The Shadow Cabinet (8 page)

“I'll bet she's got a college degree,” Donlon said, watching her return to the end of the bar for menus.

“Probably,” Wilson said, looking the other way. Two middle-aged women in flowered dresses and garden club hats sat at a nearby table drinking daiquiris. A young couple in riding boots and identical hounds-tooth riding jackets leaned with their heads against the wall at a side table, talking softly.

“Sure she has.” Donlon's smile brightened as she came back to the table.

“Something to drink?” she asked. Wilson guessed she was in her early thirties. They ordered martinis on the rocks.

“What was it in?” Donlon asked agreeably. “Psychology, sociology? Maybe history?”

“What was what in?”

“Your degree. I wouldn't be surprised if you were a teacher.”

“Psychology—psychology and English lit, but that was a long time ago. What made you ask?”

“Intuition. You've probably got a horse.”

Wilson looked away, embarrassed. Asking a waitress in Middleburg if she had a horse was like asking a skiff owner in rubber boots on Chesapeake Bay if he was an oysterman, but to his surprise the waitress seemed flattered. “Three,” she said, smiling.

“Not Appaloosas, either.”

“No, not Appaloosas.”

She went back to the bar. “I told you,” Donlon said, invigorated. “A thoroughbred.”

“What time's McVey expecting us?”

“Anytime after lunch. He suggested lunch, but that's no good. The afternoon will be long enough as it is.” His eyes still lingered on the young waitress standing at the end of the bar. “She's not bad. What do you think?”

Wilson studied the menu, trying to ignore him. If the waitress had been flattered by Donlon's guess that she kept horses, she was naive enough for anything. The menu specialties were hand-lettered in a flowery, amateurish script, some in French, and the improvised handicraft made him suspicious. “This is your neck of the woods,” he said. “What do you recommend?”

“Something quick.”

Wilson put the menu aside. “What's McVey want to talk to me about?”

“Discuss some problems,” Donlon said vaguely. “He's been in bed with phlebitis; no visitors, no small talk. That means he's pumped up. He just bought some professor's library from Johns Hopkins and has been reading his way through it, the poor bastard. He gets goddamned lonely. When I talked to him on the phone, he wouldn't let go.” Donlon looked up as the waitress put the drinks on the table. “What'd the cook get his degree in?” Donlon asked.

“The cook? I'm not sure. Why?”

He handed her the menu. “When in doubt, take the familiar. I'll have the corned beef sandwich.”

“You don't trust us,” she said.

“Make mine roast beef,” Wilson said.

“He's English,” Donlon explained.

“And you're Irish, I suppose.” She took back the menus with a smile and strolled away, this time more slowly.

“She's not bad at all,” Donlon said, watching her hips as Wilson studied the worm holes in the old pine, trying to decide whether they were made by an auger or a Civil War beetle. He drank his martini in silence. Donlon waited expectantly.

“What's wrong with Appaloosas?” she asked as she brought the plates, not waiting for Donlon's opening sally.

“Nothing, except you don't quite look the type. Someone tried to interest me once.”

“But didn't.” She was bolder now, her shoulders back as she arranged the plates.

“It's not much fun,” Donlon said. “You spend your weekends being dragged around at the end of a horse trailer.”

“I'm afraid so.”

“My pastures are empty,” Donlon said shamelessly. Wilson found himself trying to read the legend on a sporting print half a room away.

She laughed. “Really? That's a shame? Where?”

“The valley of the Shenandoah,” Donlon said sadly, as if it were a refrain from a Confederate campfire song. Donlon had a two-hundred-acre farm in the valley with an old prebellum house he and Jane had been restoring, but he hadn't been there since the death of his only son, Brian, over a year ago. Wilson was the only one who visited the place. “The high shoe country,” Donlon continued. “Do you know Yeats?”

“A little,” she replied, surprised.

“‘Huntsman Rody, blow the horn,'” he said in a Gaelic lilt. “‘Make the hills reply.' But Rody couldn't blow his horn, only weep and sigh.” Smiling mysteriously, he drank from his glass while the waitress watched. The two women in flower club hats were studying them. Wilson felt like crawling under the table. “Do you know it?” Donlon asked. “‘The Ballad of the Foxhunter'?”

“No, but it sounds very sad.”

“It is. How about another drink, Haven?”

“No, thanks, one's enough. For both of us.”

