Captains and The Kings (80 page)

little discretion." He looked at Joseph very hard now, and his light gray eyes were intent. "Rory is a good Catholic husband and father. We have worked on that, as you know. We are also mentioning that intolerance is evil, and Catholics are just as good Americans as Protestants, in spite of all the rampant anti- Romanism-" "Which all of you initiated and stimulated for your purposes!" Joseph could not help exclaiming. Mr. Regan shrugged and sighed. "It served our purposes. But now we are interested in Rory. It will be some years before anyone will take him seriously as a candidate. I give him credit: He does not have your scalpel tongue, Joe. He is diplomatic, easy, devious, placating, which is very clever of him-and civilized. If he has thoughts he wisely keeps them to himself. Perhaps even the things he does against us can be turned to our advantage. We are protean, as you know. Rory has impressed us. But, we can destroy Rory, if we wish. We know of his previous marriage -and the annulment." I should have known, Joseph thought to himself. He controlled his fear. He said, "That is over and done with, and meant nothing. Do you know how many times Rory farts, too?" Mr. Regan laughed heartily. "Indeed we do, Joe. Indeed we do." Then he became stern. "If Rory wishes to be President then he must begin now to serve us-and not just you, if he indeed serves you, Joe, which I doubt. For instance, he must oppose that nefarious new bill, to be voted on by the House soon, the Child Labor bill. Hell, what do the people breed for, except to serve their masters? And don't parents have the right to decide the destiny of their children? Aren't their children their own, and not the State's? If they send their young children into the factories at five, six, seven years old, it is their affair, for who among them does not need money? I have simplified this a little, Joe. You know all the arguments. We have the clergy with us, too, in this. You might mention it to Rory. That bill must be stopped, if it reaches the Senate, though we will try to kill it in the House." It was like an echo to Joseph, and he remembered Senator Bassett in Washington, whose death had not prevented the passage of the Alien Contract Labor Act in 1882. He said, "Somehow, I feel the Child Labor bill will be enacted, though I will suggest to Rory that he oppose it." Later he said to his son, "Rory, you and I want you to be President of this country. There are rumors that you will support the Child Labor bill, when it comes before the Senate. Don't. I repeat, don't. The arguments are very good, as you know. 'Parents have the right to control their children, and the labor of their children. Their children are their own.' Yes. You will oppose the bill." When Rory did not answer, but only smiled his brilliant easy smile, Joseph said, "When you are President, you can, within limits, support what you will or oppose what you will." "No, Pa," said Rory, very gently. "You know that is not true. I will be the biggest puppet of all, and you know that. If I refuse-" and he drew his hand eloquently across his throat in a slicing gesture. "Well, I won't worry about that. No Catholic will ever be nominated for the Presidency, let alone be elected to it. Maybe we should thank God for that." "This time we will succeed," said Joseph. Rory became grave. He looked at his father enigmatically. "Maybe I am interested in the Presidency, after all. Yes. Perhaps." He voted against the Child Labor bill. "It is a violation of parent's Supreme and Divine Authority over their children," he said. He was much I applauded in powerful newspapers. His father was congratulated by "the Circle." .
