Advise and Consent (73 page)

“They’re with you, then,” he said. “They must be. Why?”

“You go home,” Beth said again, “and I think Mabel will be along presently.”

“What’s going on?” he asked despairingly. “Beth, what’s happened?”

“She won’t tell me,” Beth said gently, “but I think perhaps she will want to tell you.”

“All right,” he said dully like a little boy obeying teacher, for he knew that something terrible must have happened and he did not know now whether he could handle it or not, “all right. I’ll go home.”

He did not know exactly how he managed to put his desk in order, dismiss the girls, go downstairs, get his car, safely negotiate Saturday afternoon traffic, and get home, for the well-trained mind has a way of functioning automatically in times of stress and he seemed to be out of touch with it just then: it had to get him home by itself. Presently he found himself in his own street approaching his own house, though he could not have told how he got there; the only thing that struck him at that moment was how peaceful and ordinary everything seemed, some kids playing down the block, guests gathering for a party across the street, a dog barking, the sound of birds, a warm wind stirring in the trees, a hazy golden peace on the world, a sense of happiness and well-being filling the neighborhood. Except for him, he thought dully; except for him.

Nor did he know, when he had parked the car and gone in and automatically taken a shower, changed from business suit to sports shirt, shorts, and sandals and come back down again, exactly what was expected of him or what he was supposed to do in the situation in which he found himself. His wife and daughter were gone, Mabel had packed a suitcase, Pooh and Piglet and Raggedy Anne had been included; and it was obvious that they intended to stay awhile, yet on the basis of what he could find upstairs he had no means of knowing why. Beth’s cryptic remarks hadn’t been much help, and though he had half expected a dramatic note in the bedroom—except that drama wasn’t Mabel’s forte—there had been none. It was not until he wandered, bewildered, into the kitchen in search of a glass of milk that he found what he was looking for, propped up against a box of soap on the drainboard. “Thought it best to take Pidge to Beth’s,” it said. “Will be back to fix your dinner and talk later.” Attached to it with a straight pin was an envelope with Mabel’s name typed on it, apparently delivered by Western Union messenger.

He took it out on the sun porch, sat down in the glider, and removed the contents, which appeared at first blush to be the sort of ugly illiterate filth that comes to many an official desk, the snarl of the beast in the jungle that underlies the polite exchanges of society. Composed of pasted letters clipped from a newspaper, its message was quite explicit enough, even for Mabel, who was not very sophisticated about such matters, or indeed about much of anything.

His first impulse, a standard one in the capital in times of crisis, was to mix himself a drink; but he made himself reject the idea of liquor, concentrate upon the problem at hand and face up, however painful it might be, to the communication he held in his hand and the implications of his wife’s abrupt departure upon receipt of it. He had never given her cause to believe it, yet in some way apparently almost instinctive she evidently did believe it, or at any rate she believed it enough to feel that it might be possible: and he realized now with a terrible clarity how badly he must have failed her down the years, not as a husband or a father or a provider, not sexually or socially or in any other of the ways that mattered together but did not matter so much one by one, but simply because in none of these relationships that went into the total structure of a good marriage had he given her enough of himself. Always, he could see now, there must have been some area where she felt herself barred and kept out, some inner kingdom of his being where she was forever alien. A heavy pity for them both touched his heart, for he had never meant it to be that way, he had done his best, he had always tried to be kind, and apparently it hadn’t been enough; and he knew now that it was inevitable, he couldn’t have helped it, it had to be so, for it was his nature to walk his way alone, and with the greatest and best and most sincere will in the world he could not have overcome it no matter how he tried. It went far beyond what a cleverer wife might have missed in the self-confusions brought on by more astute attempts to analyze it and reached into a region of instinctive understanding where someone like Mabel, not even knowing what she knew, would even so realize enough to suspect that her own exclusion might cover areas of his heart where others might conceivably be able to enter.

