The 45th, page 3
“A sudden stampede to a third candidate? I doubt the convention would turn to someone who was not able to win in the primaries. That isn’t to say that they were not all fine candidates, but the fact is they lost, and -”
“Lincoln lost his senate race, two years before he became president!” someone yelled, to the great enjoyment of the crowd.
“Yes, and if he were still around I’m sure the convention would nominate him again!”
“Are your sure?” asked Rachael Good. “Are you really sure of that?”
The press conference was over, but Rachael Good lingered behind while the other reporters began to move away, down the long dimly lit marble corridor. The network technicians went about their business, dismantling the television lights. Louis Matson leaned against the doorway at the front entrance of his office, talking quietly with Ismael Cooper.
“You promised me a private interview,” Rachael Good reminded him.
“I did, didn’t I?” replied Matson. A brief, slightly embarrassed grin told her he had forgotten all about it.
“Actually, you promised me dinner,” she said, with a look of mischief she knew would bring a reaction.
“I never promised that. I asked – first time I saw you, thirty some years ago. Promised? How could I promise what you refused?”
Her green, limpid eyes began to dance with the antic memory of time, of youth not so much misspent as misunderstood, the past reinterpreted through the veil of thirty years. What had once been her unknown future had become her history.
“I would have said yes, if you had asked again; and – remember? – you promised that you would.”
He was seeing the same thing she was, what had happened when they were both much younger, but from a different perspective, a different side, as it were, of the same picture. He did not know what he looked like then – he had never been all that conscious of himself – but he remembered how she looked, how ,that first time he had seen her, she had taken his breath away.
“I never promised you that; I promised myself – someday, if I ever thought I might have a chance.” Then, somehow, he knew, and his aging, tired eyes brightened with the certain knowledge that, like other beautiful women, she had never doubted who she was and the effect she had. “You always assumed – didn’t you? – that anytime you said no to someone the only question – the only real question – was how long before they asked again.”
“If you had asked a second time, I would have said yes,” she told him again.
“If I had asked a second time that would have just given you another reason to say no.”
“Another reason?” she asked, tossing her head in the schoolgirl way that instead of something remembered had once been second nature.
“Insufficient pride.”
“Bury your pride. You owe me an interview. You may have forgotten, but you absolutely promised that.”
“Yes, I did; but I can’t do it right now. There are some other things I have to take care of first. So why don’t we meet somewhere in Georgetown around eight?”
“For dinner?” she asked, raising her eyebrows with the kind of eager anticipation she might have shown had he ever asked again, the time that had never happened because she had been too beautiful and he had too much pride, and too much fear of another refusal.
Matson had not lied when he told Rachael Good that he had other things he had to do, but lying is not the only way not to tell the truth. There was only one thing he had to do, and despite the impression he had left her with, it had nothing to do with the senate and nothing to do with presidential politics. He had an appointment with his physician.
A little after six, he left the Russell Senate Office Building and caught a cab for the short ride to a building on L Street, just a few blocks from the White House, where his doctor, Estelle Steinberg, had her office. She always scheduled his appointment for the end of the day after everyone had gone. This had never been discussed. Dr. Steinberg understood the need for discretion. Matson let himself in through the doctor’s private entrance.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, as she pressed a stethoscope to his chest.
He sat on the end of the examining table, his shirt unbuttoned, taking, at her direction, one deep breath after another.
“About the same. A little dizzy at times, mainly when I first get up in the morning. Sometimes if I get up from a chair a little too quickly.”
She put the stethoscope away and gave him a long, serious look. With her steel gray hair pulled straight back and her pale blue eyes, she had a way of making him feel that, though she was ten years younger, she was somehow older and more experienced.
“You should be home, resting; you can’t keep on the way you do. You remain in the senate and….” She said this with a stern expression that just below the surface was as warm and sympathetic as anything he had known.
“It’s the damndest thing. You talk to me like you’re my mother, and you’re almost young enough to be my daughter.”
“What’s the difference? Mother, daughter – anyone who cares about you would tell you you were crazy.”
“It’s usually the people who don’t care about me who say that.”
Dr. Steinberg raised an eyebrow, taking his point. She sat down on the only chair in the narrow examining room.
“You’re seventy four years old,” she said in a slow, methodical voice. “You have cancer. We can keep you comfortable and alive for -”
“Two, maybe three years. Yes, I know,” he said, immediately sorry for the sudden rush of anger that had come unbidden into his voice. With a quick glance of apology, he added, “I know I’m dying. If I go home and lay down and don’t waste any energy, if I take all the medication I’m supposed to take, I can live – if you can call it that – a few more years. If I don’t do that, if I keep living the same way I have been doing, the time I have left will probably be cut in half. But that really is no choice at all, is it?” He searched her sympathetic eyes with the certainty of an agreed upon fact. “You wouldn’t give up medicine – go home, lay in bed, waiting for the end to come. Suppose you had a chance to find a cure for something, but you were told that if you didn’t stop, if you didn’t give it up, you would be dead in a year instead of two or three. The question answers itself, doesn’t it?”
