The President's Angel (13 page)

The President had no time now for luxurious reflection. He was pulled from one conference to the next, and when he was not in meetings or making speeches—either aggressive and warning or placating and negotiating—when he was not posing for the photographers on the steps of the White House with Important Men or waving from the helicopter steps, displaying the appropriate mood of the moment—serious or lighthearted, concerned or victorious—when he was not reading reports or giving orders, snatching a sandwich on the run, then he threw himself in bed, exhausted, forgetting even to be afraid.

This was not a time to think of children or beggars. The homeless no longer occupied his mind, but the armies of the dispossessed, which swept in waves, on foot, in carts, in cars, in horse-drawn, ox-drawn, dog-drawn wagons, on bicycles, and on camels. Many carried their possessions, their children, their favorite cat or bird in their arms, and they were followed by their dogs. People, moving in mass migrations, searching for safety; and starvation was imminent.

We have seen this before. Every generation has seen this anabasis accompanied by rape and pillage, brutality, bold daylight beatings, thirst, hunger, theft.

The center would not hold.

One night the President woke up shouting in his sleep.

Again Frank came in, and found him shaken, irritable.

“Just a dream. I was dreaming,” he said, and returned to his nightmares.

That morning he found he could hardly get out of bed. His legs went weak. His head was spinning. Frank helped him back to bed.

“You have a fever.”

“I feel awful.”

“Flu. I‘ll get the thermometer. Stay there,” said the faithful Frank, and when he returned, the Presidential Palace scurried with calls to the doctor and trays of tea and toast. The President was exhausted. He slept one full day. His doctor ordered rest.

It was while he was recuperating that he remembered Lily. He telephoned Scotty.

“I want to talk to your little girl,” he said. “I want to ask her what she saw.”

“She was overwrought, Mr. President. It wasn't true.”

“Oh.” He was disappointed. “You don't think she saw anything?”

“I know she didn't. Is it true we're sending troops to Norway?”

“I have no comment,” said Matt, pure reflex. “You're out of order with that question. Anyway, I‘d like to talk to her.”

“No sir, I can't allow that. I won't do that to her.”

“Do what?”

“Encourage her imagination. Swell her head.”

“What?”

“Make her think she's special. I won't do that.”

“What would it take to make you change your mind?”

That's how they negotiated. That's how the President arranged the small party to his Adirondack retreat for a weekend of winter sport. He needed a few days to recuperate anyway, to get away from war. The President asked Jim and his wife Susan (their marriage still rocking weakly along), and their children, because this would be an informal family affair. He invited the mining magnate, Mr. Stanhill (a major contributor), and his wife Emily, because he wanted to talk further with the elderly woman who had been sending him books. He invited a speechwriter's family, and a senator, an under secretary who had teenagers, and a retired general of vast reputation, as well as the Secretary of the Interior, who could help Jim work the Senator over regarding the Food and Marketing Surplus Act; and finally he invited Scotty and his daughter Lily, who would enjoy herself, you see, with the other children there. His wife, the First Lady, had other engagements and excused herself with graceful scented notes and spring flowers in the rooms of every guest.

A reporter is too low on the social scale to spend a weekend with the President, even if he covers the White House. Scotty's ambition trapped him: the honor of the invitation, the chance to get an inside scoop. It was understood he would not write anything that happened there, but he could use whatever he learned for “background.”

The staff prepared for guests. There was to be tobogganing and ice skating and cross-country skiing, and, for those who liked to be indoors, there were billiards, or bridge, or mystery novels, or talk before a blazing fire. There was food: huge breakfasts set out on the two rough sideboards—grits, eggs and bacon and sausage, chicken livers and scalloped apples, and waffles and pancakes, biscuits and butter and honey, and several kinds of jams; coffee and teas; then mid-morning snacks, and later lunch, which was also a serve-yourself picnic laid out, like breakfast, on the sideboards. Dinner each night was seated, with various courses to appeal to healthy appetites.

