The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  Brian was always there when Haven and Paul Wilson arrived, smiling softly, holding a coffee cup or a beer can, his eyes lit up by that curious glow Haven Wilson could recognize but not completely understand. He was a conscientious worker. His movements with a hammer, a saw, or a wrecking bar were lazy but sure. It was as if Brian, as they worked, saw designs hidden from the rest of them—lights, shadows, texture: the weathered whorls of an ancient oak board that didn’t need nails at all, the leaning hickory post that wasn’t made stronger by wire, already unique in its own way by the rusty nails embedded in it, by the wild grasses nearby or the abandoned chickadee’s hole at the top of the post.

  On the beam of an old barn, Paul Wilson once found a heap of rusting iron, old wagon bolts, hand-forged hooks and horseshoe nails, gear cogs, and teeth from a sickle bar—junk, nothing more, to Paul Wilson, the political science major at Georgetown; but they were arranged in a curious way, bound together by a curl of wire from a broken wagon spring. As Paul lifted the objects into the burlap trash bag, Jane Donlon stopped him. “No, those are Brian’s,” she’d said, as if she, too, had recognized what her son had found there.

  They grew accustomed to finding such clutters of rusted objects around the outbuildings as they cleaned up, Brian’s totems of rustic sculpture gathered in the corner of the old blacksmith shop, along a beam in the smokehouse, or in a box behind the kitchen range. They were Brian’s collections, Brian’s objects. Jane Donlon thought she understood them. She saw in her son’s indolence the beatitude of an artist, intent like Klee or Miró upon hieratic meanings—rusty shapes which light transmogrified, green beetles like Egyptian scarabs on the unweeded corn tassels, the haiku ideographs of the bore weevil on a panel of rotting oak board Brian had set aside, unable to burn.

  Haven Wilson, like Ed Donlon, thought only of a pastoral Eden—too much beer, too much marijuana, the effortless sensuality of those hot summer days and the girl named Sue. Neither of them knew much about drugs. Paul Wilson, who did, had nothing to say. Had Haven Wilson discovered those purple bruises on Brian’s arm, he might have thought they’d been made by a falling beam or a slipped crowbar, like the scab on his shin.

  But as the weeks passed and the herb garden went back to weed, like the front yard, and nothing got done except when Ed Donlon was there on a Saturday or Sunday, Ed’s patience began to tatter. The discovery of a houseful of drunken layabouts in the old brick house that morning was the last straw:

  “Get out and take what you have with you! Everything, both of you! Don’t come back until you’ve straightened yourself out! If that takes ten years, then it’s all right with me!”

  Brian and Sue disappeared. They heard nothing for two months. Then in late October a postcard came to Brian at the house in Georgetown, postmarked from Durango, Colorado. The card was from Sue, enrolled again at the small junior college she’d left three years earlier. “I hope by now you’ve kicked it or whatever,” she wrote, “got it back together, because if you haven’t, it’ll get harder all the time.”

  Jane Donlon thought she recognized the warning and believed it intended for her. She went to the police, who promised to look for him, and visited two halfway houses with the family physician, searching for information. She learned nothing.

  The first week in December, she received a telephone call from Brian. His voice was thick with rheum and his speech was slurred. He told her he was working at a restaurant in Largo, Maryland, and didn’t need money. He’d called because it was Thanksgiving and they would be having turkey and cranberries. He’d thought of sending them a bottle of Madeira, like the bottles his grandfather uncorked at the house in Connecticut, but hadn’t been able to find the right label. He said he wanted to wish them a happy Thanksgiving and hung up. Thanksgiving was five days past. She and Ed visited every restaurant they could find in Largo, Maryland, but Brian wasn’t employed at any of them. That was the last they heard from their son.

