The Dinner Party

by Howard Fast

  Elizabeth was introduced to the secretary of state and to his assistant for Central America. Justin responded stiffly. His problems with women came out of a fantasy world where all women desired him, and such was the sexual enticement of power that it was bruited about that he had made a new record of swift, short-lived conquests—even for Washington, where the competition was stiff indeed. But the presence of Winifred stilted his efforts; she made him aware of his physical self. Webster Heller, on the other hand, was a handsome Texan with a valid southern accent. In the media, he was frequently described as a courtly gentleman. He bowed and gushed properly, informing Elizabeth that the little girl had become a beautiful woman.

  Elizabeth inferred by this that he meant they had met before. She had no memory of it, but Heller was quick to inform her that she had been no more than six or seven.

  “Little girls become big girls,” Augustus rumbled. “Fact of life. It’s also a fact that horny old men appreciate. Why not? She’s as beautiful as the first good day in April.”

  Jenny was used to it, and she apologized by offering a long sigh to the other women.

  “You remind me of my mother,” Heller told Elizabeth. “She was the first beauty queen ever to be crowned in Texas—a true flower of the old frontier.”

  Winifred whispered to her husband, “His mother’s family kept a feed store in Dallas, and his mother was horsefaced.”

  “Will you shut up,” Justin hissed.

  “Will you drop dead,” his wife whispered gently.

  “Webster is charming,” Frances said to Dolly, regarding her husband with affectionate awe. “Don’t you think he’s charming?”

  “Yes,” Dolly agreed. “Both he and my daddy—both of them very charming.”

  Jenny was whispering to her, “Where are they? This is dreadful.”

  But then the senator and his son entered the room.

  THIRTY

  Dolly’s first reaction was pleasure and pride at seeing them walk into the room together, two tall, good-looking men, so alike even though the senator was broader and at least fifty pounds heavier then Leonard. Her mood pleased and annoyed her at once. Richard Cromwell was the same man who had ripped her to shreds emotionally at least a dozen times, who had taken other women to bed, who at times had totally ignored her and her children, and who had given her periods of utter misery. What had changed? Or had anything changed? Had she ever let go of it, stopped loving him, considered divorce? His position was not a reason for staying married to him, it was an excuse.

  Once in the room, the senator became another person. Dolly recognized the change; she had seen it a hundred times before, likening it to the man by day who turned into a werewolf at night.

  In the case of the senator, it was the political animal. His body relaxed. Everyone in the living room became a part of his extended family. He was gracious, he was charming. He told Heller that he had never looked younger, Justin that he had read with great interest a piece he had written for the Washington Post, Winifred that she was ageless—“You evoke a dream of youth”—and Frances that if she could market the secret of her skin, she could make millions. He introduced Leonard with pride, left him under the protection of his grandmother and his grandfather, and kissed Dolly very tenderly.

  She recalled a talk the senator had given some years back at Yale. The subject was politics, and the senator had begun by saying, “Politics, from the Latin politicus and the Greek politikos, the art of the people, the art of belonging to the people.”

  Did he believe it? Had he ever believed it? But there were so many things that were neither black nor white, but rather defined by a fluid field of changing grays; and he always specified, in his dislike and frequent disgust with the people who ran the government from the White House, taking it out of the president’s hand and into their own, that they lacked the only virtue any government could claim, the process of election. They were not elected. They had never gone before the people. They had never touched the people or felt them. They were of the old, wretched world of kings and courts.

  “I think your son is perfectly beautiful,” Frances said to Dolly.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I never had a son,” Frances said, “and Webster still feels that life dealt unfairly with him. But they do say that a son’s a son until he gets him a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all of her life.”

  Richard had warned her about Frances Heller. “She comes off as a total idiot. She may not be smart, but she’s damn cunning and anything you let slip comes right back to Heller. That’s why he brings her along. She’s useful, a sort of ambulatory wire tap.”

  Dolly could not think of anything said here that could be useful to Heller. All her life she had been exposed to the conversation—better called chatter—of the rich and the powerful, and unless it dealt directly with the business of being rich and exercising power, it was filled with inanities; and since their women were excluded for the most part from the business of getting richer or increasing power, they spoke of little else other than inanities. Never had she heard, in the chatter over cocktails and across dinner tables, philosophy, personal or otherwise; curiosity concerning the universe and its ultimate mysteries; thoughts, however puerile, about the fate or hopes of man; points of ethics or hints of brotherhood. Yes, books, when they were marked as best sellers by the Washington Post, films and plays occasionally, but without depth and without wit. Long ago, she had ceased to be a participant and had become an observer.

  “One treasures the young,” Heller was saying to Elizabeth and Leonard.

  “Of course,” Elizabeth agreed. “Which is why we have wars and atom bombs.”

  “Defense is our gift to the future,” Heller said. He was not tuned to sarcasm.

  Dolly signaled to Richard, and the senator took Elizabeth’s arm and announced that dinner would be served.

