The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “Not worth toting away,” said the older man. “Engine’s froze up, frame’s out of line, not worth shit. Got stole, drove without oil, then wrecked. How come you’re asking?”

  Wilson said he had a similar one he was restoring. He asked when it had been stolen.

  “Six months ago, maybe.”

  “Cronin fixed it up,” the young man said. His thick dark hair was uncombed and his bony, unbearded face was that of an adolescent. Only his height and hands were those of a man; his fingers were large and the cracked knuckles embedded with grime. “Got it running good and drove it around town, a pickup car. Then he wrecked it again, couple of weeks ago.”

  “How?” Wilson asked.

  “Have to ask him; no one’s seed him since.”

  “Yeah, Cronin—Cronin shit,” said the mechanic, crossing to a Fiat sedan with its hood up.

  “Who was Cronin? A mechanic?”

  “Pickup and service man,” said the young man. “Used that car all the time after he got it running again. Only one it’d run for.”

  The mechanic wandered back to the bench for a socket wrench. “Screwy as that car was,” he said. “Agent Orange, cowboy, whatever you wanna call him, a real junkie weirdo.” He banged a crescent wrench into a metal drawer and went back to the Fiat.

  “He was a good mechanic, Cronin was, only a little crazy,” the young man continued.

  “So he knows the car,” Wilson said. “Someone wanted to rebuild it, maybe he could.”

  “I reckon he could if he had his head straight.”

  “You know where I could find him?”

  “I dunno; he never would hardly say. Living with that same girl, I reckon.”

  “Maybe I’ll talk to them up front.” He watched the mechanic as he bent under the Fiat hood. “You wouldn’t happen to know where this girl lives, would you?”

  “No, sure don’t. Worked at a pizza place over on Telegraph Road is all I know. She used to call here.”

  “You remember her name?”

  The young man thought for a minute, shaking his head. Then he hesitated and smiled awkwardly in a moment of pure adolescent divination. “Yeah,” he recalled. “Wendy, like the hamburger place.”

  “Screwy, got a screw loose,” explained the rental manager in the front office. “Junkie, pothead, I don’t know what all.” A voluble, middle-aged man, he followed Wilson out of his small office, counting a handful of coins he’d taken from his pants pocket. His pants sagged low on his hips. Pushed back on his head was a pearl-gray fedora with a thin brim. He wore a butterscotch sports shirt buttoned at the collar, but no tie. “Tried to meet him halfway, give him a chance, the way I would any vet, but it didn’t do no good. In an’ out of the VA hospital, in an’ out of trouble, sometimes wouldn’t show up at all. No telling where he’s running loose at.” He paused in front of the soft-drink dispenser in the customers’ waiting room, still fingering the coins. “Slept in a cot back in the parts room first month he was here; didn’t know it till the mechanic back there told me. Had to put a stop to that. Told me he couldn’t get a place. Had to garnishee his wages a couple of times. Still owes me a hundred, but I’m not looking for him. Not looking for no trouble, neither.”

  He’d told Wilson to write him a letter and offer a price if he was interested in the junked Alfa. He didn’t have Cronin’s address—he’d kept on the move, one room after another every month and they couldn’t keep up—but he was a good mechanic, factory-trained by a foreign-car agency in Flushing, New York. Then he’d had some problems with the VA and come to Washington. The last time he’d seen Cronin was the day before Wilson’s accident on the beltway. They’d found the Alfa, wrecked, at the rear of the lot a day later. “He was supposed to be in Atlantic City, picking up a car, but he doesn’t show up and we find the car in the back there. What happened was he had a headful of something and come in that night and run that Alfa into the tow truck that was in the back, got scared and took off. When he called in the next day, I fired him. He was drunk on something then. Don’t know what it was, don’t wanna know.…”

  His hands had returned to his pants pockets and now he brought the coins out again, separating them carefully. “It’s a shame,” he said, “that’s what it is. The VA hospital puts a man on drugs and turns him loose, no telling what he’s gonna do.…”

  “I appreciate your help,” Wilson said, pulling on his coat. “Thanks again.”