  The second week in January, Jane received a call from the Washington police, narcotics division, asking to speak to her husband. She lost control of herself and the detective said he would call back in thirty minutes, after her husband was home. She was unable to reach Ed at his office and called Haven Wilson instead at the Senate office building, still semihysterical. He telephoned the narcotics division, spoke to the detective, and then drove to Georgetown to pick up Ed Donlon. At George Washington University Hospital, Donlon broke down in the parking lot and couldn’t leave the car. Wilson met the detective alone inside. The body lay on an emergency room receiving table in the morgue, covered by a sheet, one foot exposed. As soon as Wilson saw the old man’s foot, grayish-yellow, wrinkled, vein prominent below the ankle joint, the sole carbon black, he knew the police had made a mistake; but the error was his. Wasted and sallow from hepatitis, Brian Donlon lay under the sheet, dead of a drug overdose. Heroin and cocaine had been injected in combination into a vein bruised with needle marks. He was nineteen years old. He’d been dead for six hours when the landlady of a rooming house near Dupont Circle found the body next to the bed in his furnished flat.

  “You never talked to him, never! You never talked to him!” He stood in the downstairs hall of the Georgetown house that evening, listening to Jane Donlon upstairs, where her husband was trying to comfort her. Wilson had visited Brian’s furnished room alone and had returned with those possessions the narcotics squad had been willing to release. They’d found a quantity of marijuana in the rear closet and suspected Brian had been retailing it from a source in rural Virginia. Everywhere in the room he’d found evidence of Brian’s paralysis—the dozens of letters begun to his parents and to Sue but never completed, the fragmentary drawings and sketches in the artist’s pads, the aimless prose poems of the composition books, and the wooden box of rusting objects from the farm lying in dust beneath the bed.

  A sudden stranger in the Georgetown house, he listened to Jane Donlon’s anguished voice, to her husband’s hoarse words of consolation, and returned to the living room with the portfolio of Brian’s letters and sketches. In the armchair next to the floor lamp, he sorted through them again until he found the most recent one. It was dated January 11, the day before, and he’d found it lying in full view on the table. As incomplete as the others, it was addressed to his mother:

  I always thought Dad knew something special, knew something he’d tell me one day, but he never did. This was what I always thought, even after I went to Haverford. It was always in the back of my mind whenever we were together, whether it was working on the farm or doing something else—that maybe this was the day he would tell me.

  But that day we had the argument, I knew he was never going to tell me, that he was keeping it all for himself or he just didn’t know, and so I knew the time had come to find it for myself.

  “You never understood him, never! You refused!”

  Jane Donlon’s voice was exhausted now, only a throb of brightness dissolving in her throat, like water into coarse sand. He hesitated, still holding the letter under the lamplight, trying to decide. He was still considering the letter as the chimes sounded. The Donlon family physician was at the front door, summoned by Ed Donlon. Wilson admitted him and after he’d gone upstairs, returned the letter to the portfolio. These were Brian’s words; Wilson was a stranger., He had no right to withhold them.

  Two months later, the Donlons separated. Jane went to Connecticut and apprenticed herself to a potter and sculptor.

  9.

  Artie Kramer was ten years older and an inch shorter than his auburn-haired wife. His gray hair was long on top, combed back neatly from his tanned forehead, but puffed out like goosedown over the small ears. He looked like a man who spent a few hours a day under a sunlamp. His skin had an orange-yellow luster that didn’t so much resemble sunburn as it did margarine coloring. He wore a blue blazer, a white turtleneck, and flared gray trousers. Worn over his shoulders like a cape was a creamy-white car coat with more flaps, epaulets, zippers, and brass rings than an Italian fl
ying circus. For all this sartorial tidiness, fashion had done nothing to improve the face, which was as sour and rumpled as a club fighter’s gym bag. His voice was loose, rumbling, and derisive, delivered out of the side of his mouth, like the windowman’s at a Coney Island hot dog stand.

  But he’d stopped complaining now and sat in the center of the flagstone terrace overlooking the Potomac, in a wicker chair fetched by one of his factotums from the game room of Grace Ramsey’s cliffside house. His steady gaze drilled the sunlit spaces somewhere beyond the river. The nostrils of the battered nose were somewhat flared, as if still outraged by the headful of bad odors brought back with him from his private tour of the house. He also continued to ignore Haven Wilson, who sat on the stone wall nearby, his back to the river, regretting his decision to join them.

  He’d been waiting for the group when they’d finally arrived, thirty minutes late, driven out from Washington in a limousine-service Cadillac preceded by Edelman’s diesel Mercedes and Strykker’s white BMW. In the Cadillac with Kramer were Rita and two men who had accompanied him from the West Coast. One, named Chuckie Savant, was a plump little sycophant who scurried about with a headwaiter’s briskness and self-importance, and the other was a glum, goat-shouldered moron named Franconi, who had no voice at all and whose eyes were hidden behind dark glasses.

