The American Ambassador (3 page)

He'd said to Dick Hartnett, who was nursing a hemorrhoid the size of a golf ball: How many times in your life has the fear of the known been worse than the fear of the unknown?

And Dick had looked at him in amazement. Ah, Bill. You know better than that.
Always.

Precisely, he'd said.

One by one his friends went to their doctors and one by one they stopped smoking and cut down on the drinking. Hypnotism, acupuncture, Valium, Smokenders, cold turkey. Aperitifs became popular, Lillet, Dubonnet, Campari, vermouth—with Perrier and a twist, and a smile of surrender. Cough syrup, thirty-two proof. Designer cocktails. They hated to do it, the sacrifice of the evening Martini or Scotch on the rocks evidence of mortality no less conspicuous than falling hair, chronic insomnia, or blood in the urine.

Now he could trade stories with them. I've got the damnedest pain in my wrist. And he could grin about that because it was a bagatelle. There was no such thing as cancer of the wrist. Then, clearing his throat: Actually, it was a pain but it isn't a pain anymore. It's a numbness, actually; there's no feeling at all. And the laughter would die away because numbness was a signal, if not of cancer then of something neurological. And these were dangerous, sudden times. Two friends had died of heart attacks while jogging and each man was fifty exactly. Not forty-nine or fifty-one but exactly fifty and both had died immediately, on the spot. One had died in Beirut and the other in Rock Creek Park. And North had imagined them dying at an angle, arms stiffening, eyes glazing, and feet askew, the pavement rising up to meet them—and suddenly the moment freezing, like a film stopped in midframe. The last conscious thought would be an astonishment: a defiance of gravity. Al Murillo, dead on the Corniche in Beirut, had written a light piece for the
Foreign Service Journal
describing the perils of jogging in Lebanon, which sections were safe and which were not, and the signs to watch for. An amusing piece, everyone said so, though the slightest bit—supercilious. In Rock Creek Park near the P Street beach, Joe Deshler had been dead an hour before anyone found him, his body stripped clean as a Mercedes in Anacostia, his watch, wallet, and running shoes gone. He was found by a friend, and immediately identified, otherwise his body would have disappeared into the morgue, tagged John Doe.

These two deaths had happened within a month of each other, part of the same equation, spiritually linked; someone sneezes in Tokyo, and a tornado changes direction in Kansas. They were good, close friends and when they died it was as if part of North's own history had died; his memory was no longer subject to verification. Murillo, Deshler, and North had been members of the same Foreign Service class; all three had served in Africa. They had become specialists in the problems of the Third World or, more accurately, the problems of the United States in the Third World. They had corresponded frequently, long droll letters; nothing had been as expected. Their careers were so different from those of their heroes, Bohlen, Thompson, and Kennan. The Third World, always simmering on the back burner. Adlai had cared, but Adlai was dead. Things changed quickly: the Europeans withdrew, the Russians advanced. Batista fled, the Congo fell apart. Sukarno, Sihanouk, Nkrumah. There were new rules and when Kennedy died and the Vietnamese won their war, newer rules. These were events to which North had been witness—though, amazingly, he had missed Indochina, feeling at the time like a master musician playing Dubuque while the rest of the orchestra was at Carnegie Hall—and his memory, he knew, was no longer trustworthy. It was flabby and unresponsive, like an athlete's body gone to seed. Too much junk food had gone into it, and it was nothing he could rely on in a crisis, or swear to in court. Of course there were the documents, but the documents—memorandums of conversations, action memos, National Security Council directives, CIA estimates, congressional mandates, various minutes of emergency meetings here and there—told only part of the story and often not the most important part, They were like obits. Vital statistics did not describe a life. What was it about Age Fifty, and a career in the government?

How fragile we are, Elinor had said, but he had shaken his head: Not fragile, strong. But soon to be overwhelmed. He had said this under his breath at graveside at the most recent Washington funeral—Joe Deshler's, his wife and daughters seated, stricken, on folding chairs—as the officiating Lutheran spoke of everlasting life, the divinity of Christ, and the pressures of government service.

