Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “Fine.”

  Slim removed her fingertip from the diskette, as if breaking a psychic connection. “And now I think we’d better go and rejoin the crowd.”

  “I think so too,” said Busby ruefully, stealthily slipping the diskette into his pocket.

  Slim was smiling at him again, but only with her eyes. She had the air of a woman who had known exactly what to expect before she met him and had not been disappointed in the least by the reality. It was a look he recognized. He recognized the touch of her hand, too: back in the fifties Vassar girls, his wife among them, had cultivated the hand-on-your-hand-holding-the-cigarette-lighter trick, linked with the lifting of meaning-filled eyes, especially during senior spring, and nearly every member of his class had succumbed to this particular old one-two before finding out, to their lifelong cost, exactly what its consequences were.

  “Good night, Ms. Eve,” he said. “And thank you.”

  Next morning, very early, he had his secretary print out the contents of Slim’s diskette in the extra-large type in which all his working papers came from the word processor. Reading, he gasped in astonishment and pleasure, then picked up the phone and dialed Slim’s twenty-four-hour number. Though it was not yet seven, she answered unsleepily on the first ring. He blurted, “The Constitution actually says that?”

  Slim said, “Yes. Didn’t you look it up for yourself?”

  “No time. Does it mean what it says?”

  “It always means what it says. It’s right there in black and white in Article Two, refined in the Twentieth Amendment, which shows serious intent not just by the Framers but by later generations of lawmakers.”

  “I tell you, this is a stroke of genius,” Busby said. “I’m lost in admiration. Do you know what this can mean?”

  “For Lockwood and Mallory, yes. But my principal believes it’s a win-win situation for everyone else. A way out. A pragmatic, constitutional way out.”

  “And a new beginning.” There was joy in Busby’s voice. “Slim, you tell your principal that the Poet would be proud, capital P,” he said. “He’ll understand.”

  “I’ll deliver the message.”

  “And you can tell him I take my hat off to the two of you. I was absolutely blind to this opportunity, and my guess is that everyone else in Washington is, too.”

  “Then I’m glad we were able to help,” Slim said. “But remember, you have to lock both of them out before you can do this.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Busby said. “It’s the only way to save the party, and they all know that already.”

  “Then you’re halfway home. The other half is getting the right person, a new face, into the game as savior of the situation. I hope you’ll be thinking about this.”

  Busby didn’t even have to think about it. “I already have,” Busby said. “I know just the person for the job.”

  “Good,” said Slim. “I’m so glad.”

  Whistling a tune, Busby locked the printout and the diskette in his desk drawer. He knew that Slim had just dealt him the last card in the winning hand. The pot contained the Constitution, the presidency, and the triumph of the Shelley Definition and the dawn of the Year Zed, and he was going to win it all—not for himself but for the Poet and for the Cause.

  1

  Vice President Williston Graves’s funeral took place in the Washington Cathedral at nine-thirty on Friday morning, the day on which the Senate impeachment trial was scheduled to reconvene at one o’clock. By the time the crowd began to arrive, most insiders knew that Graves had expired while sitting in a swivel chair behind his desk with a buxom twentyseven-year-old deputy vice presidential counsel straddling his lap. Graves, a warm-blooded but prudent man, was famous for the position. “They can’t holler ‘offsides’ if they’re on top” had been his motto.

  The lawyer immediately called his wife and explained the situation. “Zip him up and comb his hair and wheel him up to the desk,” Lydia Graves advised her. “Then fix your own hair, call the White House doctor, and keep your mouth shut.” The young woman followed these instructions with considerable presence of mind, but blurted out the truth to Bud Booker of the Secret Service, who got to the scene moments before the White House medical team arrived and pointed out with the utmost tact that she was walking around with only one leg in her panty hose.

