The 45th, page 41
Julian tapped again the book he had been reading.
“The parallel lives, one ancient Roman matched against one ancient Greek, the comparison always in favor of the Greek, but written in a way that Plutarch’s Roman audience would not be offended, because written in a way they would not notice it. Whatever the differences among them, there is not one man among them, whether Greek or Roman, who ever spoke about a long life as something desirable by itself. What they wanted to last was what they built, what they created. That is the real reason, one of the reasons, why its important we talk about the exploration of space as a great adventure. It is the last, best chance to treat this obsession with comfortable longevity with the contempt it deserves. What difference does it make if anyone lives to be a hundred, what difference does it make if someone dies at forty or fifty? The only serious question is what kind of life they’ve led. Mozart died at - what? - thirty-five. Ask people whether they would like their children to lead long, happy lives or die at thirty-five but have done something as remarkable as what Mozart did. You might be surprised at the answers you get. Nothing important is measured by time. You do your work, whatever that work may be; do it as well as you know how, and if you get sick, get better so you can work again. But if you can’t, if you cannot be put back in condition to go on with your proper work, it is - of was for the ancients - only sensible that you die. Some people still understand that. What did Louis tell you when we did not have the votes we needed in the senate? - That he would get them and wouldn’t die before he did.”
Remembering what Louis had done, Julian’s mouth curled down at the corners and his eyes tightened in the dismal recognition of what he could not change and what he had to do.
“I haven’t been to see him; I’ll do it this morning.”
Louis Matson’s room at the hospital was clean, private, and full of monitors and machines measuring with soulless precision the condition of a dying man. The little light left in Matson’s eyes took what seemed the last bit of strength he had.
“They told me you were coming,” he said, his labored breath louder than his almost soundless speech. “I told them not to let you come. There’s nothing you can do. I didn’t want you to see me - to remember me - like this.”
Julian sat next to him and took him by his fragile, feeble hand.
“It’s the best you’ve ever looked.”
He said this with the lying insincerity that those who have passed their lives in politics gets closer to truth’s deeper meaning than spoken honesty ever could; a cynic’s bridge, if you will, between the world’s false sentimentality and what a decent respect for another man’s courage and intelligence requires. What might have startled, and even shocked, someone who happened to walk past, witness to a scene he did not understand, made Louis Matson come back to life.
“They were always telling me how much good a little rest would do me.”
They were alone in the room. The door was shut. No one could hear what they said.
“Rachel told me she would have married me, if I had ever asked her. I never suspected, never thought she had any interest in me - like that. And I’m not sure she ever really did. She meant it when she told me. That’s what she believes now, what she would have done then. We do that, don’t we? - Think back about what we might have done, then convince ourselves that it is what we really wanted at the time. But it was decent of her to tell me that. I would have done it, and then I might have been happy and contented, instead of a frustrated politician, always hoping for something better, and always seeing things get worse. Until now. For all my faults, all my failures, I helped get you the presidency.” He grasped tighter Julian’s hand. “And the strangest thing of all is that I knew it would happen - I could feel it - the first time I heard you speak. Even the night you had to quit the senate race, iI think I knew that somehow, someday, it would happen, that there would be another chance.”
“What’s important, is that you got the bill through the senate. No one else could have done it. We have a chance now. We can become a serious country again,” said Julian, with a look of the utmost confidence. “A place where everyone competes for honor instead of money, where the future is not what we want for ourselves, but what we want others to look back on with astonishment and pride. You did that; more than anyone else, you made it possible.”
“Listen to me,” said Matson, his voice a low, hoarse whisper. “I tried to tell you, years ago, in politics, politics in the best sense, everything has its uses. My death. Take advantage of it. Remind everyone that my name is on the bill, that it was my signature accomplishment - There is a statement, something I wrote, in my desk in my office. I left instructions to release it on my death.”
He stopped speaking and tried to regain his breath. His eyes, which had become dull and lusterless, suddenly glittered with something remembered from the long forgotten past.
