by John Updike
"And now the bitch is going to run," Doris's harsh, seldom contradicted voice leaps from her tête-à-tête. "They have no shame, those two."
The pair of little boys, ten and eight and bored beyond endurance, have been excused until dessert and can be heard banging about in the sunporch beyond the kitchen. Annabelle watches Janice to see when she will get up to clear the dishes away, so she can offer to help her. The hostess makes no move except to sip from her glass, though Mr. Dietrich's braying survey of his adventures abroad has momentarily ceased. His wife's voice, overheard by all but him, has stilled the table.
Nelson studies his untidy plate. Cranberry sauce has stained the mashed potatoes. Frowning down at it, he asks, "What does she have to be ashamed of?"
"Well, she's a crook, for one thing," Ron Junior volunteers, in case Doris Dietrich has no ready answer.
"And for another she's no more a New Yorker than I am," Alex adds with a surprising quickness, punching in his data.
The third brother has to chime in. "What's a New Yorker?" Georgie asks. "We're all immigrants there."
"You going to vote for her?" Ron Junior asks him.
Annabelle feels Georgie at her side cringe but muster mettle to reply, "Probably. If it's Giuliani she runs against. He's an uptight control freak who really blew it with this Brooklyn Museum flap. He tried to withhold city funds, it's as bad as art under Communism."
Doris says, the bracelets on her arm jingling as she props her elbow and pulls a smoking cigarette from her mouth, "The city is safer to visit than it's been for twenty years. Deet and I used to be scared to go there and now we're not."
"Maybe that's just demographics," Nelson says. "There are fewer young black men. And thanks to Clinton's boom more of them have jobs."
Alex announces, "Clinton in my book gets no credit whatsoever for the prosperity. It's all due to the American electronics industry. If anything his taxes have held it back. And now the Department of Justice is going after Microsoft-talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."
"And Alan Greenspan," Deet announces, having caught some of the drift.
"Nelson is defending Clinton, dear," Doris calls down the length of the table to him.
"And Mrs. Clinton, too," Nelson says. He has a defiant streak, Annabelle sees-a disregard that might be their father in him.
"I think they're both disgusting," Ron Junior's chubby wife puts it, having returned from the direction of the kitchen to check on her two noisy sons. "I blame her as much as him for the Monica mess."
"How so?" Nelson asks.
"Don't play naive, Nelson. She's been enabling his affairs for years -without her defending him over Gennifer Flowers he wouldn't have ever got elected."
"She keeps him hard up," their host says at the head of the table. There is a flushed pinkness to Ronnie's head, in the scalp that shows through his skimpy hair, in the tint of his tender-looking eyelids, in the color that glows through his protuberant ears. "Like they used to do for prizefighters." It's another generation speaking, Annabelle thinks. A coarser, more physical, rust-belt mentality. This man knew her biological father-played the same auditorium-gyms, inhaled the same coal-smoky air.
"And what about her and Vince Foster?" Ron Junior asks. "Don't think that's not going to come up again if she runs."
"The king and queen of sleaze," his wife goes on in a kind of rapture. "I can't stand them!" This is marriage, Annabelle sees, this joint rapture.
"Yes,"Georgie breaks in, his voice tense, having been coiled within him, "I will vote for her. She has her heart in the right place, unlike all you Republicans. She's for choice, for freedom of expression, for g-giving the p-poor a break." He is starting to stammer in his excitement; the other Harrisons narrow their eyes and sigh in an old reflex of pity and contempt; he is not the scapegoat they want today.
"Like the poor Palestinians. Like Mrs. Arafat. They loved that in New York. 'Here, honey, have a hug,'" Ron Junior runs on.
"You New Yorkers," Alex says to his brother loftily, "you're all-" He hangs on what seems to be an "f," and Georgie jumps in:
"Fags, you're trying to say."
"Full of shit, I was going to say, and then thought better of it. We have ladies and a little girl at this table." He pinches his mouth smaller yet.
