The Shadow Cabinet (59 page)

“Don't be stupid,” Artie said. “He wanted to find out what they had on him, get his lawyers wise, maybe fix the books. Use your head.”

“I am using my head, and it sounds stupid to me.”

“Yeah? Why'd the Russians steal the atomic bomb? You think that was stupid? Same thing with Nat Strykker. So when the USG dropped it on him, he'd know what it was. What's so goddamned funny. I'm dying inside and you're laughing. What'd she say, Chuckie—two or three?”

11.

Ed Donlon and Mary Sifton had had an argument earlier that week.

“Not only is our affair over, but I'm afraid I don't even like you very much,” she had told him over lunch on Wednesday, conscious of the attention he'd been giving the young waitress. “You have no idea what modernity is all about. You also drink too much. Do you have any idea how much you drink? If you did, you wouldn't sit there ogling that girl that way—not at one o'clock in the afternoon.”

“Sure I know what modernity is about,” Ed said. “It's sitting through an idiot play, like the one you've got tickets for tonight, or reading some idiot book, like the one you gave me last week, and at the end the writer telling you that you're an idiot for paying any attention to him, that the human race is an idiot, that history is a sinkhole full of idiots, only he's not because he's literate enough to rise above it. That's modernity.…”

“You're an incurable romantic. That's why you drink so much.”

She'd gone to the theater alone. He hadn't seen her since. His nights were again his own.

On this snowy Washington evening, past and present were inextricably mixed as he fixed his third martini and carried it upstairs with him. He showered and dressed, aware that the house was empty, the room above dark. He had no idea where Grace Ramsey had gone. He'd heard her talking on the phone that afternoon, inquiring about airline schedules.

Downstairs again, he emptied the martini shaker—more there than he had realized—wrapped himself in scarf and overcoat, and stepped out the front door to a lost world miraculously restored. White sculptures lay along the fence palings and tree limbs, wrapped the streets and sidewalks, and recovered long-forgotten memories.

Donlon at nineteen, waiting under the clock at the Biltmore in New York on a snowy Thanksgiving night for an aspiring ballet dancer who never appears. He goes to a Jean-Louis Barrault movie in the Village instead and picks up an art student in a nearby bar. On a studio couch covered with cat hairs, they make love until four in the morning, when her roommate returns and interrupts to ask if he has any cigarettes. He returns to Princeton on the Sunday afternoon train, flannel suit covered with cat hairs, awed by the power of feminine abstraction.

Donlon at eighteen, a snowy December night in Louisville, attending his cousin's debut at the Spinsters Cotillion at the Pendennis Club. Donlon driving his uncle's vintage Packard through Cherokee Park, the road ahead of him a seamless white, Jack Frost in the trees, an all-night disc jockey from Chicago playing fairyland music. His toes are warm, he is slightly inebriated, and he is punished by a pair of very painful gonads. Next to him on the plush seat is a complaisant young woman from Darien, Connecticut, two years older, come to attend her college classmate's debut. Her cheeks are plump and wind-chapped from a recent skiing weekend, she has barrel thighs, small shoulders, and a pug nose. She and Donlon have been necking continuously in the lounge chair of the sun porch since three o'clock. He's unbuttoned her brassiere and plumbed the small cold breasts with one hand while the other has skirmished her pubic mound but gone no further. They're surrounded by prone couples. An inquiring adult occasionally turns on the overhead light. Dawn will soon show its crapulous Peeping Tom head through the frosty windows.

They take a drive and the cold air revives them. She begins to recite what she remembers of Dylan Thomas's “A Child's Christmas in Wales” as Donlon turns into Cherokee Park toward a dimly remembered trysting place near a fountain. But snow is heavy on the hills and roads, thickening on the windshield, and his cautious speed and the privacy of their grotto tempt his partner to throw caution to the winds. She tosses her cigarette out the window and with one hand seizes his waistband while the other unzips his fly. Seduction, Donlon thought, paraphrasing Degas, required the cunning of a crime, but as he turns into the curve a cold hand is groping boldly in his underpants, Jack Frost is nipping at his testicles, and Christmas rockets are bursting across the windshield. His feet rattle on brake and accelerator, the car toboggans into the curve, twists sideways across the icy road, bongs a stone bridge, and careens into a snowy bog.