  “No trouble, friend.” He stopped to count the coins again as he stood in front of the soft-drink machine. The office was deserted, like the windy lot outside. No customers had called, the phones were silent. In his careful segregation of the palmful of coins, Wilson saw the hebetude of an idle service bureaucracy: car salesmen, clerks at their counters, barbers behind their empty chairs, gas station attendants on the midnight watch—all groping in frustration to unlock their boredom, like a child shaking a useless clock. “Don’t know what it’s all comin’ to,” the manager complained. “Try to help someone out and you just get yourself in trouble. But try telling that to some junkie Vietnam vet thinks folks like you an’ me owe him a living. Get educated right quick. Better have yourself a baseball bat ready when you do.”

  He grinned at Wilson suddenly, as if they were fellow sufferers, middle-aged, middle-class, and everywhere oppressed.

  Maybe that’s it, Wilson thought as he crossed toward the gate.

  Telegraph Road was a long, dreary boulevard. The rain began, stopped, and began again. He counted four pizza parlors along the way. At a phone booth outside a drugstore he called two before he located one where a girl named Wendy had once worked. She’d left several weeks earlier. The order clerk who told him this hung up when he learned Wilson wasn’t phoning in an order. He drove back to the pizza parlor, a new building painted in bright colors, like a carnival midway’s version of an old trolley car. The counter clerk wasn’t helpful, but the young blond girl who took his order in a rear booth had just come on duty. Her pink gingham dress was crisp and clean, her eyes bright, and he was her first customer. She brought him a pizza and a draft beer and said she thought one of Wendy’s friends still worked in the kitchen. As she gave him his check, she supplied a street name but no number, just a neighborhood not far away—an intersection with a traffic light, a gas station on the corner, then a furniture refinishing shop, a duplex next door with rooms in the back.

  He found himself on a rain-darkened walk between two clapboard houses. Beyond a sun porch whose windows were hung with green plants was an entry door, the gray paint worn with passage. Two of the four metal nameplates on the post held no cards; the names on the others weren’t familiar. Inside was a small hall, a set of chairs, and the doors to the unfurnished downstairs rooms. One door was open, but the room inside, painted an electric blue, was empty except for a mattress in the middle of the floor. He heard the sound of a television set within the door facing the front of the house. A dog began to bark furiously as he knocked and he heard its nails scratching against the linoleum inside as the door opened a crack and a pair of dark-brown eyes peered out.

  He took off his hat and said he was looking for a girl named Wendy. The door opened further. The woman who appeared was gray-haired, her face as plain as a dumpling, but her eyes were as brisk as her voice. “Gone; moved out a couple of weeks ago.” She nudged the slavering Boston bull terrier back into the sun porch with her foot. “That’s her place across the hall there, used to be.”

  The television had grown louder, aromas from a kettle of steaming vegetables bathed his face, and the pop-eyed bull terrier eluded the landlady’s ankles to stand at Wilson’s feet, stiff-legged and harmless, panting in the cool of the hallway. The girl had left ten days earlier, but without a forwarding address. She’d left the mattress behind; the landlady had her room deposit and wouldn’t return it until the flat was emptied.

  “Living alone? No, there was this fella moved in with her. That’s why I told ’em to git, both of ’em. No doubles here. He was trouble too, trouble
from the first. Played that stereo turned up loud all the way. Couldn’t hardly hear yourself think, it was so bad. You a relative of hers?”

  “No, just a friend.”

  “That girl needs friends. She sure does.”

  He asked the landlady if he could leave a message for Wendy. She seemed hesitant at first. “Less I see of them, the better.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Wilson said.

  The woman nodded. “I could leave it with her mail, I suppose.”

  Wilson scrawled out a message in his pocket notebook. “Wendy—Tell Cronin I’m looking for a mechanic to restore a 1971 Alfa Spider. Good pay.” He tore it out, folded his business card inside, and handed it to the woman.

  “She was driving a new car last time I saw her,” the landlady said as she took the message, “but she hasn’t paid me her phone bill yet.”

  “What’s her last name?”

  “Murdock. I thought you said she was a friend.”

  “I’d heard she was married.”

