Exiles in the Garden (29 page)

A
LEC WENT TO BED TROUBLED
. Before sleep came he was reading the African book of the great Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski, his observation that ordinary people searched for normality. The search was instinctive. In Africa the brutality of political events—coup d'état, rampage, revolution, conflict of every color and shape—was seen as a function of nature, natural phenomena to be endured and waited out as one would endure and wait out a storm from the heavens. In time the storm passed and normal life resumed, even if that normal life consisted of nothing more than sitting in the sun or enjoying a morning cup of coffee. Such people had no interest in pushing the envelope of human experience. Envelope-pushing was not in their nature. Envelope-pushing got you into a world of trouble, perhaps dead. Envelope-pushing was another word for vanity. But Alec was not certain that the slow-moving sundrenched furnace of central Africa was applicable in the century of the American empire, where war was always waged in a distant country and affectless unless you knew someone who was there, a soldier or civil servant. Otherwise it was experienced as a photograph in the newspaper or a film on television or on the Internet. A good question for Kapuscinski, but Kapuscinski was dead and unavailable for questioning. They said that wherever Kapuscinski went in the world, and he went most everywhere, his true subject was Poland. Iran, Congo, China—only Poland written in another tongue. Alec had no idea whether what they said was true. It sounded true, and if it was, then Poland was a fabulous country.

Alec showered and dressed and drank two cups of coffee while he scanned page one of the newspaper—more of the same, with a well-balanced photograph of an Iraqi child perched on the knee of a GI, stock footage except the child was smoking a cigarette, as world-weary as any café intellectual. Alec looked at the weather report, cloudy with rain later in the day. When he looked at the date he gave a start. Today was his father's birthday, an occasion that meant a great deal to the old man. Last year Alec had bought him a bottle of single-malt Scotch with an unpronounceable name, and when he died there was still a half-inch in the bottle. Alec stared at the date for a long time, then went to his desk and wrote a note to Mathilde, telling her where he was going and when he intended to return. Then he set out for the cemetery, the Leica snug in his pocket, strolling up the street past Admiral Honeycutt's old house and Ronald diAntonio's until he came to Mrs. Wheatley's, all the shades drawn and a faded white carnation in the gutter. The morning newspapers were stacked neatly on the front stoop. His mother had told him once that Eleanora Wheatley read six newspapers a day, cover to cover except for the sports page. She enjoyed catching her guests in errors of fact, Joseph Alsop a favorite target, Kim Malone not far behind. He wondered if Ryszard Kapuscinski had ever visited America. Certainly he had, everyone came to America sooner or later. But had he ever written on the subject? Probably not. America was not Kapuscinski's material, since it bore no conspicuous resemblance to Poland.

Alec entered the cemetery grounds at R Street and took the path that wound down in the direction of Rock Creek Park, past gravestones high and low, plain and gaudy, old stones side by side with new ones. At nine in the morning the cemetery was deserted, and then he noticed a woman setting up her easel near the Saint-Gaudens monument to Clover Adams, Henry's wife, who died in circumstances mostly unaccounted for, except it was known she drank from her own darkroom's developing chemicals; toward the end of her life she had become a passionate photographer. And decades later Eleanor Roosevelt came to sit by the hour beside Clover Adams's grave after she learned of her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer. Alec's father had told him the story. He called the gravesite hallowed ground.

Alec walked awhile, uncertain where he was in the cemetery. He was slightly winded moving down the undulating path. The distant parkway was thick with rush-hour traffic, carbon monoxide heavy in the chilly air, now and again the sound of an auto horn. He remembered the Reverend Willis walking uphill and pausing beside a tree, and now he tried to locate the tree. His father's grave was on the downslope not far from the parkway. Alec rested a moment on one of the benches placed at intervals along the path. Traffic was at a standstill now and he heard programs from a score of radios, Snoop Dogg and Puccini and news talk joined in a mighty cacophony, two hos and Rodolfo making their way arm in arm along the dangerous streets of Baghdad. Alec closed his eyes and when he opened them he saw his father's grave not fifty feet away. He sat very still, the Leica inert in his hand. A fat black crow was poking at the grave soil, its head jerking violently.

