Exiles in the Garden (9 page)

She walked the few feet to her house, vaguely troubled by Paul's farewell. "Take care of yourself" was not an expression that came naturally to him. In her kitchen she found Alec watching the baseball game. He looked up in surprise when she told him that the d'Ans had sold their house and were returning to Europe. Alec said he was sorry to hear it. He knew how much their friendship had meant to Lucia. Your home away from home, he said, his eyes drifting back to the television set, an ugly argument on the field, catcalls from the bleachers. No more second-tier intellectuals, Alec added, and Lucia agreed with him: No more second-tier intellectuals. Alec was drinking a beer and she reached down for the glass and took a sip. She put her hand on his shoulder and kissed the top of his head, the place where the bald spot was. He didn't know it was there and she saw no reason to tell him. Premature, she thought, a premature bald spot, and there was nothing to be done about it. Wasn't prematurity always a lost cause? Alec was wearing his hair longer, sideburns that fell below his earlobes, a shaggy look she liked. He smelled of the darkroom and she liked that, too. Lucia stood quietly a moment, her hands on his shoulders and her chin touching his head, watching the argument on the field but thinking about her friends and how much she would miss them and their hospitality, the guests-of-many-languages, their worldly European flair even when they misunderstood things. Surely Paul knew better; Lucia had always taken care of herself.

Paul and Marie were gone in a week. The new owners of the house next door were lawyers and not especially sociable. Construction began almost at once. The fountain was removed. The great cedar was dismantled branch by branch and a tennis court installed, the work taking most of the summer and through Thanksgiving, and when it was finished the thump of tennis balls had definitively replaced the conversations of the guests-of-many-languages, though only on weekends. The lawyers were much too busy during the week for sport. On the rare occasions when they gave a party it was a muted affair, and judging from the fragments of conversation, the guests were lawyers, intimate with the deliberations of Congress. Now and again they heard a familiar voice from Sunday morning television.

By Easter, 1968, Alec and Lucia had decided their own house was too small. Mathilde needed a larger bedroom and Alec wanted space for a proper darkroom. Lucia wanted her own study, a private place for her books and her stereo where she could play Mahler and Haydn by the hour while she wrote in her diary. And the absence of the towering cedar was disturbing. When they looked skyward at night all they saw was the hazy reflection of the lights of downtown Washington. Also, the thump of tennis balls on the weekend drove them to distraction. The lawyers found it necessary to loudly dispute line calls. Out. It was in. No, it was out. My side, my call. Bullshit. Bullshit yourself, sore loser.

Alec and Lucia found a larger place down the street, across from Admiral Honeycutt's house. The new house had three large bedrooms and space in the basement for the darkroom. Lucia took the third bedroom for her study, installing bookcases floor to ceiling. She bought state-of-the-art stereo components. She bought the novels and plays of Max Frisch and the works of the Romansh poets, determined to become current with Swiss literature. She wrote furiously in her diary each morning, recording the ordinary events of the day along with her thoughts about what she was reading. Once a week she read the tarot, to no clear result. She also wrote intimate poems, many of those in a code of her own devising, and then she abandoned the code to write in Romansh. They were long-line poems of a romantic inclination. From her third-floor window Lucia could see the summit of the Washington Monument and behind it aircraft drifting over the Potomac to National Airport—as in Zurich she had watched aircraft high above the Limmat approach Schaffhausen, reflecting sadly that the last time she had been on an airplane was the previous spring, two and a half hours to Bermuda, one week in the rain. She sat, feet up, composing her poems and watching the slow-moving aircraft and thinking of Zurich and the forgotten Café Voltaire and the waterside restaurant in Zollikon; like Leisl, she missed coffeehouses. On the wall behind her was the framed photograph Alec had taken so long ago, the day they met, Lucia in the doorway of the ambassador's office, his two children at her side, a mischievous smile present. Alec was not aware of it but she was looking at him and had been for a minute or more, wondering who he was and why he was photographing the ambassador. She thought he moved beautifully, like a dancer, the camera as much a part of him as his own two hands. She looked away, and when she looked back he was taking her picture. A single shot was all he needed. When he lowered his camera she saw his eyes, pale gray.

