The Shadow Cabinet (43 page)

Wilson scrawled out a message in his pocket notebook. “Wendy—Tell Cronin I'm looking for a mechanic to restore a 1971 Alfa Spider. Good pay.” He tore it out, folded his business card inside, and handed it to the woman.

“She was driving a new car last time I saw her,” the landlady said as she took the message, “but she hasn't paid me her phone bill yet.”

“What's her last name?”

“Murdock. I thought you said she was a friend.”

“I'd heard she was married.”

“Don't have to be nowadays. Come and go like alley cats. She owe you money?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Just asking,” she replied with sudden coolness, her curiosity ended. She shut the door.

Though the rain had stopped, the tires hissed along the wet pavement. A cold front was moving through but would be gone by morning, the radio weather bulletin predicted, bringing clear skies for the weekend. Wilson was going to the Shenandoah the following morning, to look at a farm. He started to turn off the radio but refrained as he heard the music, whose blandness dissolved the grime of the morning like a solvent. Carried along by the flow of traffic, he imagined Betsy at that hour, standing in front of her class; his older son, scrubbing for surgery in a Boston hospital; and Paul, the younger, settled at his typewriter over a draft editorial for his Oregon newspaper. He felt for a moment that surety that sometimes comes to husbands and fathers who, however disappointing their own careers, know their efforts weren't entirely wasted. Feeling that eased the shame of thinking how astonished or even disappointed they might have been had they known what he'd done with his morning.

6.

Donlon seemed hypnotized by the woman, hovering over her and sending curious looks down her low-cut silk dress. “I suppose it's the weather that keeps me indoors,” she said in her dark, rich voice. She'd once been a handsome woman and the ghost of that beauty was still apparent. Her silver-gray hair was almost white in the lamplight, the silhouette striking, but the dark-brown eyes seemed clouded as they'd looked up at Wilson, obscured by a hint of gray film. He'd thought of cataracts. Seeing her more closely, Wilson was all the more perplexed by Donlon's fascination. Her arthritic fingers were as gray as chalk, her mouth a seam of pale pink, imperfectly painted, the color straying above the upper lip and onto the creased skin.

“That's what is so depressing,” she intoned, “not being able to get about because of this dreadful rain.”

Her name was Cornelia Bowen and she sat on a cushioned rosewood chair in the second-floor living room belonging to Ed Donlon's law partner, the cocktail party's host. The room was overly warm from the log fire and the crush of late arrivals, come from some nearby diplomatic reception. Through the open door of the terrazzo sun porch behind her, a breath of cooler air stirred from the open window.

Joining them, Wilson had noticed Leyton Fischer on the porch. He was about to move down the steps toward him, curious about Nick Straus's sudden transfer at the Pentagon, but Ed Donlon restrained him, as if what Cornelia Bowen was saying was of tragic importance.

She was describing her fall on the first-floor landing of her Georgetown house six months earlier, when she'd broken her ankle. Her chauffeur and handyman had died the previous spring, collapsed suddenly on the rear patio as he carried a sickly potted plant from the solarium for its rejuvenation by the May sun.

Wilson found it difficult to muster much sympathy, unlike Donlon. “I certainly hope you're not alone now,” Ed said, concerned.

“Oh, no, there's Mrs. Childers, my housekeeper. I don't believe you ever met her. She's almost seventy-five now.”

“It's the pervasive unremitting vulgarity,” a woman's caustic voice intruded from behind Wilson's right shoulder. “You knew it was coming, you could predict it—just commerce and convenience. First the flip-top box, then the pull-tab beer can, next the throwaway razor, now throwaway sex. All-night porno on cable TV …”

She must be a Democrat, Wilson thought.

“I do a little needlepoint,” Cornelia Bowen was saying, “but only for short periods because of my eyes.…”

“So you know what was next,” the caustic voice continued relentlessly, “everything quick, cheap, and convenient. I mean, look at this administration. The quick script, the instant fix.” Wilson moved his head to identify her, but her back was to him. “Next it'll be the digestible booze bottle and the do-it-yourself funeral. A closet-sized microwave oven in the basement.” A squall of cigarette smoke enveloped him as a silvery-blond head leaned into view and a slim hand carried away the cherry table's only ashtray.

