Echo House (20 page)

"One of Adlai's socialite friends," Axel said sourly.

She did not look like a socialite to Alec. She looked like someone's distraught aunt.

"Adlai's biggest problem," Axel said. "He's not a prick. You've got to be a prick in this business and he's not. He won't tell her to get lost. He knows she contributed a magnificent twenty-five dollars to the campaign and her husband handsomely matched it, dollar for dollar. He knows because I told him. The socialites just love the Guv, love him to death. They think campaigns are run on love. First campaign I've seen where socialites were involved and at first I didn't see the attraction for them. They hate the government because it's the government that collects their taxes. But the government isn't the point. The White House is the point. They think the campaign's a kind of national coming-out party or race meeting at Saratoga. It's a fashionable place to be. It excites them, being in the receiving line or in the paddock; they don't care much for the stables, though. They love hanging around and giving advice to the professionals but they don't like to give money. If they gave money, someone might think they had something tc gain. Someone might think they wanted something, perhaps an ambassadorship, some pleasant Old World country in a temperate zone." Axel grunted, glancing sideways at his son. "This is the first socialite campaign I've seen but I have a feeling it's not the last."

The governor was helping the woman with her coat, murmuring words of consolation.

"Parasites," Axel said. "He's not prick enough to tell her to get lost. It's pathetic. And she voted for Eisenhower. In the privacy of the voting booth she looked up and her dear father's hand was on her wrist and guiding her fingers to the box that said Ike and Dick. I'd stake my life on it."

Alec sighed. Listening to his father was like listening to an insistent drizzle, the words falling and puddling, slick under foot. For this he had left a oarefoot sophomore with a ribbon in her hair and a cashmere scarf around her neck, a drowsy golden-haired girl with a garden-of-earthly-delights smile and an uninhibited attitude, a devotee of Blake. Yes, he'd said with no little self-importance, I'm off to meet Adlai Stevenson—and she had laughed and laughed.

"When you get involved yourself some day you'll know what I mean. Campaigns are xenophobic, like nations. We don't like tourists in our country. They don't understand our customs and they don't speak our language. We think they're a distraction to our sovereign, who must be focused every hour of every day. So we don't like them. And they don't like us." Smiling falsely, Axel waved goodbye to the woman with the pearls. She did not wave back.

Axel continued to drizzle. From somewhere nearby Alec heard Leila Berggren's brass laugh, filled with sarcasm and mischief. He tried to imagine her in the cashmere scarf and couldn't. She belonged in a crowd. He wished he had refused to come; there was nothing for him here. The room seemed to him isolated from the world and the governor isolated in the room. He did not look like a sovereign, a tired middle-aged man with scuffed shoes, no hair on his head and a fleshy nose. Now he stood alone sipping from a glass of Champagne and looking at the Lincoln portrait, apparently unaware that he was being observed. Alec felt a sudden sympathy for him. He was alone with himself and perhaps that was not where he wanted to be on a night of defeat. Probably he had enjoyed the floodlit union halls and auditoriums, the orchestras and microphones, speaking a smart sentence and listening to the applause. If you were in politics, that was where you belonged, even on a night of landslide, the terrain changing before your eyes; and you were the cause of the changes. But looking at the governor now, it was evident that his thoughts were unknowable. Even the Champagne might have been soda water.

Axel went on and on. People milled about, collecting in front of the door, then backing away, uncertain where to go or what to do when they got there. The atmosphere in the room was still heavy, as if they were all below sea level. Alec wondered whether these were tomorrow's men after all, or remnants of a dying civilization as out of date as the old senator planting roses and investigating the life of Goethe or Axel's dislike of socialites. The room was purposeless and stale, the men plodding around it. He thought of cattle in a corral. Yet the governor was composed and at ease, staring at the Lincoln portrait, humming to himself. Lincoln's expression was one of great unquiet grief. With sudden certainty Alec realized he had no idea what the governor was thinking or feeling. Perhaps his mind was a blank, the only sensation the effervescence of wine on his tongue. Probably all he wanted to do was go to bed. The telephone began to ring again.

Alec wondered if Leila Berggren was staying at the mansion or in a hotel somewhere, and if she was alone or with someone. He looked up when a red-faced man touched his father on the shoulder.

