The Dinner Party (8 page)

“I will.”

“Your eyes are red. No more tears, please. The old folks will be looking at you like you're going out of style.”

“I'll try.”

“And one other thing, Liz, when I break this to Mom and Dad, you have to hold them up.”

“Oh, Jesus, don't lay that on me, Lenny.”

“Who else? I've been living with death five weeks now, and it could be months more. I've faced it. I've been awake through nights of terror. They've never faced anything like this. I had to come home. I'm here. I look no different—not yet. I'm condemned to death.”

“Lenny,” she said woefully.

“No, no. You must deal with it. Will you try, Liz, please.”

“Yes. I'm good at control. Not when something like this first hits me. I'm all right now. No more tears.”

“O.K. Now let's talk about the old folks and this big dinner tonight. Do you have any ideas?”

“Only that it's about Central America. Mother says it's the road. And that stinking bastard, Justin, is only about twelve miles from here. I suppose Mr. Secretary of State is staying with him.”

“Why here? Why didn't they ask Gramps to go to Washington?”

Elizabeth managed a smile. “That would make it official, wouldn't it? Gramps would tell them to fuck off. This way, they just happened to meet at the dinner table.” She loved politics. Ever since she was in boarding school, she had seized opportunities—school breaks, long weekends—to go to Washington and hang out in and around her father's office. She tried never to be obtrusive, not to ask too many questions, and be a willing gofer for anything that was needed, newspapers, coffee, sandwiches, anything at all. At times, the senator found her to be a nuisance, but for the most part he
prided
himself on being the father of a lovely young woman who liked his company.

On her part, Elizabeth very early on decided that this was the game, the most fascinating and important game ever invented. From early childhood, she had listened to the talk in her parents' home, and as she grew up, illusions other children clung to washed away. At age sixteen, she said to Leonard, “This is what I want.” When he asked why, she replied, “Because it's a wild game and fun.” And at age twenty, she said, “Because you're not fighting the smart ones. The smart ones are like Gramps. The politicos are different, crafty, cunning, greedy for power they never earned. If you know the game, they are easy.”

Keep her on politics, Leonard said to himself.

“They want him to give up the road, you know,” she said.

“How can you be so sure?” Here he was, death crawling inside of him, and coolly manipulating the conversation to keep his brilliant sister from thinking about that death.

“I just know. All the winds blow in one direction at a moment. This is one of those lousy moments. Look! Look! Look!” They were driving on a section of the road where white lilacs grew. They were in late flower, half a mile of lovely blooms that breathed their scent into the warm air. “They're so beautiful,” Elizabeth exclaimed. “I would want to be a lilac bush—just for a day or so. Lenny, do you remember reading a story called
Mr. Sycamore
, or some such thing, about a postman so tired of walking that he just planted his feet in the earth and grew into a fine sycamore tree. Let's do that, Lenny, I'll be a lilac and you'll be a sycamore—oh, God, why am I talking so crazy, like a kid?—”

On the edge of tears again. Leonard, nipping it, said, “Come down to earth, Sis. What are you telling me? That they're going to talk him out of that road he's building?”

“That's right.”

“You're crazy.”

“Am I? Kiss my ass in Macy's window?”

“No way. I always lose. I lost enough of these nutty bets to spend a whole morning kissing your ass in Macy's window. You never said which Macy's. Where would it be, New York? Then we got to make a trip there one day. Go straight to the manager. I'm Senator Cromwell's son, this is my sister. Set ourselves up properly. She's smarter than I am, and every time we make a bet, the loser kisses the other's ass in Macy's window. Right now, I have to kiss her ass in your—what window?” he asked Elizabeth. “If I remember right, it could be Seventh Avenue, or Thirty-fourth Street, or maybe Broadway too.”

“Whichever gets the biggest crowd.”

“In your Seventh Avenue window. I'm at least three hundred kisses behind. Let's say two hours in your window.”

“Tell him it's good for business.”

“What does he say?”

“He wants to know whether we'll have media coverage. Come on, you really believe Gramps will cave in? He has the highest fuck-you level of anyone I've ever known. He'd toss the president out of his house if he thought anything the old thespian said was inappropriate.”

“Who knows. Maybe you're right,” Elizabeth said. “I'm O.K. now. Anyway, it's not caving in. Do you want me to drive?”

“No. I'm better off if I'm doing something, and what do you mean it's not caving in? Of course it's caving in.”

“You think of Gramps as being principled. He isn't principled, Lenny. He loves nothing—”

“Hold on. He loves us. Jesus, Liz, you can see that. His sun rises and sets with us.”

“We're his, the way he sees it. You can call it love if you want to. We're like his homes, his yacht, his horses, but his center is power and money. It's like this Jewish charade he puts on. Do you know how many non-Jews came into our family in the past two hundred years? We're as Jewish as the Pope. But Gramps carries on like a first-generation immigrant Jew.”

“That's true,” Leonard admitted. “It does give him status. There's nobody else just like him.”

“So he won't cave in. He'll do whatever the moment requires for him to protect his silly empire.”

“I know. But I like him. He wants me to switch to MIT, and then go into the company. Can you imagine me an engineer?” Death had receded for a moment. Neither of them could hold firmly to the reality of death.

“Never,” Elizabeth said. “Suppose I said to him, Gramps, Lenny is a poet and there's not a damn thing you can do about it?” Death broke through. Elizabeth burst into tears.

“Oh, no,” Leonard said. “Lizzie, love, we'll be at the airport in fifteen minutes.”

