My father’s own electricity galvanized the crowd. They shouted questions, he shouted answers. He was serious where it mattered and funny everywhere else. He had horror for genocide and sympathy for cats. He dodged cornering demands and promised never to put his name to anything whose consequences he didn’t understand.
“Legislation,” he said jokingly, “often achieves exactly what it is designed to avoid. We all know it. We moan about the results. I promise not to jump into emotional deep ends on your behalf. I beg the brains and common sense of Hoopwesterners to foresee disaster and warn me. I’ll raise your voices in whispers, not shouts, because shouts annoy but whispers go around persuasively and travel sweetly to the heart of things, and lead to sensible action.”
Whether they understood him or not, they loved him.
The most dedicated hecklers of the evening proved not to be the Paul Bethune opposition supporters, several of whom had bought tickets to the dinner and who had afterwards formed an aggressive bunch on the flip-up chairs, but my father’s presumed political allies (but in fact personal enemies) Orinda Nagle- and Leonard Kitchens.
Both of them demanded firm commitments to policies they both approved. Both shouted and pointed fingers. My father answered with unfailing good humor and stuck to the party’s overall stated position: he needed also to keep the die-hard backbone votes safely in his bag.
Orinda was professional enough to see she was out-gunned, but she didn’t give up trying. Mr. A. L. Wyvern narrowed his eyes and sank his ears down into his collar. Mr. A. L. Wyvern’s influence over Dennis and Orinda waned before my eyes.
My father paid tribute to Dennis Nagle. Orinda, far from placated, said that no way could an inexperienced novice like George Juliard replace her husband, however Hollywood-handsome he might be, however manly his hairy chest, however witty, quick-tongued, charismatic. None of that made up for political know-how.
Someone at the back of the hall booed. There was general laughter, a nervous release of the tension Orinda had begun to build up. The impetus swung back to my father, who sincerely thanked Orinda for her years of service to the party cause and deftly led an appreciation to her by clapping in her direction and encouraging everyone else to copy him. The clapping grew. The crowd gave generous but unaffectionate acclaim.
Orinda, to her impotent fury, was silenced and defeated by this vote of thanks. Leonard Kitchens bounced to his feet to defend her, but was shouted down. Leonard’s mustache quivered with frustration, his thick glasses flashing in the light as he swung from side to side like a wounded bull. His cozy wife looked as if she would deliver the coup de grace when she got him home.
My father courteously admired Leonard for his faithfulness and told him and everyone that if elected he would aim always for Dennis Nagle’s high and honest standard. Nothing less was worthy of the people of Hoopwestern.
He had them cheering. He exhorted them again to talk to him personally and the crowd stood and surged forward around the seats to take him at his word.
Dearest Polly chatted happily with the Bigwigs and beckoned me up onto the platform, and Mr. Bigwig, regarding the clamorous excited throng, told me that my father already had all the skills that would propel him into high office. “All he needs is luck—and to keep out of trouble,” he said.
“Trouble like Paul Bethune,” Polly said, nodding.
“What trouble?” asked Bigwig.
“Oh, dear!” Polly looked flustered. “George forbids us to attack Paul Bethune’s character. George says negative campaigning can rebound on you. Paul Bethune has a mistress with an illegitimate daughter by him, which he’s tried hard to hush up, and George won’t attack him for it.”
Mrs. Bigwig looked at me assessingly. “I suppose there’s no shadow over
your
birth, is there, young Ben?”
Polly assured her vehemently. “No, of course not,” and I wondered if my father, all those years ago, could possibly have reckoned that my legitimacy would one day be important to him. After what I’d learned of him that day I saw that anything was possible, but in fact I stayed as convinced as I’d always been that his marriage to my mother had been an act of natural characteristic honor. I still believed, as I always had, that he would never shirk responsibility for his actions. I knew my birth had been a mistake and, as I’d often said, I had no quarrel at all with the quality of life he’d given me since.
