The 45th, page 30
“No more! You understand me? We’re finished. I’m done with all of it,” he said, as he let loose his grip on the chair and sent it rattling against the table. He started to walk away, but there was something else that had to be said. He leaned close to Angela Murray. “And if I ever hear of anything that even suggests you actually mean to carry out this mindless threat of yours, I won’t wait a minute to tell the White House what you’re planning. You make a threat like that, Rufus here can visit you in prison.”
It was the way she looked at him, the hatred in her eyes, the absence of the slightest sign of conscience, the cold calculation of her own advantage, that sent shivers up his spine. It was not just the loose language of angry frustration: she meant what she said. Julian Drake was a threat to everything she believed, everything she had spent a lifetime trying to achieve. Worse than that, he threatened to change the value of who she was, turn her from a woman whose enormous success was envied and admired into an object of disdain, a woman whose only claim to attention was the kind of wealth Julian Drake would teach everyone to despise.
The ballroom had emptied out, the room full of empty tables and the desolate noise of quick moving part time waiters taking away, an armload at a time, smudged half-empty glasses and dirty dishes with half-eaten dinners. Outside, on the street, bumbled up in cashmere coats and expensive furs, the privileged and the powerful stood with democratic patience waiting for a cab or their private drivers. Inside, in the dark recesses of the hotel bar, dozens of different conversations were going on all at once, all of them, like a jazz concert, variations on a single theme: What was Julian Drake really trying to do? Louis Matson thought it obvious.
“Teaching the country how to think,” he replied when Rachel Good asked what he thought. “The speech at the convention, the inaugural, tonight - Forget the details, forget the things he wants to do. That’s important, extremely important - but it’s the speech itself; not just what he says, but how he says it. He talks about things no one talks about anymore. You know - you’ve heard it often enough - all these witless politicians talking about what ‘history’ requires, what ‘history’ will say - when they know about as much history as the average fourth grader. Julian talks about specific things that happened and the forces set in motion and how they helped shape the world in which we live. He traces - there isn’t anyone alive, not anyone in public life, who could do this - the whole history of human thought; he shows - like he did tonight - how some of the problems we face have been faced before. He ties everything together, makes everyone see - with a clarity they never had before - the reasons for whatever difficulties we have. But the key,” he added, leaning across the small table where the two of them were sitting, “the key to everything about him is that he always speaks as if he were speaking to people who, if anything, know even more than he does. He is teaching a whole generation how to speak, how to reason; he is teaching all of us how to read. And he’s doing it in a way no one seems to notice. Look around you,” he insisted, nodding toward the well-dressed crowd. “What do you think they’re all talking about? - How he is going to screw them out of their money.”
“Can I quote you?” asked Rachel, with the teasing cynicism he could never quite resist.
“Quote me? - I wish you would.” He reached for his glass and after a long, slow drink, suggested she should do more than that. “Tell them, tell your readers, that ‘the senate majority leader insisted that the president’s remarks were long overdue, that is was time someone had the courage to remind everyone that conservative doesn’t mean let the rich get richer and the devil take the rest.’”
Smiling into his glass, Matson took another drink. He became, suddenly, quite serious and even somber. Shoving the glass to the side, he gave Rachel a look that seemed to raise a doubt, a question.
“What?” she asked, reaching across to touch him briefly on his thick heavy hand. “What is it you want to say? You know you can tell me anything.”
“Off the record, just between you and me,” he remarked with an earnest, almost boyish sense of expectation. He did not have to wait to hear her response; he had known her longer than he had known anyone else and trusted her in way he had not trusted anyone else. “I’m leaving the senate, resigning my seat.”
She was shocked. For one of the few times in he life, her emotions got the better of her. The senate was everything for Louis Matson; he had no other life. There could only be one reason he would leave.
“How long…?”
He had not expected this. He had forgotten that his age was more apparent to others than it was to him, and that the first thought anyone would have who heard he was stepping down was that death could not be far away. He started to deny that there was anything wrong, but remembering that she was as good a friend as he had ever had, one of the very few people he really liked, he laughed at how little reason he now had to lie about this or anything. But such are the habits of a lifetime he could not free himself entirely from the long practice of duplicity by which he had for so many years kept himself in power.
“Who knows, a few months, a few years - unless I get hit by a car. I don’t know how much time I have, but I know its time to go - at the end of this year’s session when we all go home for the summer recess. Enough time to get through Congress what Julian wants done.”
A dozen different questions flew into Rachel’s head at once, all of them about the prospects for passage of the radical legislation the president had proposed. Suddenly, none of it seemed important.
“A few months, a few years - that isn’t what you were told, that isn’t the reason you’re going to quit. You haven’t got a few years, have you?”
Louis Matson looked past her to all the bright, shining faces gathered round the bar, cheerful in the ignorance of their own mortality, death still an abstraction, far as yet from becoming personal.
