Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  The miles of telephone line between them sizzled with static. “I thought you would come home,” she said. “Isn’t it enough to spend all this time in Washington without tooting off around the world?”

  “I’m not tooting off, as you put it. This is my job. It’s important.”

  “So is what I’m doing,” she snapped. “I’m raising two children. And they could stand a dose of their father.”

  “Hosanna can take care of them for two weeks,” he insisted.

  “Hosanna is getting old. God knows, she’s too old to handle Roseann.”

  More silence. Finally, she could hear him take a deep breath on the other end. “You know what I think?”

  “What do you think, Fitzhugh?”

  “I think you’re still afraid of your mother. At least, what happened to her.”

  “What?”

  “She probably never should have left New Orleans. And you’re afraid you’ll make the same mistake.”

  He had become more combative, she thought. He was emboldened by his success, by his place. And by the fact that they had both made their choices, of sound mind, without coercion. If she would not do what he wanted, he felt no great need to tread softly. And given that, there was always the very great danger that their tacit agreement to accommodate could come undone. Because, as she frankly admitted, she was sharp-tongued enough to begin the unraveling. And now he was sure enough of himself to do his part.

  So there was increasingly a brink there, and it fell to one or the other to decide whether to step back from it. “I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed,” she said quietly.

  And then he followed her lead. “No. I’m sorry. I understand how you feel. I’ll miss you.”

  “Then hurry home.”

  “Yes.” And he hung up.

  And so they accommodated. They were both very busy—Fitzhugh with the world at large, Bright with her own world. She became chairman of the school board, a member of the administrative board at the Methodist Church as well as chief musician, and immersed herself in a hundred projects and causes, large and small. She remembered Eleanor Roosevelt’s admonition: make a difference. And increasingly, with Fitzhugh away much of the time, she raised the children. When Hosanna died in 1952, withered by arthritis and finally felled by a massive heart attack, Bright thought to herself, “Well, I am the last of the Bascombes.” She thought more and more of her town, her people. She tried not to bully people about what she wanted. But she admitted to being provincial and proprietary. How else did one get things done unless one cared and acted?

  It became clear that Fitzhugh would be little help in raising the children. He was simply not there most of the time, and when he was it was with a growing sense of estrangement. It was not that he didn’t care for them, and care deeply. But he was not a part of their world. So when he came home from Washington, it was like a man stepping into a dim room from bright sunshine, fumbling about and bumping into the furniture until his eyes became adjusted to the different quality of light. He could not know the thousand small things and happenings that made up their lives. And try as he might, there was a gulf of understanding. Fitzhugh might sit for hours in a front porch rocker reading to Roseann from a book he had brought home, and she might rest against his chest, calm for the first time in weeks. But the moments were all too short and the partings all too keenly felt.

  And then there was Little Fitz. He seemed often in a state of perpetual puzzlement as he entered his teen years, as if he could not quite put his finger on things. He was a handsome boy, eager to please, with a great warm smile. And when he turned its glow upon you, he made you feel that he was the keeper of some good secret that blessed everything upon which his gaze fell. He seemed outgoing, loquacious. But Bright knew that it masked an uncertainty. It was as if he had some things he wanted to tell, and had some questions he wanted to ask, but was not quite sure how to go about it. When Fitzhugh was home, they had long conversations, but there was a certain formality about them. Fitzhugh asked about what Little Fitz was doing, how he felt about things. Fitz answered. They talked about Fitzhugh’s work, about the world at large. But Little Fitz went away from them with a look on his face that said, “We didn’t quite get to the meat of things.” And he was, forever, Little Fitz. Fitzhugh Birdsong’s son. And Bright’s. In search of that essential thing that said, “I am me. Just me.”

  But it took her a long time to fathom the depth of his feeling. It came in 1956, with Fitz in his senior year in college. After his earlier brush with academic disaster and Bright’s precipitate intervention, he had become a fair student, a political science major with designs on law school. The University was celebrating its one hundredth birthday, and it planned a special convocation. The distinguished congressman Fitzhugh Birdsong, recently installed as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would speak. And his son would introduce him.