There were no known photographs of Mrs. Roosevelt at the grave of Clover Adams.

Those days, his father said, they let people alone.

Alec stood and sidestepped down the slope. The bird flew away. He picked his way down, sliding here and there on the damp grass. The Leica was still in his hand but he had forgotten about it. Standing at the graveside he tried to summon his father's presence but was unsuccessful. He had thought of a few words to say, so he said them without confidence that they would be heard by anyone except himself. He asked for repose of his father's soul and happiness in the afterlife. He wished him happy birthday and hoped that someone had remembered to bring a cake and a bottle of Scotch. No one should have to celebrate alone. Alec stepped back then and squeezed off two shots of the grave and the wilting flowers beside it. They would be flat shots, for there were no shadows on this milky spring morning. The grave soil was cold to his touch and damp but he picked up a fistful anyway, crumbling it in his fingers. Alec stood stone still, aware of the stalled traffic behind him. What a lonely figure he must look to the commuters on the parkway and the joggers on the path next to it. He stepped back two more paces and put the camera in his pocket. Upslope he saw the gravediggers, the same two who had attended his father. One of them pushed the wheelbarrow and the other strolled alongside. They were talking companionably and when they saw Alec they gave respectful salutes and Alec saluted back. He thought suddenly that gravedigging must be the oldest profession. He watched them continue on their way over the hill for the day's work. Alec made a last shot of them as they disappeared over the brow.

He had done what he came to do and now it was time to go back home, visit with Mathilde. Yet Alec did not move. He listened for his father's words but heard nothing except the sound of traffic. He tried to summon conversations from years past but was not successful. His father was lodged in a region of his mind but that region was not accessible. He could not at that moment even recall the sound of the old man's voice, its tone and timbre. Alec bent down, knees creaking, and made another shot. He thought of the urn under the earth and the ashes inside the urn. Something paltry and incomplete about it, not equal to the occasion—and Alec thought then that he was feeling not grief but loss, unless they were the same thing. He and the old man were fundamentally estranged, had been estranged for decades, a question of temperament, differing ideas on how a life might be usefully lived. What counted, and the reckoning. They saw the world through opposing lenses. He wondered if the same schism occurred between mothers and daughters, and then he remembered Lucia and her mother, married to socialism. In his father's life there seemed no separation between the public and the private, each locked in death's grip. Alec wondered if his father saw his son's life as a rebuke. Probably he did. Ryszard Kapuscinski's father must have felt the same rejection. What was his boy doing flinging himself all over the world, the Asian continent, Africa, the Middle East. What was wrong with Poland? Except the whole world was Poland, and when he died Kapuscinski was the most admired foreign correspondent in all Europe. His father would have known that and, dime to a dollar, would have been proud. Surely that was the case.

Time to go. But Alec did not move.

The old man had led a satisfactory life, a life of consequence to a very great age where he could look back with satisfaction and some wonder and amusement. The Senate was no doubt a better place with him than without him. He had been on the right side of things generally, moments of accomplishment and some courage along with low comedy and the usual disappointments and compromises and feuds, the blowback of a political life. Kim Malone liked being in the thick of it. He often said there was no reason to live in Washington if you were not in the thick of it. If you didn't want the thick of it, go back to Dubuque. Alec remembered Timmy James chain-smoking and threatening to piss on a Republican. The evening calls from Franklin Roosevelt, his high Hudson Valley squire's accent instantly recognizable, wanting help with this or that piece of legislation or a judge or cabinet member he wanted confirmed at once without delay. Can you help me with this? Calls every night from colleagues and lobbyists, constituents, now and again a vice president, but the call that counted was the one from the White House. None was savored in the way that the Hudson Valley squire's calls were savored. Kim Malone believed himself indispensable to the civic life of the nation. Nothing else mattered in quite the same way as a war resolution, a tax act, Social Security, Lend-Lease. Ordinary life was a version of frivolity, redundant, and in that way he and Andre Duran were kin, one holding a floor and the other a sword. Against that Alec had a camera, used for peaceful purposes. Against that was the thought that life was not a competitive race. In life, as in golf, you played against the course, not your opponent. Courses came in infinite varieties of shapes and sizes and degrees of difficulty. Success depended on the shots you had and how creative you were with them, and always a requiem at the end of the day. Alec supposed he could be described as having had a sidelines sort of life, peaceable for the most part. Wasn't it Orwell who observed that pacifism was a respectable idea so long as you were willing to accept the consequences?

