Preserve and Protect (26 page)

“I too stand ready to serve in any capacity you may deem me worthy to fulfill. But be prepared to take me as I am. Because I am not going to change.”

And with a brisk smile for the President, a brisk nod to the Governor, a brief bow to the crowd, he stepped off the dais and into the roar of excited talk that welled up and filled the room again.

“Bob,” the President said a few moments later as the Senate Majority Leader saw him to the long black limousine waiting in the midst of its motorcycle escort, engines revving up in little bursts of angry, impatient sound as they walked briskly forward, “I’d like you and Jawbone to start work tomorrow on the anti-violence bill, if you can do it.”

“It can’t be tomorrow for us,” Bob Munson said. “We’ve got that FTC amendment to complete by Monday. I’m afraid it will have to be Wednesday, which will jam us right up against the National Committee meeting, unfortunately. But that’s our situation. I don’t know about Jawbone and the House.”

“We’ll talk to Jawbone,” the President said.

“I don’t see how Ted Jason had the gall to say the things he did,” Anna Hooper Bigelow exclaimed to Lizzie McWharter as they watched Orrin and Beth depart. “He’s insufferable!”

“Of all the egregious insolence,” Esmé Stryke declared to Roger P. Croy as they turned back to the bar after vigorously applauding the departure of the Governor of California. “I do think Orrin is absolutely insufferable!”

“Sweetie,” Helen-Anne Carrew said to Bob Leffingwell as they met in the midst of the swirling, excited, gossiping crowd, “have you made any decisions yet?”

“You’ll just have to take me as I am,” he quoted with a smile. “I am not going to change.”

“But how
are
you?” she said. “That’s what I want to know.” “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said. She uttered her raucous laugh. “Not this old tabby! It gives me more lives than I have already.”

“I would say,” Raoul Barre remarked softly, “that things march toward an interesting culmination.”

“I hear they may in Gorotoland,” Lord Maudulayne said. The French Ambassador shrugged.

“May—may,” he said thoughtfully. “But not in Panama, eh?”

Lord Maudulayne frowned.

“No, I think not in Panama.”

“I believe they’re here in the hotel,” Walter Dobius said quietly to Justice Davis, who looked genuinely alarmed.

“Heavens,” he exclaimed, “I wouldn’t want to talk to
them.”

“They aren’t pleasant people,” Walter agreed. “But I think they can be helpful. And I think also that dealing with them may be the only way to keep them under control.”

“But—” Justice Davis began, and was startled to find America’s most distinguished philosopher-statesman seizing him suddenly by the arm in a sharp, painful grip.

“Tommy,”
Walter said in a savage whisper.
“You do not know what is going on in this country right now. You do not know.”

“Mercy,” the little Justice said with a stricken look, “I’m not sure I want to know.”

“You’re going to have to,” Walter said grimly. “Make up your mind to that.”

“Say!” The
Post
remarked with some excitement to Helen-Anne Carrew as they met coming out of their respective rest rooms. “Isn’t that the Governor getting into the back elevator?”

“After him!” Helen-Anne exclaimed. But he gave no indication he had heard their noisy hailings, and the doors had closed before they could reach him.

They stood for a moment watching the little light blink up the panel. Presently it stopped.

“Twelve,” Helen-Anne said thoughtfully.

“Let’s go up,”
Newsweek
suggested.

“Indubitably,” she agreed, prodding the button vigorously.

CANDIDATES TRADE VERBAL PUNCHES AT JASON PARTY, the headlines said. NATIONAL COMMITTEE SHARPLY DIVIDED … CONGRESS TO MOVE FAST ON RIOT GAG … U.S. FORCES GAIN IN GOROTOLAND … And very late, the news breaking just in time for the morning final: PROTEST GROUPS ANNOUNCE FORMATION OF NATIONAL ANTIWAR ACTIVITIES CONGRESS. SET MAMMOTH CONTINUING D.C. RALLY FOR OPENING OF NATIONAL COMMITTEE MEETING.

