Allegiance (11 page)

Again I have the sense that I am missing something. It feels like a rush event, the brothers of St. Anthony Hall dropping allusions I cannot grasp. I did not make the cut then, and it seems I am not making it now. Richards is waiting for a response. I wonder how much I have drunk. The way the waiters keep refilling the wineglasses, it is hard to keep track. It sounds to me as though he has just suggested that FDR knew the attack was coming, or even brought it on. I fumble for an anodyne phrase. “At least it brought us together.”

“Of course,” says Richards. “Of course we were all united. No one thought of anything but America. But for them it was about unity behind the Democratic Party. They used the crisis to push their own agenda. A foreign one. Socialist.”

I try to think of a noncommittal response. “I certainly know some people who feel that way,” I say. “The State in Schuylkill . . .” At the annual dinner, the traditional toast to the President has been replaced by one to the Constitution. But Richards does not let me finish.

“Exactly,” he interrupts. “A club. I was in the Fly at Harvard. A small group of men can do a lot.”

But I have abruptly lost interest in the conversation. John Hall used to come back from Harvard and rhapsodize about the Fly Club; I need no more stories about the joys of men who really understand each other. “Yeah,” I say. “They can plank shad.”

Richards frowns at me. I stand up and look around the tables, hoping to catch sight of my vanished senorita. From the next room there comes a rough chorus. I think I can pick out Haynes's voice. I take a step to peer through the doorway and there he is, his blond hair falling over his forehead, his cheeks flushed with drink. And who is that next to him, arm in arm? Richards must have put John Hall in my mind, for I would swear that is him, green jacket damp with sweat, Army tie askew. They put their heads back and bay out the words. “Oh, Harvard's run by millionaires, and Yale is run by booze. Cornell is run by farmers' sons, Columbia's run by Jews.” The end of the line is almost lost in a swell of applause from the parlor, evidently at the conclusion of a magic trick.

Richards is grasping my arm and saying something. I turn back to him. “I'm sorry, what?”

“Clubs,” he says. “It's not democracy that keeps the government in line . . .”

And then everyone falls silent, for the guests part like water and Cissy Patterson arrives at our table.

CISSY HAS DARK
hair set in waves and something hungry about the mouth. She has donned emeralds, or, if what Pearson said is true, left them on. “Now, Bill,” she says to Colonel Richards, “don't hang on our guests.” He stands with the rest of the table, and she acknowledges us with a wave. “Hi, Francis.”

Biddle makes a small and courtly bow. “You've been missed, Cissy. Out sharpening the knives for us?”

Cissy shakes her head. “Don't you see what's happening, Francis? Boys who love this country are dying across the sea. And men who don't are taking it apart piece by piece.”

“We all love America. We may have different ideas of what it stands for.”

“It doesn't stand for dictators. How can you go on like this? I wake up screaming.”

“I try to get my screaming done during business hours,” says Biddle, rising in my estimation.

“You supported T.R.,” says Cissy. “You were there in Chicago, like me.
We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord
. I get chills just remembering. Well, now you have to choose which side you're on.”

“We're all on the same side, Cissy,” he says mildly.

“That remains to be seen.” She turns her eyes to me. “Mr. Harrison.” There is a force in her gaze. “I am glad you're here.”

“I appreciate the invitation.”

She rests her hand lightly on Joe's shoulder. It is a tender gesture, which does not seem to come naturally to her, and that itself adds poignancy.

“You may be sure you are among friends,” she says. She pats Joe's shoulder again and he touches her hand briefly, his face soft. Then she is gone to another table. Richards nods quickly to us and follows her.

Silence hangs for a moment, then Biddle breaks it. “Politics always puts me in the mood for dancing.” He takes his wife's hand. “Care to join us?” The invitation is general. Joe remains seated, cradling his glass, but everyone else seems glad enough to go.

The ballroom is pink and white, with gold taffeta chairs along the walls. There are full-length mirrors at opposite ends, and the candles in the chandeliers glint in an endless row. “You shouldn't take what Cissy says too seriously,” Biddle tells me. “She's never forgiven FDR for what he did to Joe.”

“What was that?”

