by Jake Tapper
Tonight, however, they were both trying to put aside the resentments they’d let fester. And as soon as they had their first sips of wine, she brought up the appropriations bill. She reached across the table to hold his hand. “Proud of you,” she said. He would have proposed again right there if he’d had a ring.
“It was great,” Charlie said. “I was trying to keep a low profile, but during the markup, Chairman Carlin took a moment to thank all the veterans for our service and for sharing our experiences with them. The other guys on the committee applauded; it was really nice.”
“And the appropriation money for Goodstone is gone?”
“Gone with the wind,” Charlie said. “The provision was literally x-ed out, a line struck through the whole paragraph. And on the floor of the House later, a bunch of the vets—Strongfellow, MacLachlan, Sutton, Street—all patted me on the back. Highlight of the year.” He caught himself—Margaret had told him she was pregnant in January. “In terms of Congress, I mean,” he added.
The tavern was full of revelers—Georgetown University students, professionals whose postwork happy hours had morphed into sloppy dinners, married couples trying to catch up after busy weeks. It was dark, the restaurant’s maroon ceiling and oak floors providing little reflection from the hanging chandeliers and candles on each table. Waiters bustled in and out of the kitchen, ferrying hamburgers, oyster stew, and hot browns to customers, while the saloon seemed almost like an assembly line for martinis.
Margaret rested her elbows on the table and ticked off the names on her fingers.
“Strongfellow is the OSS guy on crutches; MacLachlan, or ‘Mac,’ is the minister from Indiana; Sutton is the conservative Democrat who’s challenging Kefauver. Who’s Street?”
“The Tuskegee Airman,” Charlie said. “Distinguished Flying Cross.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “We should have him over for dinner. Is he married?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “With twins. Just born last year.”
Margaret shuddered a bit. “Twins! I can’t imagine. Let’s hope we don’t get that lucky,” she said with a smile.
“Good God, no. Can’t imagine two; I’m terrified of one.”
“I wonder if people having twins say, ‘The rabbits died.’ Or if they think there were three dead rabbits for triplets.”
“Good Lord,” said Charlie. “If it’s triplets, I’ll have what the rabbits are having.”
She chuckled. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—does your office manager have children?”
“Miss Leopold? I don’t believe she’s even married. She’s never discussed any family. She wears rings, but none on her left ring finger. I can’t imagine she doesn’t have suitors—she’s a knockout for her age—but none that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“I want to visit your office more,” Margaret said. “If this is our life now, I need to get to know the people you’re working with.”
“Any time. It would be great to show you around the Capitol now that I know it better. I’m close to not getting lost on my way to the bathroom.”
“Knockout, huh?” Margaret asked.
“For a woman in her forties,” Charlie said. “If you like that Southern-beauty-queen type. Which I don’t. Not that you’re not a beauty queen.”
“Uh-huh,” said Margaret, smiling.
“You know what I mean, sweetie. I’m going to go to the bathroom.” Charlie excused himself from the table.
“Good idea.” Margaret laughed.
On his way back, Charlie spotted the Kennedys—Jack and Jackie and Bob and Ethel—seated at a more private corner table near the back. Jack and Jackie lived across the street and a few doors down from the Marders, on Dent Place, in another Federal-style town house—a much larger one, of course. After they finished dessert and Charlie paid the check, he suggested to Margaret that they go say hi.
“Oh, that seems silly,” Margaret said.
“Why? We’re neighbors. People do say hi, Margaret.”
She rolled her eyes but relented, as he’d known she would. Even Margaret was not immune to a certain type of luminary.
They approached the Kennedys’ table; Bob Kennedy looked up and motioned them closer, his grin deployed instantly and convincingly. Charlie couldn’t help wondering if he himself would ever possess the same natural ease; it was definitely an asset in this town.
“You’re Winston Marder’s boy,” Bob Kennedy said, shaking his hand.
“That’s right,” Charlie said. “My wife, Margaret.”
“So nice to meet you,” Jackie said in her high, almost childlike voice as she delicately reached out to take Margaret’s hand. She was twenty-five but looked eighteen. “You must be the zoologist I’ve heard so much about!”
“Yes,” said Margaret bashfully, unsure of what Jackie had heard and knowing how odd it was for a congressman’s wife to have an actual career. Jackie herself had been the “Inquiring Camera Girl” for the Washington Times-Herald, though her career seemed to have ended with her marriage to the senator, as was standard. It made Margaret feel self-conscious and she wondered if other wives thought her selfish or a freak.
“Jack,” Bob said, “this is the congressman that’s taking on Goodstone. Father told us about it.”
His older brother nodded and looked appraisingly at Charlie. “I see,” he said noncommittally.
“That was a risky venture, what with General Kinetics making a move on them,” Bob said. “Lot of money and jobs at stake.”
“Lot of lives at stake if they keep making cruddy products,” Margaret said. “Charlie lost a soldier because of one of their gas masks.” Charlie suddenly realized that she’d helped him finish that large carafe of Chianti over dinner.