  They planned a family weekend of it in early November. Fitzhugh came home by train at midweek and they drove to the University on Saturday, up through the heart of the state with late fall blazing the countryside. Roseann, at fourteen, was beginning to emerge from the gawky wretchedness of her adolescence and she seemed determined just now to be very much the young lady. She and Bright maintained a tenuous truce through the trip.

  Fitz was waiting for them on the steps of the Phi Gam house when they arrived at midafternoon, wearing a dark blazer with his fraternity crest on the pocket. And as he walked across the lawn to meet them, Bright’s heart caught in her throat. He looks like Dorsey Bascombe. And he is a man, no longer just mine. He was taller than Fitzhugh, and he called his father “Dad” now. Roseann seemed almost in awe of him. He was quite handsome, very poised. He had that great winning smile and just enough reserve to give it some authority. He was the vice president of the student body this year, and he had mentioned casually to Bright the previous summer that he might one day be interested in politics. At dinner that night, he and his father talked animatedly of events in the Middle East, the Israeli invasion of Egypt a few days before, the strategic importance of the Suez Canal.

  “That’s the best talk we’ve had in a long time,” Fitzhugh said when they were alone later. “He’s quite an impressive young man, actually.”

  Bright was sitting in her slip at the dressing table in their room, face caked with cold cream. Fitzhugh, already in his pajamas, was propped on the bed, scanning a State Department briefing paper he had brought along with him. He was forever toting along papers, scholarly journals, newspapers, and books, and he read voraciously. It was another irritant. “I’m glad you had time to notice,” she said now. And then she regretted the tone of it. She didn’t want to spoil anything this weekend. It held the promise of some semblance of normality. The four of them together for the first time in a good while, their lives all moving along separate paths, the distances between them widening. A drift—some of it natural, some the product of their peculiar circumstance. She thought often of the families of celebrities, how easily they seemed to become estranged. She had managed to protect Fitz and Roseann from most of that, but there was still a price.

  Fitzhugh turned down the edge of the page he was reading and put the briefing paper on the bed beside him. They looked at each other for a long moment in the mirror. “I’ve missed a lot,” he said. “I know that.”

  “Yes, you have. There’s been quite a change. Fitz has grown up. I think I just realized it myself today.”

  “He seems quite at ease with himself. He speaks well. He’ll make a good lawyer.”

  “He made a nice boy,” Bright said, and heard a trace of the bitterness creeping in. Don’t spoil it, Bright.

  “And I missed that.”

  “Yes, you did.” I am unable to help myself. “That conversation tonight, that was all about your life, Fitzhugh. Israel and Egypt and the Suez Canal. He’s meeting you on your own ground. But did you ever talk to Fitz about snakes and snails and puppy dog tails?”

  “Some,” Fitzhugh said quietly. �
�Not enough.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t.” She picked up a tissue and turned to him as she began to wipe off the cold cream. “And if you had it to do over?”

  “I don’t, though,” he said emphatically. “There doesn’t seem to be much use in looking back.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with a little honest regret, Fitzhugh.”

  “We both made choices.”

  “Yes. But it doesn’t keep me from regretting that things haven’t been different.”

  “Then,” he said with some urgency, “change things. You could come to Washington. Even now. Especially now. It’s nothing like during the war. It’s truly a gracious place at times, not at all bad for a family.”

  She shook her head. “It’s entirely too late for that. Roseann—“

  “I know.” He stopped her. “There’s always something.”

  “Well,” she snapped, “you come home and try to deal with her on a full-time basis! She is a maddening child!”

  “The trouble is, you take everything Roseann does or says personally.”

  “Dammit, Fitzhugh,” she exploded, “don’t give me any of your long-range strategic analysis!”

  They glared at each other for a moment and then he picked up his briefing paper again. “Let’s not fight,” he said.

  “No,” she said wearily. “Let’s not.”

  The hotel manager himself interrupted their breakfast in the dining room the next morning. “Congressman Birdsong, there’s a telephone call for you. The White House,” he said, impressed. “You can take it in my office.”