This was not a cheerful inventory, and it kept North awake. He, Murillo, and Deshler; in the early nineteen sixties, when they were in Africa together, they felt like pioneers. Their ambassadors were political appointees, well-traveled men, but new to diplomacy and ignorant of the Third World. Deshler's ambassador was a man of charm and wit, a midwestern businessman of humane instinct. Son of a gun, he's said after six months in-country, this is worse than Chicago. It was not graft on a colossal scale, because the country was so poor; but everything there to be stolen was stolen. However, the country was free of Communists and that was a problem. Every year a problem with the foreign aid appropriation because there was no Moscow-inspired internal threat. In fact, as the ambassador observed, there were more Communists in Chicago. There were more Communists in one department at the university than there were in B——. But it was a bell curve. Each year, he predicted, there would be more Communists in B——, while in Chicago, of course, there would be fewer. What had Melville said about his whaling ship? My Yale College and my Harvard. That was what North felt about Africa, and wherever he went thereafter, Africa went, too. The continent had not had the same effect on Murillo and Deshler. Poor Joe Deshler—Africa had become an obsession and after 1970, as he freely admitted, he wasn't worth a damn as a Foreign Service officer. He no longer knew where his deepest loyalties lay. When he died in Rock Creek Park, he was on loan to the Agency for International Development.

When Elinor came to bed, he feigned sleep, his left hand tucked awkwardly under his chin. He thought of rolling over, then didn't. He couldn't get his mind on sex and keep it there. His dead hand distracted him. He continued to flex his fingers, feeling her beside him, her heat and the rhythm of her breathing, not quite asleep; she moved and touched his foot with her own. Your move, Jules. Her foot was warm and he backed into her, the underside of his thighs against her knees. Her touch was comfortable and familiar, without reserve. And we haven't needed anyone else, he thought; a two-edged thought. She mumbled something, turning, and he was alone again. He shut his eyes and saw the cigarette, white against the dark shag of the rug and the accusing wisp of smoke.

Then he was dozing, moving back and forth among his dead and troubled friends, his wife, and his absent son. He was trying to ignore his numb hand. By concentrating on his friends he thought he could make a separate peace. But Bill Jr. forced his way inside, an occupying army: Bill Jr. at seven, ten, thirteen, sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-four. He watched the boy grow, taller and broader; listened to the voice deepen; watched the smile disappear.

Sleep would not come so he carefully got out of bed and crept into the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. A low counter separated the kitchen from the living room. On a table at the far end of the living room, dimly seen by moonlight, were family photographs in silver frames, their national archive. Elinor in a bikini on a beach near Mombasa, almost twenty years ago. He and Elinor with Jomo Kenyatta at the race course in Nairobi, the Mzee's fly whisk only inches from her nose, the old bull rank with bed, whiskey, and cigars; Elinor maintained his only equal in pure animal grace was Richard Burton. Elinor with an animated Robert Lowell in a pub in Hampstead, both of them jolly and tight, their moods matching the rosy glow of the pub. He and Elinor in black tie, talking to Lyndon Johnson at a reception in Washington; no,
listening
to Lyndon Johnson at a reception in Bonn, the former President's hands deep in his trouser pockets, jiggling coins and his private parts, telling them about his library, greatest of all the presidential libraries, the most complete, the handsomest, and in
Texas
, magnet for scholars worldwide, he himself overseeing each detail (though North remembered, too, Dunphy, the old man's aide, late at
night, with the former President in bed and out of the way, conducting a monologue, he and Elinor listening with the attention you'd give a great cellist playing tragic Mozart in your own living room, the concert for your ears only. They were downstairs in the ambassador's residence, Dunphy suddenly announcing: “We thought he was FDR. And greater than FDR because he was a man of the people, not an aristocrat come down from the Hudson Valley. LBJ knew common Americans at first hand, and was native to the newest region of the country, not the oldest, and had passions—what passions!—and a parliamentary skill that took your breath away. But he could never overcome the manner of his arrival, and then that fucking war. He's brokenhearted now, won't last a year. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? He hears it day and night, it won't go away. I thought of the war like this: a storm that had been gathering for a hundred and ninety years, breaking suddenly, a deluge. He had the best minds around him, and he took their advice. The best minds were wonderfully articulate when talking about war. It became their academic specialty. And they were wrong and he was wrong, and there was never a greater error in the history of the presidency. What consequences! If he had come to the presidency on his own, what an eight years he, and we, could have had! That war is going to go on and on, and LBJ will be dead in a year. And I'll go back to Washington and make a lot of money because that's the other change I've seen. It happened just the other day, it seems. Money in Washington. You've never seen so much money, it's a great sea of money, and there for the taking. For the asking. And as for you, you're young yet”—he nodded at them both, his eyes welling—“you and your wife have lived abroad all this time, and you've never served in Indochina. My advice is, Stay away from it. Avoid the war, not because it will hurt your career, because it won't. The Foreign Service is going to need somebody who is not in love with the memory of Indochina. It is not the only memory there is. Indochina is an aberration, an aberration for him, and for the country. Let's go to bed now. I'm going upstairs to check on the old bastard. He's probably reading, not asleep at all. He has insomnia. Many people would say that's a small price for him to pay, and perhaps it is. But, as I say, he'll be dead in a year. And our fellow citizens, or many of them, will be happy. But I like to remember a man on the best day he ever had, so I'll remember him in the well of the House of Representatives, shouting—it was a shout, you'll remember—
And we shall overcome!
And knowing what it meant. Or knowing it as well as any white man can know it, and feel it, too. You should have seen him, after he made the speech. And knew its effect. He spread his arms wide. I think he thought he could fly, that night. He took it all, ears, tail, and hooves. I'm going now, and as you know we leave early in the morning. I don't know what we're doing here, in the Federal Republic of Germany. We go to Paris tomorrow and then somewhere else. And then back to the ranch. I'll be in Washington in a year. When you come back, look me up. I'll be in the book, the yellow pages, under attorney at law. . . .”).