"He has no coat-tails," Ron Senior says, still thinking practically. "The jerk should have been impeached and we all know it."
"He was impeached," Nelson says to his stepfather. "What he shouldn't have been was convicted, and he wasn't, if you'll recall."
But Nelson isn't the scapegoat they want either. His stepfather says patiently, "Nellie, he lied to us, the American people. He said right out on television, 'I did not have sex with that woman, what's-hername.'"
Annabelle feels compelled to speak up. "I think he's an excellent President," she says.
Her voice, though shy, is clean and pure, startling. The agitated table, smelling of food eaten and uneaten, falls into a hush. She is their guest, just barely. Who is she, come back from nowhere with her pale round face?
"How so, dear?" Doris Dietrich asks, from the other corner of the table. Her gaudy earrings, strips of copper, twitter as she brings her head forward to hear the answer.
Annabelle fights the blush she feels beginning. She elongates her neck to spread the heat. She loves Clinton, she realizes, from all those hours at the television set, letting his A-student earnestness wash over her, his lip-biting pauses for the judicious word, his gently raspy hillbilly accent. "Oh, the usual things people say," she says. "He really does make you feel he cares-that he sees you. He's been there, poor in a crummy town, with an abusive stepfather. And his cleverness, knowing all those facts, and being always right. All those experts on television like George Will saying bombing Kosovo would never work and then it did. And the way he went into Haiti. And has brought peace to Ireland."
"He's a draft dodger!" Ron Junior cannot keep in. "If I was a soldier I'd tell him to stuff his orders. Don't send me to Bosnia!"
"She was asked a question, let her answer," Nelson says; he is used to running groups.
She goes on, hating making a speech, blushing hotly now, but- having handled the mortally ill so often, knowing what waits for us, all of us, including all of us here at this table-not afraid of speaking her mind, when after all her President had kept going doing his job with the entire country full of cheap and ugly cracks, "He loves people, he truly does. And he has nerve. He knows when to gamble and when to hold back. And he doesn't hold a grudge, even against those in the Congress who hated him and tried to ruin him. Yes, it was too bad about-about his needing a little affection, but maybe he was entitled to some. Aren't we all?"
"A blow job is a little affection?" the host asks, giving her again one of those looks, a thrust from some past where she didn't exist.
"Well-"
"Of course," Nelson intervenes. "That's just what it is."
"That right, Georgie?" Alex asks his younger brother.
"Drop dead, Lex. Go back to the Bible Belt. Though as a matter of fact I agree with Annabelle, I think it's pathetic that this idiotic puritanical nation reduced its President to acting like a sneaky teen-ager. Any other country in the world, he could have a harem if he does the job."
Deet has heard enough to know they are talking about Clinton. He says in that commanding deaf voice, "The man may have his good intentions, but he is too extreme, giving all this government money to those who refuse to work. Raising taxes on the rich hurts the economy over all, history shows time and time again."
"He's for workfare," Nelson says, almost suffocated by the ignorance around him. "The liberals hate him for it."
"He makes me ashamed of being an American," Margie volunteers. Something in her akin to sexual passion has been tripped; her face shows spots of outgrown acne. "He makes America look ridiculous, drowning us in sleaze and then flying around all over the world as if nothing whatsoever has happened.
It's so brazen."
&
nbsp; Her little girl, two or so, is too big to be penned into a high chair this long; hearing her mother's voice strain, feeling her mother's blood boil, she begins to kick and whimper. With an irritable backhand she flicks her peas and cut-up turkey off the tray onto the floor. "Hey, take it easy, Alice," says Ron Junior, who has been hit in his necktie by some of the peas.
"Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it."
Janice thinks Ronnie looks tired-blue below the eyes, his hair just a gauze up top, his ears feverish. Having lost one husband prematurely, she is watchful of this one, with his silky skin, his steady ways.
Nelson says to Margie, softly, between them, "Brazen, he's still President, for Chrissake," and to Deet, loudly, "Actually, Mr. Dietrich, fiscally he's about as conservative as a Democrat can get. We're feeling the pinch at the treatment center, I can tell you."
