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Stepping from the shower, Julian heard the waking call of a veery, and went to the window to see if he could catch a glimpse of this shy woodland bird. He watched the damp ground beneath the willow in the garden corner, but had no luck. Jenny had seen eggs, two delicate greenish ones in a ground nest, and had tried to transcribe the thrush’s song for the piano: twelve falling notes. Usually it sang at evening. Back at the sink, he opened the medicine cabinet, putting his mug and brush and razor neatly in their places, and then snapped open the tube of pills. His blood pressure, 200 over 120 before treatment, was alarming to Julian’s doctor, but not to Julian. His condition led to heart attacks, cerebral hemorrhages—quick, private deaths like his father’s. Julian, in his rational way, took the pills, six each day, faithfully; the medication reduced his blood pressure to 130 over 80, a normal reading. Of course, only the symptoms were controlled; the condition itself remained, concealed deep in Julian’s body.
Julian had learned early that his own death was not a matter of great interest to him. Three times he had almost died: at fifteen, when he swam out too far in the Seine; at twenty-one, when his Phantom was crippled by flak over Vietnam and he was pulled, bleeding, out of the sea by a rescue helicopter; and, the last time, a year or so before, when Emily, angry after a quarrel, drove her car through a guardrail and over an embankment on a seaside road in Maine. Each time, after the briefest of struggles, Julian had been ready to let life go. On every occasion his last thoughts, or what he imagined to be his last thoughts, had been of others.
At his first near-drowning, he had been seized by an undercurrent so strong that he thought some big animal had pulled him beneath the surface of the Seine. He fought upwards, towards a patch of sunlight on the muddy surface of the river, and as his head broke water he heard his mother’s voice calling from the bank. The sound of it, so gay, so unsuspecting that Julian was going to die while she watched, filled him with unbearable sorrow. He struggled, fought the current, sank and rose, wept with the effort to escape. He reached safety a long distance downstream from where his mother was, coming ashore in a grassy meadow where a herd of black and white cattle, let out to graze after their morning milking, quietly regarded his dripping figure, working their jaws and switching their tails. He remembered the deep silence of the moment after the roar of the water, and that of his own blood, in his ears.
His mother waited for him in the moored dinghy. For a breakfast picnic she had brought their thick chewy sandwiches of fried eggs, and sweetened coffee in the cloudy wine tumblers. They sat facing each other in the gently rocking boat as they ate; his mother wore a faded bikini and a wide straw hat that left her face, except for her shining teeth, in shadow. The food, the sun, the motion of the boat—and, he supposed, years later, the escape from death—gave Julian an erection that he could not hide. His mother smiled and left him, walking up the steep bank, its wild grasses cropped like a lawn by farm animals. He put up the sail and took the dinghy out alone, and in a short while he saw her, fully clothed in her jeans and smock, working at her easel on a hilltop. She could never have known that his arousal had nothing to do with her. She died before Julian was old enough to tell her why this had happened to him.
That was his most painful regret when he was shot down in Vietnam, crash-landing his jet in the sea. By that time he retained no vestige of religious belief, but some part of his mind that had remained behind in childhood (during chapel at Exeter he had often tried, while praying, to transmit messages to his mother in France, as if God were an antenna) attempted to send assurances to his dead mother that he had never wished to desire her sexually; it seemed vital to Julian that she understand that, and that it was possible she might do so through the intensity of his last thoughts. Otherwise, as he hemorrhaged into waters that were the same temperature as his blood, he felt nothing but a sort of giddy good humor. He had no idea how many Vietnamese he had killed in sixty sorties, with napalm and high explosives and rapid-fire mini-guns. Hundreds, he supposed. It seemed to him a comedy of justice that his hidden, dumb victims should at last have killed him, bringing down his complicated airplane and his whole complex American organism, educated at enormous expense, with a primitive weapon—perhaps a heavy machine gun, clumsily aimed by human hand and eye, that was no different from those used by the Western powers against bewildered Asians in the Boxer Rebellion. Dying, as he believed himself to be, Julian imagined the celebration his killers must be having in their burning encampment, the heart-bursting joy they must have felt on seeing the black trail of his burning machine falling beyond the horizon.
