“At least consider what I’ve suggested.”
Earnshaw smiled again and placed his arm around his friend’s shoulder. “Oh yes, you can be sure I’ll consider it. I’ll sleep on it.” He began to lead Sir Austin to the foyer. “You’ve taken enough of your time trying to save an old man, and believe me, you don’t know how grateful I am.” He took down Sir Austin’s hat and topcoat and found his umbrella and handed them to him.
At the door, Sir Austin said, “Fleur and I aren’t leaving for Paris until ten in the morning. If we’re going to see you there, let me know at the Foreign Office, or let my secretary know your plans if I’ve gone, and we’ll make all the arrangements for you.”
“Very kind of you, Austin, but there’s no hiding a trip like this. It’s got to come into the open. If I go to Paris, I’ll contact our own Embassy. Otherwise, well, again my thanks, and you’ll have a postcard from Oslo or Stockholm. Good night.”
After closing the door, Earnshaw wandered back into the sitting room, feeling achy and infirm. A single word rattled inside his skull and would not cease tormenting him. The one enemy word that had brought him down.
Indecision.
To his original physical weariness had been added emotional exhaustion. His mind was too weak to bear the weight of further thought that might force the rattling of indecision to a halt. The sweet oblivion of sleep would not come fast enough to rescue his mind. In moments like this, so alone with himself, he often sought another. But there was no one left, except Carol. So he sought her company, even if briefly.
He hobbled into the hallway, past the kitchen, then tiptoed across the ornate dining room to her bedroom door. There was no sound of television. Gently, he turned the knob and opened her door. The room was dark, but the light from behind him faintly illuminated part of her green bed, and he could make out the mound of blanket and her head pressed into the pillow that was propped against the high headboard. He studied her, so peaceful in sleep, and envied her, and thanked the good Lord for the blessing of her companionship.
Closing her bedroom door, he trudged back through the dining room, finally turning into his own master bedroom. As he removed the open suitcase from the canopied bed, his temples throbbed. The word indecision continued to bang and bump tauntingly inside his skull, and he knew that he could arrest it only by admitting other words into his head and sorting these words into regimented thought.
With effort, he tried to reason out his dilemma, and although the endeavor was a strain, it was less painful than trying to keep his mind a vacuum. Slowly, as he changed into his blue cotton pajamas, he reviewed something that Sir Austin Ormsby had mentioned, something about his reputation being once more on the ascendency. Sir Austin had cited the publication of Earnshaw’s autobiography, the opening of his Presidential Library, and tonight’s Order of the British Empire.
At this gloomy midnight hour, Earnshaw possessed a harsher view, and a more honest one, of the revival of his reputation. He had been disinterested in the autobiography of his Presidential years from the start. He had allowed his staff to assemble the material, organize it, and even set it in a narrative form, with the assistance of a onetime White House correspondent. Positive that his public was his monument, Earnshaw had done little more than dictate some added material for the book, some corrections and inserts, and at the last moment, he had merely scanned the whole of it before its delivery to the publisher. By the time that it was off press, when the reality of his dwindling position in American life had begun to be evident to him, he had hoped more and more that the autobiography would restore him to his rightful place. But secretly, he had worried about the book, for his uninvolvement had allowed it to become a mere compendium of colorless facts, data, reports, a bloodless volume utterly unrepresentative of his real personality, his warmth, his humor, his homey point of view.
His fears had not been misplaced. Upon its appearance, the autobiography had been derided by reviewers and critics for its shallowness and dullness. And of the 100,000 copies in print, it was evident after returns that only 16,500 had been sold, and the rest were this day being remaindered at one-sixth the original price in countless bargain basements.
