Echo House

by Ward Just

  Men and a few women crowded around to say hello and shake hands. Someone handed the governor a glass of Champagne. They were reminiscing about the things that had gone wrong, incidents in Trenton and Boston, even Chicago, a speech that had been misplaced or a hall the advance man had forgotten to book, the Southern congressman who was so drenched in bourbon that he could not make the introduction and somehow thought that Adlai was Mr. Truman. The men were loose and friendly, rumpled from their long day. A few of them were tight from drinking, laughing louder than they needed to, making broad gestures with their arms. They obviously held the governor in great affection and wanted only to be near him at this—Alec supposed it was the decisive moment, the roulette wheel turning slowly and the ivory ball poised to fall. Alec noticed that his father smiled wanly at their jokes, making an effort; his focus seemed to be elsewhere.

  Alec understood little of what was said. They were speaking a language of familiar words and obscure syntax. It was like listening to Shakespeare, and the ambiance was Shakespearean as well, not the scenes of high emotion but the casual moments that prepared the way. As in any drama, only one actor was the focus at any given moment and the governor had everyone's attention whether he was speaking or not; and Axel, too, was conspicuous, though he said little and seemed preoccupied.

  My feet are killing me, the governor said, and those standing around him looked at his shoes as if they had taken arms against him.

  "Do you want to sit?" someone asked.

  "A killing day, Guv. And it's not over yet—"

  "A day that will live in infamy," the first one said, but no one laughed because the remark was in such questionable taste. Why, in the West the polls hadn't even closed.

  Alec drifted off and stood at the bay window. He touched his forehead to the cold glass, hoping that his father would want to leave soon. He was still disoriented and in motion from the long plane ride. Illinois was the end of the earth; and then you reached the Mississippi. He tapped the glass with his fingernail. Now and then a car drifted by, the driver dipping his headlights or honking. Behind him he heard a collective groan, and then the ring of a telephone and a woman answering.

  "You," she said. "You bastard, why should I have anything to say to you?" Alec listened hard, because he rarely heard women use rough language, only Sylvia when she was very angry or elated. He heard the woman laugh and lower her voice. "Bridgeport's lost, and if we lose Bridgeport we lose everywhere." She paused, giving a drawn-out sigh. "The usual," she said. "It's the rising divorce rate. People want a new head of household, a military man who'll bring home a fat pay packet and keep the Reds from our door and not trouble our sleep during the long winter nights. They want a hero instead of a wiseacre. I don't know what Adlai thought he was running for, maybe president of the Triangle Club. Everyone told him that Americans like their politics sober and every time he cracked a joke he lost ten thousand votes, and he knew it, too, but couldn't help himself. The man has no discipline, so it was obvious from the beginning that we'd lose and lose big. Of course it would've helped if we'd had more money. It would have helped if the bastard newspaper publishers had given us a fair shake. And yours was the worst. Don't you feel like a weasel every time you cash your paycheck?" After a little silence she continued, "The usual gang; everyone's being cheerful, except Axel Behl. You could measure Axel for a shroud. Thing about Adlai is, people like him. They're real fond of him, except the millions and millions who didn't vote for him. Trouble was, we ran a one-legged race. That's off the record. Everything I've said is off the record," she concluded and rang off.

  The woman said, "Who are you?"

  Alec turned from the window. "Alec Behl."

  "Yes, of course," she said brightly. "Axel's boy. I've heard quite a lot about you. I'm Leila Berggren. I know your father."

  When she left to join the others, Alec turned back to the window. Leila Berggren seemed young to be part of a political campaign, and much too young to have so sharp a tongue. She was attractive in a Bohemian way, dark eyes, long dark hair, black turtleneck sweater; chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from the bottle. She looked as if she had just arrived from some basement bar in Greenwich Village, flushed with revolution or blank verse. She did not explain how she knew his father but it wasn't necessary. Axel knew everyone. Then Alec heard the tap-tap of his father's cane and his weary voice, its tone just this side of sarcasm.

