The President's Angel (14 page)

“What?”

“Nothing.” He laughed. “She had her picture taken. She's a fine little girl. You're a lucky man.”

“If my stupid ex doesn't spoil her,” said Scotty, who naturally preferred the negative.

“Oh. Do you want custody?”

“I can't take custody. I don't have time. I‘m just worried the woman isn't taking care of her. I only see Lily every other weekend, so I don't get a lot of time to spend with her. I don't think her mother's feeding her right. I‘ve told her so. She doesn't listen.”

Susan joined them, smiling over the lip of her glass at Scotty, who turned to include her warmly. (The President remarked it all.) Across the room, Jim was on the phone trying to control the pacing of the treaty negotiations. It would be another day before it registered on him why his wife's eyes were shining, and another day after that—back in the White House—before the rage that consumed him led him to close the borders between the two countries, the treaty quashed. He was chief of Domestic Affairs, but not afraid of extending his frontiers.

But none of that had happened yet—not the kiss Jim interrupted the following day, not the bellowing fistfight that broke out between himself and Scotty, while his screaming wife tried to separate the two. Not Jim's threats to kill Scott if he saw him again, or Scotty's to lay off him, that Jim couldn't tell him what to do—no, nor Scotty and Lily's hurried departure from the camp, nor Jim and Susan's long, silent, sulking drive in the station wagon back to their house from the airport, with the children feigning sleep in the back, nor Jim's subsequent terrifying collapse. For the moment, Matt lounged gracefully before the fire with Scotty and Susan. He rested his elbow on the stone mantel and, for those precious moments, he forgot the war and his responsibilities. They were joined a moment later by the elegant Emily Stanhill, and then by the Under Secretary, who lowered himself into a chair from his canes.

The President looked around the comfortable room at the antlers over the fireplace, at the rough and rustic furniture, and felt a wave of inordinate fondness for this place, for these people, each driven by their virtues and vices. The Senator was absorbed by a consuming need to be reelected, and the Speechwriter burdened with the depression that had haunted him since childhood, and Jim by his need to control. Matt, in his newfound calm detachment, was amused to see that Susan had chosen for a lover her husband in a different guise. The two men did not look alike, but Scotty was motivated by the same high-octane energy as Jim. Both were angry, both determined to set the world to rights. Jim's rival was his emotional twin.

At dinner the President made a joke of having no desire for peace.

“It would be a tragedy,” he laughed, looking around at his guests, entertaining them with his flippancy, “to have no war. People love to make war. It staves off boredom. Listen: Of men and arms I sing! Look at the Turks and Greeks, the English and Irish, the Jews and Arabs—excuse me, Stanhill, but they love to fight. They've been fighting each other for all of recorded time. They'd feel deprived if they couldn't fight.”

The group erupted in dissent.

“When I was little,” said the President, “there was a man who raised fighting cocks down the street from me. Completely illegal, of course, but he used to throw his cages in the back of his car and take off for Arizona or Florida or Chicago or Georgia—all clandestine fights. He'd bet twenty thousand dollars on a single cock. He claimed he was doing them a favor, that it would be cruelty to the animals to deprive them of a fight, when that's all they wanted to do.”

“Are you saying humans are like fighting cocks?” asked the Senator.

“I'm just saying we'd be doing a disservice,” teased the President, “if we didn't encourage certain groups to fight. What would they do with themselves? Imagine! No war. No glory. No heroism. No literature. No purpose in life. No sorrowing over wasted lives, no men cut down in their prime—which is a mother's greatest boon, undoubtedly.”

He was in prickly high spirits, explaining the need for Sacrifice to Freedom, Justice, Honor, Truth; and you could say it was in damned bad taste. “Disgusting!” Scotty murmured to Susan.

“I've become cynical,” Matt said to Emily, and he passed one hand across his eyes, a gesture that had become habitual now.

“The trouble is, you're not,” she answered, lifting her chin with the sparkling flirtatiousness that had marked her as a twenty-year-old.