Bob and Jack seemed taken aback at her boldness, but then Jack decided to smile, and Jackie and Ethel and Charlie exhaled.
“Quite a firecracker,” Jack said to his brother, as if the Marders weren’t standing right there.
“She’s my lodestar,” said Charlie somewhat dramatically, and then, having had his own fair share of Chianti, he found himself reciting a poem he’d read over and over in his tent in France:
A star, but no cold, heavenly star—
A warm red star of welcome in the night.
Far off it burned upon the black hillside,
Sole star of earth in all that waste so wide—
A little human lantern in the night,
Yet more to me than all the bright
Unfriendly stars of heaven, so cold and white.
He finished, slightly abashed at this impromptu tableside recital.
“Who is that?” asked Bob. “Gibson?”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie said. “And forgive me. The wine.”
Bob waved his hand to dismiss any self-consciousness.
“I’m not acquainted with Gibson,” said Jackie.
“Wilfrid Gibson,” said Jack. “British poet, served in the infantry on the western front in World War One. An admiral gave me a book of his poems after I got back from the island.”
“Well, it was just lovely,” said Jackie.
“Thank you,” said Charlie. “Got me through a few long nights, reading Gibson and thinking of this lady here.”
Margaret smiled indulgently and squeezed his arm lightly: a signal. “Anyway, we’ve taken up enough of your time.”
“Do you know Alan Seeger?” Jackie asked.
“Is he in Congress?” Margaret replied.
“No, he was in the French Foreign Legion during the Great War,” Jackie said. “He was killed in Belloy-en-Santerre.” She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “He wrote one of Jack’s favorite poems. He asks me to recite it sometimes.”
“Harvard man,” said Jack. “He joined the Foreign Legion because we hadn’t entered the war yet and he wanted to fight. Give us a sample, Jackie.”
His wife smiled and began.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade
When
Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
She stopped and shrugged and Bob began to clap.
“Well done, girl,” he said.
Chapter Eleven
Monday, March 1, 1954—Morning
Georgetown, Washington, DC
Margaret sprang from her bed Monday morning at 5:30 as if answering a fire alarm. This was how mornings were for her in this early pregnant state; she snapped from a near-coma into high-adrenaline alertness. She made her way downstairs and started the percolator for Charlie, turning the nearby wall calendar to March while it brewed. The elm that stood in front of their town house was starting to sprout sawtooth leaves. The rising sun presented a clear sky. Was spring here?
The milk truck veered around the corner onto Dent Place; it belched exhaust, jerked forward, and came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the street. The milkman hopped out of his truck. He emptied a milk churn into six bottles and filled his metal carrier. A minute later, he walked up the steps of the Marders’ town house and shouted out to Margaret.
“Package on the stoop here,” he bellowed. Her previous encounters with the milkman had taught her that he spoke only at top volume.
Charlie appeared in the doorway between the stairwell and the kitchen. “I’ll get it, honey.” Margaret turned on the radio.
“—dent Eisenhower has asked the Republican Senate leadership to put an end to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s one-man prosecutorial hearings,” the newsman intoned. “Reliable sources tell this reporter that the president has beseeched McCarthy’s GOP colleagues on the subcommittee, including Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, to be present any time McCarthy is presiding over a hearing. Eisenhower’s secretary of the army, Robert Stevens, last week accused McCarthy of browbeating and humiliating army off—”
Charlie turned off the radio and placed a large box on the kitchen counter. On the side was emblazoned the Janus Electronics logo. Charlie retrieved a steak knife from its drawer.
“What is it?” Margaret asked.
“It’s…” said Charlie, uncertain. He cut open the box, reached into it, and handed her two electronic contraptions. “Um…” He took the instruction manual out of the box. “It’s a baby monitor!”
“A what?”
“A baby monitor,” Charlie said.
“What’s that?” Margaret asked.
“Do you remember a few years ago Zenith had the Radio Nurse? Basically a radio from the kid’s room to the living room so parents could hear the baby?”
Margaret thought about it for a second. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Apparently it was designed after the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The original product wasn’t very good; it kept picking up other radio signals. Anyway, this is the new technology.”
“Who’s it from?”
“I think it’s from my father,” Charlie lied. He thought of LaMontagne’s file on Boschwitz, sitting on his office desk, and how whatever he did with it might be wrong.
He was holding that dossier roughly an hour later as he made his way from his congressional office to the House Chamber, where he and his fellow members had been called for a vote on a bill allowing more Mexican migrant workers into the country. Stopping for a cup of coffee at the House Restaurant, Charlie ran into one of his poker buddies, Congressman Chris MacLachlan. The Indiana Republican was devouring a cruller while waiting in line for the cashier in the take-out section of the eatery. In his left hand, he held yet another pastry, this one with some sort of red and purple preserves.
“Hungry?” Charlie asked.
MacLachlan chewed until it was safe to speak. “A tad.”
