On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  Katy Renshaw had wanted to re-create the spring weekend on Chesapeake Bay, but had found that neither Edward nor Charlie, nor anyone else in Washington, was able to leave the city on election night and so had reluctantly agreed to come to the van der Lindens’ instead. Sal, her sister, was also coming to D.C. and would be joining them for the party, in the unconcealed hope that Frank, for whom she had developed a lingering weakness on the lake and in the woodland cabin, would be among the guests.

  Frank had persuaded his managing editor that there was no need for him to be with Nixon in Los Angeles for the result; however, there was now some disagreement over whether he should be in New York or whether, in view of his forthcoming posting to Washington, he would be better off in the capital. He promised to telephone as soon as he knew, and this uncertainty increased Mary’s feeling of anxiety.

  The news on the radio reported fine weather for voting in the South, along the Pacific Coast and on the Eastern seaboard, but rain in the Midwest was chilling into light snow in the foothills of the Rockies. It was thought that bad weather in Detroit and Chicago might keep some voters at home, but the chances of a November day being uniformly fine across the country were always negligible and the parties were still confident of the heaviest vote in the history of democracy.

  Mary had finished her preparations downstairs and was washing her hair in the bath when Charlie returned from work. He kissed her wet face, cleared a space for himself on the chair, draping her clothes over the radiator, and sat down.

  “Are you all right, darling?” she said.

  “What? Yes. All right. Benton’s been off sick and it’s been a busy day. Added to which, if Kennedy wins, the bastards want me to go to Moscow.”

  “Moscow? Why?” Mary was appalled.

  “Our people there will want a briefing on the new president and I’m supposed to know all about him. It’ll help them deal with the Russians. Also, the Embassy here will come out looking good. The Americans will like the fact we’ve been so quick off the mark and they’ll want to know how the Russians have responded.” He shrugged. “It might help.”

  “How long will you have to go for?”

  “Just for about a week. I’ll have to go to London first.”

  Mary wondered how soon after the election Frank’s Washington job would begin and how often she could see him in a week.

  “Would you come with me to London?” said Charlie in a rush. “I hate to ask, but you know what I feel about flying and … You know.”

  Mary splashed some water on her face to cover her expression. She said, “Are you telling me everything? This is not some favor for Duncan Trench, is it? It’s not something sinister?”

  “No, it’s not. I’m not allowed to do anything operational for Trench’s people. That’s an unbreakable rule. Sometimes people pass on information and I don’t see why not. We’re on the same side. But no, this is a very official trip. That’s the whole point of it, really. To show willing. Openly.”

  “But it’s only if Kennedy wins?”

  “Yes. If Nixon wins, they’ll send David Chepstow.”

  “Can you pass me that towel?” said Mary, climbing out of the bath. “I feel suddenly very Republican. Nixon’s not such a bad man, is he?”

  “No one is beyond redemption.”

  They went through into the bedroom.

  “I asked Trench, by the way,” said Charlie. “He said he’d drop in later.”

  “I wish you hadn’t. I don’t like him.”

  “He’s been good to me,” said Charlie.

  “Good to you? In what way?”

  Charlie lit a cigarette and sat down on the bed while Mary dressed. “There are a few things I’ve never told you,” he said. “About work, and … related matters.”

  Mary pulled a satin slip over her head and looked at Charlie, waiting for him to continue.

  “I found myself in some difficulties. I suppose what it comes down to is that I was being blackmailed, though it was never put that crudely. I made some mistakes when we were in Japan and various people tried to profit from them.”

  “Who?”

  “The FBI, ultimately. I couldn’t get them off my back, so I went to see Trench one day because his people have contact with them.”

  “But what did they want from you?”

  “Information. Always information. Usually about people I’d met in Moscow who might be visiting. Russians. If they’re genuine or not. Also Americans I’d met. Their own people. They want to know about their weaknesses, if they might be susceptible and so on. Trouble was, I could never remember anyone’s name. I was completely useless to them really. But that didn’t get them off my back.”

