The Dinner Party (7 page)

“I'll find them,” the senator said. It was not that he disliked Dolly's father and mother; it was a gut feeling that they had contempt for him—and no more than a gut feeling because nothing in their attitude toward him expressed it. “But don't you see,” Dolly explained to him, “they have contempt for everybody. For one thing, they are one of the oldest families in America. They look down upon such Johnnys-come-lately as the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, or the Boston crowd, the Lodges and the Adams and the others. They are impossible, and my four brothers are impossible. I'm the only civilized person in the family. They look down on the German Jews and the Eastern European Jews, even though they accept them in marriage. They hide; they feel that true aristocracy does not look for publicity, and Daddy employs a very clever person to keep his name out of the media. So don't brood over it. We don't see them enough for it to be a real problem.”

The senator had tried to live with that advice, but it was not easy. Dolly was a very rich woman in her own right, and Augustus and Jenny Levi, who were generous in gift giving, never offered money or discussed it, the single exception being the senator's campaign funds. Whatever their feelings were toward the senator, for his part, he was not fond of them. If he hated them, it was not a hatred he could admit to himself. The senator had learned long ago that in American politics, you do not hate people, and he had learned it so well that it was doubtful that he could summon up a strong, old-fashioned hate. In his business, politicians to the right of Genghis Khan were his
good friends
, people with the minds of Neanderthals were his
valued associates
and people still residing mentally in a slave society were his
respected opponents
. Hatred, like love and honor and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, was watered down and replaced with a process of being careful. And that same process led him to move heaven and earth to avoid being with his in-laws.

But his children were not to be found in the house, and he stormed into the dining room where Dolly had begun to set the table, demanding to know where they were.

“I don't know,” Dolly said. “Did you look in the old barn?”

“Why?”

“Because they might be there,” Dolly said patiently, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

The senator shrugged, left the house and started off toward the old barn. The day was hot already. The swarms of insects made him miserable, and he was sure that somehow he would get poison ivy. This he hated; he felt more vicious toward poison ivy than toward the Ayatollah, and he had even played with the notion of introducing a bill to rid the whole country of poison ivy. In his childhood, he had several painful sessions with poison ivy, and nothing could convince him that one had to touch it to get it.

Coming around a bend in the old dirt road, the barn still a couple of hundred yards away, the senator suddenly felt tired. He had awakened early in the morning, hours that felt like days, he had run, he had swum, he had showered twice, and very soon he would have Joan Herman working with him in his study, doing a first draft of a bill he had been contemplating and arranging and rearranging in his mind; and in his house Joan Herman was a problem. Being in his house, under the nose of his wife, she appeared to explode with lust, luring him into love, or into what went by the name, behind locked doors, standing, sitting, on the floor, on the top of his desk—wherever. He should have gone to her apartment this morning. Why on earth had he asked her to come here?

“Lenny!” he shouted, deciding he had gone far enough. If they were in the barn, they'd hear him. If they were not, he'd look elsewhere. And then, when they appeared at the entrance of the barn, the senator remembered his welcome—or lack of it—to his son, and he quickly rehearsed some sort of apology.

It went badly, words to the effect of a bill he had been trying to formulate for days until it had become a residing obsession. His mind was on the bill. That was the poor substance of his apology.

“I understand, Dad,” Leonard said. “It's all right. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“Well, sure. But I'll pass this on from Mother. She wants you to take the station wagon to the airport and pick up Gus and Jenny.”

“What time is their plane?”

The senator looked at his watch and decided that they had at least an hour.

“I thought Mac was going to pick them up.”

“You know the way your mother is before an important dinner party. She won't let Mac out of her sight for ten minutes.”

“O.K.”

They walked back to the garage with the senator, and no one mentioned the interrupted meditation. At the garage, Clarence excused himself, saying that it was just family and he'd prefer to remain here. “I'd like to spend a little time in the library, sir,” he said to the senator. “It looks like a wonderful library.”

“Feel free,” the senator said. “There's plenty of time. We won't be having lunch until they come back and the old folks have rested a bit.”

“Yes, I'd appreciate that,” Clarence said.

“Enough of libraries at school,” Elizabeth said to her brother. “I'll tag along with you. Can I drive?”

“Do you feel up to it?”

“I think so.”

“What's this?” the senator demanded of Elizabeth. “Are you sick?”

“If you call it that. Same old thing.”

Leonard nodded; blame it on the period, it answers all things at all times.

The brother and sister climbed into the station wagon and backed it out of the garage.

The senator hooked his arm into Clarence's and led him into the house, thinking, Damn it, things change, maybe not much but they change, and just try to think of this twenty-five years ago.

The senator deposited Clarence in the library, a warm, pleasant room, three walls floor-to-ceiling with books, old leather armchairs, a fine old mahogany library table, and three tall windows looking out over the lawn. The floor was covered with a very old, worn Aubusson rug, a fierce eagle, with lightning in its talons, woven into the center. “The rug,” the senator explained, “was a gift to my wife's great, great-grandmother from the association of cotton-mill owners in Rhode Island—although why I do not for the life of me know.”

And with this strange declaration, which left Jones puzzled, Cromwell begged his pardon and took off down the corridor from the library to the wing of the house that contained his personal bedroom and study. He heard his name called, and turned to see Dolly coming out of the door to the storage pantry.

“Hold up,” Dolly said. “I saw her car outside, so she's here and she can wait. I thought you could give us the day.”

“I shall. I only want her for an hour. I've been walking around with this Sanctuary thing in my mind, and I have to have something formalized on paper.”

“So long as she doesn't stay for lunch.”

