The Shadow Cabinet (7 page)

Waiting for them in the rear parking lot was the boy Wilson had seen skulking between the Audis and BMWs upon his arrival.

“I was wondering where you was sulking at,” said Mrs. Fillmore, her parental tone less friendly than the girlish chatter that had accompanied them down the stairs. She'd told Wilson she was from Arkansas and was a beautician.

A faint red splash illuminated the boy's cheek. At closer range, Wilson saw ghostly fingers from a powerful hand still outlined against the left side of his face.

“I was waitin'.”

“Mr. Wilson, this here is my boy Willard.”

“Hello, Willard.” The name echoed familiarly in Wilson's mind.

“I guess you heard that name before,” Mrs. Fillmore said. “Say hello to Mr. Wilson, Willard.”

“Hello, Mr. Wilson,” Willard said without enthusiasm. The small insect eyes were still stung unnaturally bright.

“I think I know the name,” Wilson acknowledged sympathetically. Willard's brightness hardened visibly.

“Well, it wasn't all my doin',” Mrs. Fillmore admitted philosophically. Her brown purse was shoved under one heavy arm as she pulled on her gloves. A filter-tip cigarette was clamped in the side of her mouth. “That boy's a handful, I don't mind telling you, a heavy burden, an' it's not just the name that does the tormentin'.” Wilson held the rear door open and Mrs. Fillmore backed in, found the rear seat, settled back for a moment, then lifted her heavy ankles around. “We're not kin, if that's what you're thinking, Mr. Wilson,” she confided as they drove out of the parking lot. Willard Fillmore, next to Wilson in the front seat, small shoulders erect, sat alert on the edge of the seat as if being in front were a rare privilege. “Wouldn't that be something?” his mother added in a girlish aside to her suspicious blond companion. “Being in Wash'n'ton an' being kin to President Millard Fillmore?”

“Ha ha,” Willard said.

There was a momentary delay from the rear seat as Mrs. Fillmore gathered her ordnance together. Leather creaked and an instant later Willard Fillmore took a salvo in the back of the head, delivered by a purse swung by its strap. “Don't smart-talk me, mister,” his mother warned. “I done told you—I had enough.”

“I heard tell of stranger things,” replied her companion fatalistically.

“Tell Mr. Wilson what President he was, Willard,” Mrs. Fillmore commanded.

“The thirteenth President,” Willard answered expertly, “only his name was Millard.” He turned to watch Wilson suspiciously.

“Was he Republican or Demo—”

“There wasn't no Republicans in them old days,” Willard said, the hostile eyes still fastened to Wilson's face, awaiting his reaction.

“He's sure got it learned by heart, don't he, Mr. Wilson?” Mrs. Fillmore called in her loud beautician's voice, the one she used for talking to a customer under a hair dryer five chairs away. “We was on Okinawa when Millard was born.”

“Willard,” her son said immediately. “My name's Willard.”

“Willard. Did I say Millard? Lordy, I done forgot what I said. There I go again.” Mrs. Fillmore chuckled, but Willard's expression didn't change. “Anyway, like I was saying, we was on Okinawa when Willard was born and the names kinda went nice together, you know, the way they do sometimes, bein' on the tip of your tongue that way, like Sears Roebuck.…”

Wilson also heard Willard's whispered voice from alongside, a seditious undertow attempting to drag him away from these backseat humiliations: “
Where'd you get this car, sucker?
”

“… an' then when my husband Albert decided they just went together, that was that. So we named him Willard Fillmore, right there on Okinawa, not knowing all the time it was Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth President of the United States, we was thinking about all that time, something we clean forgot, me an' Albert both.”

Mrs. Fillmore laughed. “
You're a loser,
” Willard was whispering, “
same as this here car.
”

“… an' so we just had the birth certificate made up like that, right on Okinawa, right at the base hospital—Willard Fillmore.”

“Them Japs don't know nothing,” her companion said truculently.

“… an' it wasn't till we got back stateside that someone in the PX nursery school told me it wasn't Willard I'd been thinking on at all back on Okinawa, but Millard—Millard Fillmore. Don't that beat all, Mr. Wilson? I wisht I'd knowed my history better, don't you? You ever lived overseas, Mr. Wilson?” Her voice drew closer as she held her cigarette out. “Here, pinch that out the winder for me, would you, son?”