The new house had a large back yard with a garden at the far end, but the garden was not nearly so welcoming as the twelve-by-twenty space where the roses climbed the wooden stake fence and hung there in glorious profusion, white roses, yellow roses, five kinds of red roses, large and small roses that reminded Alec of the seen-it-all faces of his colleagues in the newsroom. This new garden was spacious as a prairie yet carefully manicured, fussed over, the dimensions all wrong. The garden was didactic, a schoolmarm's finger-in-the-face, violence at hand. It looked professionally laid out by a horticulturist who lacked humanity, an appreciation of asymmetry and chiaroscuro, the shock of the unexpected. The ensemble reminded Alec of anonymous passersby on any city street in America, banal as polka dots. He was profoundly disappointed and concluded that he and Lucia had made a terrible mistake buying this new house. Alec saw no way to remake the unfortunate garden, owing to the dimensions and what had gone into it. The garden put him in mind of a nation governed by a tyrant, and it was too late to put things right. Surely it was wrong to tear out the roots of perfectly healthy plants. They would have to live with a mistake.

Alec regarded his old garden with the greatest affection for the rest of his life.

L
ET ME TELL YOU
a story, said Alec to Lucia.

My father was elected to the Senate when he was young, not yet thirty-five years old. He had the bearing, one might say the standing, of a much older man. He habitually wore three-piece suits, a gold watch chain strung across the vest, but the Phi Beta Kappa key that went with the chain he left at home. His hair was prematurely gray and his voice a confidential baritone, quite soft. He won in an upset against an unpopular Republican, sullen, unclubbable. That was what the political community was then, a club. Everyone knew each other. So word preceded my father: sound man, reliable, tended to business. A workhorse, not a show horse. Good poker player, knew when to hold and knew when to fold, and so forth. Everyone liked Kim Malone, he was in for the long haul, a serious man. I never knew him to listen to a baseball game or read a novel. His world was politics, specifically the Senate. He spent the ten weeks between the election and the inauguration reading the Senate rule book because he knew that the rules were the keys to the realm. The consequence was that from the beginning he was an inside man, drinks in the majority leader's office after hours, golf with committee chairmen on the weekends. After a year or so he became friendly with members of the White House staff and eventually the president himself. Kim Malone knew how to return a favor and keep his mouth shut. He never spoke to the newspapers until much later in his career, when it became unavoidable, and to his advantage.

This occurred when I was very small, seven years old, a Saturday afternoon in summer. My mother explained that she had a bridge tournament and my father would look after me. We drove to the Senate Office Building in her convertible, the top down. The day was very warm, heat rising in waves from the asphalt. The empty lobby was cool and our voices echoed in the great space. We mounted the marble staircase to my father's second-floor office. When we walked into his reception room there was no one about and the door to his private office was closed. My mother was not put off by closed doors so she knocked once and walked in to find my father with a visitor, the two of them in close conversation around his desk. He looked up with an expression of open alarm. Of course he had forgotten that I was his responsibility for the afternoon. I remember that he and my mother had a quick word sotto voce and that he gave her shoulder a squeeze before he kissed her and wished her good luck and asked her to telephone when she had news. They're better players than I am, my mother said. No they're not, he said. And call me, please. She left at once and I was directed to the leather couch and told to make myself comfortable and not make one sound.

You can take your jacket off, my father added with a wink to his visitor.

The visitor was staring at me with a baffled look. What was I doing there, a child in a senator's private office on a Saturday afternoon? Didn't I have anything better to do? The Senate wasn't even in session. It was as if the lion tamer had entered the cage to find not a lion but a white rabbit. To cover his confusion the visitor lit a cigarette, though he already had one burning in the ashtray.

Say hello to Mr. James, my father said.

Hello, Mr. James.

Mr. James works for the president.

Hello, Alec, Mr. James said, and blew a smoke ring that seemed to hang in the air forever, and a second to follow the first.

