The President's Angel (5 page)

“They don't worship the same one, though,” the President shot back. “And no one can agree on how God works. Is it a beneficial force or—”

“Yes, beneficial, very good.”

“—a punishing, threatening God?”

“Yes, punishing too. Very hard.” He nodded, always smiling. It was such inconsistencies that made the President view him with contempt.

“Sometimes he is playful too, do you not think?” the Ambassador continued. “We have a view of God as a little child playing in a garden with his toys. Do you like that? He is very playful, God.”

“And what do you believe in, Mr. President?” asked Emily Stanhill, the wife of the mining magnate.

He turned from the Indian Ambassador and stared at her without answer, and at that moment another guest leaned forward curiously: “What's the question?”

The President recovered himself. “The question is: Is there a divine intervention in the affairs of man? In fact, is there anything at all, divine or not? Is there a God?”

“Oh, of course there is.”

“Then second, is He looking out for us?” cried another at the table. “That's the question! What's God's responsibility to Man?” He sat back triumphantly, challenging his dinner partners, either side.

“And after that,” said the mining magnate's wife, “what is our responsibility to God? Do you pray, Mr. President?”

The President shot her a startled look, but before he could respond, the butler was at his arm. It was time to rise for coffee in the East Room and hear a chamber orchestra.

“No,” he said, offering her his arm. “Do you think I should?”

In the East Room they sat on uncomfortable, small, gilded chairs with red velvet seats. The President, seated beside the First Lady, was observed to be lost again in thought. At the conclusion of the first piece, he rose, bowed gravely to his wife and guests, and left.

The next morning the public relations office went bananas with phone calls. The staff didn't know which was of more concern: that the President had walked out on his duties, or that he had engaged in that extraordinary table conversation, which would not have mattered except it was somehow reported in the Press.

“What do you think is going on?” Jim asked the group at his luncheon table.

“Something's wrong,” said Steve.

“He's isolating. I wasn't even sure he was present at the meeting this morning.”

“It's as if he's listening to something else.”

“He asked for a Bible,” Jim blurted out, ashamed of his report.

“Good God!” It was accompanied by an embarrassed laugh.

“Did you get him one?” asked Norman, the Chief of Staff.

“I got him a Bible and a Hindu Bhagava-whatsis, to remind him it's only a book.”

“Look, he can read the Bible,” said Steve, Internal Affairs. “Nothing wrong with that. A Bible by his bedside, why the hell shouldn't he? Make sure the Press learns of it. Drop it casually. The President always reads the Bible at night. Great publicity.”

Bill Garcia, External Affairs, added: “I think we ought to do more with religion anyway. He ought to go to church occasionally.”

“Different ones,” said Jim. “Jewish, Catholic, Protestant.”

“Sure, hell, invite a bishop or a cardinal to the White House. It couldn't hurt.”

“Jesus, who the hell would we get?”

That's the way they talked, these ministers of state.

The angel stayed away.

Those nights when the President awoke, he roamed the carpeted corridors of his palatial prison, past sleeping guards.

He stood a long time at one tall window. The floodlights gave a perfect view of lawns. He padded to his private kitchen to raid the little fridge that was stocked with ice cream and delicacies for just such nocturnal fits. He wanted to be held. He remembered how he once could slip into his wife's bed and snuggle with her in the years before—“Before,” he called it to himself, with a capital B. But he had no desire these days for her, and often not for any other woman, though of course he sometimes feigned lust still, in order to be one of the Boys. He was known to love women, and certainly women loved him. If he slept alone, it was by choice.

He waked the dozing sentries with his restless steps.

“Mr. President?” they murmured. “Sir?”

He waved them back to sleep. “No problems. I‘m all right.”

Nights passed. Days. He knew he lied, that things were anything but well. Great sighs broke from his lips. He did not know the source of his unease.

He wanted help. You will ask why he did not speak to someone, find a kindred heart, seek out a doctor or psychiatrist who might heal the heart or mind—or, lacking that, a spiritual director or guide, a minister to the soul. But to whom could he go? Infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets; and what he needed, he did not know. In that time tradition dictated that the President would not practice religion, although political speeches were laced with godly references, precedent dying hard. Neither was it considered appropriate for a President to be in need of a doctor to the mind, a psychiatrist. In fact, the very opposite. If he required that kind of help (it was argued), then he must be unfit to lead the country. It is a hard custom that says you grind away your soul rather than ask for help.

The official and proclaimed reason no President went to church (none having done so for years) was fear of assassination. An assassination attempt (it was explained) would unfairly disrupt church services for the other worshipers.

No one questioned the argument. Fear was the predominant emotion of that age. Any action could be justified on the grounds of fear and found perfectly acceptable as rational or cautionary; and those in the Intelligentsia, who prided themselves on having displaced superstition with Science, emotion with Reason, did not make the connection that any fear, including their own, was merely an emotion too, like hope.

Hope, and also much that led to hope, was usually said to be “unrealistic.” Which is why religion and its improbable, unproved optimism were frowned upon. In that age “being realistic” was a synonym for “pessimistic,” so fashionable was despair.

And the angel stayed away.

The park bums were gone. The earth turned on its axis, unaware, and the sun rose and fell, morning and evening, in gorgeous, splashy colors like banners, saying Look at Me! Only God could create so vulgar a display and get away with it.