  Kramer hadn’t acknowledged his wife’s introductions as Wilson met them in the front drive. He hadn’t even turned in Wilson’s direction. Rita Kramer had been left standing alone, embarrassed. Chuckie Savant and Franconi had stared at him sullenly and then moved away too, following the two Kramers as they toured the grounds and then disappeared into the house. Edelman, tall, gray-haired, with a pharmacist’s pallor and dry white lips, had introduced himself but found he had nothing to say. He removed his glasses, wiped them silently, and strolled after his clients. Strykker didn’t leave his car. He watched somberly through the window, said something to his woman companion, and drove quickly away.

  Wilson had waited alone on the terrace, listening to the voices from inside—Rita Kramer’s first, followed by her husband’s, harsher, crueler, growing more ugly, his taunts unanswered. Then he’d heard no voices at all, just footsteps, the slam of a door, the slam of another, this time louder. It was after one of these explosions that Edelman appeared suddenly on the terrace alone, as if blown through the door by the concussion. He said nothing, prudently ignoring Wilson as he stood at the end of the terrace, studying the river and polishing his glasses again. Chuckie Savant and Franconi emerged a few minutes later and strolled together toward the nylon-covered swimming pool, deep in conversation. Five minutes later, Rita and Artie Kramer appeared.

  “You don’t know, you just goddamn don’t know,” Kramer was saying as he emerged into the autumn sunshine. “The sleazebags, the goddamn sleazebags.” Rita Kramer’s face was flushed, her eyes averted. “Where the hell are the goddamned chairs?” Kramer grumbled, searching for a place to sit in the sun. Chuckie Savant hurried inside and returned with two basket chairs. One remained unoccupied. Rita Kramer disappeared around the corner of the house and her husband sat in silence, nostrils flared, gazing suspiciously out across the river toward the Maryland hills.

  Now Rita Kramer had returned with a wicker picnic basket from the limousine and was unpacking the catered lunch. She unwrapped the tea sandwiches, uncovered the salad and plates, and began filling the plastic glasses from a bottle of chilled Chablis.

  The day was clear, the azure sky unbroken by clouds. The terrace, warm in the autumn sun, was cool in the shadows.

  “Where’s the Washington monument?” Artie Kramer grunted unpleasantly, bestirring himself.

  His wife moved to the stone wall. “You can almost see it,” she said, leaning out over the cliff and pointing upriver with a salad spoon.

  “Almost. Always almost,” her husband said. “Almost shit.” He made no move to look. Instead he turned to Chuckie Savant. “What’d that PR flack say about almost?”

  “Which flack?”

  “From the studio. You know, cojones. Almost.”

  “That was ‘if.’ If your mother had cojones, she’d be your father.” Savant chuckled. “But it comes to the same thing.”

  “Sure it comes to the same thing,” Kramer said. “What do you think I said?”

  “What’s cojones?” Franconi asked.

  “What do you think it is if your mother had them she’d be your father?” Artie answered. “Where’s Georgetown?” He looked across the river.

  “The same way,” Rita answered, again pointing with the spoon.

  “What’s that over there?” He nodded across the river.

  “Maryland,” Edelman replied. No one spoke for a long time. Rita Kramer went back to the wine bottle and finished filling the glasses. She served the others and then Wilson, who seldom drank wine in the middle of the day, but had no heart to refuse her.

  “We drove through Georgetown last night,” Artie Kramer said to no one in particular, shoulders hunched, knees drawn together like an invalid as he scratched his ankle. “Last night and this morning. It was crowded, all jammed up—wall-to-wall hookers, niggers, and junkies. Franconi didn’t go.”

  “I hadda date,” Franconi said.

  “Sure, Frankie had a date. A two-hundred-dollar date. How can anyone live in that place? Where’s the privacy, huh? That’s where you hang your hat, isn’t it, Edelman?”

  “Not really, but there are some attractive locations in Georgetown,” Edelman replied.

  “We didn’t see them, did we, Chuckie?”

