by Ward Just
After twenty minutes Ned stopped talking to himself and eased out of the Adirondack chair at the edge of the narrow field that rolled down to the bay. The chair was uncomfortable but the espresso warm in the ancient thermos. Watermen were already about, motoring south to the oyster beds and, farther along, the ocean. He could hear very well the soft put-puts of the engines. The rising sun cast a sharp glare on the water, so sharp Ned’s eyes burned and he had to look away. He wondered whether this place was too quiet for him, too anchored in the past, too removed from the hurly-burly of contemporary life. Hurly-burly was his father’s expression. Ned’s village, called Rockway, reminded him of Herman, except for the watermen, who were hard cases, most of them. They seemed to be at permanent war with the federal government and the State of Maryland over quotas and other matters relating to the business of commercial fishing. If he nodded at one on the street, he rarely got a nod back. They kept to themselves, the watermen. Ned Ayres had few friends in the village other than the police chief and the mayor. Their lives were so different. The events that had shaped them were wildly different. A life was a story after all, high points and low, high drama or no drama except the cycle of life itself, the interval between birth and the grave. Ned was a public man. His neighbors weren’t.
He poured a cup of espresso from the thermos. The month was late September, the year 2005. Ned looked about for his newspaper and realized then that he had forgotten to bring it. The newspaper was lying in the front yard of the manor house and he had missed it entirely. He sat thinking about the house and the newspaper on the lawn and decided he was in a good place. His memoir would take time. He was a patient man and all he needed now was a coherent first chapter. That chapter would unlock the doors to the other chapters. His living situation had been solved at last. He had craved the manor house for all the years he had lived in Washington. He bought it because he could afford it and because it was old and had its own history and would therefore be ideal for the work he had laid out for himself and was now going so badly. He was trying to bring order to the whirl of events and instead he himself was awhirl. In his dark moments Ned had the idea that his editor’s life was a curse on what he was called on to do now. Writer’s block never occurred to him. In his business, writer’s block was something that afflicted poets and novelists and was yet another euphemism for indolence. Moreover, he did not write and had never written. He edited, a higher form altogether. Something ludicrous about it. Ned had been so good with other people’s work that he was unable to get on with his own. Put another way, he was the judge parsing the lawyers and now he was obliged to write his own briefs. He sat down again in the Adirondack chair and sipped tepid espresso and concluded that he would have to make a supreme effort. The material was superb but it was a lump of clay, and one fine day he’d look up to discover that it had congealed, as unyielding as a frozen block of gravel.
He looked down at the grass, in shadows away from the water-glare. He saw tiny cobwebs and here and there an insect. The delicate cobwebs reminded him of the veils of the sort women wore years ago. His mother wore a veil when she drove to Muncie for shopping. The veil preserved anonymity and a kind of modesty. But looking at the webs now, Ned was reminded of glass. Transparent. Hard as iron. A shaft of sunlight touched the veils, causing them to collapse and vanish, as if they had never existed or existed only in his memory. Ned dwelled a moment on his veiled mother setting off for Muncie in her Buick, promising to return for dinner. She had a stew on the stove. Don’t worry about me, she said, and the bare truth was, no one did. Muncie was an hour or so up the highway. The day was fine. What could go wrong? Of course that was before the Grant business that cast such a pall over Herman and Herman’s surroundings. The trips to Muncie ended and Ned’s mother went to Mill City instead, much closer, a rugged city but not dangerous. Ned Ayres heard a creaking and looked up to see a flight of swans. Their wings creaked like a rusty door when they flew. Nasty creatures but beautiful against the azure sky.
