The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Patrick shifted in his chair, throwing his ankle onto his knee, staring for an instant at the gleaming leather of his hand-sewn shoe. Emily noted the gesture; it was usable, a little window opening on Graham’s inner person. On television, he would never have permitted himself so visible a reaction to a man who offended him. In private, he didn’t think it worthwhile to conceal what he felt.

  By some trick of Emily’s sensibility—she knew what it was, it was the condition induced in her by thousands of hours of watching television—people like Mallory and Patrick and Lockwood seemed as eerie as ghosts when seen in the flesh, when touched, when apprehended with all the senses. Sometimes she failed to remember that she had three senses in addition to sight and hearing. Now, only three feet away from Mallory, she could smell him—like Julian, he had the scent of cleanliness, the soapy aura of a recent bath; mixed with this was the faint pungency of pipe tobacco, an odor she loved. She had not yet touched him; she examined his neat ear and wondered with an inward giggle what it would taste like. Mallory had a well-made face, regular and American, pink and unlined except for the creases that laughter had left around his eyes. He had silver hair and heavy eyebrows, a combination of features that made him vividly photogenic. His voice was dry, uninflected, and in this hotel sitting room it didn’t carry well. That surprised Emily; amplified through microphones, Mallory was a powerful speaker. She had expected his words to ring in private as they did in public; Lockwood’s certainly did. Perhaps Mallory didn’t set off the same resonance in her as Lockwood did. She, too, thought Mallory and all he stood for were bad and dangerous.

  “Can you really attack what Lockwood’s done?” asked Patrick. “The polls show his policies have a lot of support.”

  “Not as much as my policies had four years ago,” Mallory replied. “Public opinion is a great clumsy beast, Patrick. One good sting on the ass can turn the whole creature around.”

  Patrick reacted strongly to Mallory’s last sentence—almost leaped. Mallory watched, eyes glittering with amusement. Emily made a note in her book; these two knew something, and whatever it was, they were hiding it from each other.

  Patrick said, “Your ideas haven’t changed in your years out of office?”

  Mallory’s eyes moved from Patrick’s face to Emily’s and back again. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re going to be in for four more years of cold rationality if I’m elected, Patrick.”

  Emily, in a flash, understood something essential about Mallory; she had never seen it before, but the tone of his voice, so much flatter than she was used to, and the amused disdain in his eyes when he spoke to Patrick, brought the truth home to her. Horace was right—Mallory was an honest man; he believed absolutely in what he said and did. More than that, he had the power to make millions agree with him. No wonder Julian feared him and Patrick could hardly bear the sound of his voice. They knew that it was only luck that the people hadn’t chosen Mallory over Lockwood four years before. A tiny percentage of the vote, only two hundred thousand people, had swung to Lockwood on an emotional issue. What if it swung back?

  “It’s a simple matter,” Mallory said. “Either Frosty’s right about the way the people are and how they think, or I am. We’ll see in November.”

  Mallory’s assistant rose to her feet. Patrick, after an instant of hesitation, got up, too. “Susan,” he said, “shall I call you about setting up the broadcast?”

  Susan Grant, as sure of her ground with Mallory as Julian was with Lockwood, answered without glancing at her employer. “The President can’t work in a studio, Patrick,” she said, “and we’d rather have your clutter somewhere else than in this suite. You’re staying in this hotel, aren’t you? Can’t you set up in your room or somewhere else in the Fairmont for Thursday evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call me with the room number an hour early so that we can set up security.”

  “Only an hour?”

  Susan Grant’s face was already turned away; she had considered their business done and was already on the way to open the door for Patrick and Emily. She paused. “Our security people can do everything they need to do in an hour, Patrick.”

  Emily, observing this exchange, was startled to feel Mallory’s dry hand slipping into hers. She turned her head and gave him a look of spitting female warning, and then saw that he had meant nothing by what he’d done. He gave her hand a little squeeze, and even in that pressure she could feel his wiry strength. He let go her hand.

  “Can you take a minute off from work?” Mallory asked. “I wanted to ask you how the President is. You’ve seen him recently, I guess?”