  As they marched into the dining room, Richard Cromwell fought for every step and every word, and he fought against his inclination to put his face in his hands and weep. MacKenzie was already in the dining room, playing the role of a proper, sensitive British butler, just as he had seen it done in British films. As the senator was seated, MacKenzie whispered, “Senator, sir, them two mothers in the big caddy won’t move. They just sitting there outside, waiting for terrorists.”

  “Fuck them,” the senator whispered back into MacKenzie’s ear.

  As was most frequently the case, both these men were in perfect accord with each other.

  THIRTY-ONE

  He should have called it off, the senator decided. He should have called it off the moment Leonard told him. He should have met the car outside and turned them away—but exactly what was his position in this damn party? He was still puzzled about Augustus’s need for the dinner party. Why had Augustus agreed to it so readily? Prior to this, it was Augustus himself who made the decisions to visit the Cromwells. When he wished to appear and see his grandchildren, he informed Dolly of his intentions. If it conflicted with the senator’s plans, Dolly would spread her arms hopelessly and ask Richard what could she do? Richard might make a point of their never taking a cent from Augustus, but he was well aware that large contributions to his campaigns had come from Augustus via Dolly, who was the last person in the world to be pledged to keep a secret. In later years, money had come directly from Augustus, who said flatly, “You can’t be a politician without being a beggar.”

  So whether this dinner party was of great or small importance to Augustus was a question that puzzled the senator—just as he was puzzled by his own compulsive anxiety about the Sanctuary trial going on at this very moment in Tucson, Arizona. The Sanctuary arrests and indictments were not the first injustice and indecency to sicken at least a part of the American public. The creation of martyrs out of people who fought for the, best elements of American democracy was apparently endemic to the nation; and as they had hanged John Brown, executed Joe Hill by a firing squad, murdered Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric chair, so were
they determined that a simple pastor and his wife and their friends, who had given sanctuary to the pursued and threatened, should pay for this by being sent to prison. His own only son was dying—and still this matter of Sanctuary obsessed him.

  In the end, this was it—this and the fact that his son had taken the issue in hand. Leonard had asked him to go on with the dinner. He realized through his agony that this was possibly the first time Leonard had asked for anything from him. Now he asked for love, for help, and for his father to finish the day. The extraordinary thing that sometimes happens had happened to the senator; he had become the child of his son.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Justin was knowledgable about the quenelle. He was a man who had applied himself assiduously to the mastery of sophistication. He knew he was disliked. He had once pointed out to his wife his physical resemblance to John Adams, who was also, as Justin assured her, disliked. Justin read Gourmet magazine. He read Emily Post. He was married to a snob, and he envied her easy snobbery. He wanted desperately to be admired for knowing about the very small details of living. “Absolutely splendid,” he declared, voicing his judgment of the quenelle. His wife allowed herself to be charitable enough to join in his praise; although, as she pointed out, in Virginia the quenelle was usually of veal.

  “Really?” Dolly said. “How interesting!” It was the kind of quiet cut that evoked envy in Justin and challenge in Winifred.

  The senator sighed and accepted the fact that swords would not be sheathed. He knew his wife that well, and he found himself irritated and pleased at the same time. He could control his dislike for Winifred Justin and her husband; Dolly on the other hand controlled only her face and voice. The round doll’s face with its dark, patient eyes and tiny nose and gray bangs appeared to be made of innocence, and the voice, rather thin and high, bespoke simple, dull honesty. It was a mask many had accepted to their subsequent regret.

  Augustus tasted the wine. “By God,” he thundered, “Château Margaux. Nineteen seventy-eight, Richard?”

  Of course, the senator said to himself, he read the label. The same wine had been served in the living room. Richard also realized that Dolly had changed the seating, switching Jenny and Winifred, so that his mother-in-law sat between the senator and his father-in-law, while Winifred Justin was encased between Augustus and Leonard. Had Dolly done this, the senator wondered, to keep Winifred within earshot, or to flatter her by putting her next to a very handsome young man?

  Augustus offered a toast to Dolly, the hostess, and the senator squirmed a bit. The toast should have gone to the secretary of state, but then Richard Cromwell had been in the family long enough to know that everything and anything Augustus Levi did was calculated and a part of the image he would never surrender.

  “It’s a lovely table,” Jenny said, admiring the gleaming mahogany, the old silver with its flat, unadorned surface, the glassware and the dishes. It almost hurt her physically to see the place plates sitting so casually; but sighing and accepting this, her pride overcame her trepidation. Jenny loved things and she loved to talk about her things. Architectural Digest had once devoted seven pages to her things, her china and silver and rugs and paintings and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture—things that were her defense against her husband, whom she had never understood, the world, and, of course, people who did not measure up to her yardstick. Jenny felt uncomfortable in the world that was the habitat of Augustus as well as in the world that surrounded her daughter. Her things were a shield and a sword, and a plea for what she felt was the only proper way of existence.

  Frances Heller understood this. “Such a beautiful table,” she agreed. “But the plates!”

  “Aren’t they wonderful? I shudder to think that one of them might break.”

  “I’m dying to turn one over.”

  “After dinner,” Jenny promised.

  “What are you two plotting after dinner?” Justin wanted to know.

  “Very innocent—to look at place plates.”

