The 45th, page 19
He looked at Rachel with the sympathy of one who shares in her confusion. Leaning back, his arms dangling over the sides of the chair, his silent laughter echoed soundless in the narrow, high-ceilinged room.
“‘Julian taught his teachers.’ It is a line from a Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, written in the fourth century to describe that other Julian, emperor of Rome for less than two years. ‘Julian the Apostate,’ as he used to be called.” He turned to Rachel, a strange secret in his bright, incandescent eyes. “It’s who his father named him after. His father - do you know this? - taught history, ancient history, at Michigan for years. I think he and Julian were close.”
Rachel thanked him for his time and got up to leave.
“Will he win?” asked The Great Walsh. “Could we really be that lucky?”
There was only one person left to see, the girl - the woman now - Julian had supposedly been in love with, a girl, from what Rachel had been told, who had been every bit as bright as Julian. Rachel’s first attempt to reach her had been a failure. Joli Wharton had nothing to say about Julian Drake and had no desire to talk to a reporter, whether from the New York Times or any other paper. That had been the whole of their telephone conversation. She had been polite but her refusal had been final and emphatic. Her refusal suggested to Rachel Good that there was a better story there than she first had thought. What was the reason, what was it that after all these years Joli Wharton still wanted to keep secret? Rachel caught an afternoon flight to Chicago.
The cab pulled up in front of the University of Chicago Hospital. Rachel told the receptionist that she was a reporter for the New York Times, there for a meeting with Dr. Wharton. Her credentials as a reporter were obviously in order; her manner, which she had learned to use with effect, suggested a woman in a hurry without any time to lose. The receptionist gave her directions to Dr. Wharton’s office and sent her on her way.
Steeling herself against the protest she fully expected to receive, Rachel knocked on the door.
“I know you said you didn’t want…,” she began as the door swung open. A woman, tall and willowy with striking almond-shaped eyes, was looking at her, starting to laugh.
“You’re the reporter, the one who wants to talk to me about Julian, and, from the look on your face, no one told you. That says something good about us, doesn’t it?” she asked in a dark, silky voice.
“No one told me…?”
“That I’m black. What else did you think? But, please, as long as you came all this way, come in, come in.”
Wearing the white coat of a physician, Joli Wharton looked every inch the dedicated doctor. If she was a little heavier than when she had known Julian, she was still remarkably fit and, with cheekbones the envy of a fashion model and tight, glistening skin the color of ebony and bronze, still remarkably beautiful. She got right to the point.
“I didn’t want to talk to you because while no one thought anything of the fact that Julian was white and I was black when we were in school, and together, there are still a lot of people out there who would use it, or try to use it, against him now. The same ones, the ‘birthers,’ who fantasize that Obama was born somewhere else and isn’t a citizen. But you’re here, and you have been told that Julian and I were once a couple. And that’s all you’re going to know,” she added, inviting Rachel to sit down.
In addition to a desk and chair, her office was furnished with a small sofa, two light blue easy chairs and a coffee table. The walls were covered with pictures and diplomas. On a shelf at right angles to her desk was a framed photograph of two young women in their early twenties and a younger, teenage, boy.
“I’m married, have a wonderful husband - he’s also a physician - and three great children. I haven’t seen Julian in it must be nearly twenty-five years. There is nothing I can tell you. I’m not part of his story.”
Rachel set her handbag next to her on the sofa. She gazed one more time at the pictures on the wall, pictures mainly of Dr. Wharton with her family, pictures taken at different places in the world, vacations, travel, the occasional escapes with her husband and children from the taxing responsibilities of medicine.
“Not part of the story,” she replied, as her gaze came to back to Jodi Wharton sitting quiet and cautiously expectant on the edge of the easy chair the other side of the coffee table. “You may be the most important part.”
She reached inside her handbag for her notebook, chancing that she could ease her way into an interview. Wharton shook her head.
“I won’t talk to you at all, on the record. I won’t tell you anything about Julian or anything else, unless you agree not to use it.”
Her soft eyes had a distant, wistful look. There were things she remembered that still had a value. She waited for Rachel to say whether she would agree to her conditions and, as Rachel immediately understood, hoped she would. She wanted to talk about Julian, and, if not desperate to do so, would have been disappointed if she could not. Rachel shoved the notebook back in her bag.
“I’m trying to write a background piece, a biography, something that will give everyone a better idea what he is like, who he really is. I covered him a little when he was in Congress. I’ve known Louis Matson for almost forty years; I knew he asked Julian to write a speech. I had not known - no one other than Louis had ever known - why, twelve years ago, he had suddenly withdrawn from a senate race he was almost certain to win.”
“His sister,” said Joli Wharton, staring straight ahead. “Her husband murdered her, and then killed himself.”
“Her husband…? Then you were in touch?” she asked simply.
“A few times,” she explained reluctantly. “After what happened to his sister, he called. A few other times. He always knew he could talk to me. We had been close once; I don’t think he was ever close with anyone quite like that again.”
“He was in love with you; you were in love with him.”