  "I see you met Leila."

  "Who is she?"

  "One of the Helpfuls," Axel said. "I know it's boring for you. I felt the same way at your age. Politics and government, government and politics. They'd talk and I'd pretend to listen, until the night I told you about a few years ago, your grandfather and his friends in the Observatory at Echo House. And that night I learned some valuable lessons and you will, too, if you listen hard and keep an open mind." Axel drew a chair close to the window, nodding at his son to sit. They sat together in a zone of incompatible silence and then Axel said, "All high emotion lives on the margins of chaos, and chaos is the enemy of judgment."

  Outside, a driver honked his horn, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits.

  "What does she do besides live on the margins of chaos?"

  Axel sighed impatiently. "I told you. She's a campaigner, like most everyone else here tonight. They're speechwriters, issues men, money men, advance men, men we call the Helpfuls. They're helpful people who know other helpful people. They have telephone numbers, the sheriff of Dade County, a banker in Austin, or a union leader in Kansas City. They know who'll lend you an airplane and a pilot to fly it. They're people who can hire a hall and an attractive crowd to fill the hall and police protection and the meals and refreshments later and the telephone and Telex machines for the press and cars to get everyone around in comfort and safety and do it all on twenty-four hours' notice, meanwhile arranging credit if the campaign's flat. They know an advertising man who'll write you a spot in his spare time gratis. They're people who walk into town with a bag full of nickels and make fifty phone calls in an hour, locating dance bands or latrines or a beer truck. Leila's one of the best. She organizes the press when she's not fooling around with her numbers." Axel began to talk of continuity, sounding now like a biologist discussing the great chain of being, conventions linked to one another, elections linked, candidates linked, Helpfuls linked, passing the tricks of the trade from one generation to the next. Why, the son of a man who was helpful to Adolph Behl was doing the same work for Adlai in Milwaukee or was it Minneapolis...

  Alec's attention wandered, to Leila Berggren and the weasel who worked for the bastard and the undisciplined one-legged campaign. What a cast of characters! And this was his family's milieu. He remembered his mother's description of the old senator, Senator Misogynist, she called him behind Axel's back, his days spent on the floor of the Senate and his nights in the card room of the Metropolitan Club. Summers he traveled in Europe with Sir Charles Rath. April and May he spent in the State with John Baver, cultivating roses and visiting American Legion halls and Rotary Clubs so that he could say he kept in touch with his "people." Dead three years after you were born, Alec, widely mourned at the Metropolitan Club, not mourned at all in the Senate, where they drew lots to select the eulogist; and the loser paid the old man's administrative assistant to write the appropriate encomium, "We shall not see his like again..." And that drew a smile: God willing. Not mourned by Constance. Deeply mourned by your father, Sylvia said, because the Behls were a patriotic family. Testosterone is an addictive chemical, men get bewitched by it, and in the ensuing masculine rapture exclude and degrade women.

  Axel said, "You can draw a line back from this election to FDR's to the election when your grandfather should have been the nominee but wasn't. I know Sylvia didn't like him." Alec nodded; the old man reading his mind again. "They didn't get on from the first minute, and for a while I found that amusing and then I didn't. I don't like disharmony at home." Axel suddenly lifted his head and put a finger to his lips.

  In th
e living room Lloyd Fisher turned up the volume of the television set. Connecticut was lost and then, in succession, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Ohio looked very bad and even Illinois was doubtful. As the tide rolled westward the Republicans claimed landslide. Many of the men in the room were pleading with the governor not to concede. The polls were still open in the West. If the South held—and then someone looked in with the news that Mobile had gone Republican.

  "Worse than I thought," Axel said.

  "Will he concede now?" Alec asked.