And Matt's heart burned—with an emptiness so profound that tears sprang into his eyes if he allowed himself even to approach with one sensitive tentacle his inner being: the void! Oh Christ! The hollow at his heart. He had not even noticed it until that night the angel appeared.

Now he talked to himself, or was it to this missing entity he had seen?

“I'm so angry,” he said. “I'm so hurt. Alone. Oh God! I‘m alone!”

That's how he prayed in those days of desolation, in the winter of his discontent, when he didn't even know that these were prayers or pleas for help, but only conversations with his empty heart.

One night the President's entourage swept through the wet, slick streets of the nighttime city, past the glinting lights of empty offices, roads cleared of other cars. He leaned back against the cushions beside Anne, his wife, whose plump right hand rested tightly on the window, the other in her lap, and who stared unseeing out her window, miles away. Her brown hair was pulled back on her neck with a pearl and diamond clasp. She sat too straight, the lonely, angry queen.

The entourage consisted first of a police car, siren screaming, roof lights whirling red and white. This was followed by four motorcyclists, riding two by two, and then a bulletproof car of secret service bodyguards, guns at the ready. The President's black limousine came next, its occupants hidden behind smoked glass. Flags fluttered on the front fenders. It dragged in its wake, like a comet's tail, more secret service cars, a dummy limousine, an open jeep with mounted machine gun, and a final octad of mounted motorcycle cops.

They were approaching the White House gates when the accident occurred. One forward motorcyclist, braking, slithered on the rainy street and jumped a curb, righted, then twisted around in his efforts to maintain control and, one tire blown (
bang
!), skidded under the wheels of the approaching secret service van. The police fanned out in case he had been the victim of a sniper's gun—the explosion of a tire:
bang
! Their man lay bleeding under the van. They rushed to positions, guns ready, in their haste to protect the President.

Accidents create accidents.

The chauffeur gunned his limousine—and stalled. Frantically he turned the ignition, listening to the dry churn of the motor. A dozen men surrounded the limousine, guns drawn.

In the back seat Matt's eyes fell on the figure lit by the streetlight in Lafayette Park. He sat, wet and in rags, on a gray blanket on the sidewalk. Above his head was a woman's purple silk umbrella. It did not keep off the rain. Beside him was a sign: PEACE NOW. ANGER, VIOLENCE BREED SAME.

Their eyes met, and an electric charge ran through the President—of what? Revulsion? Hate? The anticipated pleasure of a fight? He pulled his eyes away and banged on the glass that separated him from his chauffeur.

“Get this car moving!” he shouted angrily.

“Matthew, please,” Anne murmured beside him.

At that moment it caught and lurched ahead, snapping him back against the seat. Another moment and the limousine had turned into the White House drive. The gates clanged shut. He was safe.

But as he strode into the White House, the President was furious. He himself did not know why. He grabbed the first secret service agent that he passed.

“Why the hell is that vagrant back in Lafayette Park?” Rage consumed him.

“Sir?” The agent was startled.

“Under the purple umbrella. I told you to get him out of there.”

And he took the stairs two at a time, without waiting for an elevator.

That night, the President stalked the corridors of the upstairs rooms, pacing. He refused to take a sleeping pill. He wanted his mind clear, yet all he knew was turmoil and unwelcome restlessness.

At one point he stood at a window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. From there he could see across the green lawns, raked of November leaves. He looked through a lattice of the limbs of trees. Under the passionate white streetlights of the avenue, he could see the tramp, who sat, legs crossed yogi fashion, facing the White House. No purple umbrella covered him. His face was in shadow. Dharma bum.

The President turned away with a grimace and returned to his room.

He fell asleep like a stone dropping through water, and sometime later, like a turtle swimming with powerful, slow strokes, he rose to the surface of his consciousness again, took one quavering, sighing breath and opened his eyes.

He remembered the question: How could they have exchanged a look at night through the protection of blackened glass? The windows of the limousine were smoked, to prevent observers from seeing inside. But those eyes had looked directly into his, the eyes of the man the angel had touched.

The President was filled with longings he could not understand. He was struck by the fragility and ferocity of life. What did the angel mean by bowing to a tramp? Then, lying in bed, he remembered something else. It is a cardinal rule of the physical universe that we cannot see through a solid. No one, holding a book, can see all sides at once. We have to turn it in our hands; or if the object is too big to hold, then walk around it to observe the other side.

But standing at the north window only hours earlier, when, after the accident, he had stared out at that disreputable shape, Matt had seen all sides of the vagrant at once. He had seen his cracked leather shoes, set neatly on the grass behind him. He had seen the newspaper pushed into the seat of his pants to keep out cold. He had seen his thin shirt under his worn jacket, and his bare ankles tucked under him. He had seen his fingernails caked with dirt, and yes, his unclipped toenails too.

Matt had not questioned how he could see such detail across a hundred and fifty yards. Only now, lying in his bed, eyes open in the darkness, did the questions come.

He remembered also that when the angel (he now called it that) had disappeared and blackness took its place, the darkness had seemed more intense for the blinding quality of that earlier light. Yet there were streetlights on. Why would he have seen the night as dark? Night is never black in Washington, where lights burn all the time and reflect off the clouds with a dull orange glow. When she had disappeared (he now called it “she”), the President had felt his soul lunge out of his body to join her, and then snap back with pain. For souls can't easily leave their physical shells. Also he had felt the contradictory and delicious malice of her having left—gone from the indigent she honored. Gone from him, the President, gone from making him insane.