Photographs of them together in Cape Town, Madrid, Venice, Berlin (the Wall), and at the summit of Kilimanjaro (Elinor pointing to a pile of bones and insisting that it was the carcass of Hemingway's leopard). And at the rear, partly obscured by Venice and Berlin, Elinor's sketch of Bill Jr. on the deck (in the background, through the windows, the attentive observer could see the table with the photographs in silver frames). Standing in the kitchen, he could not see Elinor's sketch. He could not see any of the pictures clearly, but he remembered them, each detail, and their locations on the table. The sketch was made on the deck late on a sunny Sunday afternoon, Bill Jr. at seventeen, tall and muscular, clad in chinos and a plain white T-shirt, an austere presence. Any stranger would have thought him sullen. His hands were tucked in his rear pockets, his eyes concealed behind dark glasses. He wore no shoes.

The ambassador stepped around the counter and padded across the living room to peer closely at the photograph of him and Elinor with LBJ. Dunphy had gone on to become a private lawyer, exactly as he had promised. He was a lawyer who went in and out of government, often as special counsel to congressional committees, famous for his scowl, his sarcasm, and his contempt for academics and bureaucrats, anyone unfamiliar with elections, and the whims of the voters.

Lawyers, journalists, politicians, diplomats; Washington characters. The ambassador had spent his entire adult life in the milieu of government. On the wall above the table was a drawing of Lincoln, artist unknown, a present from Elinor. In a few decisive strokes the artist had managed to assemble a face broken by remorse. When he looked at the drawing of Lincoln's face, he always thought of the words from the Second Inaugural: . . . as
God gives us to see the right.
And if God was misinterpreted?

It was a face from which all happiness had been erased.

He massaged his hand.

Now he was on the deck. The night was balmy and the Sound restless under a crescent moon, empty of boats. He was startled when the cat suddenly appeared, jumping from the lawn to the railing of the deck and then to his feet, where she rubbed her black body against his ankles. She was still agitated by the memory of the surly southwest wind, the pressure causing her to dart nervously here and there in the house. She spent the nights outside, searching for rodents. He had heard once that a cat's memory was but twenty minutes long, but that could not be true. This cat had an elephant's memory, though she was old, lame, and no longer frisky. He wondered if she remembered Bill Jr. But of course she would, he listened to her purr while he lit a cigarette, looking at the lighthouse, squinting into the darkness, calculating the intervals.