“Everyone wants peace,” he said in a low voice, privately to her. “And look around the table. How many have it in their hearts? They want it on their terms, beating the enemy to a pulp, which isn't peace at all now, is it? And I‘m expected to impose world peace. Let them fight, I say.” They rose from the table and adjourned to the poker room, where another fire blazed.

Never again would all these people be gathered in one place. For the moment, however, one flicker in time, the members of this party challenged one another to billiards, or sat around the fire and talked, or played cards, or strolled on the squeaking snow under a cold, pale, passionate moon. And each heart held the world in microcosm, each moment held in it a teardrop of eternity. Yet none of them knew it. Not a person there, unless it was the lovely, elderly Emily, guessed that in his or her own hands hung the totality of life and time. Not a single one of them except perhaps the President, who was still groping toward the understanding, guessed the secret: that we get to choose our lives—not what happens to us, necessarily, but how much we see. We get to choose our responses—whether to be enslaved by desires and fears, or to let go, to trust, to take life's dare, and in that willingness to experience, if only for the briefest moment, the release that comes with the opening of the heart.

The other part of the secret is how hard it is to do this, how much practice it takes to make it into a habit, so that we are no longer held hostage by our instincts. There's no harder struggle in the world. But it's there to be chosen if we wish.

So, everything was going as it should. The world was burning up with joy and love, with anger and grief, with creation and destruction, and the people who were gathered on that weekend were burning with their own desires and delusions, hatred, fears, and love.

They say that to talk of love is to make love. All that night Emily Stanhill and the President danced a conversational minuet around the meaning of evil and the nature of God. For Emily, to talk of God was to talk of love, and Matt could not help but be moved. She described to him how to pray in such a way that your prayer is heard and answered. “It's a law,” she said, “a simple, esoteric exercise. It's what Christ was talking about, and it's rarely taught in church. But done that way, it's always answered.” (And he would remember this conversation much later, when she was dying of cancer and asked him for his prayers.)

“But you have to ask,” she said, echoing the words of the little child, “otherwise the help can't come.” He was struck by the coincidence of hearing this direction twice in the same day, once from a five-year-old, and once from a woman of seventy-two. “And finally, after making your request, ask for the Highest Good for all concerned, say thank you, and be willing to let go.”

“Be willing not to get the prayer?” He laughed. “I thought you said it was always answered.”

The fire dimmed. The other guests joined them at times, contributing snatches of poetry or their own noisy beliefs, and Emily observed (laughing to the President) that each person considered his opinion as the One True Word. Each one thought that he (or she) was right and the others mistaken or misinformed.

Her husband, the mining magnate, went to bed. The children had long before gone up. The others followed, trailing off in twos and threes or one by one. Emily danced a fox-trot with the President to the radio, then a stately and old-fashioned waltz. Susan and Scotty came inside from their moonlight walk, blowing on their fingers and casting lingering sidelong looks at one another; they could hardly break apart, and walked upstairs to their respective rooms, shoulders brushing like butterflies, leaving the President and Emily alone, still talking on the couch.

He confided in her. He told her about the angels in his bedroom (first compassionate, then angry), and about the beggar. What did it mean? He spoke haltingly at first, anticipating ridicule. Instead she listened, nodding as if his story were as natural as pine trees, and once she gave a startled exclamation of delight. He told of his confusion, his longing for solitude, his boredom with much of what he had to do, his obsession with the angel, the vagrant, the desperate wilderness he was in.

“Dark night,” she murmured.

“What?”

“Dark Night of the Soul. St. John of the Cross.”

“I don't know about that,” he said stiffly, a little annoyed at not being found more special. He didn't want just a common, everyday mystical experience. She laughed.

“It's all right, Matt. Every single person is unique. Isn't that a miracle? And each experience of God is utterly unique. Yet, still, we all follow a similar path. You are so lucky.”

“Yes?”

“To have this anguish. It means your shell is cracking. It's going to be wonderful, Matt.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” she repeated. “You should give thanks for this gift. God is reeling you in like a fish. But you have to go through the darkness before you find the light. It's going to be wonderful.”

“I don't even know if what I saw was real.”

“No. You'll only know by its effects.”