It was indeed midnight by the time most of the crowd left to go home. Mr. and Mrs. Bigwig had long gone, with chauffeur and bodyguard in attendance. Polly yawned with well-earned fatigue. Orinda and Mr. A. L. Wyvern were nowhere to be seen and Mrs. Leonard Kitchens had hauled her Leonard away with the rough edge of her energetic tongue.
I waited for my father to the end, not only because I had no key to get into my bedroom above the campaign headquarters but also because he would need someone to unwind with after the cheers had died away. Even at not quite eighteen I knew that triumph needed human company afterwards. I’d gone back to an empty room in Mrs. Wells’s house after three (infrequent) wins in steeplechases and had had no one to bounce around the place with, no one to hug and yell with, no one to share the uncontainable joy. That night my father needed me. A wife would have been better, but he certainly would need
someone.
So I stayed.
He put his arm around my shoulders.
“God,”
he said.
“You’ll be prime minister,” I told him. “Mr. Bigwig fears it.”
He looked at me vaguely, his eyes shining. “Why should he or anyone fear it?”
“They always kill Caesar. You said so.”
“What?”
“You were brilliant.”
“I can do without your sarcasm, Ben.”
“No, seriously, Father ...”
“Dad.”
“Dad ...” I was tongue-tied. I couldn’t talk to him as Dad. Dads were people who drove you to school and threw snowballs and ticked you off for coming home late. Dads didn’t send you a ticket to ski school in a Christmas card. Dads didn’t send an impersonal fax to a hotel saying “well done” when one won a teenage downhill ski race. Dads were there to watch. Fathers weren’t.
Remnants of the meeting came up with shining faces to add congratulations. He took his arm off my shoulder and shook their hands, friendly and positive to all; and I had a vision of them going around for the next four weeks saying “Juliard, a very good man, just what we need.... Vote Juliard, couldn’t do better.” The ripple from that night would reach the Hoopwestern boundaries and eddy along its roads.
My father slowly came down a little from his high and decided he’d done enough for one day. We left the hall, returned to the hotel and eventually through a harmony of “Good Nights” made our way out into the warm August night to walk across to the dimly lit bow-front opposite.
There were streetlights around the square and the hotel lights at our back, but underfoot the decorative cobbles were dark and lumpy. In icy winters, I learned later, elderly people tended to skid on them and fall and crunch their bones; and on that euphoric night my father tripped on the uneven surface and went down forward on one knee, trying not to topple entirely and not managing it.
At exactly the same moment there was a loud bang and a sharp
zzing
and a scrunch of glass breaking.
I bent down over my father and saw in the light that his eyes were stretched wide with anxiety and his mouth grim and urgent with pain.
“Run,” he said. “Run for cover. God dammit,
run.”
I stayed where I was, however.
“Ben,” he said, “for God’s sake. That was a gunshot.”
“Yes, I know.”
We were halfway across the square, easy immobile targets. He struggled to get to his feet and told me again to run: and for once in my life I made a judgment and disobeyed him.
He couldn’t put his weight on his left ankle. He half rose and fell down again and beseeched me to run.
“Stay down,” I told him.
“You don’t understand....” His voice was anguished.
“Are you bleeding?”
“What? I don’t think so. I twisted my ankle.”
People ran out of the hotel, drawn by the bang that had reechoed around the buildings fringing the square. People came over to my father and me and stood around us, curious and unsettled, noncomprehension wrinkling their foreheads.
There was confusion and people saying “What happened? What happened?” and hands stretching down to my father to help him up, cushioning him with a lot of well-meaning concern and kindness.
When he was well surrounded he did finally take my arm and lean on other people and pull himself to his feet: or rather, to his right foot, because putting his left foot down caused him to exclaim with strong discomfort. He began to be embarrassed rather than frightened and told the crowding well-wishers that he felt stupid, losing his footing so carelessly. He apologized. He said he was fine. He smiled to prove it. He cursed mildly, to crowd approval.
“But that
noise,”
a woman said.
Heads nodded. “It sounded like ...”