3

Far down the tumbling russet hills she could see the breakers curling in against “Vistazo’s” shore, their crests stained with flame by the setting sun. Somewhere close, in the dry brown grass, a quail uttered its silvery, turbulent little whistle; farther away in the nearest patch of oaks a branch snapped. Trumpet raised his head and whinnied, then resumed his fruitless search for something green. The pungent mingled odors of sage and bear-clover, baked earth and dried wheat filled the soft, gently moving air. This was the time of day she loved best, when the world turned toward night and all creation seemed to relax and rest from the suffocating heat of central California summer.

Except that for her, there was not as much relaxation and rest as she had thought there would be when she left the convention to come here to her husband’s huge ranch north of Santa Barbara. “Vistazo” meant a lot to the Jasons, comprising as it did the remaining acres of the original grant to their Montoya ancestors, filled as it was with the memories and the presence of indomitable old Doña Valuela who had fought for it, saved it, made it the foundation of the fortune whose power now reached over half the world to influence many men and many things. It had come to mean a lot to Ceil, too, in the years of her marriage to Ted, for this was not the first time she had retreated to it to seek renewed perspective on a life, running beside her own, that had increasingly disturbed and worried her as it moved closer to the centers of national power.

It was not, as both of them seemed to understand, that there had been any sharp, dramatic break between Ted as he now was and the handsome, intelligent and capable young millionaire whom she had met one night at the San Francisco Opera and married, in the most photographed ceremony of the year, six months later. The retreat of integrity did not come in any single, inexcusable act; there was always an excuse, and there was always a public front that could be put upon it to conceal its inner realities.

She had seen this suave concealment gradually become a conscious habit with her husband, and she had hated it; but she could not blame him entirely, because his friends and supporters had made it so easy for him. Long before he began consciously rationalizing and protecting his own equivocations, those who wished to see him succeed politically were doing it for him. He had early attracted powerful backers in the communications world, and well before he reached the point at which he could consciously select a course of action that would safeguard a “good image”—Jasons in his time had always been too wealthy and powerful to have to worry about image, and anyway his image in his earlier years had seemed to do all right when he was just being himself—the press had created one for him. He was surrounded and protected by a screen of favorable publicity, headlines and news stories that emphasized his leadership and strength, interpretive analyses that discussed his courage and idealism even as they subtly but steadily attempted to align him with the political point of view their authors favored.

That there might be a price for this when he finally came to make use of it with a conscious deliberation, he never seemed to realize; but for Ceil, who could see it coming, it was not enough to flash a confident grin and declare with Jason self-assurance that you could handle it.

“But that isn’t
you!”
she had exclaimed after the first big national magazine discussion of his views on foreign policy.

“It’s a good facsimile,” he responded with a cheerful smile.

“Is a facsimile all you want to be?” she asked quietly, and he had taken her hand with a sudden genuine earnestness.

“No, of course not. I want to be me. I think that’s good enough.”

“So do I,” she said. “That’s why it worries me to see you starting to slip away from it.”

He had laughed and kissed her and told her not to worry, but she had not been able to help it, because she loved him and admired him and wanted to continue to respect him. She still loved him, but the admiration and respect were dwindling fast. She realized now, as Trumpet whinnied once again and the sun touched down upon the darkening sea, that she genuinely feared the outcome.

What had seemed to her the steady erosion of character in the pursuit of public office had accelerated prior to the convention, and then in that hectic tangle of ambitions and emotions, had seemed to race dizzyingly out of control. Ted had made his dutiful statements against violence, but the fact of the matter, obvious to everyone on the inside no matter how protectively press and television kept it from the public, was that he had given tacit if not direct assent to the campaign launched by COMFORT, KEEP and DEFY. He had assumed with typical Jason confidence that he could control the situation, and if money and brains had been enough, he would have. But there comes a point in such things when terror takes over, and from that moment money is nonsense and brains do not exist. Terror makes its own rules, and ambitious gentlemen who think they can dabble with it safely find they cannot do so without being consumed in some way or another. The dreadful attack upon Crystal Knox had been the more dramatic aspect of it; but the fact that, even after that warning, Ted had actually been about to let himself be dragged into the vortex of the so-called “Peace Party” movement was, in Ceil’s mind, far more fundamental and frightening.