Scotty brought Lily, but he had warned her as they drove up in his decaying Plymouth not to speak of the angel she thought she'd seen.

“Did see,” she said.

“Okay.” He shrugged, in no mood to dispute the point.

They drove through security checkpoints on a long and winding driveway and came to a group of rustic-looking buildings, covered with snow. Scotty could imagine Jim Sierra inside, busy controlling the communications network, talking on three phones at once, smoothing over, patching up, doing in, putting out, sounding off. For this so-called “retreat” was a nerve center of power once the President arrived. At the door, Scotty admonished Lily again: “I want you to have a good time. Just be careful. Remember your manners. Be on your best behavior.” Lily rolled her eyes to the open sky. “Don't talk about you-know-what.”

But she had no intention of talking about it.

That was why, when the President greeted her in the lodge, she shied off like a skittish deer. He frowned and drummed two fingers imperceptibly on his thumb.

That evening, the group convened for dinner, grown-ups at one table and the youngsters at another in another room, and the President made no effort to approach the little girl. But he observed with amusement how Jim's wife, Susan, seated next to Scotty, bent her head toward him as he talked. She crumbled bread pills on the white tablecloth, staring intently at the table, hardly looking at him.

It was a queer match, he thought, and glanced at Jim to see his reaction; but Jim was busy with the Senator, and the Senator with the General, and later, after dinner, Scotty joined them too, and their discussion of political affairs.

After lunch next day, while her father was away, Matt approached Lily for the second time.

There is nothing like a child to make a grown man feel inadequate. Lily and Jim's kids were building a snowman. Matt joined the game, although the children felt uneasy at the intrusion of their host, who came with his pack of followers. These watched from varying distances according to their rank: secret service agents, bodyguards, shadows behind trees, the Under Secretary leaning on two canes. The President dropped on his knees in the snow, organizing the kids a little more than they wanted, since he couldn't contain his habit of authority. (The Under Secretary, arthritic, stayed only a short time at the pretty winter scene before hobbling back indoors; the aides remained respectfully back.) At a certain moment the President found himself hunkered on his heels, patting the snowman next to little Lily.

“I need to talk to you,” he said quietly, working intently on the snowman. He did not look at her.

“No, you want to ask me about the—about what I saw,” she challenged. “But I didn't see anything. Everyone wants to ask me about that.”

“You didn't.” He was disappointed. “You didn't see anything?”

“Daddy says I‘m not to talk to you,” she said. “Go away.”

“But it belonged to
me
,” he whispered back. “I have a right to know. It was
my
angel you saw!” He glared at Jim's two daughters, who had stopped their work to listen in surprise at his vehemence. “I need to know. What did it look like?” What he wanted to know was whether it looked like the ones he'd seen. Was it friendly or fierce?

“No.”

He caught her tiny wrist. “Lily, wait.” Then to the other two: “Why don't you two go inside?” His voice was soft. “I need to talk alone to Lily. Go along. Desmond will get you anything you want. There are marshmallows you can roast over the fire. Do you want to see a movie?” He knew children's ways.

It was an order, though. The smile did not light his eyes. The children scampered back to the main cabin at a frightened run. From the trees the secret service observed their President kneeling beside the little girl in a red snowsuit. He patted the snowman's body into shape.

“I saw an angel once,” he confided. “I wonder if yours was the same.”

Lily darted a suspicious look at him.

“She was very beautiful,” said Matt. “I think of it as ‘her.' All radiant colors. And brilliant white.” The sun glittered on the snow. An icicle, hanging from the gutter of the house nearby, flashed iridescent in the sun. Lily said nothing.

“Did yours say anything? Did it tell you anything?” he asked.

“I know it was an angel,” said Lily defiantly. “It was so beautiful! It was the most beautiful of anything I‘ve ever seen.” The words came tumbling from her lips so fast he could hardly keep up. “It was huge. It filled up the whole room right up to the ceiling. Only it was actually only in that one side of it, that corner, and it was all kinds of colors, shimmering. It didn't have no wings.”

