William F. Buckley Jr. (30 page)

“I don’t remember whether you knew about it. Somebody stole Rachel’s big diamond necklace the night of her party before the wedding. The state troopers were all over the place the next morning.”

Caroline reached over and put her hand down on Henry’s shoulder. “Henry. You know what that has got to mean?”

Henry paused at some length. But finally he said, “Yes. I can’t believe he’d bring up the business about the necklace to anybody … I can’t believe it. But then I guess I can believe anything about Danny at this point.… So, Carol, what now? You want me in the act?”

“No. When the moment comes, and I guess yes, it’s coming, I’ll tell you.”

“Is your priest—still … useful?”

“He’s been perfect. Has kept me slowed down to just the tolerable speed.”

“I don’t mean to diminish for a minute the importance of the spiritual question, but could it be that at this point your commitments, or what you think of as your commitments, are hurting you? I mean, more than helping you?”

Caroline was obviously glad to be able to address the question with the only other person she had ever spoken to about it.

“No no, Henry. You truly do not understand—no, that’s the wrong word. You aren’t—
familiar
with—the Christian complex. I was with Father Kevin yesterday. You may remember that he officiated at our—funny, how subconsciously I avoid the word ‘marriage,’ now that I propose to—I have to get the terminology right here, Henry, because it’s important to me. I’m not about to ‘dissolve’ a marriage, because in my understanding I don’t have the power to do any such thing: the vows were exchanged, the marriage was consummated. I am Danny’s wife, he is my husband, as long as he lives. He will be free in conscience, and of course in law, to remarry; I won’t be. Not unless it proved that for whatever reason, the marriage didn’t take place. Have you ever heard of ‘psychic consummation’?”

“No. What is it, Carol?”

She laughed. “What it probably is, is liberation theology. A fancy way to deconstruct a marriage. What it says is that a marriage isn’t consummated merely by the physical transaction on the wedding night. It can only be consummated when there is a psychic union, an emotionally evolved decision by husband and wife to stay together forever. I mention this primarily to make the point that Danny has been—in every sense of the word—my husband. When we married, he wanted very much to marry me, and I don’t doubt the sincerity of his wedding vows, though I guess at this point I have to say I wouldn’t be surprised if all along he had dalliances, perhaps going right back to the period when we were first married.

“But Father Kevin helped a great deal. His technique is really wonderful. It sounds obvious, but it isn’t. What his technique is, is never to answer a question, only to ask it. So he asks, ‘Do you still love Danny?’

“Answer: ‘Yes, I do.’

“ ‘Does he still love you?’

“I answer, ‘That depends what you mean by love. If you mean exclusively enamored by, the answer is no. If you mean merely, “has tender feelings for,” I’d say yes.’

“Next question, ‘Does his presence in the house affect affirmatively, or negatively, the lives of the children?’

“And now for the first time, Henry, I’d have to say, ‘negatively.’ Because the children are growing, and they begin to notice their father’s aloofness, the lack of interest he has in what they do—in them. His neglect of their mother.

“So I’ve had to answer, ‘On the margin, negatively.’

“ ‘Will the children suffer materially from a separation of their parents?’

“I answer to that one, ‘Modern divorce laws pay reasonable attention to the needs of mother and children.’

“He then asks, ‘Are you satisfied that if you proceed to separate, you are following the dictates of a conscience guided by your understanding of Christian priorities?’ ”

Caroline did not proceed, as she had done until now, to answer the final question she had posed. Henry said nothing, but clearly he was waiting for the resolution. Only her answer to this question mattered.

Finally Caroline spoke. “I said to Father Kevin, ‘I’m not quite ready yet to answer that question.’ ”

“What did he say to that?—No, I shouldn’t ask; that is an improper question.”

“Yes it is, Henry. But I’ll answer it just the same: He said, ‘When you are ready to answer that question—answer it.’ ”

Henry opened the door. “Come, Carol. Let’s go in, have something to eat.”

Together, hand in hand, they walked into the restaurant. Suddenly Caroline stopped. She lifted her finger to her lips. “Don’t say anything, dear dear Henry, that suggests Father Kevin has been anything less than saintly to me, through it all.”

Henry nodded. And squeezed her hand.

