Exiles in the Garden (2 page)

The hospital's slate roof was visible beyond the cemetery. Alec thought it tactless to build a hospital so close to a graveyard. Old people were superstitious. But while the hospital was visible from the graveyard, the graveyard was not visible from the hospital. The old man's doctor made the point quite forcibly. The architects knew what they were doing. They promised a secure and cheerful environment and that is what they delivered. Rest assured, Mr. Malone. The view from your father's window will be pastoral, a comforting vista for him to contemplate in his last days, however many there are. Alec squeezed off one last shot of the Confederate sharpshooter and returned to his car for the short drive to Briarwoods, private road, no trespassing. He had been making this journey once, often twice a week for five years. Each time his father had something new to say, but his words came less confidently and there were long minutes when he did not speak at all. Alec had come to realize that his father was an erratic narrator of his own life. But that was mostly a consequence of the life he had led, a leader of the Senate ensemble. There were so many violins that it was sometimes hard to identify your own; the music was dissonant and naturally there were occasions you preferred to forget on grounds that one bad apple must never be allowed to spoil the barrel. Alec believed that life was, for the most part, involuntary.

From his wide bow window the old man could see the sixteenth hole of his old golf club, the long undulating fairway and the tiny green guarded by bunkers, one bunker so deep that when a player stepped into it he disappeared and when he struck the ball you saw only a great fan of sand, the ball rising from it as fragile-seeming as an eggshell, and it landed softly as cotton. The course was championship caliber and its members mostly scratch players, a different environment entirely from the years when the old man belonged and played on weekends. The course was easy then and only a few members played to a handicap of less than twenty. A scratch handicap meant that a man was not tending to business. He neglected his homework. He was not a serious man. Instead, he was a sport. With the exception of a few doctors the membership had always been political, members of Congress and their senior assistants, cabinet secretaries and their deputies, White House staff. Ambassadors were welcome if they called ahead. A quarter of the membership were lawyers or lobbyists. Kim Malone was puzzled by this new environment, so frivolous and so self-important at the same time. Where did they come from, these new members? Where did they find the time to hone their games to such perfection, booming drives and crisp iron play, twenty-five-foot putts rolled true. They worked out. They spent hours on the practice range, whole mornings with a five-iron. They played golf like professionals, even the women. And now and then when he looked from his second-floor window he saw a familiar face from the PGA Tour playing in a high-rolling foursome, hundred-dollar Nassaus and sometimes much more. Washington had always been a gambler's town, football, horseracing, backgammon, stud poker, golf.

My God, Alec, we wouldn't've been caught dead playing with Snead or Sarazen. They were too good for us. We'd've been embarrassed by our play. We were weekend duffers. And they would not have understood our conversation, always politics and government, the merits of a judicial nomination or the conference report on the minimum wage or the little river project the majority leader had tucked away in the supplemental appropriation for the army. Also, we spoke of confidential personal matters that even a golf professional could understand and take back to the locker room at Shinnecock or Medinah, and that talk was none of his business. When I played here years ago that bunker the size of a strip mine looked like a little kid's sandbox and even then it took us three, four shots to get up and down. The other day I looked out my window and saw the usual three lobby boys from
AIPAC
, guns, and motion pictures, with a newspaper reporter. Can you believe it? All four beautifully turned out, creases in their trousers, shoes shined, straw hats. They never spoke a word, those four, concentrating on their shots. Newsman laid one up three feet from the pin from two hundred yards out, beautiful shot, just superb. My day, no newsman played golf. They couldn't afford it and no club would have them if they could afford it. Eisenhower played golf. Newsmen bowled, like old Cactus Jack Garner. Or they played handball at the Y. Maybe one or two of them played tennis. Wasn't tennis Adlai's game?

They probably learned golf at Princeton, where they all go to school now because their daddies are rich.

Come to think of it, Adlai went to Princeton.

Newsmen go to Harvard.

It's the presidents who go to Yale.

Where did you go to school, Alec?

Two years at the university. And then I went to work.