The Earnshaw Presidential Library, in San Diego, had interested him more. His initial neglect of it, his leaving its construction and stocking to other hands, had been supplanted at the last moment by a determination to make this depository of the records of his term in office the equal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, the Truman Library in Independence, the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, the Kennedy Library in Cambridge, the Johnson Library in Austin. Personally, he had invited national figures to the opening, and many of them had come. And as he had guided them through the halls and stacks, it had come as a surprise to him how limited was the corpus of his collection, how bland and lacking in interest were the materials, and how little he had ever created or committed to paper. Still, the dedication ceremonies had been heartening, and he had had high hopes. But once the festivities were ended and the library was thrown open to the public, it had shocked him how few visitors came to see his papers. There had been a trickle of tourists, of course, but almost no students, and no scholars at all.
This rejection had been followed by yet one more. A silly thing, really, yet a significant one. Annually, the leading national opinion poll had listed the twenty most admired living Americans, and for a half-dozen years, Emmett A. Earnshaw had led the names on that poll. But two years ago, he had dropped from first place to fourth in popularity, and last year, he had sunk to tenth, and this year, only short weeks ago, he had plummeted down to twentieth.
And this Order of the British Empire tonight, what did it mean, actually? That he had been a friend of the English, and that now the English honored the remembrance of him with a bauble. But who in his own, his native land would be impressed or even care? The attention of the American public would be focused, not on London, but on an active leader in Paris, fighting a real fight for their welfare and the nation’s future.
Sir Austin had exaggerated the revival of Earnshaw’s reputation. There had been no revival, because there was no reputation left to revive. Goerlitz’s chapter in the memoirs was being aimed at a nonexistent target. Why attempt to blunt an arrow that could strike at nothing but thin air?
Depressed, Earnshaw secured the bottom button of his pajama top, stuck his feet into his slippers, and made his way into the sitting room. Automatically, he gravitated toward the liquor cabinet. For the first time in years, he wanted a second brandy before bedtime.
Pouring his brandy, he leaned against the wall, drinking it, feeling the heat of it in his throat and chest, and trying to warm himself into dwelling on better times. The happier past eluded him, as the shining White House years eluded him. All that remained fixed in his mind was a summary, in some young smart-aleck historian’s book, of the style of Earnshaw’s Presidency. The historian had summarized it by repeating that hackneyed anecdote of the French Revolution. A citizen of the revolution had been dining at the window table of a Paris restaurant with a foreign visitor. Suddenly, through the window, he had seen a great mob of Frenchmen rushing past, and instantly, the French citizen had leaped to his feet and excused himself. “I must catch up with that mob,” he had said apologetically. “I am their leader.”
Earnshaw swallowed the last of the brandy, returned to his bed, turned down the lamp, and crawled under the covers.
As he lay there, warmed and dizzied by his two drinks, near sleep, painful memories departed, leaving only the rattling haunting of the one word.
Unaccountably, a stray remembered incident of his past returned to mind. The year after he had left the White House and the newly elected President had entered it, there had been the annual ribald Gridiron Dinner given by the Washington press corps, and there had been a quip from the stage which had not found its way into print but which had become an underground joke and had finally reached his ear. Some comedian had said that Earnshaw’s nickname now
was The Ex, standing for Ex-President, but that even when he’d been in the White House as President, there were those who called him The Ex.
Hilarity.
And in that instant of sleepy recollection the taunting word rattling in his skull was trapped, smothered, dead.
Decision.
The Ex in the White House. It had been cruel, and that it still mattered to him meant that there was something left of him that mattered and must be preserved. His life, the judgments passed upon it, were not his to offer up willfully and suicidally to nothingness. His life was other lives, the meaning of his beloved parents, his Isabel, his Simon, his Carol, his bridge companions, the 16,500 who had bought his book, the Midwestern tourists who visited his Library, the countless numbers who had once made him the American they admired the most.
Decision.
He owed so much to so many. He owed himself so much. He must not allow a spiteful German’s vicious misrepresentations to hammer the last nail into the coffin that would bury him far from history’s Pantheon.
He would rise at dawn. He would notify the United States Embassy in London of his change of itinerary. He would wake Carol early and tell her that he had special business in Paris, and that she would like Paris more than the Scandinavian capitals. He would take a jet—no, not a jet, no flying, doctor’s orders—he would take the Golden Arrow to Paris, and take a suite at the Lancaster, and have it out with Goerlitz, and retain some shred of mortality, if not immortality.