“Well, Joe had been editorializing against Lend-Lease and all that. But when Pearl Harbor came he snapped right around. Went to see the President and said, ‘I'm yours to command. Just tell me what to do.' And FDR looked at him and said, ‘There's one thing you can do, Joe. Go back and read your editorials for the past six months. Read every one and see what you think.' Joe never got over it.”

The explanation should not surprise me, but it does. “So it's personal? All this stuff about dictators?”

“Oh, I suppose she means some of it. But no one complains about the dictator they like. Roosevelt's gotten on her bad side. With Joe, and the cherry trees.”

“The cherry trees?”

“Around the Tidal Basin. When she heard he was going to cut some down for the Jefferson Memorial she got her friends together and they went out and chained themselves to the trees. FDR had them taken away. He's got a picture of her on his desk, kicking in the arms of the Capitol police. You can see her panties.” Biddle allows himself a chuckle and pauses for reflection. “Those trees aren't so popular now. The day of Pearl Harbor some energetic idiot chopped a few down. I was in Detroit, talking to the Slav-American foundation when I got a note . . .”

I was at Columbia, daydreaming about Suzanne. My mind drifts back. The innocence of those days, the certainty that no one could touch us. Not here in America, safe behind our oceans. Ideals are free to the invulnerable, but now we must decide whether we will pay their cost. Biddle is still talking, but I stir myself to action. No one wants to dance with me. But if Haynes is around here, perhaps he can explain what is going on.

But he is not, not anywhere I can find him, anyway. Nor is John Hall. Perhaps it was a hallucination. Instead I find Drew Pearson, nursing another martini. “I warned you, didn't I?”

“About what?”

“These people. This house.”

“Francis Biddle seems to like them well enough.”

Pearson shrugs. “Oh, Biddle likes everyone, because no one can hurt him. He doesn't understand how serious this is. He thinks they're amusing.”

“And you don't?”

“Do you? You've got a pretty good perspective, I'd think. From the Court. You know what's happening.”

But I don't, I want to protest. My mind is struggling against a tide of wine. Still, perhaps this is an opening. “So do you, it seems.”

Pearson raises his eyebrows. “How's that?”

“The decisions. You seem to know before they come out.”

“Oh, you know.” His tone is elaborately casual. “A man's got to have friends. You ever find something weighing on your mind, I'm ready to listen. Give me a call.”

Power and secret knowledge, I think. That is the currency of Washington, and he is right; I hold some. Coins with unfamiliar faces, rough and strange in my hands. “Do other clerks do that?” I remember him drinking with Douglas in Black's garden. “Justices?”

It is like a steel shutter coming down. “That's not what we talk about.” He looks at me appraisingly, then shakes his head. “You're not in the game yet.” He shrugs, changing the topic. “You haven't seen that Richards around, have you? I think I owe him a punch in the nose.”

“I haven't.”

“Well, I'll find him sooner or later. You should go home.” He nods as
though he has considered the advice and confirmed its wisdom. “Go home while you still can.”

I stand alone in the foyer. People pass all around me; the air is filled with laughing chatter, piano chords, and distant song. There is no one I know here, no one who wants to help me. Perhaps I should go home.

“Pick a card.” A man in a cheap tailcoat and checkered vest holds a pack toward me. He has a pinched and foxy face, an unctuous air. One of Cissy's entertainers, spotting me as a wallflower.

I push his hand away, annoyed. “No thanks, I'm trying to quit.”

He fans the deck in his hand. “Come on, any card.”

“I don't go in for parlor tricks.”

“Is this a parlor?” A wave of his arm takes in the sweep of the stairs, the spread of the hall. “Is this a trick?”

“Looks that way to me.” I step past him.

“Wait.” His hand taps my shoulder. “Your card. Was it the jack of diamonds?”

“I didn't take a card.”

“Didn't you? What's in your pocket?”

I take it out without bothering to look. “Yes, jack of diamonds. Very clever. If you'll excuse me, I need a drink.”

