The Henderson Equation (7 page)

"Of what?"

"Of the image-maker's bullshit. If we let down our
guard, we blow our credibility. That's what I mean by ecology. We're very
sensitive to words around here. If I get too heavy-handed, they'll get
suspicious of me, of my--" Nick paused--"let's call it integrity.
They know the parameters. If I sidestep the subtleties, they'll buck. I've got
a constituency, too." It was a lecture directed at Myra. He watched
Henderson watching Myra, who had slipped back into impassivity. Sipping his
coffee, Henderson suddenly drained his cup and placed it down again,
soundlessly, on the saucer. The act seemed a symbol of finality, as if his
persuasiveness had failed. Despite it, his coolness commanded respect.

"If there is no credible confirmation, it's dead.
That's as far as I can promise. I'm hardly an enemy. I'm not searching for
anything."

"You wouldn't know it from where I sit."

Henderson glanced at his watch to
cover his desire to leave, having seen that he was making little headway. As he
stood up, Myra followed, came around the table, and put her arm in his. Nick
remained seated as Henderson held out a firm hand and joined it to Nick's,
pumping it with undiminished vigor.

"I suppose I should understand," he said.

"Don't sweat it," Nick said. He wanted to
mitigate the man's anxiety by assuring him that rarely do words slip through
the net, his net. But he felt Henderson might see pomposity in it, bravado, and
it would make matters worse. His eyes followed them toward the door, where Henderson bent to kiss Myra lightly on the cheek.

"See you at the game Sunday," he heard Myra say. In its way it was more a confirmation than the physical closeness, the ritual of
the touching of the flesh which revealed nothing. But this thing with the game.
That was the stuff of which myths were made.

Each Sunday the Redskins were in town the owner, Henry
Bloomington Swopes, paid court to Washington power. It was no coincidence that
Swopes was the lawyer for the
Chronicle
. Power clusters together like
peanut brittle, Nick had thought on the occasions he had attended, which was
most of the time. Myra had a standing invitation to bring a half dozen guests
and therein lay the trappings of rank. Like the elegant ritual of a Japanese
sword dance, a day in the owner's box followed the scripted scenario to the
letter, complete with stage directions.

One arrived nearly two hours before the game at the private
dining room behind the owner's box. Guests came dressed in chic
football-viewing togs fresh out of the latest "W" pages. The sense of
with-it-ness hung in the air like perfume, oversweet and, in a special way,
intoxicating.

A feast was provided, rustic, but elegant in its casualness
and presided over by Swopes with a boyish charm which masked the ritualization
of the set piece, a tableau arranged around Myra Pell, the Queen Bee who, even
Nick grudgingly admitted, played her role with superb style, with just the
right measure of blue-blooded humility. Conscious of her favor, guests would
bask in the glory of proximity and like obedient supporting players, allow the
Queen the best lines.

To the practiced observer of the Washington Scene, the
primary action was played out during the game itself, when royalty exhibited
itself in the imperial box as the gladiators performed for the multitude. In
the magnified eyes of the binoculars, one might speculate, draw conclusions,
derive hints of who might be in the running for special favors and, conversely,
who was in decline. Even the late dishonored President had attended, measuring
his power against theirs, concluding, wrongly, it turned out, that he held the
better hand.

Myra closed the door softly after Henderson and came back to the table where she sipped the dregs of her coffee, holding the
cup with a light, delicate touch in shapely fingers.

"You could have at least given me fair warning,"
Nick said.

"You might have talked me out of seeing him."

"I would have tried."

"Believe me, Nick, I agonized over it." She
sipped her coffee. "But all's well that ends well. It turned out better
than I thought it would."

"How did you think it might have gone?" Nick
asked. Did she have it in her head to be a matchmaker?

"I thought you'd display some of the Gold temper, get
your dander up, become self-righteous. I'm proud of you, Nick."

