The American Ambassador

by Ward Just

  Jews were Germans, he said.

  Hitler didn’t think so, Kleust replied.

  Their boat angled off. In the distance was the little dory with two fishermen. He and Kleust could vaguely see their rods pointed skyward; there looked to be four rods, the fishermen were trolling. It was a consoling sight, a sight almost from the century before, a peaceful scene from a painting by Caleb Bingham or Winslow Homer. If the sky were a northern sky, and the water choppier, it could be a seascape near Gloucester. Except they were nowhere near Gloucester. They were in Africa, on the edges of the Madness Belt, on a lake so remote it did not appear on maps. At the edge of the precipice, according to Kleust.

  Off the starboard bow the dory rocked to and fro, shimmering in the heat. The storm was far behind them now; the skinner had been correct. They had outrun it. They were nearing land at last, smelling its thick milky smell, as if the earth itself were lactating. The skinner suddenly shook his head and sang something incomprehensible; it sounded like a dirge. He throttled back and they approached the dory slowly, circling it, staying out of range.

  It was not a dory, and there were no fishermen with rods. He and Kleust leaned forward, appalled. What they believed from a distance to be a boat was a crocodile, dead and bloated, floating on its back, high in the water. It had taken sick and died; perhaps it had been crippled. Its fat legs pointed skyward, rocking gently as the croc yawed on the lake’s surface. Its mouth was wide open, each tooth as long as a man’s finger. The inside of its mouth was a ghastly pink. They idled a moment, looking at it. It turned toward them, moved by a sudden breeze or by something under the water. The skinner said, Female. The stench was terrible, curdled milk. They could not take their eyes from it, so unexpected an apparition. The tail has been eaten, severed at the base, ragged bits of white meat spilling into the water. He imagined the crocodiles tearing at it, hitting it again and again; the female too sick and terrified to defend herself, and finally giving up. Her belly was intact, though: smooth, creamy, swollen. The skinner throttled forward and their boat heaved, leaving the crocodile astern, swirling the wake. They watched it tip and bow, stiff and buoyant as a cork, obscenely inverted. It seemed to rush toward them, as if suddenly alive and giving chase. The dead eyes of it burned red in the sun. It followed a moment, then dropped back; something from below butted it, and the carcass began to turn, slow as the second hand of a clock. They accelerated, the skinner jamming the throttle all the way forward. They watched it recede, still rotating. As the thing receded, it resumed its former shape, an innocent dory, two fishermen in the dory, rods pointing skyward, a consoling picture.

  Bill?

  He turned, closing his eyes, feeling the African breeze on his face. He could not see Kleust’s face. What had Kleust meant about worthy women? They had talked about everything but women. Perhaps he thought worthy women had died along with the nineteenth century. Poor Kleust, he had never married; he had no children. Instead of a family, he had his history, the modern history of the German people. He cared for the history as other men cared for a family; he had a responsibility toward it. He’d said, I came in at the end of everything. But what a sight it had been, that morning on the lake, the dory and the fishermen transmogrifying into the beast, and then back again. When the beast became a dory, they never looked back. The past was past, and they kept their eyes on the approaching shore, and the deserted village with the makeshift pier. They tipped the skinner, and thanked him; he departed immediately. Then Kleust remembered that there was a bottle of Scotch in the Land-Rover. They sat in the Land-Rover drinking Scotch and debating the various routes back to the capital. It was a two-day trip, hard country roads. Kleust insisted on driving. . . . He looked at Elinor, her eyes close to his.

  Bill? How are you feeling?

  Fine, he said.

  Are you in pain?

  No, he said. Was he? He didn’t think so. It was hard to tell; he felt heavy. He came back slowly, by inches, as if from a long distance. Things did not look familiar. He was lying on his stomach, Elinor seated on a metal stool. He did not know where he was, and did not want to ask.

  “Your eyes are so bloodshot,” she said.

  “Have I been drinking?”

  She smiled. “Dear Bill. I don’t think so.”

  “I’ve been dreaming,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “Africa,” he said, “Kleust. Remember, when we took that trip, hunting crocodiles. You didn’t want to go. Kurt hated it. We shot that grandfather.” He should have taken Bill Jr. on that trip, any boy would have loved it. But Bill Jr. was already gone, living somewhere else; living in Europe.

  She smiled again. “I remember.”

  “He was here just a minute ago.”

  “No, darling.”

  “He’s a good man, you know. We’ve had so many adventures together. He was here just a minute ago. We were having a drink, and trying not to talk about women.” He hesitated, his vision suddenly cloudy. He said, “Where am I?” and as he said it, he knew where he was. The breeze died; Africa vanished. Kleust vanished. He forgot all about it. He gave himself up.

  “Do you know where you are now?”

  “I don’t want to know.” Making a joke.

  She said, “You’re with me.”

  “Well, it’s all right then.” He said, “My head hurts.”

  She said, “It’s supposed to.”

  He said, “Jesus, it hurts like hell.” He felt her lips on his cheek, smelled her familiar scent. He felt himself slipping, unable to concentrate. He had gone away, but now he was back, and wanted to go away again.

  “Darling, the operation was a success.”