“I’ve had a long run,” he remarked, his eyes still fixed on the crowd. “I’ve nothing to complain about.” A solemn smile on his face, and something, a kind of rare ferocity, in his gaze, he looked again at Rachel. “I gave the country Julian. What more could anyone do than that?”
“What more could anyone do than…? What are you saying, Louis?” asked someone behind him.
He knew who it was before he turned around. The voice was too much like the sound of shattering glass to belong to anyone other than Angela Murray. He tried not to wince.
“Is it true - what I’ve been hearing - that you are doing all you can to get the senate to approve that absurd bill that would open the military to anyone who wants to join, and then pay their way through college?”
“No, it isn’t true,” replied Matson without any change of expression. “Not true at all. I won’t put through the bill without amendment.”
Angela Murray’s sharp chin came up a defiant half-inch. “Amended? - Killed, you mean.”
“Hello, Rufus; I didn’t see you standing there,” said Matson, who remained sitting where he was.
Chambers nodded toward Rachel who smiled back, politely, and as from a distance. All her attention was concentrated on Angela Murray.
“You were saying something about amending the bill,” said Chambers, hoping to keep Angela from saying anything that he, at least, might regret.
“Yes,” drawled Matson. A slight smile made its way among the deep creases at the corner of his mouth. The pensive expression on his face seemed to say that the bill was such a complicated piece of legislation that changes would have to be made. “It involves too many people, too much money. We’re going to have to cut the thing in half. We’re going to limit the program. No men, only women, will be eligible.”
Angela Murray’s mouth fell open. “Only women - what in the….? You’re not-”
“Serious? Sure, why not? Men are always what women want them to be.” He cast a quick, passing, but for all that, disdainful, glance at Chambers. “Don’t you agree, Rufus?” He looked again at Angela. “If you want to change what we think important, change the way the next generation sees the world, what better place to start than with the women, eager to serve their country, willing to sacrifice, women who would rather fight for something important than to think themselves important because of how much money they happen to have. But I see you don’t like the idea,” he said, raising his glass as if to confirm and celebrate an agreement. So, out of respect for your wishes, I’ll withdraw my amendment and do every damn thing I can to pass the bill in the form the president, Julian Drake, first sent it to the Hill.”
Chapter Twenty
“I thought that went well,” remarked Julian, drily. His blue eyes danced to a music of their own as he sat back, clasped his hands behind his neck and stared at the ceiling. “I know why it’s called the Oval Office, but I don’t know why it was built like this in the first place. Do you think it was because someone had the idea that the president is the central figure in the Great Republic, and America is the center of the world? Look at it: nothing ever ends, and everywhere you look a new beginning. Why don’t you ask someone over at the Library of Congress. Someone there should know.”
Ismael Cooper slouched deeper into the cream colored sofa that, along with its opposite twin, sat at a right angle to the president’s desk, the one that had belonged to Theodore Roosevelt, a dozen steps away. He made a mental note to make the call, but not now, tonight, sometime next week after he had taken care of the other hundred things he had to do.
“No, seriously, I thought it went as well as I could have hoped,” insisted Julian, trying hard not to laugh. Ismael just shook his head. “No one booed, - no one hissed; there was no great stampede to the exits.”
“No, you’re right - no one did,” agreed Ismael, with a mocking smile, an attempt to play the critic of a performance in which he found no fault at all. “They were all too astonished to do anything except sit there and wonder if you had completely lost your senses.”
“Everyone else is crazy - why not me?” Moving forward, he planted his elbows on the desk and folded his hands together just below his chin. “It’s true; I can prove it: What distinguishes us from the other animals? - Reason. But none of us has reason in its complete, or perfected, form. Philosophy is the quest for wisdom, i.e. the question for something we, none of us, possesses. All of us then are, in some degree, less than completely rational, which is to say that we are all irrational, or, in other words,” he went on, his voice getting louder until he pounded both hands on the desk and jumped to his feet, “we are all of us stark raving mad!”
His eyes full of laughter, he seemed so confident, so sure of his own powers, that though he might not be immortal, he was invincible: Nothing could ever touch him because the strength had had depended on himself alone.
“How long do I have?” he asked, suddenly coming back to himself. Ismael glanced at his watch.
“Half hour - if he is on time.”
“He’ll be up. Why shouldn’t he?” Julian turned to the windows behind his desk and looked outside. “The Arabs were more interesting before they became rich with oil, living in the desert, sleeping under the stars, living under the strict surveillance of a religion that instilled from birth belief that everything - everything without exception - was to be done in compliance with the same set of rules, that there was no forgiveness, no second chances, for anyone who failed in his obligations. That was the secret - it is still the secret - of their power. Christianity - what is not prohibited is allowed. Islam - what is not permitted you may never do. It isn’t that difficult to see which religion men are more likely to die for.” He turned back to Ismael. “Then they got rich and became, too many of them, corrupt, used their money to buy the armies, the weaponry, the secret police, to keep - or try to keep, because it was never entirely successful - everyone else in line. But beneath the surface, outside the gilded palaces and the air-conditioned buildings, outside the modern airports and the petrochemical plants Islam kept its hold, and those who taught it to the faithful kept and - because they refused to compromise with the forces of modernity - increased their influence.”
