I had not forgotten what Bogdonovitch had said that night at dinner, nor the way he had said it.
“And J. Edgar Hoover.”
“Yes, exactly,”said Craven, nodding his head. “He didn't say anything, did he? But he certainly left the impression that he had. He does that; he's always done that. Andrei Bogdonovitch is an engaging, intelligent man, as well read as anyone I know, and he has an absolute genius for concealment. It would be interesting to know what he wants to see you about.”
The conversation drifted off into a discussion of the working arrangements of my stay in San Francisco while I prepared for the trial. Craven was not only paying my fee, but covering all the expenses as well. He had only one condition, but it was a condition on which he insisted. I was to tell no one that he had any involvement in the case beyond the fact that he had helped Jamaal Washington's mother find a lawyer and that, because my cousin was his partner, I had been given the use of the office. The check for my fee would be issued from an account he had with a European bank.
“I have a lot of friends in the city,”was the only explanation he offered. I did not have to ask if one of them was Lawrence Goldman.
We were standing outside, waiting for the limousine that was just pulling into the parking lot, when he told me that though he had to be discreet, he did not have to be, nor would he be, disengaged.
“I know all about your reputation. I know you know how to win. But this case is different. It involves too many people. Jeremy Fullerton affected too many lives. There aren't that many people really interested in the truth. You need to understand something about these people, and about Fullerton, if you're going to have any chance to find out what really happened that night. I can help you with some of that. I hope you don't mind,”he added as we got into the back seat of the limousine, “but I already have.”
“Have what?”I asked as I stretched my arm across the back of the seat and turned toward him.
“Have tried to help. I've made arrangements,”he said, turning away from me to stare out the window, “for you to see Meredith Fullerton, Jeremy Fullerton's widow.”
He did not say anything more about it. From the bleak look on his face as he continued to stare out the window, it was apparent that he did not want to be asked. We drove along in silence, the only sound the tires humming over the road. The soft smooth skin on Albert Craven's cheek was no longer pink and blooming but a sallow, lifeless gray. For a moment I thought he might have become ill, but then I remembered that when they were just a little tired, old men could suddenly show their age. His mouth opened, as if there were something he wanted to say, but then he closed it and a moment later shut his eyes. We kept driving, surrounded by that monotonous hum, and I wondered if he might have fallen asleep. Smiling to myself, I turned away and watched out my own window as the shop fronts and houses slipped by as we drew closer to the city.
“I've lived here all my life, and I'm still mystified by it,”I heard him say, his voice again surprisingly strong and clear.
I looked over my shoulder and saw him gesturing out toward the crowded office buildings as we crossed Market Street and waited behind a cable car on Powell.
“Sometimes I'm not sure it really exists, that it isn't all a dream. Do you know,”he said as if what he was about to tell me would explain what he meant, “both my grandmothers lived through the earthquake of l906. One of them swore that when it was over, Enrico Caruso came out on the balcony of the Palace Hotel where he had spent the night and, to calm everyone, sang an aria. My other grandmother swore that he came out on the balcony and was still so scared that when he opened his mouth to sing, nothing came out.”
The driver parked in front of Craven's building and held open the door. “The appointment with Mrs. Fullerton is for this evening,”Craven informed me as we went inside. “Six o'clock. I'm sorry it's such short notice. It was the best I could do. She's leaving town tomorrow, and God knows when she'll be back.”He hesitated and then added, “Don't believe what anybody tells you about her. In her own way, she's quite a remarkable woman. I don't know anyone else who would have put up with what she did all those years.”
I
t was the ultimate San Francisco address. The Spreckles, the Stanfords, the Huntingtons: the men who for a while owned a large part of California, and no inconsiderable part of America, had all lived here, high above the city with a view that had once taken in nearly all the bay. The streets that led up to it were almost impossible to climb, but they never walked when they could ride, and anyone who could not afford to ride had no business being there. Later, when the new hotels—the Fairmont, the Mark Hopkins—were built on the rubble of the old stone mansions, automobiles were allowed to park perpendicular to the curb lest they slip loose and plummet straight down to the bottom. The cement sidewalks were grooved like washboards to give traction to those who, with shoulders hunched forward and heads bent low, tried to walk, and something for their fingernails to grab on to if they fell.
