Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea

by Richard Bausch

  “I’m leaving now. You can come or you can stay.”

  She looked at him. “All right.”

  “We’ll give you a ride home,” Alice said.

  Her father put his hand on her shoulder, and she moved to displace herself, shifting toward Marshall.

  Mr. Atwater looked at everyone, his face beginning to whiten with rage. “You better get yourself out of that chair,” he said to Loretta.

  “What’s the trouble, bunky?” Brightman said. “Why don’t you sit down and shut the hell up?”

  Minnie stood at her end of the table. “Ah won’t have this unpleasantness, na. Ah’m the guest of honuh. Let’s all sit down and have us a nice meal.” She gathered her skirt and took her place again, her attitude final, as though there could be no further discussion or conflict now that she had spoken.

  “Amen,” said Mrs. Westerbrook. “A nice meal.”

  “I’d rather read Toynbee,” Brightman said.

  “He’s making fun of me,” Atwater said to Loretta. “You’re all making fun of me.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Brightman said. “I don’t know who the hell you are. That’s for sure. If I did, I’d make fun of you, too.”

  “Mr. Atwater,” Alice’s father said quickly. “Surely you can see that Mitch is under the weather. I asked your tolerance, sir.”

  Atwater sat down again, slowly, muttering. “That’s the trouble with people like him. People like us tolerate their behavior.”

  “Oh,” Alice said. “His behavior hasn’t been that bad.”

  “Could we say grace?” Mrs. Westerbrook wanted to know.

  The rest of the meal went smoothly enough, though Mr. Atwater’s ruffled feelings were still quite visibly ruffled. And Brightman kept saying things to needle him, kept asking him who he was and remarking that he had a familiar face.

  “I was talking to you at Alice’s birthday party,” Atwater said.

  Brightman looked puzzled. “I wasn’t at Alice’s birthday party.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “No. Haven’t been to one of those in at least a decade.”

  “You were there.” Atwater turned his attention to Alice’s father. “He was there. Tell him.”

  “Matter of fact,” Brightman said before anyone else could speak, “I was there. I don’t remember you being there.”

  “I was at that birthday party. Tell him, Loretta.”

  “Clark, can’t you see you’re being teased?”

  “Well, goddammit, I was there.”

  It was a very strange, almost pathological evening, with the two Negro women sitting at one end of the table, and Alice’s father and Mitchell Brightman at the other, and the talk that bore no relation, Marshall came to realize, to the reason they were all gathered in the first place. He offered a toast to their friends Stephen and Diane and the people they were traveling with. Minnie approved of this, and again the table grew quiet.

  “Oh, I had something else to say,” Mitchell Brightman said. “I’m gonna to do an article called the duplicitous press corps. You can all be in it.” He indicated Clark Atwater. “Except that person.”

  Atwater had been talking to Loretta and hadn’t heard him. He sat up straight, chewing. “What?”

  “He’s deaf,” said Brightman. “And I don’t know who he is.”

  Alice’s father said, “He’s with my daughter’s fiancé, Mitch.”

  Brightman smiled. “Well, he’s perfectly welcome.” He leaned toward Atwater’s end of the table. “And your name is Toynbee?”

  There was a moment of an alarming sort of silence, and then Atwater simply nodded. “That’s right, sir. Toynbee.”

  “Good. We got that established, at least.”

  After the meal, Alice’s father had everyone gather in the little side porch where, Marshall recalled, the strange red-haired lady had read his palm. There were couches ranged along the left and back walls, and everyone took a seat. They were reflected in the blackness of the windows, so that the effect was of two rooms, side by side. Mitchell Brightman wanted to talk about the press corps, and cooperation. Minnie and Mrs. Westerbrook remained only a polite minute or so, then asked if they might make their way home. Alice’s father drove them, leaving Alice to tend to Brightman. It was clear to Marshall that Loretta wanted to go, too, now, but Atwater was interested, trying to draw Brightman out about John Kennedy. Brightman kept calling him Toynbee, and it didn’t seem to bother him.

