Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  >

  Perhaps it was the horribly hot summer that took what was left of Dorsey Bascombe’s mind. Days on end of it, waking to a quiet predawn still fetid from the day before, the air so thick and heavy with humidity that every breath was labored, the bedsheets damp with perspiration. And then, the moment the great unyielding sun began to splinter the tops of the trees beyond the river, it began again—a new day feeding like a dragon on the heat-blast of the one before; people moving like torpid slugs, seeking shade.

  There was rain, a late-afternoon shower every few days when the heat and humidity turned the sky into a boiling mass of cumulonimbus and suddenly erupted with sheets of water and violent lightning and thunder. But it was little relief. Storms passed and steam rose thick from the pavement and the roofs of houses, the land giving back the moisture to start the whole process anew, and the temperature instantly shot up again. It was, young Ortho Noblett wrote in the newspaper, like pouring a bucket of water on Hades.

  The refugees from the flood straggled back into town through June as homes and stores were repaired, and there was a good deal of brave talk about starting over, building something even better, the indomitability of the spirit. But then the heat took hold. By mid-July, it was a wilted, defeated place—ground down by ten years of Depression, a devastating flood, and now the most terrible heat wave to hit the area in fifty years or so.

  The first meeting of the reconvened town council degenerated into raucous argument over a proposed resolution to commend Police Chief Burkhalter for his service during the flood crisis. Mayor Pegram Gibbons and Councilman Clayton Pulyard had to be physically restrained after Clayton called Burkhalter a “worthless drunk who did nothing but shoot snakes and get in the way.” Burkhalter tossed his badge on the council table and stormed out of the chambers just as Pegram, normally the mildest of souls, but also the man who had hired Burkhalter the year before, started climbing across the table toward Clayton. It had the makings of farce, but people didn’t see much humor in it.

  People in fact didn’t see much humor in anything. The accumulated misery made them fractious. They said it was what sent Dorsey Bascombe over the edge.

  It happened suddenly. Hosanna sent Flavo running to Bright’s house on an early July afternoon. Telephone service had not yet been restored. Flavo banged urgently on the back door. “Miz Bright. Come quick!”

  She was in the parlor, reading a magazine while Fitz took his nap in the front bedroom.

  “Flavo, for goodness’ sakes,” she scolded as she headed for the door; then she saw his eyes wide with fear.

  “Mama says you got to come right now! Mr. Dorsey locked himself in his room and he’s yelling his head off!”

  She left Flavo there to listen out for Little Fitz and ran the three blocks to Dorsey’s house in the fierce heat, feeling the perspiration coursing down her back and face and the air pulling at her lungs. She found Hosanna in the hallway outside Dorsey’s room. “Mr. Dorsey,” she was pleading to the closed door, “you come on out now. I’ll get you some dinner, that make you feel better. We got fresh tomatoes today, Mr. Dorsey.” Her eyes were bleak with fright. Behind the door, she could hear Dorsey shouting incoherently.

  Bright rattled the doorknob. “Papa. It’s me, Papa. Open the door.”

  The shouts turned to sobbing. He made no move toward the door. He seemed far away, on the other side of the room somewhere. She ran down the stairs to the parlor, found the passkey in a drawer in the tall walnut secretary, returned to the hallway. She steadied her trembling hands and inserted the key in the latch, turned it with a click, opened the door slowly.

  A blast of heat struck her in the face. The window was closed, the shade drawn, the room dim and fevered. She didn’t see him at first, and then she spied the top of his head and his lower body, hunkered in a far corner between the wall and a chifforobe. His breath came in great labored gasps, as if his lungs were on fire. The terrible sound of it rasped against the heat.

  She crossed the room quickly and knelt in front of him. “Papa,” she said, “what’s the matter?”

  He would not show her his face at first, but then she put her hand gently on his forehead and he looked up at her and she could see the madness in his eyes, the froth of spittle on his lips, the flaring of his nostrils. And then suddenly he grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her roughly to him, pressed his mouth against hers. The stench of his breath, his body, was terrible. She recoiled in horror, pulled away from him, stumbled back against the bed while he cowered there in the corner. “Elise, don’t leave me!” he cried.

