The Dinner Party (6 page)

“Miss Dolly, I done that boned lamb maybe two dozen times. I know just how you want it.”

“She don't want it grilled through like leather, and you done that too,” Ellen said.

“I'll send the kids to pick up Mom and Pop. Mac?”

“Yes, ma'am.” He was miffed. He stiffened, looking straight ahead of him.

“You're my wine steward. You're the only one I can turn to about wine. What do we have in the cellar that's really good and goes with my menu?”

That pleased him. The senator had no real interest in wine or liquor. Social drinking was obligatory in his position, as was an occasional cigar under certain circumstances; his pursuit of youth drove him onto the running track and into the pool, never toward a bottle, and while he pretended to some knowledge of wine, what he had mastered came from reading the labels MacKenzie selected. It was MacKenzie who maintained their small but excellent wine cellar, both here and in Washington. Now he said to Dolly, “Well, Miss Dolly, you better run the menu through for me again.”

Dolly knew that he knew exactly what would be served for dinner, and that this was a sort of apology on her part for ordering him away from a pleasant ride to the airport and into the pantry to polish the silver and do other odds and ends, like extending the table and finding flowers in the garden that might be cut. She didn't mind. “Quenelle of sole, broiled lamb leg, salad, and lemon mousse. In the library, we'll have assorted nuts, cheese sticks and olives with the drinks.”

MacKenzie thought about it for a moment. “We have a nice white wine. It's very dry, but light and nice, maybe the best white wine there is. Pavillon Blanc nineteen seventy-eight. It's a Château—Margaux, I think?”

Dolly, now as always, was impressed. Mac had been reading books on wine for years, and anticipating that she would question him today, he had already worked out the selections. Dolly nodded.

“For the quenelle,” he said. “I'd use the same wine in the library.”

“But not for the lamb?”

“I thought maybe some variety. I was looking for a rosé, but we don't have more than three bottles of any rosé and it wouldn't hurt to have something a little heavier with the meat, because most people think it's beef anyway, the way we do it. We got almost a full case of the Lafite-Rothschild red Bordeaux, nineteen sixty-four, and it's something we been saving for something real special, if this is that special?”

Dolly grinned and the two blacks began to giggle. “I don't know,” Dolly said. “They run the country, but I don't know whether that makes them special. What do you think, Ellen?”

“Now don't go asking me what I think because trouble comes out of that. What I think is that Mac could get himself one of them jobs in a fancy restaurant when you retire us as a—what do you call it?”

“No retirement,” Dolly said.

“Sommelier,” MacKenzie said. “You like that suggestion of the Rothschild?”

“Absolutely. Now, you know, Mac, I want you to do the carving and the wine. Have Nellie serve, but you rehearse her about which is her left hand and which is her right, and you pour the wine. Now do you think we should have something with the dessert?”

“Just the mousse?”

“We have cigarette cookies,” Ellen said. “Nice and light. I made them yesterday.”

“I forgot about that,” Dolly nodded. “Absolutely. Then we should have champagne. Do we have anything special?”

“We got a case of Cordon Bleu, and we got four bottles, I think, of Dom Perignon, same year as the Margaux, seventy-eight, and really high class.”

“Good. Put them in the fridge and then get the boards in the table. I'll set it with Ellen just as soon as we can. You know about lunch,” she said to Ellen, “put out cold cuts and a salad niçoise and bread and relish and that sort of thing. We can't bother with more than that.”

“I'll hardboil some eggs.”

“Wonderful, wonderful.” Dolly sighed and leaned back in her chair and reflected on the curious ritual they were going through. Making a dinner party. Elizabeth had once said to her, “Dinner parties are ridiculous. You go through this endless fuss and bother, and this and that must be just right, with this wine and that sauce, and Mother dear, it's absolutely silly, and it's such a real, heavy class thing.” But Elizabeth was wrong. It was a ritual, Dolly agreed, but not silly—indeed one of the very oldest rituals that had come down unchanged from the misty beginnings of civilization; and right now, sitting in her marvelous twentieth-century kitchen with its eight-burner restaurant stove, its small microwave subsidiary, its enormous refrigerator, its island work counter bearing eight-slice toaster, Cuisinart, Kitchenaid dough hook and two blenders, she remembered, for some reason, a story she had read as a child. In this story, a king had invited one of his powerful noblemen to dinner. It was a very elegant dinner, and course after course was served; but as the dinner progressed, the nobleman realized that no bread was being served, and he also realized that when the dinner was over, he would be killed. Thus the absence of bread on the table, since if one breaks bread with a guest, one cannot do him harm. The story had chilled her blood when she first read it, and now the memory of it sent a chill through her and caused Ellen to ask, “Are you all right?”

Dolly managed to smile. “Of course. I was thinking about bread.”

“No trouble,” Mac said. “I picked up half a dozen french breads day before yesterday. Four of them still in the freezer.” But the thought of death, not bread, had chilled her.

EIGHT

I
think we ought to go to someplace quiet, where we can meditate,” Jones said.

“And what will that do for us?” Elizabeth demanded.

“It helps.”

“It helps,” Leonard repeated. “Nothing else helps.”

“I don't know how to meditate,” Elizabeth said, her eyes full of tears.

“It's easy, Liz.”