So she had withdrawn into that small fortress of solitude that she had gradually staked out for herself in these recent years while her husband was becoming more and more the ambitious equivocator and less and less the straightforward, honorable man she had married. Now at “Vistazo” she was watching him far-off; and nothing she had heard or seen or could sense in the past five days seemed to give much hope of change. On the occasion of President Hudson’s death, after the White House riot, and again this evening at Patsy’s party, he had been given the opportunity to break once and for all with those whose terrorism was obviously moving ever closer to a deliberate attempt to destroy the entire fabric of American society and government. He had not done so.

His statement on Harley could not refrain from seeking the support of the Administration’s critics even as he paid dutiful, equivocal eulogy to its fallen leader. His condemnation of violence at the White House still kept the door open for the adherence of the violent. His talk to the National Committee (which Frankly Unctuous had been analyzing with warm approval when she left the house) seemed to denounce violence but rationalized its existence in a further bid for the favor of those who fomented it.

Now as Trumpet, giving up at last, responded to her absentminded tug on the reins and started the long trail back to the rambling old
estancia
on its ridge above the sea, she feared for her husband greatly. Ceil Jason was terrified of terror too, not only for him but for the country, many of whose citizens, looking to him for salvation, believed him still to be the shining and impeccable knight they read about in their newspapers and heard discussed on their television screens.

In her own way, the only way she felt was open to a wife who loved her husband but believed him to be terribly wrong, she had tried to help him; first, by withdrawing to “Vistazo” in the hope that her leave-taking would jolt him into some fundamental change of direction, and when that failed, by doing what she could to encourage defeat of his ambitions. She knew he would never understand her worried call to the President, her advice to Bob Leffingwell to trust his own judgment, the call she had made this morning to Lucille Hudson with its indirect but quite obvious message of encouragement to Orrin and Beth. These were feeble little efforts to reverse a process that could not be reversed without his active cooperation, and he would probably regard her as a traitor if he ever found out; but she knew she was no traitor: she was doing the best she could to help him. Since ambition appeared to be taking him down a road whose end, she was convinced, could only be disastrous, then he must be prevented from going down that road. She was beautiful, intelligent and clever, but she was not superhuman: these telephone calls were all she could think of to do, aside from pleading in an open and abject way that would only disclose the full extent of her fear and worry for him. The end result of that would be to arouse a certain basic masculine contempt and amusement at feminine weakness, compounded by Jason ego: he would only tell her again that he didn’t have to worry because he was Ted Jason, and he could handle it. Anyone else would have been humbled out of this by events at the convention, but not a Jason: she could tell in his voice that he had come back, and come back strong. And so if she pleaded too openly she would lose whatever advantage and influence she might possess.

Her every emotional instinct as a wife urged her to go to him, and it was only by thinking it through in this fashion most carefully, and then adhering to it with a determination as strong in its way as his own, that she was able to remain quietly at “Vistazo.” She had gone on several picnics with neighbors and old friends from Santa Barbara; done some swimming, a lot of riding—“Poor old Trumpet, what a workout I’ve given you!” she said with a smile, reaching down to scratch his neck as they jogged thoughtfully along in the rays of the sunset that had flared up against the banked, innocuous clouds from which no rain would come—a lot of reading—a lot of thinking. She knew she would not go back yet. When he really needed her, when her return might have some effect, then she would. But not yet.

The old servants Manuela and Tomás, children of “Vistazo” whose families had been on the ranch almost as long as the Jasons, had a martini ready for her on the patio. She drank it alone, staring out at the last shreds of sunset as they dissolved in the dusk. The air was still warm and gentle but now the Pacific looked gray and cold.

She shivered.

“Sweetie,” Helen-Anne said sharply, “I didn’t call to play games with you, I just want to talk to your brother. okay?”

“Darling,” Patsy said, “don’t lose your temper. Temper, temper, TEMPER! I always say that’s your only fault, Helen-Anne, dear, you
do
lose your temper.”