We used to come here, Bobby and I, on summer Saturday nights when the fog rolled in and made the sidewalks slick, just to watch tall women in high heels and tight dresses grab the front fenders of cars parked like steps in a long horizontal row and, like children hanging on to the rails of a staircase, try to lower themselves down the street. All the glamour, all the mystery of San Francisco seemed to be concentrated right here in this one place, the top of Nob Hill.
Though it was only half a dozen blocks away, I hailed a cab and watched out the window at the way the early evening light softened the hard edges of the buildings and added a kind of bittersweet luster to the faces of the people who wandered down the street. At the top of the hill, the driver pulled up in front of a dark green awning. For no reason at all, I gave him a tip that doubled his fare; and then lingered for a moment, basking in the illusion that I was still young enough to be on my way to a date with a beautiful rich woman who lived on Nob Hill. As the cab drove off, I looked down the block at Grace Cathedral. Despite its gothic spires, the architect who designed it had without apparent irony called it a “truly American cathedral.”He must have meant that it was something borrowed by money.
The doorman said that Mrs. Fullerton was expecting me and that her place was on the top floor. The elevator creaked and groaned as it made its way up. I tried to think of a worse place to be in an earthquake. Each tiny jolt made me more nervous. I could see the steel-threaded cable that twisted up the coffinlike shaft begin to unravel and then tear itself apart the moment—a moment that might be just a second away—there was a slight shift of the tectonic plates on which San Francisco floated over the earth. When the door opened on the fourteenth floor, I stepped out as if I had just landed on solid ground.
Jeremy Fullerton had been famous, and his picture, which had been seen often enough while he was alive, had been everywhere after his death. But even in the photographs that were run in conjunction with the murder I could not recall having once seen a picture of his wife. Fullerton had been a few months short of his forty-sixth birthday on the date he died; because he had been married only once, and married when he was still quite young, I assumed she must be about the same age. From what I had heard about her behavior at the private party the night the senator was murdered, I imagined a graying woman filled with self-doubt, disturbed at the prospect of having grown too old to keep her husband from a younger, more beautiful woman. What I found was something completely different.
With ash-blond hair swept straight back from her forehead and light, luminous eyes, Meredith Fullerton had a face that, if not so beautiful as it must once have been, was perhaps more interesting. There was something noble about her face, something that told you that you were in the presence of a woman of exquisite sensibility and unusual intelligence. In a room full of strangers, all of them trying to meet everyone else, she would have been the one, the only one, who let everyone come to her.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Antonelli.”
She spoke those ordinary words with a kind of quiet grace. Had I not known what she must have been going through, it might have made me feel like an invited guest rather than a stranger intruding on her grief.
She led me into the living room and asked if I would care to join her in a drink.
“I was glad when I was told you wanted to see me, Mr. Antonelli,”she said, handing me a glass. “I know that the boy you're representing didn't kill my husband.”
She gestured toward the sofa but remained standing while I sat down.
“Jeremy thought nothing could touch him; he thought that nothing could stop him. I think that in a way he thought he would live forever.”She paused, searching my eyes. “Have you ever known anyone like that, Mr. Antonelli?”
She asked the question as if she were certain I had and that this created a sort of bond between us, an acknowledgment of our own unspoken imperfections.
“Jeremy wasn't like other people,”she went on.
She began to walk slowly around the room, her gaze landing on one thing and then drifting away to something else.
“Jeremy was the most intelligent man I ever knew,”she said as her eyes came back to me. “That's one description of him I'm sure you haven't read, but he was. Americans distrust serious people, Mr. Antonelli. Jeremy convinced everyone that while he had a great admiration for literature and the arts, he really preferred the same kind of books and the same kind of music as everyone else.”
