Democracy (14 page)

“It’s midnight here,” Inez had said on this last call from Janet.

“I dialed, and you picked up. Amazing. Usually I get your service. Now. Concentrate. I’ve been thinking about Mother. Do you remember Mother crying upstairs at my wedding?”

“No,” Inez had said, but she did.

On the day Janet married Dick Ziegler at Lanikai Carol Christian had started drinking champagne at breakfast. She had a job booking celebrities on a radio interview show in San Francisco that year, and by noon she was placing calls to entertainers at Waikiki hotels asking them to make what she called guest appearances at Janet’s wedding.

As you may or may not remember I’m the mother of the bride, Carol Christian said by way of greeting people at the reception.

I’d pace my drinks if I were you, Paul Christian had said.

I should worry, I should care
, Carol Christian sang with the combo that played for dancing on the deck a Chriscorp crew had just that morning laid on the beach.

Your mother’s been getting up a party for the Rose Bowl, Harry Victor said.

Carol’s a real pistol, Dwight Christian said.

I should marry a millionaire
.

It was when Janet went upstairs to change out of her white batiste wedding dress that Carol Christian began to cry. Not to blame your Uncle Dwight, she kept repeating, sitting on the bed in which she had fifteen years before taken naps with Inez and Janet. Our best interests at heart. Not his fault. Your grandmother. Cissy. Really. Too much. Anyhow, anyhoo. All’s well that ends in bed. Old San Francisco saying. I got my marvelous interesting career,
which
I never would have had, and you got—

Inez, heavily pregnant that year, sat on the bed and tried to comfort her mother.

We got married, Janet prompted.

Forget married, Carol Christian said. You got horses. Convertibles when the time came. Tennis lessons.

I couldn’t have paid for stringing your rackets if I’d taken you with me.

Let alone the lessons.

Forget the little white dresses.

Never mind the cashmere sweater sets and the gold bracelets and the camel’s-hair coats.

I beg to differ, Janet Christian, Mrs. Ziegler, you did so have a camel’s-hair coat.

You wore it when you came up for Easter in 1950.

Mon cher Paul: Who do you f—— to get off this island?
(
Just kidding of course
)
XXXX, C
.

Neither Inez nor Janet had spoken. The windows were all open in the bedroom and the sounds of the party drifted upstairs in the fading light. Down on the beach the bridesmaids were playing volleyball in their gingham dresses. The combo was playing a medley from
My Fair Lady
. Brother Harry, Inez heard Dick Ziegler say directly below the bedroom windows. Let the man build you a real drink.

Where’s Inez, Harry Victor said. I don’t want Inez exhausted.

Enough of the bubbly, time for the hard stuff, Dick Ziegler said.

Excuse me but I’m looking for my wife, Harry Victor said.

Whoa man, excuse me, Dick Ziegler said. I doubt very much she’s lost.

Upstairs in the darkening bedroom Janet had taken off her stephanotis lei and placed it on their mother’s shoulders.

I should worry, I should care
.

I should marry a millionaire
.

Inez did remember that.

Inez also remembered that when she and Janet were fourteen and twelve Janet had studied snapshots of Carol Christian and cut her hair the same way.

Inez also remembered that when she and Janet were fifteen and thirteen Janet had propped the postcards from San Francisco and Lake Tahoe and Carmel against her study lamp and practiced Carol Christian’s handwriting.

“Partners in a surprisingly contemporary marriage in which each granted the other freedom to pursue wide-ranging interests,” was how Billy Dillon had solved the enigma of Paul and Carol Christian for Harry Victor’s campaign biography. The writer had not been able to get it right and Billy Dillon had himself devised this slant.

Aloha oe
.

I believe your mother wants to go to night clubs
.

Nineteen days after Janet’s wedding Carol Christian had been dead, killed in the crash of a Piper Apache near Reno, and there in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center Janet was about to be dead. Janet had asked Inez to remember and Inez had pretended that she did not remember and now Janet had moved into the certain gray area between either and or.

Aloha oe
.

Inez had touched Janet’s hand, then turned away.

The click of her heels on the hospital floor struck her as unsynchronized with her walk.