“Where'd you read that?”

“Who's got time to read in this town? Where else? Standing in the Safeway line, looking at the
National Enquirer
, like everyone else. Like Reagan, getting his morning brief at the White House.”

“I do less reading now,” Cornelia Bowen droned on.

“A little white flash of light and
poof!
That's it. You can put hubby number three in the flowerpot with the African violets.…”

“A few old friends come by to read to me now and then. It's rather a lost art, isn't it? I felt a little foolish at first, very embarrassed for them, but that's passed now. I don't feel much like an invalid at all and I think my readers enjoy it as much as I do. We look forward to it. Leyton is reading Jane Austen to me—he's just next door. You should come read with us, Edward.”

Donlon looked like a flattered choirboy in the sacristy whom the bishop had just deigned to address. “Oh, yes, I think I'd like that,” he said quickly.

“We're finishing
Mansfield Park,
” she continued. “I insist Leyton leave it with me so he won't finish it alone during one of his trips. He's made two to Europe with the Secretary since May and one to the Middle East. Leyton's suddenly indispensable, to me and it seems everyone else.”

Wilson had never cared much for Leyton Fischer and now, hearing Cornelia Bowen's voice, he found his disapproval touching her as well. She reminded him of an elderly dowager whose recollections had so enthralled his parents when he was growing up and whose grass he'd been condemned to cut one entire summer after her gardener had ruptured himself. Her memory was like Cornelia Bowen's, a scented private garden where she lived alone, her preoccupations never touching the lives of others beyond her high brick walls. Her friends never died. They were just shown out the ornate cut-glass front door by her white-gloved houseman one summer day, the roses in full bloom, and never returned.

“No poetry these days?” Donlon was asking softly, bending his head near.

Wilson wandered away, determined to leave now, with or without Donlon and Mary Sifton, but at that moment more guests were arriving and a handful departing, blocking the landing at the top of the stairs. The host had been ambushed just outside the door, deep in conversation with a departing congressman. A few couples waited near the door to say their farewells, their smiles already prepared.

Wilson moved in the other direction, toward the small bar set up just inside the library doors across the room. The dry heat had grown sticky. The two black waiters behind the bar, forced to the corner by the congestion, were sweating and overworked, like croupiers at a gaming table.

“Those kitschy clothes she wears, for one thing,” whispered a woman from behind Wilson as he waited. “A cabinet wife? I mean, where does she think she is? Not Washington. Nibbling quiche and gushing trendy non sequiturs that don't mean boo to anyone?”

Wilson asked for a whiskey.

“Look, sweetheart, her clothes are her own business, O.K.?” grumbled a husband's voice. “Sometimes you don't look so hot yourself.”

“Did you ever ask yourself what I spend on clothes?”

He moved on into the library, drawn there by the Civil War maps and prints on the rear wall above the bookcases. A tall, gray-haired man stood there too, his back to the room, a drink in his hand as he studied the titles on the bookshelves, as if waiting to leave, like Wilson. The prints and maps were reproductions and expensively framed. Wilson lost interest and turned back.

Leyton Fischer had joined Cornelia Bowen and Ed Donlon near the entrance to the sun porch.

“Edward was telling us you'd joined the private sector,” Leyton Fischer said to him as he strolled up. “I must say that came as a surprise.”

Fischer, slight and gray, wore a gray suit, vest, and his customary bow tie. An indistinct gray mustache gave the stamp of inconsequentiality to the small face.

“Something a little different,” Wilson said, remembering how carefully one had to handle Leyton, who stored up imaginary grievances like a vain woman.

“Oh, I'm certain of that; the Center is certainly different if it's anything. I remember I once talked to your Dr. Foster. Foster, is that his name?” Fischer frowned, attempting to restore to vagueness a name he could have no earthly reason to remember.

“Foster, that's right,” Wilson said. Seeing Leyton Fischer's dreary smile, he felt a certain affection for their poor, maligned Dr. Foster.

“Foster, yes. I once talked to your Dr. Foster, who called to ask if I would appear on a panel the Center was sponsoring.”