“Oh, I was in love with him all right, really in love with him,” replied Jolie with a strange, rueful smile. “You know how we met?” she asked, looking at Rachel with the kind of excitement the memory of it still produced. “I was in my first year of medical school here, at Chicago; he was in his first year of law school. It was late in the afternoon, at the end of November, just before Thanksgiving. I was walking down a long hallway from the library. There was a place there I liked to study. There was no one around, and then, suddenly, from around the corner, Julian appeared. I was wearing a long, dark blue coat that came down to my ankles, and I wore my hair up and I had on one of those wool hats that covers your head down to your ears. And Julian steps right in front of me and with those blue smiling eyes of his asks me in all seriousness whether I am Tahitian! I’m not very dark, and my eyes had a certain shape, and he thought I must be Polynesian. So of course I had to give him a practiced look of complete indifference - I thought my heart was going to thump right out of my chest, - and said that yes, of course I was, as any fool could tell, and that I had swum all the way across the ocean because the weather was so much nicer in Chicago. He did not bat an eye. He just looked at me and said, ‘I’m glad you made it. Would you like to go for coffee?’ And we did. And, yes, I fell in love with him and it took all of about five minutes. But no, Julian never fell in love with me. Julian has never been in love, really in love, with anyone. I’m probably as close as he ever got. Haven’t you figured him out yet? Don’t you understand? Nothing was ever enough for him, nothing will ever be enough for him. I don’t mean what you probably think I mean. Julian wasn’t one of those guys who doesn’t fall in love because he always has to have something, or someone, new. He isn’t - he never was - someone who has to have everything; wealth, power, fame, reputation. He wanted more than that - or less.”
She drew her hand over her mouth, wondering how to explain to someone who had not known Julian then what he had been like.
“I loved medical school, everything about it: the long hours, the endless study. I was going to be a doctor; there was never any doubt in my mind what I wanted to do. Julian hated law school. He did not want to be a lawyer; he had no interest - only contempt - for the idea of joining some firm where everyone is a specialist and the only thing important is how many billable hours you have each year.”
“Then why…?”
“He had to do something, and a law degree lets you do a lot of things. He did not know what he wanted to do - except study. He came to Chicago as a law student, but he spent half his time the other side of the street, the other side of the Midway, sitting in on classes - graduate seminars in history, politics, philosophy, whatever he thought might be interesting, whatever he thought might teach him something worth knowing. He seldom went more than once or twice. Nothing, or almost nothing, was ever what he was looking for. Almost nothing, because he did find someone who taught political philosophy, a professor who had been here for years. I’ve forgotten his name, but Julian thought he was the only real scholar, the only one with something serious to teach. This is the University of Chicago!” she said with a sudden, irresistible laugh. “And Julian thought there was only one teacher here worth listening to! He was probably right,” she added, shaking her head, “but I couldn’t tell you why. Only Julian could do that.”
“You were in love with him, and…?”
A subtle smile creased the corners of Joli Wharton’s full mouth.
“You’re wondering, because of what I said - that I didn’t think he had ever fallen in love with anyone; you’re wondering, because he never married, whether…? No, that much I can tell you. He had more passion than anyone I had ever known. But then, when it was over, it wasn’t that he regretted what we had just done; he didn’t feel guilty, or think we should have waited; nothing like that. And it wasn’t like some one-night stand where all the guy wanted was to get you into bed and once he had you could not wait to get away. Julian and I practically lived together, at least for a while.”
She studied Rachel for a moment, trying to decide whether she had said enough. Rachel did not try to argue the point, and, more importantly, had the face of an older woman who could keep a confidence. Jolie Wharton had never talked about Julian with anyone, and now she wanted to tell everything. Nothing she said would find its way into print, but it might give a greater depth, a sense of understanding, to the story that, with or without her help, was going to be written.
“We would make love, and it was all-consuming, the kind you read about in novels: the earth moves, you can’t - you couldn’t - stop if your life depended on it; and then, when it was over, Julian thought of other things. It might be ten at night, it might be three in the morning, it didn’t matter. He would kiss me, tell me I should get some sleep, and then, before I knew it, he was out of bed, back at his desk, studying, but never any law book, never anything for class, always something deeper, more profound, ancient history or philosophy, something that suddenly he had to get back to. There is more to it than this. Even if we had not made love, even if he was back at his place, sleeping alone, however late it was before he finally slept, he did not sleep for more than three or four hours. Every morning, he was up by four-thirty, leaning on both elbows, his head bent down over an open page of Aristotle or Plato, or Hegel or Heidegger, something only he thought important.”
Joli Wharton folded her arms and stared across the room to the windows that looked out across to the gray buildings in the quadrangle, the old vaulted library with windows like cathedral glass and tarnished electric light chandeliers that provided as little illumination as the candles in a medieval monastery, the library where, if she had not liked to study there, she might never have met Julian.
“Julian was not meant for this century,” she said finally, her gaze still on the window and what she saw there of her own distant past. “The world is too small. He should have been born in ancient Rome or Athens, when everything seemed possible, before everyone was thought to be happy and content with a well paying speciality, doing the same thing over and over again every day. I told you that I was in love with him,” she said, turning slowly back to Rachel Good. “Which was the reason I said no when he asked me to marry him.”
