America America (35 page)

“How can you believe it?”

“I guess it just becomes the truth.” I looked out at the sun, which was about to set. “At least you store it in that part of your brain that stores the truth. The calm part. It loses its power. The destruction that you were afraid of. It sits in there like an old letter you’ve read a hundred times.”

“But there were those articles. Two of them.”

“Two small ones. They didn’t matter. We
made
them not matter.”

“And people have talked about it for thirty years.”

“That came later. And a lot happened in between.”

She looked at me skeptically.

“And it doesn’t matter, anyway,” I said. “I’m talking about
then
. When anybody might have said something. The thing about it—and here’s what’s interesting—I did know that something bad had happened. I
did
know that. All right, something dreadful. And I also knew that I was involved with it. For a few days I tried to figure it out. But remember—there was nothing in the news. Almost nothing. Not for a good long time, anyway. And even then, I don’t think they got it right. It wasn’t until I was out of college—I was working in New York—it wasn’t until I saw for myself some of the workings of the world that I think I understood what had happened. Maybe I should say, some of the workings of
people
. It just came to me eventually. You get to a point when you can figure things out. Intuition. So for a while I was aware again that I’d been close to something that was illegal. Big deal. I wasn’t going to say anything then. A hell of a lot of time had passed. And for another thing, I didn’t have anything to say. What? That I’d changed a couple of quarter panels with Liam Metarey?”

“That a girl was killed.”

“How was I supposed to know that? And
you
certainly don’t know what happened. Nobody does.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Yes, I do. But the thing is, that was easy enough to live with. There were always shady dealings. Show me a politician who doesn’t have them. And it’s what I said—I was aware that I’d been involved with something that was—well—
terrible
. But it wasn’t until we had Andrea—she was our first—it wasn’t until we had Andrea that it just broke over me. That I’d been involved with something—not that I
did
something, but that I was involved with something—something
unforgivably wrong
.”

I
N
P
HILADELPHIA,
on a warm Sunday afternoon in the mid-spring of 1972, Henry Bonwiller addressed the largest crowd ever to have gathered for an American presidential candidate. Fifty-five thousand people, according to the
Inquirer
. And all of them there because of the war.

I sometimes try to imagine it from the Senator’s point of view. The faces. The shimmering rows of packed-in bodies, swaying. The rippling mumble of a horde that runs from Independence Hall, choking every side street and flowing around the corner until it fills Washington Square. And from there stretches on. The police setting up last-minute barricades. Radios. Waving arms. Shouting. A sea of caps and jackets. The hand-lettered signs and the blue-and-white hats; the blue-and-white Bonwiller streamers; the long, two-posted, blue-and-white union banners, printed by the campaign for all the tradesmen’s locals, floating above. Dories on a harbor. Peace symbols. Flags. Singing. The waves of sound bouncing off Old City Hall and Congress Hall and Philosophical Hall and coming back to Henry Bonwiller even inside the entranceway as he makes his way to the portico. The chest-swelling charge of the growing chant as he reaches the steps and opens the door. Crosses to mount the stage. Frightening for a moment, all that sound, like a fighter jet overhead—it’s really that loud, swooping down as he emerges into the bright air—frighteningly loud till suddenly he understands it, and almost as suddenly knows what it means. A chill splits him. What it all means! And then not frightening but bracing. Then—as he reaches the double aisle of security men and steps through them onto the stage-rear bleachers, climbing to the top where it comes at him now from every side: calming. That’s what it is. So deeply calming.
Bon! Bon! Bon!
He takes a breath and raises his fist over his head. Then opens it.

You didn’t have to watch the news or read the papers to know. Gallup and Harris and Princeton all showed it, too: his momentum was unstoppable. The same kind of throng in Boston the next night, and in Columbus the night after. But all you really had to do was watch him in a crowd; all you had to do was drive a mile with him in the open-topped Cadillac; all you had to do was walk a block with him on any street, anywhere in the country. Men called out windows. Traffic stopped. Policemen saluted. I can imagine how it must have felt.

