The Shadow Cabinet (64 page)

They were met at the door by one of Bob Combs's staff aides and led down the long intimidating corridor to a formal reception room where Bob Combs was waiting, standing just inside the door. Shyrock Wooster was at his side, plucking at his French cuffs, elbows held out like a tin soldier's as he introduced each of the guests to the senator, so expertly reading out their names from the forgotten nameplates on their coats that it seemed to the embarrassed visitors he'd known them all his life.

Birdie Jackson was the last to enter, her wheelchair still pushed by Buster Foreman. A photographer was taking pictures as the guests passed through the receiving line, and Buster's concentration was momentarily shattered by the glare of a flashbulb as he eased Birdie Jackson across the threshold.

“Well, I declare,” he heard Shy Wooster say. “Lookit who it is, come all the way from Frogtown. I expect you don't remember me, do you, Miz Birdie?”

“'Deed I do,” he heard her say, surprised at the strength that had seeped back into her voice, which rang as clear as a bell. But even that didn't prepare him for the transformation brought by the flesh-and-blood presence of Bob Combs and Shy Wooster after all those years.

“Well, what do you think of that, Senator? I didn't think you'd remember, Miz Birdie, I sure didn't.”

“How'm I ever gonna forget? It was you an' Bob Combs burned down my house. If I'd been home that Sunday evenin', you an' them yellow shoes'd never got past my screen door.”

There was a moment of utter silence as her accusing voice traveled the length of the room.

“
A-men,
” a soft voice called out far to the rear.

Buster Foreman would remember Bob Combs's shocked pink face, searching the dark countenances gathered behind him, Shy Wooster's efforts to move the South Carolina journalists and the photographer back from the wheelchair, and then the flare of another flashbulb that sent magnesium ghosts dancing through his head.

“Just home folks here today, boys,” Wooster drawled. “You press stringers come to the wrong place. A little misunderstanding, that's all. Give the little old lady a little breathing room—”

“Misunderstandin'? What you talkin 'bout?”

“When'd it happen, Miz Jackson?”

“Ain't no misunderstandin' about it. It was a blowtorch offa Mr. Bob Combs's garage bench that fired up my kitchen wall that Sunday night, an' it was Mr. Shyrock Wooster a-holdin' it, same as he was holdin' that bag of skunk medicine when it blowed up in Mr. Tyrone Collier's Cadillac automobile.”

“
Praise the Lord.
”

“When was this, Miz Jackson?”

“Y'all move on out now, just home folks here today, no press allowed—”

“When was your house burned down?”

Buster Foreman still had a grip on Birdie Jackson's wheelchair, standing just inside the door, and it was Buster who decided that the time had come for Birdie to make her departure.

“There was a lotta folks knew about it. Cora Pepper was one. Smooter Davis another. It just may be that we'd ask the federal judge down there in the U.S. courthouse to prove it.”

“Is that why you're in Washington, Miz Jackson?”

“Time to go,” Buster whispered over her shoulder, and with that, he moved the wheelchair back out the door and down the long corridor, the two South Carolina newspaper stringers still in pursuit.

“Mercy, I didn't mean to say all that,” Birdie said from the back seat as Mrs. Foreman drove away. “I just don't know what took holt of me.”

“I think I do,” Buster said.

“How long did Mr. Wilson say it'd take to get him a case together?”

“Three or four months?”

She gave a deep sigh and sat back again. “You tell him I'll just have to go ahead an' do it, then. I wouldn't want all those folks back there thinking I was saying what I didn't believe.” She looked out the window. “I sure do hope I git my strength back.”

4.

Arriving those Saturday mornings at the remote Virginia farmhouse, the station wagon loaded with tools, bags of mortar, and groceries for another weekend of brush clearing and renovation, Betsy and Haven Wilson were greeted sometimes by deer browsing in the front meadow, by an occasional chimney swift or titmouse trapped in the downstairs rooms, by signs that raccoons or possums had come to scavenge. The foxes had been there too, resentfully prowling the evidence of their husbandry from the previous weekend. Their spoor wasn't indiscriminate, like that of the chipmunks or the field mice or the blacksnakes that lived in the old stone foundation or the nearby maple trees, but was deposited accusingly on the ashes of the previous Saturday and Sunday campfire, on a heap of plaster rubble torn from the kitchen walls, or brush cleared from the rear slope.