Her head has struck the windshield. She's lying against the door. “For God's sake,” she weeps. “I mean, how cherry can you get?”

Scrambling out of the car, Donlon finds himself standing on its side. A car with chains passes, crammed with high school rowdies. “Hey, buddy, your fly's open! Next time try taking your pants off first!”

Donlon redivivus now, marching through the Georgetown streets toward Cornelia Bowen's house, his face stung Princeton orange by the chafing flurries, on his way to an affair twenty years suspended. These aren't this year's streets, not the present snow he feels. Past and present are mixed, holiday cotillions and dawn breakfasts, the bloom of a fifth of gin on his cheeks.

Walking into his past, he crossed Wisconsin Avenue, hardly aware of the traffic creeping past. Cornelia Bowen was forty when they'd first met, Donlon ten years younger. She was the wife of a senior Treasury official and Washington held little interest for her. Her children were away in boarding school; theater, music, and art had been her diversions in New York, but politics dominated the table talk at her Georgetown dinner parties. One evening she'd discovered a young man whose memory for Yeats was greater than her own. In the spring they began meeting discreetly at the Corcoran Gallery on Sunday afternoon, her husband's day for golf at Burning Tree. Donlon had an apartment nearby.

He moved through the sifting snow, turned a corner, and found the house up the narrow street near the middle of the block. Her house. Or was it? A woman answered his ring, leaning on a cane, white-haired, her hair in disarray.

Standing on the stoop, he awkwardly searched his memory for the name of Cornelia's housekeeper. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Mrs. Bowen told me your name, but I've forgotten. She's in, isn't she?”

A difficult moment followed.

“You caught me by surprise; I said eight,” she replied, opening the door. “Don't just stand there. Have you been drinking?”

Vulgar familiarity for a housekeeper. Why was his gin bottle her business? Whose grandmother was she, anyway? Not his, thank God. Affronted, he went in silently, hat in hand. The door shut. Two minutes later he was back on the street, shaken. A lewd mistake, but not his.

He moved on, up the street, following the lights, marching now toward the clock at the Biltmore, where he would wait for an aspiring ballet dancer who would never appear.

The Italian restaurant high on Wisconsin Avenue stopped serving at ten, but the snowy streets had reduced the evening trade and emptied the two dining rooms by nine-thirty. Donlon sat alone at a rear table, carrying on an imaginary dialogue with the hostess. She was seated at an adjacent table, trying to ignore him as she reviewed the evening's receipts. He was finishing a bottle of red wine.

“Let me offer you some,” he said, lifting the bottle again.

“No, thanks,” she repeated for the third time. She didn't lift her head.

Thoughtful for a moment, aware of the superb acoustics of the empty room, he cleared his throat. “‘Too long a sacrifice,'” he announced with a certain wilted Irish charm, “‘can make a stone of the heart.'”

“You can say that again,” she mumbled, adding up a bill.

He waited, hurt and disappointed. She said no more. “Sorry to keep you waiting like this. Maybe someone's expecting you.”

“Not tonight. The snow's keeping everyone home, which is where I should be.”

Her hair was reddish black, her bright mouth was as small as a parakeet's, but she had a stunning torso. Under the white blouse she wore a black brassiere. A deep shadowy canyon lay under the V of her blouse, ready for siege.

“I live nearby,” he said, encouraged.

She ignored him, shuffling the receipts together.

“We could have a drink first.”

“I'll bet,” she said. “Angelo doesn't like that much.”

“Like what?”

“Walking out the front door with the customers.”

“Well, I think Angelo's right. Good old Angelo.”

“A matter of self-respect, Sicilian pride.”

“Good old Sicilian pride.” He raised his glass. “‘I leave both faith and pride, to young upstanding men, climbing the mountainside.'”

“You can say that again.”

He watched her with glazed disapproval, arm still lifted. Then he put the glass down. “Never water the Beefeaters,” he said dully.

