Exiles in the Garden (28 page)

Thinking of Jimmy Holder, Alec thought now of his father and resolved to visit the grave in the morning, say a few last words. The service had been perfunctory, though the reverend—and he had forgotten the reverend's name. Wallace? The Reverend Wallace had done a fine job, a touch on the pompous side but his father never minded pomposity so long as it was kept within bounds. Kim Malone once said that in the United States Senate pomposity was a sacrament. You didn't necessarily treasure it but you missed its absence. Pomposity resembled the intentional walk in baseball, tedious and action-slowing but vital to the integrity of the game. Integrity was necessary in the news business also. Alec supposed that if he had gone to Vietnam his life would have taken a different turn, driven by the one experience so drenched in the atmosphere of violence. Jimmy Holder had taken his own life by gunshot. Yet war service had not diminished Andre. Alec remembered Andre deep in thought when he and Lucia had come upon him on the porch of Goya House. Was he remembering the war? His daughter? A café in Prague? Andre Duran had as much vitality as any man Alec had ever met. He thought again of twigs into the bonfire. We did terrible things. We killed anything that moved. No one could judge us. No one who had not been with us day to day. God himself would not take the trouble. Alec thought his father would probably agree. He believed the legislative craft was beyond the ken of outsiders. The apparatus of it was mystifying. The rules often contradicted themselves. No one outside the field of combat could appreciate the personal and political loyalties of members of Congress. Even the bribe was ambiguous. One man's bribe was another's campaign contribution. Of course every election cycle the voters had their say and that verdict was final, ill informed as it was bound to be, yet another burden of democracy. Alec looked up to find Lucia and Andre staring at him, Lucia saying something.

We should go now, Alec.

And then they heard a wild commotion at the curb, cars thundering up the street and parking in front of Goya House, men spilling from the doors, shouts and bursts of conversation. Lucia recoiled from the sudden noise; the neighborhood had been so quiet. Andre was on his feet at once, waving his arms and giving a kind of lupine growl. Alec rose also, alarmed, watching the men gather on the sidewalk, shouting at Andre. A few of them gripped beer cans. All of them were wearing Basque berets and leather jackets of various colors. They rushed across the lawn to lean against the porch railing, everyone talking at once, their arms around one another's shoulders, Andre grinning, his hands flung wide in welcome.

They loved the soccer game, Andre said to Lucia.

These are my housemates, he added.

Andre signaled for quiet and introduced Lucia and Alec, the conversation subsiding at once. There were eight men, all of them older but not so old as Andre, and they all extended their hands in greeting. Alec could not identify the language they spoke. There were several languages in any case. They were all tipsy and a few of them were frankly drunk and having difficulty with their footing. But they were in very good humor and now began to explain something to Andre, evidently an account of the soccer match. Their team, whatever team it was, had won. That was obvious. The conversation went on and on, a din. Across the street someone opened her front door, looked out, and retreated back inside. More beer was produced and Andre poured schnapps once again, happily listening to their accounts of the game, winding down now. And after a while the men made their goodbyes and drifted away, stomping up the porch stairs and through the front door, dispersing to their various rooms. The downstairs toilet flushed and flushed again. In a few minutes the house was quiet and the street silent as before. Andre, Lucia, and Alec took their seats once more on the porch in the darkness. A sudden chill was in the air.

Soccer, Andre said. The one thing that reminds them of home. They are boys again when they go to the game. They become very excited. The neighbors are used to it. I hope you weren't bothered.

Not at all, Alec said.

They are good boys, Andre said.

Mostly Czech? Alec asked.

They are from all over middle Europe, and not only Europe. They were very surprised. They did not know I had a daughter.

We must leave now, Papa.

Will you come to see me again?

Yes, of course.

Tomorrow?

In the morning, Lucia said. I leave for Zurich in the early evening.

So soon?

Yes, I'm afraid so. But I'll be back.

The morning will be fine, Andre said.

I'll bring Mathilde, Lucia said. And sometime you must meet Nikolas. You and Nikolas will have much to talk about.

I am eager to see Mathilde, Andre said. My only grandchild. And then he smiled broadly and added, That I know of.

She wants very badly to meet you, Lucia said.

I'll be here on my porch, Andre said.

I am glad I came, Papa.

I, too, Andre said.