  Now the image of Graves’s last earthly moment hovered above the congregation like a hologram, bringing fleeting smiles to the lips of the many male friends, and some of the females, who had long known about his extramarital modus operandi. The circumstances in which the Lord had taken Graves home kindled affection for his memory in nearly everyone but his widow, who resented the timing and the absurdity of his departure. Like his final sexual partner, Lydia had been more than usually nice to Graves in his last days because, the way things were going for Lockwood, it seemed possible he might soon be President. She had been willing to settle for the title of First Lady as a reward for a lifetime of treating Willy’s office playmates as invisible women. The lawyer had hoped for a White House job in return for her favors, one with a gender-neutral title and an office in the West Wing itself, not across the alley in the rococo limbo that was the Executive Office Building.

  The funeral, attended by all Washington, would mark Lydia’s last appearance at center stage, and she had designed it as the entr’acte in the constitutional crisis. Understanding the town she lived in, she knew that dead Vice Presidents seldom drew a crowd. Therefore she asked Lockwood to deliver the eulogy. He had not said no, but as the organ filled the nave with the first soaring notes of B. Cowan’s Variations on “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the question remained unanswered. The news media, the whole of Washington, wondered aloud if Lockwood, who had not emerged from the White House since Inauguration Day, would come out into the open at last. There were cameras everywhere.

  From nine o’clock onward the cathedral filled up rapidly. Among the first to arrive was Attenborough, and as he waited for the service to begin, he sat all by himself at the far end of a row of chairs. No one offered to join him. Few of Graves’s friends, nearly every one of them also an old friend of the Speaker’s, so much as nodded to him as they made their way down the aisles. As these turncoats went by, Attenborough concentrated on the cathedral’s famous and popular Space Window, set into the granite just above his head. He recalled from the dedication ceremony many years before that a piece of genuine lunar rock, enclosed in a capsule of nitrogen to protect it from the earth’s atmosphere, was embedded in the stained glass. How long ago it seemed that Armstrong and Aldrin had landed in the Sea of Tranquillity, and yet how recent. The Apollo astronauts were about his age—old men. Were they all dead yet? Just about everybody else was.

  Attenborough looked away. The organ played rueful music—classical stuff that Willy almost certainly would not have been able to recognize. The dense perfume of hothouse flowers filled the air. Down by the choir, propped up amid wreaths, baskets, and bouquets, the silvered urn containing Graves’s ashes reflected sunbeams. Lydia had had him cremated as soon as the autopsy was complete, incinerating the entire corpse, Attenborough thought, in order to make sure of destroying the offending part. He made a mental note to tell Albert not to let anybody cremate him. “The body that is sown is perishable, but it is raised imperishable,” First Corinthians, chapter the fifteenth, verse the forty-second. The fact that Attenborough had never got religion in his heart didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t think there might be something to it, and if he was going to be resurrected on the Day of Glory and reign with the Lord for a thousand years, as the Book of Revelation promised, he wanted to keep his bones together in a good tight box.

  By now it was 9:25. Everyone was seated. The vergers closed the doors; the organ emitted a final tremulous note. Awareness rippled through the nave from back to front as Lockwood, with Polly on his arm and his familiar homely, sad-eyed head sticking up above the phalanx of Secret Service agents, swept down the aisle to a seat in the front ro
w.

  Although Graves had been born and raised a Disciple of Christ, the Anglican service for the dead was read in a plummy voice by a clergyman wearing gorgeous medieval vestments. Then Lockwood rose, bent consolingly over the veiled widow for a moment, and mounted the steps leading to the lectern. He began to speak, without notes, in his own accent, which was as loud and American as the priest’s had been discreet and mid-Atlantic. Towering over the audience, the President looked and sounded as Lincolnian as ever. He was an orator by nature, and he seemed happy to be speaking again and to be among people. Because of that, and because he had truly liked Graves, his eulogy was long and—because nearly all the lovable and interesting things about Willy were unsuitable for churchly utterance—boring. If Lockwood was in the least discomfited by the prospect of going on trial for his place in history in a couple of hours, he showed no sign of it. And that, as Attenborough understood, was the whole point of his showing up: What, me worry?