“Yes, m'am.”

Wilson opened the dashboard ashtray but Willard ignored it and pretended to blow lusty smoke rings for the benefit of a passing gray-haired motorist, who immediately fixed her sharp censorious eye upon Wilson. After she'd slid by, Willard quickly cranked down the glass and let fly with the butt aimed at her rear window.

Mrs. Fillmore didn't notice. “Willard's my little computer,” she was saying. “He can beat his daddy at Atari, and Albert's a missile ordnance man. Totes up a Piggly Wiggly bill faster'n IBM, don't you, son?”

“Yes, m'am.”

“It's not addin' them bills up that worries me,” said her thin companion. “It's payin' 'em.”

“He can add up a license plate quicker'n you can read him out the numbers. Show Mr. Wilson, hon.” She leaned over the front seat, pointing through the windshield. “What's that car up ahead say?”

“Which one?” Willard sat alertly on the edge of his seat, like a dove hunter at the edge of a cornfield.

“The van.”

“That's not no van, it's a combie.”

A sharp knuckle cracked the skull above the right ear. “All right, but what's it say, dummy?”

“Four hundred and eleven one way, twenty-four the other.”

The Virginia license plate read
327-84
. Wilson frowned, trying to interpret Willard's calculus sets.

“You see? You see what I'm telling you, Mr. Wilson?” Mrs. Fillmore sat back, gratified.

“Three hundred and twenty-seven plus eighty-four is four hundred and eleven,” Willard explained. “Three and two plus seven is twelve. Add eight and four and see what you get, sucker.” He turned to the backseat to look at his mother. “He's moving his lips, same as you an' Albert do.”

“Faster'n an IBM, ain't he, Mr. Wilson? He did that all the way from Oklahoma to Nashville, where we throwed a rod. Laid over for three days, but it wasn't too bad. You ever been to the Grand Ole Opry, Mr. Wilson?”

Wilson admitted he hadn't.

“You ever seen the President?” Willard asked.

“No, not much. He doesn't call me into the Oval Office much these days.” It was the kind of reply he might have given his own sons over the breakfast table years earlier, but Willard was insulted.

“Tell me something I don't know, sucker,” he whispered vehemently. “Who'd ever think I was talking about you being in the White House?”

“What's that you're saying, Willard?” Mrs. Fillmore demanded from the backseat, her Arkansas drawl full of heavy metal, threatening retribution.

“We were just talking,” Wilson explained, conscious of Willard's shrinking head and shoulders. With two sons out of college and out of his tool chest, his sock drawer, his tie rack, and his bank account, he had little patience with someone else's gamy little problems, but the error had been his, not Willard Fillmore's.

Mrs. Polk was waiting for them in front of her house.

“Now you say goodbye to Mr. Wilson,” Mrs. Fillmore instructed as she left the rear seat, turning to her son, who still hovered near the front door he'd slammed closed with all of his rebellious strength.

“Yes, m'am,” Willard said eagerly. Sedition was in the bright little eyes and some NCO club slur was forming itself in the quick little mind, but then his mother moved in suspiciously behind him, brought back by the false octave in her son's enthusiastic reply, and he seemed to change his mind. “Goodbye, Mr. Wilson,” he said, and sped off like a scalded cat toward Mrs. Polk's new bronze station wagon.

“That boy's a handful,” Mrs. Fillmore declared, retrieving the yarn cap from the front seat. “This here traveling around has got him all jarred loose.”

“I suppose so,” Wilson said, trying to ignore the small denim-clad rear end that was so energetically mooning him from the back window of Mrs. Polk's station wagon.

4.

