The 45th, page 5
“You’ll stay here tonight,” said Julian, as they sat down on two facing cream colored sofas in front of the stone fireplace that towered to the timbered ceiling twenty feet above. “If you like, I mean. And not just tonight – as long as you can stay.” With a sudden, embarrassed laugh, Julian jumped to his feet. “What can I get you? Something to drink? I have a couple of bottles of wine somewhere; I might even have some beer. I’m afraid I don’t have anything else….”
“No, nothing; I’m fine. Well, actually – would you have some coffee? After the flight out, then the drive, I could use something to clear my head.”
While Julian was in the kitchen, Ismael walked around the living room, studying more closely the meticulous manner in which several thousand books had been arranged on the floor to ceiling shelves. There was nothing random, nothing to suggest the ordinary household practice of volumes whose only function was to fill up empty space. There was an order that, so far as he could see, allowed for no exceptions. Each section, which might be as little as a single shelf or have as many as a dozen, held only books that fell within a single category: history, divided in turn among American, European and ancient; philosophy, economics, and then, among the various sciences, physics, chemistry, botany, and at least half a dozen others. There must have been thirty or forty separate subjects, and each of them organized alphabetically by author. Ismael’s eyes came to rest on the shelves reserved for literature, which included among its other divisions American, English, French and Russian. Next to War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy he found Turgenev.
“That was Jennifer’s doing,” explained Julian, handing Ismael a cup of coffee. “My niece. She is nothing if not meticulous. It used to drive her crazy if I put a book in the wrong place. I tried to remember, but sometimes I forgot. Her brother, on the other hand, did it on purpose. He made a game of it. She knew where everything was – where it was supposed to be – and so he would take something from the very top shelf where, as you can see, it’s hard to make out the title on the spine from this far down, and put it on one of the bottom shelves where you practically have to be on your hands and knees to see what it is.”
“Your niece – and your nephew…?” asked Ismael with a puzzled expression.
Julian bent his head to the side. He looked at Ismael as if he were trying to remember something. It had been twelve years.
“Louis never told you…? No, of course not. I asked him not to tell anyone. I knew he would never betray a confidence. But, still,” he went on, smiling to himself, “after all this time, it would have been understandable if….Did he send you? Is that why you have come?”
Ismael sat down on the sofa and drank some coffee and held the warm cup in his hands. He had wondered how he would begin, how he would tell Julian Drake why he had come without sounding like a perfect fool. Julian had been out of politics for twelve years, and not just that, out of Washington for so long, that no one remembered him or what he had once been capable of doing. But now that he was here, now that he had seen him, seen the place he lived and the kind of life it implied, it all seemed to make perfect sense.
“He’s giving the keynote speech at the convention, and he wants you to write it.”
Julian started to laugh. His eyes, just for a moment, sparkled with cheerful malice.
“I can do that,” he said, with a quick, decisive grin. He reached inside the tan sports jacket he was wearing, pulled out a black fountain pen, jotted a few words on a small notepad he carried in the right outside pocket, tore out the page and handed it to Ismael.
“‘I herewith resign from the Republican Party,’” Ismael read out loud.
“It isn’t just the words, of course; it all depends on how you read it,” explained Julian with a droll expression. “But if you want to say something that no one will ever forget, that is as good as I could do. And besides, unless Louis has changed, become someone completely different from the man I once knew, that single sentence is probably exactly what deep down he would most like to do. Or do you think I’m wrong?”
Ismael leaned back, more certain now than ever that what he had remembered about Julian Drake was true, that he could get to the heart of things as quick, or quicker, than anyone he had ever known.
“He would love to say that, just walk off, leave all those mindless rightwing fanatics to their own devices; let them fight among themselves over the best way to destroy the country. But he can’t – or he won’t. He thinks he has to somehow save them from themselves. He wants -”
“To give a speech that starts from the beginning, that reminds everyone what the Republican Party believed in at the beginning, what it has stood for over the years. A speech, in other words, about the real principles that should inform its conduct, what has to be done to recapture the original intent; a speech that shows – that teaches – why everything the people who now claim to represent it is wrong.”
“Yes, exactly; I haven’t heard him say it quite like that, but…. You must have followed politics pretty closely all this time. You must have -”
“Hardly at all. Almost never. I read the Sunday Times – every month or so. I don’t have a television. I had the children, and I didn’t want them to be….” Julian noticed the look of confusion on Ismael’s face. “You wouldn’t have come all this way, you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to find me, if this wasn’t something Louis thought important. He’s never asked me for anything, not once, all this time.”
Stroking his forehead, Julian looked past his guest, looked back through the years, the lifetime, that had passed since that awful night he had gone to Louis Matson and asked for his help.
“I was running for the senate. Maybe you remember. There seemed to be a reasonable chance I might win.”
“The only question was how large the margin was going to be.”