“What do you mean?”

“By whether you change, and how the new knowledge is manifested in your life.”

She actually spoke like that, and he thought, listening to her lilting sweet voice, that he had never heard such lovely turns of phrase. He didn't laugh.

“But what's wrong with me?” he asked. “I'm raw feeling. I look at the simplest thing—two lovers,” he added, these being the last objects he had noticed, “and tears well up in my eyes. I can't control myself.”

She said very little. Nodded. Mmm. Simply talking to her made the President feel better.

“So, then, do you go to church?” he asked, interested.

“No. But I believe in God. I have had experiences of my own. I guess many people have. And, yes, I believe you, first because I‘ve seen some of what you're describing, secondly—because I believe you, that's all. Only you need a guide. You can't take this journey without a spiritual guide.”

“What journey?”

“The spiritual journey. To your soul. Who was it who said that when you find your Self you find God? Was it Jung? That's what's coming to you.”

“God?”

“God. The Self. Once your soul catches fire, once it has seen into that other dimension, you can't put the fire out. It'll never be the same again. That's all that's happening. It's not extraordinary.”

“It is,” he said stubbornly.

“Well, I mean no more than the other miracles around us: like a tulip or a terrier dog. Or the constant recurrence of love. Those are miracles!” She laughed.

Later, at the end of the evening, when they traced their steps to their respective rooms, she kissed his cheek good night; or morning, for it was three A.M.

“Good night, Emily.”

“Good night, Mr. President. God bless you.”

“He has. I hope He has.”

Then he entered the room and went on his knees beside his bed as she had directed and said his prayers. Innocently. Like a child.

“Adulteress!” hissed Jim as they drove home from the airport. His voice was low so the children, in the back of the station wagon, would not hear. Susan flinched.

“Adulteress,” he repeated. “Assassin. You have assassinated our marriage.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

It was the adultery that overwhelmed him; he had a sudden memory of himself at the age of ten, watching from the third floor of the embassy in Rome—his beautiful mother in a black velvet evening gown, his father with his strong moustache. They faced each other on the staircase below him; and he, Jimmy, held the banister posts as if in a cage and pressed his face to the slats, listening, wide-eyed, as his father shouted to her: “Shame!”

“Shame!” Jim cried, to clear his mind. “I'll see you get nothing out of this,” he threatened Susan. “Not one penny. Not the house. Not the children.”

“They're my children too.” She spoke through gritted teeth, voice low, not to wake them. “My house.”

Then the appalling silence.

“Don't drive like a maniac,” said Susan. “Slow down.”

In the backseat the children exchanged frightened looks and curled into the pretense of sleep.

That night she called Scotty on the downstairs phone.

“I have to see you.”

“Now?”

“No, no. I can't come now. But, oh Scott, talk to me. He called me an adulteress. He wants the children.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“He's been violent before,” she whispered into the phone, listening for his step. “Tomorrow. Can I see you tomorrow?”

So they made their assignation, exchanged their lovers' vows and waited, lunging between ecstasy and despair, which is the condition of humankind in the grip of love or war.

Meanwhile Jim had declared war against Scotty, and his anger extended to the President, who was shilly-shallying about war and the Barbarian Empire.

The story of war is always the same. It is a strategy, a chess game of how to kill without being killed. Feed Scotty lies. Let him print part truths that Jim would then correct; let Scotty get bombed—egg on his face—kill his reputation. It was a vicious, secret, covert war that Jim led, unannounced, but no less real for that.

Jim put his attention to it with all the brilliance of his law school career. A word dropped to an aide—a leak suggested—a little packet of poisoned meat thrown out from the sleigh onto the snow behind. A cautious war. No one must trace it back to him, because if the source were known, the running wolf would pass the bait. While thinking of animals, Jim decided he could kill two birds with one stone, disgrace Scotty and push his own foreign policy. The stories he was foisting onto Scotty were of Matt's increasing thrust toward war: The President was held in check only by his military advisors. It was easy for Scotty to believe it: Hadn't he heard the President teasing at dinner at the Adirondack retreat?