Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
“I agree the hearings are turning
his
credibility into a shambles, and it’ll take him years to recover. But what’s the difference? We’ll still have Bechtel, Fluor, Foster-Wheeler—the rest of the competition in the world to contend with.”
“Who gives a shit about the others?”
“But how will this help
us?
”
“You’re forever trying to impose one form of logic on another. Mom, can’t you comprehend that psychological mathematics does not necessarily have to use a base of ten?
My
numbers sometimes have a base of two, or seven.”
“Alexander, you better get some sleep.”
“Sleep!”
“I understand, darling, I really do. I’m out to hurt him, too. But this hearing could so easily get out of hand.”
“I don’t want to hurt him. I want him stretched on the wheel until his bones crack, I want to see him groveling, blind, helpless.”
“Oh, Alexander . . . .”
He folded his dark glasses, slipping them in his pocket. His eyes were filled with tears. “He has no other son, no other begotten son, and he has never once tried to see me.”
She stroked back his hair. “Shhh, darling, he’s not worth it.”
“I realize this is rough on you, Mom, and I’m sorry. But other than that I have no regrets, not for what I’ve done or what I’m about to do.”
“There’s more?” she whispered.
“Yes, indeed. There’s more.”
She clutched at his arm. “For God’s sake, Alexander, tell me what you’re going to do!”
“There’s a document that connects him with his brother-in-law’s bribery operation. It looks exceedingly legit. Even his loving wife will think it’s genuine.”
“A forgery?”
“A fabulous forgery, by the Rembrandt of forgers.”
“Alexander,” she said firmly, “we are leaving tomorrow right after the Fords’ lunch.”
“No way.”
“This isn’t a game, it’s a Congressional hearing.”
“I’m aware it’s no game. I am hounding Curt
Ivory until one of us is in the bosom of eternity.”
She shivered. “That’s crazy talk.”
“Okay. I want him the fuck locked up in Leavenworth, I want his boats and his money and his business down the tubes, I want him destroyed and broken.”
She started to remonstrate, but the misery in his glistening eyes silenced her.
Gripping her shoulders, he pressed a long kiss on her mouth. A start of excitement, long missing and presumed dead, tingled through her. She abandoned herself to the reckless pleasure.
Abruptly he released her and sprang to his feet. “Sweet dreams,” he said.
As his door closed, she began to shiver so hard that she had to clench her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. She turned up her bedroom thermostat and left on her quilted robe as she crawled between icy Porthault sheets. She lay there chilled with anxieties about tomorrow’s hearing and more than a little frightened by the reverberations of her son’s kiss.
At this same hour, Joscelyn lay stretched on the unturned-down bed that Honora had occupied last week. She was fully dressed except for her shoes, which were already put away.
Her eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffed and the thin brows drawn together in a scowling expression as she attempted to halt the flow of tears. Even during those years of marriage when Malcolm had taken out his unhappy insecurities on her—even in the awful months surrounding his death—she had not been a weeper. Tonight her sobs were uncontrollable.
The kiss of death
, she thought,
that’s me.
She knew the structure below Fish’s testimony; she knew the role she had played engineering that structure. It was she who had insisted Honora use influence to obtain a managerial position on the pipeline for Malcolm—young and inexperienced but Curt’s brother-in-law—and it was through her friendship with Fuad that Malcolm and Khalid had come together. She was responsible for setting in motion the concatenation of forces intent on destroying Curt Ivory. An impossible burden to live with.
She wiped the moisture under her eyes, blew her nose and went to the window, aware of the faint padding sound her stockinged feet made on the thick carpet. Drawing the drapes, pulling aside the white synthetic curtain, she rested her forehead on the cold window glass.
Eight stories below her was the emptiness of M Street.
A peculiar sense of being outside herself came over her. Her breath slowed, filming the glass, her bitter self-recriminations faded and there was only the distant pavement glinting seductively.
Until tonight her infrequent considerations
of suicide had always been along succinct, logistical lines. She had seen death by one’s own hand as the Big Escape Hatch when faced with painful cancer or inutile old age. But now, gazing down at the shimmery squares of pavement, her normally acute mental processes were distorted and thoughts floated like insubstantial wisps of clouds that could not be grasped.
