by Allen Drury
Very shortly thereafter the war ended and he returned to Salt Lake City, where he found his older sisters married, his older brother in the Church, the younger girls coming along, his parents, if possible, even more the unshakeable pillars of society than they had been. With his high school chum from Ogden he got away for a couple of weeks of camping in the Uintas and fishing along the Green, and then returned to his tidy little mountain capital to sit down and formulate more definitely the plan for his future he had developed during the war. It did not take him long to do so, and as a first step he went back to the Farm in the fall, this time to enter law school. Some instinct for what would be most appealing to the voters, some lingering feeling of his own against the East, prompted him to remain in his own general area for this final stage of his education; and, too, he had a feeling about the West that, like Antaeus, he should keep one foot on his own plot of ground. Western-born, western-reared and western-schooled, he knew, would be very attractive when the time came; and he felt better about it in his heart.
Coming back to an academic atmosphere after the war he found as difficult as many did, but he brought to it not only his many natural gifts of intelligence, determination, stability, and character, but a maturity that now had been refined and honed down to the point where he was ready to make the most of his final spell of schooling and also establish again that friendly link between himself and his immediate community from which flowed so much of his strength as a person and, later, as a vote-getter. The story was the same here as it had been everywhere: great popularity, great respect, almost universal liking. The time passed without disappointments and virtually without flaw. Once in his second year he got a letter from somewhere in the Midwest, forwarded from his home in Utah, an attempt to re-establish something he felt was completely gone, or at least gone for all the practical purposes of the life he had laid out for himself; he kept it for a day and a night, read it many times, thought of replying, started to jot down the address, and then changed his mind, finally tore it up completely and threw the fragments out of his car as he drove up the Bayshore to San Francisco the next afternoon. But it hurt still, and hurt badly; he was a little frightened to realize how much. For twenty-four hours he was not as sunny, open and friendly as usual, and this was noted by his friends; but exams were nearing, tension was high, and they put it down to that. Next day he was as outwardly serene as ever. He never heard again, even though there was a time after he first became nationally prominent when he was afraid he might hear, in some way that would be detrimental to him. But he never did, and as the years passed he came to feel that by a sort of tacit, long-distance understanding they had agreed with one another to let the dead past bury its dead.
He was president of the Law School in his senior year, edited the Review, began looking, more seriously and directly now, for a girl to love and marry and settle down with; failed to find her despite many candidates and opportunities which he accepted as calmly as he always had, and went home after three highly successful, years to enter his father’s law firm and begin the calculated process of making himself known from Logan to Kanab and from the Nevada border to the Colorado line. The cases his father handled, largely land, water, and range matters, gave him a steadily growing acquaintance over the state, and with it there presently began to come invitations to speak, at first about the war and his experiences and then, more seriously, about the problems confronting the country. It became apparent that within another two years a Senate seat would be open for the taking, and after another fishing trip with his high school chum from Ogden, during which they spent long hours at the campfire planning the campaign, he sharply increased his travels over the state, his speaking engagements at church suppers and social gatherings, service clubs, and professional groups. Because he was his father’s son, many doors were automatically opened to him; because he was himself, he walked through them with ease, gathering friends and supporters everywhere as he went. One night in Provo he met a shy, plain girl who seemed to like him; in six months’ time he was convinced he liked her too, and by the end of the year they were married in a ceremony that climaxed the social season and made his nomination virtually certain. He did his best sincerely to make Mabel Anderson happy, and for the most part felt that he succeeded. Sometimes old memories would return like a knife, but he was sure she never knew it, and he put them aside ruthlessly and concentrated on his home and his career. When the party held its nominating convention his only opposition was a former governor, an aging man unable to cope with Brig’s splendid war record and earnestly handsome, youthful appeal. He won the nomination, won the election by a margin of 61,000 votes, which in Utah was sensational, and went to the United States Senate at thirty with a secret, almost superstitious determination to be a good man, a good Senator, and a good public servant. For seven years in an undeviating line he had pursued this purpose with a success the great majority of his fellows on both sides of the aisle were unfailingly quick and generous to acknowledge. A year ago he had won re-election as easily as though he owned the Senate seat; a few more years, he knew, and he would.