Goodbye, Andre, Alec said.

Goodbye, goodbye, Andre said.

Tomorrow, Papa, Lucia said, and kissed him on his cheek.

Lucia drove slowly back to Military Road, turning at Wisconsin Avenue. Traffic was light, the rush hour concluded. They were silent in the car until Alec asked Lucia the name of the minister who officiated at his father's graveside. Willis, she said. Oh, yes, Alec said. The Reverend Willis. I do that all the time now, forget names. He was looking out the window at the familiar street, the department stores and hardware stores, movie houses and liquor stores and restaurants. He searched and searched for the Chinese restaurant he knew so well but it was not where it should have been, and then he remembered that it was on Connecticut Avenue, not Wisconsin. It was years since he had been there, the last time with Mathilde when she was a teenager. My God, he thought, that would have been the Carter administration, conceivably Reagan One, somewhere in there. Alec remembered that he and Mathilde had Peking duck, amusing themselves with the fortune cookies that came with dessert. They went to the movies later, one of the James Bond epics. The star was one of Connery's successors, the one with the smirk, Roger Moore. Mathilde was taken with him. Maybe his memory wasn't going to hell after all.

Tell me something, Alec said. Was he what you expected?

The Reverend Willis? Lucia said, puzzled.

Your father, Alec said.

I didn't know what to expect, Lucia said. I had no image of him in my mind. I mean, nothing specific beyond a handsome man in a Borsalino hat. But that image went away when I saw him.

You spoke of him very seldom, Alec said.

I know. He was not part of my life. I remembered nothing of him. Only what my mother told me, and I am pretty certain that she made revisions. Perhaps made things up. I never knew why they split up. I mean, something I could believe. Something that made sense. That's why, when Mathilde was old enough, I told her everything about us. The life we had together and the advent of Nikolas. I didn't want her to be in the dark, as I was. I didn't want her living with a mystery.

Nothing wrong with mysteries, Alec said.

I don't like them, Lucia said.

Sometimes you have to learn to live with them.

Not me. Not if I can avoid it.

They drove on in silence, one stoplight after another. Finally Lucia said, Do we look alike?

Absolutely, Alec said. You must have seen it. His eyes. The set of his chin. His laugh. His gestures.

I suppose I did, Lucia said. Didn't want to admit it.

He is very masculine and you are very feminine. Still, two sides of the same coin.

I admit it was strange, seeing him.

He knew it, too, Alec said.

Thank you for coming with me, Lucia said. I was—nervous.

I'm glad I came, Alec said.

You are?

An interesting man, your father.

I suppose so, she said.

A twentieth-century life, Alec said. Every inch.

I cannot admire his life, Lucia said. A life of violence, a life that seems to me to have been dictated by history. I wish he had turned his back. I wish he had found a way to stay with my mother. She had an empty place in her heart because of him. I do, too. He does not recognize that. He does not appreciate the wreckage he left behind. That was his achievement. I cannot admire it.

You, too, Alec said.

What do you mean?

You, too, have led a twentieth-century life. Every inch.

They were in Georgetown now, on his street, then at Mrs. Wheatley's old house, a stretch limousine, bone white in color, at the curb, delivering two couples in evening dress. Lucia waited behind the limo until the passengers were on the sidewalk and the chauffeur eased away. A butler opened the door and stood aside as the guests swept through. Beyond the open door Alec saw the others, women clutching little black purses, men with their hands in their pockets. White-coated waiters passed drinks and canapés. Alec recognized one of the women as a television commentator of liberal slant, in earnest discussion with an army general in fullest fig, about one square foot of decorations on the left side of his dress jacket, stars on his shoulders. From the look of things the television commentator was doing most of the talking, not that the general appeared to care; she was an attractive woman, almost as tall as the general. And then the front door slammed shut. Lucia continued on down the block, and when she pulled up in front of Alec's house the interior was dark. Mathilde had yet to return.

Alec said, Do you remember Jimmy Holder? Your father's historian.

Vaguely, she said.

He quit the newspaper because they brought him home and made him an editor. He hated editing. He missed the battlefield and all those countries he visited. Mostly he missed his byline. So he took a buyout and wrote books instead.

Lucia rolled her eyes. She was drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, impatient to be off. Those reporter friends of yours, she said. They all blend into one. It was so long ago.