  “Don’t have to be nowadays. Come and go like alley cats. She owe you money?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Just asking,” she replied with sudden coolness, her curiosity ended. She shut the door.

  Though the rain had stopped, the tires hissed along the wet pavement. A cold front was moving through but would be gone by morning, the radio weather bulletin predicted, bringing clear skies for the weekend. Wilson was going to the Shenandoah the following morning, to look at a farm. He started to turn off the radio but refrained as he heard the music, whose blandness dissolved the grime of the morning like a solvent. Carried along by the flow of traffic, he imagined Betsy at that hour, standing in front of her class; his older son, scrubbing for surgery in a Boston hospital; and Paul, the younger, settled at his typewriter over a draft editorial for his Oregon newspaper. He felt for a moment that surety that sometimes comes to husbands and fathers who, however disappointing their own careers, know their efforts weren’t entirely wasted. Feeling that eased the shame of thinking how astonished or even disappointed they might have been had they known what he’d done with his morning.

  6.

  Donlon seemed hypnotized by the woman, hovering over her and sending curious looks down her low-cut silk dress. “I suppose it’s the weather that keeps me indoors,” she said in her dark, rich voice. She’d once been a handsome woman and the ghost of that beauty was still apparent. Her silver-gray hair was almost white in the lamplight, the silhouette striking, but the dark-brown eyes seemed clouded as they’d looked up at Wilson, obscured by a hint of gray film. He’d thought of cataracts. Seeing her more closely, Wilson was all the more perplexed by Donlon’s fascination. Her arthritic fingers were as gray as chalk, her mouth a seam of pale pink, imperfectly painted, the color straying above the upper lip and onto the creased skin.

  “That’s what is so depressing,” she intoned, “not being able to get about because of this dreadful rain.”

  Her name was Cornelia Bowen and she sat on a cushioned rosewood chair in the second-floor living room belonging to Ed Donlon’s law partner, the cocktail party’s host. The room was overly warm from the log fire and the crush of late arrivals, come from some nearby diplomatic reception. Through the open door of the terrazzo sun porch behind her, a breath of cooler air stirred from the open window.

  Joining them, Wilson had noticed Leyton Fischer on the porch. He was about to move down the steps toward him, curious about Nick Straus’s sudden transfer at the Pentagon, but Ed Donlon restrained him, as if what Cornelia Bowen was saying was of tragic importance.

  She was describing her fall on the first-floor landing of her Georgetown house six months earlier, when she’d broken her ankle. Her chauffeur and handyman had died the previous spring, collapsed suddenly on the rear patio as he carried a sickly potted plant from the solarium for its rejuvenation by the May sun.

  Wilson found it difficult to muster much sympathy, unlike Donlon. “I certainly hope you’re not alone now,” Ed said, concerned.

  “Oh, no, there’s Mrs. Childers, my housekeeper. I don’t believe you ever met her. She’s almost seventy-five now.”

  “It’s the pervasive unremitting vulgarity,” a woman’s caustic voice intruded from behind Wilson’s right shoulder. “You knew it was coming, you could predict it—just commerce and convenience. First the flip-top box, then the pull-tab beer can, next the throwaway razor, now throwaway sex. All-night porno on cable TV …”

  She must be a Democrat, Wilson thought.

  “I do a little needlepoint,” Cornelia Bowen was saying, “but only for short periods because of my eyes.…”

  “So you know what was next,” the caustic voice continued relentlessly, “everything quick, cheap, and convenient. I mean, look at this administration. The quick script, the instant fix.” Wilson moved his head to identify her, but her back was to him. “Next it’ll be the digestible booze bottle and the do-it-yourself funeral. A closet-sized microwave oven in the basement.” A squall of cigarette smoke enveloped him as a silvery-blond head leaned into view and a slim hand carried away the cherry table’s only ashtray.

  “Where’d you read that?”

  “Who’s got time to read in this town? Where else? Standing in the Safeway line, looking at the National Enquirer, like everyone else. Like Reagan, getting his morning brief at the White House.”

  “I do less reading now,” Cornelia Bowen droned on.