Julian shook his head. There were other, more immediate matters, he needed to talk about. He moved around to the front of the desk and leaned back against it. A tight-lipped grimace took an instant’s possession of his mouth. He seemed to be struggling with a doubt, how best to bring together in expression what, in the normal run of things, no one else would have thought to connect.
“I should have quoted Rousseau,” he remarked, looking across at Ismael. “‘What will become of virtue when one must get rich at any price?’ And then, ‘ancient politicians incessantly talked about morals and virtue, those of our times talk only of business and money.’ And then, instead of quoting Plato - that must have seemed the height of ignorance to that crowd - one last thing from Rousseau, the dagger in the heart of those who - like most of us now - think comfortable self-preservation the highest achievement of man: ‘With money one has everything, except morals and citizens.’”
His hands shoved deep in his pockets, Julian began to pace back and forth, a smile like that of an eager conspirator edging its way along his lower lip.
“Citizens - that is what we are missing, what we have to have. And that is what we’ll get with four years in the military, four years of a martial education, four years taught the importance of discipline and service. When they go to college, they won’t still think making money the purpose of what they go to learn - If we can pull it off! I wonder….”
“You wonder?” protested Ismael, sitting forward, his hands on his knees. “Forget those people tonight, they wouldn’t have voted for you if there had been any other possible choice. Forget Rufus Chambers and that crowd - I can imagine what they’re talking about tonight. They can’t stop this. There is enormous public support; everyone - almost everyone - thinks it’s a great idea: Instead of free tuition, the old G.I. Bill - education paid for as part of the debt owed to those who serve their country.”
Julian gave Ismael a long, worried, look. “Support for now, but later…after they calculate the cost, the kind of taxation; when they start to realize what I’m really doing…” He moved closer, patting Ismael on the shoulder as he passed in front of him, plopped down on the far corner of the sofa and loosened his tie.
“I should have quoted Rousseau,” he announced again to his own, vast amusement. He tossed his head, considering what the reaction might have been. “Citizens, ancient virtue, what Machiavelli, what Rousseau both wanted to do - what that other Julian, the one my father named me after, wanted to do….I wonder - do you think…could someone imagine that nearly two thousand years later someone would want to be like him? Do you think Julian…?”
“The emperor, that Julian -?” asked Ismael, at first astonished, and then surprised that he had not seen it before. It was all there, right in front of him: the same unquenchable desire to learn, the endless curiosity, the same ability to hide, in plain view as it were, what he really thought, the same mastery of misdirection.
“Like Julian, the emperor of Rome. Who wouldn’t want that, both a philosopher and a warrior, able to see things no one else could see, grasp in an instant what everyone else could spend a lifetime trying to understand and never get. Become emperor and start to change everything because no one could challenge what you knew you had to do - save the country, the empire, restore the ancient, martial virtues by resurrecting the ancient, martial gods. Be like Julian? - Yes, if only I were able.”
There was a long pause. Julian tapped his fingers on his knee.
“Julian wanted to destroy Christianity. It wasn’t because he believed in the ancient gods of Rome. That was not the question. The question was what everyone else believed. The Greek gods, the gods of Hesiod and Homer, what were they, what did they represent, except the various forms of human excellence, the pattern, the model, the perfection of what we can be: courage, wisdom, prudence, speed of thought, power, grace, even vengeance. The Roman gods - victory, discipline, greatness - Christianity replaced them all with one god, one teaching that insisted that this life was nothing but hardship and suffering, that what had been thought human excellence was mortal sin, that the only life worth having was the life that waited for the weak and obedience on the other side. Julian tried to change all that. Julian failed. Julian was killed, killed in battle with the Persians, perhaps by one of his own soldiers, a Christian who thought Julian the enemy of God.
“Christianity ruled the empire, and, not many years later, the empire was destroyed. And now, well, what is it we worship? God is dead. Everyone knows the phrase; how many know what it means? God is dead. Everything is permissible. Everyone is free to do whatever they wish. Which means that every choice is equal to ever other. God is dead. The gates of Hell and the gates of Heaven have both been permanently closed. What is left, nothing, except ‘spirituality,’ which is nothing more than the vague and somewhat embarrassed admission that something is missing, a sense that there should be something more to our existence than the daily repetitive work of earning a living. The ‘emptiness of modernity’ - we no longer even remember the words. After the war - the second world war - existentialism was all the rage, the belief in nothingness - a third-rate philosophy that had at least the merit of thinking the emptiness of modernity an issue worth trying to deal with. And since that - what? Nothing, not so much as a regret that we no longer think anything serious. Philosophy - except in a few places - taught as history, the irrelevance of former times, or logic, the means by which to engage in mathematics and science. Religion? - We believe all religions are the same, which means nothing,” exclaimed Julian with a sharp-eyed glance as he suddenly got to his feet and once again began to walk around the room.