  After the first five minutes of embroidered reminiscence—Lockwood reinvented Graves as he went along, making him singular and laughable, just as he had always done with everybody else he’d ever met—Attenborough stopped listening and concentrated instead on staying awake. This was difficult, even though he had taken an extra pill with the vodka he had drunk in the car on the way here, Albert watching him in the rearview mirror and shaking his head in disapproval. Attenborough was a student of the Constitution. He decided to keep his eyes open by remembering it, all of it, in his mind. Of course he knew it by heart, just as he knew at least two versions of the Bible and the Texas criminal and civil codes and most of the major Acts of Congress passed in the last thirty years. It came back to him in the exact same physical form in which he had first read it, in large clear type on the glossy, slightly yellowed pages of his ninth-grade civics book.

  Just as Lockwood began hitting his stride, the Speaker reached the Twentieth Amendment. Because he was reading the text with the mind of the thirteen-year-old boy he had been when he memorized the Constitution, the sense of its language didn’t come through, only the words and the meter, and though he tried to prevent it from happening and even reached into his ticket pocket for an extra pill, he felt himself falling into a profound sleep just as the lines about appointing an acting President appeared. In his mind, though not in reality, he sat bolt upright. The words of the amendment crackled through his mind like a spark leaping across a darkness, which was, of course, exactly what was happening inside his skull. Suddenly everything that had happened—everything—made sense to him, frightened him. Gotta tell Sam. That was Attenborough’s last thought before he fell into a bottomless slumber.

  Half an hour later, when he woke, he felt a pang of guilt. For the moment, that’s all it was, a pang. He knew why he felt it: he had fallen asleep in the middle of remembering something, a cardinal sin. But what? Whatever it was, it was vital. He remembered being frightened, as if he had heard an oracular warning in a dream. But the circumstances, the reason for his fright, had flown out of his mind, and though he could still sense its overwhelming importance, he could not recapture it.

  He opened his eyes. Willy’s urn was gone; so were the widow and Lockwood. But he was not alone. He heard the hollow murmur of the departing crowd, the shuffle of feet over the stone floor, coughing. A pattern of light falling through a stained-glass window onto the back of his inert blue-veined hand reminded him of a tattoo. And because one thing memorized often triggered the recollection of another, he tried to remember what the Lord had told Moses to command the congregation of Israel about tattoos in . . . which book of the Pentateuch? He could not remember this, either.

  All he could recall were words of warning shimmering on a page brightened by harsh Texas sunshine shining through a schoolhouse window in 1944. But he could not remember what the words said, or even the title of the work. He told himself, Relax, Tucker, it’ll come back. But it didn’t. Meanwhile, the mighty passed by, faces frozen, eyes averted. They might as well have given him a bell to ring and made him cry “Unclean, unclean.” He’d known them all for years, but he couldn’t put names to them. He felt the edge of panic.

  Finally he was all alone. The silence was so deep that he thought he might still be asleep and dreaming. Were his eyes open? To answer the question he looked upward at the Space Window again—what were those astronauts’ names?—and reflected once more that life was a hell of a lot shorter than he had expected it to be; it had been like one of those space voyages in the movies where they put you to sleep before you leave orbit and a robot with a sissy’s voice wakes you up a century or two later and reminds you that you’re still a kid but everyone you ever knew and loved on earth is long since dead and gone.

  He still couldn’t remember. “Damn!” he said in his frustration, at the top of his mighty voice. Or so he intended. But the echo that came back to him from the vault of the roof was tremulous, little more than a whisper. There was a numbness in his lip. When he lifted his right hand to touch it, he found that the hand was asleep; lip must be asleep, too, but how could that be? He felt deeply, deeply tired. He reached into his ticket pocket for a pill. Found it right away, popped it into his mouth: nothing wrong with the left hand. He looked up. Albert was standing over him with another of those fussbudget looks on his face. Must’ve got tired of waiting in the car and come looking for him.

  Albert said, “You all right, Mr. Speaker?”

  Attenborough nodded, waiting for the pill to kick in.

  “Why you staring like that?” Albert asked.