  “A little white flash of light and poof! That’s it. You can put hubby number three in the flowerpot with the African violets.…”

  “A few old friends come by to read to me now and then. It’s rather a lost art, isn’t it? I felt a little foolish at first, very embarrassed for them, but that’s passed now. I don’t feel much like an invalid at all and I think my readers enjoy it as much as I do. We look forward to it. Leyton is reading Jane Austen to me—he’s just next door. You should come read with us, Edward.”

  Donlon looked like a flattered choirboy in the sacristy whom the bishop had just deigned to address. “Oh, yes, I think I’d like that,” he said quickly.

  “We’re finishing Mansfield Park,” she continued. “I insist Leyton leave it with me so he won’t finish it alone during one of his trips. He’s made two to Europe with the Secretary since May and one to the Middle East. Leyton’s suddenly indispensable, to me and it seems everyone else.”

  Wilson had never cared much for Leyton Fischer and now, hearing Cornelia Bowen’s voice, he found his disapproval touching her as well. She reminded him of an elderly dowager whose recollections had so enthralled his parents when he was growing up and whose grass he’d been condemned to cut one entire summer after her gardener had ruptured himself. Her memory was like Cornelia Bowen’s, a scented private garden where she lived alone, her preoccupations never touching the lives of others beyond her high brick walls. Her friends never died. They were just shown out the ornate cut-glass front door by her white-gloved houseman one summer day, the roses in full bloom, and never returned.

  “No poetry these days?” Donlon was asking softly, bending his head near.

  Wilson wandered away, determined to leave now, with or without Donlon and Mary Sifton, but at that moment more guests were arriving and a handful departing, blocking the landing at the top of the stairs. The host had been ambushed just outside the door, deep in conversation with a departing congressman. A few couples waited near the door to say their farewells, their smiles already prepared.

  Wilson moved in the other direction, toward the small bar set up just inside the library doors across the room. The dry heat had grown sticky. The two black waiters behind the bar, forced to the corner by the congestion, were sweating and overworked, like croupiers at a gaming table.

  “Those kitschy clothes she wears, for one thing,” whispered a woman from behind Wilson as he waited. “A cabinet wife? I mean, where does she think she is? Not Washington. Nibbling quiche and gushing trendy non sequiturs that don’t mean boo to anyone?”<
br />
  Wilson asked for a whiskey.

  “Look, sweetheart, her clothes are her own business, O.K.?” grumbled a husband’s voice. “Sometimes you don’t look so hot yourself.”

  “Did you ever ask yourself what I spend on clothes?”

  He moved on into the library, drawn there by the Civil War maps and prints on the rear wall above the bookcases. A tall, gray-haired man stood there too, his back to the room, a drink in his hand as he studied the titles on the bookshelves, as if waiting to leave, like Wilson. The prints and maps were reproductions and expensively framed. Wilson lost interest and turned back.

  Leyton Fischer had joined Cornelia Bowen and Ed Donlon near the entrance to the sun porch.

  “Edward was telling us you’d joined the private sector,” Leyton Fischer said to him as he strolled up. “I must say that came as a surprise.”

  Fischer, slight and gray, wore a gray suit, vest, and his customary bow tie. An indistinct gray mustache gave the stamp of inconsequentiality to the small face.

  “Something a little different,” Wilson said, remembering how carefully one had to handle Leyton, who stored up imaginary grievances like a vain woman.

  “Oh, I’m certain of that; the Center is certainly different if it’s anything. I remember I once talked to your Dr. Foster. Foster, is that his name?” Fischer frowned, attempting to restore to vagueness a name he could have no earthly reason to remember.

  “Foster, that’s right,” Wilson said. Seeing Leyton Fischer’s dreary smile, he felt a certain affection for their poor, maligned Dr. Foster.

  “Foster, yes. I once talked to your Dr. Foster, who called to ask if I would appear on a panel the Center was sponsoring.”

  “Leyton works such terrible hours these days,” Cornelia Bowen reminded them in a whisper.

  “Rather odd, I thought,” Fischer continued prudishly. “Something about behaviorism and foreign policy.” He smiled for Cornelia Bowen’s benefit. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I had to decline, of course—quite preposterous.”