They patted their lips with the linen napkins and stood to leave, Robert Morton in his crisply pleated pants, shaking his knees a little so the cuffs rode over his penny-loafers. Casually, “So — a beatnik gala tonight.”
“That’s right. Her new photographs will be hanging in a popular café. I hear there’ll be music.”
“I wish I could come.”
Kimura stopped, embarrassed, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea, Bob.”
“Oh, I know, I know.”
As they were leaving the restaurant, Dr. Kimura said, “I find it hard to be middle-aged.”
“Why? You’re fit. You’re in pretty good shape in every way.”
“I’m in good shape. Yet I feel heavy with myself.”
They said goodbye on the sidewalk outside the Chateau. Morton remarked that it was a mild fall. There was soft sunlight. But Kimura seemed to have snagged a cloud, for he muttered fretfully, “Such a long season with no change in the weather!”
“Don’t worry, doc. It’ll snow.”
Kimura nodded curtly. He’d gotten cranky, unhappy. He turned and stumbled from the curb. Morton caught his arm to pull him back to the sidewalk, but Kimura’s knee gave out and he went down at a funny angle. He heard a pop and felt the meniscus cartilage squeezed, pinched and released, bruised, damaged again. An old, recurring injury. “I’m okay,” he told Morton and bid him adieu.
As he limped back to his office, Kimura’s irritation yielded to anxiety. His injured leg brought back a bad memory. Yes, Bob Morton had found him. It had frightened Kimura very much when the RCMP nosed him out as the travelling companion named in Emmett’s report to the Liaison Mission after the brawl in the bar. Robert Morton had “invited” Kimura in for questioning about his friendship with Emmett Jones. It had taken all of Kimura’s skills to conceal his fear during this questioning, his terror that Morton would connect him and Emmett with the death of a Japanese policeman. But it never came up. Morton didn’t know about the homicide in the Tokyo bar. And Kimura had helped Emmett, he’d helped his friend by drawing a portrait of him for Robert Morton, a portrait of a man innocently snared by the Red hunt.
Kimura thought, I like Bob Morton. It was true, he was excited now to be in business. Did he like being in business with Morton? Or did he want to keep Morton in full view? Yes, it’s this way for him. He has always feared the police and always loved them too.
He’d lost his fervour for practising medicine. The flesh presents untransmutable evidence of disease and decay. In these recent months, he’d felt aversion for his patients. A sort of stage fright. His compassion has been exhausted. Yet he must contrive to play against each sickness, play by play till checkmate. When did he get to be disgusted with human beings? They almost always die meanly. Even surrounded by family, they’re alone, even the very old, crying out for their mother. If only illness and death were beautiful. His knee hurt so much it made him nauseous. I should have hailed a taxi, he thought. I’ve really screwed it this time. I’ll be on crutches. I’m an imbecile.
He’s lived without great achievement. His most original act has been to serve the RCMP. An agent! Helping the police in the name of helping his friend, betraying Emmett’s privacy and in this way betraying his own privacy, inevitably, permanently, a light where there should be darkness and peace. I’ve become unnatural. He pulled at the door to his clinic. How will I live out my life? He greeted the receptionist and limped to his examination room. I should have married.
Chapter Fifteen
Emmett had noticed a sort of slipstream, when time moved more quickly and when he knew, he almost heard, what was going to happen next. For example, he knew that Harold Gembey would leave his office and go directly to see the prime minister because Gembey had told him so. But he also knew that after Gembey had left Sussex Drive, the prime minister would call him.
Emmett hadn’t had any sleep. He had a blister on his heel from his long trek home after Oscar had abandoned him on the starlit hill. Even his secretary warily noticed his high spirits, his quickened mind in dictation, felicity that seemed out of keeping in the doleful East Block. He snapped off three memos on matters that yesterday had seemed too complex for individual solution.
Oscar, you old comedian, he said to himself, we’re through, kaput, go fuck yourself.