“Perhaps, but I would not have been a candidate – I would not have won my first election to the House six years before – if it had not been for Louis Matson. He did almost the same thing for you. I remember. And if you had not lost in that primary, he would have helped you run for the senate, later, when he thought the chances were good. And, unless I miss my guess, when he decides he’s had enough, when he decides not to run again, he’ll work things so that you become his successor. No,” he insisted, when Ismael started to protest; “he did not ask you to head his staff just because you lost that primary. He knew that if he could keep you in the center of things; keep you in the public eye, you would be in position when the time comes. That’s the reason he has you go back to Michigan every couple weeks to give speeches on what the majority leader is doing, to meet with the editorial boards, to do all those interviews on television.”
Ismael was astonished. “But how could you know that? How did you know – if you don’t have a television, if you only read a paper every month or so?”
“Because I know Louis, and I know you. Nothing else would have made sense. Louis has too high a regard for his responsibilities to let his seat in the senate go to someone he does not think the best person to fill it.”
“That is certainly what he thought of you.”
Julian got up and walked over to the window. He stood there, silent, watching the blood red sun slowly sink onto the ocean’s edge.
“The election was just weeks away. I was in Ann Arbor giving a speech. I had just finished and someone passed me a note telling me something had happened and that I had to call California. It’s odd, but I think I knew that suddenly everything was going to change.”
Turning away from the window, Julian looked back across the room to his unexpected guest. He was struck by how little Ismael Cooper had changed. There was still the same serious scholarly look, so unlike most members of congress, so unlike most people generally. He had known he could trust him the first time he had seen him, known that anything he told him would always be treated as if it had been said in the strictest confidence.
“My sister and her husband had been killed. They had two small children: a boy just turned six, and a girl who was almost ten. There was no one else to take care of them, no one else to raise them. I knew that I was named guardian in their parents’ will and trustee of the estate, which fortunately was quite large. My brother-in-law was one of those computer geniuses who built a company that made money from everywhere.” Julian made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “This was their weekend getaway, a place they could come to be alone. It became our home – the three of us – and our school.”
“Your school? You mean, where you taught them what they didn’t learn in school?”
“They did not go to school. I made sure of that. It was my responsibility to give them the best education possible. But, never mind that. This is about what Louis did – And he never told you anything?”
“About what happened that night, the night you quit? No, never. I asked him. The rumor was that it was something about a woman. He said it was true, that a woman was involved, but not the way everyone seemed to think.”
“My sister,” remarked Julian, nodding twice to emphasize the distance between the rumor and the fact. “She was a woman all right, the best woman – the best person – I’ve ever known. That’s why, you see – why I had to do what I did, quit the senate race, get out of Washington. I could not let someone else raise her children while I was working eighteen hours a day on legislation and then going off for long weekends campaigning around the country. I had to do this; I had to give them a home; I had to make them feel safe. And I had to give them an education, not the kind they give in schools these days, teaching everyone what they have to learn to make a living, to be able, in that awful phrase everyone now uses, to ‘compete in the global economy,’ but the kind that teaches what it means to live. I didn’t want them to learn how to make money - my sister wouldn’t have wanted them to learn how to do that - I wanted them to learn what it means to be a human being, our place in the order of the world. I tried to teach them what it means to have a mind. But before I could teach them anything I had to learn – or try to learn it – first myself. That is why I brought them here, why we never had a television, why we never had a computer. It is why we lived here part of every year and the rest of the time in Europe.”
It had been a long time since Julian Drake had talked with anyone he had known from the years he had been in Congress, years before he had become, if not exactly a recluse, an essentially private person. He felt a sudden urgency to explain what had changed, why everything was different now, how what had once seemed so important to him had lost all meaning. He wanted to tell Ismael Cooper everything; to take him step by step through what had happened, how in the course of educating two children he had educated himself. But Ismael had other questions, one in particular, that he was not quite sure how to ask.
“Why did Louis…? Why did he, instead of you…?”
“Make the announcement; explain to everyone – especially the press – that I was quitting the race? If I had done it, I would have had to give the reason; I would have had to answer questions. It was better to let everyone draw their own conclusions; better if they believed whatever rumor they heard. The one thing I could not do was let anyone know the truth. I had to protect my sister’s children. They could never know the truth – until they were both old enough to handle it. My sister and her husband did not die in an accident; my sister was murdered by her husband who then killed himself.”
Chapter Five
Louis Matson sat at his desk, listening with growing fascination as Ismael Cooper described his trip to California and what he had learned from Julian Drake.
“Has he changed?” Matson bent his head slightly to the side. “Is he the same as you remembered?”
“Imagine someone with his intelligence, smarter than anyone you had ever met, who then spends twelve years studying every important book ever written so that he can learn how to teach. Is he the same? - Yes, and no. He’s the same, only more so; quicker, more agile, in the way he thinks. I don’t know if he can give a speech the way he used to – I don’t know if he would still have the passion – but….”
