Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  When Browning ran for the Senate, many of the places he visited he must have seen for the first time. You would not have known it, though, from the eager willingness with which he listened to every small-town complaint. He was the heir of great wealth, but he had been born to something else besides. He had that instinct, that touch, that sparkle of human kindness that can never really be taught. He made people feel that whatever they said he knew just what they meant, and that once they said it he would never forget. He made them think that whatever problems they faced, he was there to help. In his Washington offices all the pictures were of Michigan, and the Christmas cards he sent out each year were always of some snowbound Great Lakes scene. But the senator preferred New York.

  The elevator doors opened onto a marble crescent shaped entryway. On each side of two paneled double doors, a Secret Service agent stood with his hands folded in front of him, legs spread shoulder distance apart. Behind each of them was a sculpted dark gold chair with the look of furniture that is never used. The agent on the right, his grim eyes fixed on a point straight in front of him, stretched out his arm and opened our way through the massive glass and bronze-stamped door. We were inside a long, rectangular hallway with muted, recessed lighting from fixtures set at regular intervals just below the high curved ceiling on the rosewood walls. Another series of lights, each of them shielded inside a lime green shell-shaped case, had been built into the wall a foot above the floor, bathing in a soft, golden light a hardwood floor laid in a zigzag pattern in which there was no beginning and, so far as the eye could see, no end.

  There were two doors on each side of the hallway, each flanked by white column pedestals with lush green plants on top. The doors were shut tight and we walked on ahead, all the way to the end where a set of doors swung open in front of us like the stone in front of Ali Baba’s cave. We were in a room of colossal proportions, filled with furniture scattered in groupings, like the library in one of those old and exclusive downtown clubs where in the days before equality the men who were members might retire for a quiet hour of brandy and newspapers and an occasional cigar. On the far side of the room, a wall of continuous glass rose two stories tall, and each story at least twelve feet high. Across the treetops the skyline of Central Park West shimmered ghostlike in the darkness. I was in the middle of millions of people jammed into broad crowded streets that never stopped moving and tiny congested apartments that vibrated all night with noise; yet standing here, looking out over the best of it, I was overwhelmed with the immense solitude of the place.

  I turned and started to say something, but the agent had vanished without a sound. I was on a landing, two steps above the floor. A few lamps had been left on, but all the chairs were empty and all the sofas bare. I had been left to wait and no one had told me how long. It was like being locked in a museum after hours. I went out on the terrace and found a stone bench. Rocking slowly back and forth, my hands wrapped around my knee, I filled my lungs with the rich scent of money and New York, smiling at the memory of what I thought I had discovered when I first came here, when I was still young, when there was still a romance about everything, and I had not yet learned that for everything we get there is always something we lose: that the only way to live in New York was to live here rich, because with money you could live how you wanted, here, on the park, above, and no longer part of, the crowd.

  “Does it remind you very much of our room at school?”

  Thomas Browning’s hand pressed against my shoulder. I kept staring out across the park, out over Manhattan.

  “But we had something to look forward to then,” I remarked as I took his offered hand. “What do you have to look forward to from this?”

  His small eyes danced circles in the night. The warmth of his hand engulfed my own and then let go. With both hands he grabbed my shoulders. Beaming, he looked me up and down. “You haven’t put on a pound. You look just the same.” He laughed, and quietly the laughter died away. “I meant what I said tonight: You’re what every lawyer should be.” He peered into my eyes, while he held me between his two outstretched hands, nodding his head to tell me that he was telling me the truth and that he had not done it simply for effect. I believed him, or thought I did; but then, before it would have been too late, I remembered, and, remembering, drew back.

  “I never met your grandfather; I never had a conversation—I certainly never had the one you said I had—with the great Zachary Stern.”

  I waited for an answer, a denial of any illicit intent, an apology for being carried away into what he was afraid must have been a mistake, or at least an honest attempt at evasion. He put his arm around my shoulders and led me inside.

  “I remember it all quite distinctly,” he began to explain. “It was at Thanksgiving, the year before the old man died. He liked you enormously. That was very unusual for him. He hardly liked anyone at all. He certainly never liked me. But he liked you and never stopped talking about it: what you had said to him, and how much he admired the courage—the sheer guts of it, is how he put it—of standing up to him, of speaking your own mind.”

  Browning stopped halfway across the enormous room. He looked at me with a kind of worried regret, an acknowledgment of the way the longer you live time can play tricks with your mind.

  “And you really don’t remember that?” he said as he turned and with his right hand draped over my near shoulder began to guide me forward again. “How strange; how sad—when it made such an impression on old Stern—that you should have forgotten that.”

  In his calm, artful presence, I began to think that perhaps he was right after all, and that it had happened just the way he said it had.