He didn’t know if Oscar would leave him alone now. Oscar’s true motives would be unknown even to Oscar himself, maybe even to Oscar’s Soviet handler, to the handler of the handler of the handler of the air marshal of the general of the foreign minister of the Kremlin. Maybe, if Emmett Jones were wiped out by a rogue Bel Air with bad shocks, it would be because of President Kennedy. The original Marx, Herr Karl Marx, wrote that one brilliant passage on the “perversion of human needs,” and it had become a sort of mantra for Emmett. My means of life belong to someone else, my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, everything is something different from itself, an inhuman power rules over everything. An inhuman, relentless power — power for its own sake — an inhuman power rules even over Jack Kennedy.
Two hours later, when Emmett entered the boudoir of the prime minister of Canada, he found Diefenbaker dressed in a white shirt with a loosened tie, but with the same plaid flannel bathrobe thrown over his clothes, seated in a cushioned chair with his foot resting on an ottoman. Emmett greeted Dief a little too fondly and then he sobered, expressing the tired willingness of a mediocre civil servant; a necessary focus for the prime minister in tribulation. He blandly informed the prime minister that he’d had a word with Harold Gembey.
Diefenbaker cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Nothing new,” he grumbled, “same old vague poppycock.”
A vacuum cleaner powered on somewhere in the house. Diefenbaker’s bedroom resembled the one he might have had back in Saskatchewan where he’d practised law, where even his favourite painting of John A. Macdonald would represent not a statesman’s forefather but simply a common man’s ideal. The droning vacuum now made Emmett aware that Dief was not much more than a hotel guest at Sussex Drive, that the man’s chronic fury was inspired by his own sensation of being an impostor, a country cousin, a temporary embarrassment to the Establishment.
“I had visitors,” Diefenbaker began. “On the hill. Oh yes, I’ve been out today. I might just as well have been to the moon.”
The snoozy drone of the vacuum was now accompanied by the scent of floor wax. There were other odours too, of an apple pie in the oven, fragrances of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, wafting on the dust motes through the curtained bedroom. Emmett stood still but perhaps because sleeplessness recalled nights with Lennie in infancy, he swayed a little, or it was the sensation of the earth turning round. He sighed.
Diefenbaker heard the sigh and again he said, “Oh, yes. You can be damn sure I’ve had visitors. Two hours before he tells the entire world that he’s taking us to the brink of thermonuclear destruction, he sends his link boy to bring the prime minister of Canada up to speed.”
“President Kennedy, sir?”
“President Kennedy, Captain America, that arrogant son of a bootlegger. I look into a mind like that and I see a little boy, desperate to meet the measure of his own farfetched ambition. Playing politics like it’s polo. He’d sooner destroy the world than take advice from other world leaders.”
“You’ve heard from President Kennedy today, Mr. Diefenbaker?”
Diefenbaker went on, grumbling, “Of course that majordomo de Gaulle will do whatever Kennedy tells him to do. Macmillan too. I’m the only man strong enough to stand up to him. Which is why he shirks me, dodges me like a guilty schoolboy. Two hours! The very day!”
“The very day of what, sir? Two hours till what?” Emmett knew it didn’t matter how nonsensical his prompt might be; Dief would unravel his complaint as he wished. Emmett was only a figure swaying in the shadowy room.
“He showed me pictures!”
“Of?”
“Aerial photographs. Which, he claims, show a bunch of
Soviet missiles. Blow ups. Squiggles and dots. Why should I believe that wild little gangster? His fool ambassador tells me that I’m looking at Soviet missiles thirty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Shadows and polka dots! It only exists in Kennedy’s mind. He fears Cuba, so he has a nightmare, the missile sites are in Cuba. It’s the work of a psychosis. It’s a terrible joke. The world is threatened by a playboy in Washington.”
“Aerial photographs, sir? Of Soviet missile sites in Cuba?”