Looking sadly at Wilson, Donlon said, “‘The blind hound with a mournful din Lifts slow his wintry head.'” Then, to the waitress: “He says no. Sorry; maybe next time.”

They finished their lunch. The young woman returned and stood talking with Donlon for a few minutes. Her name was Nancy.

“You never quit, do you,” Wilson said as they crossed the street to the car. The day had grown darker and the wind was sharp against their faces.

“If I quit I'd be dead. Anyway, she wasn't bad.”

It was always the same with Donlon. His taste in clothes, clubs, and friends was subtle, fastidious, even a little archaic, but his eye for women was indiscriminate. One seemed to have no relation to the other. Secretaries, restaurant hostesses, cocktail lounge waitresses, even a bag girl in a Fairfax supermarket once when they'd been on their way to the farm—they were all fair game for Donlon, who was constantly on the prowl, not for immediate success but for an eventual one. Two, three, maybe four visits, and then on a rainy night, business slow, the customers' faces grown dull, the talk monotonous, the feet tired, Donlon would be there, arriving alone near closing time. Women bored or lonely with their own lives found his more seductive; they brought him alive as well; but to Wilson there was something sad about it. It was hard to tell Donlon's age now—he might have been forty-five or fifty-five—but in a few years the mystery would be gone, the adulterous intent more nakedly revealed by the wrinkled neck, the dab of hair color, or the denture lines around the mouth. And one evening in a bar or restaurant after too many drinks, he would betray himself to a woman happier or more independent than she had any right to be in Donlon's bachelor book; she would react, humiliating him in front of a few late customers, and that would be the end of the Ed Donlon he had known. He wondered who would be left to pick up the pieces.

They drove west for three miles and turned down a narrow lane sunk in a deep roadbed dug out by centuries of carriage and wagon travel. A few miles beyond, they turned into a narrower secondary road that gave way to gravel as it meandered along a wide creekbed. Stone fences lined the verges, grown over with Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and honeysuckle.

“He likes his privacy, doesn't he?” Wilson said.

“It's his freedom.”

They drove across a narrow stone bridge, past a gatehouse with a shake roof, where a wooden sign—
Boxhill Farm
—hung from the eaves. The gravel road climbed between two stone fences lined with shaggy cedar trees. Black Angus grazed along the flank of the hill. They passed a pond fringed with dry cattails, an old springhouse and a few weathered loafing sheds, and climbed the slope toward the distant hill where the tall stone manor house stood in a grove of oak, maple, and pine facing west toward the blue-gray haze of the Shenandoah. The road was paved within the second cattle guard and the hilltop partially enclosed by English boxwood that showed their age in the ragged yellow growth at the base of the trunks.

Donlon parked the BMW in an asphalted parking area in front of a three-car garage. A mud-splattered Dodge station wagon, a Jaguar sedan, and a farm truck loaded with cordwood were parked in the open area.

“This is hunt country, so don't ask about the horses or you'll get the tour,” Donlon warned as they climbed the stone steps toward the flagstone walk. Down the slope behind the rear terrace Wilson saw a stone guest cottage, a greenhouse, and a stable. A chestnut stallion was being unsaddled by a stablehand in the open door. The fields beyond were cross-fenced and held a dozen grazing thoroughbreds. “We'd be here all night.”

As they approached the stone house, Wilson could smell the faint acidity of the ancient boxwoods and the sharp tingle of wood smoke. Rhododendron, azalea, and holly trees concealed the front of the house. A girl in riding jodhpurs and hacking boots reached the flagstone courtyard as they did, climbing the walk from the other direction. Her cheeks were flushed and she carried a suede jacket over her shoulder. Despite the chill, her arms were bare. “Hi,” she called. “You just get here?”

“Just now,” Donlon said. “Jennifer, isn't it?”

“Sure, just like last time. He's been waiting for you.”

She opened the paneled white door under the fanlight and stood aside. “He's probably in the back study behind the library, where he usually is. Don't tell him you saw me; I'm not supposed to come in this way.”

Wilson followed Donlon into a warm, dim interior fragrant with wax and wood polish. A gray-coated houseman, as small as a groom or jockey, stood just inside the door. As they passed in, he moved the door closed behind them, pausing finally to peer out at Angus McVey's granddaughter, who was still outside, struggling with her boots. “Come on, Fletcher, give me a break,” she said. “I'm late.”