  He took me into his study, a more modest, book-lined room with windows that also faced onto the park, but set farther back from the street, like an alcove built into the side of the building. There was a small awning-covered private terrace with a chair and table and a single chaise lounge, a place where he could relax and be alone. The study itself was like that, a place private and reserved, suitable for a single person at work. There was a partner’s desk; one, I learned later, that had belonged to his grandfather when Stern Motors had its first permanent headquarters out on the southwestern edge of Detroit. Stern had never had a partner and perhaps the desk, which never had a chair on the other side of it, had been to remind him that he never would. A brown upholstered chair, comfortable and obviously well used, sat behind it. The only other chair in the room sat with its round wicker back and brown leather cushion, stiff and unwelcoming, off to the side. The shelves were filled with books, many of them clean, burnished leather, books that though hundreds of years old looked new, books of the sort that belong to serious collectors who do not have to bother about the expense. On the shelves closest to the desk, where he could reach something without rising from his chair, were books newer and more used. It was my impression that they were mainly about American history and politics with a heavy emphasis on biographies. There was a fair number of British titles as well.

  The few photographs intensified the sense that this was a private room, seldom seen by an outsider, or even a very close friend. However different he might be from the common run, Browning was after all a politician, one of the most successful of his time. If his picture had been taken once, it had been taken thousands of times, not just with candidates for every imaginable office, but with most of the important public figures here and abroad. It seemed strange that there was not a single photograph in which he didn’t stand next to someone also well known. There was a photograph of his grandfather, the gaunt cruelty of his mouth barely hidden behind a cadaverous grin, and there was one of his parents. There was a picture of his wedding, he and his bride dashing out the front of a stone church, laughing as they tried to shield themselves from a shower of rice. There were pictures of their children taken in the pleated skirts and buttoned blazers worn at exclusive private schools. The rest of the photographs, which I now realized followed a logical line of progression, traced h
is life and career. It stopped at what seemed a curious point: a photograph in which, angry and bitterly disappointed, Browning is caught turning away from a microphone, clutching in his hand a crumpled piece of paper.

  “The day I withdrew,” said Browning, stretched back in his chair. He was still dressed in his tuxedo, but he had taken off the jacket and put on a silk dressing gown. It was something a British politician before the war, a member of the governing class, would have done; men who did not give a thought to what they wore because their clothes were always laid out for them by servants who knew how they were supposed to dress. I wondered if somewhere, back in this maze of well-appointed rooms, someone had done the same for him.

  “That’s why it’s there: to remind me that I lost, so that I won’t yield to the easy vanity of thinking that there isn’t any serious difference between second place and…”

  Browning shoved his hands down between his thighs and drew his head back just a little, an inch or so, to the side.

  “How are you, Joseph? I mean, really? It’s been such a long time. I’m glad you came.

  “Did you think of Annie tonight, when we were there at the hotel? I did. Talking about you brought it all back. I’ve been at the Plaza of course many times since, but you haven’t, have you? I wondered what you were thinking. Whatever it was, I was sure it had to be about her.” he bent his head back a little farther, inviting a response. But I was older now and had lost the desire to make him think I was someone he might want to know. I sat as straight as I could at the front edge of the chair, reminding myself that whatever we had once been, we were now more strangers than friends.

  “You did not ask me to come all the way to New York to talk about that.” I tried to sound assertive, but it rang a little hollow and a little forced. Browning looked down at his hands, a bleak expression on his mouth.

  “I was in love with her, you know.” he said this as if it were a confession, something he had never admitted before. He stared at me with the puzzled suspicion of someone suddenly afraid he may have gone too far.

  “I was in love with Annie; I never loved anyone else in my life.”

  Is that why he had me fly all the way across the country, sit three days in a hotel, go back to where it happened, bring me here to Xanadu?—Because he wanted to hear himself say it—say it out loud—to the only person who would remember her the way he did and not think him a fool? I slipped back in the chair, smiled sympathetically and waited to hear what he would say next.

  “I wanted to marry her,” he insisted as if there was something inherently incredible about it. “Everyone thought—she thought—that because of who I was—the name, the money, the business, all of that—that nothing could ever happen, that it could never be serious.”

  Browning stood up and walked over to the glass door that led out to the small terrace. He slid it open, took a half step out and breathed in the cool night air. He bent his head and with a glum expression scraped his shoe against some loose gravel that had fallen from a planter onto the terrace stone floor. In the muted yellow light cast by the lamp inside, Browning’s hair, graying at the temples, still had the thatched unruly look that it had when it was all a golden reddish brown.

  “If you wanted to marry her, why didn’t you?” I asked. “What stopped you?”

  With a helpless shrug, Browning laughed softly into the night. There seemed to echo back the faint, youthful laughter of a young girl’s voice.

  “Everyone was a little in love with Annie,” I heard myself saying. Browning did not hear me.

  “God, I was mad about her,” he whispered quietly, his gaze had become moody and intense. He looked down, twisting his head to the side as he brushed a pebble with the side of his shoe, caught by the carelessness of things. “I wonder sometimes what would have happened if things had been different: if it had just been the two of us, without any of the rest of it… if she’d lived.” he moved back to his desk and sank into the chair. Reaching his left hand across his chest, he gripped his right shoulder and for a long while sat thinking.