In the Senate he found his niche very quickly, because he was astute about his elders as he was about most men, and there as everywhere those who held the power were swiftly attracted by his courteously pleasant, respectful, and forthright ways. He was, as Time remarked shrewdly in a cover story when his colleague had died of a heart attack and he had become senior Senator at the age of thirty-four, “an old men’s young man”; and to it he added many sound touches of his own. He was not a “mimeograph Senator,” one of those frantic types who get themselves elected, usually quite young, and then spend their days sending handout after handout to the press gallery and making speech after speech in the Senate on every conceivable topic under the sun to the point where they are soon dismissed with a grin and a shrug. Such desperation for the limelight was not in him, and furthermore both instinct and a shrewd appraisal of the Senate told him that this was not the way to get along, or to achieve the position of influence and power he foresaw for himself. He had been in office seven months before he made his first Senate speech, and then it was on a reclamation matter on which he was thoroughly informed; the Senate listened attentively and gave him a good hand afterwards, as it does with maiden speeches, and so when he spoke again a week later on the growing threat of Soviet power his audience was receptive, ready to listen, and predisposed in his favor. This speech was a soundly reasoned, well-prepared and well-practiced exposition of the facts as he saw them, concluding with several specific suggestions of his own; its effect was exactly as he had planned. In the leadership and on the Foreign Relations Committee the thought got around that maybe it would be well to consider him when a vacancy arose. Seniority interfered with this for four years during which he cheerfully went about his tasks on the District and Commerce committees, but on the third occasion when a seat fell open Bob Munson, Orrin Knox, and Tom August were able to swing it for him, and the assignment was his. Soon after he was also given a seat on Interior to replace the traditional freshman bane of the District Committee, and so was set as he wished to be for the future. He had resigned his post on Commerce—where he had received his first rather trying taste of Robert A. Leffingwell when the latter was appointed chairman of the FPC—and had immediately made foreign policy his specialty. Now further attritions in seniority had put him fourth in line for the chairmanship, and he was generally considered one of the ablest and most promising members of the committee and the Senate.
In his first year, after his self-imposed seven months of being seen but not heard during which he had carefully studied the personalities of the men around him and thoroughly familiarized himself with the functioning of the Senate, he began to gravitate into that little group around the Majority and Minority leaders who had so much to do with making the machinery go: Orrin, Stanley Danta, John Winthrop, Seab, and a handful of others among whom he found quick acceptance. He and Lafe Smith, who had been elected two years ea
rlier at the age of thirty-four, were the two youngest members of this group, and an easygoing friendship such as he had known so often in college and the war had sprung up rapidly between them. They generally hailed each other amiably as “buddy,” and they were buddies, in a pleasantly non-obligational way that permitted them to work in tandem when it suited them and work at cross-purposes when that suited them, without any personal strain. He and Mabel and Lafe and Lafe’s latest—there was always a latest, rarely the same latest as it had been the last time—often double-dated in a quiet, hometown sort of way, going to the Shoreham in good weather for dancing on the terrace, occasionally taking in a play at the National, once, before Pidge’s birth, even taking a week-long cruise to Bermuda with the latest who seemed at the time most likely to become Mrs. Lafe. She didn’t, but he and Mabel got a kick out of doing their best to bring it about. Lafe just grinned and wisecracked and stayed uncommitted with an independence Brig could understand, even though he assured him sincerely that he was making a mistake and didn’t know what he was missing.