  “And what did Trench do?”

  “I think he read the riot act. He told them to leave me alone.”

  “And has it worked?”

  “Yes, it has. I used to have these meetings with a man called O’Brien.”

  “And that’s over now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did Trench want in return?”

  Charlie sighed. “The occasional chat. ‘Keeping in touch,’ he calls it. All this stuff is so unbelievably petty. It just wears you down. These constant niggling calls.”

  Mary did not want to hear any more about Charlie’s entanglements because she did not feel secure in the area of secrecy and disclosure, but she felt it would look suspicious if she did not ask for some details. Also, she was curious.

  She said, “These things that people knew about you. What were they? Girls, money?”

  Charlie sighed. “They were things like that. They were things that … I suppose what I mean is that I no longer mind if they’re revealed. Nothing really matters anymore. They’ve lost their power over me. If I were to lose my job because of some financial irregularity in the past, I wouldn’t really care. And the other thing … I don’t know.”

  “What was the other thing?”

  Mary was now dressed. She stood in the middle of the bedroom, looking at Charlie sprawled on the bed, as she had seen him so often before; but something in his manner made her stop.

  This was neither the despondent slump of Charlie half drunk, nor the amiable informality of the man whose lack of self-importance she had loved for so long: this was the languor of someone with nothing left to lose.

  “Something of which,” he sighed, “I suppose I no longer feel uniquely culpable.”

  Before Mary could digest his phrase, he rose from the bed. “Let’s have a stiff one, shall we, before these bores arrive?”

  Two hours later, seen from outside, Number 1064 was blazing like a cruise ship in the backwaters of the Potomac. The occasional noise of cheering, laughter or dance music seeped through the closed windows to where Frank stood listening beneath the lamp on the opposite side of the street.

  He had called to say that he was coming on the first shuttle he could make from New York. He had taken a taxi from the airport, but had stopped it a hundred yards or so short of the house so that he could walk the last part. He did not know why.

  He could see figures move in front of the uncurtained windows, hands raising glasses and cigarettes, heads occasionally thrown back. He pictured the van der Lindens’ friends inside, the Embassy people and journalists to whom such parties were an extension of work, churning around the gossip of promotion, appointment and divorce. At least tonight they had a subject for their hungry speculations, a real drama at which to marvel and enthuse.

  And in among them was the woman he had first sighted in this same place at a moment he had known at once to be that to which all his life had been, with whatever Pacific loops and Indochinese diversions, gradually leading him. He strained his eyes to make out her shape through the glass. She was there, inside, within his grasp.

  Then, standing beneath the lamp, he knew why it was that he had decided to walk the last part of his journey. When he had asked Mary what she wanted from him, she had told him that he had to prove to her that there was a world outside time.
As the wind came down the street, he turned up the collar on his coat and shivered. He could not do it.

  She was there, inside, like a captive bird in her glass cage, but everything was breakable. Knowing that his life depended on it, he had managed his passion for her not only with honesty, but, it seemed to him, with skill; he did not see how he could have done it better. He knew that when he had made love to her she had on occasions felt the same transcendence he had and that not only would she remember it until the day she died, but that it would change her view of dying.

  Yet it was going to break. It was not he who wished to fracture it; he would give his life, without hesitation, to preserve what he had found with her: but when he walked across the street he would restart time’s linear, destructive rush, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

  Mary, unusually for her, had drunk too much. Charlie had poured her two large scotches with his own, and she had drunk them rapidly to quell her unease about what he had said: “No longer … uniquely culpable”: it was vague, but it was unsettling. She had drunk a glass of wine to celebrate Frank’s phone call from La Guardia, and then, in the rush of arrival and the astonishment of the early poll predictions, had unthinkingly sipped her way through two or three more.