  “About three weeks ago, Mr. President.” Emily saw no reason not to call Mallory by the title that was his by right. “He seemed the same—full of life, relaxed. He told me a lot of funny stories about his football days.”

  “Did he? Athletes have a lot of fun. They all seem to be comedians. Certainly Lockwood is.”

  “Do you and he know each other?” Emily flushed. “I mean, have you met and spent time together? That was a silly question.”

  “Not at all. It was a good question. Yes, we do know each other, and pretty well. We were in the Senate together, and we were friends, Polly and Frosty and my wife and I, long before either of us ever thought about ending up as we have. The friendship lasted, especially for the girls. We saw each other often until Marilyn died—in New York at our place and in Washington at theirs. After my wife was gone, I had them to dinner with me in the White House a few times, but I guess we ran out of things to say to one another. Polly couldn’t really keep us off politics without Marilyn’s help.”

  A smile, startling in its sweetness, lit Mallory’s face. The man was remembering his wife. Emily felt tenderness for him; she wanted to slip her hand back in his. Patrick called to her from the doorway. Mallory’s smile vanished—it did not amuse him that Graham would suggest in this way that his time was more valuable than that of a former President of the United States.

  “When you see Frosty again,” Mallory said, “I hope you’ll give him my best. Tell him—this is important—tell him to call me if there’s anything he needs from me. Will you do that?”

  “Of course I will, sir.”

  “Good. He’ll trust the messenger, I think. It’s hard for men in our position to get word back and forth, you know. It’s hard, too, Mrs. Hubbard, to run for the presidency against a friend. I like Lockwood so much.”

  Mallory gave a little nod, smiled again, repeated the nod. He held out his hand and Emily shook it. Mallory’s eyes were now cleared of whatever tender memory she’d seen in them a moment earlier. The look he gave her was one she was used to seeing: it was the half-smile of a male who wishes he had the time, or room, for a woman who is about to walk away forever.

  In the corridor, Patrick was silent. Closed-circuit television cameras surveilled him and Emily as they walked to the end of the hall, where Mallory’s security men took back the unobtrusive badges they’d given them when they entered. Emily, used to such things at home, knew that the badges deactivated the alarm systems. One of the bodyguards inserted a key in a control panel, and an empty elevator opened before them. He rode with them to their floor and let them out.

  “Opinion?” Patrick asked.

  They were inside his suite. His producer was busy on the telephone, and the crew played cards on the white cloth of Patrick’s breakfast table. They had piled the dishes in the hall outside.

  “Of Mallory? Yours first, Patrick.”

  “Mine is no secret. What did your first glimpse tell you?”

  “I came away surprised. You’ve all made me think he’s such an ogre. Actually, he’s awfully nice and bright. Charming, in fact.”

  Patrick lit one of his innumerable cigarettes and dragged hungrily on it; he hadn’t smoked in Mallory’s presence. Emily had never known him to abstain before, and she noted the detail.

  “You sound like Charlotte. I think she’d have gone to Munich and hung around that re
staurant where Hitler came to eat spaghetti, hoping to catch his eye. Women want to breed with tyrants; if they have to, they hide inside an ideology, the way Queen Pasiphae did with the wooden cow for the Cretan bull, to beget the Minotaur.”

  “Oh, Patrick, bullshit,” said Emily.

  8

  Susan Grant was the only person who was ever alone with Mallory. They had become lovers a year after Mallory’s wife died. Susan was the second woman he had known sexually. Though many women had desired Mallory and he knew it, he had wanted no one but his wife while they were married, and no one since except Susan.

  Mallory and his wife had first made love when they were fifteen, in a pine grove on a hillside above a country fairground in New York State. They had simply left the fair and climbed the hill, taken off their clothes, and lain down on a bed of fragrant pine needles, lustrous and brown like Marilyn’s spreading hair. In their amazed pleasure they heard the distorted noise of the carnival below, cheap mechanical music and the shouting of the barkers above the hum of the crowd, and saw the garish lights glowing in the night sky.