But Liam Metarey—I wonder how it all must have felt for
him
, too. To be carried so high on a wave of acclaim, which was intoxicating even in the puny examples I’d seen of it—yet to know, all the time, what killing menace lurked behind. To ride such a cataclysmic surge. To let yourself be taken upward and upward despite all of it. All that you know. To fly so high the ground disappears.

A man who seeks such office surely must crave public acclaim as sustenance; yet, paradoxically, he surely must also be immune to doubt. That, I think, is why Henry Bonwiller was the candidate and Liam Metarey only the strategist. Perhaps Henry Bonwiller simply erased from his mind all that had happened and all that any reasonable man would have suspected was going to happen in response. But I don’t think Liam Metarey was capable of that. Not of either one.

By Easter, strangely, the house had quieted again. Most of the staff had moved down to Baltimore and Atlanta for the races that were approaching in the South, and at Aberdeen West there were no more than a dozen campaign workers about. Liam Metarey, for whatever reason, was one of those who’d stayed behind, even though this was the hour of his candidate’s triumph. I don’t know whether he’d fallen out of favor—I never saw it, but I have to assume an unrelenting battle for influence was always being played out close to the Senator—or whether it was merely that he’d not been needed in the new territory. He didn’t, by his own admission, know much about the southern states. More likely, though, I think he knew what was coming. He’d been kind to me in nearly every instance of our association, and I can only take from his actions that he was a person who could feel what another felt—which is why, if you follow the idea to its conclusion, he took so strongly to heart his standing in the community. Perhaps that’s why he stayed at home.

But it’s also important to say that in all my time at the Metareys’ and in the campaign, I never enjoyed more than an outsider’s view of the proceedings—even if I was almost always a welcome one. I saw only the house, and only those rooms that I was asked to enter. I never explicitly heard strategy. I never witnessed a struggle among the principals or even any significant words of derision or contempt, although certainly the campaign must have been rife with them. Whenever the house emptied, as it did a few times even in the flurry of the early battle days, it seemed to me that the campaign itself had come to some kind of early close, when of course it had only just moved away temporarily, to Iowa or New Hampshire, or to wherever the next engagement lay. There were probably other Liam Metareys in the effort and other Aberdeen Wests, too—all across the country, for all I knew. And certainly other Corey Sifters, as well. The war of primaries was new in those days, and I suspect the campaign’s tactics must have been changing at every turn. Those were the years when the modern strategy was first being made into what it is today. But all I ever saw were the mostly peaceable workings of policy, the constantly genteel meetings in the upstairs rooms of the estate, and the staged appearances before the press, in which Henry Bonwiller stood before the cameras framed against the west acreage’s never-ending expanse of trees. I can’t say I ever truly understood what was happening behind it all.

What I do know for certain, though, is that it was not until after the Senator’s crescendoing victories in Wisconsin (44 percent), Pennsylvania (47 percent), and Massachusetts (51 percent), and his overwhelming poll numbers in Indiana and Ohio (48 and 52 percent), that it was not until after we had exulted in five states and then confidently turned our attention to Tennessee and North Carolina and West Virginia—it was not until after all this occurred that, one warm morning in late April, the telephone rang in Mr. Metarey’s upstairs office, where I was opening the casement windows for the breeze. He listened for a moment, nodded, and hung up. Then he appeared next to me at the glass.

“Well,” he said. “They’re here.”

“
S
PEAKER
-S
ENTINEL
,” I said again. “Sifter.”

Again there was silence. I waited. I checked the caller ID: the number was familiar, but barely. Finally I hung up.

“Nothing?” said Trieste. She was working at the desk by the door, writing up the county board of supervisors meeting and the arrest blotter. Next to her a reporter was on deadline for page one.

“Wrong number,” I said.

“Or second thoughts.”

“Right. Or second thoughts.”

A moment later the phone rang again.

“
Speaker-Sentinel
. Corey Sifter. What may I do for you?”

Again, nothing.

“Sometimes they’ll do that,” I said, hanging up.

“What?”

“Wait for someone on this end to say more.”

“Or less.”