Chapter 49
Ann Marie was thirty-six years old, and her brother, "The Senator," came from Washington to Green Hills-the "Settlement"-to celebrate their joint birthday. His wife came with him, querulous as always and expressing her opinion that this was a hardship considering that "the Season was in full bloom, and you need to be Seen, Rory." Her children, neglected and brought up by well-paid but indifferent servants and governesses, annoyed her. Mentally a child, herself, she thought of them as rivals. She reminded Rory that her parents had planned a birthday party for him in Washington, and now it must be postponed for several days. "After all," she would complain to Rory, "you owe everything to the fact that you married me and I am of a Distinguished Family, and your father is only a businessman." She could not understand why Rory laughed himself almost into hysteria. Ann Marie seemed more of a child than ever, rosy, fat, smiling innocently, babbling, playing with her dolls. Rory, her twin, sat in her rooms with her and tried to find, in that blank face and those luminous sherry- colored eyes, some trace of the sister he had loved, and who had grown in the womb with him. Once, when they were alone, he said to her very quietly, "Ann Marie? Do you remember Courtney?" The rosy smile had widened. But all at once Rory saw, in those shining eyes, a shadow, a terror, an anguish which jolted him. Then it was gone. He was shaken. How much did Ann Marie remember? Was she lurking behind that plump and roseate facade, hiding? The soft lax hand in his had tightened, had grasped, and then it was limp again and she was talking about her new doll. When he stood up to go, sighing, she had looked up at him and the smile was gone. "Rory?" she said. She had recognized him, then, though when he had appeared only an hour ago she had looked at him questioningly, with a child's shy and wary smile, shrinking at the sight of a stranger. He bent over his sister, himself resplendent and shining even in the pale and bitter sunlight of March, and the icy reflection of the glittering snow outside. "Yes, dear," he said. She put her fat arms up to him and he held her, and he felt the trembling of her cheek against his. Then she moaned, "Rory, Rory. Oh, Rory-Courtney." She clutched him desperately, and he dared not move or speak. Then she had dropped her arms and he had straightened up and she was giving him, once again, a very young child's wide-eyed stare. She giggled. She pushed a doll at him and said, "Kiss, kiss." His mother said to him, with a weariness not entirely affected, "I wish to God your father would permit her to go to a fine private institution. You have no idea of the hopelessness, Rory, and the responsibility. Ann Marie is becoming so heavy that nurses complain, and leave, no matter what we pay them. She is walking less and less, and spends more and more time in bed, and she is so fat that I can't understand what the doctors mean by 'atrophy.' She certainly isn't wasting! She can't go for drives any longer.
It is almost impossible to get her up and down the stairs, and now your father is installing an elevator for her. She looks like an infant. It is more than I can bear. Do talk to your father. When we have parties here, she sometimes screeches from upstairs and it unnerves people, and sometimes she fights with her nurses and is uncontrollable and shouts that she has to go to the woods. Really, Rory." She sighed. "Worse and worse. And Rory-sometimes the smell! It is disgusting, and I am ashamed to speak of it. The whole upstairs, sometimes- Complete degeneration, the doctors say, who agree with me that she'd be far better off in some institution." "She never speaks about-anything?" Rory asked. "No. If I don't see her for a few days, and God knows I am always here now, and I go into her rooms she stares at me and whimpers and doesn't recognize me, her own mother. It is very strange. She does recognize your father, no matter how long his absences are. I feel there is a curse upon this family, Rory, a curse "Now, Ma," he said, but he frowned. He did not speak to his father.* Joseph tried to be in Green Hills at least one week in every month to, see his daughter. She always greeted him with such delight that he would * dare to hope, for a minute or two, that she had returned to this world, for ; she knew him and would hold out her arms to him and cuddle against him, shyly. But within an hour or two she was withdrawn, smiling that little childish smile, and babbling. He would smooth that soft brown hair, and notice the widening bands of gray, and the increasing wrinkles in the' soft rosy face. Sometimes she seemed sixty years old, blubbery, almost massive in her fat, inert, blinking, not seeing, not knowing. But how can I send her away? he would think. This is all she has, her home, these rooms, her toys, her nurses. He would look into her eyes, childlike still, and try to find his daughter, to discover that "soul" that had once "; inhabited this bloated flesh. But it was like peering down into a deep well where only reflections rippled the surface. He came back to Green Hills on a June morning so warm, so