by Reed Karaim
What was it? Was it the mention of money? Was it Bushmill? When had Maureen Barstow started to come unhinged? She had been on edge from the beginning, but that simply could have been the uneasiness of dealing with a reporter. What had started her toppling bottles and slamming doors? I tried to remember what I had said, but I couldn’t be sure. The question that undid her, however, was clear. But why? Why shouldn’t Thomas Crane call if he was in town? They had been high school friends. That was all she’d had to say. Old friends. A trip through town.
The last of the sun slipped beneath the horizon and the fields and hills went out like a blown match, but the sky flared even brighter, streaks of autumnal orange and vivid blue flung up casually in astonishing beauty. Don’t you see how lucky we are to be here? Don’t you see how special all this is? Of course I do. How could you think I wouldn’t understand? How could you believe I can’t see? But there are still questions, and maybe there are even answers. I saw a nervous hand falling again and a bottle tumbling toward the floor. I knew I should have let it break—to see what came spilling out.
But I’d wanted to catch it. I’d wanted her to hold herself together. I’d been glad when she told me to leave.
Bill Crane didn’t recognize me at first when he opened his door; then an unaffected grin split his square face.
“Minnesota, right?” he said.
“Almost. Montana.”
“Montana, Minnesota,” he shrugged, rolling his wheelchair backward so I could enter. “I thought all you reporters were through sightseeing in beautiful downtown Berthold.”
“Not me. I love the night life.”
He laughed as we made the short trip into the living room.
“You know what the big entertainment used to be here twenty years ago?”
“No.”
“Train wrecks. The bend used to be too tight on the Illinois Central just south of the cemetery. They’d come around and about once every few months some engineer would get to feeling cocky and take it a little too fast. They’d derail, stuff would spill all over hell and, that night, folks would go help themselves. When my father was a kid there was a time when a car full of Canadian liquor tipped over.” Bill laughed, tipping that great big square of a head back. “The whole town was drunk for a week.”
“Let’s head out there. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
He shook his head. “The train doesn’t come through here anymore.”
He settled in by the Formica table in the corner. Everything was exactly as I remembered, the sagging floors, the faded wallpaper, the crucifixes and motorcycle posters on the walls.
“Not much comes through Berthold at all anymore, except reporters,” he said. “And I thought you were about done too.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’ve always got more questions.”
“I’ve got one first,” Bill Crane said. “How’s he holding up out there?”
He had settled his bulk in the chair, looking as stolid as a bust of a British prime minister. But there were bags under his steel blue eyes and a pulsing vein along his temple not present on my earlier visit.
“You worry about him,” I said.
He waved a hand and stared with a wounded expression out the window into the dark. “Naah, he’s a big boy. I just wondered if they were treating him all right.”
“He’s holding up good.”
I noticed something new on the fridge, visible through the kitchen doorway: dozens of newspaper headlines cut out and taped up—CRANE WINS NEW HAMPSHIRE. ILLINOIS SENATOR EMERGES FROM PACK. DEEP SOUTH UPSET. CRANE ROLLS THROUGH MIDWEST. GOLDEN STATE SEALS CRANE NOMINATION. DEBATE KNOCKOUT!—and on and on, crisscrossed and piled on top of each other across half the fridge.
Bill followed my glance. “One for each day of the campaign. Seventy days to go.” He winked at me. “Now what was it you wanted?”
“He called you when he was going to run for the House and the Senate, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t visit, did he?”
He shook his head. “No, I would have remembered that.”
“You don’t know what else could have brought him back here around then, do you?”
Bill looked at me, trying to decide if a trap was being set. He was a generous man, but there was no confusion about his loyalty. I waved a hand dismissively to take any edge off the question.
“I just heard he was back in the area then, and I was curious why.”
“I can’t imagine. People get confused about times.”
The wooden legs on my chair were uneven. I placed both elbows on the table to steady myself and decided to leave Phillips and Maureen alone for a moment.
“I’ve been thinking more about when he came back to town after your mother’s funeral. Money must have been pretty tight for this family then.”
“Hell, money was more than tight. You got to have some money before it can get tight.”
Bill’s big ragged smile split his face and I knew I wasn’t going to lead him on anymore.
“I heard that Roger Bushmill gave or lent him some money back then. Do you know what it was for?”
Bill rocked his chair back and forth, the old boards beneath him creaking in protest. He stared out the darkened window and his proud soldier’s profile slowly turned grayer than marble. All of a sudden he was an old man in a wheelchair.
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s goddamn business what happened when he was twenty-five,” he said. “My brother’s never taken a bent nickel. You better go.”
I drove back to Springfield in the dark. Now I knew something had happened almost eighteen years ago, even if I was no closer to finding out what. His brother knew and Maureen knew. Eddie didn’t know, at least not for sure, but he was worried. Maybe he suspected, or maybe I had just set him on edge.