Dr. Steinberg nodded slowly in apparent agreement. The lines in her high white forehead deepened.
“And is that what you have a chance to do? In the next year, find a cure for something?” Her voice had a sad, distant quality, the gentle weariness that comes with the knowledge that there is nothing more to do, nothing that will make any real difference in what fate or fortune, or whatever you want to call it, has determined. Louis Matson was going to die, and medicine had no answer for that.
“A cure? I doubt it. But I may have a chance to do something so that things don’t get any worse.” He glanced out the window where, in the distance, part of the White House was visible. “When I was a kid in college and Kennedy was running for president – it was right at the end of the campaign – he came to Ann Arbor and gave a speech outside the student union. It was close to midnight when he got there and it was cold, freezing. There were thousands of us waiting. We had been there for hours and no one had left. I had not decided yet whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. It did not matter. When he spoke I never felt better in my life. And I never felt that way again. When he died – and I am of the generation that no matter what happened to us later never forgot exactly where we were, exactly what we were doing, the moment we first heard that Kennedy had been shot – when he died it was as if something had gone missing in our lives, something nothing, that no one, could ever replace. And we were right - nothing ever has. If I could do anything to bring back that sense of hope, the belief we had that we were a great country, that we could do anything if we put our minds to it….What if I could do that, if I could help do that – I probably can’t; it’s probably too late, but still, what choice do I have? Why bother to live at all, even a year, except to try. There are worse things than failure.”
Estelle Steinberg gave him a prescription for something to help with the pain, something stronger than what she had given him before.
“My father died when he was almost ninety. He should have died six months sooner. He did not want to live anymore. They had him all doped up on morphine. What is the point of it? I’ll use what you give me, but only if it doesn’t cloud my brain. You have to promise me that, promise that you won’t give me anything that won’t let me function the way I should.”
“No, I promise I won’t. But the pain will only get worse, and then….”
“And then I’ll do something about it.” He began to button his shirt. He noticed his mottled, wrinkled skin and the way it fell loose around his ample waist. “I’m seventy four and I never think of myself as old. Is that common? Do all of us think that getting old only happens to other people? I know I’m dying, I know there is nothing you or anyone can do, and the truth of it is I still think I’m the same kid who stood out in the cold night air in Ann Arbor listening to JFK. Some mornings I wake up and worry I might be late for class.”
Estelle Steinberg scratched the side of her face and smiled.
“I had a patient some years ago who got up every morning and made breakfast for his wife. She had been dead for almost five years. They had been married for almost fifty years before she died. Why wouldn’t he think of her as if nothing had changed? She was all he had ever had, all he had ever wanted. You wanted something else, and from what you told me you still do. Consider yourself fortunate. You want something serious, something worth leaving behind.”
Chapter Three
Louis Matson liked riding through the city at night. The massive tan stone buildings that lined the broad avenues had an even more majestic look, especially in the sultry heat of summer, illuminated in the shadows, than they did in the harsh light of day. There was a sense of purpose, a sense of power that made it somehow different from what he experienced in cities in which soulless steel skyscrapers crowded life into narrow streets and vacant glass walled spaces. Paris, London, and Rome were the only other cities of importance that had kept intact a sense of great accomplishment, of a history worth remembering, instead of this modern obsession with mere technical achievement. Four cities, four capitals, and, at different times, four empires, each of which had for a while dominated the world. And all of them, Matson reminded himself, empires that had fallen victim to their own arrogance and ambition, and, more than that, the belief that after all they had done, all the sacrifices they had made to acquire what they had, nothing like the same effort was required to keep what they had gained. If there were only some way he could make everyone see that, see it before it was too late, then his life might be worth something after all.
The taxi pulled up outside the Georgetown restaurant where he was to meet Rachael Good. The well-lit street was full of people, young couples, some with small children, going nowhere in particular, a summer evening stroll after what for many of them had been a long day working in an executive office or on Capitol Hill. Matson recognized a few of them, and nearly everyone recognized him. He was used it, the sudden looks, the quick whispered conversations in which someone told someone else that he was there. It was not vanity, and it certainly was not because he especially liked to draw attention to himself, but the constant notice, the fact that everywhere he went in Washington he was always recognized made him feel, not so much important, as useful. The look in their eyes meant that he still had a connection with the unknown future, that any attempt to anticipate what would happen next in the world of politics had to take him into account. Estelle Steinberg had been right: He did want to do something serious, something worth leaving behind; it was just that he had no very clear idea what it should be or how to accomplish it if he had.