Give my best to your father when you see him tomorrow.

I will, Lucia said.

And if you get the chance, ask him how he got to Goya House.

If I get the chance, she said.

It's a strange setup, Alec said. A bit of a mystery.

Lucia said, In case you're interested, I don't look on my life as a twentieth-century life. I look on it as a normal life. She spat the words as if she could not get rid of them fast enough. And I don't think you admire my father. I think you're envious of him. Envious of the wreckage.

No one envies wreckage, Lucia. I do admire fidelity. Alec stepped from the car and she drove away without another word. He fumbled with his keys a moment; when Mathilde had gone out she had forgotten to turn on the lights. He stepped inside the house, collected the mail from the floor, and leafed through it as he pressed the button on the answering machine. One message, Mathilde announcing she was spending the night with a friend and would call in the morning. Alec dropped the mail on the hall table and ambled into the kitchen, intending to pour a glass of wine until he thought better of it and poured Scotch instead. He stood on the steps leading to the garden, sipping whiskey and sifting through Andre Duran's crowded biography. But he quickly tired of that and wandered back inside. Nothing of interest in the refrigerator except a carton of eggs, enough for an omelet. He wasn't hungry. Alec looked into the living room and sat in the big wing chair, facing the west wall where his photographs were clustered, more than fifty years of work, his pleasure and his livelihood, what he liked to think was the organizing principle of his life. The ones on the wall were not necessarily the best photographs but his favorites, having to do with the circumstances of the shoot or the personality of the subject, and as he looked at them he thought he would go to his father's grave in the morning, shoot something in black and white. He stared now at the Jefferson Memorial at dawn and the facade of Mrs. Wheatley's house, the grille of a Buick poking through the right edge. All the photographs were set in simple black frames. Next to Mrs. Wheatley's house was a shot of Jimmy Stewart, nonchalant in a dinner jacket, a flute of champagne in his hand, homespun Mr. Smith as worldly as any Georgetown gigolo. Mathilde at a tender age concentrating on a chessboard, her index finger touching the queen's crown. Annalise on the beach at Malibu, delicious in a yellow bikini, balancing a red beach ball on her nose like a trained seal. His father asleep at his desk on the Senate floor. The Japanese houseman Charles, a faint smile at play on his mouth, holding someone's overcoat. There were a dozen others—his garden in the moonlight, his mother smoking a cigarette on the terrace of the Chevy Chase house, Duke Ellington shaking hands with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Henry Fonda brandishing a nine-iron, Oleg Cassini, the Countess d'An, Joseph Alsop, Admiral Honeycutt, the Confederate infantryman, Jacqueline Onassis, and the newsroom of the paper late at night, no one in sight, identical desks with identical typewriters, the big Westclox on the wall reading midnight. Finally, the long-ago Georgetown students, on book, giving
Lear
everything they had.

The telephone rang but Alec did not rise to answer it. He sipped his drink and looked carefully at the photographs, one after another, up and down and left and right. He realized that none of them were of recent vintage. He remembered the circumstances of each shoot, the location and the time of day, the solid feel of the miraculous Leica in his hand. Cassini and Admiral Honeycutt were caught unawares, Cassini in a bathing suit on the terrace of a villa in the south of France, the admiral taking his afternoon constitutional. Jimmy Stewart and Mathilde were more or less posed. Annalise was pretending not to pose. The unseen figure was himself, the man behind the camera, the mechanic at the engine; and then he saw a sliver of shadow on Annalise's red beach ball, his own. Naturally all the photographs had his signature, though Alec was hard put to say precisely what that signature was, its specific stamp, its tone of voice. Alec wondered what it was that bound the photographs together or if anything bound them together. They were his favorite shots so somewhere ran a common theme, the extended imagery of a poem or a song's ostinato. Alec rose and stepped forward until he was a foot from the wall, looking at the photographs again each in turn. He closed his bad right eye so that he could see more clearly, judging the light, the boundary of the shot, the feel of the material. He finished his whiskey and put the glass on the sideboard. Now he closed his good eye, moving from one photograph to the next so that all the photographs were in motion, variations on Munch's
Scream.
But that was not the common theme, far from it. Alec stood staring at the wall of images for many minutes and realized finally with the most open dismay that the common theme was the absence of conflict.