The cashier rang them up and MacLachlan nodded his thanks as he patted his belly, which to Charlie’s eye had expanded in the previous month or so. He now looked like someone who had eaten the version of himself depicted in his most recent congressional portrait. MacLachlan seemed to be reading Charlie’s thoughts and a sheepish expression crept across his face. “I’ve got to stop,” he acknowledged. He indicated his half-eaten pastry to Charlie. “Want it?”
Charlie shook his head. “I’ve already had breakfast.”
They walked out of the restaurant. Members of Congress and their aides, journalists, and lobbyists filled the hallways. The two congressmen took a left and proceeded up a narrow staircase to the second floor. MacLachlan gestured to a step beneath their feet. “See those stains?” he asked, pointing out clusters of a dozen dark brown splotches on the seventh and eighth marble steps. “Congressman William Taulbee’s blood.”
“What?”
“A reporter killed Taulbee in 1890, shot him dead right here. Long and seedy story, but bottom line: The reporter wrote about an affair Taulbee had. Taulbee beat him up. And then one day the reporter brought a pistol to the Capitol and shot him.”
They began walking up the stairs again, MacLachlan breathing heavily, removing his pocket square to blot beads of perspiration starting to form on his upper lip.
“I definitely do not recall hearing about Taulbee being murdered right here during my high-school tour of the Capitol,” Charlie said. “But then again, they didn’t talk much about the ugly bits.”
“Ha, no, the tour guides don’t talk about it. I’ve been visiting the members-only collection at the Library of Congress. Fascinating stuff in there—as a scholar, you should really check it out. An incredible collection of history nobody seems to know about.”
“And there’s a section on Taulbee?”
“On him and others whose ghosts haunt these halls. Civil War soldiers and the like.” He lowered his voice dramatically. “Some people claim to have seen Taulbee’s ghost right on the stairway.”
“I never understood the whole ghost phenomenon,” Charlie mused. “People only claim to see historic figures or those killed under horrific conditions. But what about all the old people who died? If there’s a world with ghosts, shouldn’t we be constantly walking through hundreds of apparitions of just regular old people?”
“You raise a decent point,” said MacLachlan. “And it cannot be mere injustice that provokes a haunting—why, there have been people killed for unjust reasons all over this city; we’d all be haunted day and night. Perhaps it’s the specialness of the death that creates the need for a ghost to haunt. And this was odd, a journalist killing a congressman at the Capitol!”
“And we think today’s reporters are rough,” Charlie joked.
MacLachlan raised an eyebrow. “We do? I don’t. You’ve gotten some tough coverage?”
Charlie thought about it. There had been a few vicious jabs at him in tabloid political columns—mostly about his father’s role in his appointment and his privileged background—but as a married academic and war veteran with a shiny clean reputation, he had largely avoided bad ink. The same could not be said for his predecessor, Congressman Van Waganan, whose reputation was still being dragged through the grimiest mud imaginable, with no lurid rumor spared repetition.
“I suppose not, not me personally,” Charlie admitted as they continued their journey toward the second floor.
“Truth is, most of our so-called Fourth Estate is focused on nonsense. Even the ones fixated on McCarthy’s daily theater. Same so-called journalists he’s attacking as Commies today were only too happy to give McCarthy’s character-assassination campaign front-page attention a few years ago with nary a scintilla of editorial discretion or judgment that what he was peddling was pure balderdash. As if there does not exist such a thing as empirical fact!”
“You don’t think there are Reds in the government, Mac?” Charlie was surprised to hear MacLachlan’s skepticism about McCarthy, given his deep conservatism and loathing of the Godless Communists. He’d made a few comments over poker one night about how happy he was that Alger Hiss was in Lewisburg Federal Prison; he’d been imprisoned for perjury, since the statu
te of limitations had run out on his acts of espionage. “I don’t care if they get him for jaywalking as long as they get him,” he’d said.
“Of course there are Reds in the government,” MacLachlan replied. “They’re infesting it like termites. But McCarthy isn’t finding them. Hoover is. McCarthy hasn’t produced the name of one proven, clear, actual Communist agent. Not one! And that’s not even the point. It’s a distraction, or—what did Isaiah call it?—the old okey-doke. Look over here! Look over here! And meanwhile your pocket’s being picked.”
“Yeah, he said that about the comic-book hearings,” Charlie said, wincing a bit internally at the thought of an event he dreaded.
MacLachlan patted his shoulder and grinned. “Better you than me, my friend.” Charlie grimaced and followed MacLachlan down two hallways of the second floor to the door of the Speaker’s Lobby. “Talking about ghosts, Charlie, John Quincy Adams is said to haunt this room,” he said, opening one of the doors; Charlie peered inside. “In the middle of a debate over some fairly innocuous issue, he had a stroke on the House floor,” MacLachlan said, pointing at a sturdy couch with light green cushions. “The Adams box sofa, where he died. Awful way to go.”