Capable of Honor (27 page)

Chapter 8

Again Lafe saw the broad lawns dropping to the Hudson, the handsome, unknowing boy, wrapped in sweater and blanket, sitting under an ancient oak while the bright sun and gentle breezes hurried the snows to their melting. Again he felt the terrible inadequacy that he knew the boy’s father had felt with such anguish on so many occasions; and again, like the boy’s father, he braced himself and went forward with a hopeful and encouraging smile. It was a new role for the junior Senator from Iowa, but one he was learning to fill with a surer touch and a greater conviction as the weeks and months went by.

“Hi, Jimmy,” he said easily. “How are they treating my pal?”

For a moment he thought there would be a response: just for a second he thought he saw the eyelids seem to flicker, the slightest movement of the head as though it might turn toward him in response. But no. It must have been imagination as always, hopeless hope betraying him again. Jimmy Fry continued to stare straight ahead, the customary polite, heartbreaking smile on the classically handsome face, no motion anywhere as far as Lafe could see—although he insisted to himself stubbornly, he was almost certain he had sensed something. Surely there had been something. Surely the Lord would not permit it to go on forever.

With the terrible and crushing thought that it might go on forever, he knew the late Senator from West Virginia had contended to the day of his death from leukemia six months ago. Hal Fry had never, perhaps, entirely given up hope, but it had diminished to almost nothing in the sad years since the boy had fallen ill. He had commended Jimmy to Lafe’s keeping when he had finally discovered that his own end was approaching, in the midst of the hectic days when, as chief United States delegate, he was battling Terry, Felix, and their many-hued and many-sided friends in the UN. It had been a bequest that did not carry much hope with it, but Lafe had accepted it with the determination that if anyone could find the path through the labyrinth of Jimmy’s mind, he would. He had told Beth Knox when they met at the airport the morning after the Secretary-General’s annual ball, that he felt a sense of responsibility he had never felt before, “now that I have a son.” In the pursuit of that responsibility he had made the trip up the Hudson twice a week since Hal’s death. So far, he was forced to admit, without tangible result.

Yet he could not believe that he was entirely mistaken in the ghostly sense of response he was beginning to feel lately, the intimation, elusive, indefinable, but increasingly there, that somewhere, far inside, some reaction to his visits was beginning to stir in Jimmy. He warned himself that he might be like the devotee of the ouija board whose own hopes and nerves drive the board without his conscious volition to deliver its cryptically garbled messages; but he fought this down. Rigidly he excluded all possibilities of imagination, dismissed things that might otherwise be construed as sentient response, reminded himself constantly that he must not overempathize—and still there seemed to be something. Faint, fleeting, fugitive, not to be stated, not to be grasped, but—there.

And if there were? He asked himself with a sudden mood of bitterness, as he came around and sat down so that the level, hazel eyes were looking into his (now there was the vague, meaningless recognition that came when something was placed directly in front of the boy) why he should be so anxious to bring Jimmy back to the world. What kind of a world was it that he wanted to return him to, and what made Lafe think the boy wasn’t infinitely better off locked away in his serene and apparently happy silence, protected forever from that world’s terrible torment and travail? What right did he have to force him to face what mankind had to face in these savage days?

He could not honestly say, as he began to chat easily and naturally about events at the UN, using simple language but otherwise talking as he would to any other youthful mind, that he was doing the boy any favor. He could not honestly say it was a world he liked himself, filled as it was with hatred, bitterness, and crisis. “I beg of you,” Hal Fry had cried to the silent nations of the General Assembly in his last, searing address, “let us love one another.
Let us love one another!
It is all we have left.” They had listened, moved for the moment; thought about it for a day or two; paid it dutiful lip-service; and returned to hate. Why was it so important to make Hal’s son suffer with the rest of humanity? Except, the Senator from Iowa told himself grimly, that if he didn’t suffer he wouldn’t be a part of humanity in this twisted century, and if he weren’t part of it then he might as well not have lived at all. Living was worth the suffering, and better to pay the price than exist and die a vegetable.

