Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  He handed her the package, watched as she opened it. “Oh, Fitzhugh!” Gershwin. A two-record album, sixteen-inch discs with Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. A very modernistic drawing on the front of a piano with notes rising from it like bubbles from champagne. Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. A brilliant blend of jazz and classical. She had heard it performed on the radio.

  “The lady at the department store told me it was quite the thing,” Fitzhugh said.

  “Oh, it is!” she cried, clutching the album to her. “But we don’t have a Victrola to play it on. It got ruined in the Flood, remember?”

  “You do now,” he said slyly. “I believe it’s being delivered at home just as we speak.”

  “I could kiss you right here,” she said.

  “Fine,” he said. “Go right ahead.”

  So she placed the album on the settee beside her and flung her arms around his neck and kissed him long and deeply. A young naval officer passing them gave a low whistle and said, “Atta way to go, lady.”

  She released him, blushing, and they sat looking at each other for a moment, laughing.

  Finally he asked, “Have you had a good morning?”

  It brought her back to earth. She hesitated, wondering if he knew. Of course he knew. “Interesting,” she said.

  “Did you …” He hung fire, looking at her quizzically.

  “Go to the White House? Yes.”

  He smiled. “She’s quite marvelous, isn’t she.”

  “Quite a presence,” Bright said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like her.”

  Fitzhugh chuckled. “I think she pesters the horns off the president sometimes, but she generally gets what she wants.”

  She could tell it in his face. He knew exactly what Mrs. Roosevelt had planned to propose to her. But he didn’t know what the answer had been.

  She took a moment. And then she said softly, “I said ‘No thank you.’ ”

  His smile froze and she could see the color drain from behind it, leaving a mask. The hotel lobby was filling with people now at lunchtime, a surging babble that smelled of cologne and tobacco smoke and the cold midday outside. Bright felt lost, alien. And, again, homesick.

  “Why?” Fitzhugh asked.

  She thought of all the perfectly good excuses. Wartime Washington was no place for a young child. Why, you couldn’t find decent housing. And it might well be a dangerous place. If an enemy attacked, certainly here. Plus the weather. Snow on the way. What if Little Fitz got sick? All these strangers.

  But what she said was “It’s not home.”

  “Bright, for God’s sake.” He looked around the lobby, at the growing crowd. “We can’t talk here,” he said. “Let’s go to our room.”

  She recoiled at that, at the thought of being closed up in the small room with him, with his disappointment and disapproval, with the thing that stood most between them now. “No,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  They sat on a concrete bench in a corner of Lafayette Park, away from the foot traffic, and they had the place much to themselves. A biting wind sent the noontime crowd scudding along the sidewalks, quick about the business of seeking shelter. Only the squirrels and pigeons eyed them curiously. Lafayette, green with age on his horse across the way, seemed forever en route to distant battles, unheeding of a man and woman who huddled together with the rawness of the midday stinging their eyes and plucking at their hair. Fitzhugh watched Lafayette for a moment, seeming to seek direction. And then he turned to her finally and there was a nakedness, a vulnerability, in his face that made her long to touch him. But she kept her gloved hands burrowed deep in the folds of her coat. “I had hoped you would stay,” he said. “I had hoped that very much.”

  “I can’t,” she said simply. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. It’s just not something I’m capable of.”

  “Yes, you are,” he insisted. “You’re very much up to it. Haven’t you seen that these past few days? And last night …”

  “It’s not a matter of that. It’s simply that this is not my place.”

  “For God’s sake,” he exploded. “It’s the nation, Bright. This is …” He waved his hand, searching for the word.

  “Indispensable?” she finished for him.

  “Yes,” he said emphatically. “Especially now.”

  “To the nation, perhaps. To you. But my God, Fitzhugh. Washington in wartime? It’s no place for a family.”

  He shook his head, but then he took a long time to speak, and when he did he weighed his words very carefully. It had the tenor of something he had been saying in his mind for quite a while. He said, “Your father’s dead, Bright.”

  “Of course he’s dead,” she shot back. “I don’t need you to remind me of that.”

  “Then bury Dorsey Bascombe and be done with it.”

  She felt the sudden rush of a great rage then—at Fitzhugh, at circumstance. And yes, at Dorsey. All of it locked away for a long time behind the numbness that had become the door to her heart. “How dare you!” she lashed at him, full of the fury of it. “You have no right to speak of him! You couldn’t …”

  And then she caught herself. The enormity of what she was about to say and all that it meant seized her like huge hands plucking her powerfully from the park bench as if to fling her into the bare wicked limbs of the trees. Her voice froze in her throat. No!

  But it was too late. He stared at her for a moment, saw the anger and then the fear. He blinked once, slowly, with the fine agony of it. And then he said softly, his words almost lost in a gust of wind. “No. I couldn’t. I have seen that for a long time. But then, I don’t need to.”

  She looked away quickly, unable to face him. But she could feel his gaze on her. After a moment she summoned her voice. It seemed a strange, unconnected thing. “My father once told me to be whatever I wanted to be and not worry about what other people thought. That was a very great thing for a man to say to a daughter. Men are supposed to think that way, but not women. And then, he said that when you live in a place, you put your heart into it. And I’ve done that.”

