“I really don’t think the theatrics are necessary.” For Fred, the speech had just been the beginning of negotiations, the senator stating his opening position. Nothing personal, only business. “You know as well as I . . .”
“Excuse me, Fred.”
It was time. I turned toward the senator.
“Bob.”
He turned to me. A long, thin stream of blue-white smoke spewed from his mouth. Fred’s plume was thicker. He had turned to me, also, with a stern warning in his eyes. I turned my back on both of them.
The terrace outside the French doors had a granite rail. It was ornamented with statuary, and I was suddenly pleased to see my little stone friend there! Maybe he had followed me from the church, or maybe it was his twin. His hand was up and he was looking right at me. It was a portent—a sign that fate was with me.
“Eight years ago, Melvin gave you your senate seat.” I said it loud enough for him to hear me, with my back to him. Maybe Katie and her hostess could hear me, as well. Eric was not in sight. “If we’re discussing incompetence, you were the one who was incapable of winning an election on your own.” I turned, and we faced each other. “When you were given the office, there were conditions. And you have not been released from your obligation.”
He was furious, his own cold anger finally hot. “Young man, I have already told you—”
“Shut up.” We locked eyes. “I expect respect, not condescension.” Who would ever have stood up to him like this, against his money and power and pride? Which of us was stronger now?
“You brazen upstart.”
“I didn’t come this evening for you to reprimand me, or to listen to your conceited tirade. I came to discuss Governor Bright. You thought your show of arrogance would frighten me, and it was quite a show. But you were wrong.” We were still eye to eye, and I wasn’t sweating. “You made a big mistake, Bob, and it’s going to cost you.”
“You are making the mistake.” He was not backing down, but at least I’d become someone he had to speak to. “Do you think your money can buy you anything you want? You are wrong. I owe you nothing. I am a United States senator, and I have wealth to match yours.”
“Bob. Jason.” Fred saw the need for an adult to intervene. “You’ve both had a chance to express your frustrations. Now, let’s get past this and move on to the business at hand.”
“I think this is our business for this evening,” I said. “We are deciding who will be the next senator, and it won’t be a cozy deal. It will be whoever is strongest.”
“This is ridiculous.” Forrester made a quick glance at the ceiling, as if he had just lost patience with the encounter. But he’d blinked and we both knew it.
“I want you to announce that this will be your last term.” I looked out the window. The little statue was still smiling at me. I must be doing well.
“I will do no such thing.”
I slowly turned back to him. “Are you sure, senator? Do you really want to fight this out? Do you want to see the crowds turning against you? Do you want to read the antagonistic editorials? Face the hostile reporters?”
“Stanley Morton would never treat me like that!”
“How much of his company do you own? And picture the campaign. It won’t be like last time. Maybe there will be scandals. This pedestal you’ve got yourself on will be real easy to knock over. Do you think your precious president or anyone else will care what you think when they see your whole state turning against you? Just imagine what it will feel like when everyone around you is watching you fall and laughing at you behind your back, or maybe to your face. And now you’re an old man, too, and you’re tired. Do you have the stomach for this fight, senator?” The words were flowing out of me—I didn’t even need to think, they just came.
I gave him plenty of time to answer. He didn’t, so I did.
“I didn’t think so.”
Fred was looking straight ahead, not at either of us, just waiting. Forrester had lost focus, too.
“You’re as evil as your father,” he said.
“I am my father’s son.”
There was a sound, between a gasp and a sigh. I looked back and saw Katie standing in the open doorway. She was staring at me, her mouth open in shock at the words my mouth had just spoken.
“We’re done here,” I said to her. “Fetch Eric.”
She collected herself. “They just went to see the Rolls Royce. They’ll be a few minutes.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll wait outside with you.”
I didn’t look back into the room. She moved aside to let me pass and followed me out onto the terrace. Gladys was seated on a bench near the doors.
“He can’t mean that” came from the library.
Fred’s voice rumbled, “He means what he says, Bob.”
“This is outrageous. Of course I won’t step down.” But he knew what the future would be and that he would surrender rather than face that humiliation, and in his voice I could hear the splintering and cracking of his soul. It brought a swift image of Harry Bright, alone at his podium.
Katie was close enough for just me to hear her. “What . . . ?” It was a continuation of her sigh. She was trembling, also, not from the cold, and there was fear in her eyes, of me.
“We’ll talk later.”
We stood and waited. The earth turned and I was its axis. If I had lifted my hand I could have commanded the stars to blacken or the land to be moved, but I chose not to. It was enough to have extinguished this one star.
Fred approached. “We will discuss this tomorrow,” he said. “I would suggest doing it this evening, but your state of mind would make it a waste of time.”
“I’ll call you,” I said.
“You are very effective in tearing down,” he said, his own state of mind not very steady. “You should try building up for once.”