A minute later: a third time. I picked it up but didn’t say a word. On the other end I heard rustling, then breathing. “Yes?” I finally said. “
Speaker-Sentinel
?” I heard a scratching sound, like somebody moving a fingernail across the mouthpiece. Then tapping.

“
Speaker-Sentinel
,” I said. “Yes? May I help you?”

More tapping. The breathing was quick and rasping. That’s when I realized whose number it was.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Stay there—”

NINE

I

O
N THE PORCH
outside 410A Dumfries was a note:

NEKS DOR

When I ran over to 410B the first thing I saw through the open door was the phone off the hook on the rug. Then Mr. McGowar in the chair. It wasn’t until I got inside that I found Dad on the couch next to him. He was lying there in his work clothes with Mr. McGowar holding his hand.

“Did you call 911?” I said, taking Dad’s other hand. Mr. McGowar nodded his head vigorously.

Dad looked like he’d been severely frightened. Or at least half his face did. The eye on that side was wide open and the mouth contorted, and his hair was disheveled everywhere. But the eye on the other side was calm and seemed to be staring reasonably ahead, and the mouth on that side was set the way it used to be set in the morning when he went to work. He turned toward me and I didn’t know which side was him—the calm and reasonable one or the one that was wild with fear. I looked from one to the other.

“It’s me, Dad.”

“What’s the fuss?” he whispered.

“You tell me.”

There was a tap on my shoulder.

FEL OVR

“He did? When?”

DONO

“Dad, what happened?”

“Oh, Christ.”

FOND M OTSID

With one arm Dad was pushing down sort of lamely on the cushions—pushing down and then giving up, then pushing down again—and after a moment I realized he was trying to sit up. One of his arms wasn’t working.

“Well here, then,” I said. “Let’s help you.”

We raised him, with Mr. McGowar at one shoulder and me at the other, and moved him into the chair. One arm dangled, and when we sat him up his whole body listed. He looked up drowsily. That’s when I noticed the smell of urine. I went into the bathroom for a towel, and Mr. McGowar found him another pair of pants. Dad looked okay, actually, after we managed to get them on him. Not as bad as I’d first thought. He tried to stand up on his own then—he was stable enough once he got his legs under him—but I still wasn’t happy with the look in that one eye, so I got another towel for a cushion and we sat him back down in the chair. By then I could hear the sirens. Mr. McGowar pointed to the phone. When I picked it up I found the 911 operator still on the line.

M
R
. M
ETAREY AND
I
STOOD LOOKING
out the office window at the corral, where Breighton was nosing the new crocuses that had parted the grass. We both just stood there for a time. There was something of such balanced majesty in that horse’s posture that even Liam Metarey was stilled.

“Hard to stop watching,” he finally said. “Isn’t he?”

“He is, sir.”

I turned back to straightening the room.

“No. Stay a second. You work too hard. Have since the moment I met you. Just look at that beautiful animal for a minute.” He opened the curtains wider.

“He’s a good horse, Mr. Metarey. Calm, too.”

“Utterly content is what he is. I thought June was crazy to get him. I really did. Now I’m grateful she didn’t listen to me. Sometimes I think he’s just here to mock our paltry endeavors.”

We stood watching again.

At last, he said, “I need you to get everybody up here for a meeting.”

“Sir?”

“Would you be kind enough do that? Everybody who’s still around, at least. In my office.” He went back to his desk, pulled out the leather planner from the drawer, took a long breath, and began circling on different pages. “When the rest of them get back up north, we’ll have another meeting—in the big library, for that one. For everybody. They’ll be coming in all day, I presume. Make it nice,” he said. “Nice wine. Tell Gil to decant the Bordeaux—he knows which one. Nice food, Corey. Don’t spare anything. Might as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as I left him, I took the station wagon from the work shed and headed off to town. There was a lot to do. At Burdick’s a line of women waited at the meat counter, but it wasn’t long before Ren Burdick himself came out from the back and stopped next to me.

“Hear you’ll be needing a truckload from us, eh?” he said in his sly, French-Canadian voice.

