“No.”
Charlie thought it over. “My Lord. What a world this is.”
“Yes.”
“So,” Frank persisted, “have you ever had any, like, memories of your previous incarnations?”
“No.”
Frank nodded. “That’s what the Dalai Lama said too, in the paper. He said he was an ordinary human being.”
“I am even more ordinary, as you know.”
“So why should you continue to believe you are the reincarnation of some previous person?”
“We are all such. You know—one’s parents.”
“Yes, but you’re talking about something else. Some wandering spirit, moving from body to body.”
“We all have those too.”
“But identifiable, from life to life?”
Drepung paused, then said, “I myself think that this is a heuristic device only.”
Charlie laughed. “A teaching device? A metaphor?”
“That’s what I think.”
Charlie began to think about that in the context of what had been happening to Joe.
“And what does it teach us?” Frank asked.
“Well, that you really do go through different incarnations, in effect. That in any life your body changes, and where you live changes—the people in your life, your work, your habits. All that changes, so much that in effect you pass through several incarnations in any one biological span. And what I think is, if you consider it that way, it helps you not to have too much attachment. You go from life to life. Each day is a new thing.”
“That’s good,” Frank said. “I like that. The theory of this particular Wednesday.”
Charlie was still thinking about Joe.
A few weeks later, by dint of some major begging, Charlie got Roy to give him ten minutes of Phil’s morning time. Dawn patrol, as it turned out, because it was not only the best time to fit something in, as Phil himself remarked, it was also the traditional time for him and Charlie to meet. On this occasion, however, a Sunday morning.
Charlie showed up at the White House having slept very little the night before. Phil met him in a car at the security gates, and they were driven down Constitution and past the front of the Lincoln Memorial. “Let’s walk from here,” Phil suggested. “I need the exercise.”
So they got out and were followed by Phil’s Secret Service team through the Korean War Memorial. It was a foggy morning, and still so early that the sun was not yet up. The pewter statues of the patrol hiked uphill through a wet mist, forever frozen in their awful moment of tension and dread. A long black wall on the Potomac side of the statues was filled with little white faces peering out from what seemed to be different depths within the stone, all bearing witness to the horrors of war. At the top of the memorial a small stone basin was backed by a retaining wall, on which was carved the message “FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.”
Phil stood for a while staring at it. Charlie left him to his thoughts and walked over to the apex of the statues.
We here honor our sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they did not know and a people they never met.
Then Phil was beside him again. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So many wars. So many people died.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if we can make it all worth it.”
“Sure we will,” Charlie said. “You’re leading the way.”
“Can anyone do that?”
“Sure. People like being part of a cause. And Americans like to like the president.”
“Or hate him.”
“Sure, but they’d prefer to like him. As with you. Your numbers are really high right now.”
“Any time you get shot your numbers go up.”
“I suppose that’s so. But there you are.”
Phil shook his head. “Doesn’t it seem like these memorials are getting better and better? This place is a heartbreaker.”
“They found a really good sculptor.”
“Let’s walk down and see FDR. He always cheers me up.”
“Me too.”
It took several minutes to walk from the Korean to the FDR Memorial, skirting the north bank of the Tidal Basin and heading for the knot of trees around it. On first arrival it looked unprepossessing; one felt that FDR had been shortchanged compared to the rest. It was a kind of walled park or gallery, open to the sky, with the walls made of rough-hewn red granite. Little pools and waterfalls were visible farther ahead, but it was all very unobtrusive, like a kids’ playground in some suburban Midwestern park.
But then they came to the first statue of the man—in bronze, almost lifesized, sitting on a strange little wheelchair, staring forward blindly through round bronze spectacles. He looked so human, Charlie thought, compared to the monumental gravity of the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. This, the statue said very obviously, had been another ordinary human being. Behind the statue on a smoothed strip of the granite were words from Eleanor Roosevelt that underscored this impression:
“Franklin’s illness gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.”