Ed Donlon was only half Irish, but he had a certain Irish charm which many women found seductive. He was a prodigious drinker, raconteur, and philanderer, could quote Yeats and more obscure voices by the hour, especially when he was in his cups, and had a sexual vitality that neither alcohol nor advancing middle age seemed to have dulled. He'd grown up in a sedate Victorian house in Trenton, New Jersey, surrounded by maiden aunts, grandmothers, and older sisters, he and his father, a patent lawyer, the prisoners of a spinsterish sisterhood he wasn't to escape until he was sent off to Princeton at seventeen. He'd been taking his revenge ever since, he'd once told Haven Wilson. They'd known each other for years. Both had been lawyers together at the Justice Department, both in the criminal division, where they'd shared an office. Donlon had moved on to the Agency as deputy counsel and had ended his government career as an assistant secretary of defense. He'd attempted to persuade Haven Wilson to join him at the Pentagon as his senior deputy, but Wilson had remained on the Hill, more interested in returning eventually to a senior position at Justice. In the late seventies, Donlon had left the Pentagon after a policy dispute and joined a small but prestigious Washington law firm. Wilson had the impression that he didn't work very hard, kept comfortable hours, and had been drinking and whoring even more voraciously since his wife had left him.

It was a little before one o'clock as Haven Wilson climbed into the front seat of Donlon's BMW 2002 and the two men drove out through Fairfax into the Virginia countryside. Donlon was dressed for the country in gray flannels, a tweed hacking jacket with elbow patches, and red-soled walking shoes. Only the ascot was missing. He was smaller and a few years older than Wilson, but his thinning chestnut hair was barely touched by gray and his fair-skinned, robust face was uncreased by worry. In his company, Wilson sometimes felt as dull as the paint on a bus-station door.

The rain had vanished and the wind had grown colder. The gunmetal sky held the first premonition of winter. On the way out, Wilson mentioned the problems he'd been having with the California woman who wanted to buy Grace Ramsey's house. Ed Donlon was her lawyer, Grace Ramsey the best friend and former college roommate of Donlon's wife, Jane. But Donlon had washed his hands of it once he'd turned the house over to the Virginia brokerage.

“She doesn't care about money, I'm not going to talk to her about money, her New York lawyers won't talk about money, and that's all there is to it,” he said. “I don't care about these people from California, she doesn't care about these people from California, and if they won't meet her price for the house, then she doesn't care. She didn't put the price on the house, a broker did, and it took me six months to get her to agree to put it on the market. Grace is strange, flaky. She floats around in a world of her own. Too much money, which is maybe why George drank himself to death.”

The road narrowed to a single lane and they drove past rolling unkempt fields and abandoned farms, ruined silos and tumbled barns awaiting the developer's bulldozer.

“This California woman wants to talk to her,” Wilson persisted.

“Grace won't talk to her.”

“To you, then.”

“I won't talk to her. If I talk to her, I'll have to talk to Grace, and I'm not going to talk to Grace about money. I'll talk to her about religion, poetry, buggery, whatever, but not about money. Never.”

“So what am I supposed to tell these California people?”

“What you've been telling them. Listen, Grace stayed with us in Georgetown for two months after George died—two goddamn months. It was like living with someone out of
Midsummer Night's Dream
, Jane used to say. Then she left this painting behind. You know what it was? A bloody Matisse; I'm not kidding. For the house, she said—for the room and the house. It belongs there. When George was drying out in North Carolina a couple of years before that, she stayed with us for six weeks. Six weeks. That's when I learned—she won't talk about money, doesn't know anything about money, and doesn't care anything about money. For her, it doesn't exist. So after George died, that house sat empty up there on the Potomac because she refused to think about that house and money—for three goddamn years. So her New York lawyer and I finally got her to sit down and talk about that empty house. It was like a séance, a séance with a Ouija board—that's the way that New York lawyer and I had to talk to her. She wasn't even there in the same room with us. You don't understand what I'm saying, do you?”

“No,” Wilson admitted.

“Well, you won't—not until you meet her. She doesn't live in our world.…”

The landscape had changed. The fields were cultivated and the pastures closely grazed within board and stone fences. Old stone and brick houses, circa 1780, lay within boxwoods and azaleas at the end of oak- and cedar-lined lanes.

They had lunch in Middleburg, at a stone inn off the main street. The cellar restaurant was darkly paneled under a beamed ceiling, like a rathskeller, but the old pine tables, the copperware, and the hand-painted hostelry and ironmonger signs were early American. In the rear, a few tables and booths were arranged around an old brick fireplace where a few logs smoked without flame, but the room was acrid with unventilated kitchen smells and they returned to the front room, where a tall young woman showed them to a table. She didn't look like a rural waitress and Donlon noticed her immediately. She wore a cardigan, a flannel skirt, and boat moccasins; her dark hair was tied in pigtails.