  Bright pressed her fist to her mouth, shaken to the core, repelled and sickened with shame. She ran from him, from the sight and smell of him, past Hosanna, who had seen it all and who stood bug-eyed in the doorway. She reached quickly and caught Bright with one hand and closed the doorway with the other as Bright collapsed against her, sobbing wildly. “Oh, Hosanna! He’s mad! Oh, God!”

  Hosanna let her cry for a long time, pouring out her grief and anguish until she was numb and empty. “Come away now,” Hosanna said gently. “I’ll fetch the doctor.”

  When Finus Tillman had come and given Dorsey a strong sedative, Bright sat in the kitchen and summoned the strength to ask Hosanna what had happened.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know Mr. Dorsey sent for Mose this morning, told him he wanted to go to the lumberyard. Mose come in one of the trucks and took him over there ’bout eleven, I reckon. When he come back, he look real strange and he just come up here to his room and closed the door. ’bout an hour later I heard him hollerin’.”

  She went to him again in the late afternoon after Finus had left, sat for a long time by his bed, fanning him with a small cardboard church fan while he slept fitfully, mumbling and turning about, unable to find peace even under the spell of the sedative. His body seemed as dry as a desert, the skin parched and paper-thin, body and soul wasted.

  Finus came again in the evening. Bright waited downstairs while he examined Dorsey, and when he came down, Bright asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

  Finus hesitated, shook his head. “I don’t know, Bright. About this today, I just don’t know. It may well be the shock of seeing the lumberyard for the first time since the flood. It may be an accumulation of things.” He looked down at the black bag in his hand. “What’s in there can’t heal the mind. Maybe nothing can.”

  “Is my father insane?”

  “Your father, my old and dear friend, is very fragile,” he said gently.

  “He’s only sixty-four!” she cried.

  “That has very little to do with it.” He could sense her despair. He took her hand. “Stay with him, Bright. Do all you can humanly do, and take solace in that.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “Is he dying?”

  “We’re all dying,” he said, his voice heavy with the twilight weariness of the many years he had carried the worn black bag in and out of dim rooms, of a doctor’s inevitable ultimate failure. “We’re all dying,” he repeated. “It’s the only way out.”

  >

  On the fifth morning after Dorsey’s fit of madness, Bright woke very early in the bedroom next to his and felt a great stillness. Outside, the first dim gray of daylight was giving faint outline to the leaves on the tree in the front yard. Silence. It was too early for Hosanna, but there was something else—a void from which life itself seemed to have been sucked. She lay in her bed for a while, listening, but the house itself seemed deadened. Finally she rose, pulled on a robe, and opened the door to her father’s room. The bed was empty. Not only that, but neatly made, with the chintz spread tucked underneath the pillows. It looked as if no one had ever slept there, as if this were a room preserved in memory.

  Bright’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh, no!” she cried softly.

  The lumberyard was a barren place. The flood had swept it clean, smashing the great stacks of lumber and carrying them away. Monkey had scouted downriver to see what he could salvage and had come back
empty-handed. The operation would have to start over. The big shed housing the planer mill was just now being rebuilt, but it would be some time yet before Bascombe Lumber would be back in business. Here in the long-shadowed moments of early morning it was empty and lifeless, a wasteland. Years of accumulated sawdust that had made the ground spongy and sweet-smelling underfoot had been washed away. In its place the river had left a coating of red that was parched and cracked by the heat. How it must have grieved him when he saw it, the wreckage of his dreams and honor.

  Bright found him in the tiny office, set back on its foundation since the flood had gone. The door was ajar, and just inside in the dim light she saw first the hated leather corset, cast aside on the floor. She closed her eyes tightly, sick with dread, afraid to see. She wanted desperately to turn and go, close the door quietly behind her. But she forced herself to stand her ground. She began to cry now, to give way to the great encompassing ache that settled over her like a shroud. Then she opened her eyes, and through the shiny film of her tears she saw the brown leather boots. She moved behind the desk and knelt beside him. “Oh, Papa!” she cried. “Oh, dear Papa!” His unseeing eyes stared at her, pierced straight through to her heart. The huge black pistol lay on the floor next to his outstretched hand. And beneath it, the note, barely legible in his fevered scrawl:

  Bright,

  It’s all gone. Everything. I can’t bear the sight of it, or of myself. I love you, but I am so ashamed. It’s up to you now. Don’t run from it, as I have done. I have failed. You must not.