The sound of her voice when she thanked the resident struck her as disembodied, inappropriate.

Outside the hospital rain still fell, and traffic was backed up on the Lunalilo Freeway. On the car radio there was an update on Janet’s guarded condition at Queen’s Medical Center, and on the numbers of congressmen and other public officials who had sent wires and taped messages expressing their sympathy and deep concern about the death of Wendell Omura. Among the taped messages was one from Harry, expressing not only his sympathy and deep concern but his conviction that this occasion of sadness for all Americans could be an occasion of resolve as well (Inez recognized Billy Dillon’s style in the balanced “occasions”), resolve to overcome the divisions and differences tragically brought to mind today by this incident in the distant Pacific.

“Not so distant you could resist a free radio spot,” Inez said to Billy Dillon.

At five o’clock that afternoon, when Inez and Billy Dillon arrived at Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s house, the first thing Inez noticed was a photograph on the hall table of Janet, a photograph taken the day Janet married Dick Ziegler, Janet barefoot on the beach at Lanikai in her white batiste wedding dress. The photograph did not belong on the hall table, which was why Inez noticed it. The photograph had always been on Ruthie Christian’s dressing table, and now it was here, its silver frame recently polished, the table on which it sat recently cleared of car keys and scarves and lacquer boxes and malachite frogs. The photograph was an offering, a propitiatory message to an indefinite providence, and the message it confirmed was that Janet was available to be dead.

“I called St. Andrew’s this morning and told Chip Kinsolving what we want,” Dwight Christian was saying in the living room. “When the time comes. Just the regular service, in and out, the ashes to ashes business. And maybe a couple of what do you call them, psalms. Not the one about the Lord is my goddamn shepherd. Specifically told him that. Dick? Isn’t that what you want?”

“Don’t anticipate,” Dick Ziegler said. “How do I know what I want. She’s not dead.”

“Passive crap, the Lord is my shepherd,” Dwight Christian said. “No sheep in this family.”

“I’ll tell you what I want,” Inez heard herself say as she walked down the few steps into the living room. She was remotely aware, as if through Demerol, of the vehemence in her voice. “I want you to put that picture back where it belongs.”

At this moment when Inez Victor walked into the living room of the house on Manoa Road she was still wearing the short knitted skirt and the cotton jersey and the plumeria lei in which she had left the airport ten hours before.

She had not yet slept.

She had not yet eaten.

She had not yet seen Jack Lovett, although Jack Lovett had seen her.

Get her in out of the goddamn rain, Jack Lovett had said.

11

T
HIS
much is now known about how Jack Lovett had spent the several months which preceded Inez Victor’s arrival in Honolulu: he had spent those months shuttling between Saigon and Hong Kong and Honolulu. There had been innumerable details, loose ends, arrangements to be made. There had been exit paperwork to be fixed. There had been cash to be transferred. There had been end-user certificates to be altered for certain arms shipments, entry visas to be bought, negotiations to be opened and contacts to be made and houses to be located for displaced Vietnamese officers and officials (even this most minor detail was delicate, in those months when everyone knew the war was ending but everyone pretended that it was not, and Jack Lovett handled such purchases himself, with cash and the mention of overseas associates); the whole skein of threads necessary to transfer the phantom business predicated on the perpetuation of the assistance effort. That there is money to be made in time of war is something we all understand abstractly. Fewer of us understand war itself as a specifically commercial enterprise, but Jack Lovett did, not abstractly but viscerally, and his overriding concern during the months before Inez Victor reentered the field of his direct vision (she had always been there in his peripheral vision, a fitful shadow, the image that came forward when he was alone in a hotel room or at 35,000 feet) had been to insure the covert survival of certain business interests. On the morning Jack Lovett watched Inez arrive at the Honolulu airport, for example, he also watched the arrival and clearance from Saigon and immediate transshipment to Geneva via Vancouver of a certain amount of gold bullion, crated and palleted as “household effects.” When he later mentioned this gold bullion to Inez he described it as “a favor I did someone.” Jack Lovett did many people many favors during the spring of 1975, and many people did Jack Lovett favors in return.