These are sash windows
, she thought with sudden clarity.
It’d be easy to open one.
She jerked back from the window and stood breathing heavily with her arms crossed over her chest. Her head bent forward. She was crying again.
* * *
Joscelyn could not shake the episode of morbid guilt. On the following day when the subcommittee broke for its long midday recess, she insisted Honora and Curt take a stroll on Capitol Hill. She stayed in the anteroom alone. Except for those brief years of marriage, her life had been spent alone. And alone she should be. She was a leper, a plague carrier, she brought death and destruction on those she loved.
At around two, before the subcommittee reconvened, she went into the anteroom’s lavatory. A mop and bucket stood in the corner; on the dark wood of one of the two stall doors was taped a penciled note,
Out of order.
Taking off her jacket, she unbuttoned her blouse cuffs, rolling the sleeves above her elbows. For several long minutes she stood at the sink letting cool water flow over her wrists to calm herself.
* * *
When the four Talbotts emerged from the elevator on the third floor of the Rayburn House Office Building, Anne gamely attempted to keep up the pace Alexander was setting in order to avoid the small crowd of media folk hustling in their wake. Before they had traversed the length of the hallway, Anne lifted her hand to the great bulge of her stomach, halting. “Hold up there, Gid,” she said.
The other three slowed, as did the press entourage.
“Everything okay?” Gid asked in a low, concerned rumble.
Smiling and wincing, she said, “Our offspring’s playing soccer in there. Must be trying to work off the heady gourmet delights of White House cookery.”
They had eaten plain broiled chicken—ketchup was available on the side—with unsauced asparagus in the private upstairs dining room with a noted Alabama heart surgeon, a wizened and legendary producer from Hollywood’s Golden Age, the cheery, overjeweled wife of a Mexican billionaire and the Presidential couple. A lofty
mise en scène
that should by rights have intimidated Anne into muteness. Instead, she had entertained the long table with her affectionately told tales of the New Guinea ancients whose oral histories she was taping.
Crystal, woozy with lack of sleep and on edge with misgivings about the upcoming afternoon session of the hearings, had nevertheless been
pleasantly surprised by her daughter-in-law’s success, and now she felt a tug of affectionate concern. “Anne, dear, you and Gid better go on back to the house and rest. We can manage.”
“Everything’s cool,” Anne said. “The thing is, this particular May I’m not in shape for the thousand-meter race.”
The cameras were whirring, and Crystal turned her head away. She glimpsed a swarthy, dark-haired man emerge from one of the pedimented doorways, easing along the corridor to slip in and become one of the dozen or so in their retinue.
He doesn’t have a press card dangling from his neck
, she thought fleetingly.
“See you in a couple of minutes, then,” Alexander said. “Gid, this time you sit between our ladies.”
Alexander took Crystal’s arm. Trotting at her tall son’s side, she fought her irritation with him.
Will he produce that fake document himself? It’s not Alexander’s style, but then again he’s not himself about this whole deal. I hope to God he won’t hit out at Curt so that it’s obvious what he’s doing. I can’t bear Honora’s huge reproachful eyes again. What does she care anyway? She left Curt ages ago. Why can’t it be golden and sweet like it was when we were children, like it was yesterday on the Capitol steps?
Her ankle bent inward. Gripping Alexander’s sleeve, she groaned with exaggerated loudness.
“Sorry, Mom,” he said
sotto voce.
“But I figured you’d prefer to stay ahead of the vultures.” He gripped her elbow, whispering,
“Courage, ma mère, courage.”
“I’ll survive,” she said with a note of maternal asperity.
“Good. Because we’re about to face the foe.”
On the far side of the knotted group waiting to be vetted outside the hearing chamber, Curt and Honora were striding along, their long steps synchronized, his arm protectively clasping her shoulders, she bent pliantly toward him. Whatever their marital arguments might have been in the past, it was obvious to Crystal that their reconciliation was not only public but private.
Irrationally Crystal found herself blaming her sister as well as Curt for the mysterious harpies who fed on her son’s living flesh. As she moved toward her enemies, she again glimpsed the dark, greasy-looking man. Why was he so intent on Alexander?
