by Ward Just
Ned was silent a moment. He said, That does not happen in the newspapers. Something is printed. We call it a “piece.” It’s a double meaning. It’s factual enough and sometimes it causes great harm. That is not its intent. But it’s the result. This comes as a surprise. No one expected harm. My God, you think, what have I done? In all innocence. But innocence is not the excuse. Innocence is the cause. And we are appalled, those of us who are in charge. The others turn the page.
Tell me more, Michael said.
Another time, Ned replied.
They parted on the sidewalk, promising to stay in touch. Michael said, When we meet again you must tell me about your “piece” that was “factual enough.” Will you do that?
Ned did not answer. Instead he hailed a cab and helped Michael Ardmore inside. The old man appeared to be falling asleep, his eyes closing and his arms crossed on his chest. Until then, Ned said, and walked away up Michigan Avenue toward the Chicago River, head bowed against the north wind, a Canada or Minnesota wind rushing in from the lake. Ned knew there would be no “then.” Then was none of Michael Ardmore’s business, and he would not understand it in any case because it bore no relation to a compass, a barometer, the tide tables, or the atomic clock. Nothing mechanical, only wretchedly human. Then was out of bounds.
The street and the sidewalk were vacant at midnight. He began walking and soon enough came upon a derelict in the doorway of a bank. The derelict was huddled in a shabby sleeping bag that looked too small for him. His head rested on a worn overcoat, yesterday’s newspaper stuffed into one of the overcoat pockets. Ned took a ten-dollar bill and slipped it between the derelict’s fingers and fussed with the overcoat until the bill was concealed. A nice surprise for a faithful reader. Ned marched on. Michigan Avenue looked as though it went on forever, not a pedestrian in sight, the great stone buildings looming thick and impersonal. Like Stonehenge, they were difficult to distinguish one from another. And where were the druids? Now and again Ned saw a light in an upstairs window, a lawyer or an accountant working late. Perhaps a cleaning woman thinking about the midnight bus to the South Side, at that hour filled with bone-tired cleaning women, the air sweet with disinfectant.
Ned stepped carefully across Madison Street. Snow came with the north wind. He wished he had taken gloves with him. He paused to look across Michigan Avenue at empty Grant Park, a wilderness of shadows. The only moving things in the street and beyond were snowflakes. Ned buried his chin in his coat collar and soldiered on, thinking once more about the story that was factual enough. An ugly story, cruel at its heart, all but forgotten now except in the memories of its participants. Ahead of him a Yellow cab dipped its lights and turned the corner. Ned’s feet were cold. Everything inside him was cold. His heart was frigid. He was approaching the Chicago River now, his office only steps away. He looked left and right, no cab in sight. The river waters were dark and tumbling slowly. He decided to detour to the office for its warmth and familiarity. There was always someone about in the newsroom, all lights switched on, the teletype from AP and UPI rattling away. Somewhere in the world there was breaking news, too late to appear in the morning paper. The late edition was long off press. He thought of himself as the last occupant of Chicago.
In moments he was in his office, shucking his overcoat and warming his hands at the register. They were crabbed hands, an old man’s hands, big-knuckled. The newsroom was near empty, the two late men playing cards at one of the back desks, waiting for the telephone to ring, a fire or a killing. Ned poured a pony of Ballantine’s, put his feet on his desk, and commenced to brood. He thought of Elaine Ardmore and her father. Michael had lived too long in Italy. His opinions were cockeyed, but what else would you expect from a Capri world view? Expatriates were usually unreliable. They were especially unreliable when assessing the merits and demerits of America. Too much sun, too much prosecco. Too many lazy afternoons on a beach or on the fantail of a boat. America required reporting from the inside, shoe leather stuff. Nothing sophisticated about it. Pencil, paper, shoe leather. That was the beautiful thing about shoe leather reporting. It discouraged speculation. The facts took you only so far, and when the facts were exhausted you stopped typing and handed the piece to the desk. The desk arbitrated. Changed a verb, eliminated a redundant sentence, cut the last adverb, sent it downstairs.
