Claire Marvel (14 page)

twenty-two

I
T WAS NEARLY THE END
of the school year. The days were growing warm and balmy as I sat in Mary’s garden grading final papers for my section in Davis’ course. My number 2 pencils were honed like scalpels, the stack of papers neatly arranged.

Back in March, during long office hours at Café Pamplona, there’d been the gratification of helping my students choose their paper topics. This was teaching, after all, guiding, putting spark to the kindling of curiosity and seeing what sort of fire burned. Learning as a blaze of light.

But here now, alone and at a loss, it seemed suddenly preposterous to think of myself as a force of illumination. By afternoon I would find myself erasing comments I’d written on papers that morning, doubling back in my tracks, scribbling
revised thoughts over the shadowy corpses of previous ones—reminding myself with each new scratch of the pencil of my own tenuous hold on certainty.

It was little wonder that my own work was crawling along at an enfeebled pace. For every new chapter of
Congress and the Constitution
that Davis typed I seemed to produce, like some hair-shirted monk in a cell, but a single elaborately illustrated footnote for my dissertation. Viewed in thin light, my introduction might have appeared promising: the full scope of my argument laid out with clarity and boldness; my intellectual arsenal made apparent, with a surprise or two cannily held back for the conclusion; the Progressive movement in American political history never again to be seen the same way. This was not inconceivable. The problem, of course, was that the introduction was all there was.

And Davis, for all his lip service in support of my publishing future, had offered no concrete help. On the contrary, I had the growing suspicion that he was all too content to keep me buried in the landfill of his tremendous output, toiling away like some beleaguered clerk, thereby ensuring that I would never produce anything consequential of my own.

One afternoon he called and asked me to come by his office. I arrived expecting the usual handout of fresh pages, but instead saw two cardboard manuscript boxes sitting on his desk beside a bottle of single-malt whiskey.

“I think this calls for a toast,” he said. Opening a drawer, he brought out two glasses and poured a finger for us both. “To
Congress and the Constitution,”
he declared. He was beaming.

“Congratulations, Carl.”

We drank.

“So,” he said. “Think you can get your notes to me by Wednesday?” It was Friday.

“Actually, Carl, I’m right in the middle of grading papers. How about a week from Monday?”

His smile, without altering physically, took on a noticeable stillness. “It’s my course,” he said calmly. “I give you permission to hand your papers back late.”

“I’ll do my best,” I replied.

I carried the boxes home. Three pounds, 767 pages. I made a pot of coffee, finished grading my students’ papers at four that morning, slept a couple of hours, then began reading through the big man’s book. And when I finished early in the week I humbly offered him the last remnants of my months of research, throwing in a few random notes of minor criticism. How intelligent and well written, I concluded, which was true, undeniably, even if his “Reagan Revolution” was not my idea of a revolution. The poor and homeless, the disenfranchised, the minorities—the needs of these people were everywhere assaulted in this mammoth volume. Though at present I didn’t have the stomach for a fight. And so my editorial remarks did not reflect my true beliefs, and my mentor’s satisfaction with my work remained, I believed, undimmed.

Then without warning it was June, commencement week, alumni reunion week: the big dollars rolling in, the crimson flags raised high, the pomp and circumstance, the invocation before the convocation, the protective ropes removed from
around the quadrangles of freshly seeded grass, the departmental festivities and familial celebrations, the private dining rooms at Locke-Ober’s, the gowns rented, the suits and dresses bought on Newbury Street, the champagne drunk, the sun taken by the river.

Every year before graduation, Davis threw a cocktail party at his home for some of his colleagues in the government department and the Institute of Politics, and a few carefully chosen Beltway insiders from Washington. The governor usually made an appearance, and a Kennedy or two. There had been sightings in the past of high-ranking members of the Reagan administration. And Davis’ old pal Kissinger could be counted on to show his perpetually tanned face, casting a Mitteleuropa glamour over the assembled guests and ensuring at least a mention in the
Globe.

When I next saw him, Davis assured me I was invited, and even suggested the date I ought to bring.

“What about your friend … ?” he said, snapping his fingers to himself, as if her name were there at his fingertips awaiting instant recall. It was all just there for him, I thought darkly, all of life’s essential information all the time, constantly being sorted through that prodigious brain, an endless returning to the well, a perpetual orgy.

I’d come to his office on a Saturday morning to discuss his next project. Now that the political book was done and the publication date set, he wanted to get going on the memoir. There was a lot of fascinating material from the early part of his career, he assured me, half a dozen file cabinets alone in the basement of his house, the house he was currently renting since the divorce from his wife last winter; and there was
a lot of stuff too in his mother’s house back in Scranton, an entire garage full of documents, memorabilia, trophies, letters, photographs. Enough certainly to keep me busy all summer from dawn till dusk, if I was inclined. A researcher’s heaven. And that was just the early years. This one would be fun. The last book had been business of a kind, but this would be pure pleasure, including the fat contract he intended to get for it. Possibly instructive too, if he said so himself, would be the experience, digging up touchstones of a life spent thinking about government and its consequences, its ramifications and contradictions and meanings, yet spent also in the thick of things, the front line, in politics, the two sides, ideas and action, the branching of these great rivers and then the uniting of them in one man’s life, thus far. It would be a hell of a time, he said, wouldn’t it, working together, the two of us, on a book like that.