As a reader you are ahead of the narrative here.

As a reader you already know that Inez Victor and Jack Lovett left Honolulu together that spring. One reason you know it is because I said so, early on. Had I not said so you would have known it anyway: you would have guessed it, most readers being rather quicker than most narratives, or perhaps you would even have remembered it, from the stories that appeared in the newspapers and on television when Jack Lovett’s operation was falling apart.

You might even have seen the film clip I mentioned.

Inez Victor dancing on the St. Regis Roof.

Nonetheless.

I could still do Inez Victor’s four remaining days in Honolulu step by step, could proceed from the living room of the house on Manoa Road into the dining room and tell you exactly what happened that first night in Honolulu when Inez and Billy Dillon and Dick Ziegler and Dwight and Ruthie Christian finally sat down to dinner.

I could give you Jack Lovett walking unannounced into the dining room, through the French doors that opened onto the swimming pool.

I could give you Inez looking up and seeing him there.

“Goddamn photographers camped on the front lawn,” Dwight Christian would say. “Jack. You know Inez. You know Janet’s husband. Dick. You know Billy here?”

“We were both in Jakarta a few years back.” Jack Lovett would be speaking to Dwight Christian but looking at Inez. “Inez was there. Inez was in Jakarta with Janet.”

“Inez was also in Jakarta with her husband.” Billy Dillon’s voice would be pleasant. “And her two children.”

“The reason the vultures are on the lawn is this,” Dwight Christian would say. “Janet’s not cutting it.”

“Don’t talk about Janet ‘not cutting it,’ ” Dick Ziegler would say. “Don’t sit there eating chicken pot pie and talk about Janet ‘not cutting it.’ ”

“A change of subject,” Dwight Christian would say. “For Dick. While I finish my chicken pot pie. Jack. What would you say if I told you Chriscorp was bidding a complete overhaul at Cam Ranh Bay?”

“I’d say Chriscorp must be bidding it for Ho Chi Minh.” Jack Lovett would still look only at Inez. “How are you.”

Inez would say nothing, her eyes on Jack Lovett.

“Do you want to go somewhere,” Jack Lovett would say, his voice low and perfectly level.

A silence would fall over the table.

Inez would pick up her fork and immediately lay it down.

“Millie has dessert,” Ruthie Christian would say, faintly.

“Inez,” Billy Dillon would say.

Jack Lovett would look away from Inez and at Billy Dillon. “Here it is,” he would say in the same low level voice. “I don’t have time to play it out.”

Well, there you are.

I could definitely do that.

I know the conventions and how to observe them, how to fill in the canvas I have already stretched; know how to tell you what he said and she said and know above all, since the heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis, a tacit contract between writer and reader to surprise and be surprised, how not to tell you what you do not yet want to know. I appreciate the role played by specificity in this kind of narrative: not just the chicken pot pie and not just the weather either (I happen to like weather, but weather is easy), not just the way the clouds massed on the Koolau Range the next morning and not just the clatter of the palms in the afternoon trades behind Janet’s house (anyone can do palms in the afternoon trades) when Inez went to get the dress in which Janet was buried.

I mean more than weather.

I mean specificity of character, of milieu, of the apparently insignificant detail.

The fact that when Harry and Adlai Victor arrived in Honolulu on the morning of March 28, Good Friday morning, the morning Janet’s body was delivered to the coroner for autopsy, they were traveling on the Warner Communications G-2. The frequent occasions over the long Easter weekend before Janet’s funeral on which Adlai found opportunity to mention the Warner Communications G-2. The delicacy of reasoning behind the decision that Harry and Adlai, but not Inez, should call on Wendell Omura’s widow. The bickering over the arrangements for Janet’s funeral (Dick Ziegler did after all want the Lord as Janet’s shepherd, if only because Dwight Christian did not), and the way in which Ruthie Christian treated the interval between Janet’s death and Janet’s funeral as a particularly bracing exercise in quarter-mastering. The little flare-up when Inez advised Dick Ziegler that he could not delegate to Ruthie the task of calling Chris and Timmy at school to tell them their mother was dead.