Strangest thing, not knowing of Elaine’s polio. Occasionally she complained about bad knees, but so casually he never thought about it except to ask if she wanted an aspirin. He remembered her lightly massaging her knees, a sour expression on her face. Somewhere along the line he had decided she was not marriage material. Neither was he. Still, he was unable to get her out of his memory. She was stuck there like a nervous tic, part of his private repertory company, like Uncle Ralph and his mother, who knew a beautiful man when she saw one.
Then Ned was home, on the doorstep fumbling for his keys, his hands clumsy in the cold. Ned Ayres was disoriented. He was tired and stooped like a cleaning woman in the Loop. He counted the twelve steps to his apartment, grateful for the sudden warmth. He turned on all the lights and looked carefully at the bookcase on the long wall. He supposed he had a thousand books, mostly histories and biographies, and was too tired to read any of them. But the books were a comfort. Ned had vacation time coming and planned to go south for a week and take half a dozen books with him. He thought about a nightcap and decided against it, then said the hell with it and poured a finger of scotch into the Lalique glass Elaine had given him on his birthday. He stood at the window, watching the snow gather below. The streetlamp cast a wan glow but not so wan that Ned was unable to see the couple necking, pressed against the hood of a blue Cadillac. He watched them a moment, thinking that it would make a wonderful photograph for the paper, page one for sure. Necking as the snow fell on Astor Street in Chicago, run the thing above the fold. There was a privacy question, but with their faces pressed together, they would be impossible to identify. And what would they think, picking up the paper on a Sunday morning and seeing themselves, caught unawares. Readers would love it. Romance in the snow.
Looking at them, thinking of Elaine, Ned remembered a quotation from somewhere:
The dogs bark. The caravan moves on.
Four
The Haberdasher
NED AYRES ARRIVED in Washington a half hour before a spring snowstorm, a three-day affair that effectively closed the city. His flight from Chicago was the last plane in. He put up at the Willard Hotel, dined well, and rose the next morning to find a white city, no pedestrians, no cars, a few athletes on cross-country skis traversing Pennsylvania Avenue. Ned had thoughtfully brought snow boots and set out to look at the government buildings nearby, the Treasury and the White House, the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, Lafayette Square across the street. No one was in the square. It was a ghost square, somnolent and pristine, newborn, Ned thought. He noticed that the White House driveway was cleared, then saw the guards who had cleared it, gathered around the sentry house next to the open gate drinking coffee. There was no wind. Ned was comfortable in his heavy coat and scarf, his fedora set at a Bogart angle. He brushed aside snow to sit on one of the square’s benches and lit a cigarette. At ten in the morning most of the White House windows were dark. Then he observed two dogs cavorting on the lawn, LBJ’s dogs, he supposed. They were the only moving parts in the vicinity. The White House had a southern plantation look to it. The snow around it was white and fluffy as cotton. The Old Executive Office Building resembled something in frigid St. Petersburg, two plainclothesmen in long coats and bearskin hats flanking the entrance. Ned thought of Cossacks. Still, a nineteenth-century atmosphere. Where were the men in top hats? A woman in crinoline? Ned felt a surge of well-being, as if the nation itself was asleep and without care. He looked around him and believed at last he had found his place in life, and in the nation’s capital of all places, a city on a river, the American flag limp on its standard, snowed in.
