The Dinner Party (15 page)

“I'm willing.”

“You know, Richard, we don't split on the money question. I've never objected to this political game you play.”

“Thank you for your overwhelming kindness.”

“I am totally and indecently rich, and pretty old, and when I go, I don't take two nickels with me. My sons inherit, and my daughter has a nice pile put aside for her, on top of the boodle her granddaddy left her. My father never cared for the boys which is why he left so large a bundle for Dolly.”

“I'd just as soon not review comparative financial standings in your family. Are you going to tell me that I married my wife for her money?”

“No.”

“Thank God for small pleasures.”

“I turned it around, you damn fool. I was specifying that you and Dolly want nothing from me. That makes you unique in my eyes. I like it. You don't have to brownnose me. You can tell me to fuck off any time you want to.”

The senator nodded. It was a long time since he had been this furious about anything, and he did not trust himself to speak.

“Damn it, Richard, will you get off your high horse!”

The senator controlled himself. His anger subsided, and he said slowly, “Let's walk again, Gus.”

“Too hot to walk.”

“Then let's go downstairs in the house and shoot some pool.”

“I want to talk to you. I'm not finished.”

“We'll play pool and talk. It gives me a chance to think, and maybe pool is the one thing I can beat you at.”

“Maybe.”

The pool table was in a room that had once been part of a large basement. When modern heating systems made coal storage space unnecessary, and electricity and refrigeration made root and apple cellars a thing of the past, Dolly's father turned most of the cellar space into a billiard room, and when Dolly's mother gave them the house as a wedding gift, the billiard table came with it. It was a deep cellar, nine-foot ceilings, and great twelve-inch-square oak beams to support the house above. Dolly had added to its attractiveness with dead white ceiling between the beams, white walls, and a floor of oak-stained eight-inch wide boards. The pool table was an old one, made in Milwaukee in 1901, by Stien and Scherson according to the gold plate on its edge. It had huge, bulging legs, and it nestled under green billiard-room lamps.

“You did beat me once or twice,” Augustus said. “You don't practice, your skill goes. I started playing on this table when I was twelve. At eighteen I could beat a hustler. But I don't play anymore, not at the club, not at home—home. The pool table's in Switzerland. I don't know where the hell is home these days.”

“Straight pool?”

“Good enough.”

The senator racked up the balls, and then nodded at Augustus, who was chalking a cue he had selected.

“You break,” Richard said.

“You're a gentleman. It's something I've always admired about you, Richard. I'm no gentleman.” He was feeling his cue, and then lining up the white ball for his breaking shot. “Definition of a gentleman. He treats the lowest, the poorest, the most unappetizing with the same attention and courtesy he might give to that actor in the White House. No, I'm no gentleman.” He made his shot and the balls broke widely. “Do you know, Richard,” he said as he studied the board and planned his shot, “I'm going to lay the whole thing out for you. I might as well. I don't want any loud noises at dinner tonight.”

“I thought you would.”

Augustus didn't speak again. He fixed his attention on the table and ran the whole set of balls. Cromwell watched him with amazement, the old man's steady hand, his detachment and his uncanny judgment of ball and cushion. “I don't do that too often,” Augustus said. “Maybe half a dozen times in a lifetime. Maybe it's the table. I know this old table. Your turn.”

“The hell with pool,” the senator said. “You're too hard an act to follow. Let's sit and talk.”

“Got any cigars?”

“I keep a box of Don Diegos here.”

“Cuban?”

“I don't smoke Cuban cigars.”

“Come on, Richard, they smoke them in Congress and in the White House too, for that matter.”

“When the dunces who run our foreign policy make their peace with Cuba, I'll smoke Cuban.” He took the cigars out of a closet and offered them to his father-in-law. “Anyway, these are just as good.”

“If Jenny comes down here, she'll cut my heart out.”

“Take your chances. It's an uneasy life we live.”

They dropped into two brown leather chairs at the end of the room, lit their cigars, and leaned back comfortably.