"It's good to see you here, Axel," the red-faced man said, smiling tentatively.

"A disappointing night," Axel said sadly, extending his left hand.

"We lost Mobile. Can you believe it?"

"I want you to meet my son. I was just telling him some family history, some stories from the old days. Alec, this is Lloyd Fisher. We were friends in the war."

Lloyd Fisher smiled and shook hands, his grip hard as iron, and returned to the matter at hand. "Mobile, can you believe it? My wife's family comes from Mobile and they assured me it was safe, we didn't have to worry. And I believed them.
Mobile,
it doesn't seem possible. First time in history, Mobile goes to the Republicans."

"Grant won it in 1872."

"You're joking," Lloyd said.

"General Grant," Axel said, raising his eyebrows.

"That explains it then. They're unreliable in Mobile. They're idiots. You can't trust people who'd vote for a man who defeated their army in a war and generally fucked them over, excuse me, Alec."

"An omen for the future," Axel said.

"We can be proud of our campaign, though." Lloyd smiled sarcastically.

"Adlai can. I don't know if we can."

"The historians'll like us even if the people didn't."

"Too bad there aren't more historians in Mobile, Lloyd."

"What the hell, you do what you can. Sometimes it's beyond your control; people believe what they want to believe. Racial, ancestral, whatever you want to call it. We lost too many Chicago Poles this time around. We had their wallet but Ike had their heart. The Poles approve of generals running things. They're a romantic people. They liked the Sikorskis and the Pilsudskis and now they like Ike. I'm damned if I know what they think he intends to do. Listen to them and you'll get the idea that he'll throw a nuke into the Kremlin and send the Marines to declare the restoration of Great Poland, free, strong, and Catholic once again. And stop the sideshow in Korea so that we can get on with the real war, the one against the Soviets. I always thought a man voted his wallet, but sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he votes his genes or his adolescent memories, Mass at Saint Stanislaus, trolling for perch in the Warta, a Chopin sonata, or his grandmother's noodles, not forgetting his permanent state of grievance."

Axel began to laugh. Alec was mesmerized.

"Democrats are soft on communism, it's well known. The shit from Wisconsin has done more damage than Fuchs, Hiss, and the Rosenbergs put together. He's a greater menace than Stalin, though I don't have to tell you about that, do I?"

"No, you don't," Axel said sharply.

"So our Chicago Poles forgot about the New Deal and the Fair Deal and talking sense to the American people. They left their union cards in their lunch buckets when they went to vote, because Ike's going to liberate their homeland. And I'll tell you something else. We've lost them for a generation. André agrees with me."

"I have no doubt," Axel said.

Lloyd looked at Alec, then back at Axel. "Emma left me."

Axel said, "I heard."

"Hated it in Chicago. Hated the weather. She thought all anyone was interested in was money, which is true but that's what Chicago
is,
a money foundry. If you want to sniff flowers, move to Mobile, which she did for a while. She's with someone, I don't know who." He rubbed his knuckles and frowned. "She was in a permanent state of grievance, like our Chicago Poles. Aren't women unpredictable?" Alec saw the sadness in Lloyd Fisher's eyes and his father's evident embarrassment. They stood quietly a moment, lacking words to illuminate either grievance or unpredictability. Alec thought both men were masters of disguise.

"Forget it," Lloyd said. "You should come back to Chicago with me tomorrow. We can survey the battlefield, count our casualties, see where we are and where we're going and who we're going with, next time around. Adlai might try again."

"Might," Axel said.

"Depends on how much he liked it. What he felt like when he went to bed at night and what he thought when he woke up in the morning. If he can remember the good shots and forget the bad. Politics is like tournament golf; you have to believe the ball will go in the hole and if it doesn't it's not your fault, it's the fault of the weather or the groundskeeper or the spike marks on the green. And he'll have a better chance, next time around. The Republicans don't know how to govern, never did. They'll screw up. So Adlai's our man if he remembers the putt that went in the hole instead of the four shots it took him to get out of the bunker." Lloyd paused then and put his hand on Axel's shoulder, squeezing. "I'm sorry about your trouble."

Axel nodded, glancing warily at his son.

