America America (29 page)

It disappears when they make love. The stone melts. It goes back into her veins.

But in the morning, still at The Pines, she stays in bed a little longer than she should, reading the paper, and it comes back. It starts in the front of her mind and she can make herself think of something else, but soon it’s there again even when she’s not thinking about it; a little sour flicker just before she starts another article, just before she turns on the hot water in the shower, just before she gets out of the Gremlin at McBain & Sweeney for work. It’s there when she says “good morning” to Mr. McBain and even when she smiles at the janitor she likes with the war limp, a Negro man like one of the ones Henry Bonwiller wants to help. It’s there again when she waits at The Pines that night.

I’m doing this for the black man and the Latino man and the American Indian.

So why does that upset her? But it does. And it panics her, too. Because it won’t go away. And she doesn’t understand. Why should it sour her that he wants to help all those people, those people in need? Louis Lefkowitz wouldn’t do anything for any of them. And she hates Louis Lefkowitz. So then what is so bitter in her that this is what she feels whenever Henry Bonwiller says his brave and extraordinary things? But it is. This chilly little stone attached inside her. People must see it on her face. It’s not there every minute exactly but it comes right back as soon as she is called upon to produce anything from inside herself, a word or a smile or even a hand on a shoulder—the bitterness comes out alongside it like some foul glue stuck to everything. At the worst times—mornings, usually—speaking is actually starting to become a trick. Speaking normally and not showing what’s inside her. She checks her expression in windows, in car mirrors; she checks it in her compact while pretending to remove a new ream of typewriter paper from the bottom drawer. Driving, she makes up little conversations. “Hi,” she says. “Good morning.” “Good morning to you.”

One afternoon at work she hears a client in Mr. McBain’s doorway say the name
Bonwiller
. She draws up straight, slips a piece of paper silently into the platen of her Selectric. “That
slime ball
,” the man says. She stiffens. Pretends to study the letter she’s about to type. “How a guy can be in everybody’s pocket at once, I don’t know. The niggers and the unions. And the oil companies. What a combo.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, Frank,” Mr. McBain says in his skillful voice, from inside the door.

“Yeah?” the man says, “Well why’s nobody trying to help
me
?”

That’s
it
, she thinks. She rolls the paper into the platen and begins to type. And for a few moments, at least, she’s cured. Why is nobody trying to help
her
?

M
Y FATHER WORKED
till dark on the weekdays, so it was Gil McKinstrey who picked me up at the bus depot in Islington now, every Friday. And he would take me straight back to the estate, rather than to Dumfries Street, which I liked. When I was in Saline I still slept in my own bed, of course, but it probably isn’t hard to see that I preferred Aberdeen West to my own house; in fact the truth was that I might even have been trying to avoid my father now, even though I knew that in our new circumstances we needed each other more than we ever had. I’m not proud of that reaction, but I suppose it’s common.

There was a return bus at dawn on Monday that got me back to Dunleavy just in time for my first-period class, so sometimes I slept at home on Sunday night as well. I’d have spent both days at Aberdeen West, doing whatever was needed—sometimes working on the land but more often running errands for the campaign. My father cooked breakfast and dinner for the two of us—he was getting better at it—and on Sunday evening I’d do my laundry in the machine on our back porch, then take my two shirts and my two pairs of pants upstairs to iron. Dad was usually in his bath.

One evening in March, not long after the Senator’s watershed win in Illinois, I was standing at the ironing board in my room when a seagull flew down and landed outdoors on the sill across from me. It perched on the wood and looked in. Gulls don’t often come so far inland around here, and especially so early in the season, but this one had. It cocked its head and stared at me, appraising with its curious eye.

“I can do a shirt in two minutes now,” I said.

It raised its wings and showed me their gray undersides, like a dove’s.

I sprayed water on the collar and ran the iron up to the seam in tiny quick strokes. “See?” I said.

It flew then, and I went to the glass to follow. When I found it, it was down on our fence, perched on some stalks from one of my mother’s tomato plants that were still twined through last year’s cages.

“You’d be happy about the ironing,” I said. I moved back from the window and in a pair of quick strokes finished one of the sleeves.

You’re getting better at it, Cor.

I flipped the shirt over and did the other one. After a moment, I said, “Mrs. Metarey
does
scare me, you know. You were right.”

She’s like Clara—you told me.

“They both scare me, Mom. It’s like they know something, or they know that
I
know something. About me, I mean.” I turned the shirt inside out and did the button side now, pulling on the tail with my other hand so that there was no crease. “I think Clara thinks I’m trying to sneak my way into their family.”

Maybe that’s what she’s afraid of.

