The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  Donlon at eighteen, a snowy December night in Louisville, attending his cousin’s debut at the Spinsters Cotillion at the Pendennis Club. Donlon driving his uncle’s vintage Packard through Cherokee Park, the road ahead of him a seamless white, Jack Frost in the trees, an all-night disc jockey from Chicago playing fairyland music. His toes are warm, he is slightly inebriated, and he is punished by a pair of very painful gonads. Next to him on the plush seat is a complaisant young woman from Darien, Connecticut, two years older, come to attend her college classmate’s debut. Her cheeks are plump and wind-chapped from a recent skiing weekend, she has barrel thighs, small shoulders, and a pug nose. She and Donlon have been necking continuously in the lounge chair of the sun porch since three o’clock. He’s unbuttoned her brassiere and plumbed the small cold breasts with one hand while the other has skirmished her pubic mound but gone no further. They’re surrounded by prone couples. An inquiring adult occasionally turns on the overhead light. Dawn will soon show its crapulous Peeping Tom head through the frosty windows.

  They take a drive and the cold air revives them. She begins to recite what she remembers of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” as Donlon turns into Cherokee Park toward a dimly remembered trysting place near a fountain. But snow is heavy on the hills and roads, thickening on the windshield, and his cautious speed and the privacy of their grotto tempt his partner to throw caution to the winds. She tosses her cigarette out the window and with one hand seizes his waistband while the other unzips his fly. Seduction, Donlon thought, paraphrasing Degas, required the cunning of a crime, but as he turns into the curve a cold hand is groping boldly in his underpants, Jack Frost is nipping at his testicles, and Christmas rockets are bursting across the windshield. His feet rattle on brake and accelerator, the car toboggans into the curve, twists sideways across the icy road, bongs a stone bridge, and careens into a snowy bog.

  Her head has struck the windshield. She’s lying against the door. “For God’s sake,” she weeps. “I mean, how cherry can you get?”

  Scrambling out of the car, Donlon finds himself standing on its side. A car with chains passes, crammed with high school rowdies. “Hey, buddy, your fly’s open! Next time try taking your pants off first!”

  Donlon redivivus now, marching through the Georgetown streets toward Cornelia Bowen’s house, his face stung Princeton orange by the chafing flurries, on his way to an affair twenty years suspended. These aren’t this year’s streets, not the present snow he feels. Past and present are mixed, holiday cotillions and dawn breakfasts, the bloom of a fifth of gin on his cheeks.

  Walking into his past, he crossed Wisconsin Avenue, hardly aware of the traffic creeping past. Cornelia Bowen was forty when they’d first met, Donlon ten years younger. She was the wife of a senior Treasury official and Washington held little interest for her. Her children were away in boarding school; theater, music, and art had been her diversions in New York, but politics dominated the table talk at her Georgetown dinner parties. One evening she’d discovered a young man whose memory for Yeats was greater than her own. In the spring they began meeting discreetly at the Corcoran Gallery on Sunday afternoon, her husband’s day for golf at Burning Tree. Donlon had an apartment nearby.

  He moved through the sifting snow, turned a corner, and found the house up the narrow street near the middle of the block. Her house. Or was it? A woman answered his ring, leaning on a cane, white-haired, her hair in disarray.

  Standing on the stoop, he awkwardly searched his memory for the name of Cornelia’s housekeeper. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Mrs. Bowen told me your name, but I’ve forgotten. She’s in, isn’t she?”

  A difficult moment followed.

  “You caught me by surprise; I said eight,” she replied, opening the door. “Don’t just stand there. Have you been drinking?”

  Vulgar familiarity for a housekeeper. Why was his gin bottle her business? Whose grandmother was she, anyway? Not his, thank God. Affronted, he went in silently, hat in hand. The door shut. Two minutes later he was back on the street, shaken. A lewd mistake, but not his.

  He moved on, up the street, following the lights, marching now toward the clock at the Biltmore, where he would wait for an aspiring ballet dancer who would never appear.

  The Italian restaurant high on Wisconsin Avenue stopped serving at ten, but the snowy streets had reduced the evening trade and emptied the two dining rooms by nine-thirty. Donlon sat alone at a rear table, carrying on an imaginary dialogue with the hostess. She was seated at an adjacent table, trying to ignore him as she reviewed the evening’s receipts. He was finishing a bottle of red wine.