In this, he recognized, he was reflecting something of the thoughts of Mabel Anderson, expressed in the letter he had received night before last when he and Cullee returned to the Waldorf from Selena Castleberry’s party.

He had not corresponded with Mabel in the months immediately after Brigham Anderson’s suicide at the height of the Senate battle over Bob Leffingwell’s nomination to be Secretary of State, but at Christmas he had sent a card to Provo, Utah, where she and little Pidge were living with her parents. The response had been a brief letter, hesitant and cautious as Mabel was in her human contacts (thanks partly, he could see now, to Brig’s unhappy problems and all she had gone through with him), but genuinely pleased. On an impulse he had replied at considerably greater length, telling her the latest gossip of Washington and the Senate, bringing her up to date on old friends, deliberately giving her as much as he could, in his straightforward and good-hearted prose, of all the busy and exciting life of the great white capital sprawled along the Potomac. She had told the Knoxes after Brig’s death that she never wanted to see it again, but her immediate and pleased response to Lafe’s letter indicated that now, a year after Senator Anderson’s death, she was not so sure that self-imposed exile was what she wanted, after all. Their correspondence had intensified. Now they were writing on an average of once a week. Having exhausted gossip and old friends, they were beginning to get into areas more personal and, as they could sense each other beginning to realize, more self-committing.

Over this Lafe had hesitated, but not for long. His hasty marriage and equally hasty divorce, after years of the activity that had won him the wry reputation of being the Senate’s greatest Lothario and the UN’s
chausseur formidable
, had left him with the sour feeling that it was about time for him to take on more responsibilities than just Jimmy, if he were ever going to. He had felt, suddenly, quite old and tired after his divorce from little Irene, who had kept him company on the night before the Leffingwell nomination had come up to the Senate, and who had subsequently turned out to be no better than—well, than he was. The sort of easy and endless sex he seemed to have been born with a gift for was always a great fascination to those not similarly gifted, but he had reached a point long since where he knew how desperate and empty and futile it was. A scathing self-disgust had finally come upon him. If he climbed into one more meaningless bed, he thought even as he compulsively did so, he would go stark, staring mad. But of course he didn’t—at least consciously, though he suspected that what he was doing was itself a form of insanity, the coldest and bleakest and most empty of all, without heart, without warmth, without dignity, without reward save the same old automatic one that came and went and left nothing behind. He had reached a profoundly depressed state of feeling about it, underneath the sunny good wall and casual friendliness he still managed to show the world. He really felt he led an empty and pointless existence, in the most fundamental sense. He was beginning to wonder whether there was anything in the world for him that could give it some meaning and make it worthwhile. And this while outwardly and publicly he was one of the most attractive, most popular, and most effective members of the Senate of the United States.

Then, quite unexpectedly, had come the gift of Jimmy—and he did regard it as a gift from Hal, who had judged him better, perhaps, than he judged himself—and very soon after that the more or less inadvertent re-entry of Mabel Anderson into his life. If a crippled boy depended upon him—as he was beginning to, he told himself fiercely, he
was
beginning to—and if a nice girl like Mabel, knowing him and his nature as she did from the old days of his intimacy with Brig in the Senate, still responded as openly and willingly to his proffer of friendship as she had, then perhaps life could still have some reasonable purpose after all. It was a measure of the desperate nature of his need for reassurance, perhaps, that it had taken him no more than a week or two to reach this conclusion and from there to jump to the near-certainty that there was something inevitable about Mabel. As with Jimmy he fought to preserve his skepticism, told himself angrily that it was far too trite, assured himself that it was a long way from a few letters to a bed that would be permanent and a union that might bring love. But he was too knowing to misread the overtones in Mabel’s letters. He was an old campaigner and he knew the signs.