And now in this evil thing he held in his hand, this apparent crudity—which he suspected was probably a very clever parody of crudity—she had suddenly found it all spelled out with a brutal clarity that could not be evaded. Someone had entered those areas after all: it said so on this piece of paper, and though he knew she must have spent many anguished minutes trying not to believe it, she had ended by not being sure, for the one thing she did know for certain was that she never had. No wonder her first reaction had been to leave; the wonder was that she could possibly be brave enough to come back and face him. But he knew numbly that she would, for he understood, now that it was too late, a little of the depth of her love for him which, in her nervous, awkward, unhappily emotional way she had tried for so long, with so little success, to show.

When he heard her enter the house he touched a match to the carefully smudged paper and watched it burn down to ashes on the red-tile floor. Then he got up and went inside, closing the door to the sun porch behind him so that no word of their conversation could drift out into the gently golden afternoon. He felt a physical pain, as though he had run a great distance, climbed a great mountain, just escaped drowning—or, perhaps, was just about to drown. He squared his shoulders and held his head high, though he was so terribly tired and sick and unhappy that he did not know how long he could keep from collapsing. He heard her in the kitchen, and after a moment she came out and joined him in the living room.

“It was good of you to come back,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, not looking at him, “I couldn’t let you get your own dinner. You probably wouldn’t know how.”

“I probably could have managed,” he said, “but it’s better with you here.”

“Is it?” she said, looking at him from swollen eyes. “Is it really better with me here?” She gave a shaky little laugh and sat down in a chair across the room from him. “I’ve never really been sure.”

He started to protest and then dropped it.

“Oh, beloved,” he said instead, “I am so sorry you have had to be subjected to this.”

“Well,” she said with a forlorn attempt at bitter humor, “I guess that’s politics.”

“I guess it is,” he said, “but I should have been able to protect you from it somehow.”

“How could you have,” she said, “once—once—it was done?”

“You believe it, then,” he said. Mabel tried an ironic smile, but it didn’t work.

“The note I got was—rather specific,” she said.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Well, there’s no need for anything but honesty between us now. It happened: it happened. Long before I ever met you, long before I ever entered public life, long ago when I was in the war. In Honolulu in the war, just like the man said. People go off the track sometimes, under pressures like the war. That’s what happened to me. I went off the track. I hope you can believe that, too.”

“I do,” Mabel said slowly. “I guess.”

“Never before,” he said, “and never since. You’ve got to believe it, if we’re to come through this at all.”

“I can’t understand how you could—how you could do such a horrible thing,” she said.

“It didn’t seem horrible at the time,” he said honestly, “and I am not going to say now that it did, even to you. But I have lived all my life since being as good a man as I could, to make up for it. I think,” he said with a sudden bitterness, “that gives me the right to a little charity now.”

“I’m trying to be charitable,” she said brokenly, “except that—”

“Except what?” he asked in the same bitter way. “Charity isn’t divisible. You have it or you don’t. Except what?”

“Except that I don’t know whether it was just the war, or whether—whether you might have done it anyway,” she said, and began to cry, abrupt, racking sobs that hurt him terribly. “I don’t—mean that—the way it sounds,” she said between them. “But you’ve always seemed so—so closed-off from me, somehow, and I haven’t been able to get through.
I just haven’t been able to get through.
”

“Beloved, beloved,” he said. “That hasn’t been the reason. Oh, you must believe me. It hasn’t been the reason, ever.”

“Then it must be me,” she said in a voice of utter desolation. “That’s the only thing left, so it must be me.”

“No, it hasn’t been you,” he said desperately. “You’ve been a wonderful wife and mother and helpmate and I don’t know what I could have done without you. I don’t know what I
will
do without you,” he added in a tone as desolate as hers, “if this doesn’t work out.” He started to stand up to give his words greater emphasis, but he found that his legs weren’t working very well just then, so he remained seated. “Whatever failure there has been,” he said firmly through the gray haze of tiredness that filled the world, “has been my failure, and it hasn’t been yours in any way at all, Nor has it had any relation to anything I did in the war. It’s been my failure to be as good a husband and father as I should have been.”