  "Not yet," Axel said. "You have to choose the moment, then say exactly the right thing. We'll see. Adlai's grown up in this world; he'll do things the right way, not the way my father did them. He couldn't let go of his ambition, didn't understand that what you lose today you can win tomorrow." Axel peered into the interior of the room, where the others were, and dropped his voice. "The vice presidency would have changed your grandfather's life and, maybe, the life of the nation. Instead, he became embittered and the last bad years canceled out the early good ones. And his election would have changed my life beyond imagining. I would have had a different war because my circumstances would have been different. I would have practiced diplomacy in Moscow or London. I would not have been behind the lines in France, chasing after George Patton, blown up on a road you can't find on any map."

  Axel's voice had risen. His son touched his arm.

  Axel said quietly, "And it would have changed your life, too, because it would have changed my life. My circumstances would have changed your circumstances because right now we wouldn't be at Adlai's Election Night party. We'd be at mine. Senate, governor, House, one of those three, because I would have believed in promises and mumbo-jumbo. I would have made a different marriage, not a Bohemian with a sharp tongue. Not a woman who thought of government as a spittoon and a stuffed ballot box."

  "That's not fair," Alec said stoutly.

  Axel laughed unpleasantly.

  "I don't want to talk about it," Alec said and looked again out the window.

  "Having a President or vice president in the family is like having a suicide. It's always an option."

  "Jesus," Alec said under his breath.

  "Ask Henry Adams When he was a young boy he thought the presidency was the family business and that was what you did when you grew up. Ask Adlai," Axel said, pointing at the governor, tête-à-tête with an older woman, who seemed to be explaining something to him, because he was looking at his shoes and nodding. They were standing under a huge oil portrait of a heavy-lidded Abraham Lincoln.

  "Adlai's grandfather was one of Cleveland's vice presidents, forgotten now except, naturally, by the family. All he did in four years was to fire forty thousand Republican postmasters. That's history's verdict on Vice President Stevenson's four long years. But you can bet that wasn't what he remembered as he recollected it later. He remembered the Pullman strike and congressional intrigue and stories about the President. So what the curious public knows from history books, the Stevenson family knew from the old man himself. His family listened to him as one day another generation will listen to Adlai, and when he's forgotten except by a few students of American politics, he'll still be remembered inside the family, if only as an option."

  Axel paused then, self-consciously shifting in his chair, tapping his cane on the toe of his shoe. In the big room the governor was telling a story and people were laughing, crowding around him. The company had become disheveled, men in their shirtsleeves and women :n their stocking feet, everyone smoking cigarettes except for an elderly man sitting alone in a corner of the room, quietly pulling on his pipe. Somewhere a telephone was ringing.

  "Get that phone!" the elderly man cried. "Ike can't read the numbers; he's conceding!" And everyone laughed as the phone continued to ring.

  Axel paid no attention. "What's done's done. You can't walk back the cat."

  "Seems to me a small ambition," Alec said. "Vice president of the United States, vice president of the junior class. It's ceremonial. Who needs it?"

  Axel waited a moment before replying. "The official version was that Adolph wanted it out of vanity. But what he really wanted was to use his influence to establish museums in every region of the United States. He wanted to do for museums what Carnegie did for libraries and he was prepared to use the family money to help it along. He wanted to put them everywhere, art museums, natural history museums, museums of science, museums of Americana, whaling, farming, sport, the frontier, commerce, politics. You would think it quixotic and you would be right. But it wasn't a stupid idea and it wasn't vain. It wasn't a small ambition. And he didn't care what you thought. Or anybody."

  Axel fluttered a hand at the governor, who smiled wanly. He was listening to a middle-aged woman who twisted the pearls at her throat as she talked. The atmosphere was suddenly swollen with frustrated desire, everyone realizing that the campaign was finished; America had looked at them and turned thumbs down. The woman with the pearls leaned on the governor's arm. She seemed near tears, her voice loud in the now-quiet room. She was telling the governor how sorry she was that he would not be President after all. We love you, Guv. What fun we could have had in Washington.

  "One of Adlai's socialite friends," Axel said sourly.

  She did not look like a socialite to Alec. She looked like someone's distraught aunt.

