Watergate (54 page)

Under the circumstances LaRue would almost have preferred seeing his wife come toward him.

Clarine took in the situation, drew on her cigarette, and laughed. She retreated several feet to hide from Eastland, the task of making herself inconspicuous complicated by the red cocktail dress she’d chosen to wear, as well as by her long, fashionable hair amidst all the beehives and permanent waves.

“Mr. President,” LaRue said with a smile, using Eastland’s Senate title, the “president pro tempore” he had gotten from thirty years’ worth of seniority.

Eastland tilted back his soccer ball of a head and laughed. A silver
filling inside his open mouth caught the beam from a ceiling spotlight, as did his Rhodesian tie clasp. He asked one of the policemen to take him and his “old friend Freddy LaRue” someplace quiet for a minute or two. Once they’d been escorted down one of the Coliseum’s ramps, to a corridor with some utility closets, the senator said, “Freddy, I was backstage with the
real
Mr. President when Billy told me he thought he’d seen you. I figured it would be a little awkward for Mohammed to come to the mountain, so here I am, comin’ to Mohammed.”

“I suppose that makes Richard Nixon into Allah,” said LaRue with the same soft laugh Eastland had always appreciated.

“I suppose it does, Freddy.” The senator raised his voice over yet another burst of applause, dulled by distance but strong enough to travel even down here.

“Deafenin’, ain’t it?”

LaRue shook his head and smiled, acknowledging the political improbability of it all.

“If he goes to trial in the Senate,” said Eastland, “we’re going to hold the line.”

“Can you do it?”

“Today? Yes. Tomorrow? Could get complicated. I’m not talkin’ about these transcripts we hear are comin’. I’m talkin’ about whatever other surprises still might be out there. Anything you know I don’t?”

“No, sir. But what I don’t know was always more than what I did.”

“Freddy,” said Eastland, solemnly, “you know how bad I feel about everything that’s happened.”

“Yes, sir.”

The senator took his elbow. Drawing him further away from Billy Pope and the cops, he practically whispered in his ear: “Freddy, Mr. President knows you’re here. I told him so back in the holdin’ room once Billy said he thought he’d spotted you.”

LaRue raised an interested eyebrow.

“He said to tell you hello.” Eastland imparted the greeting as if it were a secret message smuggled out of an occupied country. “This whole political fortification he’s now countin’ on is The House That Freddy LaRue Built—his exact words, or nearly so.”

“Nice of him.”

“He said more. Said that you should ‘keep the faith.’ ” Eastland laughed at the phrase. “Sounds like a nigger preacher, but that’s what he said. And it’s what you ought to do, Freddy. Keep the faith. Get your lawyer to string things out for as long as he’s able. See if he can keep you out of jail through ’76, because Mr. President will go out of office issuin’ a bunch of pardons. He said this, Freddy.”

LaRue said nothing. He didn’t see how he could go on playing Scheherazade for another two years. The committees and the prosecutors would soon have their fill; the tale would exhaust itself, and he would be locked up.

“He knows that you’ve never asked for anything, Freddy. And he gave me this assurance very privately, without a hundred special prosecutors buzzin’ around.”

“And no hidden microphones.”

Eastland laughed.

“Well,” said LaRue, “I appreciate even moral support.”

“Oh, we can do a lot better than
moral
support. Freddy, I’m not goin’ to be staying up in Washington, D.C., forever. I’m planning to retire in ’78 and come back to my cotton and soybeans. Yes, sir, this is my terminal term. And when I’m home, you can help me out runnin’ those six thousand acres.”

LaRue laughed. “Do you know how much money I’ve lost in one business and another? I’m better at counting votes than dollars.”

Eastland gave him a serious look. “There’ll always be a place for you, Freddy. You just need to keep your head high and think about comin’ home. Everybody
does
come home, you know—at least everybody who comes from here.” He extended both his short arms, as if to take in the whole state of Mississippi.

“Everybody?” LaRue asked with a smile.

“They sure do. In fact, do you know who my Elizabeth saw shoppin’ in McRae’s yesterday?”

“Who?”

“Miss Clarine Lander! Standin’ in front of the makeup counter, tryin’ on the fiercest lipstick in the store.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do say.
Everybody
comes home, Freddy.”

The senator nodded to Billy and the policemen, ready for their escort. “I’d best be gettin’ back to say my goodbyes to Allah. You keep well, Freddy. And you remember all I told you.”

LaRue shook Eastland’s hand and returned to the ocean of standees at the back of the Coliseum, squeezing his way through dozens of folks until he reached Clarine. As he murmured “excuse me” to them all, Nixon was winding up:
I say today that 1976
,
the two-hundredth-anniversary year for America
,
will be the best year in its history
,
the most prosperous
,
the most free!

Watching the crowd whoop themselves silly, LaRue saw a small cluster of blacks, curiosity-seekers, he supposed, politely withholding their applause. Larrie withheld hers, as impolitely as she could, staring balefully through her dark glasses.

LaRue thought about 1976 and decided he didn’t want to wait. He wanted to go to jail and get it over with. If he did it soon enough, with a little bit of luck and leniency he might be home free before ’76 was even through.

Everybody does come home
,
you know
.

Maybe so. But as he looked at Clarine, he knew that she wouldn’t stay for long.

Nick had always said she’d be late for her own funeral, and at ninety Alice supposed she already was. She was indisputably late for Stew’s this morning, but she didn’t like being rushed by Janie or the driver, and she had decided to take her time—now that Stew had all the time in the world.