Diefenbaker chortled. “With enough power to blow up Hudson Bay. Enough nuclear weapons to wipe out Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, and Lima Peru. Kennedy’s trying to hold a gun to our heads.”
“Soviet missiles, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“Pictures of what he says are nuclear warheads. He’s got nuclear on the brain. We need better proof! We need consultation! If it’s real, it should go to the UN! What we need is an independent, on-site inspection by the unaligned members of the disarmament committee. But what we get is the American president showing faked-up pictures taken from an airplane and telling us it’s war.”
Emmett said, “Soviet nuclear warheads stationed in Cuba and aimed at North America.”
“Quite a story, eh? He’ll have everybody’s attention now! Champion of democracy!”
“What if it’s true?”
“Don’t be so easily fooled. It’s a phoney set-up by the CIA. It’s a manufactured crisis. It’s horse opera.”
“May I ask, what are you planning to do?”
“Nothing!”
“Forgive me, sir, but that might not be possible. Under the circumstances.”
“I say do nothing. Call his bluff. If I let my government go along with the Americans now, we’ll be their vassals forever.” Diefenbaker’s hands clutched the arms of his chair. He stared so hard at the wardrobe situated behind Emmett, Emmett turned around to look, as if an attack might spring from it. Diefenbaker asked, “Do you have children?”
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“Go home then.”
Chapter Sixteen
He went home. They watched television while they had dinner, Emmett, Suzanne, and Lenore. Emmett and Suzanne would certainly have preferred to shelter their daughter from President Kennedy’s dry, raspy presence at the dinner table but couldn’t refrain from moving the TV set around so they could watch while they ate. They had meatloaf with creamed corn, a meal that none of them liked but which Suzanne seemed to feel compelled to offer.
While Suzanne was taking away their plates, Lennie asked her father, “Is there really an imprisoned island?”
“Cuba? No,” he said. “It’s what President Kennedy thinks.”
“He’s our president?”
“No.”
“Are the Russians going to take us prisoner?”
“No, baby. That will never happen.”
“Will they blow us up?”
“No. Never.”
“How do you know?”
“It would be crazy, wouldn’t it.”
“It’s what people do.”
Suzanne returned from the kitchen with ice cream and chocolate sauce.
Lennie spooned ice cream, kicking the legs of her chair. Suzanne told her to stop, but Lennie went right on kicking. They’d turned off the TV. The only sounds were the scraping of their spoons and Lennie’s shoes striking the legs of her chair.
Finally, Suzanne said, “You have homework.”
“I already did it.”
“Then go upstairs and take a bath.”
Lennie got down from her chair. “Dad? Come to my room please.”
“Sure. Why?”
“I have to talk to you.”
He followed Lennie upstairs to her bedroom. She told him to sit, there, on the bed, and then closed the bedroom door. She still had the ballerina lamp she’d had since she was in a crib. He turned it on and touched his finger to the dust on the dancer’s pink shoe.
Lennie stood on the chair in front of her white desk to reach into the cupboard above, where once she’d stored her china horses. Now she carefully lifted down what looked at first like a stack of egg cartons but which proved to be a series of masks, one of them still powdery and unpainted, but the others lacquered in white, like egg shell, with black rims around the eyes. The painting was skilful and remotely Asian. One mask was painted in more ordinary watercolours, Emmett marvelling over the brush strokes, the blending of a sage green to make a skin tone, fawn shading at the temples. Lenore held this mask to her face.
She held the mask in place, an inch or two from her face, and in the quirky lamplight the mask threw a shadow on her own features, making a triplicate of Lennies.
He told her, these are very good; he said, he hadn’t realized she had such talent.
Lennie removed the mask and laid it down. She gently stacked them again then stood on her chair to replace them in the cupboard above her desk. “Would you like me to make one of you?” she asked.
He said he’d like that. But he hoped she didn’t want to do it right now. “I have to go back to the office.”
“Late at night?”
“The House of Commons is sitting tonight. I should go and see if there’s anything I can do.”