Seen from afar, up the narrow carriage path, Ned Ayres’s pre–Civil War manor house had the aspect of a Hollywood film set, perhaps one of the strangler films. It was three stories high, built of brick, surrounded by towering black oaks. The house was forever in shade, its great bulk suggesting a fortress or prison. Here and there were flower beds gone to seed. The lawn was overgrown most of the time. The windows of the manor house were opaque, heavy glass distorting the view inside and out. Earl Bosenquet, the hired man, could only do so much. He was old, arthritic, and slow. He talked in a drawling country accent that made him difficult to understand. But Earl was genial most of the time and knew the place, as he said, upwards and backwards. When Ned asked if he could use some assistance, Earl said, Absolutely not under no circumstances, with a vehemence that caused Ned to back off.
Gulls were forever overhead and raccoons roamed the lawn. A derelict turn-of-the-century combine was partly hidden behind one of the oaks, evidence of an attempt at farming once upon a time. The property had been proud and evidently prosperous. The manor house easily accommodated a family of eight or ten. One of the previous owners tried to make it into a rural inn, but that thought was never realized. Any visitor needed a creative imagination to summon the cries of children or the thump of a croquet ball or the swish of a lawn party, the women in crinoline and the men in top hats. Yet surely that was its heritage, gentle and slow-moving, well mannered, without guile. Ned was amused. He thought of his house as a nation gone to seed—badly maintained, inflated, bad vibrations, bad debts, corruption. He thought of Sudan or the Alabama hinterland. And, most recently, the newspaper business.
The house had a history: under the black oak in the side yard was a gravestone, the epitaph effaced after so many years. A stranger wouldn’t look at it twice, an anonymous stone, but in the town everyone knew the story. In October of 1862 a deserter from the war arrived at Wilson’s Fifty. His arm was in a sling. He was famished and disoriented. He was incoherent, scarcely able to utter an intelligible word. He wore a Confederate gray shirt and Union trousers, and his speech was so garbled it was impossible to know whose army he was part of. He was indisputably a soldier because of the shirt and trousers and the rifle slung over his shoulder. His hands shook. When the doctor came to look him over, he stayed but a half hour, announcing at the end of his examination that the boy was touched in the head, battle fatigue. God knows where he has been, but wherever it was, he’s run away from it. Except for the damaged arm the boy had no wounds, or none that were visible. The doctor put his age as between eighteen and twenty. I can’t do anything for him, the doctor said, and you can’t either. Wilson’s wife, Calista, thought of herself as a Christian woman and refused to send the boy away. She put him to bed in one of the second-floor guest rooms and brought him food every morning and evening. The meals were only nibbled at. He began to slip away and in a fortnight he was gone, having managed one clear word before expiring. That word was Antietam. Calista Wilson arranged the funeral and the entire town turned out, since it was impossible to know on whose side the boy fought. The town was equally divided so far as the war was concerned. The minister of the Congregational church conducted the service, ending with a short sermon deploring the loss of life, both sides. The next day Calista Wilson went to the stonemason and requested a marker for the boy’s grave. She thought and thought about a suitable epitaph, finally giving it up and requesting merely: An Infantryman Known but to God. For many years schoolchildren came to visit the grave as part of their Civil War lessons, a field trip close to home. Then the school abandoned the Civil War as a separate subject, working it in with the more general American history curriculum. The field trips ended. What was the point? And many of the parents found the effaced gravestone ghoulish, and so grass and thornbush grew around it and the stone sank so that it could hardly be seen. Also, many people thought that the subject of the War Between the States was divisive and often hurtful. Time enough for that at the university. Earl Bosenquet told Ned the story one summ
er evening, sipping lemonade in the gazebo.