But once again Julian survived. Rising from a drugged sleep in a naval hospital in Hawaii, he found Horace standing at his bedside. Julian’s injuries weren’t serious—broken bones and cuts—but he had less control than usual over his mind because of the morphine he had been given, and so he told Horace how it felt to die by water. “You had no will to fight against death?” Horace asked. Julian shook his head; he wanted very much to see his brother’s features, but he couldn’t because Horace was standing with his back to the window and it was a bright day, so that his lanky body was outlined by brilliant sunlight. Horace’s face was in shadow, as Julian’s mother’s face had been hidden by the shadow of her hat in the dinghy long ago. “No. It’s very peaceful to feel the person going,” Julian said. Horace stroked his younger brother’s hair; rubbed a knuckle over his cheek, scratchy with a two-day beard. “It’s all that time you spent with Pa,” he said. “I know he thinks that nothing matters, that humanity is a junk species. But he may not be right, Julian. Next time, struggle a little, have a little curiosity about the future, try to live. You can be damn sure our father would take his full three times going down before he drowned.”
Horace had always tried to teach Julian to struggle against the pessimism in their father. That was why Julian had gone into politics. Even in school, he had begun to want to believe in the goodness of man. Julian didn’t like the idea of sin, of blame, of responsibility. Especially, he couldn’t attach those words to the poor and the exploited: whatever they did to attack their horrible lives, even if they murdered, they had a right to do. Surely Julian, bleeding to death in the Gulf of Tonkin, had put this conviction to the test: his final thought before he lost consciousness was this: Good for you. The thought was addressed to the yellow men who had shot him down, scrawny and superstitious and deceived even by their own ruler who had fed a whole generation of them into the meat grinder of Western technology. Ho Chi Minh had killed these peasants to fulfill his own idea of himself as the greatest Vietnamese of all time. Julian and his fellow aviators had killed them for sport, like German officers at the turn of the century hunting Bushmen instead of gazelles in South West Africa; but the Vietnamese had killed Julian out of hatred and fear, and to Julian they were, therefore, the only true human beings involved in the cycle of slaughter.
Julian’s choice of a political career was his one conscious rebellion against the values of his father’s life. Julian stood next to a President who was trying to change society, who was reckless in his belief in the goodness of man. The two of them thought it was possible to destroy the hateful stupidities of the past. Neither Lockwood nor Julian believed in change—they believed, instead, in the imminent discovery of man’s goodness beneath the grime and the scars of his history. Man had only to be himself to save himself. A hundred years earlier, the two of them would have sailed for the Congo with a kit of medicines and a crate of Bibles. The cool intelligence of Elliott Hubbard had mingled with the romantic impulsiveness of Julian’s mother to produce, in their son, an idealist.
Nothing in his life surprised Elliott more, or amused him as much. Even in the 1950s, when he was saving romantic leftists, Elliott had had contempt for politics. He looked on belief as poison. “You’re old enough to look around at what’s happening,” Elliott said at the table one night in the sixties, when Julian was in his late teens. “Do you think you’ve lived so far in a sane and stable worl
d?” Julian shook his head. “Unlucky boy,” his father said; “but how do you think you would’ve liked my boyhood? Irishwomen singing in the kitchen, the honest dead ball in the major leagues, steamy horseshit in the streets, a wonderful aroma. The American elms were still alive in New York, the sky in West Stockbridge was full of barn swallows; I used to spend whole days trying to shoot one on the wing with my slingshot. The medieval hierarchy prevailed: God, seraphim, angels, saints, kings, nobles, peasants, animals, plants, earth, water, stones; every idea and every creature in its place.”
Julian had stopped eating in order to listen.
“That was your great-grandfather’s view of the universe,” Elliott said. “In his mind, he was one of the nobles; he wanted to teach me how to be one, too. He had cotton mills in which he killed children. Their parents, immigrants from Europe, were his accomplices—they’d breed big families and send them into the mills at the age of eight, then confiscate the wages. The children would get tuberculosis from breathing the mill dust. Once when I was at the Harbor for Christmas, down from Exeter for the holiday, I walked by a very pretty girl on Fenn Street—she may have been fifteen. I’ve never seen such rosy cheeks as she had. She was Irish; in those days Americans could tell who was who. She was in front of the mill, on her way to work. She was coughing blood into a snowbank, scarlet gobs of it. It made me see the real color of money. You should, too, Julian.”