“Mine didn't speak,” said Matt humbly, and he found his heart was beating too fast. “Did yours? Did it say anything?” Something for me, he wanted to ask.

She patted the snowman with both hands, concentrating on her task, and then suddenly turned to him, as if she had made up her mind. “Now,” she said definitively, as if she had reached a decision, taken him into her confidence: “You mustn't tell. Promise?” And she smiled flirtatiously, sharing secrets, the delight of little girls. He nodded quietly.

“It waved to me,” she said. “But it was so sad. I just wanted to stand there with it, that was all, and comfort it. Because it was so sad. Just the way it looked at me. Like this,” she continued, attempting the expression. “It was looking that way at everyone. As if it wanted to cry. And then I waved to it, and that's when it smiled.”

“Did it have a message for me?” he asked, and this time his voice cracked.

She stared at him, a guileless child. “It said, ‘Don't be afraid.' And I wasn't. I wasn't afraid at all. Then the others came.”

“The others?”

“Lean down,” Lily whispered, and when the President bent down, she cupped her mouth to his ear with one red-mittened hand, talking confidentially. “I didn't tell anyone. Except Daddy. First there was the big one, looking so sad, and after she said, ‘Don't be afraid,' that's when the singing began, like a big crowd. That was the singing you could hear. Could you hear it? There was singing everywhere, and then the angel disappeared.”

Matt looked at her. It said, Don't be afraid. But were those words for him? He wanted to cry out in frustration.

She nodded solemnly. “And it was an angel. And you can't say I didn't see it, 'cause I did!”

“I know you did,” he said. “That's why I need to know if the angel is always there, invisible to us, or whether it comes and goes at special times. And was it saying ‘Don't be afraid' to you, or did it mean for all of us? For me? I wish I could see the angel,” he confessed.

Lily stared at him thoughtfully. “Why don't you ask?”

“Ask what?”

“Ask to see it,” she said seriously. “It will come if you ask.” Matt broke out laughing at her childish innocence.

At this moment the photographers arrived, alert to a good picture when they saw one. Jim's two daughters were called back outside (the Under Secretary's teenagers and the Speechwriter were off skiing), and the photo of the President romping with three children in the snow appeared in every newspaper in the country.

Meanwhile, Jim's wife, Susan, was skiing along the gentle rolling golf course. Her legs and shoulders moved in ceaseless rhythm, hands reaching forward on her poles, her skis hissing in the snow. She was following, mesmerized, the flat, strong shoulders of Scott, their easy rotation, and the dark snake of his tracks unwinding from his skis before her. She thought she had never been so happy, though she could not imagine why. She wished he would stop and look at her, pause for a time and talk.

Scotty slid on through the blue-gray light. He set his concentration on the thrust of his knees, the lift of his heel in the shoe, as he tried for smoother and more rhythmical strides. He was acutely aware of the woman behind him, and decided that at the holly tree up ahead he would stop. It was a pleasure to him to impose on himself the discipline and anticipation of waiting; he could not stop until he reached the holly. He attributed to exercise his pleasure with himself, his delight in the glittering snow, the cold air scalding his nostrils at each breath, the soft shooshing of his running skis, the tense silence of the snow. Soon, though he did not know it, he would kiss her, and tilt the course of world events.

The President was at that very moment smiling his engaging grin into the camera's eye, his head thrown back with laughter, and the children pelting him with snowballs.

The Stanhills were walking hand in hand by the frozen lake, still affectionate after forty-five years of marriage. It would be nice to have a photograph of them at that moment too. And if we had one of Jim Sierra, it would be indoors as he poured whiskey in a glass, preparing to buttonhole the Senator and impress upon the poor trapped man the need to organize votes for the Farm and Marketing Surplus Act, and what benefits would accrue to the Senator if he voted right and helped the President out.

Later, over cocktails by the fire, the President snagged Scotty. “I was talking to your daughter,” he said amiably, and remarked the curious tensing of Scotty's jaw.

“What did she say?”

“She said to ask,” said Matt.