Lloyd didn't miss Axel's caution. "And I'm glad to see you dodged the bullet."

"It wasn't close," Axel said.

"We've all got to be careful." Lloyd sighed and lowered his voice, though no one was within earshot. "That committee, they've got investigators everywhere and informers. Damned gumshoes. Vigilantes. I heard they were looking into your European operations."

"I have some charities in Europe. They didn't care for some of the people who were running the charities."

"I had a feeling, Axel Longfellow's bank was an accident waiting to happen."

"It wasn't anything to do with Longfellow's," Axel said. "They thought it was, but it wasn't."

"Yessss," Lloyd said, smiling.

"It was a fishing expedition."

"Where did they get their information?"

"He's no longer with us."

"Not Carl?"

"No, not Carl," Axel said.

"Who was the real target? Ed?"

"They want you to grovel," Axel said suddenly.

"It's either that or a contempt citation."

"I didn't grovel."

"That's what I heard," Lloyd said.

"What else did you hear, Lloyd?"

"That you got an apology from Tail-Gunner Joe himself."

"Not quite an apology," Axel said.

"And Cohn, too."

"It wasn't Cohn. Cohn's never made an apology in his life. Never will. McCarthy said, 'I have no further use for this witness.' If you want to call that an apology, that's what he said."

"He ask you if you were a Red?"

"He asked me how much time I'd spent in 'that France.' Then he asked me if I was or if I'd ever been. I said I wasn't now but had no memory of then."

"Jesus," Lloyd said.

"I didn't like it," Axel said. "However, it's a great opportunity to find out who your friends are."

"I found that out a long time ago," Lloyd Fisher said, turning to Alec and telling him how lucky he was to have a chance to watch Election Night at ground zero, like a box seat at the World Series, ha-ha, except your team's getting the shit kicked out of it with no chance for ninth-inning heroics. Still, the important thing was being there. Taking part. Getting to know the people involved. You get your father to bring you to Chicago; we'll have a night on the town, I'll introduce you to some wiseguys. Lloyd nodded vigorously, opening his mouth to say something more—but touched Axel on the arm, and wandered off in the direction of the bar.

"So," Axel said to his son. "Do you like it at ground zero?"

"No," Alec said. "And it would've helped if you'd said something about McCarthy's committee. So that I'd have some warning in the event my name shows up in the newspaper. What's it about, anyway? Or is it another secret?"

"I should have put you in the picture. McCarthy thought I was part of the twenty years of treason, and when he decided I wasn't, he let me gc. I give money to certain people in Europe. Some of them are socialists, social democrats they call themselves. Washington doesn't get the distinction. McCarthy thought I was Stalin's banker. I have friends who helped out, made telephone calls. Hard to know what would have happened without the friends and their phone calls. I got to people who got to him. I should have told you. But I was busy day and night. And I only did just dodge the bullet."

"Is it over now?"

"It's never over," Axel said. "That committee throws mud and it sticks, nothing to be done about it. Means: in the holy war you were friendly with the antichrist. No one ever forgets. I suppose you've noticed." Axel raised his head and looked around. "That I'm not the most popular man in the room."

But it seemed to Alec that his father was neither more nor less popular than usual. People always treated Axel Behl with caution. "Popular" was not a word he associated with his father.

"It got into the newspapers then?"

"No, but it's out. Some version of the hearing, what Senator Joe said and what I said and what Cohn said." He said, singsong, "Axel Behl, that prick. What did they have on him? I heard he got it quashed. I heard he had something on Joe and got a man to make a phone call to make certain Joe knew. What do you suppose it was, the evidence that Axel had? Something to do with money. Money or women. Axel Behl's rich as sin and's not afraid to pay for information..."

"And that was what you did?"

Axel shrugged.

"Who are they? The people you helped."

"They're good people," Axel said after a moment. "They're excitable. They worry about the future. Us and the Soviets, we're so big and so very thoughtless. They worry about the future because they've lived in darkness and their eyes aren't accustomed to the light. They only want to avoid the giants. They want to cross the bridge safely, avoiding the trolls underneath. They want their privacy back, Alec." Axel smiled, but his son looked at him coldly. "So I help them out. I give them money. I make it possible for others to give them money."