“Yes,” Phil murmured as he scanned the words. “To think out the fundamentals of living. He was forty when the polio hit him, did you know that? He had had a full life as a normal person, I mean, unimpeded. He had to adapt.”
“Yes,” Charlie said, and thought of what Drepung had said on the river. “It was a new incarnation for him.”
“And then he got so much done. There were five separate New Deals, did you know that?”
“Yes, you’ve told me about that.”
“Five sets of major reforms. Diane has done a complete analysis of each.”
“He had huge majorities in Congress,” Charlie pointed out.
“Yeah, but still. That doesn’t guarantee anything. You still have to think of things to try for. People have had big majorities in Congress and totally blown it.”
“That’s true.”
“What would he do now?” Phil asked. “I find myself wondering that. He was a pretty creative guy. The fourth and the fifth New Deals were pretty much his own ideas.”
“That’s what you’ve said.”
Phil was standing before the statue now, leaning a bit forward so that he could stare right into the stoical, blind-seeming face. The current president, looking for guidance from Franklin Delano Roosevelt; what a photo op! And yet here were only Charlie and the Secret Service guys to witness it, as well as a runner who passed through with a startled expression, but did not stop. No real witness but Charlie; and Charlie was about to jump ship.
He was feeling too guilty to let the walk go on any further without reference to this. So as they moved to the next room of the open gallery he tried to change the subject to his own situation, but Phil was absorbed in the Depression statues, which Charlie found less compelling despite their inherent pathos: Americans standing in a bread line, a man sitting listening to a fireside chat on a radio. “I see a nation one-third ill fed, ill housed, ill clothed.”
“It’s almost like the problem is the reverse now,” Phil observed. “I see a nation one-third too fat, too clothed, too McMansioned, while the third that is ill fed and ill housed still exists.”
“And they’re all in debt, either way.”
“Right, but what do you do about that? How do you talk about it?”
“Maybe just like you are now. These days, Phil, I think you get to say what you want. Like on your goddam blog.”
“You think?”
“Yes. But look—Phil. I asked for some time today so I could talk to you about my job. I want to quit.”
“What?” Phil stared at him. “Did you say quit?”
“Well, not quit exactly. What I want is to go back to working at home, like I was before.”
As Phil continued to stare at him, he tried to explain. “I want to take care of Joe again. He’s having some problems getting along at the daycare center. It’s not their fault at all, but it just isn’t working very well. I think it would be better if we just stayed home for another year or so, until he gets to the normal preschool age. It would be better for him, and the truth is I think it would be better for me, too. I like spending time with him, and I seem to do better with him than most people. And it won’t last long, you know? I already saw it with Nick. It just flashes right by. A couple of years from now everything will be different, and I’ll feel better about leaving him all day.”
“These are critical years,” Phil pointed out.
“I know. But maybe they all are.”
In the memorial they were moving from the Depression to the Second World War, as if to illustrate this thought. In this open room there was a different statue of FDR, bigger and in the old style, draped in the dramatic sweep of a naval cape, free of glasses and looking off heroically into the distance.
“I don’t want to stop helping you out,” Charlie said, “not at all, but the thing is, most of what I’m doing I could do over the phone, like I did before. I thought I was doing okay then, and you’ve got all the technical advice you could ever want, so all I’m doing is political advice.”
“That’s important stuff,” Phil said. “We’ve got to get these changes enacted.”
“Sure, but I’m convinced I can do it over the phone. I’ll work online, and I’ll work nights after Anna gets home.”
“Maybe,” Phil said. He was not pleased, Charlie could tell. He approached the big second statue, which included, off to one side, a statue of the Roosevelts’ dog, a Scottie. Phil scolded it: “And your little dog too!”
The bronze had gone green on this version of FDR, everywhere except for the forefinger of the hand stretched out toward viewers. So many people had touched it that it was polished until it looked golden.
Phil touched it too, then Charlie.
