The President's Angel (7 page)

Here is another reason he knew things were awry: His feelings toward his wife began to change. He looked across the dining room table at this woman with whom he had lived for thirty-eight years, mother of his sons, and there was the fresh-faced college girl now hidden behind a matron's face, cheeks going heavy, and the skin of her eyelids wrinkling over her brown eyes.

When you live with a person for many years, you think you've learned their ways. You set them in a frame and see that portrait even though it may not represent that person anymore at all, but merely the image that she (or he) has become accustomed to holding up to you.

They had not shared their lives in years. Except in public. Political pretense, at which they both excelled. They held hands and smiled at each other's grins on camera and waved triumphantly from platforms. He could put an arm around her shoulder and hug her to him, and she would wind her arm around his waist as the cameras ground. But as soon as they moved out of the crowds, she shifted almost imperceptibly under his arm, which he dropped; she moved away, her face composing itself into its normal wary look. Now the President found himself observing the heavy stance of her plump body, set foursquare against her anger and pain, the tension in her neck, or the looks she gave him these days when she said good night, a piercing, questioning glance. She knew something had happened to him. She assumed it concerned another of his easy ladies, affairs thrown in her face.

One night he woke up at the usual four A.M. He opened his eyes to the dim light of the empty room. “Not here,” he said aloud, remarking on the absence of that one angelic image that now tugged always at his mind. Behind his eyes rose memories. It is impossible to get to the monarchy without having performed Aztec sacrifices, and lying there, alone and unprotected, he was assailed by his own betrayals.

How many deaths had he dealt out? Most frequently it is the human heart we kill—ambitions or love or the creative instinct. But he was head of state, and the blood of living men and women lay on him as well. His policies, his acts, affected everyone.

Nursing homes and nursery schools, food, transportation, business opportunities—all the stuff of living and dying lay in his hands.

“I never meant to harm,” he cried aloud, and suddenly he was walking with Anne, hand in hand, across a college campus under the falling red maple leaves. “You watch. I‘m going to be President,” he announced. Her head was thrown back, eyes sparkling as she looked at him. He'd not thought of that in years. Or of their first two-room apartment, when he was still in law school and held a night job on the side, while Anne, then pregnant, worked at the university. They hardly had time to meet, against opposing schedules, and when they did, could barely tear themselves apart. The passing years were marked by larger apartments and houses, and moves from his home state to Congress (a house in Georgetown), to Governor (the mansion in the home-state capital), and each move took something out of Anne, though she smiled gallantly and made a joke about a rolling stone. In that period she developed a twitch at the corner of her mouth. He wondered if she drank in the afternoons, but had no time to worry about it and bought her a maid instead, and got her a membership in the country club so that she could play tennis or golf with other political wives, and entertain at the club, if need be, and not bother him with her troubles.

It was four-thirty in the morning, and no angel had appeared. His thoughts were lions roaming round their cage. Then—without warning—both his boys pounced on him, and he scrambled to recover his wits, for these were memories he never permitted to himself. Nonetheless they roared onto him: his sons, just little guys, tough and compact of body, not two feet high and swinging at baseballs or flailing at the water when he took them swimming; or later, as adolescents, wrestling one another in the pool with the splashes of whales. They were growing into fine, young, muscled men; and frantically he tried to jerk his thoughts onto another track—his work, a woman—Eileen, Rebecca—the Peruvian problem to resolve—but they pressed in on him, those two great grinning, awkward, clownish boys with their huge hands and gawky feet, the elder having hardly achieved full height, but taking out girls, starting to drink now and also make speeches in the congressional campaigns, when they took the car for that fatal ride and left their bodies under the tractor trailer on the Beltway, their blood and muscles slippery on the road.

He screamed. The highway smeared with blood.

His heart was pounding. His skin had broken out in sweat.

The door opened. Frank: “Sir?”

“Go away,” he growled. “Get out. I‘m thinking.” But he threw his feet on the cold floor and padded to the angry bathroom to relieve himself, and the tears were running down his unshaven cheeks as he stood before the toilet and pain seared all his joints. His shoulders shook. He could not stop the tears.

Afterward he gulped cold water. He washed his face. He threw himself still trembling back in bed—uncoupled, he was, by his dear dead boys who had taken with them all his love and dried good, lusty ambition into dust.

Instantly he was Anne, scorched by hate at how he'd used their deaths. His teeth began to chatter. He threw off the covers and slipped to his knees beside the bed. “God, help me. Help me,” he prayed, as if a deity were not imaginary. “Help me,” he prayed. Until suddenly he was kneeling in his imagination at Anne's feet, kissing Anne's feet in love and supplication. But before she could extend forgiveness, the image broke into the figure of the boys, who reached down and hauled him up, enfolded him in their great snuffling embrace, which turned to shoulder-pummeling and leg-wrestling and then to one of those wild racing rough-houses that shook the lamps as they all three thundered from the living room up the stairs and through the bedrooms and down to the basement again, the house rocking with their roars. No cushion was left in place where they had played. Laughing, they threw themselves on the floor.

The vision changed. He was staring at the image of his half-grown sons. They stood before him enveloped in a light beyond imagining, and they weren't doing anything, just standing, looking, smiling at the air.

The President woke from his trance and pulled himself exhausted into bed. He was drained. Now his tears were not for the boys or Anne or even for himself (though God knows he had wept for them before), but for all suffering in this life, this short-lived, fragile, little life. So frail, he thought. So fragile that nothing is given us to keep, but only to lose, to lose, to lose.

