The Shadow Cabinet
Page 50
“I was embarrassed, standing in front of my class this morning,” she told him one Monday evening during dinner, after a Friday and Saturday night at the farm. “I think I was blushing.”
He’d known what she meant; it was no less mysterious to him. He’d resisted casual or curious visitors for the same reasons.
The two bathrooms had been completed and the house was more habitable the bright Sunday afternoon Ed Donlon visited them after his lunch with Angus McVey. He was alone in his BMW. In tweed jacket and crushed Irish hat, he seemed proud of his sobriety. He gave the house his approval. Betsy’s dishevelment seemed to intrigue him—her dark hair tied up in a bandanna, the loose, paint-speckled T-shirt, and the ripped tennis shoes. He announced he’d taken up bird-watching. He rose quite early these mornings, but bird-watching was more than just an urban indulgence while waiting for the coffee to boil; Jane needed her rest, you see. He was back to a two-woman household again. Grace Ramsey had departed once more. The Aegean, he thought, but couldn’t be sure. Jane’s studio was now on the third floor and her statuary in the back garden. He chased starlings, nesting chickadees, titmice, juncos, even a grosbeak, from the crypts and hollows of her mounted pieces. On Saturday mornings, he occasionally took his binoculars along the C&O canal.
He talked as he followed them about the rear meadow, where they were staking out a vegetable garden, avoiding the patches of mud, the sere stalks of last autumn’s burrs, and the string lines. Like the gold-and-purple finches in the nearby woods, drab in their winter colors, some brightness, too, had fled from Ed Donlon’s eyes. He left promptly at four. Dinner on the dot these days, artists need discipline, a continuing TV series on Sunday night public television he’d grown fond of—all these explanations offered with the authority of an asylum parolee who assures others he rules the ward with an iron hand.
In April, Ida and Nick Straus joined them for their first weekend visit. Betsy was worried that the Strauses would either be inconvenienced by the disarray or feel like intruders during a long working weekend. She’d planned to put her first plants in. The weather conspired against her. The day was cloudy and dark, rain intermittent, the wind cold. The spring sunshine that had been promised went elsewhere, flooding the offshore Atlantic, where acres of vacation light poured down on blue combers, mackerel, and yellowfin, while the weekend homesteaders of the Shenandoah shivered under gray scud and a blustery wind. Ida brought a few plants for the garden, potted at home in McLean, but the weather kept them indoors. Returned the night before from a two-day national security seminar at Cambridge, Nick Straus seemed discouraged. Confusion everywhere, he told them—confusion on the right, confusion on the left. The final morning of the conference, one group had circulated fliers inviting the participants to a Saturday antinuclear demonstration at New London, Connecticut, where a newly outfitted nuclear sub was to sail, bound for an Arctic patrol. It carried World War II’s firepower in its hull, the flier declared, but the crew was born circa 1950 and didn’t recall those details, which had been programmed instead in its computerized fire-control systems. Few of the officers had ever seen the aurora borealis, either, but a Navy artist’s facsimile was painted on the ward room door. The final afternoon of the conference had deteriorated into a shouting match between the extreme right and the extreme left.
The shuttle from Boston to New York, New York to Washington, had been late, La Guardia and National airports both shrouded by rain. His seat companion out of New York, a strange-looking U.N. official, had refused to give up his queer, bulky briefcase to the hostess for storage in the overhead compartment.
“Nick,” Ida protested.
He smiled, looking to Betsy for support. She didn’t like flying any more than he did. “You have to be careful who your seat companions are on the planet these days,” he said.
He relaxed as the afternoon passed. They inspected the garden and the rear meadow during a break in the drizzle, frightening two ducks from the pond. Under the raw, cold sky, surrounded by wet meadows and dripping woods, the old house seemed even more remote. Nick prowled the rooms with Betsy, trying to decipher its history. At dinner, he teased her about her politics. He told her he’d recently discovered a former X-rated movie house near Dupont Circle where old newsreels were shown to middle-aged audiences like them, seeking escape from the present on rainy afternoons. Pathé News and March of Time film clips take them backward to the childhood verities of black and white, where their dreams began. Today might be a sleepy Sunday afternoon in December 1941, Pearl Harbor a tranquil lagoon where the China Clipper lands en route to Shanghai, carrying Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre in wrinkled tropical suits. Tomorrow, Washington contracts as the B&O evacuates Coxey’s Army of civil servants to the hinterlands to rusticate in rural cabins. The banks reopen. Millions of small depositors return with their savings to reinvest entrepreneurial initiative. Roosevelt abdicates and the face of our grandfather, who owned the corner pharmacy with its white marble soda fountain and its five-cent ice cream, withdraws in horse-drawn carriage down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
“Sound familiar?” he asked, smiling again.
“Almost,” she said.
They talked until midnight and slept late the following morning. The peas didn’t get planted, the cabbage plants weren’t put out. After lunch they walked in the woods, searching for the first dogwood blossoms. Returning slowly through the back pasture near the creek, they found a small orange intruder, brought down by random winds and deflected cold fronts, caught in the lower branches of a young persimmon tree. Haven Wilson thought it was a hunter’s cap, Nick Straus a meteorological device. It was neither. It was a schoolboy’s balloon, trailing a length of cotton cord to which was attached a small crude card, sealed in plastic. They read it together, standing on the stone outcropping. The fifth-grade printing on the card read:
My name is Mark Parsons. I am doing a science experiment.
Please send me the following information:
1. Where did you find the balloon?
2. When did you find the balloon?
3. Who are you?
Fifth Grade, Taylor Elementary School Roaring Springs, Pa.
In certain parts of America, fifth-grade science was another kind of innocence, Betsy reminded them. Nick, accustomed to the deciphering of other trajectories these days, was still looking at the card, moved. So was Ida.
“We’ll have to answer it,” Nick insisted, lifting his eyes.
“Please do,” Betsy said, as if not surprised it had been there at all.
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d say that came out of your own seventh-grade science class,” Haven said after the Strauses had driven away, the balloon on Ida’s lap.
She laughed and they walked back toward the house. The light was fading, but she didn’t want to leave, not yet. They still had a few minutes left to them, time enough to count the ducks coming in to the rear pond.
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Copyright © 1980 by W. T. Tyler
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9702-7
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