Life had been kind to him, and he had cheated on Life, because he had never done as much with it as he had been capable of doing or as much with it as he had expected to do. But he would make up for it, yes, do this for yesterday’s Isabel, tomorrow’s Carol, and for all the voters and Electoral College members who had once put their lives in his hands.
Decision.
He would be The Ex for Ex-President, not The Ex for Extinction. No, never would he pull a blanket of earth over his head if he could help it and if the Lord helped him. Only a bed blanket over his head, soft blanket, so there would be morning not mourning.
He yawned, and felt better, and then he tried to sleep…
IT WAS ENERVATING, on a hot Saturday morning like this, rehearsing the new numbers, especially when she had not completely made up her mind that she would extend her engagement at Chez 88-40-88.
Listening to the beat of the jazzed-up French recording of the classic old American minstrel song blaring through the amplifier above the stage, Medora Hart tapped one thonged sandal on the polished dance floor and waited for her cue. The heat seeping into the almost empty nightclub from the pavements of Juan-les-Pins was stifling, and Medora Hart wished that she was climbing down into the cool water of the Provençal hotel beach or, better yet, was strolling in the chill morning air of London’s East End from her mother’s flat to the grocer’s.
Fleetingly, she remembered how many of Paddy’s girls had become his girls because they dreamed of the Riviera, the Cöte d’Azur, and—crikey!—if they only knew how she hated it. You can have it, girls, she thought, you can have every yacht off Villefranche, every swimming pool in Cap d’Antibes, every casino from Juan-les-Pins here to Monte Carlo, and I’ll throw in the Croisette, too—you can have it all for just one smell of Billingsgate, one glimpse of Soho, one stroll across Blackfriars Bridge.
The tinny recording was louder, the beat faster, and as she anticipated her cue, Medora Hart automatically snapped her fingers, hunched and weaved her shoulders in the professionally sexy all-with-it way, and took a step to the microphone. Catching the musical cue, and in her half-singing, half-reciting, partially intimate, slightly girlish voice, she sang out with forced frenzy (although under wraps, it being a rehearsal, it being so profanely hot):
De Camptown ladies sing this song, Doo-dah! Doo-dah!
De Camptown race track five miles long, Oh! Doo-dah Day!
From the corner of an eye she could see that the only other occupants of the nightclub, stocky old Jouvet, the proprietor, and jittery young Mauclair, the director, were watching and listening, and now Mauclair, standing behind the proprietor, was bending down to whisper to him.
Disregarding them, addressing the number to the empty tables and upturned chairs before her, Medora Hart continued:
I come down dah wid my hat caved in, Doo-dah! Doo-dah!
I go back home wid a pocket full of tin, Oh! Doo-dah Day!
She went on until the recording stopped and decided that, incongruous as it was to render the American Negro song in her theatrical English accent, it was lively enough, noisy and swinging enough, for the highly charged atmosphere of the late show. That was the hour when Chez 88-40-88 was always overflowing, full of smoke and chatter, the American and German tourists drunk and the bearded Belgian boys finally getting their hands under the short skirts of their French girl friends.