  CBS had enlisted the help of a computer that belonged to IBM, into which had been fed the finest and most foolproof sample of early votes, cross-indexed and cross-slotted to take in every minute variation of human diversity, mathematical error and political history. It predicted, with solemn certainty, a victory for Richard Nixon by 459 electoral college votes to 78 for Kennedy.

  The guests were divided in their preferences; many of the diplomats and journalists claimed to be impartial; yet even among Republicans there was a feeling that Kennedy would at least be an interesting president. There was disappointment in the room that the result was apparently going to be one-sided; people felt cheated of an all-night party, and this swung the waverers to the Kennedy cause. They cheered as the first results started coming in from Connecticut and showed the Democrats’ East Coast machine to be living up to its reputation; Senator Bailey, with whom Frank had waited in the bedroom of Kennedy’s Biltmore suite, had delivered the vote. Within an hour the tide of industrial city numbers had forced the computer to alter its prediction: it now foretold 51 percent of the popular vote for Kennedy. Mockery of the poor machine rang through the laughter.

  Mary laughed, too, not knowing why she did so. If Kennedy won, she would have to go to London; if Nixon won, she might at least find an excuse to go back to New York. She found her politics incline to the Republican, watching the screen intently as Eisenhower exhorted his troops to keep fighting to the last minute.

  So Mary van der Linden stood in the sitting room, her dark hair alive in the electric glow of the table lamp behind her. She did not hear the front-door bell ring and was not aware that Frank was in the doorway, looking across at her. He smiled, reflexively rubbed his chin with his hand to make sure it was still passably smooth and, clasping the drink that Dolores had pressed into his hand on arrival, made his way through the crowd to greet his hostess.

  She retained the self-possession that had daunted him, as she turned and kissed him briefly on the cheek, not blushing or giving any indication of surprise.

  “Frank,” she said, “do you remember Lauren Williams and her husband, Vernon? I think you met them last time you were here. We’ve been on holiday together since then, in France.”

  “Oh boy,” said Lauren. “Did we ever! What a place that turned out to be. We were the first people there since the Revolution!”

  Frank smiled politely. “How’s the count going?”

  “It’s going to be close,” said Vernon Williams gravely. “I think maybe Kennedy’s shot his bolt. The Midwest’s a landslide for Nixon. It’s hard to see where Kennedy’s extra votes are going to come from.”

  Dolores took Mary aside to ask when she should serve the chili con carne and Mary noticed Katy’s sister, Sal, sidling up to Frank. She watched his face to see if he would remember and, to her irritation, he seemed to do so with some enthusiasm.

  Charlie was at his post behind the drinks table, approaching the moment of chemical equilibrium at which the world could still seem to him a glorious place. Next to him stood Katy Renshaw, uncomplaining as he squeezed her round the waist, Kelly Eberstadt, a bony, intelligent-looking woman with orange beads over a black dress, and Duncan Trench, smoking a cigar and assuring anyone who would listen that either candidate was all right as far as he was concerned.

  Frank slipped out of the room to use the telephone in the hall, as Mary and Dolores came back from the kitchen, bearing trays of food. The traffic through the narrow space was such that both women had to check their progress; Mary took a pace back so that she was almost standing on Frank’s feet.

  “So what’s the second edition headline?” he was saying.

  He held the telephone in his left hand, while with his right he surreptitiously caressed the back of Mary’s thigh and then her hip, as she stood for a moment, her hands occupied, trapped in the noise and smoke of people pushing past.

  “ ‘Kennedy Holds Commanding Lead.’ Sounds all right. I’ll come into the office in half an hour. I’ll call a cab now.”

  The blockage of people eased and Frank replaced the receiver. An argument was taking place in the sitting room between an Irish diplomat, who was saying that Nixon should concede, and Duncan Trench, who pointed out that Kennedy had nothing left he could rely on winning and was still short of the necessary number of votes in the electoral college.

  “The industrial Northeast and the Old South—we knew he’d win those. But what else is there?”