He felt her attempts at manipulation and, now that his
guard was up, he listened closely. He felt in himself an echo of Charlie's
anger, the cutting edge of his madness. "The devious bitch," Charlie
had erupted. But was it really deviousness? Her strategy was almost
transparent. Surely she knew that, and had orchestrated this charade as an
oblique confrontation.

"How else could it have been played?"

"You could have accused me of deliberately trying to
get you to kill a story."

"I'll reserve judgment on that."

"You still don't believe him then?"

"Do you?"

"Why do you always answer a question with a
question?"

"It's my Semitic background."

"And your newspaperman's natural tendency. Your
cynicism is showing."

"So is your starry-eyed innocence."

She smiled thinly at first, then broadly, displaying her
cared-for, even teeth. Like her hands, smooth and tapered, her teeth were
distinguishing characteristics, oddly youthful in her aging face with deepening
crinkles around the eyes.

"I'm not innocent, Nick," she protested.
"Intuitive perhaps, but not innocent." No, she was not innocent, Nick
thought, remembering Charlie again. She lit a cigarette, puffing deeply.

"You believe him then?"

"Yes, I do, Nick. Call it a gut feeling if you won't
go with intuition."

"Is there a difference?"

He wondered if there was a romantic interest in Henderson, an errant thought quickly discounted. Myra's sexuality had been sublimated, he
had concluded, long ago, its fury spent, if Charlie's graphic early
descriptions were to be believed, on Charlie.

"The woman's insatiable," Charlie had told him in
the early days of their marriage, and he had hinted at it during their
courtship. Could it flicker again, Nick thought, recalling the morning with
Jennie? Yes, it was quite possible for love, whatever that was, to intrude,
even in midlife, gathering heat in the ashes. He must watch for signs in Myra. Henderson was certainly attractive, confident in his manhood, ambitious enough to
use that route as a last resort.

"I believed him," Myra said.

"He was believable, I'll grant you that. It's his
dominant quality. It's also the trained response of the clandestine service.
Unfortunately, I have facts to contend with."

"Like what?" Myra asked, a trifle too swiftly, a
brief frown lining her forehead, then disappearing.

"Allison's so-called confession. Gunderstein's
instinct."

"Even you admit that you're not convinced."

"I have to go with Gunderstein's track record. Hell, Myra, he is, after all, a star in the
Chronicle
's crown. We went with his instincts
before."

"Also our own."

"True."

"We knew he was on the right track before. We encouraged
him. We put all our strength behind him. We were committed from the
beginning."

"We were dealing with an acknowledged enemy, with
ideological differences. That's a hell of a motivating factor."

"At least we both agree that Henderson's a
friend." She drew deeply on the cigarette again, then added quickly,
"He stands for the things we believe in. He has compassion, decency, a
sense of morality. The country needs that kind of leadership, Nick. He's our
kind of guy."

"That's beside the point."

"That
is
the point." She punched out her
cigarette in the ashtray, a trace of frustration in the act.

"You really believe we're persecuting him?" Nick
asked, measuring his words carefully.

"I think he's entitled to a quick resolution."

"Either way?"

"Either way."

He was seeing her differently now, as if the light were
shifting in the prism of his lens. She did, after all, have the power to order
him to shut the tap, a privilege she had never invoked. Was he prepared to walk
away from this, all this? His sudden vacillation frightened him. Her message
came through quite clearly. All subtlety was dissipated, her direction
confirmed. He slapped both his thighs.

"Well then, let the chips fall where they may."
And let the best man win, he might have said, completing the cliché.

"I never implied otherwise," she said, lighting
another cigarette. He watched her grope for control, then turned his eyes away.

"I trust your judgment, Nick," she said, a hint
of pleading in her voice. "Just as Charlie did." She paused, letting
the reference to Charlie take effect. "You believe that, don't you,
Nick?"

"Yes," he said after a while, but his long pause
had added a note of tentativeness which she ignored, perhaps hoping to dispel
the tension. She stood up and went behind her large desk. Opening a drawer, she
took out a hand mirror and patted her hair.