radiant, so full of brightness, that it was like a promise of coming joy. The roses rampaged from every bed on the estate, red and white and yellow, and were full of scent under the blowing trees. He remembered that spring day when he had first seen Green Hills and had heard the peepers in the f trees and had seen the shine of blue water and the brisk arrowing of birds from limb to limb. What had he told himself then, what had he promised himself? He could not remember. I am an old man, he thought. I am tired, and old, and my hair is white and it is a burden to wake up in the morning and confront the day. Yet, I must. Why? I do not know. I have yet to find out what drives us. He suspected that the tiredness of his body j came from his mind and not from his still vigorous lean body and his supple muscles, but that did not decrease the weariness, the mounting sense of futility that ran over him like a tidal wave when he was most vulnerable. He was no more interested in his grandchildren-about whom Bernadette was always prattling-than he had been when his own children were this young age. Their occasional presence in his house bored and annoyed him. The shrillness of their voices, the pounding of their feet on wood or marble, their empty faces, depressed him. There was a growing fad these days about "the Children," and he found it obnoxious and irritating, and when his friends spoke of their grandchildren he thought them fatuous, and knew that they knew they were. Daniel and Joseph, nine and eight respectively, were already attending boarding school. ("Thank God," Joseph would remark.) The little girls, pretty but vacuous of face, were still at home. Now this was June, and the boys were in Green Hills and shouting "all over the damned place," thought Joseph. Why didn't that fool of a mother of theirs try to restrain them, or their governesses thrash them? When Joseph spoke of his grandchildren to their father, Rory, Rory would say with a curious smile, "I don't think they are too bad. Of course, they are not very intelligent, but neither is their mother. And you did want me to marry their mother, didn't you, Pa? Matter of inheritance. At least they are equal to Claudia now in their minds, if that is any consolation, which it isn't." Marjorie's children, Rory would think, would be bright and witty and spirited, not "lumps," as Joseph called his grandchildren. Marjorie's children would be full of radiant mischief, but gentle, kind, understanding, perceptive. Marjorie, Marjorie, my darling, Rory would think, looking at his children with their red hair and pallid blue eyes and big teeth. Rosemary was certainly no more aware of life than Ann Marie. Sometimes she drooled. "Blood will out!" Rory would say roundly to his father, with a strange grin. "Claudia's blood." But he could not understand why his father would then look so somber and turn away, for never had he suspected that Joseph had had any part in the annulment of his marriage. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, Rory would think, contemplating his children and their mother. But he did not speak of this to Joseph. If only I could get rid of Claudia and not endanger my career, Rory would often say to himself. That foolish woman with her big backside and fat bowed legs and airs and graces! He no longer saw her charm, her formidable power of entrancement. He did not particularly like his mother but he resented Claudia's malicious imitations of her, the Irish imitations. Once he said to Claudia, "When your ancestors were grubbing for English squires and sawing wood my ancestors were noble in Ireland," to which she had replied, "Really! No one takes the Irish seriously. Hod-carriers, and such." She loved wine. She was always complaining of Rory's vulgar whiskey. "Whiskey is not civilized," she would say. "Only brutes drink it." Rory would look pointedly at her hands and she would darkly flush and hide them. Now it was June and Rory and Claudia were in Devon-"to hear the nightingales!" Claudia would sing, throwing back her head and showing all her huge white teeth.
(Horse teeth, Bernadette would say.) Rory was in England for another matter, concerning the Committee on Foreign Studies, and was his father's emissary. "Gentlemen's affairs!" Claudia would carol in her infant's voice, when Rory went to London each week. They rented an estate in Devon each summer, for Rory, for a reason he would not explain to Claudia, refused to buy a house in England, though he remained in his father-in-law's house in London when he was in town. Unknown even to his father he would manage to visit Ireland for a few days also, and went to Carney where Joseph had been born. The poverty and misery of the Irish drove clefts about his mouth. His children remained in the "Settlement" for the summer, ostensibly under the devoted care of Bernadette, their grandmother, who loved to parade them briefly before her friends, but only briefly. "I am not here very often," Joseph would say to her, "so is it necessary for them to be screeching in my house when I come? Send them home. I bought them a fine house, and let them stay there." The children feared him; they would look