"Face it, Nellie, the guy stinks," says Ron Junior, while his daughter wriggles in his lap, glad to be out of the chair but not wishing to be confined by her father's embrace either. "He's dead meat. He's a leftover going fuzzy at the back of the fridge."
Alex opines primly, "He makes Nixon look like a saint. At least Nixon had the decency to get out of our faces. He could feel shame."
"Nixon? I never heard him admit anything except how sorry he felt for himself," Nelson says.
"It's the sleaze!" Margie cries in a kind of orgasm, visibly quivering. Alice starts to whimper in sympathy. Her mother gestures toward her. "What are children supposed to think? What do you tell Boy Scouts?"
"Boy Scouts!" Georgie exclaims, a big grin creasing his face. "Keep your mind out of the gutter, that's what our scoutmaster used to tell us. But none of us did. Boy Scouts are no saints. He was no saint either, it turned out."-
"A much-maligned man," Deet announces, having heard the word "Nixon." "What he did then would be shrugged off now."
"Like Reagan shrugged off Iran-Contra," Nelson says. "Not that he had a clue what they were talking about. Talk about senile dementia!"
"He made the Russkies bite the dust, I'll tell you. He brought the damn Wall down," says Ron Senior, lifting the bottle in front of him and finding that it is empty. "Janice, is there any more wine? Is it all drunk up at your end?"
Doris Dietrich beside him also calls down to Janice. "Janice, what do you think? What do you think about Hillary's running?"
Janice tries to focus. She had been thinking of how much like Harry Nelson was, defending Presidents. Her son has that expression on his face Harry used to call "white around the gills." Why do they do it, care so about those distant men? They identify. They think the country is as fragile as they are. Her father, who hated Roosevelt to the day he died, would get so excited, saying the Democrats were giving the country away. She tells the expectant table, "Oh…she should run if it makes her feel better. Let her get it out of her system. Ronnie, you've had enough wine. It's time to clear, but everybody except Annabelle stay sitting. She may help me."
Her attempt to protect the girl fails, for everybody except the Dietrichs and Margie and Alice picks up dirty dishes and crowds into the kitchen. Ron Junior's two boys, Angus and Ron III, have taken Ron Senior's golf clubs out of his closet to the sunporch and set up a kind of putting course among overturned summer furniture. They are taking fuller and fuller swings, and their father gets to them just before something is broken-the rippled glass table where they sometimes eat in the summer, or a panel of screening he has just fitted with new Fiberglas mesh. "We're going to have pies, boys," Janice promises them, and then remembers that she should have been warming the apple and mince in the oven instead of just sitting there listening to them all argue.
There is a milling about at the kitchen counter as the guests deposit the plates and glasses and silver. Annabelle starts rinsing the plates into the Disposall and stacking them in the dishwasher, whose baby-blue interior is new to her. Her host comes over to help, which is his right, it being his kitchen. But it brings him very close, his sports jacket off and his sleeves rolled up so the blond-white fur of forearm hair shows; he lightly bumps her aside and takes the wet plates into his hands. There is a density to him, a fullness of blood that her own veins feel. "We'll load all the big plates into the lower rack and save the saucers for the next load."
"I can move away, Mr. Harrison, if you'd like to do it."
"Why? This works. You rinse, I load." He is close enough that she smells the sweet sauterne around his red-eared head. "So," he says, "a blow job's just a way of showing affection."
"That's what I said." She has dealt in her life with so many older men coming on to her that she feels calm with it, confident she can fend.
"You're your mother's daughter, all right."
"I am?"
"I knew your mother, once. Before she got involved with that jerk Angstrom."
"Oh?" Fear and fascination twitter together inside her. Her hand trembles, setting the delicate old wineglasses, family treasures with etched designs, into the upper rack. He takes them from her two at time, and rearranges those she has set in place.
"Otherwise, they rattle around and break," he explains.