What did you do?

You remember, Alec said. Snapshots.

I was always sorry you didn't go to work in politics.

I'm not good at politics.

You aren't?

No, Alec said.

I always thought you were.

Often in the past when Alec came to visit, the old man was watching the play with a friend who occupied the adjoining suite. Listening to them was like hearing one of Harold Pinter's wayward domestic dramas. Eliot Bergruen was a lawyer who had been in and out of government for fifty years but whose memory had stopped somewhere in the 1930s when he had been minority counsel to the Senate Finance Committee. He had gone on to become one of the capital's most successful lawyers, rarely the lawyer of record but essential at the table, saying little until called upon to sum up, which he did with scrupulous accuracy. Exactitude, he called it. Someone was in trouble with one of the federal agencies or commissions or the Justice Department itself; someone was on a hook and Eliot got them off the hook or made the hook disappear or turned the hook into a ladder. But of those years he had no memory at all. Neither did he remember his own name or the names of his children. He did not remember his wife, dead now many years. He did remember to address Alec's father as Senator, though for half of the previous century he had called him Kim. They had collaborated on numerous projects, reaching across the aisle, as it were. Collaboration was the essence of the legislative craft, half a loaf a kind of sacred grail or golden mean.

Eliot Bergruen and Kim Malone knew so much and had forgotten so much that younger men, seeing them years ago tête-à-tête at their downtown club, called their corner table the Graveyard. Eavesdropping was useless because their gossip was decades old and the names and situations were unfamiliar. Muscle Shoals, Trygve Lie, Warren Magnuson, Clayton Fritchey. Eliot had only a few tricks up his sleeve now and they were well thumbed, not always to the point. Occasionally he came up with a startling fact. Watching golf in the senator's room one afternoon Eliot remarked that Herbert Hoover was an eighth cousin once removed of Richard Nixon. Moreover, Lou Hoover was the greatest of all the first ladies, dignified and witty at the same time, well read, a radiant smile, nice legs, certainly a damn sight better than the harridan who followed her and the nonentities who followed the harridan, though he could not at this precise moment recall their names.

We've seen the best of it, he said.

What was the harridan's name?

Eleanor, Alec's father said.

That's the one, Eliot said. That voice! Those shoes!

She had a beautiful voice, Alec's father said. She was a beautiful woman.

No, Senator. She was not.

Bore a passing resemblance to Garbo.

Who's Garbo? Eliot asked.

Never mind, he added. I know. Senator from Mississippi.

That was Bilbo, Kim Malone said.

One of yours, Eliot said.

My side of the aisle, yes.

Dumb as a post.

That was the least of his failings, Kim Malone said.

They had been great friends and collaborators, though on the opposite side of things politically. With the advent of the Eisenhower administration—eight green years after twenty of drought—Eliot Bergruen prospered and continued to prosper until well into the second term of the Clintons, by which time both he and Kim Malone were museum pieces. They retired to the private hospital within weeks of each other in the summer of 2003. Eventually the old lawyer stopped speaking altogether. His family no longer visited him. His firm dropped his name from its letterhead. But Alec's father continued to insist that Eliot be brought in to watch the golf, the spray of sand that announced the shot, the derisory laughter that drifted up from the sixteenth green. Kim kept up a running commentary but Eliot did not notice. His gaze was fixed on the heavy clouds approaching from the west and the cherry trees that lined the fairway, their petals scattering in the breeze. Eliot did not speak and it was impossible to know what he gathered or if he gathered anything, the look on his face as faraway as witty Lou Hoover's. Still, Kim Malone enjoyed having him in and was always sorry when the nurse arrived to wheel Eliot back to his own room.

So long, see you tomorrow. Sleep well.

Yup.