Ned Ayres saw at once that
the city remained preoccupied by the assassination. The dead president’s ghost was the context. What would Kennedy have done? Did he have a secret plan? His many able assistants remained in government, in the various departments and the White House itself. They felt obliged to support the new man, keep him on track to advance the martyr’s legacy. But they were diminished in spirit, objects of sympathy. They were yesterday’s men. In some fundamental way they had lost confidence, in themselves and in their new president, whose anguish over the war dead was obvious to anyone who saw him up close. Things were unbalanced. No one spoke of the New Frontier. Events were in charge and the events lacked coherence. One thing did not lead to another in any logical sequence. That was owing to the ghost whose promise seemed so bright. Brilliant really. And that was all it was, a promise that was unfulfilled. The spoiled and remorseless gods of antiquity hovered over most every conversation. That was the true meaning of the fascination with conspiracy. Oswald was banal. His motives, to the extent that his motives were understood, were banal. His very life was banal. The capital seemed caught in the crux of a trash novel with many chapters still to come for the martyr, certain women and undisclosed health problems, but these were not, for the moment, fit to print. A familiar face was among them once again. Nixon.
Ned Ayres moved with circumspection, the better to earn the confidence of the newsroom. He was an unknown quantity, fresh from Chicago. Chicago politics bore little relation to politics in the capital, altogether more subtle, and of course more consequential. The foreign aid bill was not a tenement fire. Committee chairmen did resemble aldermen—why, some of them had been in power for decades. The House of Representatives with its arcane rules and procedures had nothing in common with the Chicago City Council except for occasional unruly debates. The press was not regarded lightly as it was in Chicago. The press was part of the scheme of governance. Important congressmen each had a reporter attached to him like a Seeing Eye dog, favors given, favors withheld, guidance. The same seemed to be true of the departments—the Pentagon, State, and Treasury. They all had their Boswells, all agreed on one simple principle: The work was important. It was the nation’s business. Reporters carried with them an attitude of lofty seriousness unknown in Chicago. Was this seriousness a little too lofty for its own good? Perhaps. Dispatches from the State Department often employed the language of diplomacy, written by one man for one man—the secretary of state. The ordinary reader was often baffled. “Disingenuous dissembling.” The crisp, clean lede was derided as simplistic. Ned watched all this for two months before he made his first move, adding one reporter to the Saigon bureau and removing one from London. The Saigon man was elated and the London woman was not. Her Belgravia friends would now be lost to her. But the staff approved: This Ayres knows what he’s doing. And the ultimate tribute: He’s one of us.
For Ned, the unfamiliar soon became commonplace. Within a few months he was plunged into the city’s lively evening hours, where the shadow government and its aspirants flourished. Ned found a suitable three-room apartment off Dupont Circle within walking distance of the newspaper and in due course was introduced to the writer Monica Rainer, who was drawn to a newspaper editor who came from Herman, Indiana, and had never been to college. Monica believed in the self-taught. She had grown up in Washington, the daughter of diplomats who had spent most of their careers outside the United States. Sometimes she accompanied her parents abroad, most times not. She had attended a boarding school in Connecticut and visited her parents in the summer, when it suited her. Really, she said, she had raised herself. Her parents had been wonderfully permissive. When Ned met her, she was a few years out of college and working as the weekend girl at one of the newsmagazines, earning enough to keep her own apartment in Adams-Morgan, where she wrote her articles and, as she said, watched the elephants dance. The year Ned met her, Monica had won a prize—not one of the big ones, but one of the good ones.
With Monica on his arm he discovered that Washington was loose, alert, and much more vivacious than he had expected. It had very little in common with Indianapolis and Chicago, let alone Herman. Monica observed that the workday usually extended well into the evening, work a kind of fetish, even for the press corps, or perhaps especially for the press corps. Why, one of her colleagues spent last Christmas Eve at the office, polishing a piece he had written the week before, destined for the New Year’s issue. Mommy and the kids wrapped the gifts and trimmed the tree and sang the songs, and when he arrived home at last the drudge demanded—well, never mind what the drudge demanded, but it wasn’t eggnog. Washington was worldly and hospitable in the manner of the old South. Negroes drove the taxis but were not much visible on the police force, let alone in the Foreign Service or the newsroom. During daylight hours the pace was serene or appeared serene. The clumsy blockhouse office buildings contributed to the serene idea, giving the impression that all was well, things under control. Monica laughed and dropped her voice an octave: You know what we say around here—what’s past is prologue. Shakespeare’s all-purpose remark. The press liked to think of itself as a necessary ingredient to all this, sometimes watchdog, sometimes lapdog, as much a part of the government as the Central Intelligence Agency. Requires a certain personality type, Monica said, curious, adaptable, ambitious, and subtle, not so different from the skills of a lawyer, minus the glam.
