by D. W. Buffa
“How long have you worked for Browning?” I asked. With the back of my hand I wiped the mustard that had dripped onto my chin.
“A long time,” she replied, frowning into the sun. “More than two years. I started in New Hampshire, in the campaign.”
“Why Browning?” she finished her hot dog; crumpled up the napkin she had not used and tossed it into a wire trash can. “Do you always call him that?” she asked, as I took the last bite and wiped my mouth clean. I did not understand the question. “You always use his last name.”
I was not sure I wanted to tell her. “What do you call him?”
“The vice president.”
“What did you call him before that—in New Hampshire, before the first primary was held, at the beginning of the campaign?”
“The senator.” She was completely serious.
“What did you call him behind his back? When you were making fun of him, mocking something he had done?”
She studied me with what I can only describe as professional curiosity. I felt like a member of some lost tribe under the slightly astonished gaze of an anthropologist, a Trobriand Islander encountering the patronizing neutrality of Margaret Mead.
“You never made fun of something he had done? Never laughed a little at the way he sometimes gets out in the middle of a very long sentence, so caught up in his own enthusiasm that he suddenly doesn’t quite remember where it was he wanted to go?” I cocked an eyebrow and tried to find even a hint of comprehension in her impenetrable eyes. “You’re going to tell me that Browning never did that—never got tangled up in what he was saying—never started laughing because he thought the way he had botched things up was just about the funniest damn thing he had ever heard?”
There was a faint glimmer of recognition, a first hairline fissure in the ice. “Self-deprecation. Yes, that was one of his greatest strengths. We worked on that a lot.”
“Browning,” I said, shaking my head as I began to climb the steps.
“Yes?”
“You asked me why I always called him that.”
“Yes,” she said, still interested.
“Because that’s how we talked then.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
A puzzled expression entered her disciplined eyes. She did not understand. That was not what she was worried about. She did not understand why she did not understand.
“We wanted to talk the way people who knew things worth knowing talked, and that meant with a certain formality; so we made, I suppose, a kind of game of it. Instead of using first names, we used last names, because it reminded us that we wanted to be serious and do serious things. I called him Browning; he called me Antonelli.”
We reached the top. The statue of Lincoln, his knees bent close together and his huge hands draped over the arms of the chair, towered above us. The words inscribed on the white marble wall reminded me of something I had not thought of in years.
“In the fourth grade I had to memorize that. If I had to, I could recite it, or most of it, even now. In those days, everyone had to do that, memorize the Gettysburg Address. But when we were in law school, Browning memorized Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. He had this fascination with American history, with the way the country had changed. He had, I think, a greater sense of connection with it because of what his grandfather had done, with the kind of changes that had taken place after Lincoln and after the war. I’m only guessing, but I think he thought those changes had come with a certain cost, and that the only way to know what that cost had been was to go back, see what things had been like before, try to understand what the people who brought those changes about thought they were doing. So while the rest of us were plodding through Contracts and Property and Conflict of Laws, Browning was reading things all of us should have read, but never quite found the time to. But then, Browning could always do things other people could not.”
She nodded that she understood, and I knew that she did not understand at all.
“No, I don’t mean what I was saying before: that Browning had come to Harvard to learn some law, but not to become a lawyer. His mind never stopped working; his curiosity was insatiable. He took things in at a glance I never got at all. He memorized Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. He recited it verbatim late one night. When I asked him why he had done it, he said that he loved it so much he wanted to make it his own. And then he told me something that I’ve often thought about because what he said keeps getting more and more true. He said that that speech, the last major speech Lincoln gave, was the high point; that there would never be another American speech like it, and that each succeeding generation would fall farther and farther behind.”
I had been carried away by the memory of things from a past only dimly remembered; by Lincoln’s brooding presence and the reminder of what we had once been and might become again; by the innocent and perhaps misguided desire to impart something of value to someone young and intelligent. I felt a little like a fool, and did not mind so very much that I did. If she did not understand what I was telling her, or thought it a boring irrelevancy in her busy and ambitious life—I had at least the satisfaction of having told the truth. Or as much of it as I knew, because of course the truth, the whole truth, about anything involving Thomas Browning was far beyond any capacity of mine.
“I have Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” she said with a kind of eager certainty. “I have all of Lincoln’s speeches—in my computer. I can call up any one of them I want. I can even type in a key word—say, freedom—and pull up every place Lincoln used it. Not just Lincoln, of course, but Roosevelt, Kennedy—pretty much every speech, every presidential speech, ever given.” With what seemed genuine sympathy, a physician’s lament for the miracle drug that, had it only been discovered earlier, might have saved a favorite patient’s life, she added: “He wouldn’t have had to spend all that time memorizing the Second Inaugural. He could have just typed in a word.”