The Wilson family had owned the property for almost a century until the blood ran thin and the money ran out. The grandchildren and their descendants were spendthrift and bad managers generally, a quarrelsome tribe given to dubious experiments. An attempt at cattle ranching had been a failure. Plans to turn the estate into a riding academy foundered. The property decayed and eventually was sold to a newly minted United States senator from the West Coast named Golden, who envisaged it as a weekend retreat. The senator’s wife, Henriette, insisted on being put in charge of renovations, and soon enough an invitation to Wilson’s Fifty was coveted by friends in Washington and beyond, who saw it as a sort of hybrid of Cliveden, Versailles, and Camp David. Twelve years later, to his great surprise, the senator lost his reelection and in a fury at his ungrateful constituents put the house on the market and announced his decision to relocate to Europe, the Italian Riviera, precisely (he claimed unconvincingly) as “Jack” planned to do had Nixon won in 1960. The hell with them, Jack would’ve said, meaning the American people. Instead of the American people he would have the grace and favor of Gianni Agnelli and the ambiance of his merry yacht, said to be one hundred and thirty feet in length with ten private staterooms, and a motorboat for water sports and sympathetic companionship in the evenings—so many ports of call in the Adriatic and east to the Aegean. Signore Agnelli was a generous and scrupulous host. No request would go unmet. The senator went on and on about his European plans as Henriette rolled her eyes, one more pipe dream from an overstressed and defeated politician. Moreover, he did not know Signore Agnelli, and Signore Agnelli did not know him. Or me either, Henriette added. But illness intervened and the senator never saw the Adriatic except in his dreams.
There were two more sales after that, and then the property passed into the hands of a Washington lawyer named Fitts, who had the purse to maintain it but not the will or the energy, and so the manor house and its grounds and outbuildings continued their decline—their “desuetude,” as the lawyer put it. The fields lay abandoned, overgrown with briarbush. The tennis court and the Summer House were destroyed in a hurricane. The pheasant went away. A coyote showed up now and again to howl at the midnight moon, the ghost of an infuriated Wilson, according to the neighbors. A tragedy, they said, such a fine old place. Do you remember the October afternoon when the president came to lunch? He and Golden were very close friends. But there was nothing to be done about it now. Wilson’s Fifty was finished, and nothing short of divine intervention would put it right. The senator was a fool and the lawyer inattentive. Careless was the better word. Those alien to the region did not understand the simple principle of maintenance, a daily business, a full-time job like caring for an invalid. One did not advance in such an environment. One maintained. One preserved, remained in place, guarded, conscious of the claims of the future. Now, thanks to willful neglect, the property was on life support, not so different from some bankrupt third-world autocracy, the rulers stripping assets as the nation fell to pieces. The local people were quite positive in this view. Fitts died and the estate went on the market once again and was sold at last to the retired newspaper editor who knew it well, having visited often during the senator’s reign years before. He and Henriette were especially friendly. Rumor was, they had a walkout, but there was no drama because the senator didn’t mind. Earl Bosenquet was asked to verify the rumor but refused to say one word. The editor paid him well. He was owed respect.
Ned Ayres had fallen at once for the manor house and its surroundings, as another man might fall for a starlet or the roulette wheel, perhaps a racehorse or an Old Master. Ned had his eyes on the place from the beginning. He was young then but foresaw the day when he would retire like a good American and work on his memoirs. He saw the memoirs as his life’s work, occupying his time as—had things turned out differently—grandchildren might. Or his golf game. Or taking an annual cruise, the Caribbean or the Baltic. Shuffleboard in the afternoon and too much whiskey at night. Not likely. He had intended all along to work at a deliberate pace, but now he was inert. When one had spent a working lifetime attempting to understand the motives of others—well, you came up dry when writing of your own. Pleasures and miseries, they too were dimly seen. What was not dimly seen was the ambiance of the newsroom, the swing of it, the excitement when presented with something utterly unexpected. An Oval Office scandal, a cabinet secretary caught in flagrante, the suicide of a revered jurist, stories that went on for months and were rarely resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Pieces of the story were missing, lost, hidden away, a general silence on the part of those who knew him—rarely her—and the situation. At such times a newspaper reporter could believe that the city of Washington was a place of dark corners, inaccessible, abnormal, mysterious. Ned Ayres had his diaries and notebooks and the rest, the cartons meticulously dated and organized by subject, observations on American journalism, its ethics and personalities, its rituals, the milieu of the newsroom, ending when he walked out the door, the paper under his arm, its headline immaculate: BUSH DEFEATS KERRY. And so at long last he had a congenial place of his own to write. No distractions.