  Fitzhugh pursed his lips, then looked at the rest of them apologetically. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be just a moment.” He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, then folded it neatly and slid it under the edge of his plate and got up and followed the manager.

  He was gone for a long time. Bright and Fitz and Roseann finished their breakfast and then Bright had another cup of coffee and finally she paid the bill, and they went to sit in the hotel lobby and wait for him. Roseann fidgeted in a chair, pulling and tugging at her hair, and Bright fought the urge to bark at her. She talked with Fitz instead. He volunteered in an offhand way that he had been seeing a good deal of a young lady. An Alpha Chi. They would meet her this afternoon after the convocation. And would it do for him to bring her home with him for Thanksgiving? Bright’s eyebrows shot up. Of course, she smiled. Bright had long ago resolved not to put her son through the agony of female rivalries.

  She looked up finally, saw Fitzhugh walking toward them across the lobby. He looked very intense and a little unsure of himself. Unlike Fitzhugh. He sat down on a sofa next to Bright and they all looked at him expectantly. “Britain and France have invaded Egypt,” he said. “At Port Said and Port Faud. They apparently mean to take back the canal. Ike’s having a fit. Everybody’s having a fit. I think Eden has put his foot in it this time.”

  Bright didn’t want to ask the question, but she knew it was inevitable. “And you? What about you, Fitzhugh?”

  His eyes went bleak with the conflict. You would rather take a whipping than tell us, wouldn’t you. “I’ve got to go back to Washington. Ike’s sending a plane.”

  Little Fitz stared at him, dumbfounded. “Now?”

  Fitzhugh nodded. “I’m sorry, son. I’ve called the president of the University. He was very understanding.”

  Roseann hunkered deep in her chair, her hands a whirlwind about her head, grabbing fistfuls of hair. “Stop it, Roseann!” Bright snapped at her.

  They sat in wretched silence for a few moments, and then Bright said, trying to hold things together, “Can’t they do without you for just a few hours?”

  “The president’s asked the cabinet and congressional leadership to be at the White House at three o’clock.” He shook his head. “Ike needs all the help he can get on this one.”

  “Daddy, is there gonna be a war?” Roseann asked. She looked small and frightened, a child again.

  “I hope not,” he said. He seemed grateful for the question, for a chance to explain himself, but he did it all wrong, Bright thought. A child needed reassuring, but Fitzhugh was suddenly the congressman, the foreign affairs expert. “The Soviets are threatening to intervene. The UN is hopping mad. Yes, there could be a war. If we don’t handle things just right.”

  But it was Little Fitz who surprised them all. He stood up suddenly and Bright saw the sudden flash of anger and knew instinctively that it had been there for a long time. It stunned her. “And if we do get in a war, Dad,” Fitz said, “where will you be? At your post like a good soldier. And we’ll be here.”

  Fitzhugh blanched. He looked down at his hands. “Son, really. I hate this. I’m sorry.”

  “Do we always have to take a back seat to the rest of the world?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s just that this …” But when Fitzhugh looked up, it was to see the ramrod-straight back of his son striding across the hotel lobby away from them, and there was a quick, naked grief in Fitzhugh’s eyes. Bright did not speak. There seemed to be absolutely nothing to say.

  They did not see Little Fitz again. Fitzhugh caught a cab to the airport and Bright and Roseann drove home, refusing the University president’s invitation to stay for the afternoon activities. He did not press. They would have been in the way, Bright thought, another reminder of the mess that had been made of things. The congressman had to respond to the call to duty, of course, but it left a pall over things. No, he did not press.

  Fitzhugh called late that night, waking Bright. “I just wanted you to know, I think everything’s going to be all right.” He waited for her answer, got only silence. “Britain and France are having second thoughts. They’re looking for a graceful way out.” More silence. “Bright?”

  “Don’t come home, Fitzhugh,” she said.