Eighteen years ago, and fourteen years ago when he running for the House, and eight years ago when he was running for the Senate. Something that could still knock the wind out of Maureen with the mention of a telephone call.
It’s always interesting how poor boys get to be rich boys, Latrelle Gregory had said. It was a clever line, designed to send me marching down a twisted path, but it didn’t ring true for Crane. The thieves I knew on Capitol Hill didn’t steal just once, they stole compulsively, like children let loose in a mint, stole until they got sloppy and got caught, or became committee chairmen and moved on to grander larceny on behalf of their entire state. Crane had powerful friends and I knew they’d helped him. But there was no sense that money mattered greatly to him, no sense of the political sensualist who revels in the material rewards of power, no sense of grosser appetites. He had always been an inner politician, the kind who lives on the warm breath of applause, who feeds on a purer sense of self reflected back at him. His vanity was spiritual. If it was vanity at all.
In my motel room I ordered room service, turned on the television and lay on the bed. CNN’s Week in Politics was doing a montage of the Crane campaign, old clips from the beginning. I saw myself briefly, standing on the steps of a high school in New Hampshire, frozen crusts of dirty snow lapping at the stone. Then Crane was shaking hands in a snowstorm, startled pedestrians peeking out of their parkas. I thought about those days and how they had all changed the night of the first debate, and the next morning when we had driven to that high school in—where was it?— Manchester? Then the deer and the look in Crane’s eyes as they stared at each other through the glass. A sense of inescapable recognition and loss. What had we been talking about? His mother. We had been talking about when his mother had died and he had said something about choices. Then the deer. No, after the deer staring through the window at us. That was when he lied.
We had been talking about the days after his mother had died, the thing that had brought me back here. The days after his mother had died.
Then the deer startled him, caused something he was hiding to surface. More than sadness or loss. Something else. Regret.
On the television scr
een Thomas Crane stood at the podium during the convention and behind him his life played on other television screens. He was a wide-eyed boy walking down a gravel street. He was a young lieutenant in front of a cathedral. He was a freshman congressman on the steps of the Capitol. He was a husband with his wife dreaming on his shoulder in an airplane. He was a dozen things, he was everything you, or he, or anyone could wish, but one thing.
You think it will be a piece of paper or something you can hold in your hand. You think it will be something you can hold in your hand and raise toward the light. But sometimes it is much less.
He was everything b ut one thing, and I understood what I had seen in his eyes when he stared at that deer on the other side of the glass. I knew the answer.
IX.
IN THE MORNING I made one stop before leaving for Phillips, but that stop took longer than I expected and the sun was high overhead by the time I was back on the highway. The day had the gentle clarity of late August, the red barns and white farmhouses glittering in the sunlight with the precision of a landscape in a dream. I thought the country had never looked so beautiful, and as sad and hopeless as this sounds, I found myself wishing Robin was sitting beside me so she could see it, and then I remembered her in bed the last morning we had been together, the rose light stealing up her pale cheek until her eyelids fluttered and she turned away from the window and buried her head in my shoulder.
I could smell her hair, and I wanted her so badly then I would have betrayed a nation for a chance to wake her gently, then insistently, one more time. I would have promised anything. I could see her in bed so clearly and I reached for her and we had time, time outside of history, time to explain, to come to understand, and I knew it was all an illusion, a concoction of light and perpetual motion. But for a moment it was all I could see, more real than the road ahead.
The same spindly tree stood on the Barstows’ lawn, withered green apples the size of golf balls rotting in the brown grass. Maureen Barstow came to the door in an oversize shirt, untucked and rolled up at the sleeves, hanging down to her knees. She stood behind the unopened screen, wiping her hands on the shirttail, the articulated shadow of the wire mesh wrapped around her like a net of silk thread.
“You shouldn’t have bothered,” she said. “I don’t have anything more to say.
“Are you sure? I have just a couple more questions.”
“I’m sure.”
She was about to shut the door in my face.
“If you’d give me a drink of water,” I said, “I’ll be on my way.”
Reflexive courtesy is the Midwest’s grace and its undoing. She pushed the screen open and led me into a narrow, neatly ordered family room with a pale blue couch and a corded gold rug. She went into the kitchen and I heard water running. Pictures of her daughter covered the wall above the television. Gentle brown eyes, a soft mouth. I took one off the wall and was holding it when Maureen returned. She stopped when she saw what I had in my hand.
“She’s his daughter, isn’t she?” I said.
She stood with a glass held toward me in a suspended and suddenly sad act of courtesy.
“Born seventeen years ago,” I said. “Born nine months after you saw each other in Berthold. Born a little more than six months after you suddenly left town.”
She pulled the glass back as if it carried the weight of an ocean.
“He fled east back then,” I said. “He was disturbed. And when he had to decide to run for the House and the Senate, he came back here each time. To talk to you. What sense does that make? You had a secret you shared. He needed to know if it was safe.”
“No.”