“Not here in Hoopwestern ...”
“Was it... a
gun?”
An important-looking man said impatiently, “A rifle shot. I’d know it anywhere. Some madman ...”
“But where? There’s no one here with a gun.”
Everyone looked around, but it was far too late to see the rifle, let alone the person taking potshots.
My father put his arm around my shoulders again, but this time for a different, more practical sort of support, and cheerfully indicated to everyone that we should set off again to finish the crossing of the square.
The important-looking man literally shoved me out of the way, taking my place as crutch and saying in his loud authoritative way, “Let me do this. I’m stronger than the lad. I’ll have you over to your office in a jiffy, Mr. Juliard. You just lean on
me.”
My father looked over his shoulder to where I now stood behind him and would have protested on my behalf, I could see, but the change suited me fine and I simply waved for him to go on. The important-looking man efficiently half carried my hopping father over the remaining stretch of square, the bunch of onlookers crowding around with murmurs of sympathy and helpful suggestions.
I walked behind my father. It came naturally to do that. There was a high voice calling then, and I turned to find Polly running towards us, stumbling on the cobbles in strappy sandals and sounding very distressed.
“Ben ... Ben... has George been shot?”
“No, Polly.” I tried to reassure her. “No.”
“Someone said George had been shot.” She was out of breath and full of disbelief.
“Look, he is there.” I took her arm and pointed. “There. Hopping. And hopping mad with himself for twisting his ankle and needing someone to help him along.”
Polly’s arm was vibrating with the inner shakes, which only slowly abated when she could see that indeed George was alive and healthily swearing.
“But ... the shot ...”
I said, “It seems someone did fire a gun at the same moment that he tripped on the cobbles, but I promise you he wasn’t hit. No blood.”
“But you’re so young, Ben.” Her doubts still showed.
“Even a tiny kid could tell you there’s no blood.” I said it teasingly, but I guess it was my own relief that finally convinced her. She walked beside me and followed the pied-piper-like procession to the headquarters’ door, where my father produced a key and let everyone in.
He hopped across to his swivel chair behind his accustomed desk and, consulting a list, telephoned the local police.
“They’ve had several complaints already,” he told everyone, putting down the receiver. “They’re on their way here. Letting off a firearm... disturbing the peace... that sort of thing.”
Someone said, “What you need is a doctor ...” and someone else arranged for one to come. “So kind. You’re all so bloody kind,” my father said.
I left the hubbub and went to the open door, looking across the square to The Sleeping Dragon, which perversely had every eye wide open, with people leaning out of upstairs windows and people standing in brightly lit doorways below.
I remembered the
“zzing”
of the passing bullet and thought of ricochets. My father and I had been steering a straight line from hotel to headquarters; and if the bullet had been aimed at
him,
and
if
he’d stumbled at the exact second that the trigger was squeezed, and
if
the bullet’s trajectory had been from upstairs somewhere in The Sleeping Dragon (and not from downstairs because there were still too many people about), and if the bullet had smashed some glass so that I heard the tinkle, then why was every pane of the window in the bow-fronted headquarters intact?
Because, I told myself, the whole thing had been a coincidence. The bullet had not been intended to stop George Juliard’s political career before it started. Of course not. Dramatics were childish.
I turned to go back inside, and saw for an instant a flash of light on broken glass down on the ground.
It was a window of the charity shop next door that had been hit.
Zzing. Ricochet. Smash.
The straight trajectory could have been deflected by the curve of a cobble. A rifle bullet traveling straight and true would very likely have gone straight through glass without breaking it, but a wobbling bullet... that might set up glass-smashing vibrations.
The police arrived at the parking-lot side of the headquarters, and the doctor also. Everyone talked at once.
The doctor, bandaging, said he thought the injury a strain, not a break. Ice and elevation, he prescribed. The police listened to the self-important man’s view on gunshots.
I stood to one side and at one point found my father looking at me through the throng, his expression both surprised and questioning. I smiled at him a bit, and the window of line of sight closed again as people moved.