A proud, almost defiant expression flashed across her face. Then, suddenly, she laughed.
“Do you know what he used to do? He would be giving a speech somewhere and he would quote someone famous—Lincoln or Churchill or someone like that—a quotation he had inserted himself—and then he'd look up with that bashful grin of his and say something like, 'My speechwriters like to let me know how smart they are.'
“You see what he was doing?”she went on, anxious that someone should know the truth about her husband. “He was giving the speech he wanted to give, a serious speech, and he was doing it in a way that seemed to say, 'Look, I'm no smarter than you are.' But it was more than that, you see; much more. He was also saying, 'We may not be the smartest people in the world, but we know when something has been said we should take seriously.' I think he was trying to get them to listen to themselves, to what they would say if they knew how to say what they felt deep down, in that private, lonely place where everyone really is serious.”
Meredith Fullerton sat down on the facing sofa and placed her glass on the coffee table between us.
“I buried my husband, Mr. Antonelli. Everyone was there: the president, the vice president, the governor. The services were right across the street,”she added, nodding toward the window. “Grace Cathedral. Jeremy would have loved that.”
She picked up her glass, and while she drank, the pale reflection of nostalgia entered her eyes.
“We lived over there when we were first married,”she said, nodding again toward the window as she rose from the sofa and walked toward it. From where she stood, you could see the Golden Gate and, farther on, past the steep untouched hillside that curved north along the bay, the village of Sausalito, sheltered at the water's edge.
“We lived over there because it made more sense for Jeremy's political career, but there was another reason as well.”
Lingering at the window, a faint smile hovering over her mouth, she watched the place she had lived with her husband recede into the shadows while the bay still sparkled with the soft golden light of a late summer day.
“Did you ever read
The Great Gatsby,
Mr. Antonelli?”she asked, her eyes still fixed on something perhaps only she could see. “Remember the green light? This was Jeremy's green light— San Francisco. He was in love with it, the way Gatsby was in love with Daisy, the Daisy of his dream, the dream he had dreamed all those years he was trying to make his fortune and become what he thought she wanted him to be. In Gatsby's mind she had never changed, never grown older, never been married, never had a child: She was always the beautiful girl, ageless, unchanging.”Jeremy Fullerton's widow went on in a slow, melodic voice that sometimes grew so faint I could barely make out the words.
She leaned against the window, her eyes pensive and dark, a furtive smile flickering like candlelight on her mouth.
“Jeremy started with nothing, and he loved the city, and he knew he had no chance to be anyone unless he became somebody else, made money, did something to be noticed. We lived there, in a small house on the hill, and every night he would sit there, watching, thinking about how it was all going to happen, how he would become the one the city loved.
“Sometimes, late at night, after the bars closed and the tourists had gone, we would wander down to the end of the main street of Sausalito and watch the lights of the city dance on the dark black waters of the bay. You should do that sometime, Mr. Antonelli—stand out there late at night, breathing the cool sweet air, and look across at San Francisco rising up from the center of the bay like Babylon rising up from the desert.
“It was everything he wanted: It was the city of his youth, the city of his dreams, the one place—the only place, I suppose— where he never felt the urge to leave or had the feeling there was someplace else he ought to be. He'd stand there next to me, and I knew he was thinking of her—the city. It was like he was watching the girl he loved dancing at her wedding to someone else, someone she had married for money and could never really love; not the way, deep down, he knew she really loved him.
“I think that is what he wanted more than anything else. The House, the Senate, even the presidency; part of the reason— maybe the only reason—he wanted any of that was so he could be the center of everyone's attention, the only one the city really loved.”
Her arms folded in front of her, she kept looking out across the bay to where they had started the beginning of a journey that had now reached its end. After a while, she looked at me over her shoulder.