  “Let me offer you some,” he said, lifting the bottle again.

  “No, thanks,” she repeated for the third time. She didn’t lift her head.

  Thoughtful for a moment, aware of the superb acoustics of the empty room, he cleared his throat. “‘Too long a sacrifice,’” he announced with a certain wilted Irish charm, “‘can make a stone of the heart.’”

  “You can say that again,” she mumbled, adding up a bill.

  He waited, hurt and disappointed. She said no more. “Sorry to keep you waiting like this. Maybe someone’s expecting you.”

  “Not tonight. The snow’s keeping everyone home, which is where I should be.”

  Her hair was reddish black, her bright mouth was as small as a parakeet’s, but she had a stunning torso. Under the white blouse she wore a black brassiere. A deep shadowy canyon lay under the V of her blouse, ready for siege.

  “I live nearby,” he said, encouraged.

  She ignored him, shuffling the receipts together.

  “We could have a drink first.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said. “Angelo doesn’t like that much.”

  “Like what?”

  “Walking out the front door with the customers.”

  “Well, I think Angelo’s right. Good old Angelo.”

  “A matter of self-respect, Sicilian pride.”

  “Good old Sicilian pride.” He raised his glass. “‘I leave both faith and pride, to young upstanding men, climbing the mountainside.’”

  “You can say that again.”

  He watched her with glazed disapproval, arm still lifted. Then he put the glass down. “Never water the Beefeaters,” he said dully.

  She lifted her tired eyes. “What are you—a college professor or something?” She got up heavily, pushing up from the table. Her hips were wide and lumpy. “You ought to find a cab and go home. Twenty minutes from now you’ll be stranded. That’s why we’re sending everyone in the kitchen home.”

  “Why don’t I do that,” Donlon agreed, hearing an invitation to a tryst.

  The cashier locked the door behind him and he waited at the curb beyond the mounds of snow churned up by the passing cars. The restaurant’s lights went down and the waitresses and busboys began to leave. She wasn’t among them. He flagged down a cab, but the driver wouldn’t wait. He waited alone. Ten minutes later a small Volkswagen left the side parking lot and stopped nearby. “No taxi! Stranded!” he called out, scrambling over the mound of snow.

  She cranked down her window with professional patience, her voice weary but wise. “We got a rule inside—don’t insult the customers. It’s late and I’m tired and I don’t wanna insult you anyway. You’re a nice man and maybe you’re a college professor. My old man may not have any college degree, but he’d break you in two. You understand what I’m saying?”

  She drove off.

  He began walking, struggling down the treacherous pavement, but only as he moved into Georgetown was he aware of how complete was its transformation. It was an Alpine Village. A cross-country skier slid by; two more followed. Cars were stalled here and there along Wisconsin, some abandoned. Beer steins were brought from bars by those recruited inside to help the disabled. Couples walked in the street, holding hands. His throat grown dry, he joyfully joined a group of revelers helping push a stalled van out of a drift and then down the hill. He followe
d them into a disco bar—crowded, noisy, full of wassailers, like himself—followed them into the smell of hops, damp wool, cedar chips, and Saturday night intoxication.

  To a young waitress at the serving space next to his stool, bright-eyed and red-cheeked, flushed by the conviviality of this snowy Washington night, he said, “‘We feed the heart on phantasies.’” She pretended she heard, smiled, took her tray, and hurried away. Donlon took the smile as an invitation to the dance.

  He ordered a double martini, but it was poorly mixed. When he complained in his friendly, old-chap, tally-ho style, reminding the young bartender of the perils of cheap gin and cheaper vermouth, the young man said, “Look, it’s a busy night, friend. If you don’t like it, take your business down the street.”

  “In dulci jubilo,” Donlon said.

  He’d been here before. He remembered those young faces in the far corner—the ski sweaters, the two young men in tails. Weren’t they from the Pendennis Ballroom in Louisville, friends of his cousin Hillary? He recognized a table of drinkers from Stowe, Vermont, and that holiday when he and George Ramsey had competed for a week in sleeping their way through the Sarah Lawrence Alpine Club. “Nice to see you again,” he murmured affectionately to two young women in nylon parkas, just entering. So they were all here, these old friends from Princeton, New York, Trenton, Louisville, and Stowe, come to attend winter’s debut at Georgetown’s festive après-ski.

