America America (24 page)

Of course, I would have thought most of these tourists would be his critics, but to my surprise I’ve found that they aren’t. Far from it, in fact. The first one I ever spoke to was sitting in a pickup on Route 35 about a mile north of where the Metarey driveway used to run. This was on my way home from work one evening, maybe ten years ago. He was stopped on the shoulder, leaning back in the driver’s seat, a burly man with a flushed look on his face.

“Do you need any help?” I called out.

He sat up and rolled down his window.

“Hear this is where the girl died,” he said in answer, setting a map on the dashboard. A New England accent: Vermont, maybe. A dissipated expression. “It’s what they say.”

“Yes, sir. They do.”

“Don’t know about you,” he went on, “but I’m a Democrat myself—every election since Stevenson. Whole family’s that way. Dad. Granddad.” He unfolded the map, and I glimpsed where he’d marked it—just about the point where his truck was parked. “You know—was all the Democrats who died in that car. All went into that ditch, right there.” He pointed. “My old man used to say that and I have to agree.”

“I suppose I do, too, sir.”

He pointed again. “I figure he ended up in those woods about there.”

“He might have. Nobody’s ever proved it.”

He only glanced at me. “Must have panicked,” he said. “The whole boat going down under him. Everything he’d ever done. That big house, too—up in Islington, is it? Going there next, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, sir,” I said, “it’s twenty minutes or so.” I pointed. “Straight north from here.”

Of course,
The Speaker-Sentinel
did a story on it. I had my reporter stake out the site, and in a month he’d interviewed a dozen others. And nine of them were Democrats. You’d think it would be those who were angriest at the man before it all happened—the legions who despised him—who would have made the trip to mark his downfall. Or at least to stake out their claims of conspiracy. But from all I can tell, the ones who still come are the ones who
loved
him. They’re the ones who are still reeling.

I
DON’T KNOW
whether my father waited for some reason to send it, or if he just found it one day that winter after he’d started cleaning the house himself. It was still sealed in its envelope, with my name, in her firm handwriting, across the back.

Dearest Corey—

I’m writing this on a beautiful warm day in September with all my ripe tomatoes outside the window to pick. Heavens there are some times so many of them I can hardly keep up. I will put up 10 gallons this year if the temperature stays like this! (But why do I keep planting so many cucumbers? Your father is starting not to like them anymore, which is strange don’t you think for a man who loved them all his life.)

I think about you many times during the day. Right now its 11 in the morning and I just cleaned the kitchen from breakfast, these days its hard to keep a schedule and there’s really no reason to anyway as long as I’m ready by lunchtime. From your schedule I see you are in your first period English class (is that Mr. Burrows or is he history?) now. How lucky you are. I liked English when I was a girl (even though this letter is hard for me now, you have to keep in practice!) and would have liked to have been an actress (can you believe that? Me? The shopkeeper’s daughter?) I wonder if you have read any plays yet. I used to think Tennessee Williams was the best writer who ever lived when I read The Glass Menagerie. I know your chuckling but don’t. Goodness knows there are plenty of Irishwomen on the stage before me, the Maureens (O’Sullivan and O’Hara) come to mind first even though their sons might have chuckled at them too and it took quite a pretty day for them to be discovered, remember.

I can imagine you becoming something great like a lawyer who defends the just or a doctor who takes care of the poor or a union man like your father. I hope that you keep such ideas in your head and follow them.

Heavens its almost noon and I have to clean the kitchen for your father’s lunch, I’ll be right back.

Oh, look what happened. Its three days gone now! (I’m teaching your father a little bit of basic cooking and he likes to make his own lunch now which is a lot more work for me of course like having a toddler in the kitchen.) And I’ve been just so tired from all the canning (12 gallons so far, I was wrong!) and I have a headache.