  “Is that right?” He remembered the operating room now, the bright lights, the doctors and the anaesthesiologist, and counting back from ten.

  “A great success.”

  “Prowler came through?” The pain came at him in waves, centered somewhere in the front of his head. He wondered if he had shrapnel in his head, a chunk of iron that had been dislodged during the operation. He decided not to say anything about it.

  “He came through. So did you. They said you’re tougher than you look.”

  “I hope,” he said. It was gathered right behind his eyes.

  She said, “You were on the table for two hours.”

  “I believe it.” On the edges of his vision, something moved. He did not know if it was the pain moving, or a person.

  She said, “Does it hurt badly?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’ll call the nurse.”

  “I want to go to sleep again,” he said. The pain was a physical thing; it took human form. He could not see its face, but it was inside his head, talking at him.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll call the nurse.” She put her hand on his shoulder, rising.

  “Is Bill Jr. here?”

  She said, “No, darling.” He was looking at her thighs. He could not see her face.

  He said, “I thought he was here.”

  She said, “No, darling.”

  He said, “You could never count on that kid.”

  She said something he did not hear, or could not understand. Her head was above him, out of sight. Then her face was very close to his. There was one thing that he wanted to say, but he could not remember what it was.

  She said, “Bill?”

  He was looking down a long tunnel, and beginning to fall.

  She said, “I’ll get the nurse.”

  He said, “No, stay. Stay with me for a minute.” The pain lay stretched out beyond his eyes, grinning. It had a mean androgynous young face. It seemed to be challenging him, to fight or to consent; but either way there would be no winners. Moving again, fluttering its hands, the pain grew, swelling. He opened his eyes, and Elinor vanished. Why would she go, when he had asked her to stay? So it was just him and the pain, his dream world. Americans lived in a dream world; so he had been told. He felt his wife’s mouth on his cheek again. She was crying. He h
ad been talking nonsense, not knowing if he was asleep or awake. She kissed him again, spoke his name. He was so moved. The pain began to ease, rising, moving back into the shadows behind his eyes. Everything would be all right, if only she would stay. He said to her, “Stay.” Then, what he had forgotten but came back to him now, he spoke without hesitation. “I love you.”

  3

  BILL HAD BEEN READING a memoir from the Eisenhower years, and when the afternoon sun touched the top of the page he realized he had been dozing; that, or daydreaming. The radio hummed away at his elbow, Mozart. He came to. Perhaps he had transmigrated to the blue serge Washington of the nineteen fifties, to the Cabinet room of the White House, stuffed with businessmen, George Humphrey, Sinclair Weeks, Arthur Summerfield, and the others. He had been staring at the same sentence for minutes, perhaps hours. The autumn of 1957 was portentous and impressive, according to Boston’s Bobby Cutler, Ike’s special assistant for national security affairs. Gosh. All at once?

  The music stopped and someone began to speak. A national hotline had been established for missing and abducted children, an 800 number, toll-free. There were pictures of the children in supermarkets and on milk cartons and if you recognized one you should call the hotline number. A million children each year, missing. That was a little less than one half of one percent of the population of the country, missing or abducted. How the hell could there be a million missing or abducted children? Maybe some of them just lit out for the territory, bye-bye Aunt Sally. He had run away from home once, got as far as South Station; it was more fun planning it than actually doing it. The voice on the radio had a portentous and impressive quality all its own, repeating the hotline number, emphasizing again that it was toll-free. Finger a kid, and it won’t cost you a dime.

  He turned off the radio and put the book back in the shelf, next to Sherman Adams, and called upstairs that he was going out for a walk. Elinor mumbled something indistinct in reply: Fine, don’t be late, take it easy, whatever. He knew she was working, concentrating on her canvas. He could hear her radio in the background, rock music. Baseball in the summer, rock the other seasons. When she was thoroughly involved in her work she paid no attention to life outside the studio; it was as if there were no life outside the studio.

  He stepped out the front door into O Street, surprised that it was so warm; the house was cool. It was early November and it might have been July. Washington’s deceptive season. The trees, wonderfully red and gold, looked out of place in the lazy heat. Brittle leaves cluttered the sidewalks and gutters. He went back inside and removed his sweater.

  He stood on the stoop looking across the street. A young woman was punching the code into the security system of the psychiatrist’s house. Their eyes met, then slid away. She was dressed in black, black skirt, sweater, and tights, a thin gold chain around her neck. Black to match her mood, he thought, though she was an exceptionally good-looking girl, twenty or twenty-five years old. He wondered if she knew the reputation of the psychiatrist. Probably not, and anyway a psychiatrist’s reputation varied with the patient. Or did they call them clients now? He glanced at his watch—ten before the hour—and when he looked up she had vanished, the door closing with a little audible click.