"You are coming to the game Sunday?" she asked,
examining her face in the mirror.

"Yes."

She turned away, a finger poking at an eyelash. Then
without looking at him she said, "And bring Jennie."

"Jennie?" He had no time to control the reflex.
She had caught him with a dart outside his field of vision. Rooted to the spot,
he waited for more to come.

"Come on, Nick. Isn't it time you came out? It's no
secret, you know."

He remained silent, turning to go, a stammer caught on his
tongue. He felt her eyes on his departing back.

"Don't be so damned inflexible," she called after
him, her meaning unmistakably clear.

In the elevator, he felt the anger glow inside his gut. He
looked at the bank of buttons and pushed "B," hoping that the cab
would descend without interruption. But he was not to be spared. On the
editorial floor, Bonville emerged, his thin face scrupulously searching Nick's
in his myopic way, as if investigating for skin blemishes.

"I've put the defense copy on your desk," he
said, insensitivity proclaiming itself in the face of Nick's obviously
distraught look. "Landau said he wouldn't put it in type without your
final okay." The word
okay
was belched out with contempt.

Nick grunted and looked above Bonville's head to the
lighted floor signals. When the elevator opened at ground level, Bonville
stepped aside, an obvious act of deference, a deliberate nurturing of
arrogance. When Nick didn't move, he shrugged, the beginning of a sneer arranging
itself on his features as he proceeded out of the elevator cab. Nick made a
mental note to rip the hell out of his editorial, already convinced of his
suspicion that Bonville had reached far beyond the agreed-upon parameters.

On the basement level, Nick stepped out into a massive
forest of heavy paper rolls, the pulpy smell heavy in the air. Vaguely
recognized by the workmen who handled the paper, he walked down the long
corridors, like trails through a forest. He hadn't been down here in months. He
wondered why he had come here now, a small figure roaming in the midst of these
oversized cylindrical stumps. Perhaps he had come seeking recall for some
moment of time past, hoping like Proust to find some epiphany in the scent. Was
he looking for Charlie in these groves? When he had traversed the long length
of the area, he found an exit and mounted a metal staircase, his leather soles
clacking on the steps. Opening a door on the next floor, he found himself
confronted with the skeletal massiveness of the press, a vast superstructure
laced with latticed stairwells. There was an awesomeness not only in the
technological puzzle of the devices but in the size of the huge rollers. Even
the sounds of tinkering seemed portentous, tiny signals heralding the cacophony,
as the oiled and inked maws waited for the ingestion of words. He felt humbled
in its presence. Did the captain of a huge ship derive the same humility facing
its complicated entrails, knowing in his heart that despite the dependence on
technology, despite the crew, despite the exigencies of weather and the
unpredictability of the ocean, the ultimate responsibility of all lives
depended on his own fallible judgment?

In the end, what was all this technical acrobatics in the
face of man's will and spirit? Just another pile of shaped alloys, a junk shop
of potential ruins for future scholars of antiquity. The smell of ink permeated
the huge cement cavern, reassuring somehow, like the paper rolls below, a clue,
perhaps, that man could still perceive the power of it and in that perception
was, therefore, still in control. Could Gutenberg have imagined it back in that
German cellar? The power of the word! Of course Gutenberg knew, beginning
symbolically with the Bible as if to confirm the reverence of his pursuit. A
wrench fell nearby, clattering to the cement floor. He looked up and saw a man,
oddly hatted in the special fold of copy paper, the badge of the pressman. The
man shrugged in apology.