“Churchill planned his own funeral. He wanted to be sure it was larger than the one given the century before for the Duke of Wellington, because, you see, Wellington’s funeral had been larger than the one given, the century before that, for Churchill’s ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill wanted that honor to come back to his own family.”
Very gently, Julian freed his hand from Matson’s grasp and stood up.
“What would you like us to do?”
“Invite all my friends,” he replied, with a faint, dry grin on his tired, desiccated mouth. “I have three of them: Rachel, Ismael, and you.” He reached for Julian’s hand. “This is important. Have you talked to the governor? I don’t trust the son-of-a-bitch. He promised to appoint Ismael when I resigned from the senate this summer. But I’m not resigning, I’m dying - he may think that gives him a way out. Don’t give him the chance. The day I die, announce that Ismael Cooper is going to take my place, that it was my wish and that the governor has agreed. Now, go. I can’t tell you how proud - how grateful - I am.”
Three days later, Louis Matson died in his sleep. Rachel Good was with him at the end, more certain than ever that she would have married him if he had only asked. She tried to write a fitting obituary for her paper, but after two failed attempts at a first paragraph, knew she could not do it and asked that someone else write it instead. It was, she discovered, too difficult to separate what she knew and what she felt; too difficult, really, to even be quite sure she knew the difference. Everything was all jumbled up: the memory of what she had covered in her long years as a Washington reporter, the memory of her changing sense of things, what Louis Matson had been like, not as a congressman or senator, but as a human being: what she had liked about him, what had drawn her close to him, made her believe - made her know - that he was almost the only man she could always trust to tell he what he really thought. Maybe, she decided, it was better that they had never married. She might not have known him as well if they had.
The funeral was not what Louis Matson had asked for. They were there, the only three people he considered his friends, but so was half of Washington, crowded into the National Cathedral, listening to Julian Drake tell the story of how, without bothering to ask his consent, Louis Matson had made him president.
“He had a great respect for the power of language, a regard for the way everything, almost everything, depends on the way we speak to one another. He understood, as few others have, that without the ability to explain clearly what we had to do and why we have to do it, nothing of importance ever gets done. He understood that without clear, persuasive speech, we are nothing but those idiots of Shakespeare’s marvelous description, telling tales that only fools believe. He understood the tragic irony in those famous words from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address that, ‘the world will little note nor long remember what we say here.’ The world will remember nothing, and not remembering, never learn, without words that once we hear them we can never forget. Louis Matson was not a great speaker. He was something better than that. He was a great listener, which made him a great judge of what was important and what was not. Louis Matson was my friend, but, more than that, he was one of the best friends this country has ever had.”
When the service was over and, under a sunny sky, the crowd had dispersed, when everyone else had gone back to their busy lives, the only three people Louis Matson had wanted at his funeral, the only three friends he had, stood at the gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. Each in turn tossed a handful of earth onto the lowered casket and then, with this, their last, goodbye, Ismael Cooper and Rachel Good turned and walked away. Julian stayed behind, wanting, as he explained, to spend a few more, private, moments.
Rachel held onto Ismael’s arm and, as she would remember later, felt a sudden breeze on her face, the air sweet and clear, and thought it a kind of solace, a reminder of something permanent amidst the passing lives of friends and strangers, the gift of existence that death, instead of defeating, only makes more vivid. She took a long, deep breath - she remembered that - and then a few more steps, and then, just as Ismael turned to say something, she heard it. They both heard it. They turned, the two of them, to look back and - she remembered - there was that brief moment, an instant, in which their eyes met and they knew, knew before they had turned to see, knew with all the certainty of a death foretold, that the shot they had heard had been an assassin’s bullet and that Julian Drake, the president, was dead.
About the Author
D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J. Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph. D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his seven Joseph Antonelli novels reflect that experience.
The New York Times called The Defense ‘an accomplished first novel’ which ‘leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again.’ The Judgment was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel of the year.
D.W. Buffa lives in Northern California. You can visit his Official Website at dwbuffa.net.
D.W. Buffa, The 45th