“Leyton works such terrible hours these days,” Cornelia Bowen reminded them in a whisper.

“Rather odd, I thought,” Fischer continued prudishly. “Something about behaviorism and foreign policy.” He smiled for Cornelia Bowen's benefit. “I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I had to decline, of course—quite preposterous.”

Donlon looked on indignantly. Wilson said nothing, his interest in inquiring about Nick Straus's transfer at the Pentagon gone.

“I think I've told you how many trips Leyton has made with the Secretary,” added Cornelia Bowen.

Fischer inclined his head near hers as he stood behind her chair. “Are you sure you're comfortable there? It is getting late.” The balsam of tenderness was offered in a low, patronizing voice and she yielded to it, like a sleepy child, her hand touching his sleeve.

“I do feel a little tired.”

“Shall I get the car?”

Wilson, turning to remind Ed Donlon that he was leaving, was surprised at the look on his face. It was the face of a cuckold, angry and outraged. Only then did Wilson remember who Cornelia Bowen was.

The night was chilly as Mary Sifton, Donlon, and Wilson walked back through the quiet Georgetown streets toward Donlon's house. Mary was still curious about Cornelia Bowen, but Donlon, whose behavior seemed increasingly eccentric, refused to answer. Mary Sifton was slight and dark-haired, in her early forties. She took tiny steps as they walked and Wilson could imagine her handwriting as he slowed to keep stride—tiny, precise, and always legible. “
Chacun à son goût,
” she said wistfully. “I suppose you read poetry to her.”

Donlon refused to answer.

“I have a feeling you're losing your intellectual verve,” she said sadly after a few more steps. Then, to Haven Wilson: “When we first met, Ed seemed to me very intellectual. Now he seems to have lost those interests. Could it be that I was deceived?” Her way of speaking was as precise as her footsteps. Behind the words he heard a shrewd, finite little mind, but too shrewd, too finite. The illogic of emotions would always elude her, as Ed Donlon would soon escape her. She would always be disappointed. “No theater, no concerts, nothing at all these days.” She gave a small, pathetic sigh. “I'm not a very political person, Mr. Wilson—”

“It's Haven,” Donlon said.

“Haven, then. Please don't walk so fast. I'm not a very political person, Haven. I think Ed is tiring of my world.”

Wilson had stopped again, waiting for her. Donlon waited too and gruffly let her take his arm. The old brick sidewalks were uneven and she moved carefully in her high heels. “She was probably very attractive once,” she resumed in a tiny voice. They emerged into the brightness of Wisconsin Avenue. A police siren wailed in the distance. “Where did you meet her?” Donlon stubbornly didn't reply, his thoughts his own. “Who was the man with her?”

“A bloody idiot!” he exploded.

Donlon had been thirty at the time, a young Treasury lawyer. She was nearly forty, the wife of a senior Treasury official appointed under the Eisenhower administration. Their affair had lasted a year, Wilson recalled now, but Donlon still talked of her when he and Wilson had shared offices at Justice twenty-five years ago.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Wilson declined the invitation to join them inside, and found his car nearby.

His office was chilly. The streetlamps bathed the dark front rooms with their frosty light and drew eccentric oblongs on the office walls. Only his desk lamp was lit, mixing splashes of odd color from the small squares of cathedral glass at the top of the bay window. The limbs of the maple trees were limned across the floor. He stood at the desk, his coat still on, looking at the telephone messages left for him. Betsy had called twice; so had Rita Kramer.

He telephoned the hotel suite and it was a long time before a sleepy voice answered. Artie Kramer wasn't there. He'd flown to Los Angeles that afternoon with Chuckie Savant and Franconi, not to return until the following week.

“I dozed off, watching television,” Rita said drowsily. “I wanted to tell you they'd gone. What'd you want to talk to him about?”

“I wanted to ask about that telex he sent you, telling you to break off the talks about the house. Do you know how he sent it?”

“Telex, but it got all screwed up.”

“Whose telex?”

“Through Strykker's office in L.A., I think. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“It's a funny time of night to be wondering.” A silence followed. “Another goddamned weekend,” she continued sleepily. “I guess you've got yours all planned.”