  The bullet had gone through his heart. It was the place where he hurt the most.

  21

  Fitzhugh meant to enlist, and as soon as possible. It would be a young man’s war, as all wars are, but there would be a place for men who were no longer young, and they too were signing up. They wouldn’t let him at the front at his age, but there were important things he could do. Perhaps a commission in Army Intelligence. That was something akin to politics.

  But FDR got wind of it and called Fitzhugh to the White House on a gray late December afternoon in 1941. He sat Fitzhugh down in front of a crackling fire in his office and said, “Fitz, I don’t want you tooling off to the Pescadores now. I need you here. We’ve got to have soldiers on the Hill too, because that’s where some of the most important battles will be fought. Just because there’s a war on doesn’t mean the hyenas will roll over and play dead.” Roosevelt cocked his eye and took a drag on his cigarette, peering at Fitzhugh over the top of his glasses, and that was that.

  So Fitzhugh resigned himself to staying home and tried to hide his disappointment. But it was there. His war, the one for his generation, and he was missing it. The president could talk convincingly about manning the battlements in Congress, but it wasn’t the same as going in harm’s way. So a dinner at the White House with Winston Churchill was important, at least in making Fitzhugh Birdsong feel that a little bit of the war was being waged where he could get to it.

  Bright went with him back to Washington after New Year’s. There seemed little else to do, he was so insistent, so excited about the dinner, almost pleading. They left Little Fitz in Hosanna’s care and drove to Columbus to catch the train, then rode all day and through the night, making love as the train rocked gently under their urgent bodies, waking to a Virginia countryside brilliant with frost, so clean and dazzling it could make your heart ache.

  She sat watching it from their table in the dining car as the train approached Washington, feeling for the first time in two and a half years that things might be made right again. Not the same, but made right and whole. She felt herself awakening from a long sleep in which nothing had mattered but dreams and the memory of dreams. She thought suddenly of her mother, of the long deep silences in which she had wrapped herself and the household during Bright’s childhood. She understood something about that now, how an injured or fearful soul sought refuge in the quiet dark, trying to heal itself. Bright had existed since her father’s death as two people: one who functioned, one who hid behind a curtain. She played the piano; she heard no music.

  She blinked now in the sunlight, felt the warm glowing place deep in her body that Fitzhugh had stirred in the night.

  He took her hand. “I’m so glad you came. I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

  She looked at him, searched his face, studied the lines and angles as if seeing them for the first time. There were tiny crow’s-feet around his eyes, slivers of gray in his hair, a softness about his lips. He had always been an attractive man. Now there was the grace of maturity, an ease that came of accomplishment. Fitzhugh Birdsong was one of the most influential young members of the Congress, a confidant of the master politician in the White House. Moreover, he had staked out his ground—foreign policy—just at the moment when it had seized the nation’s consciousness. He was gaining influence on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a builder of consensus, a gently persuasive man who could, nonetheless, drive a ruthless bargain when he had to. Most of the time, he didn’t have to. Fitzhugh Birdsong combined charm and just the merest hint of vulnerability. It made you want to agree with him if you possibly could.

  She could scarcely remember the moment in 1940 when he had told her he intended to run for reelection. He couldn’t leave now, he said. Neither could FDR. They were both men who saw the world, and America’s place in the world, in a new light. And the world they saw was spinning out of control. It was no time for such men to shrink back. He paraphrased Emerson: “Events are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” She had heard him numbly. It didn’t matter. Nothing seemed to matter very much in 1940. She felt alone. Whether Fitzhugh was there with her or off in Washington, she still felt alone.