  “I wanted to tell you that,” he said finally. “That I was in love with her, that I wanted to marry her—that I would have married her.” His eyes drifted away from me, out through the open door, back somewhere into the past. “And I wanted to tell you that you were right, what you said back then—that it’s my fault she’s dead.”

  “I never said I thought it was your fault.” he dismissed my objection with a wave of his hand. “She was supposed to meet someone. That’s what she said. She was supposed to meet someone and she was late. I kept insisting she stay. I kept telling her to stay just a while longer, have one more drink… We’d all had too much by then as it was. You remember that, don’t you?” he asked suddenly.

  It was as if he had been transported back in time, watching it all unfold before his shiny, eager eyes. He moved forward, placing his elbows on the desk, resting his chin on his two folded hands.

  “The Christmas party at the Plaza that had gone on all week. I don’t remember if we had one suite or two or if in a moment of reckless abandon—trying in my arrogant stupidity to impress her with the very thing that never would—I had taken the whole damn floor. There were people there I didn’t know, people I’d never seen, milling around, coming in and out. We must have been drinking for days. You were there; you remember. You remember how it was: the way we studied all the time, went to class, and whenever we got the chance to get away, came down to the city, found a few girls, or took a few with us, and went off on a binge.”

  I tried to remind him that he was not talking about me. “I worked here one summer, and then that Christmas…” But he blinked his eyes without comprehension and continued calling what he remembered back into being as if he were simply reporting what he could actually see.

  “There were people everywhere, coming and going. It was like one of those kaleidoscopes I had when I was a boy, all those shifting, changing, wonderful colors forming one shape and then another. God, I was mad about her, about Annie, about the way she looked, the way—that lithe, long-legged, slim-waisted way—she moved. I was in love with her. I would have done whatever she wanted—anything, if only she had said yes. That’s why it happened: because I was that much in love with her and I could not let her go. I just wanted five minutes alone, five minutes to tell her I’d do anything she wanted if she would just give us a chance. But she kept saying she had to go, that she had stayed too long already, that…”

  “And then Jimmy Haviland walked in and suddenly he was telling Annie that you didn’t love her and that he did,” I interjected. “Then Haviland left and Annie went after him to make sure he was all right. What happened—when Annie came back?”

  Browning looked at me with puzzled eyes. “Who told you that?—Haviland?”

  “Yes, of course. He was there tonight.”

  “I see. What else did he say?” asked Browning with a look that suggested he knew it had to have been something bitter and cruel.

  “That Annie told him they could talk later, that everything would be all right.”

  I was not sure I should tell him everything Haviland had said, but Browning kept looking at me, certain there was more.

  “He said that Annie went back to see you, that there was something else she wanted to tell him, and that she leaned out the window, hoping to see which way he had gone, and that’s how it happened, how she fell to her death. He said you told him that, and that you said it was his fault Annie died.”

  I bent forward, peering intently into his eyes. “Is that what you told him, that it was his fault Annie died?”

  Browning stared down at his hands, folded in his lap. “I probably said a lot of things I should not have said. But what Haviland told you isn’t quite the truth. Annie did not go after him. Haviland didn’t leave.

  I did.”

  “You?”

  “Haviland was out of his mind. Everyone had had too much to drink, and so had he. Annie was trying to calm him down, but h
e wouldn’t stop screaming at me. I left them alone so Annie could talk some sense to him.”

  “But you went back?”

  Browning raised his head and nodded. “Haviland had left. Whatever he had said, Annie was very upset. That’s why I said what I did to him, that it was his fault. She wanted to go after him, to tell him he was wrong— the things he had said. That’s why she was looking out the window when she fell.”

  There must have been something in my eyes, a look of skepticism, a moment’s doubt. Browning saw it and knew immediately what it meant.

  “He doesn’t believe that, does he? That she fell. He thinks… ?”

  “That you were angry because of what he had done; that you were angry because of what she had said to him; angry because she wanted to come after him. He thinks you must have pushed her. He doesn’t think it was an accident; he thinks you killed her.”

  I had thought Browning would be outraged, or at least upset, that at a bare minimum he would begin to protest; instead, he treated what I had just said like the answer, or the beginning of an answer, to something he had been struggling to understand. His pensive gaze moved around the private, book-lined room, as if he sought in some unopened volume the rest of what he needed before he could finally solve whatever riddle had been posed.

  “It’s late,” he announced presently. He straightened up from the hunched-over position into which he had gradually sunk. “You’re staying here tonight. All the arrangements have been made,” he said before I could object. “In the morning we’re flying back to Washington and you’re coming along.” he started to rise from his chair, but saw that I had not moved. He seemed to recognize that I would not be put off, that I was not going anywhere until he explained.