I took off my jacket. My mother had dressed me up in a blazer and short pants, white shirt, brown oxfords, because we were visiting the Senate Office Building. Both my father and Mr. James were in suits and ties. They had drinks in their hands. My father rose heavily and went to the sideboard to pour me a soda. He and Mr. James returned to their discussion, of which I understood very little except there was an absent party and this man was not a friend. There was a reservation somewhere and he had gone off it. He was not thinking of the national interest but of his own interest and it was urgent that he be brought to heel at once or there would be hell to pay and he would pay it. Mr. James was talking and my father was listening, not altogether comfortably. Mr. James was not a prepossessing man. He was painfully thin with a bony face and a gray complexion. He looked exhausted, as if he had not slept in weeks, whereas my father was heavy-set, pink-cheeked, the picture of good health. Yet the force in the room was Mr. James. The tension between my father and his visitor was palpable. Then suddenly Mr. James had a coughing fit and had to turn away, his hand to his mouth. He was so frail. He stopped the coughing fit by lighting another cigarette but there was no smoke ring this time.

We're counting on you, Kim.

It's difficult, my father said.

The Boss wants it.

I know he does, my father said.

If not, I intend to piss on the son of a bitch. And others'll get wet.

Timmy, my father said. But he was smiling now.

You know I'm right, Kim.

I'll speak to him, my father said.

It's going to have to be more than talk.

I can't put a gun to his head, Timmy.

The hell you can't. He's a goddamned traitor. Tell him I said that.

I'm not going to say that to him.

Tell him the Boss said it.

My father took a swallow of his drink and did not reply.

We'll be grateful.

I'm sure you will be, my father said. And then he cleared his throat and leaned close to Mr. James and said something I could not hear but whatever it was Mr. James smiled and lit another cigarette.

I was there for a long time and began to daydream. I always wondered if I acquired my taste for daydreams in my father's office that day, listening to him and his visitor talk about the senator who had gone away from his reservation and had to be brought back, forcibly if need be. On the mantel opposite me was an old pendulum clock. Each tick seemed to have the resonance of a pistol shot, and when the minute hand advanced it did so with a sharp click. I was hypnotized by the clock, sixty pistol shots punctuated by the click when the minute hand jumped forward. I believe in that way I came to conceive of time not as a smooth evolution but as a series of abrupt progressions, relentless and unsurprising so long as you anticipated the sharp click. I would say that was my introduction to the modern world, except really I was just a little boy sitting on a leather couch listening to two men of government trying to settle a score. Then Mr. James raised his voice and said one last thing that I do remember word for word. He said, Of course I'm playing politics. What else would I do? I play politics the way Caruso sings Puccini. With a damn sight more at stake.

What were they talking about? Lucia asked.

I have no idea, Alec said.

Did you ever ask your father?

Never did. I like mysteries.

Really?

Yes. Definitely.

I like your story, Lucia said.

I told you so that you could know me better.

I know you pretty well. We're to be married after all.

I want you to know how I grew up. Sitting in my father's office watching Timmy James blow smoke rings and threaten to piss on a United States senator. But that's my father's world, not mine. I was never attracted to Washington the way my parents were and perhaps that's because they were from someplace else. They were immigrants. Union Station was their Ellis Island, the Lincoln Memorial their Statue of Liberty. Most everyone in Washington is from someplace else but soon enough they switch allegiance. And they do not acknowledge this allegiance shift when they visit their former home because the residents there are outsiders. They are civilians and they wouldn't understand the reinvention of self. More to the point, they would not understand the mystery of government. How it works actually, the rules and regs, the greater arcana. My father called it "the privilege" of public service. Washingtonians, at least the Washingtonians I'm talking about, feel closer to the pulse of things than other people do. Election returns come in and your neighbor across the street finds himself without a job and the next day or the day after you drop by for a drink and the talk is subdued because of the corpse in the parlor. He's still your friend but he isn't the same friend because he's an ex. Ex-senator. Ex-congressman. And when you're out, you're out. There are no second acts in American politics unless your name is Nixon. So you say goodbye to the cloakroom and become a lobbyist or of counsel to a law firm and they're the same thing in most cases. Washington is a present-tense city, zero-sum. You can forget almost anything but you shouldn't forget where you're from. Don't you agree?