I just read this over and see that I haven’t gotten to what I meant to say, which is wherever you are and whatever occurs please know that I am with you. When you face difficulty think of what I would say. Work hard. Keep your sense of justice and kindness and loyalty about you. Be generous and treat people fairly and stand by them when they need you even if it doesn’t always come back to you. At least not right away. I can tell you it will.

I’m not sure whether I should say the rest but I think I will and will write you another letter anyway to send. This one I’m putting in the drawer with instructions.

I think I’m not long now. You just know. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think so. Now it all just seems different. I guess you will know for certain if your reading this. There’s nothing Doctor Leary can do and I’ve asked him to be quiet about all of it and Mrs. Janeway (from kindergarden remember?) even took me up to Buffalo and they said the same thing. A hundred miles for that! (Thats why I didn’t want to ask your father.) You’ll wonder why I never told you but one day when you have your own children you’ll see. You’re at school now, and its a wonderful school and a wonderful chance and you have the benefit of your father’s great good character and Mr. Metarey’s now too that I know will always serve you. Both of them. And I will too. Always.

I only wish I had more time to see all the good things that happen to you and even some of the bad and above all what you become and what kind of father you make. There are so many things to say but I’m tired now and what I want to say most is that one day you will understand why I did it this way, and I love you Corey and I will be with you always and always.

I’m not afraid. Don’t you be either.

Love,

Mom

SIX

I

T
HEN
P
RESIDENT
N
IXON WENT TO
C
HINA.

He left on the 21st of February, just two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. The White House was calling it
a journey of peace
, and that night in the library we watched John Chancellor turn solemnly to the camera and go even further:
an unimaginable act
, he called it. No president had ever dared.

The next morning, the front page stories hit. And then the pictures. Nixon with Zhou Enlai. Nixon in the Great Hall of the People. Nixon before the Red Guard. And the rumors followed quickly after. A trade agreement. Full diplomatic relations by the end of the week. When I carried the newspaper sticks up to Mr. Metarey’s office now, he would close his eyes for a moment before he reached for them. Nixon on the Great Wall, smiling in a fur-lined overcoat. The president and Mrs. Nixon, hand in hand with Chairman Mao.

And suddenly the Democrats had to fight just to make it into the papers. Suddenly, nobody was there to hear the Senator on the front porch of the house. They weren’t there for Muskie, either. Nor for McGovern. And not for Humphrey or Wallace or Jackson. Just for Nixon. The president in the Forbidden City. The president at the Ming Tombs. The president smiling through a pair of chopsticks crossed into a V above his plate.

It was sobering how fast it all changed. Now at Aberdeen West we couldn’t be guaranteed more than a few reporters at a briefing. Liam Metarey arranged for Henry Bonwiller to be there himself instead, whenever he could, rather than just one of the press spokesmen; but that hardly helped. Two weeks before, he’d drawn fifteen hundred people in an icy drizzle in Manchester, New Hampshire. Now, ten days before the primary, on a crystalline winter day, there were a total of three reporters at his news session. The next morning
The Union Leader
showed Muskie with a twelve-point lead and McGovern even with us. The house had grown quiet. If we didn’t win New Hampshire, or come very close, we weren’t going to last beyond it. The money would vanish as fast as the reporters had. At dawn on Washington’s birthday, I drove down to the Excelsior to give up our new block of rooms.

I remember coming into the library later that morning to wish Mr. Metarey goodbye before I caught the train back to Dunleavy. He was in a chair pulled close to the TV. On the tiny screen in front of him, the president was sitting next to Zhou Enlai, watching a ping-pong match in Peking. Zhou’s long, aristocratic face was recognized now all across the country. The crowd was perfectly behaved. Clapping as one. Silent as one. In the center box, smiling magnanimously, the president leaned over the railing and applauded. It was an extraordinary sight, even to me. If I were a voter sitting at home, I realized, I would vote for the man sitting there with the people of China. I remember turning away from the screen in the midst of a long rally, the ball being kept in play by the American from deep behind the table, and telling Mr. Metarey that I would be back the next weekend, to help Senator Bonwiller win New Hampshire.