They went to the old barn. The senator's place was five acres, and the old barn was hidden from the house by a roll of the land. The house that had once been its companion had burned down long ago, leaving only its fieldstone chimney, covered over with honeysuckle and poison ivy. The glade where the barn stood was reached by a narrow dirt road that wound through high, sweet-smelling grass, netted over with insects and birds, all of it succulent in the morning warmth. Once, when Elizabeth was eleven, her mother yielded to her pleading and allowed her grandfather, Augustus Levi, to buy her a horse. At that point, the old barn was hardly more than a pile of barely joined boards, but the senator had it rebuilt for the beautiful little filly that took up residence there—at least for the summer months. In the winter, it was boarded elsewhere. Leonard had never been interested in horses, and by age fourteen, Elizabeth had passed through her horse phase. The horse was sold and the barn abandoned.

They had changed into jeans and cotton shirts, all three of them dressed alike without thought or choice. “We'll sit cross-legged,” Clarence said. There was an old decaying English saddle in one corner of the barn. “You can use that, Liz, if you have to.”

“I can sit cross-legged,” she said. “I've been doing it since age two.”

Leonard had fallen into position, legs crossed, hands loosely clasped in his lap. They formed a triangle, the three of them, each at a corner.

“I pick a spot in the center for my sight,” Clarence said. “I keep my eyes open.”

There was a pungent, lonesome barn smell to the place, full of memories and the nostalgia of time and the pain of time. Why had Leonard picked this place? She thought of getting up and telling them that it was no good and that they must go elsewhere, but instead she asked Leonard, “Are you going to tell Mother and Dad?”

“I have to, sometime.”

“Better if we don't speak. I'll speak a little—just to help Elizabeth,” Clarence said.

“Sorry.”

“Wipe your tears, Liz. It's this moment—only this moment. Nothing is happening now. Don't think about anything at all. I'll count my breaths. Ten.”

She counted her breaths, one to ten.

“And now I stop counting,” Clarence said, “but I watch my breathing. I watch it rise and fall, and at the same time, I make myself aware of my body. I sense toes, feet, legs—I go over my whole body and bring it into my consciousness.”

It was a strange experience for Elizabeth, fighting with all her mental strength to empty her mind, not to think of Leonard and his fate, not to remember their childhood together, the games they played; the time when the two of them were lost in the endless halls and rooms of the Capitol building in Washington; the hours in this same old barn when the two of them groomed her horse; their secret talks and investigations; hard to put that away from her mind; yet it happened, long moments of nothing that washed over her like a very strange benediction.

“I let go of all the tension in my body, in my arms, my neck and around my head.…” His voice trailed away and Elizabeth raised her eyes to look at her brother. His eyes were shadowed. He sat very straight. She wondered how long he had been doing this. It didn't protect him. Nothing could protect him. He sat cross-legged, slender, erect, handsome, and pledged to death.

And silently he pleaded, fearful and wistful, Let it go away. But to whom? What gods listen to prayers? When he came weeping to his mother as a child, a bruise, a cut, a bump on his head, she could kiss it and make the pain go away, and then the cut or bruise or bang would go away; but now, remembering that terrible, icy line of Swinburne's,
Only the sleep eternal in the eternal night
, nothing could make the pain go away.

So easy for Jones to say, “Empty your mind.” Jones had persuaded him into meditation. “It's bad enough that the world doesn't know what we are. We don't know what we are or who we are, and that's the thing to find out isn't it? The only thing.”

Over the winter break, instead of going home, he had gone with Jones to a place in the Maine woods, which they called an ashram, and there for six days they had sat and meditated with thirty-seven others in the cold, short winter days, cold always and mimicking the Buddha, who had meditated for many, many years until one day he was able to say, “I know the answers to all the questions.” But Leonard knew no answers. Not why and not how, and the only real prayer now was in thanks, since Jones, miraculously, was free of it. Or was he?

If Jones was clean, Leonard was grateful, yet suppose Jones had it too. Would it be easier, the two of them together; and for that thought, he punished himself. No, Jones must live and he must die. He had the mark of the beast, he told himself defiantly. He could be like that, defiant, death be damned, I am not afraid, resting peacefully for a moment in the memory of what an old Buddhist rashi had said, “Death? You ask where you will be? Where were you before you were born?” But only for a moment this kind of defiant indifference; then the quiet emptiness that comes sometimes out of meditation and then he remembered again.

He remembered the thing on his foot, the purple spot like a blueberry, and the old doctor who looked at it and then murmured softly, “Kaposi's sarcoma,” but with such sadness in the two whispered words that Leonard's heart stopped; and then tests and more tests, but never even a suggestion of hope. The only positive thing he could exact from them was an agreement not to inform his family; and in return he nodded to the old doctor's warning, “Your semen and your blood are deadly now. Remember. They have the power to kill.”

NINE

D
ressed now, Senator Cromwell set out to avoid being chosen to drive to the airport and pick up his in-laws. If Dolly pointed a finger at him, he would use the fact that his secretary, Joan Herman, was coming by in a half hour or so to take some letters and a few notes. When Dolly informed him that the kids would drive to the airfield, he felt relieved. At the same time, Dolly told him that she didn't know where the kids were, except that they were somewhere on the property because all the cars were in the garage. She was about to send Mac out to find them.