“Never played pool when you were a kid?” Augustus asked.

“Nope.”

“Missed something.” He tasted the smoke. “A lovely cigar, Richard. I don't deny it,” he said, referring to the matter at hand. “It's about the road.”

“They never liked it.”

“You know—right from the beginning, it caught my imagination. A highway across Central America, linking the oceans. Only old Goethals had a dream like that.”

“It's a very high-class dream. It certainly is.”

“You're not going to say, I told you so, are you, Richard.”

“No.”

“I admire your presence.”

“You build roads. I'm a politician.”

“Don't tell me you don't have dreams. I never had one like this before. It's like building that tunnel they're going to have, connecting England with the continent. And this is historically overdue. You know that. Everyone in Congress knows that. A broad, fine, weatherproof road, ocean to ocean, with a rail line running alongside. It would change the whole history of Central America.”

“That's just it.”

“Damn it,” Augustus said, “those two old buzzards could have come to my office, they could have subpoenaed me down to Washington—why here?”

“Here it can be social. The velvet glove and all that crap. You know what they're going to say. The wrong time, Gus. Politically inadvisable. The Pentagon garbage. A lot of talk—but the way I see it, the essence will be—forget it or we'll close you down.”

“Like hell they'll close me down!” His cigar had gone out. He lit it again and said, “I suppose they could.”

“I'm not sure they could. You're working for local governments.”

“With money borrowed from us, Richard.”

“Yes, everything is our money. All the same, we could put up a terrific fight in Congress—and we might just win.”

“We? Who the hell is ‘we,' Richard? Are there thirty men on your side of the house who'd stand up against those warmongering bastards? Name them. Your damn party has shit in its blood. I'm a Republican. I hate those gross bastards who have taken over the White House. I hate them because they're stupid and greedy beyond measure, and because they could burn us all in some senseless holocaust. But I am what I am. I'm rich, I intend to stay rich, and I belong to the party of the rich—and by God, through the years we haven't done too badly—until this crew of bloodsuckers took over. What have your boys done? You gave us Korea and you gave us Vietnam and you've left a trail of blood and suffering right through the twentieth century, with your crazy Johnson and your dimwitted little haberdasher Harry Truman. You make wars and we pick up the bodies and end them. Your people created the Pentagon and the C.I.A., and now you're trying to sell the American people the notion that we were responsible for all of it.”

It took the senator a minute or two to react to a kind of anger and eloquence that he had not experienced before from his father-in-law, and in the interval he fought to control his own anger. He managed that, and he managed to say, coolly enough, “Do you really believe that?”

“Oh, Lord, Richard, I am not putting you on trial. You're a decent good man. But what I said is history, not opinion.”

Cromwell took a deep breath, and then lit his cigar, and puffed deeply. You don't inhale a cigar, but when you do, there is nothing in the world like it. Calm, calm, calm. You can help this man. He can help you. What he said was not totally false, nor is he so different from the crowd in the White House. Like him, they disdained to hide their position. If they lied, it was boldly and blatantly, and only fools believed them. If they hated welfare, they did not disguise their hatred with euphemisms. They needed hungry workers to break the unions, and they needed small wars to keep the industrial military complex in good standing. And when his own party aped them, his own party lied.

His anger faded.

“You're sore as hell, aren't you?” the old man said.

“No—no, I don't cherish illusions any more than you do, but I dream that perhaps it can work a little better. I think I could get at least a hundred voices in Congress to speak out for you—but that wouldn't make much difference, would it?”

“What do you think, Richard?”

“No. I'd never get a majority. If they want you to give it up, well, they know how to twist arms. The C.I.A. can grow more damn accidents than an army of black cats. Your shipments would stop, your machines would blow up, and your ships would have all sorts of interesting accidents. And your workers would develop a habit of getting themselves dead. What are you in for right now? I mean out of your own money.”