Very well, then, he told himself fiercely, this time it was now or never, and this time he would be worthy. He wouldn’t push it too fast, he wouldn’t be tricky, he wouldn’t use any standard techniques—because if this really might be love, then there were no techniques except the techniques that would suit this one case. He would just let it develop as it came, writing whenever she did but not being in too much of a hurry to get out to Utah, letting events bring them together soon or keep them apart for a while as events saw fit. They had not even talked on the telephone yet, and there, too, there was no hurry. If it happened, it happened; it would someday, before too long. She had mentioned something in her letter last night about being asked to sit on the platform at a rally in Salt Lake City next week. For the first time since Brig’s death she had not rejected such a political invitation out of hand, but had accepted because, “I think maybe just by being there I can help to carry on a little of what he stood for.” Widows of Senators sometimes turned up as members of state delegations to national conventions, and Lafe knew he would head Iowa’s. Somehow or other, he suspected, life would work it out for them if it were meant to work out. His only problem would be to refrain from becoming too anxious. A technique for that, he thought with a rueful amusement, had not yet been developed by man. But he would have to do his best.

Meanwhile, there was Jimmy, and as he went on talking, quietly and pleasantly, to the vacant, handsome boy in the steadily warming day, he felt again that tantalizing, fugitive sense of—something. Deep, deep inside, responding just a little, beyond sight or grasp of ordinary communication: a spark. He thought it was growing, but again he told himself sternly that he must not be overly anxious or optimistic. Senator Fry had failed in all his years of trying. Why convince oneself that a stranger could do what a father could not?

But still there was—something.

He talked for fifteen minutes in a calm, unhurried tone and then got up.

“Goodbye, Jimmy,” he said, reaching down for the strong hand lying placidly on the blanket, giving it a friendly squeeze. “I have to leave now and go to Washington for a session of the Senate. But I will be back,” he promised, his voice sent clear and distinct and apparently certain of acceptance into the shadows that engulfed the mind before him. “My name is Lafe, and I will be back.”

There was no outward indication, the clear, kindly eyes stared straight ahead, the gentle, friendly smile remained unchanged. But he was sure, as he watched for a long moment and then turned away. Somewhere inside there was—something. And he was undismayed.

His name was Lafe, and he would be back.

“Bob?” the familiar voice of the Speaker said, “are you ready to go? I’m calling from downstairs. My car’s here.”

“Oh, O.K.,” Senator Munson said, from his office near the Senate floor. “We could have taken mine, though, and saved Elbridge the trouble.”

“Elbridge doesn’t mind driving me,” the Speaker said with a chuckle. “As between our two chauffeurs, I think he minds rather less than C.B. does. Don’t you think so?”

“C.B. is in love again,” Bob Munson said. “His mind isn’t really on his work these days. I’ll be right down.”

“Good, I’ll be talking to the cops on the door and finding out what’s really going to happen in the Senate. They always seem to know.”

“Better than I do,” the Majority Leader said. “See you in five minutes.…Now,” he said, when he and the Speaker were comfortably settled in the back seat of the Speaker’s limousine and Elbridge was driving the car slowly out from under the archway beneath the Senate steps into the bright sunlight, “how does it look for Harley’s resolution on your side?”

“Puzzling,” the Speaker confessed. “Don’t know as I quite understand what’s going on in the House today.”

“That will be the first time in forty years. Has anything changed since I talked to you yesterday?”

“Well, yes: the vetoes.”

“Do you approve of them?”

“Oh, yes,” the Speaker said calmly as Elbridge swung the limousine left into Independence Avenue to start the ten-minute run from the Hill to the White House. “
I
approve. Some don’t.”

“We have the same problem in the Senate,” Bob Munson admitted. “Arly Richardson and Freddie Van Ackerman seem to be leading the parade.”

“I noticed in the papers that Fred and COMFORT seem to be right in there. Arly’s a little surprising.”

“Anything to be in the opposition,” Senator Munson said in an annoyed tone, “Arly’s been in the Senate for twenty years and every single day has been devoted to making himself stand out from the crowd. It’s a congenital necessity that he be a loner. No matter what it is, there’s Arly, alone against the universe. It’s a psychological compulsion.”

The Speaker smiled.

“So, will they tie it up?”

“They may for a while,” the Majority Leader acknowledged.