  "Adlai's biggest problem," Axel said. "He's not a prick. You've got to be a prick in this business and he's not. He won't tell her to get lost. He knows she contributed a magnificent twenty-five dollars to the campaign and her husband handsomely matched it, dollar for dollar. He knows because I told him. The socialites just love the Guv, love him to death. They think campaigns are run on love. First campaign I've seen where socialites were involved and at first I didn't see the attraction for them. They hate the government because it's the government that collects their taxes. But the government isn't the point. The White House is the point. They think the campaign's a kind of national coming-out party or race meeting at Saratoga. It's a fashionable place to be. It excites them, being in the receiving line or in the paddock; they don't care much for the stables, though. They love hanging around and giving advice to the professionals but they don't like to give money. If they gave money, someone might think they had something tc gain. Someone might think they wanted something, perhaps an ambassadorship, some pleasant Old World country in a temperate zone." Axel grunted, glancing sideways at his son. "This is the first socialite campaign I've seen but I have a feeling it's not the last."

  The governor was helping the woman with her coat, murmuring words of consolation.

  "Parasites," Axel said. "He's not prick enough to tell her to get lost. It's pathetic. And she voted for Eisenhower. In the privacy of the voting booth she looked up and her dear father's hand was on her wrist and guiding her fingers to the box that said Ike and Dick. I'd stake my life on it."

  Alec sighed. Listening to his father was like listening to an insistent drizzle, the words falling and puddling, slick under foot. For this he had left a oarefoot sophomore with a ribbon in her hair and a cashmere scarf around her neck, a drowsy golden-haired girl with a garden-of-earthly-delights smile and an uninhibited attitude, a devotee of Blake. Yes, he'd said with no little self-importance, I'm off to meet Adlai Stevenson—and she had laughed and laughed.

  "When you get involved yourself some day you'll know what I mean. Campaigns are xenophobic, like nations. We don't like tourists in our country. They don't understand our customs and they don't speak our language. We think they're a distraction to our sovereign, who must be focused every hour of every day. So we don't like them. And they don't like us." Smiling falsely, Axel waved goodbye to the woman with the pearls. She did not wave back.

  Axel continued to drizzle. From somewhere nearby Alec heard Leila Berggren's brass laugh, filled with sarcasm and mischief. He tried to imagine her in the cashmere scarf and couldn't. She belonged in a crowd. He wished he had refused to come; there was nothing for him here. The room se
emed to him isolated from the world and the governor isolated in the room. He did not look like a sovereign, a tired middle-aged man with scuffed shoes, no hair on his head and a fleshy nose. Now he stood alone sipping from a glass of Champagne and looking at the Lincoln portrait, apparently unaware that he was being observed. Alec felt a sudden sympathy for him. He was alone with himself and perhaps that was not where he wanted to be on a night of defeat. Probably he had enjoyed the floodlit union halls and auditoriums, the orchestras and microphones, speaking a smart sentence and listening to the applause. If you were in politics, that was where you belonged, even on a night of landslide, the terrain changing before your eyes; and you were the cause of the changes. But looking at the governor now, it was evident that his thoughts were unknowable. Even the Champagne might have been soda water.

  Axel went on and on. People milled about, collecting in front of the door, then backing away, uncertain where to go or what to do when they got there. The atmosphere in the room was still heavy, as if they were all below sea level. Alec wondered whether these were tomorrow's men after all, or remnants of a dying civilization as out of date as the old senator planting roses and investigating the life of Goethe or Axel's dislike of socialites. The room was purposeless and stale, the men plodding around it. He thought of cattle in a corral. Yet the governor was composed and at ease, staring at the Lincoln portrait, humming to himself. Lincoln's expression was one of great unquiet grief. With sudden certainty Alec realized he had no idea what the governor was thinking or feeling. Perhaps his mind was a blank, the only sensation the effervescence of wine on his tongue. Probably all he wanted to do was go to bed. The telephone began to ring again.

  Alec wondered if Leila Berggren was staying at the mansion or in a hotel somewhere, and if she was alone or with someone. He looked up when a red-faced man touched his father on the shoulder.