanging sheets from the line. And here was I, driving Averell Harriman’s Aston Martin with its mahogany gearshift down the short gravel lane to the garage. Taking a set of lambskin-covered keys from Tom Watson, the chairman of IBM. Lining up Henry Bonwiller’s set of dark leather valises on luggage stands in the guest cottage and unzipping them halfway. I hung his dark suits in the closet and propped his hand-sewn Maine shoes on the wooden tree. The shoes of the man who was going to be president! The Senator’s own house was only a half hour away, in Islington, and his wife and family were there, but he had permanent quarters now at Aberdeen West. Two other guest apartments had been set up for his advisors now, as well, men who arrived at all hours from cities on the coast, their black cars wheeling up the drive or their planes touching down behind the trees. Senator Bonwiller’s rooms looked out on the riding ring and the two oblong casting pools behind it, and before going home every evening I made sure a bamboo fly rod was hung by the coat rack and a corkboard of flies was on the sill.

And yet even as it was happening, it was all half unreal to me. I was still surprised, I have to say, every time his dark blue Eldorado rolled down the garden turnaround, still relieved every time Henry Bonwiller emerged from it, shaking hands with Liam Metarey and handing his briefcase to his driver. I suppose from my upbringing I expected some disappointing news to be at hand, some inevitable punishment for this kind of ambition.

One evening, on the library balcony where Christian had invited me after my shift, she said, “Daddy’s going to be secretary of the treasury again.”

Clara snorted. “Daddy’s going to be secretary of the pub.”

The three of us were sitting on iron chairs, looking down over the band tent, where a campaign party was being held. It was the first time Christian had invited me anywhere since the night in the tree, an episode that I still didn’t understand, and I was wary. She wasn’t outside on the bur oak’s iron bench anymore when I finished work in the afternoons, and she wasn’t anywhere in the house—at least, not that I could see—when I arrived in the mornings. But sitting now on the balcony, she looked the same as she always had. And to my relief she acted the same, as though nothing had happened.

Below us, a couple of hundred guests stood on the grass drinking cocktails, and under the entrance awning a jazz trio was playing. Senator Bonwiller and Liam Metarey were speaking privately underneath the stretched guylines outside the tent, and I could see that there were other men waiting nervously to join them. Churchill lay across Christian and Clara, stretched out on their laps like a white stadium blanket they were sharing.

Christian said, “Daddy said Treasury or maybe Interior, Clara.”

“Church agrees with
me
,” said Clara. “He thinks the interior of the pub.” She was drinking something with liquor in it. She kept offering it to us, but since Christian refused, I did too. Gil McKinstrey tended bar at these parties.

“Not at all,” said Christian. “Daddy says Senator Bonwiller will win Iowa or maybe finish second there.”

“Glenn Burrant thinks he has a good chance in New Hampshire, too,” I added. “Even though it’s a conservative state.”

Clara snickered. “We’ve been talking to Glenn Burrant, have we? What Senator Bonwiller has a good chance of finishing,” she said, “is ass-up on the lawn. Tell Glenn Burrant
that
. I know the kind of man Henry Bonwiller is. He’s going to be dead last in Iowa. Right, Church?”

The dog raised its head.

“He can see the future, you know,” Clara said, tilting her glass to her lips. She patted him on the snout. “Can’t you, sweet?”

Churchill whimpered and licked Christian’s hand, then Clara’s.

Christian said, “However, the dog is too great a politician to commit at this point.”

“Okay then,” said Clara. “In that case, Corey will have to tell us. Tell us, Corey. Tell us what
you
think, not what Glenn
Burr
-Ant says. Henry Bonwiller’s going to finish ass-up, is he not?”

Her eyes were shining. Christian’s eyes gazed sensibly into mine.

“Clara,” Christian said quickly, “you’re drunk. Here, give me that.” She reached for the glass. “You give me that.”

“And that’s if he’s
lucky
,” Clara snorted. She pulled the glass away and held it above her head. “He’s got less of a fucking chance in Iowa than
I
do,” she scoffed. She shook the ice cubes, then leaned forward and threw them over the rail into the crowd.