  “California, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you been listening?”

  “It’s far too soon to say,” said Trench crossly.

  “Would you like some chili, Duncan?” said Mary. “Or some chicken fricassée?”

  “What, what? No thanks.”

  “It’s on the table if you change your mind.”

  “Mary.” Frank took her wrist gently as she moved off. “I have to go to the office to make sure everything’s all right for the final edition, which goes at three. I could come back if you think the party’ll still be going on.”

  “Oh, I imagine so,” said Mary brightly. “Looks as though it’ll go on all night. The television just said the tide was starting to turn.”

  “I hope not,” said Frank.

  “Why? Do you want Kennedy to win?”

  “I don’t want the wrong headline. You know, another ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ fiasco.”

  “Who did you vote for?”

  He was standing very close to her in the crowd; she could smell a faint aroma of toothpaste and bourbon on his breath as he leaned toward her and looked hard into her eyes. “That’s my secret. See you later.”

  The cherry-and-white taxi was waiting outside. Within fifteen minutes Frank was going up in the elevator to his newspaper’s office on L Street, near the junction of 21st. There were a dozen people clustered around the television set, with cups of coffee, a few bottles of Michelob and some bags of potato chips balanced on the typewriters and littered across the desks.

  Frank had already written eight articles for the next day’s edition, though five of them were in the B-matter pile—a ten-page alternate section on the winning candidate, giving details of everything he had done or said since infancy, except in the matter of his love affairs, on which the paper was silent. He had also contributed to an editorial that welcomed Nixon (or Kennedy) and pointed out that although it had been a close race, the paper had always believed that Kennedy (or Nixon) would ultimately prevail.

  Frank took a beer from the fridge and joined the group in front of the television, which reported that Kennedy was only two votes short of victory in the electoral college.

  “Where’s Cordell?” he said.

  “He’s at Joe Alsop’s,” said Maria, the office manager. “He’s written his piece a
nd he’s not coming back. That kid in Illinois called. Said it’s in the bag for Kennedy.”

  “Hmm,” said Frank. “Depends how many Daley can make up in Chicago. What’s happening in California? Has Scott called?”

  “Yup. He’s says it’s stacking up for Kennedy.”

  “So it’s all over then?”

  “Yeah, provided Scotty’s right. They’re not that far into the count yet. And, Frank, you need to call Bill Stevens in New York.”

  Frank dialed the number. “Hey, Bill. How’s it going?”

  “Pretty good. I’m fighting off Bob Levine, who wants to go with ‘Kennedy Elected.’ ”

  “How long can you wait?”

  “Forty-five. What’s happening there?”

  “Everyone’s watching TV. Anything from Ike?”

  “No. Red’s still hanging on there. Says Ike’s fuming at Nixon for screwing up. And at Kennedy for buying votes.”

  “Sounds nice. You need any more from me?”

  “Any more from you, Frank, and you’ll have written the whole goddamn paper. We just need to hear from Scotty one more time.”

  “Why isn’t he in L.A.?”

  “Because he’s one perverse son of a bitch. He thinks he can read the poll quicker there. He knows someone. Also he’s pissed that we asked Julie Pereira to cover Nixon when you pulled out and—”

  “I did not pull out, Bill, I—”

  “Okay, okay, Frank, I need this line now. Call back in one hour.”

  Frank smiled as he replaced the receiver. He had never heard Bill Stevens enjoying himself so much. He took another beer from the fridge and helped answer the phones; he too began to feel elated by the process that was taking place. He liked the idea that the spread-eagled states, for once, made up one country; that the young man in San Diego punched the same ballot as the old woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He had felt this about his country when he went to train at Fort Benning in Georgia, where, for the first time in his life, he heard a New England accent. In the Pacific jungles he had experienced the federal unity with painful keenness, when his life depended on the speed of reaction shown by men from Detroit, Maine or Alabama. In peacetime he tended to forget about these places.