She lifted her tired eyes. “What are you—a college professor or something?” She got up heavily, pushing up from the table. Her hips were wide and lumpy. “You ought to find a cab and go home. Twenty minutes from now you'll be stranded. That's why we're sending everyone in the kitchen home.”

“Why don't I do that,” Donlon agreed, hearing an invitation to a tryst.

The cashier locked the door behind him and he waited at the curb beyond the mounds of snow churned up by the passing cars. The restaurant's lights went down and the waitresses and busboys began to leave. She wasn't among them. He flagged down a cab, but the driver wouldn't wait. He waited alone. Ten minutes later a small Volkswagen left the side parking lot and stopped nearby. “No taxi! Stranded!” he called out, scrambling over the mound of snow.

She cranked down her window with professional patience, her voice weary but wise. “We got a rule inside—don't insult the customers. It's late and I'm tired and I don't wanna insult you anyway. You're a nice man and maybe you're a college professor. My old man may not have any college degree, but he'd break you in two. You understand what I'm saying?”

She drove off.

He began walking, struggling down the treacherous pavement, but only as he moved into Georgetown was he aware of how complete was its transformation. It was an Alpine Village. A cross-country skier slid by; two more followed. Cars were stalled here and there along Wisconsin, some abandoned. Beer steins were brought from bars by those recruited inside to help the disabled. Couples walked in the street, holding hands. His throat grown dry, he joyfully joined a group of revelers helping push a stalled van out of a drift and then down the hill. He followed them into a disco bar—crowded, noisy, full of wassailers, like himself—followed them into the smell of hops, damp wool, cedar chips, and Saturday night intoxication.

To a young waitress at the serving space next to his stool, bright-eyed and red-cheeked, flushed by the conviviality of this snowy Washington night, he said, “‘We feed the heart on phantasies.'” She pretended she heard, smiled, took her tray, and hurried away. Donlon took the smile as an invitation to the dance.

He ordered a double martini, but it was poorly mixed. When he complained in his friendly, old-chap, tally-ho style, reminding the young bartender of the perils of cheap gin and cheaper vermouth, the young man said, “Look, it's a busy night, friend. If you don't like it, take your business down the street.”

“
In dulci jubilo,
” Donlon said.

He'd been here before. He remembered those young faces in the far corner—the ski sweaters, the two young men in tails. Weren't they from the Pendennis Ballroom in Louisville, friends of his cousin Hillary? He recognized a table of drinkers from Stowe, Vermont, and that holiday when he and George Ramsey had competed for a week in sleeping their way through the Sarah Lawrence Alpine Club. “Nice to see you again,” he murmured affectionately to two young women in nylon parkas, just entering. So they were all here, these old friends from Princeton, New York, Trenton, Louisville, and Stowe, come to attend winter's debut at Georgetown's festive après-ski.

He asked for another double martini. His bladder painful, he moved to the men's room at the rear as his drink was being mixed. In the washroom mirror he discovered a poor dim dishonored replica of his own face, as muddy as those pathetic oil portraits Jane once painted of him, her family, and her friends—this before her Corcoran instructor advised her to transfer her talent to clay and stone, where her crimes against humanity went undetected. The face troubled him. Returning to the front bar, his nostrils reeking of mothballs, his right leg wet, he found someone had taken his stool. He didn't protest. As he reached forward to take his glass, a young woman turned suddenly:

“
Would you stop breathing on me, for Christ's sake!
”

Obviously a mistake. He opened his mouth, but no words came. He'd forgotten her name. “Sorry,” he managed finally.

She turned back to the bar and he watched in fascination as a long arm reached behind a tweed-clad back from a stool away. Sly fingers that weren't his teased the soft hairs at the base of the young woman's neck.

She turned immediately. “I'm warning you!”

He smiled, finding the face crudely familiar. “Tally-ho,” he remembered. “‘Rody, blow the horn.' Nancy, isn't it?”

“No, it's not Nancy and someone's gonna blow your horn if you don't keep your goddamn hands to yourself.”

“Come on, leave her alone, will you?” her companion asked.

“Charley, would you get this guy off my back and find him a table somewhere.”

“Come on, mister, I told you,” said the bartender. “Take your business down the street.”