  Albert and Emma sat together on the opposite side of the room, near a small aquarium. Albert was whispering to her, describing the colors and shapes he saw in the lighted water.

  “I have to go,” Loretta said finally. “I can’t stay awake another minute.”

  “I’ll take you,” Marshall offered.

  “Wait a damn minute,” Atwater said. “This is my girl. I’ll take her.” He stood, wavered, reached to the wall for support.

  “Watch it there, Mr. Toynbee,” Brightman said. “This stuff’ll kill you.”

  “It’s Atwater,” the other said, a little too drunk to be indignant.

  “No, it’s whiskey.”

  “Whatever you say, there, Mitch,” Atwater said. “You’re the expert.” The emphasis was disdainful.

  “Hail and farewell,” said Brightman.

  Alice kissed Loretta on the cheek, and walked with them to the door. Albert and Emma stood and apologized for leaving early, too. They all moved to the living room, saying their good-byes. The air in the open space of the entrance was cold and moist-feeling. Marshall had hugged his mother and promised not to stay too late, then he shook hands with Albert as Albert was starting out. There was a lot of confusion: Clark Atwater sniping at Loretta about the cold and wanting to drive the car; Emma and Alice talking in the open doorway. The young man walked back through the house, to the side porch, where Mitchell Brightman was sitting on the couch under the black windows, staring into space. Marshall stopped and was about to leave the room.

  “Sit down,” Brightman said.

  “Sir?”

  “Sit down, son.”

  Marshall did so. They were facing each other from the farthest ends of a right angle, at opposite sides of the couch.

  “You afraid of me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You want to be president.”

  Marshall said nothing.

  “Alice told me all about you.”

  “Sir, I don’t know about the presidency—”

  The older man began to laugh. It started low, almost under his breath, but soon he was lying back, really laughing. Finally, he subsided. He sat forward. “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Marshall said. Then, “Sir.” He felt uncomfortably as if the other had put him in a category with Clark Atwater.

  “Sure there is,” Brightman said. “There’s always something to be sorry for. Never forget that, kid.”

  A moment later, he cleared his throat and seemed to consider something, going over it in his mind. “I’m gonna tell you something.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You’re a nice kid. You have a sense of—ah—shit. Never mind. I’m gonna tell you something. Alice says Kennedy’s your hero—and hell, it’s obvious from your hairstyle.”

  Marshall ran both hands through his hair.

  Brightman looked at him. “Look, kid. It’s all a show. You had it right doing the radio school bit. During the war—men’re dying all around us, you know? Thousands of lives ending, and the whole country’s hurting. But that didn’t stop it from being a show. Old Walter Winchell, you understand? H. V. Kaltenborn. All of them. Show guys, really. Bringing everybody the show. Winchell hunching over the microphone, waiting for show time, for the signal to start talking in that heavy, portentous voice. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentleman, and all the ships out on the sea.’ Like that. High drama. But showbiz. You understand? It’s in everything. Kennedy—that New Frontier crap. A show. Hell, they put that flag up at Iwo six or seven times so the guy could get a good
film of it. For the folks back home. So much of it is just show business.”

  Marshall simply stared at him.

  “In twenty years, that’s all any of it will be. And it’s just not what you think it is, kid. None of it. Kennedy wasn’t interested in anything but politics and skirts. You know how many women he screwed? He had them coming in all hours of the day and night. And we all knew it, every one of us. We knew it and we looked the other way. See? Because it wasn’t part of the show.”

  The boy said, “Kennedy…” He couldn’t finish.

  “That’s right. A skirt hound. Sometimes two at a time. Girls. Hollywood starlets, walk-ons. He was a skirt chaser from the first, like his old man. We had a couple of them around the White House—hell, we didn’t even give them names. Called them fiddle and faddle. The guy screwed everything in sight. He used to say if he didn’t get laid every day he’d get migraines. And he got laid every day. Sometimes more than every day and sometimes with more than one woman.”