“I know.”

“Will you please kill the tears, once and for all.”

“I'll try, Lenny. Promise, promise.” She dried her eyes. “How do I look?”

“Wonderful. You always look wonderful.”

“You haven't even looked.”

“I'm driving. Go on with that Gramps business. I never knew you went around shrinking people?”

“It's not shrinking. It's just looking and listening. I make a kind of game of it, ever since I was a kid and used to hang around Daddy's office in Washington. When I was seventeen I heard Senator Bassington say to Daddy, ‘Cromwell, there are only two kinds of people around here, and they're both sons of bitches. The difference is that half of them are our sons of bitches and the other half are their sons of bitches'—pretty stiff, huh?”

“What did Dad say?”

“He said, ‘You're wrong.' I was in the next room, so I couldn't hang around and listen to the rest, but that's what he said.”

“Score one for the senator.”

“Tell you something, Lenny. Up at school, a bunch of us got interested in the Sanctuary thing. Do you know about it?”

“I'm not sure. I haven't been interested in much lately, not much of anything.”

“All right. I'll try to sum it up. You know what's been happening in El Salvador with their death squads. In the last few years, they've murdered almost forty thousand people who opposed the government in one way or another, so thousands of men and women and children have fled from El Salvador and gotten up here to the States. Immigration has been picking them up and sending them back, which is like a death sentence. Then a few of them were given refuge in a church. That's where the Sanctuary thing started. Other churches and synagogues joined in, until there were hundreds of these Sanctuary churches through the west—something like an underground railroad. The government got very upset about this, and they took a man from El Salvador whom they had the goods on and who they could send back if they wished to, and they paid him and wired him with a tape recorder and sent him into a little church in Arizona as a spy and witness.”

“You're kidding,” Leonard said.

“Oh, no. This is fact, the
New York Times
and all that. Now, the church people are on trial, in a Federal court in Tucson, and they can be sent to prison for five years. Well, you know the way it is at school, and the kids get to talking about it, and this really bowled us over—you know, this kind of thing can't happen here. And then here's Liz, with her daddy a United States senator.”

“Oh, no. You didn't promise anything, did you?”

“I'll tell you what I did. We would get batches of material, because we were all chipping in with money to send to Tucson, and I would pick off the best of it and send it on to Daddy.”

“And?”

“Well, I just don't know,” Elizabeth said. “I haven't mentioned it to him, but then why is he willing to have those deplorable two from the administration at our house? They want to see Gramps. Well, why didn't Daddy say, you want to see him, invite him to your place? But instead, Daddy went out of his way to set up this dinner party.”

“Liz, the ins and the outs don't hate each other. They play footsie under the table. It would calm the senator's nerves to be buddy-buddy with the other side.”

“No way. No good reason. He's no saint, but he'd never play the double agent. Never!”

“Mother loves a dinner party. She's wonderful at it.”

“Not enough. No. Daddy has enough failings, but down there in that squirrel cage, he knows his way around. He really does. I've watched him. Now Congress isn't in session. But even if it were, it would take weeks to push a bill through that would help those church people. The whole thing is a cheap frame by the administration, and my guess is that Daddy feels that if he can get the terrible two to the dinner table in our home, and feed them nice and talk to them nice, he might just get them to call off the prosecution.”

“Could they?”

“In a minute.” She reached over and took Leonard's right hand from the wheel and pressed it up against her lips for a long moment, and then she said, gently, “He's a good person, the way things are measured in this stinking world, and you have to tell him, and he will die in his own way a thousand times, so please, Lenny darling, try to love him a little.”

“Jesus, I love him so much already,” Leonard cried. “Why can't he just once be a father to me?”

TEN

D
o you know, there is something wrong in this house today,” Ellen MacKenzie said to her husband, who was polishing dry and shining a set of champagne glasses. “There is something dark and sad.”

“I am dark,” Mac said, “and you are making me sad and sorrowful.”

Ellen bristled. “How?”

“You are a pessimist. You always been a pessimist. I am an optimist.”

“That'll be the day.”

“O.K.—O.K., woman. Spell it out. What is dark and sad?”

“Vibrations.”

“I wish,” Mac said deliberately, “that I was one of them niggers could put his wife on the bed, ass up, and give her a dozen of the best.”

“You ever use that filthy word in here again, I'll give
you
a dozen of the best.”

“Vibrations. Vibrations. God help us. Furthermore, you used that same word right here this morning.”

“That was different. God won't help you, because you don't have a sensitive bone in your body. You are Boobus Americanus.”

“What? What on earth is Boobus Americanus?”

“Mencken.”

“What's Mencken?”

“That other gentleman coming tonight, Justin, the man from the state department, I asked the senator was there anything special about his needs we should know, the senator called him Boobus Americanus, which is something this Mencken said. Put the glasses on the table there.”

“So I'm that,” Mac said thoughtfully. “How come, if I'm so stupid, I got two kids who are smart.”

“My genes.”

“Well, you are one smartass fox, I got to admit. What time do I go to the airport for the VIPs?”

“No time. The Justin summer place is about twelve miles away, and they'll be driven here. What I want you to do is get down the Federal plates, the ones with the blue and gold stripe and the eagle in the middle. We got nineteen of them, but tonight we want only eleven. They'll be place plates.”

“We ain't used them maybe two years.”

“They are too precious. One hundred seventy-nine years old, according to Miss Dolly. She decided to make them a gift to the White House, because the way the Levi's got them was a gift from—oh, what is his name?”