  He asked for another double martini. His bladder painful, he moved to the men’s room at the rear as his drink was being mixed. In the washroom mirror he discovered a poor dim dishonored replica of his own face, as muddy as those pathetic oil portraits Jane once painted of him, her family, and her friends—this before her Corcoran instructor advised her to transfer her talent to clay and stone, where her crimes against humanity went undetected. The face troubled him. Returning to the front bar, his nostrils reeking of mothballs, his right leg wet, he found someone had taken his stool. He didn’t protest. As he reached forward to take his glass, a young woman turned suddenly:

  “Would you stop breathing on me, for Christ’s sake!”

  Obviously a mistake. He opened his mouth, but no words came. He’d forgotten her name. “Sorry,” he managed finally.

  She turned back to the bar and he watched in fascination as a long arm reached behind a tweed-clad back from a stool away. Sly fingers that weren’t his teased the soft hairs at the base of the young woman’s neck.

  She turned immediately. “I’m warning you!”

  He smiled, finding the face crudely familiar. “Tally-ho,” he remembered. “‘Rody, blow the horn.’ Nancy, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not Nancy and someone’s gonna blow your horn if you don’t keep your goddamn hands to yourself.”

  “Come on, leave her alone, will you?” her companion asked.

  “Charley, would you get this guy off my back and find him a table somewhere.”

  “Come on, mister, I told you,” said the bartender. “Take your business down the street.”

  “Is this not a public house?” he asked, eyes drawn to some ribald face, satyr or goat, he wasn’t sure, cropping glass bottles along the mirrored shelf behind the bar. His hat was on crooked, his tie caught on one shoulder, like an epaulet.

  “I mean, look at the poor guy, would you?” someone pleaded.

  The bartender gently obliged, removed the glass from his hand, and guided him out the door. He made no protest. He couldn’t focus his eyes. With careful dignity, he fell across the bank of snow at the curb and into the street. He hadn’t seen it and now that he did, sat atop it, blissfully breathing in the cold, dark air. He stood up at last, eyes stung bright by the cold. He found the middle distance—a familiar sign down the hill—and made for it. The world had come back into focus—joyous world, magnificent world. He was amazed. Skiers slid by gracefully, couples walked hand in hand, a snowball sped over his head and vanished into the night, like a meteorite.

  At the entrance to his street, a small car without chains or snow tires was stuck in a drift at the curb. Four hefty female college students were straining against the rear end, trying to push it free into the downhill lane. Gallantly he moved to their assistance. In the darkness there was confusion for a moment as the driver and one of the pushers changed places. In the melee he found his hands pressing heroically against two soft plush fenders in ski pants, his right thumb dangerously near that crevasse—

  “Hey!”

  The car was mercifully free. So was he. His street was dark, the snow drifting down.

  Old lecher with a love on every wind.

  He moved with dignity, erect and graceful. Disasters had been avoided, humiliations adroitly sidestepped. He had a precise notion of who and where he was, himself, Edward Donlon, this vast hovering presence extending over Alpine Washington from Bethesda to Alexandria, seeing all, forgiving all. Crossing an icy patch near his front gate, he lost his balance momentarily but didn’t fall. Perilously close, though. No one had seen—only Bishop Berkeley and himself.

  At the top of his porch steps, he said adieu to the evening, his consort, bowing, then leaning forward to blow his breath back into the air. Still leaning forward, he slowly drank it in again, as if drawing this entire intoxicating evening into his lungs for safekeeping until tomorrow evening at seven, when, from this same porch, he would blow it out and resume his pilgrimage. The effort left him dizzy.

  He struggled on the porch to find his door key. The key was inserted but the door swung open, unlocked, and he moved into the familiar warmth of his front hall. A pair of matched leather bags stood alongside the staircase.

  Grace Ramsey’s?