On Monday, Clurman absentmindedly lit a cigarette while his other lit cigarette lay on the ashtray only half consumed. Clurman was absentminded about such matters (he had once ordered two complete meals sent to his room at a hotel). He was not in the least absentminded about the hundred-odd correspondents
posted nationally and internationally to serve
Time/Life.
Henry Luce had for many years put heavy emphasis on contracting to the extent possible the time between the event and his readers’ survey of it, through the instrument of
Time
’s reporters, researchers, and writers. No expense was inordinate. When Marilyn Monroe was found dead in Los Angeles on a Sunday morning, one million copies of
Time
had already been printed and were on their way to subscribers. Yet purchasers of
Time
could buy the magazine on Monday morning with twenty-nine inches of detail on her death: a technological miracle over the news-gathering part of which Clurman had presided, two or three telephones ringing at one time, two or three cigarettes, as often as not, burning at one time.

The Chief of Correspondents had sensed the closeness between Henry and his interpreter, whom Clurman had met and admired on one of his trips to Saigon. Clurman had authorized an under-the-table special bonus for Than Koo’s work in bringing together invaluable information on the last hours of President Diem. He knew that a sharp break from conventional journalism for Henry would be good therapy.

“We got a request a week ago.” He leaned back at his desk. “Columbia School of Journalism. Paul Appleby has had a stroke. They are left without an up-front ex-reporter star professor. School starts in a week. They want a replacement, somebody who’s served as a working journalist. One semester is all they need—they’re working on a permanent replacement. Ten grand, and Time Inc. will pay an extra five. I think it’s just right for you, what do you say?”

Clurman could never quite understand that subspecies that needed to deliberate. He was pleased, but not surprised, when Henry said, “Sounds good.”

They spent three hours, and then lunch, discussing Vietnam. Clurman had concluded that President Johnson would not pull out and possibly couldn’t do so, and what he wished for most was any evidence of internal weakening in North Vietnam. He wanted to know how Hanoi could take the punishment. “How can they get ten, fifteen thousand troops down the Trail every
month? How can they stand the damage we’re doing to their shipping? How do they succeed in replacing the people we apprehend and imprison or execute?” Henry said that no one was theoretically better equipped than he to try to answer such questions, but that he couldn’t do so. “My experience at Hoile is—the national experience.” It was not easy to satisfy Clurman, and Henry did not succeed in doing so.

The class Henry was to teach was made up of eighteen students, one or two freshly graduated from college, the majority in their mid and late twenties, two or three in their early thirties. These last had engaged in newspaper work mostly in outlying parts of the country. They had been picked by their editors as especially promising reporters/analysts who needed that odd combination of book learning, competitive writing experience, exposure to historical texts, deep drafts of newspaper culture that the journalism schools seek to provide.

Henry was the complete professional. In fourteen years he had done everything, specifically including a few paragraphs for the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Yearbook, a historical update on Vietnam. He had interviewed and conversed with many of the men and women who dominated the news, had done reporting for twenty cover stories and had himself written eight for
Time.
He was inexhaustibly patient with those with whom patience was merited, or necessary. If it required twenty hours at the Quai d’Orsay to get something from President Charles de Gaulle, Henry would wait as patiently as, only a couple of years ago, he had waited, in a car, outside the last building President Ngo Dinh Diem had spent a night in. If a student was deeply troubled in a search for the best way to frame a story, Henry would stay with him (or her—ten of his students were women) as long as required.

But if a student was frivolous or exhibitionistic, Henry could be as unsparing as he had been in the boxing ring. The second day of class a tweedy young man with a wispy mustache, who affected a stutter and walked about with a gold-topped cane,
raised his hand after the week’s assignment had been read out and said, “What’s the point in reading
The Taming of the Shrew
?”

Henry answered, “The point in doing so is that you will then have done what I have told you to do.”

The young man twiddled his mustache, took in the look in his teacher’s eyes, and decided to let the matter drop.

A month later, taking lunch in the cafeteria shared by faculty and graduate students, Barbara Horowitz asked if she might sit with him. By all means. Henry was struggling to his feet when she touched him on the shoulder and restrained him.

“Miss Horowitz,” as Henry referred to her in class, was in her thirties, dark, sturdy, her hair provocatively set in a Dutch-boy bob utterly incongruous with her brassy temperament. She had attended Reed College in Oregon and gone to work in Walla Walla for the daily newspaper. After a few years she quit to join the staff of a weekly whose guiding lights were
Rolling Stone
magazine and
The Village Voice.
For
Beetle
she wrote about rock music and the shooting stars of rock land, and about civil rights, racism, imperialism, the military-industrial complex and nutrition.