“The magic touch,” Phil said. “How touching. Every person that touches this finger still believes in America the beautiful. They believe in government and justice. It’s a kind of religious feeling. Do you think any Republicans touch it?”
“I don’t think they even come here,” Charlie said, suddenly gloomy. He recalled reading that FDR had been pretty ruthless with aides who no longer served his purposes. They had disappeared from the administration, and from history, as if falling through trapdoors. “We’re two countries now I guess.”
“But that won’t work,” Phil said, holding on to the statue’s gleaming finger. “May the spirit of FDR bring us together,” he pretended to pray, “or at least provide me with a solid working majority.”
“Ha ha.” Again Charlie marveled at the photo ops being missed. “You should bring the press corps down here with you, and invoke all this specifically. Why is this not the great moment in American history? You should say it is—up until now, anyway. Give people a tour of FDRness, and a look into your thinking. Into what you admire about Roosevelt, and America in those years. Remember the time we were at the Lincoln Memorial with Joe, and that TV crew was there for some other reason? It could be like that. For that matter you could do Lincoln again. Do them both. Take people around all the memorials, and talk about what matters to you in each of them. Give people some history lessons, and some insights into your own thinking about where we are now. Keep calling these years now another rendezvous with destiny. Call for a new New Deal. These are the times that try men’s souls, and so forth.”
“I don’t think there are any monuments to Thomas Paine in this town,” Phil said, smiling at the thought.
“Maybe there should be. Maybe you can arrange for that.”
“In my copious spare time.”
“Yes.”
Phil slapped hands with FDR and moved on. They went around a corner into the final room of the gallery, where an amazingly lifelike statue of Eleanor Roosevelt stared out from an alcove embossed with the emblem of the United Nations.
“The UN was his idea, not hers,” Phil objected. “She worked for it after it was established, but he had the idea from even before the war. World peace, the rule of law, and the end of all the empires. It was amazing how hard he tweaked Churchill and de Gaulle on that. He wouldn’t lift a finger to help them keep their old empires after the war. They thought he was just being a lightweight, or some kind of a card, but he was serious. He just didn’t want to come off as all holier-than-thou about it. Like his lovely wife here used to.”
“But he was holier-than-thou, compared to Churchill and de Gaulle.”
“No, de Gaulle was the holy one in that crowd. Roosevelt was an operator. And everyone was holier than Churchill.”
“This is what you should be saying. So—what do you say?”
“About becoming a memorial tour guide?”
“No, about whether I can do my job from home again.”
“Well, Charlie, I think you’re doing good work. We need to get to sustainability as fast as we can, as you know. There’s a lot riding on it. But, heck. If your kid needs you, then you’ve got to do it.”
“I think he does. Him and me both.”
“Well, there you are.”
“I can still do the daily phone thing with Roy, and come in with Joe like I used to. And we’ll get a big majority in Congress at the midterms, and then you’ll get re-elected—”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure of it. And by then Joe will be in kindergarten and beyond, and this phase will have passed. I’ll be really anxious to get back to work then, so I don’t want you to hold this against me and drop me, you know? That’s what FDR did to his aides.”
“I’m not as tough as he was.”
“I don’t know about that. But I’ll want to come back.”
“We’ll see when the time comes,” Phil said. “You never know what’ll happen.”
“True.”
Charlie felt disappointed, even worried; what would he do for work, if he couldn’t work on Phil’s staff? He had been doing it for twelve years now.
But he had wanted to stay with Joe. Actually, he wanted it all. But no one got to have it all. He was lucky he had as much as he had. He would have to keep working hard to stay innovative from home, over the phone. It could be done; he had done it before.
Phil gestured to his guys, following them at a not-so-discreet distance, and a car came to pick them up less than a minute later. Back to the White House; back to work; back to the world; back home. Phil was silent on the drive and appeared to be thinking of other things, and Charlie didn’t know what he felt.