Why not?
she asked herself. Everyone else was staring as the paired Ivorys and Talbotts confronted one another at the crush by the committee chamber.
Honora murmured a greeting that was swallowed by the surrounding racket.
“Good afternoon, Aunt Honora,” Alexander said. “Mr. Ivory—or should I call you Uncle Curt?”
Father
, Crystal thought, and from the pause knew that the four of them were joined in the correction.
More flashes, and pressing forward of snouted motion picture lenses.
The swarthy man had positioned himself three feet or so to their left. He wore a cheap,
nondescript brown Dacron suit, white shirt and black knitted tie too narrow for style. Nothing about his clothing or his haircut was unusual. He looked utterly commonplace. So why should her attention be drawn to him? Because, she realized, his was a parody of normalcy. Surrounding him was an aura of wildness that set him apart from the rest of the journalists. His muscles were flexed tauter, heavier moisture gleamed on his Levantine flesh. His eyes protruded a bit, as if being crowded from his head. The pupils, contracted to wary pinpoints, stayed fixed on Alexander.
She gripped her son’s arm, feeling the lean muscles, wanting to draw him away from the feral gaze, yet unable to speak.
Did I have time to warn him?
This fine point would haunt her the rest of her life.
She saw the hand reach under the Dacron jacket. A movement swift, yet also incredibly predictable. And she was not surprised when the hand withdrew holding a gun, a smallish pistol, the familiar accoutrement of countless movies and television shows.
So much for all the metal detectors and security
, she thought.
He’s aiming at Alexander.
He wants to kill Alexander.
Later, later she would wonder why, if her thoughts drifted so leisurely, she didn’t have time to scream a warning.
A body hurled between the gun and Alexander, moving so swiftly that in the blur she didn’t realize immediately that it was Curt.
Simultaneously, a sound like a twig cracking. Acrid smoke. Curt’s mouth opened, he swayed from side to side and back and forth, like one of those inflatable plastic punching toys that never topple. But he was toppling. Hands reached out to break his fall.
The crowd had the Capitol police pinned near the doorway, and if the dark-skinned assailant had intended to escape he would have had a good chance in the confusion that was eddying outward. Instead, he planted his feet apart, raising his left hand to steady his right wrist as he aimed again at Alexander.
The second shot cracked just before the screaming filled the universe.
“A-a-l-e-e-x-a-a-a-n-d-e-e-e-r . . . .”
Honora never saw the gun.
Curt’s fingers on her shoulder dug through her clothes and into the flesh for the briefest fraction of time. After that he moved instantaneously. She had no time to register bewilderment or astonishment. Like a defensive fullback, he hurled himself at Alexander. The tackle never made contact. At a sharp, cracking sound Curt halted. He swayed an uneven circle, his face bewildered, his feet not moving. Then his torso sagged.
Adrenaline blazed through Honora, filling her muscles with strength. She grasped his
waist, not realizing she was sobbing with the effort of lowering his limp heaviness gently to the marble. She knelt over him.
Still uncertain what had happened, she saw the neatly indented hole just to the left of his top jacket button.
As bright redness oozed onto the dark Italian silk-serge, she pressed the base of her thumb against the slippery fabric, a primitive, instinctive attempt to stay the blood. During the war the upper forms at Edinthorpe had taken Red Cross: now her mind refused to conjure up more of those classes than a vision of the coarse cotton triangles they’d used to tie tourniquets, and the unsubduable, girlish giggles that had accompanied the bluff, gray-haired gym mistress’s demonstration of the groin pressure point.
There is a Reaper, whose name is Death, and with his sickle keen he reaps the bearded grain at a breath, and the flowers that grow between.
Why remember poetry and not how to stay the flow of her husband’s heart blood?
“Honora . . . .” The struggle of Curt’s whisper heaved, slippery, below her hand.
She looked at his face and shivered. How could his ruddy, vigorous color have drained so quickly? The boat tan overlaid his sudden pallor with the yellowish hue of beef suet bought at a cheap butcher’s.
“Honora?” He was staring up at her.