Julian put down his fork with a clatter. He was reading a lot by that time, and he had begun to think that it was wrong to be rich. “What has any Hubbard ever done to make up for that girl?” he demanded.
His father pressed his lips together in a smile. “I can’t speak for the others,” he said. “I’ve saved a lot of my friends who’ve let the kind of conscience you seem to want for yourself carry them too far. In the fifties I kept Sam Rodgers—you know him, he writes things—out of jail for perjuring himself about the identities of people he’d known in the Communist Party. Sam was never really much of a revolutionary. The Communists humored him because he was a source of money. They made their girls sleep with him the way they’d send them up to Harlem to hand out leaflets, for discipline. Back in the thirties he’d have what were called ‘Red Gets’—fund-raising parties for comrades fighting in Spain. He used his father’s mansion on the North Shore, filled it with Bolshevists—it was a delicious joke. Sam Rodgers came to me again last week. His son, a few years older than you, is a true believer like his father, but no more anxious to go to jail for his beliefs than old Sam was fifteen years ago. The youngster has received a draft notice. Sam wanted me to get the kid out of the draft without getting him into trouble with the law. Therefore I sent Sam and young Sam to a lawyer who specializes in Selective Service law—he can get any young man whose father has two thousand dollars for his fee out of the draft. Sam’s son will not be inducted in November, as scheduled. Think what that means, Julian. This boy won’t have to compromise his conscience, he’ll never have to kill an innocent Vietcong or himself be killed by one. But think further. Does the fact that this youngster has evaded the draft mean that the government will take one less young man in November? No, it does not. It means that some Negro or some poor white will be drafted in his place, and that young fellow will kill or be killed in the dirty war my friend Sam Rodgers has saved his son from. I pointed this out to Sam. Would you like to hear what Sam said to me? Sam said, ‘Then what I’m doing for my son is politically correct. The black or the poor white boy who goes in his place will come back from that Goddamned war a revolutionary!’ That, Julian, is the beauty of idealism—it always finds a way to make others pay for its pleasures.”
Nevertheless, Julian believed it was possible to be an honorable man. He joined the Navy when he graduated from Yale. He wanted to be a pilot, but he had difficulty being admitted to flight school because he measured forty inches from seat to head, an inch above the limit for flyers who might have to eject from jet aircraft. Julian went to his father for help. “If you were willing to get Sam Rodgers’s kid out of going to war, you ought to be willing to get me into it,” Julian said. Elliott sympathized; he himself had parachuted into France with the OSS when he was far too old for the work, and had needed the intervention of friends. Influence was applied; Julian was remeasured. The medical officer who signed the form shrugged. “I advise you never to pull that ejection lever, son,” he said. “You’ll leave your skull or your ass in the cockpit.” It was that advice that saved Julian’s life when his Phantom was struck by ground fire: he crash-landed in the sea instead of bailing out.
Caroline and Julian met at his father’s house when she was a freshman at Vassar; Julian was then in his third year at Yale. She was a granddaughter of one of Elliott’s friends. Caroline had lovely changing eyes with deep blue irises and glistening whites. They gave her face—she had classical American features and astonishing ivory skin and gleaming black hair—a dramatic look of intelligence and deep emotion. Julian told her so. “It’s a trick of the light,” Caroline said; she was a pretty girl who didn’t like to discuss her looks.
Julian soon found that she was more than that. They were standing together near the fireplace, away from the older guests. This was a Christmas party, and Horace was at home. He came and stood with them, holding a glass of brandy in his long fingers. Julian introduced him as a banker. Caroline, with a great white smile, took the glass from Horace’s hand and threw its contents into the fire; a tongue of blue flame shot into the room and singed the long skirt she wore. Julian pulled her violently out of danger. Her hair flew.
“That was an asinine thing to do,” Julian said.
“I don’t like the stink of money,” she said. Caroline was a very small girl, but she did not seem to realize that Julian and Horace were taller than she as she glared up into their faces far above her own.
Horace looked her up and down. She was wearing hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes from Bergdorf’s and a young girl’s jewels—a topaz pendant, an emerald-chip ring. “Is that entirely rational?” he asked.