It would help if women were a part of this scene, but they aren’t, except to keep the flags flying at home. And when you find a woman in the White House or on one of the national committees, as often as not they are as aggressive as the men. They have a word for it that somehow does not fit the bill. Resolute, yes. Brilliant, okay. Intrepid, brainy, all okay. Monica gave a theatrical sigh.
Not, however, tough. That’s a man’s word, tough. A bully’s word also, I think. And the thing is, women buy into it. They think, It’s a man’s town, and if you want to compete you’d better speak the local tongue, and that includes toughness. And the next best compliment is, “She’s got balls.” Monica said, That’s one of the things I don’t care for about this town, the vernacular. The other is the locution “this town.” They use that because they think of the capital as a village where only about two hundred people actually count. Drive the horses. Some truth to that, by the way. But not enough to excuse it. But that’s me, Monica said, raising her eyebrows. And I’m well known for being behind the times. I like to rain on parades. You’d think writing articles in such an environment would be foolish. Don’t believe it for a minute. We live in nature’s realm, the survival of the fittest. Depends naturally on what you mean by fittest. How that’s defined. And how the fates behave, meaning the alignment of the stars. And you, Neddy, you’re in the middle of it now. Monica gave a kind of witch’s cackle and turned off the bedside light, leaving the room in total darkness.
From the beginning, Ned Ayres saw the capital as a portfolio of secrets, hidden hands concealed by Oriental screens. Now and then the screens parted and hands were visible. A furtive handshake and the screens closed tight. That was how business was done and had always been done. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner with their Gilded Age were on to it. Sometimes, listening to a confidence, Ned was reminded of Uncle Ralph and his war delusions. Ned tried to explain that to Monica, but it seemed his story did not travel, for she only smiled and said something to the effect that delusional behavior was run-of-the-mill in the capital. The rule as opposed to the exception.
Of course most everyone Ned met was from someplace else, to the point where it was customary to ask, Where are you from? And the answer was immediate: Ohio or California or Kansas. But such was the pull of the capital’s magnetism that after a year or so the ancestral home receded as surely as dusk, and the response became, Well, Ohio, actually, but we’re here now and intend to stay. Isn’t Washington a beautiful city? It seemed that no one ever went home except former presidents. This was known informally as the Truman Rule. To most everyone else Washington was exciting and, more to the point, durable in a way that C
leveland was not. Washington was here today and most emphatically here tomorrow. No such thing as a labor shortage in the capital, and so the man who came aboard as legislative assistant to the senior senator stayed on after the old man’s defeat or retirement, easing into a splendid law office where his knowledge of Senate procedures and the men who enforced them could be put to work at once. Their wives, the ones who were tough enough, often went to work for the government or a lobbying firm. Their eldest daughter managed a summer internship at one of the newspapers. All this did not begin yesterday, but it reached a summit during the Kennedy administration, stuffed with Harvard professors and other academics, school friends of the president. Old Democratic lions who believed their day was done were suddenly catapulted into an important embassy or the seventh floor of the State Department. These were the newcomers’ neighbors, seen walking their dogs on N Street—and so the capital became a kind of fabulous village with wonderful markets catering to the many foreigners, diplomats mostly, the French and the Greeks and Brazilians and Cairenes and Japanese, and boutiques for women, not as glamorous as those in New York—that would come—but glamorous in their own way, particularly exciting when a shopper was notified that Jackie Kennedy was in the changing room.