“I’ll do what I want.”
He paid his respects to Gladys and left. Katie was stranded beside me—Gladys had heard all and there was no possibility of even a stilted and formal conversation. I doubted they’d been having more than that anyway.
The hostess stood and went. Katie gave her a tight nod and smile, which were not answered.
The chatter and merriment of Eric and his damsels was carnival music on a battlefield. They came down a path through the gardens, one of them on each of his arms. I would have Katie pick one for him. It was time for Eric to settle down and get married. Whichever of the two was the grandfather’s favorite.
Eric saw us watching.
“Don’t you have anything else to talk about?” he asked, bright as a star himself, and one of the girls giggled.
“No.”
“I’ll get a ride home later. You don’t have to wait.”
“We need to go.”
“Is Fred still here?”
“He’s already left.”
He understood. The girls did, too. They disengaged and tittered and grinned, but they understood that there was enmity, and a barrier had been erected. Eric said his good-nights and the three of us walked around the house, not even through it, to our car.
Despite the cool parting, Eric was enthralled. We let him jabber in the back seat.
“Genevieve is leaving for Washington in two weeks. She’s going to intern with her grandfather. Madeleine’s going back to Paris to graduate school.”
So perhaps Genevieve would be the one. Neither Katie nor I felt like talking.
And when we were home, about the last thing I wanted was to watch myself and Bill Idiot Sandoff, four feet high. But Eric was bouncing off the walls, and Katie was curious, so off we trooped for the viewing of the interview.
My thoughts had petrified. That moment of Katie’s gasp and the senator’s hatred was unmovable, and I couldn’t reach any other moment.
Eric diddled with the technology and I had a brief hope that the attempt had failed. But no, the brain that knew little of life knew much of video recording. There was a flash and a frozen image
. My stomach turned.
“There you are!” Katie said. For her, this was comforting, this vision of her and my glory, and her tension from the evening dissipated into the humming air.
“I’ll find the start,” Eric said. As he searched for the beginning, split-second contortions battered the screen, rapid frozen images of my face smiling and shredded. I closed my eyes. This was my outside showing the fragmented reality of my inside, and I couldn’t watch.
“There.” Now it was Bill who was frozen, mouth gaping. Eric settled back into his chair and pushed the button. “Here we go!”
The mouth moved and words came out, but the static inside my head was too loud. Broken questions and disjointed answers crumbled into heaps of words and there was no place for my ears to put any more.
I tried to concentrate. He was talking about someone. “. . . we found a warm and open man, comfortable with his power and wealth. But there is no mistaking that he recognizes the responsibility that he has inherited along with his riches. He has moved decisively to right what he considers the wrongs of his father. Now he is the silent center of the political hurricane that is sweeping through the highest levels of state government. While investigators are only beginning to unravel millions of dollars of illegal bribes and fixed bids, and three very high profile murders, Channel Six’s exclusive interview sheds some light on Jason Boyer.”
Not Jason Boyer. Someone else. Someone responsible. Comfortable with power and wealth.
There is nothing silent in my center! I can’t do it anymore. I can’t play this game.
The Jason in front of me smiled. He was comfortable. He was responsible. It wasn’t me. It isn’t me! Look at him, at the truth of him. Arrogant, lying—more than any of the rivals he is casting down to set himself up higher. Ruthless. I know him. There is no center at all. Everything in me rose up against being that person.
The four-foot head continued. “Will you be meeting with Senator Forrester again?”
“Yes, actually. Katie and I will be visiting with him this evening, at his request. I hope we can have some reasoned discussion. The last thing we need just now is hot tempers and baseless accusations.”
It had ended. Katie squeezed my hand and put a little kiss on my cheek.
“I am so proud to be married to that man,” she said.
She hadn’t forgotten what she had seen at the Forresters’. The interview had put it in context for her, though, as a use of power rather than a clash of personalities. She was comfortable with that.
Eric said, “You should run against Forrester. You’d kill him. What did you talk about, anyway?”
“We had some differences,” I said.
“Who won?”
“Only time will tell,” I said. “Good night.” I couldn’t even imagine when I would ever sleep well again.
30
I was up early Sunday. The house was still dark when I left.
Katie called me an hour later.
“Jason! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. You saw my note?”
“Yes. But I was worried.”
“I want some time to think,” I said.
“Because of last night?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “They’re terrible people. Whatever you have to do, they deserve it.”
“I hope not. Someday I might get what I deserve.”
“Don’t do that! You always turn my words against me.”
“No, not against you—against me.”
“Last night you said that you were your father’s son. That’s not bad, Jason. It’s why we are where we are.”
“Getting born into some family is a pretty random thing.”
“But it’s what makes you who you are.”
“Then why don’t I like it?”
“I can’t argue with you, Jason.”