“Rationality is the enemy of consciousness.”
“I see.” Horace was just back from Israel. He had seen a busload of children blown up by a terrorist’s bomb on a road near Jerusalem. He described the little torn limbs on the pavement smeared with blood, and women shrieking as they sorted through the dead, searching for their sons and daughters.
“Savagery is the highest morality if it brings change,” Caroline said. “The past must be smashed, a clean new international class of youth, united to the oppressed, must arise.”
She had marched against the Establishment, screaming obscenities. She told them of her experiences, how she had been radicalized. At her first demonstration, a black girl, beautiful and serene, caught Caroline’s eye because she was wearing a dress. All the whites, male and female, were in overalls and chambray shirts, bandannas and work boots. Suddenly the black girl turned her back to the police, lifted her skirt, grasped her ankles, and urinated—a long thick yellow stream, arching in the bright autumn sun. The outraged officers rushed the students. “We all had baggies filled with our turds. We pelted the motherfuckers!” said Caroline. She was not quite nineteen.
Horace took his glass from her hand and went to get himself another drink. Julian went away, too, and Caroline remained where she was. She was too pretty to be left alone for long, and as the party went on, Julian watched as men approached her, smiling, only to leave her moments later with the stunned eyes she had hoped to inflict on Horace and Julian. When she left with her parents, she walked across the room with hand outstretched to say good night to the brothers. Horace put his brandy glass in her fingers and Julian laughed aloud. She drained the glass. The cognac brought tears to her eyes. With her wonderful smile she said, “Fuck you.”
Soon afterwards, Caroline began to call Julian on the telephone. She always called after midnight, to talk for hours in a low, insistent voice. Julian would lie in the dark with the receiver on his pillow, dozing as her voic
e penetrated the distance between them. She required no response. Julian thought at first that Caroline was mad, but then he saw that she was merely dazed by the atmosphere of her times: the words, endlessly repeated, that didn’t mean anything; the television images, ceaselessly rebroadcast, of the dead in Vietnam—broken dolls, seeping red televised blood. In her boarding school intonation she spoke over the telephone of highs and lows, ups and downs, orgasms and male sexual failures, napalm and torture. She had a single emotional pitch: the wholesale death of human beings in Vietnam and the extinction of the blue pike in Lake Erie brought her to the same level of frenzy.
After some weeks, they met in New York. Caroline borrowed an apartment, cluttered with dirty clothes and unwashed pots and dishes, and, taking Julian there, she made him her lover. She bled; she was the only virgin he ever had. Julian, so much larger than she, was afraid of hurting her and drew away. “Think of your own fucking pleasure and leave me to mine,” Caroline cried, seizing his slippery member in both her small hands and driving it into herself. She wanted to be deflowered by her own will and act, she told him afterwards. She told him, too, that she loved him. Julian was as astonished by that as he had been by her virginity. He could no more answer than reply to her monologues over the long-distance telephone.
Usually Julian let Caroline talk while he himself remained silent. She had mastered a vocabulary, but she had no ideas, only passions. She didn’t understand her love for Julian and tried to force him to explain it to her. “Make me understand!” she cried. “Passion is the whole answer,” Julian replied, quoting her. Julian’s political passivity, or what she took to be that, drove her into a frenzy. He cared nothing for her causes. Caroline beat him in her fury. Her fragile fists, thumbs clenched inside curled fingers, pattered on his chest and face. Sexually, she devoured him. They made love on the grass in public places and in her parents’ bed, in her room at college while her roommate slept three feet away in the other cot and in the deep leather chairs in the boardroom of the Yale Daily News with Britton Hadden looking down on them from his unctuous portrait. Caroline loved risk. She wouldn’t use contraceptives. She aborted three of Julian’s children, never telling him of her pregnancies until after the fetuses were dead. She took drugs that were supposed to intensify orgasm, snapped ampules of smelling salts under Julian’s nose as he ejaculated. Once, in an empty subway car after midnight, she had fellated him, hiding the action with the spread curtain of her long gleaming hair. Julian watched as the amazed faces of people on station platforms flashed by the windows of the speeding express.
The Better Angels Page 5