Establishment

by Howard Fast

  His wife was not his most enthusiastic admirer. When the business of Barbara Lavette had first occurred, she had said to him in no uncertain terms, “You are a fool. With the whole country to choose from, you pick the Lavette family.”

  When he dined with Tom and Lucy and reported back to her, she said, “Are you an idiot? Why didn’t you tell them that you would drop the whole thing?”

  “They didn’t want me to. The truth is, he doesn’t give a damn about his sister.”

  “Coming from anyone else, I might believe that.”

  He had undertaken, in the course of years, two plaintive liaisons with sympathetic women in Washington, a city with no shortage of sympathetic women, and in each case, he had evaded divorce with the plea that it would destroy his political career. Then he gave up sympathetic liaisons for a tolerable relationship with a blowsy woman who worked in his Washington office. He wife found out about it. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t divorce you?” she demanded of him.

  “One, yes—I think,” he begged her. He could be humble and beseeching.

  “Just let me hear it, and if it concerns your political career, you can take it and stuff it. I am past giving a damn about your political career.”

  “I don’t think you should say that,” he pleaded. “I mean, it is my political career, but it goes beyond that. I think I have a chance to be vice president.”

  “You are out of your mind.”

  But he was able to convince her that he was not entirely out of his mind, and tonight, standing outside of the Lavette mansion, he was a good deal closer to the incredible goal of vice president. His wife might have asked herself with some cynicism why they had chosen him; for himself, he could find reasons. He felt he had resources that had never been tapped, a breadth of understanding he had never put to use, and above all, imagination. He felt certain of that. He did have imagination.

  Well, this was not the time to indulge in dreams. Whatever the decision would be, whatever Lavette’s hints would lead to, tonight would provide him with definite answers. He had been assured of that.

  He pulled the iron chain that hung from one jamb of the ornate doors and heard the gong echo throughout the house. No cheap electric doorbells here. A butler opened the door and took his hat and coat.

  “The gentlemen are in the library, Mr. Drake,” he said. “They are expecting you.”

  He followed the butler, swallowing nervously, and then trying not to swallow. His doctor had warned him that this nervous swallowing of air was the chief cause of his flatulence, and flatulence was the last thing he desired tonight.

  Tom Lavette rose to greet him as he entered the library. Seated comfortably around the room, some with cigars and brandy, were six men.

  “Good of you to come and join us, Drake,” Tom said, as if there had been an alternative to his coming there tonight. “I’ll introduce you. This is Joseph Langtrey. Congressman Drake.” Langtrey nodded without rising. “Mark Fowler,” Tom said.

  “Evening, Drake,” Fowler said. They knew each other. Fowler rose slowly, offering his hand.

  “Ira Cunningham,” Tom said.

  “Just so you know where the chips are stacked, young feller,” Cunningham said, “I am president of Lakeland Steel. Mr. Langtrey runs the First New York City Trust Company, and Louis d’Solde over there has a finger in half the chemical companies in this country.”

  “I think you know Mr. Culpepper and Mr. McGinnis,” Tom said.

  If he didn’t know them personally, he knew very well who they were and what they represented. He took the seat that Tom indicated. He accepted brandy and a cigar, which he left unlit. And he waited.

  McGinnis was talking about Kuwait and its oil resources. He had four hundred million dollars invested there, and he was wondering how the new State of Israel was going to affect the whole balance of oil and nationalism. Drake followed the conversation that came out of this, waiting from moment to moment for them to ask his opinion. But they didn’t, and finally Culpepper turned to him and said, almost casually, “Lavette here thinks you’d be a good bet for the vice presidency. Do you want the job?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. But then, won’t it depend on who’ll be President. I mean, who’ll be the candidate, his choice?”

  “Our choice,” said McGinnis.

  “How clean are you?” Fowler asked. “I don’t mean women or little peccadilloes. I mean fraud. How clean are your campaign funds? I’m not going to ask whether you ever took a bribe. What is there on paper? What kind of bank deposits are there that you can’t account for?”

  “I’ve been scrupulous about my bank deposits, and there’s nothing on paper that could be embarrassing.”

  “What about Internal Revenue?” Langtrey asked him. “Do they audit you?”

  “Not for the past four years, no, sir.”

  “Well, you will request an audit. As soon as possible. Providing you can come out of it clean.”

  “I can. No problem in that direction.”

  “You have a safe deposit box?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you keep there?”

  “I have some bonds and stock certificates.”

  “No cash?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, some cash.”

  “How much?”

  “About eighteen thousand.”

  “Get rid of it.”

  “How?”

  “How the devil do I know? Give it to your wife. Spend it. Spread it around—a few hundred here, a few hundred there. Buy her a fur coat.”

  “What’s the situation with your wife? Do you get along?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s a good marriage.”

  “And your kids? No fancy escapades?”

  “Oh, no. They’re fine kids.”