Breaking off, she took the throat of the microphone and said matter-of-factly, ‘That should warm them up, Monsieur Jouvet. Then I thought you could bring the lights down, put a soft yellow spot on me, and let the band go into ‘That Old Black Magic.’ I prefer it to ‘Les Flonflons du Bal,’ slower beat, easier to handle. I’d wear the new cocktail ensemble I picked up in Cannes, there’s enough of it to take off and bring me to the end of the reprise. Something like this—”
Humming the song briefly, she began to pantomime her projected striptease. “Sing-sing, then off with the white gloves and slow unbuttoning and off with the sequined jacket,” she intoned. “Then sing-sing, a little pirouetting dance around the floor, right up along the tables, so they can see the blouse, high front but nearly backless and the skirt flares beautifully, so they’ll get a tidbit of my thighs and bottom. Then back to the mike. Sing-sing while I undo the blouse and pull it off. Next, unbutton and unzip the chiffon skirt. Step out of it. Then I’d shake out of the half-slip, next unhook the garter belt and get rid of my stockings. Now only music, no vocal, maybe humming or whistling, a few phrases, I’d circle around the customers’ tables—maybe a little banter instead of humming, whatever you think—and all the while, fumbling with the nylon bra, the skin-tone one, then return to this point, and off with the bra, give them the breasts and some kind of squirming dance for a chorus, then, picking up the lyrics, I’d turn my back or maybe you can start revolving the color wheel in front of the spot, and off come my pants, flesh briefs, I think, and that leaves me with only the gold necklace and the gold patch, which is au naturel enough. After that, maybe glide to the center of the floor, full spot, then arms up high, legs wide apart, head thrown back, hair loose, eyes closed, do a kind of undulating, ravished, pain-and-ecstasy dance, all in one place, nothing moving but my body, kind of black magic of sex, and as the number ends, I’d burst forward, go down on my knees, head arched way back, and you cut the lights and I get off.”
She had become so entranced by her oral choreography, her creativity, that she failed to realize she had been addressing no one but the microphone and herself.
Enthusiastically, she turned to Jouvet and Mauclair, asking, “What do you think? I think it can be effective. I’m tired of all the crazy, tricky stuff.”
Mauclair, who had drawn up a chair beside Jouvet and was engaging him in low and intense conversation, had not been paying attention to her. And the proprietor, listening to his director and automatically nodding his approval to her, had been almost as inattentive.
Irritated at the energy she had expended on two blocks of wood, she pressed her mouth to the microphone and demanded loudly, “Well, do you agree with me or not?”
The proprietor’s face, a warted pickle, was instantly alert. “Trés bien, Medora. What next?” But simultaneously, caught by something the director was saying, he had turned away from Medora once more.
“Next,” she said, hands on her hips, “you can both aller vous faire foutre! And for me, next, I’m going to the W.C. And if you bother me, I’ll flush you both down the loo!”
She started across the barren dance floor, as haughtily as p
ossible for a child-woman so long advertised as the Continent’s sex goddess. Passing the two loutish Frenchmen, she heard them arguing about francs, and the union, and the General Labor Confederation, and she continued on to the front of the club. In the club’s entryway, so close to the street, the heat assailed her, and she felt spent and drained of energy. Removing several coins from her belt pocket, she went to the Coke machine, and the minute that she had the ice-cold bottle and had begun to drink from it, she felt slightly better, slightly.
Inexplicably let down, listless, she entered the ladies’ room, snapped on the lights, took another swallow of Coke and set the bottle on a chair. Twisting the faucet marked FROID, she placed her wrists under the stream of water, having heard that this cooled the body quickly. Then she applied water to her damp forehead, and behind her ears and neck, and traced the wetness across her chest and down between her breasts. Finding a clean towel, she dried herself, and while doing so, she studied her reflection in the wide mirror above the basin.
Studying mirrors was one of Medora Hart’s favorite preoccupations. Rarely did she pass a mirror without halting to consider pensively what was shown in it, to hold interior dialogues with that image, to philosophize and psychologize over that image, to wonder about the ingredients of that image that had cast her so high up in the world and had then sent her tumbling so far down, so far down that now she teetered on the brink of Hell.
She stared at the upper half of the five feet four inches of herself in the mirror, and the self that was captured in the polished glass stared back at her. Tossing the towel aside, she backed off diagonally the width of the tiled bathroom floor until she could see herself almost full length. Her sun-blanched flaxen hair, tied in a mane, fell below her shoulder blades. Her shining brow was unmarked, although she was already twenty-one years old, and her huge, frank, gray-green eyes were clear, although her suitors and lovers liked to tell her they looked at once experience-old and little-girl-lost, which she had learned to translate as really meaning that they promised free giving and promiscuity.
The Plot Page 13