Matson nodded, scratched the back of his head, and then rubbed his chin. His eyes darted in one direction and then in another. He had heard everything Cooper had said, but he was thinking of only one thing.
“But will he write one for me? What did he say when you asked him?”
Cooper had come straight from the airport. He opened his briefcase and removed a sealed manila envelope.
“Here it is: the speech you wanted him to write.”
Matson looked at him in astonishment, and then, smiling, shook his head.
“Probably did it at one sitting; probably wrote it straight through and never changed a word. Have you read it?”
“I don’t know if he wrote it straight through, the way you said; I didn’t even know he was going to write it. I told him what you wanted, that you hoped he would help. Before I could say anything else, he told me what he knew you would want to say. Just a couple of sentences, but – at least it seemed to me – a perfect summary of everything you have been talking about, all those -”
“All those weird ramblings, those vague thoughts, I could never quite put together. Yes, I know; he could always do that.”
“As I say, he tossed off those few sentences, and then we started talking about other things, including what you did for him, what happened the night he found out that his sister had been killed , the night he found out she had been murdered by her husband and her husband had -”
“Killed himself. He told you that?” Folding his hands in his lap, Matson narrowed his eyes, trying to penetrate the thickening mists of time. “I’d never seen anyone look the way he did that night. His whole world had come apart. I don’t mean just his sister’s death – that would have been hard enough – and though this may sound strange, not even the fact she had been murdered. It was that she had been murdered by her husband, the father of her children, and there was no reason, no reason at all. It was not jealousy; she wasn’t involved with someone else. It wasn’t because her husband was a violent man; he did not even own a gun. He bought one that afternoon; bought it, went home, sent the kids down the street to stay with a neighbor, and then murdered his wife and shot himself. And no reason, no reason at all. That is what Julian could not deal with, what he could not accept. It meant that there was no reason for anything; that there was nothing you could trust, nothing you could believe in. But he had enough sense to believe in himself, to know that there was something he had to do, something only he could do – raise those two children, to think only of them. I never had any doubt he would do it, and do it well.”
“He certainly did it in a way different from what anyone else would have done,” said Ismael with a glance of puzzled admiration.
“That he kept them out of school, taught them himself?”
“Not that, exactly; the way he did it, as if it was not terribly important what they learned, or if they learned anything at all. He made a strange remark, which, when I thought about it later, was not really strange at all: He asked me if I knew anyone who could not read; and then he asked me why, if everyone learns how, it should be thought important that someone learned it faster than someone else. All of us eventually learn well enough. He was not interested in having his two charges – he called them that, his nephew and his niece – compete with others. He asked them what they wanted to do. He told them stories out of Homer, stories about Helen of Troy and the Trojan War, stories about Socrates and ancient Greece. And then he asked them if they would like to see what it was like in ancient times, and, like any children, they were thrilled with the thought of adventure, and so they went to Athens and lived there two years. And then, because he taught them history by in a way living through it, they lived two years in Rome. They picked up languages the way other kids pick up games. They knew Greek and Latin before they were teenagers, and then, after a year or so back in America, they were off to France, Great Britain, Germany and Spain. And everywhere they lived he found in the things they saw something by which to lead them to want to learn something they had not known before. They looked at things, wondered how they worked or how they came into being – and he told me this was the most important thing - they learned how to ask questions.”
“The boy would be what now – eighteen or nineteen; the girl twenty-two or twenty-three. He’s not still teaching them?”
“No, they’re both now in school,” replied Ismael, tugging on his ear as he tried to suppress a grin. “The boy is in his second year at Harvard, majoring in physics. The girl has just finished her first year in medical school at Yale. She is going to be a neurosurgeon.”
Matson roared with delight. “Finally, a member of Congress who knew what he was doing! Now, tell me, about the speech….”
“We talked until – I don’t know – it must have been midnight before I got to bed, three in the morning east coast time. I was exhausted; I slept until almost nine in the morning, and when I got up he had it done. He said he worked on it for a few hours, went to bed around three, got up at seven and finished it then. He didn’t say anything about it, but I had the feeling that this was not unusual, that he doesn’t sleep more than a few hours. He studies all the time. He said that when he started teaching the children, he suddenly realized that everything he had always thought he knew was wrong, that he had never really understood what it meant to question our assumptions because – and this really struck me – we have no idea what our assumptions really are. Anyway, he gave me the speech and said he hoped you would forgive him, that it might not be anything like what you had in mind, that he had not given a speech in years, and that he was glad he did not have copies of the speeches he used to give. He thought they would be too embarrassing.”
“Have you read it?” asked Matson. Smiling to himself, he tapped with two fingers the sealed envelope.