As they lay exhausted and stiff on their mattress in one of the empty upstairs bedrooms, they heard the raucous high-pitched barks from deep in the rear woods, but misinterpreted them. Betsy thought they were screech owls. But one moonlit night in February they were awakened after midnight by the familiar cry just outside the window, and through the pane discovered the fox standing in the moonlight near the dying embers of the fire they'd built that evening, as visible in the frosty light as the deer that morning in the front meadow.

Betsy had hired an architect and they worked from his plans. A local brick mason relined the old chimneys, a rural plasterer restored the deteriorating walls. Restoration was Betsy's object, not rebuilding. She stripped the hide of old paint from the pine woodwork by hand. When friends from McLean dropped by one Sunday afternoon and suggested the addition of a rear redwood deck, she looked at Haven in silent astonishment, as if her intentions were so clear by now that only the willfully blind could misunderstand. She resisted weekend visitors because they intruded upon their privacy and complicated their work schedule, as they also disturbed her concentration. She dressed as she pleased when the two of them were alone—tennis shoes, loose shirts, paint-splattered jeans or denim skirts—bathed in a washtub in the kitchen at night, only the moon watching, and then would race upstairs, flushed and still damp, her flesh tingling, to take refuge under the covers with him in the cold room. In the morning he would go downstairs while she waited for him to bring her clothes. The energies each found in the other during those solitary weekends seemed to astonish both of them.

“I was embarrassed, standing in front of my class this morning,” she told him one Monday evening during dinner, after a Friday and Saturday night at the farm. “I think I was blushing.”

He'd known what she meant; it was no less mysterious to him. He'd resisted casual or curious visitors for the same reasons.

The two bathrooms had been completed and the house was more habitable the bright Sunday afternoon Ed Donlon visited them after his lunch with Angus McVey. He was alone in his BMW. In tweed jacket and crushed Irish hat, he seemed proud of his sobriety. He gave the house his approval. Betsy's dishevelment seemed to intrigue him—her dark hair tied up in a bandanna, the loose, paint-speckled T-shirt, and the ripped tennis shoes. He announced he'd taken up bird-watching. He rose quite early these mornings, but bird-watching was more than just an urban indulgence while waiting for the coffee to boil; Jane needed her rest, you see. He was back to a two-woman household again. Grace Ramsey had departed once more. The Aegean, he thought, but couldn't be sure. Jane's studio was now on the third floor and her statuary in the back garden. He chased starlings, nesting chickadees, titmice, juncos, even a grosbeak, from the crypts and hollows of her mounted pieces. On Saturday mornings, he occasionally took his binoculars along the C&O canal.

He talked as he followed them about the rear meadow, where they were staking out a vegetable garden, avoiding the patches of mud, the sere stalks of last autumn's burrs, and the string lines. Like the gold-and-purple finches in the nearby woods, drab in their winter colors, some brightness, too, had fled from Ed Donlon's eyes. He left promptly at four. Dinner on the dot these days, artists need discipline, a continuing TV series on Sunday night public television he'd grown fond of—all these explanations offered with the authority of an asylum parolee who assures others he rules the ward with an iron hand.