Of course Ned had too much house, he knew that. Three stories and fifteen rooms, most of it in one stage or another of disrepair. The roof leaked. The furnace needed attention. The interior was filthy and small things were out of order. The centerpiece of the fanlight above the front door was cracked. Editor Ayres had drastically underestimated the cost of mere maintenance, he who had run such a tight newsroom and had been so careful when line-editing a piece for the paper. He had badly needed a change of scene, and the manor house held wonderful memories for him and a provocative history that went back before the Civil War. At the end of his life Edgar Allan Poe had rusticated for a spell in one of the third-floor bedrooms, a servant’s room actually, drying out from his usual excess. He had left a fragment of a poem, the handwriting all but indecipherable but unmistakably Poe’s own hand. A century later Mencken was a frequent visitor. A framed photograph of the blue-eyed sage hung in the library, its inscription to a certain Jane Irma Smith: “Get out of Paris as soon as you can. It is poison to Americans.” Poe’s poem and Mencken’s photo with its two-sentence admonition were placed either side of a sketch by the Frisian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, two Roman boys hauling water from a well. Ned noticed at once that the poem, the letter, and the sketch were screwed into the wall. They were not meant to be removed, as much a part of the manor house as the fireplace near the piano and the vast library, two stories high with a teak ladder attached to a rail in the ceiling.
The library contained more than two thousand volumes, mostly a legacy of the Wilson years. Lawyer Fitts and the senator’s wife were avid readers and pleased to find that a number of the volumes were signed. James Branch Cabell. Ida Tarbel. Alice Roosevelt Longworth had supposedly called the library “the greatest room in the East,” certainly greater in every way than the mundane Oval Office or the overdecorated Blue Room in the White House, where the only books were ceremonial. Everyone gathered in the library for drinks. Senator Lester Golden and his wife were enthusiastic hosts with a wide circle of friends, so the evenings were animated, the conversation wide-ranging with, most often, a political undertow. The Remarques. John Gunther. William O. Douglas. Gregory Peck. Alger Hiss, a quiet presence, but when he spoke the table fell silent. Henriette Golden valued friendship above all else. She was a sparkling Californian, a daughter of the entertainment industry, her father a producer and her mother an actress who shined brightly for a decade and then retired to look after her husband, “keeping an eye on him,” as she put it. Henriette was a thoughtful hostess who set an immaculate table. She was keen for gossip and usually placed Ned Ayres on her left, Ned a good listener, attentive to nuance and up to speed on the ways and byways of the capital. In other words, he had something to contribute. Henriette was amused when Ned declared that the thing about Washington was that you had to know whose hand was on whose leg an
d whether that hand signified a proposal of marriage or something else. The capital was alive with the sound of intrigue. Henriette saw at once that Ned was one of them, a value-added addition to the table—and all this time she had found the news business a forbidden zone, utterly baffling, as if it were a kind of cult with its own rituals and sacred texts, passwords, goes and no-goes. Bottom line: the press could not be trusted. This Ned was cut from different cloth, cloth that resembled her own.
Ned’s memories of the Saturday-night suppers were fond and he intended to devote a full chapter to them, who was at table and what was said and the menus and the parlor games later. What Hiss said to Gunther and what Gunther said back. The real attraction to the Golden table was its conversation, the less circumspect the better. True coin was indiscretion. In the beginning Ned found himself conflicted over just how much he committed to the pages of the slender, green leather diary he had bought at Mark Cross for the occasion, not a word transcribed until he was safely upstairs and abed. He took the precaution of writing in code. He did expect that the guests along with the senator would be dead before it came time to write anything. Ned was usually the youngest guest in the room by thirty years and more, except for Henriette. Also, there remained the question of how much privacy was allowed around a dinner table, with its exaggeration and presumption, some malice, sly references. The dead could not be libeled as a matter of law. As a matter of personal ethics, there were the usual disputes. What was the shelf life of a reputation?