“An old supporter of his saw him driving up County Highway 123. I drove up that same highway yesterday. It leads here. I know he phoned you. One of his staff members remembered a name jotted down another time when he left unexpectedly. The staffer wasn’t sure, but he thought it was Joe. It wasn’t Joe. It was Mo. That’s what they called you.”
“No.”
“The money from Bushmill. I asked both you and Bill if you knew what he might need the money for. You answered by saying he would never take a dime for himself and would never do anything dishonest. That’s because the money wasn’t for him. It was for you.”
“You can’t prove any of this.”
“I checked her birth certificate in Springfield today. No father’s name, but you shouldn’t have given her the middle name of Gretchen. His mother’s name.”
Maureen set the glass carefully on a table. She sat in a brown chair and her head fell into the chapel of a cupped hand. I raised the photograph of her daughter.
“His eyes,” I said. “His mouth. I’ve spent months staring at his face, seeing it in my sleep. This is his daughter.”
“No.”
“Yes, it is.”
Light fell in gold bars across the couch. Something ticked inside the wall. Her face moved behind her hand and I saw that her eyelashes lay still as powdered ash. You forget in Washington how hard it is for most people to lie when confronted with the truth.
“It’s hard to see, really,” she said. “Just the eyes. You’d never know unless you looked for it. She looks more like me.”
She held out a hand and I gave her the picture. She stared at her daughter. Their daughter.
“Gretchen was a stupid choice,” she said.
“It was kind.”
When she had been in the kitchen, I’d set my tape recorder on the television, and its baleful red eye glared at us, but she hadn’t noticed, and now she looked at me hopefully.
“Does she know?” I asked.
Her head shook fiercely.
“Were you ever going to tell her?”
“No. Never.”
“Why not?”
“She’s my daughter. I’m the only parent she’s ever had. I wanted her all for myself. I was selfish. I didn’t want to share her.”
“I don’t believe it was that simple.”
She glanced at her hands. “It was that simple.”
“Did he want her to know?”
“It was my choice. That was a long time ago.”
“I don’t believe you were selfish.”
She stared past me at the wall, perhaps recognizing the meaninglessness of noble gestures at this point.
“I didn’t want to ruin his life. Why should I? What bad thing had he ever done to me? Give me a daughter I love? Is that bad?”
“Of course not.”
In the kitchen the coffeepot dripped. The little house was bright and neat, full of merry sunlight streaming through the blinds like an electrocution. Maureen sat in the brown chair with her red, chapped nurse’s hands clasped in her lap, holding herself erect.
“And now you found out,” she said, “and it’s going to ruin him.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t written anything yet.”
“You’ll write your story. You know you will, and that’ll be the end of him.”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do. You know it won’t matter how he tries to explain. It won’t matter what I say. It won’t matter if I tell the world he’s been a wonderful man. They have this view of him, all those people out there who want to believe in something, and this wasn’t part of it. I saw the debate. ‘I’ll never lie to you,’ he said, and now he has. It doesn’t matter why. It doesn’t matter what I wanted twenty years ago, or how scared we were, or how young. It’ll ruin him as sure as if you tell the world he shot someone.”
She lifted her square, honest face toward me.
“You know what I hope? I hope he doesn’t say a word. I hope he tells you all to go to hell. Let you write whatever nonsense you want. Let people think whatever they want. The hell with all of you.”
We were finished. I picked up the tape recorder. Maureen glanced at it blankly and then led me out of her house and into the sunlight.
“I knew,” I said. “I knew, but I really didn’t have anything. I didn’t have a single piece of e
vidence that would hold up. You could have lied.”
She stood in the doorway, not understanding at first.
“You really are from Washington, aren’t you?” she said, and shut the door.
I drove halfway back to Springfield before I turned onto a gravel road and stopped the car. There was nothing in sight except a stunted pine tree in the ditch. I opened the door and stepped out. The sun hung low, as hard and red as a hammered railroad spike. Late afternoon, plenty of time before deadline.
I walked along the road, hearing small sounds in the grass, smelling the baked cornfields radiating heat. A spray of starlings shot out of the pine tree like darts. What could I do? What choice did I have? I was a reporter and I knew something that would change the nation’s understanding of a man running for president. There was nothing complicated about my decision. It was simple.
I stood on the road and then I turned slowly on my heel and, as I did, I remembered Robin on the night of the first debate, pirouetting under the stars as she breathed deeply of the magic of the campaign. Cornfields rolled off in every direction, rising and falling in broad, golden swells that tumbled finally into the sky. I could hear the whole country out there, raising its voice, begging to be heard, clamoring for someone to listen. I had heard them for six months and I had seen him face them day after day and I thought he was trying, I thought he cared, I thought he was the best chance they had.
I turned on my heel and I knew I wasn’t going to write the story. He was too many things to be this one thing forever. We want the character of our leaders to be etched in marble at birth, every man a tombstone. It’s not fair. The answer isn’t what we were, but what we are, what we’re trying to become.