  “Now understand us,” Fowler said. “If we win the election and you stand in as Vice President, it’s a dry run, so to speak, a test run. The future will depend on how you conduct yourself, and the future means the top job. Do you follow me?”

  “I think so.”

  “As far as this House committee of yours is concerned, we’ve had enough of it. It’s meaningless and nonproductive, and the same goes for McCarthy’s shenanigans. You’ll change the image. I think the less subpoenas from here on in, the better. Now there are certain things we are interested in, not only for our good but for the good of the nation. McGinnis there wants to unlock the offshore oil. We need it. Louis is deeply interested in the advancement of the space program. Lavette wants transcontinental and European franchises. Cunningham is worried about the growing bias against new aircraft carriers. These are only indications. There’s no point in going through a detailed list tonight. Plenty of time for that. The only thing we are really interested in this evening is an area of understanding. Do we have it?”

  “I would say we do,” Drake agreed.

  After Drake left, Fowler said to Tom, “I do hope your judgment stands up, Lavette. I don’t like that little sonofabitch.”

  “I think,” Tom said, “he has the quality of loyalty that you would find in a well-trained whipped dog. I can’t think of anyone else down there in Washington who could be purchased as completely. Also, for reasons I must confess I don’t understand, he is one hell of a vote-getter. Apparently the people who do the voting love him.”

  “I don’t love him,” Culpepper said. “When I think of that man as potentially President of the United States, I wonder what in hell this country is coming to.”

  ***

  That night in bed, having given Lucy a blow-by-blow account of what had taken place in the library, Tom said, “After all, Lucy, we haven’t done too badly, our little combination of Lavette, Seldon, and Sommers. We’re still the smallest apple in the basket, but we’re in there, aren’t we?”

  “It goes further than that, Thomas. We shall one d
ay have shares in the man who runs the most powerful nation on earth. It’s not simply owning a politician—it’s owning the whole beautiful thing.” She reached out and touched him tenderly. “That is power.”

  Suddenly, he was away from her, lost in his own thoughts.

  “Tom?”

  “Yes.” He stared at her.

  “Ugly little beast, but he’s all ours.”

  “Yes.”

  “What on earth—you are pleased, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “What’s eating you now?” She was irritated. It was her triumph. She wanted it to be his as well.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Dan Lavette?” she asked softly.

  “He’s my father.”

  “Tom, we’ve been all through that. He had to find out. Anyway, he doesn’t mean a damn thing to you.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “According to you,” she said. “According to you. And as for Barbara, you didn’t send her to prison. That was her own choice.”

  “In all my life,” Tom said tiredly, “in all my goddamn stupid life, there was only one thing I wanted and couldn’t have. I had all the rest—everything except a nod from that cold bastard who calls himself my father. If once, if only once he had looked at me and spoken to me the way a father does to a son—”

  “Oh, stop it.” Lucy was annoyed. “It’s been a good day. What are you doing to it?”

  “I don’t hate him.”

  “You’re being a damn fool.” She turned off the light and rolled over on her side.

  Tom lay awake, a line putting itself together in his mind—the last line of some book he had read long, long ago, when he had been at Princeton: “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

  ***

  Alexander Hargasey was taken ill on the set of a film he was directing, and four hours later he died. He was overweight and in poor physical condition, and he was struck down by a massive coronary. By the time Sally arrived at the hospital he was dead, and Sally sat in the hospital waiting room and wept as she had never wept before. She was in the third month of pregnancy. She had loved Hargasey. He had been surrogate father, confessor, teacher, and good friend. Whispering to herself that boy or girl, this child would be called Alexander, she surrendered to a grief that was real and unadorned with any of her romantic trimmings. She had never truly faced life and she had never confronted death as it must be confronted, as the end of something, as a cruel hole in her mind that could not be evaded or healed.

  Joe went with her to the funeral. He had his own memories of the director, a fat, bald comical character; he listened to Sally’s estimate of the man, and not without a degree of awe and shame. “He was a good man,” Sally said. “It was a kind of decency that I don’t even understand because I don’t have it. Not a shred of it.”

  “I liked him,” Joe pleaded, reminding Sally that he had met Hargasey years before, when Hargasey had commissioned Dan Lavette to build him a yacht. She was thinking that he blamed Hargasey.

  “I will not make a picture with anyone else. Never. I’m through. So it doesn’t matter what you think of Alex Hargasey. I’m through with it.”

  Joe took her home and went on to the clinic. Later that day, at six o’clock in the evening, he returned to the house in Beverly Hills and found Sally sitting in the semidarkness of her bedroom.

  “Are you all right?” Joe asked her.

  “Sure. I’ve been thinking.”

  “Did you mean what you said before? About never making another film?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “What!”

  “It’s all right. It’s perfectly normal. I’m in my third month.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes, I’m quite certain, Joe. I went to Dr. Brimmer at the studio. I’ve had the tests.”

  “Do you want the baby, Sally?”