He heard a step behind him and wheeled about to see Mathilde.

She said, I knew you would be here.

To say a few last words, Alec said.

I have to say goodbye, Papa. I have a noon flight.

So soon? Well, I'm glad you were here.

Me too.

When will I see you next?

Mathilde gave an inconclusive shrug. Probably a few months. Certainly before the end of the year.

You should make an effort to meet Andre. You'd like him. He's—unusual.

Mama said the reunion went well. She was nervous beforehand.

I think it did, he said.

She's with him now, Mathilde said.

The reunion meant quite a lot to Andre, too.

I'm worried about you, she said.

Don't be, Alec said. He raised the Leica to his left eye and made two shots of his daughter. For the second shot Mathilde offered a wide grin—a reluctant grin, Alec thought. He said, I'm driving up to Maine for a week or two. I'll call you in London.

Will you take care of yourself? You should get more exercise. And watch your diet. Mathilde went on in that vein and when she finished they embraced, and with a wave she was gone, walking back up the hill with an athletic stride. Alec waited a few moments before he, too, began the climb up the hill.

Home, Alec stepped into the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. He was winded from the walk back from the cemetery and now paused to take stock of his surroundings. The pot was decades old. The refrigerator and stove were decades old, as were the chairs and sofa in the living room. The carpet was threadbare. The digital wall clock was new, a Christmas gift from Mathilde. He could donate the ensemble to the Smithsonian for one of their exhibits, "The Way We Lived Then." Minus the wall clock. Minus the Bose radio, also a gift from Mathilde. Probably the time had come to give the place a shave and a haircut, a makeover for the twenty-first century. Alec made a mental note to call Bloomingdale's in the morning. Bloomingdale's was his mother's department store of choice. Two chairs and a sofa—his mother had called it a davenport—and new end tables, and lamps to go with the end tables. He heard a sound somewhere and thought it was his father laughing.

Pouring coffee, he remembered the telephone call from the night before, the one he had left for the answering machine. He touched the button and heard Annalise's breathy voice. She was arriving in New York at four in the afternoon, staying at the Algonquin. I've been thinking about you and hope everything went well with your father. Are you going to Maine? Please call.

Alec drank his coffee, killing time for an hour, paying bills and thinking about Bloomingdale's. A dozen or more bills had collected over the past fortnight. He made a mental note to call his bank for a fresh supply of checks. He noticed another ten percent increase in his health insurance premium. Heating oil was on the rise. The American Express bill was negligible because he hadn't been anywhere. The Democratic Party needed money. Alec put the mail aside and called the Algonquin and left a welcoming message for Annalise. At noon he set off in his car, up Wisconsin Avenue to Military Road, right on Military to the tree-lined street where Goya House was located. He sat in his car a moment listening to the engine tick. Andre was alone on the porch, looking as if he had not moved since the previous evening. He was smoking a cigarette and rocking gently in his chair and did not notice Alec approach.

Andre? Alec said.

Yes. Andre fumbled with his earpiece.

It's Alec, he said.

Lucia is no longer here. She had to catch her airplane.

I know.

She is returning to Europe, Andre said. She did not bring Mathilde. Apparently there were appointments at the State Department.

Mathilde left for London this morning. Via New York.

So much travel in your family. But we'll meet when it is time.

I wanted to see you again.

Why?

I enjoyed our conversation yesterday.

Andre made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a grunt and in a sudden motion pitched his cigarette onto the lawn. The day had turned dark, heavy clouds building to the west, no breeze.