  That was all true, she thought. And it might explain her. But it was not sufficient for now. Perhaps nothing was. She turned finally, touched his sleeve, and as she did so she understood with perfect clarity that everything hung in the balance. Everything about them.

  “I just want …” His voice trailed off, but she knew. And that was when she began to cry, when it all flooded out, and she was powerless to stop it, even here in this most public place in this profound city on this wretchedly cold day with the world turning itself inside out. She felt small and inadequate, threatened by great forces over which she had no control, by the unfairness of being forced to choose, and once having chosen, being forced to face the consequences of choice. She sobbed, and he put his arm around her and pulled her against him and didn’t try to stop the tears. She cried for a very long time and when she finally began to regain control she looked up and saw Fitzhugh’s own deep weary sadness. He reached into his coat pocket for a handkerchief and handed it to her and she dabbed at her eyes.

  “We’re a great deal alike,” he said. “We both want the same kinds of things. Only they happen to be in different places. Now what are we going to do about that?”

  “Perhaps we can live with it,” she said.

  He thought about that for a moment and then he nodded. “Perhaps we can. If that’s the only way.” Then he looked down into her eyes and said the most gallant thing he ever said in his life. “I will not give you up.”

  “I love you,” she said. And she did, truly.

  But he said, “I suppose I could say that if you loved me you would come away with me. But it’s not that simple, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Then love really doesn’t have a great deal to do with it.”

  They sat for a while longer, letting the midday slip past into a gray afternoon when the overcast seemed to get thicker and somehow softer, as if the snow mi
ght come any moment—big wet flakes that would cover the streets and park benches and deaden the sounds of the great hurrying-about. Perhaps over there in the White House, Winston Churchill might push Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wheelchair to a broad window and they would look out on the South Lawn stretching white toward the monuments and believe for a moment that gentleness and beauty might one day return to the earth. The earth, even at war, could mask its wretchedness under a snowfall. A heart, Bright Birdsong thought, could not.

  >

  She barely remembered the afternoon, the taxi ride to the station, the terrible crush of the crowd, Fitzhugh kissing her before he handed her up to the conductor. She seemed to be in a well, sounds bouncing hollowly off the walls around her, a round hole of light far above, beyond her reach. The train started to move almost as soon as she sat down and she looked out the window, searching for him in the throng as they pulled away. He stood silently, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat, trying to spot her as the train picked up speed. Then their eyes met for an instant and she could see the pain there. He nodded, and then he was gone and she was leaving Washington behind.

  They went south into snowfall and the Virginia countryside faded into winter darkness with white flakes flashing by in the light from her window. She sat clutching the Gershwin albums in her arms, declining the conductor’s invitation to go to the dining car. She was not hungry. She thought she would go to bed early, taking refuge in sleep as the train clicked and rumbled southward toward home. She began, after a while, to come to herself. And as she did she began to think of all the people and things waiting for her. There were Little Fitz and Hosanna, and all her music students. And the school board—at odds now over expanding the library at the high school. Can’t do it with a war on, some said. Can’t let a war stand in the way, Bright Birdsong countered. And there was the lumber business, or what remained of it. She intended to turn it over to Monkey Deloach when she got home. It would be his, to salvage if he could. Monkey was made of the stuff it took to do such things. It would be her way of repaying a debt long due. There was that, and so much else to be taken care of. So much to do.

  So Bright went to bed early and let the night and the rolling music of the train settle around her. She woke in the morning to a strong, clear light at the edges of the window shade. She climbed down from the bunk and pulled up the shade and saw that the train was hurtling through dense woodland, the track a narrow ribbon through the towering green and brown blur. The smell of it, clean and fresh, was strong even through the closed window of the car and she inhaled it hungrily. It was powerful, like opium, and she felt it lifting her. She heard music, imagined the majestic sweep of orchestra, strings and brass. And the sweet golden notes of a trombone. The sound of God’s breathing, he said.

  22

  Bright told herself in the years after the war that even if she had agreed to what Fitzhugh wanted there in Washington in January of 1942, she could not have made good on her promise. She was barely home when she discovered that she was pregnant. Piteously, convulsively pregnant.

  Nothing about it was easy or pleasant. She was first a slave to her roiling stomach. It refused anything, snarled at her even when abjectly empty, left her weak and gaunt. When that had passed she was virtually emaciated. Dr. Finus Tillman, grown old and mottled-skinned now, said that he had never known a woman to lose weight in her first weeks of pregnancy. Bright hated being sick for any reason. She particularly hated being sick at the whim of this barest of lives growing like a nettle in her womb.

  Hosanna took it all calmly. “Different baby,” she said. “This one get through announcin’ hisself, he’ll settle down.” Hosanna always spoke of babies as he. She was partial to boy children, she said. She was especially partial to Little Fritz. Bright had had a relatively easy pregnancy with him, and now he was quiet, bright-eyed, eager to please. He was in awe of Hosanna, who filled him with the same nuggets of myth and wisdom she had showered upon Bright in her own youth. Little Fitz seemed to prove that Hosanna’s partiality to boy children was correct, ordained.