It brought me back to my senses. I glanced at my watch; Elizabeth Hartley glanced at hers. We moved down the steps, jostling our way through sweaty, wide-eyed tourists getting out of a bus as we headed toward her car.
“Tell me something, Elizabeth,” I said as she turned on the ignition and checked the side-view mirror. “I was with the vice president this morning at the White House. Why do those people seem to hate him so much?” she darted a glance in my direction, then looked back at the road. This was a question lodged squarely in the present. She gave me a second glance, reminding herself that it was safe, that I was the vice president’s old and trusted friend. Still, she wanted to feel sure.
“I read the vice president’s speech, the one he gave last night in New York. Did you know he was going to say what he said about you?” She asked this with a smile that suggested she had known about it for weeks.
“No. All I knew was that he wanted me there. That’s the only reason I went,” I admitted. “Because he asked.”
“The office called?”
“No, Browning—I mean, the vice president—called. Why does Arthur Connally in particular dislike him so much?”
“You remember how Kennedy picked Johnson, and how all the people around Kennedy, the ones closest to him, were against it?”
She knew something after all.
“Bobby especially,” I said, shaking my head as I pondered how easily enemies could become friends when it was the only way to win. It was not the principals, but the people who worked for them, the people who believed in them, who were usually the most difficult to convince that former enemies would not become enemies again.
“This is like that, only worse. Nobody really thought Johnson was smarter than Kennedy, or that he would be a better president; everybody knew Thomas Browning was enormously intelligent and that almost anyone would be a better president than the boy idiot from North Carolina.”
“The ‘boy idiot’?” I asked, laughing.
“Well, we had to mock someone, didn’t we?”
Turning a co
rner, she parked on a long, narrow, tree lined street below the Capitol. “I thought you might like to see a little of the Capitol. Or we can just walk around—or find a place to sit and talk.”
We walked up the road, circling around the Capitol until we were across the street from the white marble front of the Supreme Court.
“Have you argued a case in front of the Court?”
“No, I never have.”
“Do you wish you had?”
A little uncertain, I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’m a trial lawyer. I’ve never done much appellate work. I wouldn’t know what I was doing.”
“Did you know Reynolds? You were in the same class at Harvard.”
I had told her perhaps more than I should have about Browning; I was not going to breathe a word about Reynolds and what I knew about him. Reynolds had been a liar and a cheat, a nervous wreck who studied with maniacal devotion and then, afraid of forgetting something under pressure, took crib sheets into final exams. He was never caught, but everyone knew what he had done. And now it was Justice Reynolds and, so far at least, none of us who had known him had told anyone what we knew.
“No, not really. I think we were in a class or two together. That was about all,” I said with a shrug.
We walked across to Union Station, restored from its shabby decay to the look it had when the only way to get to Washington, D.C., was by rail. At a café inside the high vaulted dome, we got a cup of coffee.
I wanted to know more about what was going on; about why, if Browning was right, someone was willing to go to the extraordinary length of inventing a case of murder out of an accident, an accident that had happened so long ago that there were probably not more than half a dozen people left who still remembered Annie Malreaux. Browning seemed certain that it was a conspiracy to force him out of office, but why would anyone care that much about whether he was vice president? Elizabeth Hartley did not know anything about what had happened in a New York hotel room a few years before her birth, but she knew a great deal more than I did about the present circumstances of Thomas Browning’s life. I thought she could tell me things that Browning seemed unwilling to tell me himself.
“What happened? Why did Browning lose? And why did he take the vice presidency? Thomas Browning is the last person I ever thought would settle for second place.” she had invested so much of herself, so much of her own shining ambition, in Browning’s quest for the presidency that though age might bring a certain distance, and even a kind of ironic detachment, she would never be able to think of it without a sense of something lost, a once-in-a-lifetime chance that she had missed.
“We didn’t want him to take it.” She nodded thoughtfully. “We knew going into the convention that Walker had the nomination. That wasn’t the point,” she continued, living it over again in her mind. “The point was that we’d come closer than anyone thought we could. We wanted to do what Reagan did, back in… seventy-two or seventy-six—when Reagan lost to Ford: give a speech at the convention that no one can forget.”
“So that four years later—after Ford, in this case Walker, lost—you start out running for the nomination as the odds-on favorite to win.”
She was surprised, and even a little impressed. “Yes, exactly; except, of course,” she went on rapidly, getting back to the central thread of her thought, “we did not have Reagan’s appeal to hard-core conservatives. Walker had that. But we didn’t want to show we had more support from conservatives; we wanted to show we had more support in the country. Walker had the nomination, but he did not have any realistic chance of winning the election. There wasn’t any way he could get back to the middle after going so far to the right. He killed us in South Carolina on abortion, on prayer in schools. He practically insisted that everyone had not just a right, but a duty, to own a gun.”
