America America (33 page)

“It’s not the accident I’m talking about. It’s what he did after.”

“I know that, Trieste. But I don’t think people heard about it here. It was 1900. They couldn’t just turn on the TV.”

“But Saline’s a union town, Mr. Sifter. Canadian miners are the same as American miners. Dead ones, at least. Word would have traveled, and it seems to me it should have been a story.”

“It wasn’t a union town
then
, Trieste. The Wagner Act wasn’t till the thirties. It was
Liam
Metarey who let the unions in. The old man himself never would have. Probably still turning in his grave over it. And Eoghan Metarey was the one who founded the
Speaker
, too. Remember that. Used for his own purposes, of course, but founded nonetheless. Don’t imagine it was a story he’d cover in his own paper.”

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only if you own one.”

“That’s Liebling,” I said. “Very good.”

“You’re surprised.”

“I’m surprised anyone your age remembers him.”

“I don’t
remember
him, sir,” she answered. “But I’ve read him. Would
you
cover it now?”

“Of course I’d cover it now.”

“Hmm,” she said. She took a bite of her muffin. “But didn’t it change what you thought of the family?”

“It was their
grand
father, Trieste. Clara and Christian’s, at least. It was nobody I knew.”

“And you had a lot to be grateful to them for.”

“Yes. And I still do, Trieste. I still do.”

I
TOOK THE TRAIN NORTH
from Philadelphia again, reading Camus. It was April of my senior year at Haverford. A perfectly blue spring sky and the trackside shacks and dives beginning to vanish into forest. At Penn Station, throngs of commuters rushing the platforms. I buttoned my coat and turned uptown to walk the fifty blocks. The mid-town edifices like statues behind washed glass. The crowds like crowds of emperors.

At the top floor, Clara answered. There was still no ring on her finger.

I saw it then. I saw it in the subtle smirk on her mouth as she went to fetch her sister; in the way she sat primly, her knees together, on the ottoman, while Christian and I shared the couch. I saw it when she insisted Christian and I spend the afternoon without her.

So we did. We went to Linden’s again. Sat at a small table in back. By then Christian looked better. Her hair had grown in. She wore a sundress, though it was chilly for it.

“What are you studying?” she asked.

“English. A history minor.”

She sipped from her mug.

“Mother says you’ve become quite a good student.”

“I guess. I guess I have.”

That was what our conversation was like. She’d been an art history major at Columbia until she’d left school. Now she was figuring out what to do. Before we finished our coffee, I asked if she’d rather go for a walk. We made our way, hardly speaking, along the edge of the park, pointing out the sights to each other. A mulberry tree. What looked like a policeman on roller skates. The gingkos coming shyly into leaf. But after a while we were silent.

Back at their apartment, Clara met us again. “Coffee?” she said as soon as we walked in.

“Just had some,” said Christian.

“I’ll take another.”

Clara disappeared into the back and Christian sat down on the couch. I took the chair across from her. After a moment I said, “Might as well go check on the coffee.”

I rose and went into the kitchen. Clara was standing at the counter with her back to me, shaking the grounds into a filter. After she set the filter in the pot she turned around again, leaned back against the counter, and looked up. We hadn’t spoken at all, but I saw it there again. She knit her brow, as though to remind me. I nodded my head. She was wearing a short pearl necklace and a sweater whose neckline almost touched it.

“Well, Corey,” she said finally, “Church would say it’s time to do something about it.”

EIGHT

S
OON SHE’S READING
about him all the time.
Senator Henry Bonwiller (D–New York) introduced legislation today to require congressional approval for…. Reached for comment, Senator Henry Bonwiller (D–New York) said he supports any measure that would bring an earlier
…. She looks for his name and for Louis Lefkowitz’s, too. Their enemy. The newspaper is a living thing, waiting quietly at the end of the hotel desk. She folds it quickly and carries it up to the room. In November, the first big headline:
EARLY POLL: BONWILLER A FACTOR IN IOWA.
They’re seeing each other twice a week now, maybe three times. But she’s spending whole days at Morley’s on her own now, too, eating meals and never seeing the check. Dark glasses. The paper spread in front of her at the table. Her friends have vanished. Then, a couple of months later, another headline:
BONWILLER CLOSING ON LEAD AS FIRST TEST APPROACHES.
That night they meet again. She’s had a vodka tonic by herself in the bar. It’s snowing just a little.

He doesn’t even get there till almost two in the morning. Wakes her up when he comes into the room and she has to do her makeup again in the bath. More drinks. She can feel the string again, tugging her. But then he asks her to sing for him. “Bonnie Kellswater” and “Red Is the Rose.” He sits in the chair with his Scotch, eyes closed. Then “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye,” and for that one he joins in on the chorus with his velvet bass. That does something to her. Always has. They make love in the big bed. He’s got a certain energy. Afterward, while he’s reading something that’s stapled together, she leans out from the mattress and opens the window shade so she can watch the flurries in the lamplight. The brook is frozen and the falls are a shimmering icicle.