  They married at twenty. Working as a secretary, Marilyn put Mallory through college and the Harvard Business School. At night she studied with him, and though she had no degrees her formal education duplicated his, In Mallory’s years in business and politics, even in the presidency, his wife had been his only true assistant. Until the week she died, without warning, of a pulmonary embolism, they had given each other everything that either wanted, sexually and as loving friends. When Marilyn died, she left Mallory alone; thirty-five years of reckless lovemaking had never produced a child. He learned from her doctor that she had been taking birth-control pills almost since the night they claimed each other’s virginity above the fairground; the pills’ side effects had produced the blood clot that killed her. Mallory could never decide whether Marilyn, surreptitiously swallowing a substance that deprived them of sons and daughters, had been selfless or the opposite.

  To Mallory, though to nobody else and least of all to herself, Susan Grant resembled Marilyn. The likeness wasn’t physical. Susan was a cheetah of a girl—tall and blond, with a narrow boyish body, firm and small-breasted, with wide hazel eyes. She was all one golden color, hair, eyes, skin. Marilyn had been small and soft and pink. The two women were similar in their minds and emotions: crackling with intelligence, quick to be roused to passion. Susan had everything Marilyn hadn’t: a well-to-do father, degrees from Smith and Harvard, a place of her own in the world as an associate professor of economics at Columbia.

  She had come to the White House with a group of economists to talk to Mallory about the economic effects of his policies. He was then in the second year of his presidency; Susan was thirty-one years old, Mallory fifty. She detested his politics. So did all her friends. They thought they saw what he meant to do to the country. Susan wanted to see the man close up. Even so, she lost friends by the mere act of stepping into Mallory’s presence. Only the week before, he had appointed his fifth Supreme Court justice in the course of a single year: two had resigned, one had died, two had been killed by terrorists. Nobody who hated Mallory could believe that blackmail and assassination had not been involved.

  During the meeting, Susan caught Mallory’s eyes upon her more than once. His gaze made her uncomfortable, but she met it squarely. As the others left, Susan, as the junior person present, was last in line. Mallory slipped his hand in hers, the same gesture he would use years later when he spoke to Emily.

  “Miss Grant,” he said, “I wonder if you could dine with me here tonight at eight. Would that inconvenience you?”

  She was disarmed by the charm of his smile, the apology in his eyes. She did not see a ruthless man who had seized control of the Supreme Court, but a man of startling appeal. Looking at him, she felt as she always felt when she saw her name in print without expecting to do so: her heart leaped; what would come next?

  “I’d be glad to come,” Susan said. “I can take the last plane to New York.”

  When she returned to the White House, Mallory met her in an upstairs sitting room and, taking her hand again, led her to a west window to look at a spectacular sunset: shafts of brilliant sunlight and boiling purple thunderheads. Mallory began at once to speak to her as if he had known her all his life. There was no fencing, no initiation rite of polite questions. Later she learned he was that way with everyone. If he decided that another human being was worth knowing, he wasted no time knowing him. The other’s past meant nothing to Mallory: he was interested exclusively in his own relationship with the person. More than anyone Susan had ever met, Mallory lived in the moment in which he found himself.

  She had dined with him twice at the White House when one night, very late, the doorbell rang in her apartment in New York. She looked through the peephole and saw Mallory standing outside. It was February and he was wearing a sheepskin coat and a knitted hat that concealed his famous white hair. She let him in; there was no sign of the Secret Service anywhere; she wondered how he dared to be alone.

  He pulled off his cap and his hair was tousled. Susan was in her dressing gown. Mallory put his hand—the flesh so cold that he couldn’t have come in a car, he must have walked up Broadway past the night hunters to find her—he put his hand on her flat stomach. The gesture didn’t surprise her. She had expected it sooner or later and she had planned to step away from it. No President could tumble her like a shepherdess unless she wanted him as she would want any other man. Susan hadn’t thought that she could want this intense bleached man with his hard mind. But she hadn’t anticipated that he would come to her like this, dressed like a mortal, his flesh chilled by the wind. She moved closer and kissed him, and then took him down the long, echoing hall into her study, where no lover had ever lain with her before.