The day was hot. The tall twelve-paned window was wide open to the breeze and Davis stood before it, his hands loosely clasped behind his back, looking out at the Law School.

“What’s her first name again?” he asked.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Your friend, the marvelous Miss Marvel.”

“Claire,” I said, to get him off my back.

“That’s it. Claire. How’d it end up with her anyway? Are you two together?”

I didn’t answer. It had never been our habit to talk about personal matters and I did not want to start now.

“Unless, of course,” he added, “you’d rather not discuss it.” He cocked his head and looked at me as though I were being oversensitive, squeamish.

“There’s nothing really to discuss.”

He raised his eyebrows but did not comment. For a while, drawing his own conclusions, he returned to gazing out the window. I saw birds out there, a squirrel climbing a tree. Then he said, “Well, all the more reason to ask her. It’s going to be a hell of a party, for one thing. It always is. And if you won’t ask her for yourself, then at least do it for the
party.”
He stressed the last word to make the pun evident, and then turned and shot me a clubby grin. “Because I’ll tell you, nothing makes the old boys happier than a pretty face.”

twenty-three

I
T ALL STARTS SPEEDING UP NOW
. The story. One moment I am here and it all seems remote; the next she is right in front of me, she is everywhere, and I am back in my old life, years younger, scurrying around, prostrate on my bed, getting excited, getting depressed, trying not to fear anything, holding my head in my hands, holding my head high, being stupid, being brilliant, making decisions, making choices, all of them wrong—and yet filled, filled with such ardent love, such good intentions, and such resilient hope.

She agreed to come to the party as my guest, an acceptance that sparked in me an optimism I hadn’t known in weeks. Though there was something she had to do that afternoon, she
added, an appointment she chose not to specify, which would make her a little late. She would meet me at Davis’ house, if that was all right. And I said that it was.

The day arrived. I dressed in my bathroom, in front of the chest-high medicine cabinet that was my only mirror; in order to see my bottom half, I had to back out of the bathroom and stand on the bed. My blazer was a crisp navy blue, my pants a summer-weight gray flannel, my tie, which I had tied and retied three times, a light paisley from Liberty of London. My loafers were spit-shined. I moved from bathroom to bedroom to bathroom, peering and crouching, tugging at cuffs.

I didn’t feel unlucky. There was nothing evil today in the sleeping stars or the moon, it seemed to me, or even in the mirror. And so, checking my watch for the tenth time that hour, intending above all not to arrive at the party earlier than was appropriate, I strode out into the bright afternoon with my spirits rekindled. It was a typical late-spring Cambridge day, a day of privilege and beauty, sunny and fair but not too hot, the air graced with the sweet green notes of grass and privet.

I walked. It wasn’t far. I came off Brattle Street toward the river. And from half a block away I began to hear it—a clench-jawed, drink-smoothed murmuring. I had never been to Davis’ house. It was not one of the old ones but modern, with a generous front yard enclosed by a picket fence. And it was in that yard, above the arched teeth of the fence, as in some kind of white-collar barnyard, that I observed the crush of partygoers.

Then I was in that crowd, among them, and there was no more distance or perspective to be had. I was up close, flat against it, where nothing could be gleaned but the stark angles
of people, facades like snapshots, clothes, outfits, blues and pinks and whites, wrinkled linen and pleated cotton, the wild glances of sunlight off a hundred champagne flutes. A uniformed waiter handed me a glass. I swallowed half of it and tried to get my bearings. Everybody was there, just as advertised: the governor, short and large-headed and dour; only one Kennedy, but at least it was Teddy, the patriarch, who in event-terms counted for two; a major real estate developer and Republican fund-raiser; and the state’s junior senator, with his noble visage and stellar war record. And Parker Bing was there, of course, in a straw boater and white bucks, conversing intently with the deputy secretary for Near Eastern affairs, a fellow Fly Club member, who as I watched slipped a leather-backed memo pad out of his pocket and wrote something down—no doubt Bing’s number, I thought, turning away in disgust and almost bumping into Mike Lewin, my Littauer comrade-in-arms, who muttered, “Did you get a load of Bing’s hat?” I said I had and he shot me a gallows grin. I asked if he’d seen Davis yet and Mike shrugged, gesturing across the sea of heads to the other side of the yard. “Probably over that way. And don’t miss Kissinger holding court by the shrimp boat.”