"What was she like then?" She asks this but has already decided she doesn't want the conversation to continue. She half turns away from him, looking for a towel to dry her hands.
Ronnie keeps his voice low, so Janice, putting her pies belatedly into the oven, doesn't hear. "She'd fuck anybody," he says softly into the fine hair at the side of Annabelle's neck.
"Why didn't you do that before?" Nelson is whining at his mother.
"Oh, it slipped my mind," she says, "everybody getting so excited about Clinton. Isn't his term about up, in any case?"
"Not soon enough," Ron Junior shouts from the sunporch, where he is trying to restore order.
"It must feel funny," Ronnie murmurs to Annabelle, "being the illegitimate daughter of a hooer and a bum."
Tears spring to her eyes as if at the lash of a twig while walking in the woods. Nelson sees the change in her face, sees her wheel from the sink with her wet hands still up in the air, and in two steps is at her side. "What happened?" he asks, his breath hot, his eyes sunk deeper into his skull.
"Nothing," she gasps, struggling not to sob."What did he say?"He didn't say anything."I asked her," Ronnie tells his stepson conversationally, "how it felt being the bastard kid of a whore and a bum. I didn't ask her for a blow job, though."
"Ronnie!" Janice exclaims, letting the oven door slam."Well, shit," he says, only a bit abashed, "what's she doing here anyway, telling us what a great guy Clinton is?"
Nelson squares up to him, though he is a bit shorter and was neveran athlete. "You told Mom she could come. You said you wanted to see how Ruth Leonard's daughter turned out."
"Now I know. Looks just like her, without the ginger in her hair. And cunt, my guess is." Buried years of righteous resentment surface in the cool guess.
"You couldn't stand it, could you?" Nelson says. "My father beating you out every time. Every time you went up against him, he beat you out. That's how he was, Ronnie. A winner. You, you're a loser."
"You'd know," Ronnie says.
Others have pushed into the kitchen, the older two Harrison sons."What's going on?" Georgie asks.
"Mom," Nelson asks his mother. "Why did you marry him? How could you do that to us?" The "us," he realizes, must include his dead father.
Janice looks as though she has had this conversation with her son before, and is weary to death of it. "He's good to me," she explains. "He's had too much to drink. Haven't you, Ron?"
"No," he says. "Not quite enough in fact. You drank it all at your end."
"Please forget whatever he said," she says to Annabelle. "Let's go for a walk, some of us. While the pies warm up."
"The rain has started up again," Alex points out.
Ron Junior want
s to defend his father but doesn't quite know from what. "You squirt," he says to Nelson. "This was all your crazy idea, bringing her."
"It's thrown him for a loop," Georgie offers to explain, from his New York angle, seeing his father with a detachment the other two haven't managed yet, as an old man getting older. "She got him stirred up, remembering." His young-old face with its exaggerated big features reveals, in the tug of a smile crease at a corner of his lips, what he shares with his brothers, satisfaction that at last some sort of counterblow has been struck for Rabbit Angstrom's leading their mother into adultery.
"I am not stirred up," Ronnie says, with the oblivious stolidity of the insurance agent who will not go away, who will not leave the house until a policy has been sold. "This is my house and I like to have some control over who comes into it."
"Well, we're going," Nelson tells him. "This is it. Mom, I'll come by for my things when this pig isn't here."
"Nelson, you have no place to stay!"
"I'll find one. Come on, Annabelle. Here," and he dodges around Ronnie, startlingly, and rips a generous length of paper towel from the rack under the old-fashioned wooden cabinets and hands it to his sister, to dry her wet and soapy hands with.
Numb, heaped with disgrace, she follows him back into the dining room, past the tall breakfront where Ma Springer's precious Koerner china trembles at their double retreat. Annabelle has to hurry with her choppy small steps to keep up. She dressed for this occasion in a white cashmere cardigan and cinnamon-brown skirt, perhaps a little tight and short for the company. But that's how skirts come now, from New York via the buyers for the malls.