The restaurant was full of chatter, full of noise. White jacketed waiters moved like acrobats between the tables, balancing trays of food and drink above diners too absorbed in their own eager analysis of the latest rumors and the latest scandals to notice what was passing just above their heads. Rachel waved to him from a booth in the back corner, and, apologizing each time he bumped into someone’s chair or the back of their shoulder, Matson made his way through the softly lighted room.
He ordered a Manhattan and, when the waiter brought it, greeted it like a long lost friend.
“The best part of the day,” he remarked, as he took a drink.
“Was the day that bad?” asked Rachael.
“The day was good. Better than most,” he added with the show of confidence he could summon on even the worst of days.
Rachael Good reached across the table and gently touched his hand.
“We’ve known each other a long time. How are you – really? You seem a little distracted lately. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“You mean my health - because I had that surgery last year? I’m fine. As a matter of fact, I just saw my doctor – that was one of the things I had to do this afternoon.”
It was a minor deceit, a slightly larcenous evasion, a way of keeping things as they had always been. No one looked at you the same way when they knew that death was waiting just around the corner. You might get sympathy from your family, if you had one, or your friends, if you had any, but the only meaning that death and illness had in Washington was that suddenly there was a new opening, a new opportunity, for someone else.
A look of wistful malice suddenly came into Rachael eyes. She leaned forward on her arms.
“Do you ever think about – her?”
Matson did not understand, and then, a moment later, he knew whom she meant.
“Linda? No, not really; not for a very long time. It was years ago and….Why?”
“And you never thought about re-marriage?”
“No, but why are you…?”
“Because she’s here, and she’s coming over.”
Matson had been married once. He fell in love, or thought he had, because given how easily he had gotten over the divorce he wondered if it had ever been anything more than a temporary infatuation, a passing obsession for a gorgeous young woman. Linda Lattimore was still attractive, but she was no longer young and when men looked at her it was to admire in the faded remnant the beauty that had once been hers.
“Hello, Louis. How are you?” she asked with a glittering, made up smile. Matson wondered if he would have recognized her had they passed each other in the street.
“Fine, just fine. And you?”
She had always managed to make it seem that the moment, whatever the moment was, belonged to her. In a reviewing line at the White House, she had stood in front of the president as if he had passed through the line waiting to see her. The world belonged to Linda Lattimore, she seemed to say with every breath she took, but she had her mind on other things.
“I haven’t seen you since that embassy party two - or was it three? - years ago. Well, good to see you,” she said, and then, without another word, turned and walked away.
“She remembers you at least,” remarked Rachael Good with a wry, impish grin. “We were roommates for almost a year, when we both first arrived in Washington. She had just graduated from someplace in Texas and had a job in the office of a Texas congressman. I had just come down from New York….But of course you remember that. You met her through me.”
“You told me you thought I would like her better. That was your way of saying no when I asked you out.”
“And I was right. You married her.”
Matson took another drink, a long one this time. He arched his eyebrows and laughed.
“I would have thought it proved you wrong. Her father owned half of Texas. How do you think she got that job in the congressman’s office? She was not looking for money; she had all anyone could want of that. She wanted what she did not have; she wanted power. She was young and so damn good looking it hurt to look at her. I was just starting my second term. I had a future. Listen,” he said, as he slowly stirred his drink, “there was a great story Gore Vidal wrote somewhere about a Hollywood actress, so dumb she thought the way to get ahead, the way to get a role in a movie, was to fuck the writer. Linda thought the way to get ahead in Washington was to marry a congressman. What could be dumber than that? But she wasn’t dumb – not like that, anyway. She had a kind of genius, if you take my meaning: an instinct for the main chance. We had not been married a year before she realized that no one threw Georgetown parties for a second term congressman, but everyone fell all over themselves for a senator or a member of the cabinet. Married two years, and six months after the divorce she’s married to Clyde Wilkerson, then a senator from North Carolina – remember him? But Wilkerson was never going to be president so….”
“Another divorce, another marriage. Yes, I know. And look who she is with tonight.”
Rachel nodded toward a table on the other side of the room. Matson followed her gaze, but did not recognize the man his former wife was with.
“You could look at it this way,” continued Rachael. “She had a career like most of the men she married. One term, that is to say one marriage, in the House; then the senate – several terms, as in several marriages; a failed candidacy for the presidency, and now, finally, like nearly everyone who ever held elective office in Washington, a lobbyist. She isn’t married to this one, however. Rumor has it that he prefers someone younger. Now, let’s order dinner and then you can tell me the real story, the truth; not that nonsense you told the press conference. Nothing on the record; I’m not looking for a quote - background only. What do I need to know?”
“The truth?” asked Matson, after they ordered. He finished his drink and felt better for the warmth of it. “You think I know what I’m doing? But someone has to do something, stir things up a little; remind everyone that this isn’t just a question whether Cruz or Trump can win over enough delegates pledged to the other one to get the majority they need. Remind everyone,” he added with sudden emphasis, “that there is no rule that says the nomination has to go to someone just because they finished first or second in the primaries.”