She threw me a sudden, anguished glance, like someone hurt trying hard not to cry. “We still might have won, if it had not been for that whispering campaign those liars claimed they didn’t know anything about. Awful things, unbelievable things,” she murmured. She shook her head at the unfairness of it all. They had done something despicable, and people who did things like that were supposed to lose.
“Walker was going to lose, and it was not going to be close. Everyone would finally understand that Browning was the Republicans’ only chance. And then they came to him with that offer—if you want to call it that. More like a threat, if you ask me.”
“A threat?” I asked, growing more intrigued.
“Connally did a poll. Different combinations: Walker paired with each of a dozen possible running mates. No matter whom he was paired with, Walker would lose by ten or fifteen points. Except when he was running with Thomas Browning. Then the race was dead even. They did another poll, measuring it state by state, to see if the same thing held in terms of the electoral vote.”
I remembered the comment Browning had made. “And it came down to Michigan. With Browning they split the rest of the country and Michigan put them over the top.”
She wondered if it was a shrewd guess or if I had heard it from another, better, source. The café was filling up. A young man in his thirties, dressed in a suit and tie, had taken the table next to us. Elizabeth gave him a quick, hostile glance, then turned her chair toward me and lowered her voice.
“They needed him to win, and they hated him for that.” Her eyebrows danced as her face came alive. “They hated him anyway,” she explained. “This just made it worse. Connally told the senator that if he didn’t agree to run as vice president, Walker’s defeat would be his fault and that the conservative wing of the party would never forget it.” She paused, pressing her lips together as she appeared to consider what she was going to say next. “I heard—I wasn’t there, but I heard—that Connally said something about how the senator certainly couldn’t be under any illusions about how far conservatives were willing to go for what they believed.”
She looked at me to make sure I understood. “They were talking about what happened in South Carolina. They were telling him that if Walker didn’t become president, Browning never would.”
Elizabeth picked up the cup of coffee, brought it to her lips, hesitated for a moment, and then set it down.
“Of course, that wasn’t the only thing that was said. They talked about the kind of close cooperation there would be: how as vice president he would be consulted on everything the president did. They promised that after the convention the two campaign staffs would be merged into one. They promised that he would have a substantial say in the appointments made to the Executive Branch, including especially—they were quite explicit about this—the key appointments in the White House itself.”
She picked up the cup, raised it halfway to her chin, and then put it down. There was a question in her eyes.
“He had to have known they were lying, saying whatever they had to so he would agree. He knew they would lie about anything. If he didn’t know it before, he certainly knew it after the kind of things they said about him after he won in New Hampshire.”
The puzzled expression in her eyes seemed to shift from an immediate object to something more remote. “I still don’t understand why he did it. Without him, they would have lost. What was the point in settling for second when, if you just waited… ?”
“The threat?” I reminded her again. I wondered how she could have forgotten what just a few moments before had formed the core of her argument about why he had had to do what he did.
“I know,” she replied. “I know what I said. I know what I’ve been told. It’s just that it’s never quite made sense to me. If he hadn’t done it, if Walker had lost—what difference would it make if those right-wing fanatics didn’t all come flocking to Browning? All the better! Browning is a conservative, a real one, not one of those Bible-quoting morons that pray to Jesus while they stab you in the back.” Her blue eyes were hard, shrewd, unforgiving. “They would rather elect a liberal than a conservative who doesn’t think that politics is
just another path to Armageddon. The whole point was to let Walker lose, to show that the right wing would always lose, to show that only Browning could win when it came time for the whole country to vote. I don’t understand why he did it—I just don’t, and I guess I never will. And now those cutthroats want to get rid of him for good.”
Two other young men joined the one at the table next to us. By now there was not a vacant table left. Swirling crowds came and went under the spacious dome.
“Let’s walk,” suggested Elizabeth. She pushed back from the table and got up. Straightening the light-colored trench coat that hung easily from her shoulders, she cast a cautious glance at the three faces at the table just behind her.
“I must be getting paranoid. I could almost swear one of those guys—the one who got there first—was sitting just a couple of tables away from me at the restaurant where I had dinner last night.”
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” I suggested. She pretended to agree, but not before she threw another quick glance over her shoulder to see if he was still there.
When we were outside the station and clear of the throngs of people moving toward it, she again began to talk about the White House and Thomas Browning.
“It’s an embarrassment to them to have him around,” she remarked with a vindictive grin. “Every time he gives a speech, you can almost hear the gnashing of teeth. It makes them just crazy,” she added as the grin gave way to a laugh. “Being shown up like that; knowing they can’t do anything about it; knowing that Browning is brilliant and could give a better speech in his sleep than Walker could if he trained ten years. Browning speaks in whole paragraphs, sometimes from memory, and sometimes just off the cuff—and they sweat themselves into a coma worrying whether with all their polling and focus groups they’ve found the one word that will put the president on the side of whatever the public is supposedly waiting to hear.”