“Or maybe it’s what you said.”

Are you in love with Christian?

“I don’t know, Mom. She’s wonderful.”

Does that mean you love her?

“I’m not sure. There’s still something about her that sort of disappears when you look at it. It’s like she goes away a little. Sometimes when I’m at school I have a hard time just remembering her. I remember that I like her and that I love being around her, but I can’t say much more.”

Clara’s not like that.

“Clara’s the opposite. She scares me even when she’s not around.”

I think I understand why. Clara feels things deeply. Maybe like her mother does.

“And you were right about Mr. Metarey, Mom. He
is
trustworthy. Even with everything he has to take care of, he thinks of the people around him. His kids, especially—but me, too. That’s a comfort.”

It is to me, too.

“There’s some kind of rivalry between Christian and Clara over him, I think. That’s all I can figure out. They both want him to notice them. That’s why Clara does all those crazy things. And maybe Christian, too—why she does all those nice things. Sometimes I think it’s all they see in me. That I’m a way to get to their dad.”

I finished the shirt and folded the arms neatly into my duffel. “There,” I said. “That’s more than I’ve ever told you.”

G
LENN
B
URRANT,
to his credit, was one of the few liberal columnists who treated Muskie’s fall with skepticism. He wasted no time in questioning the rumors of Jane Muskie’s debauchery; and a month later he was the first to question a letter to the editor, which had appeared in
The Union Leader
shortly before the New Hampshire primary, saying Senator Muskie was biased against French-Canadian Americans—who numbered close to a million in the New England states. These bits were only a small part of his column, but sitting in the Dunleavy library the week after Henry Bonwiller’s second win, in Illinois, I read them with uneasy attention. The letter to
The Union Leader
about Muskie had been signed by a man named Paul Morrison, of Deerfield Beach, Florida, and Glenn Burrant had actually taken the trouble to look for him. His article ended with the words, “Paul Morrison, of Deerfield Beach, Florida, as far as this reporter can determine, does not exist.”

That week, I wrote Glenn a letter—the only time I ever did. I wanted to tell him how much I respected his work, but I also wanted him to know that I’d taken to heart the words he’d said to me when we first met: on my bus rides home from Dunleavy that spring, I’d taken it upon myself to read
A Mencken Chrestomathy
. So I ended my letter with a quote that I thought he’d like, especially in regard to his latest column. “A national political campaign,” I wrote, “is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.”

A week later there was a card in my box at school:

Every man is his own hell
, was all it said.

O
NE
S
ATURDAY MORNING
later that month I arrived early at the estate to find the parking circle empty. It was a weekend, but even at that hour there should have been a dozen cars already lining the drive. I walked up the side steps to the house and two Secret Service men opened the door.

“Name,” one said.

“Sifter.”

“Sifter what?”

“Corey Sifter, sir.”

He didn’t bother to answer. He was looking at a list on his clipboard. “All right,” he said. “I don’t see why—” He looked me in the eye. “But go ahead.”

I glanced at his partner, who nodded. “Have to search you, son.”

Inside, the rest of the staff was gone. Something was going on in the upstairs library. I had a strange feeling as I walked around on the lower floor. Already all the doors were shut, and it was not yet seven in the morning. And at the top of the stairs, in a folding chair blocking the landing, another Secret Service man sat scanning the hallway below. He wasn’t the one who usually sat there. I set myself up in the workroom off the kitchen and began unloading a box of new phones, then assembling them. The first floor was completely empty of activity except for two other agents who one at a time kept coming into the room where I was working, then going back out. They kept a continuous pace through the house and the grounds, walking briskly, one of them always inside the building and the other one always out. There were no cooks in the kitchen.

The week before, just as Liam Metarey had feared, the North Vietnamese army had crossed the demilitarized zone, and within days they’d pushed twenty miles into the South. Nixon had responded on TV, from his desk in the Oval Office: America would not back down. So had Kissinger, from a podium outside the Rose Garden. B52s were sent to the 20th parallel. Then all the way to Hanoi. Haiphong Harbor was mined. It looked as though the war was changing into exactly what Mr. Metarey had feared: all-out combat, to be followed, just before the election, by a peace treaty. More strategists were flying in to the estate, but nobody needed to tell us the obvious: the endgame was being timed to favor the president.

Later that morning, while I was working on the phones inside the deserted house, I heard a percussive beat in the air. I went to the window. From behind the barn a helicopter suddenly appeared. It lifted up, joggled its tail rotor, then dropped again below the roof. It was a military chopper, like the ones we’d been seeing on the news. I stepped out onto the porch. Another agent was out there.

“Back inside,” he said.

“What’s going on?”