  The lights in the front room were on. So was the lamp in the small hall between the dining and living rooms. He heard an oddly familiar voice, a woman talking—not the housekeeper’s Maryland nasality, not Grace Ramsey’s secretive murmur, but a sharp, incisive voice. He moved on, through the living room.

  “I think he just walked in—wait a minute. Ed? Ed, is that you?”

  He stood looking into the small lamplit hall where Jane stood, telephone in hand. She looked very tall, very elongated, somehow thinner. Her hair was cut short. She wore a gray tweed suit and the hall reeked of strong cigarette smoke.

  “Yes, it’s Ed. He looks snockered. Are you snockered, Ed? I’m talking to Greta in Old Lyme.”

  She held out the phone, but he didn’t know what to say. He felt like Tom Thumb, fallen into the milkmaid’s churn.

  “Yes, I’m afraid he’s sloshed, too shocked to say a word. The weather’s absolutely atrocious, as I said. I was delayed out of New York for four hours and we flew into Baltimore, of all places. I despise flying anyway and my angst level was absolutely poisonous. I couldn’t cope. Fortunately my seat companion helped—a doctor, totally nonthreatening. I could let myself go without feeling victimized.…”

  What barbaric intruder was this?

  “… no psychic massacres yet. Yes, he just walked in and we haven’t talked. He certainly looks nonvindictive, but you can’t tell what kind of wormwood his thyroid is secreting.…”

  He listened woodenly, without the strength to remove his coat. She watched him as she talked on. “Yes, Grace met me at Baltimore—she hired a car. She’s been so supportive in all this.…”

  She was whispering now, her back to him. Wizened and old, he’d shriveled like a sea orchid, brought up from the depths. He was still standing there when she hung up. She took off his hat, then helped with his coat, stripping it from the back, the sleeves turned inside out and pulled off from the rear, like a straitjacket. She led him across the room and up the steps.

  Who was this person?

  At the landing, catching the warm wind of some gentle fragrance, he clumsily tried to embrace it, but a firm knee backed him away.

  “Don’t be archaic; this is strictly a cooperative household. Grace has been warning me for weeks you were tottering on the brink, but I had no idea it had gone this far. Your breath is absol
utely atrocious.”

  He leaned backward, looking up, but reeled, losing his balance. Jane held him under the arms. Still he looked up. Grace Ramsey, a spy in his house?

  It was true. She was there, standing at the banister on the third floor, looking down, hovering over the stairwell like the Queen of the Night, come to safely return this house, this home, this family, to her fairyland cuckoo kingdom.

  “Yoo hoo.” He waved feebly, moving his fingers.

  She helped him up and led him into the second-floor bedroom, where she helped him undress. He ignored the pajamas she’d found for him and crawled into bed in his undershorts. “I’m going to stay and help you, but you’ve got to cooperate,” she said. She paused at the door. “Do you want me to leave the light on?” He didn’t answer and she went out, shutting the door behind her.

  He’d heard their whispers and recognized their conspiracies since he’d learned to walk, wakened to their morning intrigues and fallen asleep to their nightly plots—he the only son in a Victorian house where every room was filled with the echo of feminine strategies. A cook in the kitchen, a laundress in the basement, two spinster aunts on the third floor, a grandmother in her front suite, four sisters with bedrooms side by side on the second floor. They planned the luncheon menu over breakfast, the dinner menu over lunch, his tea dance partners, social responsibilities, barber, and yard chores over dinner, when his father’s place was often empty. His father preferred to work late in his downtown law office by then, near a private club, and spent the passive weekends of his middle age locked away in his downstairs study rereading Prescott, Thoreau, and P. G. Wodehouse, or listening to his Bix Beiderbecke record collection or the afternoon Phillies games to escape that shrill incessant attention of a nine-woman household.

  Young Donlon had been their prisoner instead—seventeen bloody years of it until he’d escaped to Princeton, where he’d disguised his rebellion by conquest and seduction. But after each possession, each solitary victory, one more remained. Yet he’d fooled no one. They had suckled him, coddled him, bathed him, clothed him, tutored him, taught him, fed him, fondled him, fucked him, and now they would claim him. He was theirs once again, as he had been all the time. A woman upstairs, a woman downstairs, a woman with his gin bottle—he was a prisoner of the sisterhood.