  It took him a moment. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Nobody at the White House said anything like that to you, did they? Everybody at the White House said, ‘Yes, Congressman.’ And, ‘What do you think, Congressman?’ Didn’t they.”

  “Bright, for God’s sake…”

  She hung up on him.

  But by the time he arrived home, she had already withered in her resolve. She didn’t let him know that, not at first. She exacted a measure of blood from him. And she made him confess. “If you leave me, I’m finished,” he said. He sat on the sofa with his shoulders slumped, abject in his sorrow.

  “You mean your political career,” she said. “People in the South don’t vote for congressmen who can’t hold on to their women.”

  “No, it’s not just that.”

  “Not just that. But some that.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “I’m just indispensable to you, aren’t I.”

  “Think of the children if nothing else.”

  “Oh, I have. Believe me, I have. For years.”

  But finally he had enough of wallowing in apology and he rose up angrily. “You chose,” he said bitterly. “We both chose. We both agreed we’d try to live with it. I chose my life’s work, and it happened to be in Washington and there is a great price to pay for that. But you raised the price, Bright. You! Because you’ve been unable to tear yourself away from this town and your father and all that means to you. So we knew damn well what we were doing. We’re big boys and girls. And we’ve just tried to do the best we could!”

  And that, she thought, was the truth. They raged at each other, slinging bitter words and stripping away layer after layer of flesh until they got down to where they both bled. But at the bottom of it was the truth, and Fitzhugh had spoken it. So when they were spent with their outpouring, the truth was still there. And both of them had in the end to either face it or turn their backs on it. The terrible thing was, they were both honest people, not much given to self-delusion.

  So in the end, they accommodated—or rather, continued the accommodation they had settled upon a good while ago. There w
as mutual need, things shared, what remained of love. And that was no small thing in itself, the business of love. Amazing how bits and pieces of it could survive much abuse. Perhaps, Bright thought, enough to think of someday mending the broken parts and filling in the empty spaces.

  It was, in truth, not so terribly long until Fitzhugh began to talk of coming home. The fifties became the sixties, and being a Southern congressman became a wrenching thing if you had much integrity about you. And then came Vietnam and Fitzhugh agonized over the deepening void it became, swallowing presidents and congressmen and young boys in its maw. He harbored a great distrust of it from the beginning, but again his Southernness bedeviled him. It was the hunt, the match, fourth and goal on the one-yard line. Manhood. Fitzhugh Birdsong was too gentle for all that, and Bright realized that it would only be a matter of time until Fitzhugh could no longer reconcile himself to the duality of the job. Then he would come home to her and they would knit the tattered threads of their lives into new cloth.

  There would always be a certain amount of regret. But they would make things as right as possible. And there would be no more choices.

  23

  The river. It began as a small creek in the uplands, falling over itself as it tumbled like a playful child, end over end, and joined forces with other streams. Then it slid gray-green past the capital through the rich heartland of the state, beckoning towns and farms and forests to its banks as it went. Bright had to stretch her imagination to think of it as the long ribbon of water it was. In her lifetime, it had been just the river that flowed past her town, the one she had seen from Ollie Doubleday’s biplane on that bright March day in 1919, making a sweeping curve past her father’s sawmill. And later, an invader. But always there. A constant.

  Downstream, the river was something of a disappointment. Nowhere along its course was it very deep, but it turned brown and torpid as it entered the sand and scrub pine of the coastal plain and began to meander, as if it had grown weary with the journey and lost its way. It had also been a disappointment for Dorsey Bascombe in his day. He had envisioned it as a commercial boon to the state, made navigable with a series of locks and dams along its length. But in this instance he failed to make others see his vision. He had organized committees, lobbied the legislature, to no avail. Just not worth the trouble and expense, people said. It had been something of a source of irritation between Dorsey and his son-in-law in Fitzhugh’s early days in Congress too. Fitzhugh was more interested in rivers as geopolitical boundaries of Europe and the Orient, not as pathways of domestic commerce. Dorsey and Fitzhugh avoided open disagreement, but Dorsey was apt to say on occasion, “I can’t see Heathen China from my front porch.”