When Eliot Bergruen died, Alec's father began to lose himself, concerned now only with his own unraveling condition. He insisted that he had ceased to see himself as a human being, hence his confusion, bad temper, idleness, and shabby appearance. He allowed himself to go to seed, allowed his hair and fingernails to grow like a corpse in the grave. He thought of himself now as a laboratory specimen confined to a bedlam-kennel supervised by indifferent technicians, careless vivisectionists. The vivisectionists wore half-glasses and cultivated an air of vulgar disdain. They were the sentinels of the modern world come to carry him off. They answered to no one. They were beyond the reach of any human authority. Alec's father stated that he was no longer in a situation of becoming. He was slipping backward, neither here nor there. He no longer had standing.

He said, I live in the calm of the horse latitudes. I am from the land of lost content.

Alec thought his father said "lost contentment."

No. Lost
content.
Nothing there.

Yes, Alec said. I understand.

No, you don't. But you will.

Do these vivisectionists have names?

I know who they are, the old man said.

Thin-faced? Long-nosed?

They are my enemies, he said.

But you've outlived your enemies. All your enemies are dead.

Not to me they're not. Wherever I'm going, they're waiting for me, each one with a score to settle. The residue of seventy years of public life. I'm outnumbered. They're crowding me. I've lost my immunity. Things were better when Eliot was alive. Eliot could back them off, did so on a number of occasions. Oh, he was good. He had no use for the law, you know. Didn't own a law book. Eliot knew human nature backwards and forwards and that was his great secret. The old man paused at that, frowning and moving his shoulders. I do so wish now I'd gone to his funeral.

Why didn't you?

I don't know, the old man said carelessly. Maybe I overslept. The vivisectionists were present. However, I was told it was a grand occasion, three members of the cabinet, the British ambassador, because the British have long memories and knew that Eliot had worked for Lend-Lease. Enough lawyers and lobbyists to fill San Quentin. The vice president gave the eulogy. All Eliot's women were there, or those who are still alive. They filled the rear pew of the church and all of them were smiling through tears, according to my informant.

His women?

Eliot had a rough-and-tumble love life. A fact that went unremarked by our I-don't-know-and-I-don't-care vice president, who preferred to concentrate on his services to the party. Eliot was quite a fine piece of work. And what I want to know is, where did he find the time?

Eliot?

Women loved him. That elfin look, his boutonniere, his habit of sending flowers, and inside the vase along with the flowers a little blue box from Tiffany's. He was a beautiful dancer, you know. The waltz, the tango. When he danced he was light on his feet. And he always had his hand up some woman's skirt. The old man made a gesture with his hands as if he were shooing away insects, and then he laughed. He said, Besides the elfin look and the dancing he had a cynical outlook on life that appealed to women. Eliot maintained that most Washington women were cynics. That was because they knew their men intimately. What was said at night in the darkness as opposed to what was said at the televised news conference or on the Senate floor. For God's sake be the man I married instead of the man I almost didn't marry. Words of that kind from the wife to the husband. Personally I never found that to be true, the cynicism of women. But that was what Eliot said, and he ought to know. I mostly spent my time in the company of men.

I'll be damned, Alec said.

You didn't know that? I thought everyone knew, common knowledge. He loved chasing women and he loved the Republican Party. I don't know in which order. Maybe they came in no particular order, merely situational. Republicans in the daylight, women after hours. The old man sighed and when he spoke again his voice was pale, losing timbre with each word. He said, Eliot got started with women during the Second World War when he was working for Lend-Lease. Washington, so gray during the Depression, was a wide-open town during the war, everyone working dawn to dusk and loving it. That was the first time in memory that we had a government that everyone looked to, even Republicans, much as they despised Franklin. Most of the men were away in the service. Their wives and girlfriends stayed home and went to work at places like OSS and the War Department and found that they liked it. They were women who were attracted to masculine atmospheres, high stress, sometimes profane, wisecracking, footloose. Also, the wages were good. I think it came as a surprise to women, how much they liked the work and how good they were at it. At any event, Eliot was Four-F owing to a bad heart. So he stayed home, too, dancing the nights away. And he lived to a hundred and three. My oldest friend.

I didn't go to the funeral because I didn't want to hear the eulogy, the old man added. I hate that p-prick.