sideways with sly eyes at him, and hate him, but they obeyed him always and never muttered as they did with Bernadette. He could not endure the constant grins of the little girls, which showed the great white teeth they had inherited from their mother, and Daniel's whining and spoiled demands infuriated him. "I am afraid the girls are idiots," Joseph would say to his wife, "and Daniel is effeminate and Joe is a boor. Keep them far from me." But still, they were his grandchildren. He came to Green Hills to be with his daughter, and with Elizabeth, when she was home. She did not visit him very often now in New York or Philadelphia or Boston. "I am almost sixty, my dear," she would say to Joseph, "and I tire easily now and travel is wearing. I don't know how you manage the travel so much, either." She had retained the figure of her girlhood, graceful and lissome, and Joseph thought she still looked like a young woman though the fine silky pale hair was more silver than blond now, and her complexion had faded. But her green eyes were pure and steadfast and calm. "You are much younger than I am," Joseph would say to her, holding her tightly in his arms. "You should not be so tired all the time." Neither of them spoke of Courtney, the monk in a cloister in Amalfi, who seldom wrote to his mother and then only to thank her for a gift she had made to his monastery. But Joseph knew Elizabeth's grief that the estrangement between mother and son had never been healed. She would say to Joseph, "I have no one but you, my dearest, no one in the world, no sister nor brother nor cousin nor nephew nor niece. I have only you." Her exhaustion seemed more pronounced each time Joseph saw her and he was becoming alarmed. Elizabeth smiled. "I am in perfect health, Joseph, but after all I am not young any longer." It seemed to him this June that there was a transparency about Elizabeth which he had not noticed a month ago, a translucence in her face which made her appear ethereal. She had visited her doctor recently, she assured him, and her health was not impaired. Passion was not spent between them, but it had reached a stage of tranquility, of profound acceptance, of absolute trust. They would sit, or lie, for hours, without speaking, their hands clasped together, and it was the only peace Joseph had ever known or would know. He thought of Elizabeth as his wife, and she thought of him as her husband. He was, as she often said, all she had in the world. Her one terror was that he would die and leave her. He had to reassure her over and over that he would not permit this, and he would smile. He came of a hardy, long-lived race, in spite of the early deaths of his parents. "You can't kill the Irish," he would say, "except with a bullet or far old age. We are made of steel and rope. We've had to learn how to survive." Elizabeth thought of Bernadette, fifty-five, coarsely vital if enormously fat and lumbering, with her heavy red complexion and loud voice and hair just slightly gray. Elizabeth had seen women like her in the markets of Europe, as strong as men and as vigorous. Elizabeth would sigh. Bernadette would live to be a very hearty old woman, into her nineties, eating and sleeping with zest and animal passion. Elizabeth had never known of Bernadette's great love for her husband which had never weakened at all through the years. "You spend more time with That Woman than you do with your own family," Bernadette would complain to Joseph. "Managing her affairs," she would add hastily. "Doesn't she have lawyers, for God's sake? Yes, I know my father made you one of the executors, with his bank, but still- She lives like a nun in Green Hills. Her old friends hardly see her. She must be getting very, very old, and a recluse." This June Bernadette said to her husband, making her voice regretful, "I have heard that Elizabeth is not very well. Some say she looks like a skeleton. She doesn't go-to town-much any more. Really. Well, at her age- Yes, I know she is younger than you, my dear, but then she isn't Irish. The English fade early. No stamina any longer. They're really decadent, you know. All the strength seems to have drained out of them. They're as bad, now, as the French." Joseph thought of a recent meeting he had had with his colleagues in Paris. His face tightened. He said, "I think, in a war, that the English, whom I detest, would do very well. Very well, indeed. They are not so decadent as we'd like to believe they are. The Anglo-Saxon can be a tough old party. And the French, in spite of their everlasting wars, can be as bull-doggy as the English, if not more so." "Well, there won't be any more wars," said Bernadette. It was nearly twelve years since Kevin had been killed, but she remembered. He had been the one child she had come close to loving, though she was proud of Rory and gloried in him. There were times when she was actually fond of him, for everyone spoke of his splendor and his glowing personality and his affable disposition and intelligence. "He is just like my father," she would say with pride. "He was the handsomest senator in Washington, and, when he was governor no one could resist him. Rory is the