“You’re wonderful with Pidge,” she said, more quietly, and the name of their daughter seemed briefly to invoke a fragile calm upon their conversation.

“Well,” he said, “all I can do is promise to do better, I guess. It seems a feeble foundation, but I suppose many a marriage before ours has been rebuilt upon it. I’m sorry, as I said, that you have been subjected to this, but I hope you can realize the pressures I’m under right now. I hope you will come back and—and help me. I need you to help me.”

“I don’t know,” she said, beginning to sob again. “I just don’t know what to do. If I could only believe that—that you really belonged to me, and that I—I really belonged to you, then maybe—But I don’t know,” she said, and she gave him an anguished and searching look. “
How can I ever be sure again?
”

He felt then as though the world had ended, and that even if it weren’t entirely official yet, they would notify him presently. Now he was dead inside, himself, and those who had wished to destroy him had achieved their purpose. He had never fainted, but he came as close to it as he ever would right now as the room seemed to spin and his wife with a sudden cry of despair and contrition said, “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” and ran to him.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said again through her sobs, “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t.”

But her husband did not answer as he held her in his arms, staring out upon the gentle twilight and absently stroking her hair while she clung to him and cried as though her heart would break, as his already had.

After that time began to dissolve and the world no longer seemed to have much light or dimension. The golden day, the golden season, had vanished somewhere into night and he did not know whether it would ever return for them. Mabel did stay, and in a tremulous phone call to Beth she requested the return of Pidge, who was presently delivered troubled and upset but valiantly managing not to cry. Beth came in and kissed them both and deliberately stayed for a while, ignoring their ravaged expressions and chatting firmly about ordinaries until she began to perceive what seemed to be a relative calm returning. And somehow, so tenacious is the human animal and so capable when necessary of withstanding what seem at the moment to be the most completely devastating and destructive blows, calm actually did return and it actually was genuine—or genuine enough, at least, for Mabel to put together some kind of a meal for him, which he barely touched, and for them both to give Pidge her bath with a determined attempt at lightness that sent her to bed, though still troubled, not quite as uneasy as she had been. He said he wanted to watch the COMFORT rally and Mabel decided she would go up early to bed, trying not to cling to him too desperately again as she kissed him good night. He sat down before the television set to watch the junior of his two mortal enemies perform.

It was, for twenty-five minutes of it, a standard performance, notable principally because the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce had managed to draw a surprisingly large crowd. The National Guard Armory was full to overflowing, an estimated 5,000 more were standing outside listening to the proceedings through loudspeakers, and had he been in a condition and a state of mind to appraise it with the political shrewdness he used to know before his world began to collapse, he would have considered this highly significant of the mood of worry and indecision in the country. Washington was not a town for big rallies or violent enthusiasms, everybody there had seen too much history parade by to get very excited about it, and the tides of national policy, ever-shifting, produced a lively interest but very rarely the type of fanatic concern that COMFORT fed on. Nonetheless, the crowd was there, the proof of it was fully visible on the little screen, and when Senator Van
Ackerman and the nominee entered together the mood was unmistakable. There was a roar of insensate sound that must have caused shivers in all rational men who heard it, and upon the man who knew he might be about to be offered up as victim it struck with a chilling impact that did not diminish even though he knew Fred was far too clever to make as crude an attack as he had threatened. He would be offered up, all right, but in this place and before a national audience, it would be smoothly done. The alley brutality that had shattered his home would not be visible here, for Americans, telling each other constantly that politics was a dirty business, did not dare let themselves realize that upon occasion it could actually be that dirty. That would really upset them; and while they liked to be clever about their own shortcomings, they did not like to be upset by them. Senator Van Ackerman would not upset them.