“I just hope it’s not the last time we need you,” he answered.

“I’ll be here either way.”

“I know you will,” he said. “I know you will.”

I turned to leave, but he touched my arm. “Look at that,” he said, pointing. On one half of the screen, the American had just lunged to make a save, and on the other half the camera had zoomed to Premier Zhou, who had his hand on Mrs. Nixon’s arm. The Chinese player somehow missed the return, and Zhou smiled and bent to whisper something in her ear. She laughed, a little uncertainly. Zhou turned the other way next and whispered something to the president, who looked back at his wife. Then all three of them laughed together.

“He’s giving advice about the primaries,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever tried to be funny for Mr. Metarey.

He laughed. “Fo-cahs ahn Mah-skie,” he answered. He looked around, sheepishly.

Then I laughed, too, and it struck me later that this was a different kind of moment than we’d ever had together.

“But it ain’t over yet,” he said suddenly, snapping off the TV and turning back to his work. “Politics isn’t a baseball, Corey. That’s the damn thing about it.” He opened a notebook, shaking his head. “It’s a
foot
ball,” he said, and turned the page. “That’s the thing you have to remember. You never know how it’s going to come back up.”

O
NE DAY SIX YEARS AGO,
a few weeks after our oldest daughter had headed back to college, I realized I’d only thought of this from Henry Bonwiller’s point of view. Our daughter was at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York, and in mid-October my wife and I and the two younger girls went up for a visit. We arranged to meet at a coffee shop close to campus. I was just parking the car when I looked up and saw Andrea emerging from the rust-colored trees, carrying her books in one of those leather schoolboy straps out of a French movie that are popular again with college kids, wearing blue jeans and a light-colored blouse that looked a little too thin for the weather. You can imagine how that felt. There was still a touch of summer in the air, but not much. She paused before crossing the street—she still hadn’t seen us at the opposite curb—then proceeded just ahead of a couple of bicyclists and an old VW Beetle looking for a parking space; and I must say, watching her walk out of those trees, like some creature of the forest, out into the main avenue of businesses, where the cafés and clothing stores and antiques shops were doing a brisk commerce and students and families and groups of businessmen in suits with their cellphones out were filling up most of the narrow sidewalk, I was struck with such a feeling of tenderness that I nearly broke down.

I guess that in my years with the Metareys I was too caught up in Henry Bonwiller’s hopes to think of it from any wider view. JoEllen Charney was only in her twenties when it happened.

I’ve spoken to plenty of people about it over the years. Understandably, it’s not a rare topic of conversation up here, even now. Some of the details are known. But even these details have been sketched and resketched in barbers’ chairs and grocery lines, some of the conjecture random and innocent, and some of it, I think, not. Most of it, to this day, remains a mystery.

They met, I think, at a fund-raising function. It is some time in mid-May. All the trees are in bloom and that feeling is in the air. A luncheon to raise money for one of the causes her family has probably never heard of—the preservation of the local streams and woodland, which her father doesn’t have the money or the inclination to give to, even though he likes to hunt. He’s a working man, operates a forty-five-ton crane for Harburg-Shrewsbury. Her mother is a secretary at an elementary school south of Buffalo and a regular at church. JoEllen is the first to have gone to college, and she’s made some friends there with ambitions. Maybe she has ambitions, too—she’s not sure. When she won the Miss Three-Counties pageant she had to sing “Danny Boy” to beat a prettier girl from Fredonia, and for a few months this has given her some kind of boost and made more of her old friends interested in her again. She’s had boyfriends but she’s never thought of herself as any kind of beauty. So she’s been riding just a little high. Still, she’s a plain girl at heart. She’s been invited by one of these girlfriends to this fund-raiser luncheon and is nervous and slightly confused to be there in the Elks Hall, finally, where she knows nobody else and which has been set with rented tables and plastic flower arrangements in oversized vases. She’s not wearing anything fancy, just her blue jumper and a peach blouse and black flats from work. Then Senator Henry Bonwiller arrives, and for some reason she’s thrilled enough just to stare outright at him. He’s standing in a small group of older gentlemen near the stage, talking to this one and that, gesturing with his large hands at all kinds of comers and goers; and when his eye falls on hers for a moment, then goes on—then comes back—she blushes and turns away.
He knows I don’t belong.
She takes a couple of steps toward the punch bowl and makes a distracted effort with a plastic cup, but when she turns around again he’s still looking at her. He makes a little nod and a half-smile in her direction.