“Close that.” He takes another drink.

A little dart of hurt.

“I like looking.” She’s pulls up her slip, refastens her bra. Out on the square, a couple is walking, arm in arm. It’s so late for anyone to be out, but there they are. They stop under a lamp, the snow drifting down around them like a desk toy.

The light goes off behind her.

“Close it.”

He pours another.

But after she does, she pulls back the corner again and peeks out. The string again, tugging.

Finally, he sits up. “Okay, then,” he says, slapping down his reading on the bedspread, “let’s go out then.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“But wear the dress.”

She smiles. “Which one?”

“You know which one.”

She has to take off the slip again to do it, but she doesn’t mind. She likes that dress. He watches her pull it over her head and shimmy in. The tight red cling. She does it nice and slow, and when she’s done he steps behind her and she feels something tap up the back of her spine, ahead of the zipper. Fingers.

Maybe kisses.

They take his car. She likes that, too. Usually she has to drive her own and this is nicer. She ducks in the seat as they pull out of the garage, but once they’re out of Saline he says, “Screw it, it’s a beautiful night.” She has no idea what time it is. He slows down on the outskirts of town and takes a long drink from the flask in the glove box. Near the highway, the Esso station’s still open. Or maybe it’s already opening up for the morning—who knows how late it is? He pulls in there but he waves off the boy who comes out of the building clapping his hands in the cold. Doesn’t need to fill the tank. Just wants to use the bathroom. While he’s inside she takes another nip at the flask. When he comes back out he’s combed his hair.

There’s something sweet about that. Boyish.

He gets in again and takes his own turn at the flask, and she takes another, too. Then he pulls something from the glove box and reaches to snuggle her under his arm. “Listen to this,” he says. It’s a book. A little tiny leather-covered book no bigger than his hand. “The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves,” he says in that certain voice, “and of the shore and dark-colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn…” And on he goes for a little while in the melancholy way he gets sometimes until finally he sets the book down and turns the ignition so that the heat comes on again. He says, “That was a poem. Walt Whitman. You should read Walt Whitman.”

“I will,” she says. Nobody’s ever told her anything like that. She’ll get it from the library in the morning.

Now she’s right up next to him. The radio is tuned to a jazz station, big band, and she lets her head rest on his shoulder. They cross back onto the road, and just before they reach 35 he pulls over, unlatches the clips on the windshield, and lets the sky open up above them. Big and black and clotted with stars though there’s still a few flakes drifting in it. He takes another drink and pulls back onto the highway.

“You’re going to freeze me,” she says, giggling.

She wraps the stole over her neck and moves up closer. But actually the Cadillac’s big heaters are more than enough, blowing waves of warm air over them. It’s so cozy! Like hiding under the covers.

“Okay, then, we can freeze together,” he says back. He shouts up at the sky: “We’re going to freeze!”

But they’re not; the heat is blasting. It’s the most wonderful thing. And here and there a snowflake, a delicate crystal on her dress lasting just a moment in the light. At the bend, there’s another car approaching.

“I have heard what the talkers were talking,” he begins to recite now, in a slow half-whisper with his eyes on the horizon. “The talk of the beginning and the end.” He puts his arm around her, pulls her in tighter. “But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” He glances down. “That’s more Whitman.”

“It’s nice,” she says. “It’s pretty.”

“There was never any more inception, than there is now,” he goes on. “Nor any more youth or age, than there is now; And will never be any more perfection—than there is now.”

She hooks her thumb over his seat belt and burrows in close. Rubs her cheek on his shoulder. Then lets her fingers drift down.

“That’s nice, too,” he says. He takes a heavy breath. She likes that moment, the way it stirs something.

“Oh,” he says, in another kind of voice.

She sees the gold threads standing out in the red fabric of her dress now, shining lightly, and another snowflake that lands and then winks out on her leg. The other car’s headlights must be on them. For a moment she can feel him shift lower in the seat—just a little. But then he sits back up tall. She moves her cheek down to rub his chest. Moves her hand lower, too. Lets her fingers start their work. “Oh, honey,” he says, a rough murmur now as they head into the wide turn before Silverton Orchards. “Mmm, honey.” The other car’s lights are coming at them from an angle through his window now, sweeping across her door as they reach the sharp part of the curve. He’s driving too fast—that’s what she realizes—and she jerks her head up, her mind clearing for an instant to see, of all things, her mother, setting down her cup and saucer, saying
promise me you’ll always carry money for a cab
.

F
OR THE MOST PART,
I’ve left our daughters out of this story. I have my reasons, even though the principals here have come back now in all of them. The revelation, no matter how often it comes, is always a surprise: that our pasts are remade like that, in pieces and shadows. Our girls’ names are Andrea, Emma, and Dayna. I won’t bring them up except to relate a single incident.