Whether this was true or not, he was not always completely sure; but the storms were gradually dying in his heart, and he thought it was true most of the time. Certainly he did his best to make it true. Mabel was a thoroughly sweet and decent person, and he had no intention of letting his marriage become like so many he could see around him, a few islands of ease in a sea of tension. He devoted himself consciously to preventing this, and on the whole was quite happy with his bargain, fortified and strengthened as it was by time and circumstance and the public position in which he found himself which made a solid married life obligatory upon most ambitious men. How Lafe managed to be such a gay blade, coming from respectable Iowa, he could never understand until he happened to discuss the matter casually one day with a member of the Iowa delegation in the House. “What does the state think of all this chasing around?” he had asked humorously, and the Congressman shrugged. “They don’t hear about it,” he said, “and if they did, they wouldn’t believe it.” He sounded as though he really didn’t, either. Obviously it was a matter of faith.
In addition to Lafe, he soon developed strong personal ties to the older members who had in effect adopted him, made him their protégé, and actively promoted his career. As Bob Munson once remarked to Stanley Danta, “We don’t get material as good as that very often, we’d better make the most of it,” and they did. Of them all he found himself most drawn to Orrin, who had an uncompromising honesty and a bluntly forthright way with the truth that immediately appealed to his young friend from Utah. Tart, tactless, impatient, fearless, and unimpressed, the senior Senator from Illinois wasted little time on fools; but on those he liked who were not fools he conferred a friendship of absolute loyalty and a deep warmth of affection that appeared surprisingly from beneath his shyly abrupt exterior. The twenty years that separated them were no barrier, and a very close relationship, almost father-son, was soon established. Happily it had extended to their wives. With Orrin and Beth he and Mabel had developed an in-and-out-of-the-house friendship that took them to Bethany Beach in nearby Delaware together for a couple of weeks and quite a few weekends each summer and generally made them members of the Knox family. It was Brig and Mabel, in fact, who had happened to bring Crystal Danta over one weekend when Stanley was away on a speaking trip and so had begun what Beth Knox referred to as “this joining of the ancient houses of Montague and Capulet,” though the analogy wasn’t very apt but just one of those dry and humorous things Beth would say. Both he and Mabel valued the Knoxes most highly, and of course in the Senate the friendship of the two men made for a strategic alliance that, added to all the other little strategic alliances that existed in the Senate, was frequently most profitable for them both. Neither ever asked the other to moderate his honest opinion in any degree, neither made much attempt to swing the other to his views; but in the majority of cases, they found, their views coincided, and when this wasn’t so they went their separate ways in mutual respect and reformed their alliance the next time they saw eye to eye.
It was at Bethany with the Knoxes last Labor Day, in fact, that he had suddenly realized that he had found a happiness to equal or surpass any he had known. Pidge had been out at water-line shoveling busily in the sand; it was time for lunch and he had gone to bring her in. There had been some minor, muted disagreement with Mabel just before he had left the Knoxes’ cottage and he was not in a very good mood; the waves had crashed, swimmers out in the sea had called to one another, a reminiscent melancholy had suddenly gripped his heart. Then he had reached his daughter, and with perfect love and trust and acceptance she had stood up and smiled at him. It had seemed to him then with a feeling close to revelation that in this tiny, sway-backed, ridiculous figure with her little behind sticking out in back and her little tummy sticking out in front, her blond hair caught up with a ribbon in a horsetail mop and her dark eyes filled with an amiable candor, all the love and hope of the world were concentrated. At that moment a surreptitious wave suddenly arrived at the rear of the ridiculous figure with surprising force, and the ridiculous figure sat down abruptly. There she remained for several seconds while a look of thoughtful concentration passed over her face. Then she looked up at her father with a sunny smile.
“I wetted the water,” she explained.
Brigham Anderson gave a shout of laughter so completely happy that Mabel, coming contritely up the beach behind them, sighed with relief.
“The water wetted you, so you wetted the water,” he said, scooping Pidge up onto his shoulder. “We’ll pass a resolution and do something about it.” And the three of them had started back in perfect harmony along the sand to the Knoxes’ cottage.