  Marshall said, “That’s—that’s not true.” He felt sick to his stomach. Something in him wanted to strike the man sitting there on the other side of the room. “That’s just not—not true.”

  “Of course it’s true. Why would I make that up? I was there, kid. I knew the guy. He was a regular poon hound. He was smart, and he liked talk, and he had one subject. Politics. Period. He wasn’t this—prince they’re making him out to be, that’s all. There were things about him you had to overlook. Big things. Especially if, like me, you didn’t think it was particularly a good thing for the president of the United States to be screwing whores in the White House by the goddamn numbers.”

  Alice came back, then, carrying Brightman’s coat. “Time to go, Mitch,” she said.

  “Really?”

  She stood over him, holding the coat out.

  Brightman looked at Marshall. “Marilyn Monroe, kid. You remember her singing to him at Madison Square Garden? Know what happened later on that night?”

  “Mitch,” Alice said. “Home, come on.”

  “Not fit to drive,” he said. “I’m telling this boy something of what he needs to know if he’s going to take up the art of politics.”

  “You’re wallowing in a lot of dirt and my father has told you about this.”

  Brightman got to his feet, and let her put the coat on him, turning a little to put his arms in the sleeves. She patted him on the back, then guided him out, and for a few minutes Marshall was left alone, in the quiet room reflected there in the windows, and in the lighted green-glowing glass of the aquarium with its tropical fish moving in their peristaltic slowness.

  Alice came back through and sat down next to him, breathless, her hair smelling of the outside. “He’s never going to make it home,” she said. “I feel guilty. I had to pour him into the car.”

  Marshall said, “I’ve never seen anybody so drunk.”

  “Oh, it’s been far worse. Tonight was mild.”

  “That—what he was saying—”

  “Look,” she said. “Don’t pay any attention to him. That’s a kick he gets on when he’s had too much to drink. He played around on his wife and she died and he’s always felt so low about it. Don’t pay any attention to him, really.”

  “But why would he make up something so—evil—why would he make that up?”

  “It’s just the booze talking, Walter. Forget it.”

  “It’s a lie, though.”

  She answered with a kind of sigh. “What difference does it make, really? Of course it’s a lie.” She put her arms around him. “Here’s what’s true, Walter.” She kissed the side of his face. “We’re alone.”

  “What about Clarence and the other guy?”

  “They’re in the kitchen.”

  “The kitchen’s right through there.”

  “Forget about it,” she told him. “Look, I know it’s against your religion and all that, but something must happen sometimes in your church or there wouldn’t be so many big Catholic families. Kiss me.”

  “Alice,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I like you so much—”

  “Like me.”

  “Please,” he said. “Let me finish.”

  She sat back and regarded him, folding her arms under her breasts. “Go right ahead.”

  Across the way, his little reflected shape in the aquarium glass made his nausea grow worse. “I—I think we ought to slow down a little—”

  “Slow down?” she said. “Jesus. The Ice Age was faster.”

  “I just don’t think we ought to rush into anything.”

  “Fine.” She stood. “I’m really tired, now, Walter. And I think I’ll just go on upstairs and go to bed.”

  “Alice,” he said.

  “No, really. You don’t have to say another thing. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t say one more goddamn thing.”

  They both heard movement in the next room, then. Her father was home—had been home. He spoke to someone in the other room—Clarence, probably. There were the sounds of dishes clattering, water running. Mr. Kane appeared in the doorway and said, “Did you put him in the car?”

  “Yes,” Alice said.

  “Alice, what’re you thinking of?”

  “I wanted him to leave.”

  “He drove straight up onto the Grantham’s lawn. I don’t know how I saw him. He got out and laid down on the grass. He could’ve frozen to death.”

  She said nothing.

  “I put him in the car and Clarence is driving him home.”

  “Good night,” she said and walked quickly out of the room.