In April, Ida and Nick Straus joined them for their first weekend visit. Betsy was worried that the Strauses would either be inconvenienced by the disarray or feel like intruders during a long working weekend. She'd planned to put her first plants in. The weather conspired against her. The day was cloudy and dark, rain intermittent, the wind cold. The spring sunshine that had been promised went elsewhere, flooding the offshore Atlantic, where acres of vacation light poured down on blue combers, mackerel, and yellowfin, while the weekend homesteaders of the Shenandoah shivered under gray scud and a blustery wind. Ida brought a few plants for the garden, potted at home in McLean, but the weather kept them indoors. Returned the night before from a two-day national security seminar at Cambridge, Nick Straus seemed discouraged. Confusion everywhere, he told them—confusion on the right, confusion on the left. The final morning of the conference, one group had circulated fliers inviting the participants to a Saturday antinuclear demonstration at New London, Connecticut, where a newly outfitted nuclear sub was to sail, bound for an Arctic patrol. It carried World War II's firepower in its hull, the flier declared, but the crew was born circa 1950 and didn't recall those details, which had been programmed instead in its computerized fire-control systems. Few of the officers had ever seen the aurora borealis, either, but a Navy artist's facsimile was painted on the ward room door. The final afternoon of the conference had deteriorated into a shouting match between the extreme right and the extreme left.

The shuttle from Boston to New York, New York to Washington, had been late, La Guardia and National airports both shrouded by rain. His seat companion out of New York, a strange-looking U.N. official, had refused to give up his queer, bulky briefcase to the hostess for storage in the overhead compartment.

“Nick,” Ida protested.

He smiled, looking to Betsy for support. She didn't like flying any more than he did. “You have to be careful who your seat companions are on the planet these days,” he said.

He relaxed as the afternoon passed. They inspected the garden and the rear meadow during a break in the drizzle, frightening two ducks from the pond. Under the raw, cold sky, surrounded by wet meadows and dripping woods, the old house seemed even more remote. Nick prowled the rooms with Betsy, trying to decipher its history. At dinner, he teased her about her politics. He told her he'd recently discovered a former X-rated movie house near Dupont Circle where old newsreels were shown to middle-aged audiences like them, seeking escape from the present on rainy afternoons.
Pathé News
and
March of Time
film clips take them backward to the childhood verities of black and white, where their dreams began. Today might be a sleepy Sunday afternoon in December 1941, Pearl Harbor a tranquil lagoon where the China Clipper lands en route to Shanghai, carrying Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre in wrinkled tropical suits. Tomorrow, Washington contracts as the B&O evacuates Coxey's Army of civil servants to the hinterlands to rusticate in rural cabins. The banks reopen. Millions of small depositors return with their savings to reinvest entrepreneurial initiative. Roosevelt abdicates and the face of our grandfather, who owned the corner pharmacy with its white marble soda fountain and its five-cent ice cream, withdraws in horse-drawn carriage down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

“Sound familiar?” he asked, smiling again.

“Almost,” she said.

They talked until midnight and slept late the following morning. The peas didn't get planted, the cabbage plants weren't put out. After lunch they walked in the woods, searching for the first dogwood blossoms. Returning slowly through the back pasture near the creek, they found a small orange intruder, brought down by random winds and deflected cold fronts, caught in the lower branches of a young persimmon tree. Haven Wilson thought it was a hunter's cap, Nick Straus a meteorological device. It was neither. It was a schoolboy's balloon, trailing a length of cotton cord to which was attached a small crude card, sealed in plastic. They read it together, standing on the stone outcropping. The fifth-grade printing on the card read:

My name is Mark Parsons. I am doing a science experiment.

Please send me the following information:

1. Where did you find the balloon?

2. When did you find the balloon?

3. Who are you?

Fifth Grade, Taylor Elementary School Roaring Springs, Pa
.

In certain parts of America, fifth-grade science was another kind of innocence, Betsy reminded them. Nick, accustomed to the deciphering of other trajectories these days, was still looking at the card, moved. So was Ida.

“We'll have to answer it,” Nick insisted, lifting his eyes.

“Please do,” Betsy said, as if not surprised it had been there at all.

“If I didn't know you better, I'd say that came out of your own seventh-grade science class,” Haven said after the Strauses had driven away, the balloon on Ida's lap.

She laughed and they walked back toward the house. The light was fading, but she didn't want to leave, not yet. They still had a few minutes left to them, time enough to count the ducks coming in to the rear pond.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 1980 by W. T. Tyler

ISBN: 978-1-4976-9702-7

Distributed by Open Road Distribution

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