“We’re having a meeting,” I answered, as quietly as I could.

“So I just heard.”

He took me to the back, where one of the butchers was already wrapping foil around a pair of steaming beef roasts. He pulled out a couple of cooked ducks, too, and three good-sized whitefish that had been deboned and decked out on planks with parsley and cranberries. “You could buy the wine from me too, eh?” he said, wrapping the parcels in butcher paper. “You know?”

“Mr. Metarey said to get it from McBride’s.”

“Fair enough, eh? What’d you say it was for again?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Burdick.”

After that, I drove to Cleary Brothers Bakery for rolls, just as the youngest of the portly, cheerful Clearys was pulling them from the ovens. On the way home, I stopped at McBride’s for the cases of white wine that Gil had asked for, to serve alongside the Bordeaux. By the time I got back to the estate, it was early evening. The windows of the station wagon were steamed from the roast beef. I pulled up next to the service kitchen to unload.

In the pantry as I was closing the door of the walk-in refrigerator, it was Gil who stopped me. “Guess you ain’t heard,” he said.

“Heard what, Gil?”

“Why the shindig. From the looks of you, at least.” He was sitting on the big Manitowoc ice maker, bouncing his boot heels back and forth against the side. I realized I had never seen him idle. “Article about the girl,” he said. “Is what I hear.” He shook his head. “Comin’ out in the paper.”

“What?”

“On the front page, I guess.”

“Which paper?”

“Can’t say I know.”

I ran upstairs. When I reached the landing, I could see Mr. Metarey sitting in the chair in his office, leaning forward with his head on the desk between his arms. I didn’t knock, but I waited at the threshold, and after a moment he looked up and waved me in. “Sorry, Corey,” he said.

“I just heard.”

“I should have said something. I should have. To you especially.” He stood and looked out the window toward Saline. “You’ve been all over town, I hear.” He let out a mild chuckle. “I got people calling about a celebration. I should have told you before you went.”

“Where’s it coming out, sir?”

“Well, where would be the worst possible place?”

“It’s not—”

“It is, Corey.”

And the fact that I never said G. V. Trawbridge’s name, and that Liam Metarey never answered with it, only confirms in my mind that, despite the turmoil of a campaign and despite our nearly impenetrable common lie, both of us had long known what was going to happen. What had to happen.

“When?” I said.

“Day after tomorrow. Sunday. Not sure how he kept it secret this long.”

“What about his other piece?”

“Well, I’m not sure what you’re asking, but if you’re talking about the one in the magazine, the answer is I don’t think he was setting us up. I think he believed what he wrote.”

He looked at me.

“It’s okay, Corey,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “This too shall pass.”

“What about TV, sir?”

“Well, they’ve got their dogs on the scent already. I’d expect we’ll have till sometime Saturday night to enjoy ourselves, before they get full hold of it.”

“Is it bad, sir?”

He looked at me closely. Those dark eyes of his. Those dark eyes of his father, and of his daughter. At that moment I was acutely aware, somehow, of the silence we’d long shared, of the particular morality that had made our trust—his of me, mine of him—a matter of such long-standing assumption. And I understood—perhaps it’s more accurate to say,
I promised myself
—that this trust would remain intact.

“Well, that’s what I’m trying to find out,” he said finally. “Just how bad it
is
.” He shook his head and turned away. “Just what it is he thinks he’s found out. And from whom.” He turned around and looked at me quickly. But it was only that, a look. “Or at least, how much.” He went to the window. “Got my own men working on it already, but got to give ’em credit down at Times Square—they’ve circled the wagons. Won’t say anything to anybody from our staff. Vance won’t even call me back. But from what I gather—yes, it’s bad. Bad indeed. I’ve got lawyers on it but they’ve got lawyers on it, too. For a lot longer, I might add. Pretty damning all in all, from what I’m told. More than damning,” he said. He turned from the window. “Killing.”

“What does the Senator say?”

He let out a low laugh. It sounded, in a way, relieved. “The Senator’s practicing for the convention, Corey.”