  Marshall stood. For a tense few seconds, the older man simply stared at him.

  “She’s upset,” Mr. Kane said.

  “She—she says she’s—tired, sir.”

  “Your mother—she works for that guy?”

  Marshall was momentarily stunned. “Pardon?”

  “Does your mother work for that Atwater fellow?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s the principal at the high school.”

  “They going to be married?”

  “I guess so, sir.”

  “Your mother’s happy about that?”

  Marshall shook his head. “I don’t know, sir.”

  Mr. Kane nodded. “He’s a bit of an asshole, isn’t he?”

  Marshall said nothing.

  “I’ve been talking to Alice about it, son. It’s no secret, is it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your mother types for him—secretarial kinds of things?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell her I’ve got a job for her if she wants it. I’ll pay her more than the State of Virginia’s paying her, too. Tell her that. Or do you want me to tell her?”

  “I could tell her.”

  “Whichever you like.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Kane scratched his ear, looking down. “I heard some of that—what you and Alice talked about.”

  Marshall waited.

  “I think that’s the mature thing. To go slow. I’m impressed with your maturity. And I agree with you.”

  “Yes, sir.” Marshall swallowed the last word, then repeated it, barely missing the falsetto. “S-Sir.”

  “You got a car?”

  “Yes. My mother’s car.”

  “Good night, son.” The older man turned and was gone.

  Marshall heard him on the stairs, heard the noises in the kitchen. He made his way quickly to the front door, listening for Alice’s voice amid the other sounds of the house. Her father was talking, and the tone was of a kind of badgering. It seemed to the young man that this was often enough the note Mr. Kane struck when talking to his daughter. He let himself out, crossed through the cold shade of moon-lighted trees on the lawn, aware of his own shadow, moving away, like a fugitive skulking from the scene of a crime.

  Chapter 19

  For days he carried inside himself the knowledge—no, the suspicion—like a wound under the heart, that all of what Mitchell Brightman had told him was true. At time
s, his mind presented him with the possibility that it was more than true, that Brightman had been giving him only the surface of what must have been a much larger story. At Saint Matthew’s Cathedral, he knelt and tried to pray, thinking of a prince of the Church saying the words of the Mass over this man struck down in the sunlight, when he least expected it, taken before he could confess his sins or ask for pardon, and by the tenets of this faith, Kennedy’s own faith, such a sudden blow made the state of his soul all the more terrible to think about, if all that Brightman had said was true. Marshall saw again the cardinal with the tall mitre, saying the Mass for the dead:

  We ask your blessing on the wonderful man we bury here today.

  Did the cardinal know? Did all of them know?

  He couldn’t pray. The words rode through his mind and left no trace, and he repeated them, to no avail.

  There were practical matters to attend to. He had received a notice from Mr. D’Allessandro that there would be a meeting at his home concerning the unfinished school year. There was also the matter of trying to appease his mother in her anger with him for interfering about Clark Atwater.

  “I just might marry him, Walter. Even if I take this—better job in Mr. Kane’s office. And you’ll just have to get used to it.”

  “But you don’t have to marry him now.”

  “I never did have to. This is not your business. Clark has his foibles, but we get along. Do you understand me? We get along. He is not like—that man you saw at the party. He feels everyone’s disapproval and it makes him nervous.”

  “He makes everyone disapprove.”

  “Walter, this is my business. I don’t have to do anything for a year. I’m going to think about it. I have fun with him, believe it or not.”

  “But he hit you.”

  “No, he did not. That was just what I said it was, and you’re going to have to start learning to accept that what somebody tells you is the truth and just leave it at that.”

  He went through that week, and then the next week, sleepless, filled with an increasing sense of failure, and haunted by fears that everything was true—the worst imaginings. They bordered on impure thoughts. Kennedy in a bed with two women, like the two women he had seen in the little parlorlike library of the now defunct D’Allessandro School. He had dreams about it, and lay awake at night remembering phrases from the speeches.