“It’s okay. I can argue with myself just fine. I don’t need someone else to help.”
“I wish I could help.”
How I wish you could. “Just give me time.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Decide.”
There was a long enough pause after that, that I wondered if the connection was breaking up.
“But I have decided,” she said finally. She was breaking up, not the connection. “You’re scaring me. You make me feel like everything’s built on sand.”
“It is. I can’t fix it, Katie. I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t, either,” she said.
I told her I’d call later.
My father’s son. I leaned back in his old wooden desk chair behind the old wooden desk, among the books that were never read and the globe that was never turned, and the son was the father.
Had he ever asked the questions?
Had he found answers, or had he learned to live without them?
The windows looked out over the gardens and lawn. It was all just starting to fray a little from lack of care. The sky was still clean and tended.
What a beautiful Sunday morning. Five weeks since Katie and Eric and I had sat at our breakfast table in shock at Melvin dying the night before. Now I was the one who had died the night before.
How much longer could I go on like this? I would either accept my fate to be Melvin or kill myself, and they were both the same thing.
But I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t live with this confusion in my soul—it would be only a matter of time before I would drive myself off a cliff to escape the questions.
It was real, that I would kill myself. All the money and power— that was what it was trying to do, however it could. It would kill. That was its real goal. Melvin, Angela, Grainger—it had killed all of them. Katie, Eric, Fred, Bob Forrester, Harry Bright—they were all mortally wounded. And when I looked at it, I knew the answer.
So it was that I made my decision, life or death, and I chose to live if there was any chance left that I could.
I locked the door of the mansion behind me and then I was standing next to my car. I didn’t know what I’d actually decided, only that I had.
Where was I going? I couldn’t go to Katie, not yet. I wanted someone who knew what I meant and could help me.
Nathan was only one man I knew who had somehow escaped the sting and poison. I set my course back toward the city.
I called him once I was on the highway. Always polite, yes, he was home, he would be very pleased to see me. Come right over.
In fifty minutes I was in his neighborhood. It was at the other end of town but identical to my own old neighborhood.
He answered the door himself. There was something confusing about seeing him this way, in slacks and a polo shirt, in a domestic setting. Everything was tasteful, balanced. A few things were expensive. It was all comfortable.
We sat in his study. There were lots of shelves, with lots of binders and reports and scholarly books on them. A study where a person would study. Nathan worked very hard, but not to build his own bank account or influence. A person would need a reason to work this hard. What had seemed meaningless before now enticed me with the lure of meaning.
“Sit down, Jason.” I got the grand stuffed chair, where so many of those reports had been read. Nathan sat in his desk chair, where many of the reports had been written.
“I need help,” I said.
“Whatever I can do,” he said, his brow wrinkled.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
He knew what I meant, immediately. He waited for me to keep going.
“You’ve been right all along,” I said. I was surprised by my own vehemence. “I’m being destroyed. I have to escape.”
“Jason.” He might even have been wondering if he should call the police, or an ambulance. “I didn’t mean it that way. I never meant to imply that you . . .”
“But it’s happening anyway. Last night . . . I was just like Melvin.”
“I understand. You were at the Forresters’ last night?” Yes, he certainl
y understood.
“It was real nasty. I was. I was everything I hate, Nathan. It was like . . . like it wasn’t me. But it was.”
“I do understand, Jason.”
“It will kill me. I mean that literally. I want to get out.”
“What do you mean, ‘get out’?”
“I don’t know,” I said. This was the real decision, and he waited for me. “I want to go back to the way it was, before he died.”
That answer crumbled swiftly. “Were you satisfied with your life back then?” He knew I wasn’t.
“No. Not really.”
“You can’t go back anyway. Too much has changed in these last weeks, especially you. Let me ask you a different question.” It took him some time to assemble it. “What can you accept of your father’s?”
I knew right away. “I . . . no. Nothing. I can’t.”
“Is there any line you can draw? Could you accept an income, as you had before, and nothing else?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where to draw a line. I tried before, but it never worked. There’s no right place to draw it.” And this was the line in my own mind that I could never get past. “What would you do, Nathan?”
He looked away from me, and he was still and silent. It took him a long time. Even after more than a minute, when he looked back up at me and studied me, he didn’t speak.
Then he sighed. “I’m very troubled about saying this, Jason. It’s perilous to give counsel to another person when the consequences will be so great.”
“I want to know.”
“I’m not sure what I would do, because I’m not in your place. I’ve come to know you, though, and I knew your father, and I’ve known many people and seen many things. This is what I believe you should do.” It was the first time anyone had ever said those words before and I’d wanted to hear them. “Give it up, Jason. Turn away. I don’t know what this course of action will do to anyone else affected by it—and that will be many people. I am only speaking to you, about you. Give it all up—everything.”
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