very image of him. We expect wonderful things of Rory." Bernadette could endure even Claudia when Rory was home, but now Rory was in London and Claudia was in Devon. That silly affected conceited creature! Bernadette thought. She gets worse every year. And that dark coarse complexion of hers, and her gloves! Common blood. Now she chatters all the time in French, to her children, and even her servants, and her accent is really abominable. Schoolgirlish. She may impress low and ignorant people, but not me, my girl, not me. And everyone knows how, tight-fisted you are, except when it comes to your own clothes and jewels, and how you pare the cheese when you are here. Shameful. Self-indulgent creature, with no more brains in your head than a peacock. At least a peacock's pretty, which you aren't. Poor Rory. Bernadette knew that Claudia snubbed her. It made her at once hilarious and infuriated. Ann Marie's doctors tried to soothe Joseph. It is true, they said, that she was degenerating physically, but she might still live for years. It is true, they said, that she had to be helped into chairs and bed now and could hardly walk. But her health was superb, considering everything. Her appetite was good, though her food was bland, like a young child's. But she thrived on it. Her mind, they would say, had not shown more degeneration, which was a hopeful sign. "Hopeful for what?" Joseph had asked J them with bitterness, and they had not answered. The elevator had been installed, and Ann Marie was helped into it by panting nurses assisted by the butler and the handyman, and she was taken into the gardens almost every day, to sit hugely in a chair, smiling j in the sunlight and asking for flowers-which she promptly tore to shreds in fat rosy fingers, squealing all the time like an infant. She cried as easily t and as loudly as an infant also, something which the doctors did not tell Joseph, and it was a mindless crying. It was only when she slept that she would suddenly awaken, wailing like a woman, and calling, calling in thick confused accents. Lately it had taken hours of cajoling-and sedatives- to soothe her back to sleep, and when she slept after the outbreak her face I was the face of a heart-broken woman. Joseph spent hours with her every day this June, reading books or newspapers in the shade of thick dark trees, sometimes listening to his daughter's babble, sometimes taking her hand, sometimes talking simply to her. She basked in his presence, and smiled, and if he had to leave her for a minute or two she cried, big tears running down her face. It would demand much of his strength to pacify her, while she clung to his hand on his return. Was he imagining it or was she showing a new fear this time, a new awareness of her desolation? He could not tell. When he came to Green Hills he would invariably bring his daughter a new doll, a new toy, which she would receive with delight and crows of pleasure. He had brought her a Teddy Bear this time, which had been created in honor of Theodore Roosevelt. She hugged it to her flabby breast and murmured to it, and Joseph, with his book in his hand, watched her with a despair that never lessened. He knew, this June, that the long hope he had had was finally gone. His daughter had left long ago, on that ghastly day in the woods at the top of the hill. But, where had she gone? This piteous creature was not Ann Marie. It was only an animal which had long lost even a semblance of the slim shy girl of earlier years, except for the eyes. There, in those eyes, Joseph would often fancy, there was a distant tiny figure, the figure of Ann Marie, on a far plane, longing to leave, and as despairing as himself, lonely, isolated, existing in Limbo. But still he could not bear the thought of this body dying, for the body held Ann Marie in thrall so she could not leave her father. She lingered, at an immeasurable distance it was true, but she lingered. At least, this was what Joseph believed and wanted to believe. When he looked into his daughter's eyes he would hail the infinitesimal figure of her in the clear pupil, and often he thought that she hailed him back, young, sweet, full of love and that delicate tenderness for him which he had known for years too brief and painful to remember. There had never been a June day so perfect in temperature and shining quiet and fragrance, and the glistening green lawns spread all about the estate and the gardens shouted with roses and there was a singing fountain nearby, rainbowed in the sun. Leaf shadows fluttered over Ann Marie's face as she alternately murmured to her new Teddy Bear or crossly slapped it or hugged it. Her dry drab hair had been braided and then tied with pink ribbons, and the plaits lay on her gross bosom incongruously. She was fatter even than her mother, but her muscles were soft and weak and flaccid. Her legs, covered by a light blue rug, did not move. She wore diapers, like a baby. The big mansion gleamed like alabaster in the sunlight, and shadows tossed themselves radiantly over white wall and red roof and polished pillars. There was a breeze, and it made the far distant trees run greenly and nimbly up the hills.