The magazine folded, but her contributions to it had been noticed by regional editors, and now the editor of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
had sponsored her for a Columbia School of Journalism slot. Her ideological zeal was at missionary-high level and in class she was provocative but never ill-mannered. Henry would not argue with Miss Horowitz, but in correcting her papers he would indicate where she was simply attitudinizing. Henry was quick to acknowledge that the line between reporting and editorializing was not clear, that as a writer for
Time
magazine he was hardly equipped to be censorious on the point. But the writer absolutely needed to know, and to communicate to the reader, that he knew what he was up to. “Otherwise you are engaged in guile, and you don’t want that, or, at least, shouldn’t want that.” Miss Horowitz listened to what he had to say and paid attention to what he wrote on her papers.

Within ten minutes, Miss Horowitz had persuaded Mr. Chafee to call her Barbara. He said he was prepared to do so from now
on, that he inclined not to use first names unless asked to do so. Whereupon he asked her to call him Henry.

“You are a quiet fascist creep, Henry, you know that?”

“Yes,” Henry said, sipping his iced tea. “Would you rather I were a noisy fascist creep?”

She laughed. “While I’m at it, why did you land so hard on Little Lord Fauntleroy that first week?”

“You’re referring to Andrew Bradford III.”

“Who else?”

“Imagine exposing yourself to such ridicule, asking out loud, Why read
The Taming of the Shrew?
”

“You’re evading me. Remember, Henry, I am a skilled journalistic interrogator. I didn’t ask you why people should read the
The Taming of the Shrew.
I didn’t even suggest it’s dumb to ask the question. I asked you why you knocked little Andrew out of the ring just for asking?”

Henry sighed. He was about to reply when Barbara interrupted him—“God, I wish you would shave off that beard, so I could find out what you look like.”

“Now who’re you picking on?”

“
Whom
am I picking on.”

“I don’t use the objective whom except after a preposition.”

“In that case you can edit
The Taming of the Shrew.
Shakespeare didn’t know about your rule. ‘Of all thy suitors, here I charge thee, tell/Whom thou lovest best: see thou dissemble not.’ ”

“Nice going,” Henry said. “And what’s more, I give up. What do I have to do to get just a little quiet from you?”

“Denounce U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, contribute to the fund to build a sanitarium to park Barry Goldwater in, and go march in Mississippi.”

Henry laughed. At the end of lunch he felt ten years younger.

And at the end of the semester he asked Barbara Horowitz if she would marry him.

“Are you sure you’re not a homosexual, Henry?”

“At this point,” he said, “I am quite certain.”

They were seated at Maxwell’s Plum. Her hand reached under the table and gripped his. She lowered her head to hide the tear,
but he had seen it. He felt within him an irrepressible devotion to this independent, raucous, opinionated woman with her bob-cut hair and flashing eyes. She had become everything, and more, as he discovered how urgent was an appetite he had kept in place all these years. She tightened her grip on his hand and Henry Chafee felt an elation he hadn’t ever felt before, something so deep and consuming he knew of it only as an abstraction he had encountered in his reading. He knew now that it really existed.

T
HE
NEW YORK TIMES
gave Barbara Horowitz a job. She had elected to retain her maiden name. At the little civil wedding ceremony Danny served as best man (Caroline agreed with Henry that at this moment there was no alternative to tapping Danny). Henry, straight-faced and clean-shaven, asked her whether she desired him to change his own name to Horowitz. She had already changed the name of Henry to “Henny.” “I don’t want to call you by the same name everybody else does, and you’ve made it clear you don’t much like ‘Hank.’ So it’s Henny, same thing Ann Boleyn called Henry the Eighth.” Henry—Henny—let it go, along with his beard. At the newspaper she quickly earned the respect of her editors and was soon writing features under the supervision of the style setter, editor Charlotte
Curtis. It was the year of a heated municipal campaign in New York City, with rising Republican star John Lindsay ready to abandon his seat in the Congress in order to run for Mayor. She was assigned to do several stories on Lindsay’s background and temperament—his public life had been well chronicled over the years.