That evening, the estate began to fill. And late that night, as I was finally getting back to my own house, I heard the thunder of the campaign jet returning from Chattanooga. The next morning Henry Bonwiller began a series of meetings in the guest quarters. I spent that day the same way I’d spent the one before, hurrying all through the kitchens and the barns and the cellars, and all over Saline and Islington. But now I understood what I was preparing for: a strange kind of event that never seemed to start and never seemed to end but that lasted all that day and the next, men getting drunker and drunker, standing around the tables of roast beef and whitefish, moving from meeting to meeting. I drove to Burdick’s again for baked hams and wheels of cheese and more roast beef, then to McBride’s for more Scotch and bourbon and wine, and every couple of hours to any number of hotels in Carrol County to ferry back surly-eyed advisors and aggrieved-looking managers of statewide races. I recognized a few operatives from other campaigns, too. The same brusque McGovern aides who’d visited after Florida, and a woman—the only one I saw—who’d been at the house that same week in March, now wearing a small blue-and-red Wallace pin on her lapel. And as I was walking at the far end of the downstairs hallway, a door opened abruptly into a side room and I think I glimpsed Glenn Burrant in there—but just as abruptly it closed again. The meetings lasted through the morning.

Early in the afternoon, news came that the next day’s campaign stops in North Carolina had been scrapped.

That night, after I’d parked the car in the garage, I emerged to find Henry Bonwiller himself walking alone along the rim of one of the fly ponds. By that point I was exhausted—everybody was—and though ordinarily I wouldn’t have stopped to watch him, this time I did. It was late, close to midnight. He’d been in meetings since breakfast. Here he was, this close to the presidency, if he could just survive one more salvo. His silhouette was imposing against the still lighted rooms of the house. He was moving slowly—strolling really—pausing to skip rocks across the long ovals of ruffled water that shimmered under the high moon.

“Young man!” he suddenly called out, and when he turned in my direction I approached a little closer.

“Yes, Senator?”

He looked away from me, back over the water. “A fine night, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, moving nearer again. “It is.”

“On this fine night,” he said, so softly that I had to move all the way up behind him, “they’re making their final plans to destroy me. Are you aware of all this, Corey?”

“I am, sir.”

“Because of what I’ve done for poor people,” he said. He glanced back over his shoulder. “And working people, Corey. That’s why they’re doing it. You can say what you want about the rest.” He reached down and picked up a stone from the path.

“You’ve done a lot for the country, sir.”

“I know what I’ve done,” he said. “I know it’s not all good.” He turned and threw the stone, and it skipped, almost magically, all the way across the water.

“Nice one, sir.”

He turned and studied me then, the way he never had before. “But you know?” he said. “I’ve had a dream of justice, and it’s a dream I’ve always followed. That’s the truth about me. That’s the truth I hope is written someday, even with all the rest.”

Standing there under the moonlight, he reached out his arm then, and we shook hands.

Then he turned and walked up the path toward the house.

I stayed there, next to the water, and I remember wondering at that moment what it was like to be a man like him. At the time, I saw his life only in a boy’s grandiose terms. His strength. His ambition. His array of mortal enemies. Vanity is so often considered the essence of anyone who is stained with it, but I think now, partly because of my experience with Henry Bonwiller, that it’s actually a secondary quality, more on the order of wistfulness or mirth, and that it’s in our best interests to recognize that it comes so often twinned with the greatest attributes we ever produce. I’ve seen it more than once yoked to an exceptional empathy, for example—a paradox, perhaps, but the way I think it was in the Senator’s particular case. A peculiar ability to see everyone, even one’s own self, as both a stranger and an intimate. Henry Bonwiller was no doubt driven by self-manufacture, by a greater and greater need to enlarge himself in the reflective eye of the populace, but I also think he had some inchoate knowledge of what it was like to be the dregs of that populace. The excluded. The illiterate. The poor. JoEllen Charney was not half his equal in achievement or class, but she was a hopeful girl driven incessantly to make the best of things, not by decision but by character, and carried by a current of determination that some might call delusional; and in that light I think she was much like the man who killed her.