The man bows ingratiatingly. I step to the bar. “Scotch.”
Smoke on the tongue
, Judge Skinner said to me,
fire in the throat
. I see him measuring it out in fingers from his crystal decanter, sitting back in the library among his books.
Slowly, Cash; it's waited a long time for you
. The Judge could help me understand this world. The Scotch cannot, though I give it a second chance and then a third. People wheel past, their voices indistinct. I need to work tomorrow. Pearson was right, I think, as I struggle to make my good-byes. I should have left a long time ago.

Outside, the night air is still humid, thick and cloying. Traffic buzzes through Dupont Circle, a river of noisy lights. A deep breath does nothing to clear my head but succeeds in making plain the extent of my intoxication. I reflect for a moment. Walking back to my apartment will not be pleasant, but vomiting in the back of a jolting taxicab would be worse. I put one foot in front of the other. Why did I let myself get this way? There was the waiter
who kept refilling my wineglass. The Scotches that were supposed to help me think. And, more realistically, the desire to escape my thoughts for a while. To forget the dinner conversation with Richards, the embarrassment of Fish House Punch, the realization that I am totally out of place here.

Coming up on the bridge across Rock Creek, I realize I have made at least one good decision tonight, not to try the taxi. Even the walk is beyond me. I step quickly off the sidewalk, into the brush, and spend an unpleasant few moments reviewing my dinner. The steak is still tough. I bend over, hands on my knees, catching my breath and spitting unidentifiable substances. And as I step back into the streetlights I remember one more thing I was trying to forget. Someone is following me.

The realization is no great accomplishment, because I all but bump into him. It's the first of my new friends, the man from Eastern Market. He's wearing a blue suit now, but easy enough to recognize this close up. An economist, probably, who doesn't really know what he's doing, who thought he'd lost me and hurried to catch up.

He stops dead and blinks at me. Revulsion overtakes alarm. A fair enough reaction, I suppose, but I've had enough of mysteries, enough surprises, and this look of disgust is the final insult. In a moment it all boils over. I haul off and punch him in the face. Not hard enough to knock him down, but it sends a flash of pain through my hand and I can see the sting in his eyes. “Leave me alone,” I yell. He still looks horrified, though the hand over his mouth makes it a bit harder to tell. Blood is coming through his fingers. I spit one more item on the ground and start over the bridge.

Now he's got a reason to look scared, I think. That guy won't be following me anytime soon. Maybe I should have done this long ago. There is a sharp pain in my hand; there is a general sense of unwellness that ebbs and flows. But there is also a small satisfaction warming within me. And then I see the shadow coming up along the pavement at my feet.

My satisfaction cools fast, freezes to a solid lump of dread.
No one's trying to get you
, Haynes said. But that was wrong. I start to walk more quickly. Here on the bridge a scuffle could turn deadly in an instant. Up and over the side with him! It's hundreds of feet down. A second shadow starts to gain on me. I break into a run, pumping my arms. The shadows accelerate too, rushing
past me, arms flailing. I stop and they stop; I wave and they wave back. I turn my head, and only a row of streetlamps stands behind me. Otherwise the bridge is empty. It is me, always me, only me. I wave again, try a dance step with my new companions. Me, myself, and I. By the time I reach the end of the bridge, I am laughing like an idiot.

Of course, that's where they're waiting for me.

I WAKE IN
my own bed. The pillowcase is stiff with blood. Mostly from my nose, I think, though there's a fat patch on my lower lip over the left incisor and a coppery taste in my mouth. I swing my feet to the floor and stand up slowly. The pain of the hangover is something I've felt before, but this time it's joined by several more discrete aches, the traces of fists or shoes. I was beaten last night, and probably kicked as well. I remember a crowd forming around me as I came off the bridge. No words, just a blow from an unknown quarter. And then more of the same. How I got home I have no idea.

I walk gingerly to the bathroom and run a shower, avoiding the mirror. I don't want to know what I look like. The hot water is restorative, and there's no blood on the towel when I dry my face. I take that for a good sign and step to the mirror to see how much of the damage remains. And I realize that it wasn't
trader
the man said to me in the scrum at Lincoln Park. They have left the right word for me. The glass is fogged, inscrutable, but one thing is clear. One word scrawled in soap.
Traitor
.