“Good heavens, Dolly,” he protested, “I can't get rid of her before one. How can I send her away without lunch?”

“She won't starve. Ellen will bring her a sandwich if you're that worried.”

“No, no, no,” he said worriedly. “My goodness, she'd see the terrace going to her car. You are setting lunch on the terrace?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, it would be a slap in her face. Come, Dolly, let's be reasonable.”

“I don't feel reasonable, and I don't give a damn whether you think it's a slap in her face. She could use one. Mother and Father and the kids will be here. I want the family. I don't want her. I don't want Pop to have to break bread with someone he knows you're humping.”

“What?”

“Richard, this isn't the time or the place. I know. He knows. Other people know.”

“For God's sake, Dolly; we can't talk about something like this here in the hallway.”

“You're right. But I want her out of the house before lunch.”

“God Almighty,” he whispered, “how you must hate me!”

“No, I don't hate you.”

“I'll send her home,” he said hopelessly.

But that was easier said than done. Joan Herman was no fool. In fact, in spite of her position as the senator's personal secretary, she was in all truth his chief of staff, and when Richard had finished explaining how he could not possibly marshal his thoughts today, what with preparing for the visit from the secretary of state and Bill Justin, assistant secretary, she said coldly, “That's horseshit, Richard—pure, unadulterated horseshit,” using his given name. She almost never used his given name.

Cromwell sighed and shook his head hopelessly.

“A little more explanation, sir. That bitch laid down the law to you.”

Joan was unlike Dolly in all the ways one person could be unlike another. Dolly could not be put down; she was as secure in her social position as the Queen of England. Anything, any slanted remark, slur, imagined or otherwise, any bit of misdirected humor could destroy Joan. She was taller than Dolly; she was blonde; her figure was large-boned and rangy; she was strongly handsome rather than beautiful, and she constantly fought to be self-possessed, a quality Dolly enjoyed without ever considering it.

“Joan, this is not the place,” thinking that neither was the corridor.

Joan commanded her voice, taking a deep breath and dropping it to just above a whisper. “There is no place, Richard. I haven't seen you for a couple of days, and I came here panting like a damn female hound dog, with some stupid fantasy that you'd fuck me right here on the floor. Oh, the hell with it!” And grabbing her purse and briefcase, she stalked out of the room.

The senator fought an impulse to go after her. He would not chase her through his own home, and the last thing he desired was a shouting contest, with Dolly and the servants as witnesses. This had happened before and he supposed that it would happen again. He needed her; she understood things that he did not understand, and she sensed the special gait of politics in a manner that was beyond him. Essentially, Richard Cromwell was a good-natured and easy-going man; he lacked proper claws, and he lacked the ability to think politically. He still was uncertain why the secretary of state had sought him out and intended to bring with him one of his heaviest guns, namely Bill Justin. That they wanted to talk to his father-in-law might mean anything. Joan had already suggested, a few days ago, that the subject was a road Augustus had contracted for in Central America. On his part, he was not sure; and he clung to the possibility that they might be equally eager to talk to him. He felt he had something that might best be said off the record, outside of Washington, over a good brandy and a good cigar. He had not spoken to Joan Herman about this. She might well have said, “Senator, love, you're not thinking politically.”

He remained in his room, staring out of the window, until he saw Joan's car come around the house and go down the driveway toward the main road.

“My driving used to scare you to death,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh? That's funny, scare me to death. I wish you would.”

“Forgive me. It's because I don't believe it. I can't believe it. You're not even sick. You're beautiful—just the way you've always been.”

“Funny, if I weren't gay, you wouldn't say that, would you?”

“Say what?”

“Beautiful.”

“You mean that only a gay man would be beautiful to me?” Elizabeth asked.

“No, that's not exactly what I meant.”

“You've always been beautiful,” Elizabeth said. “You always delight me. You're decent. I used to tell the kids at school that I had the ultimate big brother—” She broke off and stood on her brakes, pulling over onto the side of the road with a loud screech of rubber, and then sat behind the wheel, weeping. “I can't drive when I'm crying,” she whimpered. “Take the goddamn wheel, Lenny.”

Leonard got out of the car and walked around, while Elizabeth slid out of the way. “Long legs. Nice. I don't have to adjust the seat.”

“Don't talk silly!” she snapped.

“Why not?” He pulled back onto the road. “Silly is the prime definition, isn't it? I'm dying in a country where a community of cretins who call themselves the moral majority have defined my death as a judgment of God on my wickedness. These same dunces crusade against you having an abortion, calling it an act of murder, while they back an atomic policy that will probably wipe out the human race during the next few years. You can't expect me to be profound in such a framework. Come on, old dear—you know, they used to say that those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Mad is too elegant a term for our present condition. Silly, foolish, stupid—”

“Lenny,” she interrupted, “don't talk like that.”

“How? Liz dear, they never invented any distinctive mode of speech for the departing guest. I'm not trying to be flip. I just find that words are meaningless.”

“I love you so much.”

“Then maybe,” he said, “we're discovering what love means. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've asked myself what that word means—if indeed it means anything in America today. It was a garbage word, a fraud to cover every cheap TV product, every worthless encounter, every emotional swindle. Now—did you see the way Dad reacted, first at the pool, where he couldn't even relate to me as a person, and then the way he tried to make up for it? And it matters, because I want so desperately for him to put his arms around me and tell me that he loves me, because I can sort of understand him now and I can love him. Do I make any sense?”

“I think so—but I'm not thinking very clearly. I sit here and try to adjust to what you told me—”

“Liz?”

She nodded, rubbing her eyes.

“Liz, you have to pull yourself together. You have to stop crying and behave like everything is normal.”