He didn't move, looking at her lugubriously. The thick gray hair was parted in the middle and dipped down over his forehead on each side, like gull wings. Beneath the alcohol-coarsened nose he wore a full handlebar mustache. Wilson had the impression he'd just stepped from behind the bar of an 1890 Bowery saloon or the daguerreotype of the original Abner Doubleday baseball team. Under the gray cotton jacket he wore a white shirt without a collar. He was small and gnarled, but the hand closing the door was larger than Haven Wilson's.

“Come on, Fletcher,” Jennifer called. “Be a pal. I've got my boots off now.”

He relented, opened the door a crack, and peered out. “Last time.”

“Last time,” she promised.

He swung the door open and she slipped in, ran lightly across the hall, carrying her boots, and up the staircase.

“This is Haven Wilson,” Donlon said.

Fletcher nodded mutely and led them back along the center hall below the staircase. “He's been waiting,” he said. The ancient pine floors were lustrous and unmarred. Wilson fell in behind Donlon, keeping to the beige runner. Above the chair rail, the white paneled wall held a half dozen brown ancestral portraits, one of whom, Wilson thought, bore a surprising resemblance to Edward VII. On a small cherry table at the rear of the hall was a mounted brass hunting horn under glass.

As they crossed through a rear sitting room with white sofas, white chairs, and a deep-pile carpet, Fletcher broke the silence. He was wearing old white tennis sneakers and moved like a cat, without a sound. “Haven't seen you since the Crofton Cup.” His head seemed to float through the dimness. “Had one at Charles Town the other night,” he continued, opening a heavy white door. “A sure thing.”

“What did it pay?” Donlon asked. They crossed through a formal library, softly lit and silent as a mortuary. A small, white-haired figure was bent over a writing desk. He didn't look up.

“Didn't. Threw a shoe and the jock pulled her up. Threw it clean over the grandstand. Jock's name was Joquita, Chicata, something like that. A real banana. He don't go to Pimlico anymore. I go up to Charles Town by myself, Jennifer and me sometimes. Those mountain Baptists bet the shit out of the short odds, hammer them right in the ground. You're better off playing bingo at a church supper. You a betting man, Mr. Wilson?”

He inspected Wilson with cool precision as they reached the door at the end of the library.

“Not much.”

“The quiet life,” he said, the blue eyes lingering on Wilson's gray suit, the soft white shirt with the button-down collar, and the solid woolen tie. “Keep it up,” he murmured with quiet approval. “He's in here, just up from the barn.”

He opened the door. Wilson followed Donlon into a large, disorderly study. Books and book cartons were strewn everywhere. Angus McVey was seated on a small leather sofa opposite the fireplace, where a low fire blazed beyond the brass fender. He arose to greet them, a tall, whitethatched man in his late seventies, slightly stooped. The blue eyes in the thin wintry face were, for a moment at least, as bright and curious as those of his granddaughter. But then, just as quickly, the curiosity dimmed, the head faltered, and he seemed overcome with confusion. He avoided Wilson's eyes as he shook his hand and Wilson recognized the symptoms Donlon had described to him.

He wore a ratty tweed jacket, a faded denim shirt, whipcord trousers whose twill was threadbare at the pockets and knees, and a muddy pair of gum boots whose leather uppers were cracked with age. He'd been removing the latter as they'd entered, his feet carefully positioned on a square of spread newspaper upon which he continued to stand. “Please,” he began in dismay, “sit down, both of you. Have you had lunch? What about a cocktail? Would you like a cocktail? Fletcher, what about a cocktail?” His hands seemed to be trembling, his eyes were flushed. He looked only at Fletcher, no one else.

“Yes, sir, whatever they'd like,” Fletcher replied calmly.

“Thanks,” Donlon said, “but we just finished a couple of martinis.”

McVey misunderstood. “Martinis, then. Two martinis, Fletcher. How do they prefer them, very dry?”

He stood in front of the leather couch on a piece of spread newspaper like a scolded schoolboy or a muddy spaniel, a millionaire flushed with an amateur bartender's anxieties as he tried to accommodate his two guests; and Wilson identified in the distraught recluse everything Donlon had warned him about—the morbid sensitivity, the horror of public appearances, and the initial excruciating discomfort among strangers, a man so pathetically isolated within himself that the act of performing some small inconsequential duty, even in the sanctuary of his own study, seemed to bring him agony. But it would pass, Donlon had said. Just be patient and blind.