“He asked you to…? And you said…?”
“It is what I said before: I was in love with him; he wasn’t in love with me. He asked me to marry him. It was something he thought he should do. No, it wasn’t that. I wasn’t pregnant. Julian was always preoccupied with the question that hardly anyone ever asks themselves: how he should live. Not what he should do, how he should make a living, what kind of occupation. He asked me to marry him, and it was like finding yourself in the middle of a problem in geometry, part of a possible solution; not a number, but close enough. There was always passion with Julian, but there was never romance.” She paused, as if she were suddenly not sure, or rather, that suddenly she was. “No, that isn’t right. Julian was full of romance, but not the kind that involves another person. He was not in love with me; he was in love with all these dreams of his own, the things he thought worth doing, things he thought could not happen anymore. He read Homer and imagined himself Achilles; he read Seven Pillars of Wisdom - read it more than once - and wished he could have been Lawrence of Arabia. You should have seen him when he talked about what it must have been like, living when things like that were possible, the way his eyes seemed to take in all the world, the excitement he felt. I used to tease him, call him my Don Quixote, but he was more serious than that. He understood the way the world had changed, understood it and kept trying to find a way to bring it back, make the world what it used to be before everything got mechanized and everyone wanted to think the same way as everyone else. It used to make him a little crazy, how everyone seemed to think everything had gotten so much better, that science and technology had made a better life for everyone. He thought we were all insane. And the thing was, when I was with him, listening to the way he talked about the future and the past, I agreed with him. And to tell you the truth,” she added in a voice softening into laughter, “I still do. Maybe I should have married Julian. After all, who knows? But I didn’t, and it was all because I thought in my youthful ignorance that he lived so much in his own mind, had so many dreams, romantic dreams, of what he wanted to do, that if I married him he wouldn’t stay with me, stay with me when I became a doctor and had to stay in one place, that he would not be able to live with that sense of confinement, that limit, that limit of time and place on what he could, on a sudden, decide he had to do. I was a fool for that. Don’t misunderstand,” said Jolie Wharton, her eyes shining with the memory of what had not happened, the bittersweet nostalgia for a life she had not had. “I love my husband, but….There was never anyone like Julian.”
Chapter Fourteen
Leaning back in his chair, his hands locked together behind his balding head, Hobart Williams nodded thoughtfully. He was not without sympathy for Rachel Good’s dilemma.
“You’re right; you can’t use what she told you. Everything she told you was in confidence. Hell, you can’t even use most of what she said. You know the rules. But you can still use what you learned from her about what he was like: young, driven, with dreams of his own; someone who did not know what he wanted to do, someone who - and you can use this - ‘should have been born in a different century’ - not the phrase, not the quote, but the general observation, this sense - and she was not the only one to have it - that he had his own way of looking at the past. Sure. Why not? It’s what he said in that speech of his - going back to what conservatism used to mean. I mean, look, it’s a start. We wanted a profile, what Julian Drake did before he became the only person anyone seems to want to talk about, what he was like, who he really is, who -”
“Who he really is?” exclaimed Rachel with a doubting laugh. She sat sideways on the chair in front of Hobart Williams’ desk, her left arm slung over the back of it. She could not count the number of times she had sat in that same chair, going over whatever she had been able to discover in whatever story she had been asked to cover. But this time felt different. There was more at stake.
“It’s been three weeks since the convention,” said Hobart, shrugging his shoulders in a gesture of his own confusion, “and with every poll that comes out he increases his lead. I just got the results of the latest one we’ve done. It’ll be the lead story in tomorrow’s edition. He’s at damn near sixty percent! Three weeks ago no one had ever heard of him, and now he’s running better than anyone since - I don’t know - LBJ against Goldwater in ’64, Nixon against McGovern in ’72? You weren’t at his press conference, the one in D.C. The television ratings went through the roof! The son of a bitch has changed everything. He was right: he doesn’t have to campaign the way everyone else has done; he doesn’t have to go anywhere to get an audience; he doesn’t have to stage events. All he has to do is announce a speech or a press conference and everyone stops whatever else they’re doing to watch.”
Hobart stared out the window down the glass canyons of a New York street. The soft, pudgy fingers of his left hand beat a slow, steady rhythm on the padded arm of his cream colored upholstered chair.
“How many times were we told, when we were young reporters; how many times have I repeated the same thing, given the same advice since I became an editor: ‘follow the money.’ It always made sense; it was always a good place to start. Greed, ambition - they were always joined at the hip.”
Turning away from the window, he reached for the cup of coffee he had not touched in hours and, too caught up in what he was thinking, did not notice it had gone cold. He took a sip, put it down and searched Rachel’s eyes as if she must by now have discovered the answer to a question he had not yet asked.
“The money,” he said, as if to remind her what was in his mind. “The guy doesn’t have any. He has enough of his own, I guess, to get from place to place. He doesn’t have any campaign money. He isn’t taking the public money he could have used; he isn’t raising - he won’t accept - any money from anyone else. Okay, when it comes to money he’s like Caesar’s wife - above suspicion. Or is he? Is this all some kind of massive fraud?”