The next day, it’s her girlfriend again who calls to say that the two of them have been invited to another event.
Invited!
It’s a speech the Senator is giving up in Morrison, more than fifty miles away. She chooses the red dress this time, the short-skirted one she sewed herself for Miss Three-Counties. It has a trace of gold thread that shimmers in the fabric and she probably shouldn’t but she does. Well, why not? They borrow her girlfriend’s brother’s car, a Camaro with leather seats, and drive up to the college auditorium where the Senator makes a speech about water rights and the urgent need to enforce the new antipollution laws, and she listens so carefully she can quote the statistics back to him later when they run into each other by accident in the parking lot near her car. He says, “Nice to know someone was listening.”

All she can do is blush.

A few days later, she’s called at her own apartment, by one of his aides. “This time,” he says, “don’t bring your friend.”

T
HERE’S ANOTHER INCIDENT
I should mention, a small one. A Saturday night. Late February, near the middle of that crucial time. The weather had been warming, but that evening a front had blown in, and Gil had called me over to the Metareys’ after dinner to knock down the rafts of icicles that were hanging over the patio from the porch eaves. I was sweeping the last of them into the snow drifts when Mr. Metarey himself appeared. “Don’t tell me we have you working all night around here now,” he said.

“I’m pretty much done, sir.”

“Then maybe you’ll keep me company for a minute or two.”

It was dark, maybe eight o’clock. When I paused in my work the cold stung my throat, the particular metallic snap of an old-time Lake Erie winter that I remember so well from those years; the perfume of the cedar trees just a bitten hint in the air.

He walked down next to me on the brick. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “How are you faring?”

I looked up. “Fine, Mr. Metarey. I miss my mother, though.”

“I know you do, Corey.”

“But I’ll be okay. Just makes me a little sad, talking about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking over. “I know. It must.”

I stood and leaned on my shovel. In front of us a rabbit leaped out of the brush and made a swift path across the yard. He set his hand on my shoulder, then lifted it and pointed out at the woods. “Great horned owl,” he said. “Listen.”

I heard it in the distance:
hoo
,
hu-hu-hu
,
hoo
.

We walked down together to the edge of the terrace then, which looked out to the north of the casting pools. The ice was glittering where it had been swept.

“Exquisite in winter,” he said, “isn’t it? Not so much a painting anymore. More a drawing.”

I’d never seen it in that way. The snow was deep all around, and another dusting had fallen that afternoon, so that in the distance the moonlight lit the line of treetops.

Presently he said, “You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Sir?”

“In the woods that night. You didn’t get hurt, did you? In the car? I realized I never asked.”

“No, sir. Not a bit.”

“Good. Good,” he said. “Would have been terrible if someone had been hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

“When I was in the service,” he said, “ended up in a little scrape in a Willys jeep myself once. Didn’t feel like much then—but on nights like this the old neck still likes to remind me of it.” He craned his head around. “Almost thirty years later. Just a twinge when it gets bone-damp. Just a little hello.”

The owl’s shadow suddenly swooped across the snow; a moment later, we could see its profile in one of the close oaks, high up near the top. Its claws were empty. We stood there, looking at it against the crisscrossed limbs.

“Utterly without mercy,” he said softly. “That’s what nature is.” He cleared his throat. “And we somehow expect it not to be. Or pretend it’s not, maybe. The source of man’s unease, I’d say. If you had to put your finger on it.”