It seemed to him, lying there with the first pearl light creeping across the sky, that all of life is no more than that adjustment to loss: loss of pets, loss of parents, loss of children, loved ones, loss of homes and dreams. Whatever we value is taken from us. It was intolerable. But then it occurred to him how just this was, how right, how incorruptible, and how our task was merely to accept our loss, and grieve appropriately and give it away, because at some level there is no loss, he thought, hovering on the edge of insight and struggling to hold the idea that was already slipping from consciousness, another loss. For a moment he caught the concept that during our lives we must undergo loss again and again, loss of love, loss of people, loss of possessions, until we lose our possessiveness and see that only with loss is there possibility of … and he lost the words as he lost consciousness. It flashed across his mind—there is no loss—before he fell into sleep so sweet that Frank had to shake him awake in the daylight morning, where he lay in bed marveling at his serenity after such a stormy night.

The next morning, he found Anne in the breakfast room, reading her mail through her half-specs and dictating answers to her secretary.

“I saw the boys last night.”

She looked up, disgusted. “Oh, Matt.”

“Go away,” he said to her secretary, seating himself at the table, at which Anne quickly stood.

“Stay, Marie,” she ordered. But the secretary had more discretion than her boss.

“I'll wait outside.” She slipped away, hearing only Anne's voice rising in annoyance to her husband:

“Really, Matt. Must you?”

“Sit down,” he said quietly.

“I don't want to hear your recital.”

“I think they came back to say that they're all right.”

“Oh, for God's sake!” She paced the room in agitation, pulling at her ring.

“Annie, it was all right. I saw them, I tell you. They stood in front me, both boys, looking at me so lovingly. They were happy.”

“You're such an egoist, Matt. I cannot imagine why—”

“Annie, they came to tell us something.”

“Then tell them to come to
me
,” she said. Then in a burst of frustration, “How could you do this to me? How dare you? I am sick of this charade. I will not put up with it anymore. You have your presidency. You have what you wanted. Glory. Power. So live with it. But don't come to me with your guilty conscience.”

“Goddamn it, Anne. I didn't kill them.”

“You might as well have. And if not them, then all the other boys you're killing in this war.”

“Goddamn you!”

“I do my business. Just don't ask anything more of me, understand?” They faced each other eye to eye, before he turned on his heel and left, muttering about murder and wives.

So the days passed into weeks as the planet raced ever faster toward the sun, picking up speed as it approached the finish line (the January ought-three perihelion, when, closest to the sun, it turned and began the long and slowing journey away from its focal star). Some people believed the days were growing shorter because Daylight Savings Time had ended, and others, more learned, because of the tilt of the autumn Earth; but time had no place in those later days. The President felt he only just got up in the morning and turned around once before it was time to fall back in bed. Time took no pause. He felt breathless as the year was running out, as if he were the figurehead of a ship on the soaring planet Earth, and it was running at 1,663,929 miles a day toward the sun, which was itself sweeping through space at some unimaginable velocity; and the solar winds were roaring through Matt's hair, so that if he didn't hold on, he would be blown right off the surface of the Earth into the nothingness of space.

So he held on and did his job and grinned and played the game.

But the President had a secret, and the secret was his connection with the beggar in the park.

As with all secrets, the owner guarded it jealously. He would not reveal his obsession, but he fingered it in meetings or while jogging on his exercise machine, or during the massage afterward, soothed by the caresses of his masseur. He found himself glancing out the window toward the park as he walked down the corridor with his aides, and always in the evening, as he prepared for bed, he found some opportunity to stroll to the north window casually and glance outside, looking for the demonstrators in the empty park.

It was Jim who noticed that the single vagrant was back; he asked the President if he wanted the man removed. He was not a protestor and therefore, technically, did not belong with the dissident group that had been rounded up earlier. Sometimes he sat cross-legged on a park bench, sometimes he stretched on his blanket on the grass. Sometimes he went away, and then for hours at a stretch—or days—he would be gone. Should he be removed?

Matt cut in quickly. “No, no, just leave him there, no harm.”

One reason was the craftiness the President had developed: He didn't want to seem more eccentric than Jim probably already found him. But the other reason was because the man in the park, this derelict, belonged to him. He watched him from the window on the second floor. He made inquiries. The man apparently was sane. Not troublesome. Or quarrelsome. But Matt, the sensitive, knew this anyway.

The President took to walking to the front gate of the mansion—for exercise, he said. He waved to the tourists, shaking hands (to the dismay of the secret service) through the iron fence, and letting himself be photographed, happily bantering with the crowd. Then he shot a look at the park, looking for the vagrant, wondering if he noticed. Sometimes the beggar was in the park and sometimes not. When he was there, the President felt a surge of triumph, a vindication of some sort, mingled with antagonism and rage. When he was not, he felt a sag of disappointment. Then he stalked irritably back to the White House, to his office, his desk, his papers and meetings and international crises, and threw himself into life and death.

One night in December a fine sleet slashed at the windows. The President stood with his back to the fireplace and a brandy in his hand. It was eleven o'clock. He could not keep the image from his mind. It had risen before him during the rare, private dinner with his wife, at which they talked like strangers before the servants or lapsed into their private prolonged silences. He did not know what she thought about in such moments—the boys, her trips, her work, perhaps her lover in California. His own thoughts were interrupted by the beggar, whose figure retreated later in the face of the papers he was studying; but when Anne had nodded good night and gone to her room, when he had started a snifter of brandy, the soft, sharp aroma floating in his nostrils and swirling around his tongue, then the man's presence crept out from the back of his brain again, demanding his attention. He rang his butler and gave the order.