  “Just thinking, Albert,” Attenborough replied. The words came out as a feeble croak. Albert’s look of exasperation was replaced by one of alarm. Attenborough smiled, tried to stand up. Staggered, lost his balance; Albert had to catch him by the elbows to keep him from sliding under the pew.

  “Shit!” Attenborough started to say, but stopped at the diphthong when he remembered where he was; Albert was a pious man.

  Albert held the Speaker’s biceps, the one on the good side of his body, in a grip like a blood-pressure cuff. With his other hand he was fumbling in his pocket for something. “We should call Henry on the telephone,” Albert said. “Get you to the hospital.”

  “Not yet; got to stay with it,” Attenborough said in the wheeze he now had as a voice. He could hardly keep his balance because his right leg was asleep, too. He knew it wasn’t really asleep. He knew what was happening to him without talking to Henry, knew he had to keep this quiet, keep it away from the media. Everything depended on it; he knew that, too. In a while he’d remember why.

  “Get me out of here, Albert,” he said. He was damned if he’d die in church.

  2

  Albert drove Attenborough straight to Henry’s office in the Watergate, but the Speaker refused to get out of the car. Henry came down the elevator to the underground garage and examined him in the backseat of his limousine, behind its one-way smoked windows.

  “Is it a stroke?” Attenborough mumbled. The right side of his face drooped and his right arm and leg were still numb, though not so numb as they had been a while before.

  “I don’t think so,” Henry said. “It’s impossible to be sure without tests, but I think you’ve had a TIA.”

  “A what?”

  “A transient ischemic attack. That means a certain area of your brain was deprived of blood for a short time.”

  “Why?”

  “Arterial obstruction.”

  “You mean a blood clot?”

  “Roughly speaking, yes. That’s why you’re experiencing these difficulties with your speech and your arm and leg. Is your memory affected?” Attenborough did not reply; this was not something he was prepared to admit and, besides, he was working hard to get it back. Henry eyed him and said, “What was your mother’s maiden name?” Attenborough could not remember. Henry said, “How about your Social Security number?” Attenborough could do no more than shake his head helplessly. He found himself fighting tears. Henry said, “You should be in the hosp
ital. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I remember your telling me that before,” Attenborough said. “And I told you I can’t do it. How long is this going to last?”

  Henry did not like the question. “There’s no way to predict. Could be as little as twelve hours, could be forty-eight. Or much longer.”

  “But sooner or later everything will come back including Mama’s maiden name?”

  “I can’t say for sure, Mr. Speaker. You could also have a fatal stroke.”

  “I’ll have to take my chances on that, Henry. Can you give me something to hurry it up? I need my brain in working order.” He tried to wink but couldn’t. “Maybe you could just kinda step back and kick me in the head, like we used to do to start the car.”

  This drew no smile. As Attenborough had noted on other occasions, Henry had no sense of humor whatsoever. They must have taken it out, like a malignancy, at Harvard; it happened all the time. “I can give you pills,” Henry said. “But if you go on this way, Mr. Speaker, you won’t need medication. You’ll need an undertaker.”

  Attenborough smiled into Henry’s earnest African face; he looked just like Albert at the same age. “Higbe,” Attenborough said.

  Henry was scribbling a prescription. He looked up. “What did you say?”

  “Higbe. That was her name before she was married,” Attenborough replied. “Mama was a Higbe.”

  “Good,” Henry said. “Remembering that is a good sign. Keep it up.”

  “I’m working on it,” Attenborough said.

  3

  The Speaker was worried about the cameras catching him dragging his leg as he took his seat in the Senate gallery, so he got himself a cane and made up a story about falling down in the bathtub. “Hit my head on the rim and busted up my mouth,” he told Morgan Pike off-camera. Straining to understand his garbled speech, she looked at him strangely. “The Lord sure can pile it onto his servant when he’s a mind to,” Attenborough said. “I already had this damn malaria. Can’t hardly talk, can’t chew, can’t walk.” He winked at her, managing this time to open and close the lid in a slow-motion parody of lechery. “Only got about two more can’ts to go and I’ll be completely harmless,” he said.