  “Naw, we didn’t see them.”

  “Only I didn’t say Lake Tahoe, did I say that? All the way out here? Lake Tahoe?” Kramer’s head was turned as he spoke to his wife, who knelt at the picnic basket behind him, but he couldn’t see her face. She didn’t lift her gaze from the plates she was preparing. “Did I say Lake Tahoe?”

  “No,” she answered, her head still lowered. “You didn’t say that.”

  “O.K., then, you shoulda waited like I told you to—”

  “I wanted to save you the trouble—”

  “You shoulda waited, goddammit!” His voice lifted cruelly, but she didn’t stir, still crouching out of sight, searching for knives and forks from the basket.

  Wilson had seen and heard enough. He rose silently, looking at Rita Kramer.

  “Two days, that’s all,” Kramer muttered, turning back toward the river. “Just two days, two crummy days, an’ I woulda been here myself, handling these sleazebags.”

  Rising, Rita leaned over from behind him, put a paper napkin on his knee and then a paper plate. He moved the wineglass to his left hand and took it. “What is this stuff?” He picked suspiciously at the corner of the sandwich.

  “It’s chicken and lettuce, all white meat.”

  “That’s mayonnaise. That stuff looks like mayonnaise to me—”

  “It’s butter; just butter, salt, and pepper, that’s all—the way you like it.”

  Gingerly Kramer picked up the sandwich and began to chew, his mouth partially open, the sounds audible to everyone. Wilson carried his wineglass back to Rita Kramer’s picnic basket.

  “I think I’ll move along,” he told her. “The security man can lock up after you’re finished.” She lifted her head, her eyes wide, like a punished child. It wasn’t the face he had grown accustomed to.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Stick around, Wilson,” Artie Kramer called loudly over his shoulder, still smacking his lips. “I haven’t finished with you yet. You think I forgot about you, watching over there all this time like some kinda Mister Invisible? You think I’m just sitting here enjoying the scenery? I seen better scenery in Bakersfield. I wanna talk to you.”

  “Please,” Rita whispered.

  Wilson returned to the stone wall and sat down.

  Artie Kramer finished his sandwich and gazed out over the river, butter still on his lips, his cheeks pouched like a chipmunk’s. His jaws still moved rhythmically
. He washed his mouth with Chablis, put paper plate and plastic glass on the flagstones at his feet, and wiped his face, neck, and ears with the napkin. “Maybe you think I didn’t notice,” he resumed, tossing the wadded napkin toward the picnic basket. He missed and it rolled into the cool shadows. “Hey, babe,” Kramer remembered, watching his wife retrieve it, “I forgot to tell you. Howie Dickson bought a place up near Carmel. Paid what—eight hundred thou, Chuckie?”

  “Eight hundred thou,” Chuckie said.

  “That’s nice,” Rita said.

  “Wait’ll they hear about this. Wait’ll they hear Rita bought a wired-up house built by the head of the CIA—right, Chuckie?”

  “Wait’ll they hear,” Chuckie said, turning to look at Wilson.

  “Only we wanted to come into Washington real quiet, didn’t we, babe? Real quiet. No bank dicks at the front gate, like this one has got, no one blowing off sirens, no closed-circuit TV unless we put it in ourselves. You a friend of his, Wilson? Is that why you were giving Rita all of this hassle about this house, checking her out like you were looking for something? What are you looking for? You wanna see my tonsils, you wanna see my gall bladder scars?”

  “Let’s not start that again, Artie,” Rita said.

  “Start what? I’m talking to Wilson, O.K.? I’m not talking to you! I’ll get to you, don’t you think I won’t. This guy’s into me for a hundred and fifty Gs already, like you are! You mean I can’t talk to him like he’s my pal? If I was into someone for a hundred and fifty Gs, I’d be his pal, O.K.? How about it, Wilson? You a friend of his?”

  “Who are we talking about?” Wilson asked.

  “Who’m I talking about, listen to him. Who’m I talking about? The guy that built this house, that’s who I’m talking about. So what’s all this hassle, all this shit with Rita, with Edelman there? All those guys in uniforms out at the gate, all this hardware inside? I may not have a pedigree like you creeps, but I’m not stupid!”