We’d taken them on a family boat trip to Alaska. The Inside Passage. This was August, five years ago. Andrea is the oldest, the one at Colgate, and I suspected that this might be our last chance to travel with her. In September, she was starting her senior year. She was twenty then, and she had a steady boyfriend in Boston, and Emma had just graduated from the high school that Dayna was about to enter. I haven’t taken many vacations in my life, but I knew this was the time.

Clara did the booking and found a cruise that left port in Seattle and made its leisurely way north, past Vancouver Island, through Queen Charlotte Sound, and circuitously through the Alexander Islands to Juneau. The boat was small, by cruise standards, and was fitted more for scientific research than luxury. This was fine with all of us. There was no swimming pool but every few yards along the walls of the bridge there were high-grade binoculars hung from hooks. The library was as large as the dining room and displayed an enviable collection of birding manuals and drawn renderings of all of North America’s wildlife, from grizzly bears down to plankton and mycelia, as well as the usual books by Jack London and Farley Mowat. The rooms were simply finished in a maritime way, with bunks bolted to the walls and grab-handles along the bulkheads. Clara and I shared one berth and the three girls shared another.

From the first morning out of port, we stopped two or three times a day, at the mouths of rivers, where eagles and ospreys circled, and offshore of any number of tiny islands, which the boat’s passengers were encouraged to visit on launches that were lowered on a boom and boarded from a low deck off the stern. I must say, I haven’t felt many pleasures in my life that could equal the feeling of sitting at the back of a six-passenger rubber dinghy as the ship’s crewman next to me steered it through the swells, the salt spray dampening the faces of my three daughters and my wife, while in the near distance the arched spine of a gray whale’s tail slapped the water and dived. When the launches idled down and sat bobbing off the beach, otters appeared.

We were half a day north of Cape Scott, at dinner our second night, when a man my own age appeared at our table. He introduced himself as Millar Franks, from Vancouver, Canada. He was traveling alone, and of course we invited him to sit with us. He turned out to be quite an interesting companion. He was a naturalist, a self-made multimillionaire in business, and now a social agitator by avocation. After retiring from the flash-memory card company that he’d founded, he’d set to the task of improving the lot of women in Canada. This was very interesting of course to Clara, who works for the League of Women Voters now, but it appeared to be even more so to our daughters. Millar Franks had started a foundation that granted money to all sorts of projects—initiatives in women’s health, in women’s education, in the plight of women in prison. About all these things he spoke fervently, gazing keenly at whichever of the girls had asked a question, or at Clara. More than once, he even seemed to forget he was eating. On top of that, he was able to identify every gull and plover that was circling the panoramic, shoreward-looking windows of the dining room, looking for scraps. You can imagine the reception he received at our table. I liked him enough myself. Though I had my reservations, he was exactly the kind of worldly, knowledgeable friend one hoped to find on a ship.

The next day, north of Port Hardy, the boat dropped anchor in the sound, where a pod of Dall porpoises could be seen off the seaward side. All species of storm petrels and auklets filled the sky. As we were waiting to fill the launches, Millar Franks joined us on deck. Just as our family reached the ladder off the low boarding deck, though, we realized that our own boat wouldn’t have room for him; but instead of saying goodbye to Mr. Franks for the day, Andrea stepped out of line and offered to accompany him on the next boat, which at that moment was being lowered on a pulley from the overhead boom. There was no time to consider it: down the ladders we went, and the remaining four of us took our places together in our family launch. As we sped across the calm sound, I looked back at Andrea and Millar Franks trailing us. I was trying to concentrate on the sea, which broke here and there with surfacing seals, but from the side of my vision I could see him talking to her, gesturing with his arms at the shore and at the carousel of birds that circled the flotilla. She was leaning toward him from her perch at the edge of their boat. He was my age, as I’ve mentioned. And Andrea had a boyfriend in Boston, whom both Clara and I liked, and whom, as it turns out, she would later marry.

That night at dinner, he sat with us again and ordered some very nice wine. Clara doesn’t drink, for reasons that should be clear, but our own kids seem to be able to handle it well enough that we encourage them to make their own decisions. Even Dayna and Emma were given a glass, and we didn’t say anything when Andrea poured herself a second one. Soon, somehow, Henry Bonwiller’s name came up in a story Millar Franks was telling.

“Do you know him?” asked Clara.

“I do,” he answered. “He’s a great man. A great hero of mine. The last champion of liberalism. Or at least of what you Americans call liberalism. It’s what we Canadians take for granted.”

“He’s not so popular anymore in the States,” I said.

“That’s because you’re prudish.”

“Prudish?”

“Yes,” Andrea joined in, seeing the look in my eyes. “We Americans have always been prudish about our politicians.”

“Since when have you been such a student of politics?”

“Dad—”

“The man did some very questionable things,” I said. “In fact, he did some deplorable things.”

“You don’t know that,” said Clara.