  “You worry too much about plots, Justin,” Augustus said. “We’re all becoming a little plot crazy in this country.”

  “With reason.”

  “Tell you something. There aren’t any secrets. The big plots are out in the open. Nobody gives a damn.”

  Frances Heller looked puzzled, and Jenny shook her head. She felt that Augustus let things drop simply to befuddle a situation.

  “Interesting man, your grandfather,” Webster Heller remarked to Elizabeth, who was seated beside him.

  “He’s a great man,” Elizabeth said seriously.

  “Oh? Then you reject your father’s persuasion?”

  “I don’t understand,” Elizabeth said, wondering whether he could be gauche enough to refer to the fact that the senator was not Jewish.

  “I was thinking of the Democrats. Gus is a rock-ribbed Republican.”

  “Oh—no.” Elizabeth smiled. “I have no persuasion in politics, neither Democrat nor Republican. I’m a Buddhist.” She failed to add that only this morning she had meditated—for the first time.

  Nellie was removing the place plates and the first course, and behind her MacKenzie followed with the dinner plates. Dolly whispered to him, “Is Ellen carving?”

  “Right now.”

  “That’s hardly political,” Heller said to Elizabeth. “Buddhism’s a religion.”

  “Not really. Not in the Western sense. Wouldn’t you say so, Leonard?” she asked her brother, who was sitting across the table from Heller.

  “I suppose that since you can be a Buddhist and a Christian or a Jew, you could be a Buddhist and a Democrat or a Republican. I don’t think that’s what Liz means.”

  “I would like to know what Elizabeth means.”

  “Really, Webster,” Frances said, “is the dinner table a place to discuss religion?”

  The exchange at Dolly’s end of the table had drawn the attention of the entire company. Other chatter died away, and the secretary repeated his request.

  “Buddhism,” Winifred said. “What an odd thing!”

  “I’m not dodging the question,” Elizabeth said. “I just have trouble putting it properly. Could you, Lenny?” she asked her brother.

  “I could try,” Leonard agreed. “I heard about a discussion between Allen Ginsberg and Helms—it was some time ago, and I think that Mr. Helms was then the chief of the C.I.A. They were talking about meditation and Buddhism, and Ginsberg told Mr. Helms that if he were to meditate seriously for six months, he would resign as head of the intelligence agency.”

  “And did he?” Frances asked.

  “Oh, no, no. If he did resign, it was not for that reason. Oh, no—he never took up meditation. As I heard the story, he was very indignant about the suggestion and declared that he loved his work and wouldn’t he be a damn fool to go in for something that would make him unfit for his job.”

  “Is that what you’re talking about—something that makes you unfit to serve your country?” Justin demanded of Elizabeth.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions, Bill,” Heller said. “They both look fit enough to serve their country. But just what did you mean?” he asked Leonard. “I’ve been to Thailand. That’s pretty much a Buddhist country, isn’t it? I never got the impression that would lead me to accept what you say about Ginsberg and Helms.”

  Leonard didn’t answer. He had closed himself off, turned inward, and Dolly, observing this, watching her children intently, felt a chill of fear, an instantaneous vision of both her children torn from her, gone forever, an ugly vision that passed as it came, in a matter of seconds.

  “Let me see whether I can answer that, Mr. Heller,” Elizabeth said, very cool and controlled. “I don’t think Leonard meant to imply that any magic or subversive forces were at work. I know that subversive forces always suggest themselves in such a situation, but I’m not even sure what subversive forces are. What could happen, I suppose, is that if Mr. Helms or someone like him were to meditate seriously in the Buddhist fashion fo
r six months, he just might find that an act of violence was impossible. I don’t suppose you could run the Central Intelligence Agency without violence.”

  “She’s got you there,” Augustus said, “although I don’t know what the devil she’s talking about.”

  “What are you talking about?” Justin wanted to know. “Pacifism?”

  “Not exactly,” Elizabeth said.

  “Are you and your brother incapable of an act of violence?” Heller asked Elizabeth.

  “That’s such a personal question,” Jenny said. “I think we ought to drop the subject.”

  “Oh, Granny, it’s all right,” Elizabeth smiled and patted Heller’s hand. “I don’t mind questions. Questions have become very ‘in’ since you were a child. As for Lenny and me and violence—who knows? But I do like to think that neither of us are capable of it.”

  “Too deep,” Winifred said. “Much too deep and provoking. When I was a kid, we talked of other things.”

  “I’m sure you did,” Dolly said pleasantly. “On the other hand, it was a long time ago.”

  “Do you agree?” Heller asked Leonard.

  “Oh? Yes, I think I do.” He had come awake.

  Dolly, watching her son, began to sense that something was wrong, terribly wrong. The threads that linked the two of them had suddenly become tangled; nothing was right, nothing that she could pin down was wrong, but the threads had become tangled. She glanced across the table to where the senator sat and felt that she saw her own fears in his eyes without knowing exactly what she saw.

  The meat was being served. Delicious pink slices. She had forgotten that Leonard would not eat meat. It would have made no difference in the menu, but she should have remembered. Why was she so nervous? Why this talk of Buddhism and meditation?