It was that day, also, however, on which he had begun to realize most fully that the happiness he wanted would never come with Mabel, for all his conscientious efforts and her desperate attempts to match them, for she was one of those good people who are also in spite of all their earnest efforts basically dull. Perhaps if Pidge had come at once instead of five years after their marriage, perhaps if the bloom, laboring under handicaps Mabel would never understand, had not had time to go quite so fully off the rose before it was rekindled briefly by their daughter’s birth, it might have been different; as it was, despite all his cares and attentions, they were no longer as close as they used to be, and he could not honestly say where the greater fault lay, though he was quite sure he had done everything mortally possible on his side. Of late there had been at times a gnawing boredom that he had not always quite concealed, though he never let it get out of hand. Nonetheless, Mabel knew, and there had been an increasing number of arguments about it, usually not very serious and turned off with a joke and a kiss and sometimes a small gift or a night out. The night before the morning Pidge had fussed so long over her oatmeal, however, the situation had suddenly become more serious for some reason neither of them could analyze. There had been a rather long argument over trivia, ending with Mabel in tears uttering the ancient cry of those who love more than they are loved, “Sometimes I don’t think I know you at all!” At this her husband had given her a startled look she could not define from those level dark eyes she worshipped so much and in a faraway voice had said softly, “Maybe you don’t.” And then with a sudden contrition he had told her how much he loved her and done things she fiercely enjoyed to prove it, and they had gone to sleep at relative peace with one another. Later in the night, however, she had awakened to cry again, and the next morning she had slept late and then taken Pidge and gone over to the Knoxes’ after telling Ellabelle to clean up the attic, and cried some more on Beth’s shoulder. Since then they had re-established an outward harmony, and this morning in the bright spring day she had laughed and kissed him and sent him out to the garden in apparent high spirits, so things were easier again.
Searching his heart and mind with complete and unsparing honesty about it now, he knew with absolute certainty that the situation they were in could have happened, and indeed did happen,
to many and many a marriage; it had nothing to do with ghosts from the past, though he never denied their importance to his life. He was a good father, a good if temporarily troubled husband, a good servant, a good Senator, and a good man; and central to all this, in a way he understood thoroughly in his own nature, was the episode in Honolulu.
Physically of course it was a closed book, for nothing ever again induced in him quite that combination of restlessness, uncertainty, impulse, and desire. It had come about after a long period of self-questioning, because of a unique set of circumstances that were never duplicated again, and he felt no need to try to recreate something that had flared once and was, he was quite sure, gone forever. Furthermore, there were ten thousand reasons of reputation, family, home, and career why it should not be revived, and so he steered deliberately clear of any such situations, which in Washington as everywhere were numerous, that even remotely seemed capable of leading to it. Furthermore, and this he knew honestly was also fundamental, it had meant something very important to him at the time, it couldn’t be recaptured and he knew it, and that too was a major reason along with all the others of self-preservation, obligation to society, integrity, and self-denial.
If he had been possessed of a cowardly and self-protective mind he could have pretended to himself that this was not the case, but he was not the type to spare himself on anything and no more did he spare himself on that. Nor did he see any reason why he should, for in a way he came consciously to realize, what had started as a weakness became transmuted by a very strong character and a very decent heart into a profoundly important strength. As surely as Seab Cooley, surviving his own private hell in Barnwell half a century before, Brig knew when he emerged from his that it had been a proving ground. For all its pain, and for all that it was not exactly the sort of thing you would want to discuss in Salt Lake City, he did not regret that it had happened. There were things he had to find out about himself; the war, as it did for so many, furnished the crucible, and in it that episode had probably been the single most illuminating episode of all. He could not honestly say he was sorry; his only sorrow was that fate had ended it so hurtfully for them both instead of allowing the war to send them apart again as calmly and simply and inevitably as it had brought them together.