She looked at him without saying anything. She was wearing a navy jumper with a white shirt and navy leotards. She had long legs and arms, long hands with long fingers, and she wavered or it appeared that she did; a concentrated searching of her father’s face rippled through her body. As had happened so recently in speaking with his wife, Emmett had the sensation that if his daughter were to say what was on her mind at this moment, his world would blow up. He waited in dread. She was trembling, like water trembling at the lip of a glass before it overflows.
“What is it?” His question was barely audible. He heard her swallow. She looked into his eyes, and when she looked away, down at the baby blue carpet, he felt abandoned, irretrievable. More loudly, in a normal voice, he asked, “What’s up, Lennie?”
She said, “I’ll never tell.”
“But why?”
“I’ll never tell on you.”
“Well,” he said, laughing nervously, “thanks.” He stood up to leave.
She didn’t move but observed him closely. He might have been a well-constructed robot; she seemed mildly impressed by his ability to operate his limbs. Her lovely face, her suddenly beautiful mouth, and her direct gaze softened. Her kindness completely unnerved him. He laughed again and began to hurry out. He was in the hallway, wondering if she wished him to close the door behind him, when she added, “Don’t worry.”
“Okay,” he said. He made himself smile and lightly respond, “I’ll try not to, Lennie Penny. And don’t you worry either.”
“People always laugh when they know they’ve done something really terrible,” she said.
Emmett turned, re-entered her room, and sat down again on her bed. “Have I done something terrible?” he asked.
She gnawed at her lip. He saw her uncertainty. He asked her to tell him, “Do you believe I’ve done something bad?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “When you’re not here.”
“Maybe I have. But I’ve tried to be a good man.”
A look of revulsion, as if at a foul odour, passed over her face. She patiently waited for him to leave and go back to the office. He was embarrassing her. “It’s hard,” he said. “In the grown-up world. In the adult world,” he corrected himself; he must no longer speak to her as to a child, “we have to make decisions based on what we know at the time. Sometimes we make mistakes.”
“Do you make mistakes?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Of course I do. I’ve made many mistakes, I know.” He added, disliking himself, “My intentions were good.”
“What have you done?”
“Well. Many things. A lifetime of things.” He looked to the ballerina lamp for an answer. He thought, Everything is something different from itself. “I hope you have a life, my darling, my love, that lets yo
u be good. Really good. For your entire life. You deserve that. How I wish it for you, baby.”
Chapter Seventeen
The prime minister was planting tulips. Olive was helping him because he was still using crutches. Emmett walked up the drive and passed a scowling, furious minister of defence on his way out. Harkness would assume that Diefenbaker was being counselled by civil servants just like Jones, in his decision to stall on putting the military on high alert to match the Americans. NORAD and the regular forces were waiting in vain for the prime minister’s okay.
Olive was on her knees digging with a trowel while the prime minister sat on a lawn chair, holding a burlap sack filled with bulbs. She didn’t stop working when Emmett approached. Diefenbaker gave him a quick, nervous smile. “I told him off,” he confessed without preamble. He shook his jowls. “Those photographs are phoney baloney. It’s a set-up by the CIA.”
Olive said, “Don’t talk. Plant.”
“It’s going to rain,” the prime minister explained. “We’ve got to get these in before the weather goes sour.” He dug into the sack and produced a bulb, handing it to his wife and saying, “Harkness would have us go off like sheep to war. He may be a fine fellow, but he’s weak, a follower, he’s too eager to please the Americans.”
Emmett said, “It might not hurt to let the forces go on high alert, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Hurt! Hurt! Of course it’ll hurt! Why, we stand to lose — not just a chance to make peace — we lose our credibility with the Cubans! We lose our credibility for nuclear disarmament. Kennedy wants a war? Let him have his war. He’s been itching for it since he messed up the Bay of Pigs.” He shook his sack of bulbs.
“Actually, Mr. Prime Minister, there’s word that the military has already moved on this.”
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