When she arrived at the church, one of Stew’s sons—what was his name?—led her down the aisle that she had never walked as a bride. Roland Smith, the rector of St. John’s in 1906, had been annoyed when it was announced that the Episcopal bishop of Washington would perform her wedding to Nick in the East Room. Strange that she could recall Smith’s name and not this boy’s, but she was not going to believe that her inability to come up with it presented evidence of some mental decline to go along with the physical one she’d been feeling, markedly, since the birthday party.

Strange, too, on this lovely morning, to be thirty years older than the corpse. She’s been told, thank goodness, that there will be no eulogy, so she won’t have to sit in this second-row pew and listen to tales of how brave Stew had been while being poked by the doctors and infused with Joe’s vinegary blood. He
had
been brave, of course, and had written of his ordeal better than any preacher could talk of it; the mourners might now show a little bravery by not yammering on about all the lessons that suffering can teach us and all the comforts we can offer one another. There
is
no comfort, and there is no “we”; death is omnipotent, and it will go on performing its extinguishments, one by one.

Fiddlesticks. Stew was as likely to meet up with the stuffed tiger whose paw had come off in his hand as he was to meet his Maker. She looked toward the coffin. It was ready, once the service finished, to be loaded into a hearse for burial up in Connecticut. Why not burn it? And, honestly, why not now consider whether she really wants her own carcass to spend eternity next to Paulina’s? Could she perhaps split the difference? Would Rock Creek accept a can of her ashes to go into the ground instead of her bones?

What Stew’s death would do to Joe was anyone’s guess. He’d told her on the phone last night that he felt amputated from the brother with whom he’d shared his byline and blood. He’d yet to get over his
mother’s
departure, now three full years ago. Alice leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned around in the front pew, she saw how ashen and distressed he really was. For one awful moment she thought he would lean over and kiss her, but he instead just surveyed the congregation stretched out behind him.

Here in “the church of presidents,” Alsop could not keep his gaze from returning to the president’s pew, number 54, from which the behind of Richard M. Nixon was lamentably absent. Up until a minute ago, Joe had been hoping for the sudden murmur of excitement that would indicate the arrival of his
homme sérieux
. But it was not to be. The White House had commented on the “sad loss” but sent no human offering, not even so modest a one as Jerry Ford. Joe could spot Shultz and Bryce Harlow and—amazingly enough—Kleindienst, Mitchell’s successor and his equal in disgrace as attorney general; he’d filed his own guilty plea two weeks ago. Had Stew once written something sympathetic about him? Joe couldn’t recall. Another craning of his head revealed Arthur Schlesinger and Mrs. Dean Acheson. God, what a back number the very mourners were making him feel! But he did notice one more or less up-to-the-minute touch in the presence of Larry O’Brien, presumed target of the Watergate burglary and thus, in his way, prime mover of the current apocalypse.

A scolding look from Alice warned him to put an end to his fidgets and face the altar.

His mind went back to Stew as a little boy destined to be handsome but then beset with eczema. They’d had to swathe him in gauze and slather him in cocoa butter. The memory now filled Joe’s eyes with tears, which persisted in falling for the rest of the service, all the way through “Abide with Me” and “The Strife Is O’er.” Oh, how he wished it were! And oh, how he’d come to loathe this city where he’d outlived himself.

The honorary pallbearers—Tom Braden and Kermit Roosevelt among them—walked beside the casket as it rolled back up the aisle on a platform with casters. Joe helped Alice to shuffle along behind it, something she accomplished with such difficulty that, once she reached the vestibule, he got one of the vestrymen to set out a chair for her right there.

Alice accepted the offer reluctantly. The throng who now had to pass her looked slightly startled. Some were afraid to approach, and others were excessively eager. Jack Valenti and George Bush came over as if she were the wallflower at a dance, in need of their high spirits and loud voices. Then came Ben Bradlee and Kay, marching together like Watergate, Inc.

“How are you, my dear?” asked Mrs. Graham.

Alice said nothing.

“I loved Stew,” said Bradlee, his voice sounding as if it were grinding rocks. “The
indignation
that the man could display. Just gorgeous.”

“Yes,” said Alice. “I’ve never been capable of it myself.” Nor, she thought, could she ever approximate the sorrowful expression on Kay’s puss. She decided to speak to her. “You did get the obituary right this time. Leukemia. So often your paper gets the cause of death
wrong
.”

Kay looked mystified; she just smiled weakly and moved on. Alice knew the penny would drop later, that she would realize the reference had been to Paulina.

The Shrivers said a brief, solemn hello. At least they acted like people at a religious service, which wasn’t the case with Teddy and Ethel, now following them through the vestibule. Alice was polite to her, for Bobby’s sake, even while the silly woman jabbered on about everything she’d put into her sympathy letter to Joe—a boatload of nonsense about how Jack and Joe Jr. and Kick and Stew and Bobby would now all be talking to one another in heaven, as if earthly life were just a matter
of packing for some eternal picnic. “You know,” said Ethel, “Teddy and I are heading over to Arlington from here. It’s Jack’s birthday. He’d be fifty-seven! Can you imagine?”

Well, yes, she could.

Stewart Alsop’s mourners lingered to chat outside the church, whose simple stucco walls could belong to almost any house of worship in any American small town—which is what Washington, D.C., had always seemed to Joe, before the 1960s unleashed their detestable passions. For a brief, genuine moment, Lady Bird Johnson put her arms around him.

But then a peculiarly excited young man introduced himself as Richard Darman and conveyed to Joe the regrets of Elliot Richardson, who would love to have been here this morning but couldn’t break his commitment to give this year’s Shattuck Lecture to the Massachusetts Medical Society. “He trusts that you’ll understand,” said Darman. “If anything is going to make progress against this dreaded disease from which your brother suffered, that of course will be medical research.”