“It's not pocket money. We draw our own plans based on our own surveys. No other way to sell the bonds. That's already almost five million dollars. We've designed some new earth movers, bigger than anything that's ever been used, and we've placed orders up to—say sixteen million. We have a small army down there working on the right of way, buying property and clearing brush.”

“Any of it guaranteed?”

“Those banana republics don't have a pot to piss in. The bonds that will pay for this are guaranteed by the U.S.A.”

“And what are you in for—I mean what does it add up to at this moment?”

“About two hundred million. Now, understand, Richard, this is a toll enterprise all the way. We have floated a company, sold bonds, and intend to run it the way the Canal is run.”

“Do you stand to lose?”

“That's it. We don't if we begin to lay down the road. At that point, Washington comes in with enough money to pay off our expenses, and they pick up whatever is left of the bond issue.”

“But right now, the two hundred is down the drain.”

“I don't think so. I think those two peculiar bastards will propose a deal.”

“To save your two hundred million or to save the road?”

“What do you think?” Augustus asked.

“They sure as hell don't want the road.” He studied his father-in-law with interest. “You won't fight them?”

“Richard, they may have crawled from under a rock, but it's my rock. You want something from them?”

“Yes. You don't have to cave in immediately. You can make it rough for them, because in the end they'll get what they want and what they came for. You can make a small deal.”

“With you as the beneficiary.”

“Not alone. Others will benefit.”

“Tell me about it.”

Richard nodded. “All right. I thought of bringing it up after dinner, but since you're going to give away the road, we might as well talk about it now. You've heard about the Sanctuary Movement?”

“I saw something in the papers. I haven't followed it.” He lit his cigar again. “A good cigar, Richard, mellows even an old beast like myself. It soothes the savage breast. At another moment I might have said, out and out, that I don't give a fiddler's fart about your Sanctuary Movement. Now I've had a fine lunch and I've seen my favorite daughter and my favorite granddaughter, and I'm prepared to listen.”

“We thank God for small favors. I'm very serious about this—believe me, Gus. I'll shorten the background. Since nineteen eighty-one, our immigration people have deported more than fifty thousand refugees back to Guatemala and El Salvador—almost half of them to prison and execution. The stories that come back to us are hideous and almost unbelievable, and the horrors are perpetrated by governments we back. This is at best a brief summary, but it is in response to this situation that the Sanctuary Movement came into being. Last year in San Francisco. Church people opened their doors to these refugees. They hid them, fed them, sheltered them—and not only Protestants, Gus, but Catholics and Jews, and in one case even an order of Catholic friars. Can you see it—there hasn't been anything like this since the old underground railroad of the days before the Civil War. Did I say it began in San Francisco—oh, it spread, California to Arizona and Nevada and Colorado until over two hundred churches and synagogues were involved.”

“Why the synagogues—to soften me?”

“God damn it, no!” the senator exclaimed angrily. “The synagogues are involved. Does that surprise you? Do you expect less from the Jews than from us?”

“Finish your story, Richard.”

He'd finish it, but he did not know why or to what end. The man sitting beside him was a stranger, a man worth more than a billion dollars who cleared a pool table on the break, who professed love for his daughter and granddaughter but apparently loved nothing, who was the least Jewish Jew the senator had ever met.

“You could guess, Gus. What was the name of the three-star general who said last month that the worst enemy the Pentagon faces are the goddamn churches—excepting of course the moral majority?”

“You're drifting.”

“Sorry. Back to the point. The White House decided that this Sanctuary Movement, this revival of the underground railroad, this use of the church and synagogue, was, as the general specified, the major enemy. Whereupon, they ordered the immigration service and the F.B.I. to arrest and indict. Sixteen Sanctuary workers, a Presbyterian pastor, a Catholic nun, and a number of lay religious workers were arrested. Two of them are on trial now as we speak, in Tucson, Arizona. They have thrown a conspiracy charge at them, which could mean five years in prison on each count if they are convicted.”