  “It’s my baby. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s good. But I don’t understand about the movies. God, we’ve talked so much about it and what it means to you. How can you stop something that means so much to you?”

  “Because it doesn’t mean that much anymore.” Then she began to cry again.

  “Sally, please, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying for Alex now,” she managed to say. “I’m crying for myself. Oh, I feel so rotten, Joe, so lost and so frightened. I’m here, and I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know how I got here. Joey,” she said pleadingly, “I want to go home.”

  “Sure. We’ll go up to Napa for a few days. If you want to, you can stay there for a few weeks with May Ling.”

  “I don’t mean that. I want to go back there for good, and I want you to come with me. Please, please, Joey. You can open an office in Napa. Or in Oakland, if you want to. There are just as many poor, sick people in Oakland as there are here. But I can’t stay here. I want three or four kids. I want to be a human being. I want to be able to walk down the street without everyone turning to look and whisper about me. Please, Joey.”

  “What about the house?”

  “We’ll sell the house. The hell with the house! Don’t you understand? My own daughter’s a stranger to me. I don’t want kids who are strangers.”

  “I’ve put so much into the clinic—”

  “Joey, let’s try to save ourselves. We’re part of the human race, aren’t we? And the clinic will survive. Just say that you’ll give it a try—because if we miss out now—”

  He shook his head unhappily.

  “Please. Just give it a try.”

  He was broodingly silent. He promised nothing. He simply muttered, “O.K. I’ll try.”

  ***

  Barbara’s decision to go to Israel was very sudden, not anticipated even in her offhand thoughts. Simply her having been away from Sam for so long should have precluded it. Jean took it as a whim.

  “Why now?” Jean asked her. “Oh, I know you must be restless after those hideous months in prison. But haven’t you been separated from Sam long enough?”

  “It would only be ten days at the most.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. Maybe to lay a flower on Bernie’s grave. Maybe to see what my husband died for.”

  Or to find an answer when she didn’t know the question. In New York, at Idlewild Airport between planes, she was ready to cancel her passage to Europe and return to California. But she talked herself out of that, and instead she telephoned San Francisco and spoke to Sam. “Am I going to live with granny always?” Sam asked plaintively.

  “No, no, no, darling. I’ll be back next week.”

  “But you promised me you wouldn’t go away again. You promised. You know you did.”

  At that moment she almost decided to take the next plane home. But she did not, and the following morning she was in London. Just before noon, she took off in an El Al plane on the final leg of her flight to Tel Aviv.

  The man sitting next to Barbara struck up a conversation with her. An Israeli, he was in his seventies, urbane, spoke excellent English, and he introduced himself as Aaron Cohen. He informed her that he owned a bookstore in Tel Aviv, and when she told him that she was Barbara Lavette, he responded with recognition and pleasure. “Of course. I should have recognized you from your picture. I sold a good many of your books.”

  “In Hebrew? I wasn’t translated into Hebrew.”

  “Oh, no, in English. We sell a great many English books. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be translated into Hebrew, and I can do something about that. But what brings you to Israel? Curiosity? Or are you working on a book about us? You’re not Jewish, are you?”

  “No. My husband was. His name was the same as yours.”

  “It’s a common Jewish name. Is this your first trip to Israel?”

&
nbsp; “Yes.”

  “You say ‘my husband was.’ Are you divorced? Or a widow?”

  Barbara told him what had prompted her trip, insomuch as she knew what had prompted it. Cohen listened thoughtfully, then nodded.

  “I think I understand,” he said.

  “Do you, Mr. Cohen? I’m not sure I do.”

  “Well, it’s not a very pleasant thing to say, but death is a finality. Or it should be. Life must go on. You’re a prisoner of your husband’s death. I think you must free yourself.”

  “That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “Have I hurt your feelings?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not sure of very much at all, and the truth is I’m not really sure what brought me here. Every step of the way I was on the edge of changing my mind.”

  “Where is your husband buried?” Cohen asked.

  She opened her purse and took out her notebook. She remembered the name; it was the pronunciation she was unsure of. “It’s called Kiryat Anavim.”

  “Oh? Yes, I know the place. It’s a kibbutz on the road to Jerusalem—that is, on the Tel Aviv road to Jerusalem. You do know what a kibbutz is?”

  “A sort of commune?”

  “Yes. This one, Kiryat Anavim, is rather old and large, and I think they do have their own military cemetery, but you know, that would be only for their own people—I mean for the boys of the kibbutz who were killed during the war. You say your husband was killed somewhere to the east of Haifa?”

  “On the road to Megiddo? I’m not sure.”

  “In forty-eight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, things were very confused then. I’ve never seen the cemetery at Kiryat Anavim, but it can’t be very large. It’s a pleasant place. But then, I’m biased. I feel that the Judean Hills are the most wonderful place on earth.”

  “How will I get there?” Barbara asked him.

  “It’s very simple. We’re a tiny country. Just take a taxi outside your hotel. Where are you staying, by the way?”