  Bill walked slowly up to 34th Street and turned right. This was the part of Georgetown least changed over the years, at least physically. Pausing, he looked at the doors with their bright brass knockers, red security lights above the doorbells. All these houses had back yard gardens, flowering nine months a year, where the children played. There had been plenty of children in the old days, zipping up and down the sidewalks on their tricycles, as often as not supervised by a nanny or au pair. There were no children anymore, the neighborhood was filled with older people whose children were grown, or young professionals who did not have children. They had their careers and each other and the usual souvenirs, BMWs, houses in Virginia, money market accounts, caterers, expensive dogs, security systems. There was not a child in sight, and of course no one would dare leave a trike on the street; but if there were no children, there would be no trikes either. He had a moment of déjà vu, then realized that it was not déjà vu at all but an unconscious recollection that the brick and white-clapboard look of the street had not changed in thirty years; it had not changed since the portentous and impressive autumn of 1957. Except for the tricycles.

  In the early 1960s they had lived up the street in a little narrow house Elinor called the vertical dungeon. Their neighbors were mostly young bureaucrats, lawyers, and newspapermen. In those days there were very few newspaperwomen. Women kept house and raised the children and (Elinor told him much later) made pacts among themselves: to stick it out, that life would get better, that the children would grow up and leave home, that their husbands would grow up and stay home, that there would be a reward at the end of the day. This was early days, before their community was truly a community: before the first inexplicable death, the first divorce, the first nervous breakdown, the first flower child. They were all married to boys apprenticing to Great Men. In time their husbands would be Great Men themselves, with public careers, rank and title, profiled in news magazines. The future was assured and it seemed altogether worthwhile, even morally superior, to be conspicuous in Washington as opposed to established in Lake Forest, Darien, or Sewickley, suburbs in which they had grown up and watched their fathers prosper. They never used the word, but the truth was they believed themselves patriotic, in government service. Even journalism was a form of patriotism, and later in the decade perhaps journalism most of all.

  She had told him all this during their own bad time in the early nineteen seventies. He was astonished at how much he’d missed, at how much happened on 34th Street during the daylight hours, all the transactions in the park up the street, where the women went with their children late in the afternoon. She’d said that the women thought about sex all the time, sex being an undercurrent in Washington; sex in Washington was different, part of the city’s cultural and political life. Everyone was in heat. It had to do with Kennedy and the people around Kennedy, and the careless atmosphere they created. Their husbands, being as personally conservative as they were politically liberal, refused to believe the gossip. It was the sort of conversation mid western businessmen had in the locker rooms of their golf clubs. The women talked of little else. The men were interested in issues and answers, most of which were highly sensitive and therefore could not be brought home to the dinner table or the bedroom. At that time the city was filled with men who had outgrown their wives, giants married to runts. This was one of the hazards of Washington—so single-minded and hard-working, the stakes so high, the dangerous atmosphere reminiscent of wartime London, a romanza. It was a kind of epidemic, men outgrowing their wives, childhood sweethearts whom they’d married the summer after graduation, anticipating a pleasant commercial life in Pittsburgh or Chicago. But instead they came to Washington, were “lured,” as they said, by the promise of involvement in the national life. The men went from success to success, and the women couldn’t keep up. Nothing in their childhood had prepared them for the meritocracy and publicity of the capital, its high-mindedness and skullduggery, and their envious mothers were no help at all. Their mothers wanted the inside story of Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage.

  They took themselves oh so very seriously.

  Elinor’s estimate of one Great Man who had left his wife of thirty years to set up housekeeping with a woman young enough to be his daughter: “I think he just wanted to get laid. He probably hasn’t been laid recently. Probably he has never been laid properly. Look at his wife sometime. Of course he’s no prize either. He is not one of the men that we think about when we think about sex. But he’s on the front page of the newspaper, deciding the fate of the nation, and she isn’t. So he gets the chippy. And she gets to go home.” The silence that descended on the table that evening, the men so silent and embarrassed, the women aghast. Elinor had a way of going to the heart of things. He had delivered a lo
ng lecture to her when they got home. It was a lecture stressing the need for discretion, there were powerful people at the table. It was all right to think it, but it wasn’t all right to say it. Really, she should have some consideration. People’s lives were never what they seemed, and it was well known that the Greats had an uncommonly unhappy marriage, and he worked so hard. She had looked at him and giggled. Oh, come off it, Bill.

  He was smiling now, remembering that; she didn’t have to say anything else, and it was in the background always when he lectured her on the need for decorum and restraint. And the lectures were fewer, too; there hadn’t been one now for years. Bill walked on, remembering the old days. He thought he would walk to the park—the park down the street from their old house, the vertical dungeon, where Elinor took Bill Jr. in the afternoons, to sit on blankets on the grass and talk with her friends and watch the children play—and keep an eye on the tennis. There was often quite good tennis. He paused at the corner, listening. From somewhere nearby he heard a violin. He listened hard, his emotions beginning to tumble. The music came from the second floor of the house across the street, he could see the open window. The notes hung one by one in the thick warm air, then a thrilling arpeggio, the last note traveling to the breaking point. He held his breath, the better to preserve the single note, and when it began to fade at last (he imagined it soaring to the heavens) the fault was not that of the musician but of his own concentration. He tried to imagine the violinist, practicing Baroque music on 34th Street on a warm Wednesday afternoon. The sound seemed to be for him alone, an audience of one. The street was empty, it could have been high summer, with everyone in the country or on Cape Cod or Long Island, the capital desolate.