  Now, on this bright Virginia morning with the frost in the broad grassy fields fracturing the new sun into a million pinpoints of light, had it come to matter, at least a little? Was there an end to the aloneness? She couldn’t answer that yet. She was here with him, that was all.

  She smiled. “I’m a country girl come to town. Will I be terribly frightened?”

  “No,” he said gravely. “I won’t allow that. They’ll love you. You’ll see.”

  They stepped from the train in the middle of the morning into the middle of the war. Union Station was a madhouse, a surging throng—young men in a rainbow of uniforms, young women clutching suitcases with one hand and holding their hats on their heads with the other, men with fedoras carrying briefcases, everyone in a terrible hurry but nobody particularly put out by the whole thing. While Fitzhugh fetched the bags, Bright clung to a broad marble column and saw the great ethnic diversity of America pass before her, the faces of Europe and Asia, the babble of strange accents and foreign tongues. It struck her: how provincial her upbringing, how sheltered her life, how narrow her perspective. These were strange, even exotic people, many of them with ideas and ideals that would undoubtedly be alien to her. But all God’s creatures. Great heavens, what a stew he had cooked! It was a bit breathtaking.

  She marveled at Fitzhugh, making his way back to her, so self-assured, moving so easily in the noise and crush. “Where did all these foreigners come from?” she asked when he reached her.

  He laughed. “Brooklyn and Des Moines, probably. Quite a hodgepodge, isn’t it. We’re going to war with our ancestors.”

  They crammed into a taxicab with a Navy captain, an Air Corps lieutenant, and a young woman who had just arrived from Richmond to take a job in the Office of Production Management. The cabbie let them off first at the Hay-Adams and Bright sat on a sofa in the dark-paneled lobby, watching the scurrying about of people who looked incredibly important and busy, while Fitzhugh checked them in. He shared a small apartment behind the Capitol with three other congressmen, but there was no privacy for them there.

  They lunched in the Hay-Adams dining room, lobster bisque and mountain trout, interrupted by a stream of passersby who stopped to say hello to Fitzhugh—a senator, an undersecretary of something, various bureaucrats and congressional aides, and, m
ost notably, Tommy Corcoran. Bright recognized the name instantly—a key member of the Roosevelt brain trust, one of the great behind-the-scenes powers at the White House. Fitzhugh greeted him warmly and he sat with them for a brief moment, talking about the great upheaval of Washington, the difficulty of getting a suit of clothes pressed.

  When he had gone, Bright said, “I thought he looked a little sad.”

  “He’s on the outside looking in now. Practicing law in New York and wishing he were back with his hands on the levers. He tried to wangle an appointment as solicitor general, but he couldn’t muster up the support.”

  “I thought he was one of the most important men in Washington.”

  Fitzhugh shook his head. “Not anymore. Tommy’s no longer useful. He and folks like Ben Cohen and Rex Tugwell, the ones who helped put the New Deal together, have been left behind. The important thing now is the war, and they couldn’t reconcile themselves to that. They’re still talking about social programs, and Roosevelt and Churchill are over there in the White House right this minute talking about bombers and heavy cruisers.”

  “Good heavens.” It was a bit unsettling, the thought of the two most powerful men in the world deep in strategy a few hundred yards away from where they sat eating a leisurely lunch.

  “What Tommy and the rest of the New Dealers can’t see,” he went on, “is that they’ve already won. They’ve changed the basic way the country operates. Government is a major player now, where ten years ago it was pretty much a benign observer. Government is as important as business in determining how people live, how they work, how they raise their families. The war can’t do anything but reinforce that.”

  “You said he’s no longer useful. Does the president toss aside people who are no longer useful?”

  “Of course,” Fitzhugh said without hesitation. “The president is first and foremost a politician, probably the best that ever was, and the most pragmatic. If he likes your ideas and the way you back them up, he’ll let you approach him. But not get too close. And you can stay only so long as you serve his purposes. Forget that, and he can break your heart. He doesn’t do it overtly. He has no stomach for direct confrontation. But suddenly one day you find yourself on the outside. That’s what happened to Tommy.”