  The baby did indeed settle down for a while, but Bright did not. Her ankles swelled horribly, she felt bloated and distended through the sickeningly hot months of the summer. Her pregnancy was a wound that would not heal, and just when she thought that she might be gaining a measure of control, she would suffer some other indignity. At seven months, her belly turned into a cement mixer. The baby thrashed about like a caged animal, poking and knocking Bright’s insides, particularly her bladder. Fitzhugh, finally home from Congress after the end of a session that had dragged on far past its usual length, stood back just beyond her torment with a perpetual look of bafflement on his face.

  “Arrrgggghhh,” she bellowed in the middle of one night, “be still for one instant, for God’s sake!”

  Fitzhugh sat bolt upright in bed beside her. His mere presence infuriated Bright.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked innocently.

  “Help?” she cried. “Help?”

  “A damp washcloth?” he tried.

  “Get out!” She turned away from him, pummeled the pillow with her fists. “Just get out!”

  He did, taking his own pillow with him to Little Fitz’s room, where they slept fitfully, waking each other the rest of the night with their tossing. The next morning, everyone in the house was cross. Except for Hosanna, “Y’all look like the fellow up in the tree with the bobcat,” she said at breakfast as they all glowered at each other through reddened eyes. “He say, ‘Somebody shoot up here amongst us, ’cause one of us has got to have some relief.’ ”

  “I’ve had enough of your folk wisdom,” Bright snapped.

  “No,” Hosanna said. “You’ve had enough young’un.”

  The baby came, as babies must, but Bright discovered that the ordeal had not ended, simply taken a new direction. She woke in the middle of the night after her delivery to Roseann’s hideous screams down the hall in the room where Hosanna had set up camp. After a moment, the door opened and Hosanna stood there with the bellowing infant in her arms. “This one different all right,” she said. “She got a burr under her saddle.” Hosanna brought Roseann to the bed, where she attacked Bright’s breast with the same fury in which she had leapt and tumbled in the womb—pummeling and sucking until Bright thought she would be turned inside out. “I’m sore,” she cried. But Hosanna insisted. “Baby got to eat. She don’t get some satisfaction, we all gone be loony ’fore morning.” She drained Bright dry—first one breast and then the other. Still she cried.

  “Is she still hungry?” Bright asked, astonished.

  “No,” Hosanna said, “I think she just ornery.”

  Bright looked up to see Fitzhugh in the doorway, robe-clad, shuffling in his slippers, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Let me,” he said. And while Hosanna stepped back and watched, he took Roseann from Bright and nestled her against his chest and walked out. They heard the baby’s fitful cries echoing in the hall and down the stairway. And then silence. Blessed silence.

  It was to set the pattern for their days, until Fitzhugh died in 1971. Through Roseann’s infancy and childhood, Fitzhugh was the one who could calm her rages, still the terrible restless energy. In the months when he was away, Roseann tormented Bright and herself and anyone else within reach—plucking at her hair, disrupting meals, breaking things. When he was at home, she was more reasonable, more pliable. She demanded and got his attention. In fact, she demanded and got everyone’s attention, but usually with upsets and tantrums. With Fitzhugh, it was freely given. There was just never enough of it. She cried inconsolably when he left. Still, he left.

  Roseann was not quite three when the war ended, and Bright held out a brief hope that he might now reconsider his future. But when he announced that he would run for reelection in 1946, she was not surprised. Fitzhugh Birdsong was clearly a man for postwar Washington. With Roosevelt dead and the great conflagration over, Congress was beginning to reassert itself in pol
icy, domestic and foreign. And Fitzhugh had emerged from the war as one of Congress’s most effective and influential members in the shaping of the nation’s role in the world.

  For a time, he kept Washington and home separate, as much as any congressman could. He did not bring that part of his work home with him. He might be a student of the world in Washington, a man whose pronouncements affected Indochina and Greece and Eastern Europe. But when he was home he was the congressman who catered to the needs of his constituents—farm subsidies, Social Security, government loans. He was husband and father. He maintained an active and fairly lucrative law practice in the postwar years and took in a younger attorney to help with the business and manage affairs when he was away.

  But increasingly, the world held his attention. It was a global age, he said, fraught with perils large and small. America might have emerged from the war as the bulwark of democracy and the underpinning of the world’s economy, but that also meant that its stakes were extraordinarily high. And the wolves were at every door. So Washington drew Fitzhugh Birdsong away. In the prewar years, Congress had met for at most five months out of the year. It was a leisurely business. But now the sessions stretched on for months longer. And when recesses came, the world called—trips to Berlin and Istanbul, Buenos Aires and Manila. Journalists called them junkets. Fitzhugh took them as serious business. And he did not take his wife.

  It had come to a head with them fairly early—in 1948. Fitzhugh and three other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee would take a two-week trip to the Far East: Toyko, Manila, Hong Kong, Sydney, Auckland. He called from Washington. “I want you to go,” he said. “All the wives are going.”