  Mallory shut the door behind them. Susan felt the same half-fear, half-thrill that she had felt when their flesh had first touched: what was next? She sat down in the only chair in the room, the one drawn up to her cluttered desk. Mallory, smiling, took off his clothes where he stood and left them in a heap on the floor. There was only the light from the street, but Susan saw that he had the hard body of a boy: a wedge of muscles. He began to kiss her, gently. His body was still cold from the outdoors and this made him seem more of a stranger. She accepted his mouth but did not respond. She turned her head away; she thought that she couldn’t do it. Mallory put his hands over her eyes, as if gentling an animal. They remained so for several moments. She put a hand on his chest and felt the chill of the wind again. Mallory took his hands away. She saw him smile. He opened her robe and began to kiss her again. Except for those moments when he covered her eyes and changed her mind, he never used his hands. She had never known such a lover; she might have been touching herself, he knew her pleasures so well.

  For about a year, Susan took the seven o’clock shuttle from LaGuardia each Friday, spent the weekend with Mallory in the White House or at Camp David, and returned to New York on Monday morning in time for her ten o’clock lecture. Susan was an experienced woman, but she had never had an affair that left her so hungry, in the days between Monday and Friday, to return to a man. One Tuesday, while Susan was listening to the confusions of a graduate student in her office at Columbia, Mallory called her on the telephone. His voice was brisk: “Susan, can you come down here tomorrow and see me at two in the afternoon? Good. Thank you.”

  She canceled a lecture and flew to Washington. Mallory met her in an office in the Executive Office Building that she had never seen before. It was fitted out with his own furniture and pictures; it wasn’t a large room, and there was nothing on the door to indicate that this was where he actually worked.

  “I wanted you to come, Susan, because I have something to ask you,” Mallory said. “As you know, you and I are very compatible; we see things in the same way….”

  My God, thought Susan, he’s going to propose. Marriage was the last thing she wanted. She knew nothing would divert him.

  “Sus
an,” said Mallory, without pausing, “I want you to resign your professorship, or take a leave of absence. I need you by me all the time, here in this house. I want you to become my executive assistant. The job has always been vacant. I never needed to fill it when Marilyn was alive. I never thought I could fill it until I found you.”

  Susan and Mallory gazed gravely into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then she exploded a laugh. “Franklin, you’ve got it all backwards,” Susan said. “You’re supposed to make a female your employee first, then make her your mistress. That’s the accepted sequence.”

  Mallory didn’t take the joke; he waited for her answer. “Will you do it?” he insisted.

  Susan felt something go dry within her. She knew she had wanted him to ask the other question—she could have said no to that because it was the lesser temptation.

  “Do you really think we can work together and sleep together?” she asked. Mallory took off the wedding ring he still wore and laid it on the low table, next to Susan’s sharp knee. “I’ve done it before,” he said. “I think you’ll find it makes everything better.”

  And so she had. Mallory never again wore the ring Marilyn had given him, but the ceremony of its removal was as much of a wedding as he and Susan ever had. It was, in the end, as much as Susan wanted. Their life together was one of constant stimulation. They made policy during the week and love on the weekends. Mallory had admitted her into his person without reservation: they were one mind as well as one flesh.

  9

  After Patrick and Emily left them, Mallory and Susan Grant wasted no time talking about them. They never let any incident spill over into the next segment of time.

  Mallory’s mind, when it wandered, was not on any of the questions Patrick had raised; those were matters, as Patrick was a man, he could deal with in his sleep. He had something else to think about—something he, and he alone, had done. At eight o’clock that evening, it would happen—the world would see it; Mallory’s name would be linked to the event in the way that the names of Ferdinand and Isabella were joined to the discovery of America. Mallory was going to change history, change the way man saw himself. Even now, though his own television screen was unlighted and mute, the images and the excited voices of commentators filled the air; the impulses carrying their voices and images were passing through Mallory’s very body.