Nick retreated to the stairwell and moved upward, pausing
briefly on the next level, from which the stacked and folded papers would in a
few hours fan out over the world, bound in wire, loaded into trucks, carrying
the word, a mirror of the world, his world, in that moment of time. His
faltering confidence returned as he moved upward still another floor to where
the words were processed, the shrinking bank of linotypers cranking out their
metal slugs of words, thrashing arrogantly in the last throes of obsolescence.
He walked past the ungainly machines toward the area where the new technology
was encroaching, where the new word-processing equipment was in smooth action,
keyboards clicking out the sentence visible on their electronic consoles. He
was more recognizable here, and he nodded to familiar faces when eyes strayed from
the consoles as he passed. He had fought hard for the installation of the new
equipment, despite the unions and his own impatience with their reluctance,
bucking all the way through the long negotiations that had, toward the end,
interrupted the flow of words. An army of editorial workers sweated over tapes,
the photographed type, the paste-up. Lines of people stood along the proof
racks, fitting together the ads, pasting, reading, proofing--an endless
process. He watched the clock as the hands moved relentlessly toward imposed
deadlines, finite time that controlled the rhythm of his life. The clock was so
embedded in his head, he did not need the graphic view of time to respond. He
ducked quickly through a door and pounded upward toward the editorial rooms,
swinging open the door to the brightly lit center of his life.

His brief tour had refreshed him, validating once again his
relationship to his work. It was a ritual that Charlie had woven into his own
life in the days when it was possible to know by first name even the humblest
paper handler, the shiest typesetter.

"We are all cogs," Charlie had told him.
"Never forget that." Surely even Myra had felt the same sense of awe.
Of course, there was a mystique about this business. Henderson's allusion was
the instinctive reaction of the outsider who saw only the power of it, the
muscle itself encased in the supple skin, not the blood and tissue that fueled
it.

The city room was teeming now, the typewriters clacking in
wild crescendos, counterpointed by the persistent ringing of telephones. He
headed for his glass cage past lifted eyes.

"A half hour to budget conference," Miss
Baumgartner reminded. He waved at Landau as he passed. In his corner
Gunderstein typed, engrossed in still another telephone probe.

Bonville's editorial nagged at him from the top of the
Lucite desk. Pencil in hand, he began to read it hurriedly, emasculating the
persistent line, sculpting it to the proportion of his own vision, feeling joy
in the doing, flexing his power. When he had finished, he waved to a news aide
who responded quickly and took the copy from him.

"Bring it to the editorial copy desk," he
commanded. The young man took it and left quickly. Picking up the phone, Nick
punched out Jennie's extension.

"Get ready, kid, we're having a coming out
party."

"A what?"

"A coming out party. We're going to the ball game
Sunday. The royal box."

"Nick. Are you all right?"

"It's a command performance. By order of the
queen."

"As a twosome?"

"A dynamic duo. You and me, babe."

"Christ, Nick. I don't think I'm ready for it."

"Then get ready," Nick said, his voice lowering.
"It's the moment of truth."

The tour of the plant had dissipated his depression and
hearing Jennie's voice had exhilarated him.

Despite ominous signs in the heavens, he told himself, all
was still well on the planet. Not that he had discounted the blip on the radar
screen. Myra was, unquestionably, moving into a more militant phase of her
management, her confidence buoyed by the paper's recent string of phenomenal
successes.

Looking back now to his nine years as executive editor, the
years before that when he had walked gratefully in Charlie's shadow, he
applauded his, their, instincts in building a sturdy ship with a tight tiller
that responded only to their special touch. The mechanism was a complex, Rube
Goldberg concoction, each part oddly fitted by his and Charlie's own hands. At
each terminal of movement, where the joints fitted smoothly together, Nick had
carefully honed his own special fittings. Landau, managing editor; Madison,
Metropolitan editor; Domier née Gold, Lifestyle editor; Peterson, Editorial
Page editor; Prager, Sports editor; Phillips, World editor. The others he had
created--like Gunderstein, even Gunderstein, and all those special
correspondents burrowed into the White House, the Hill, the Defense Department,
the Treasury, and into every major foreign capital of the world. A single
faulty part could injure the whole.

And he was the fuse, the spark of connection through which
the special energy flowed. It was quite true, he told himself with candor, that
the fuse was replaceable, but not so simply dislodged, and if dislodged, not so
simply replaced, and if replaced, not exactly replicated. Try extracting a note
from a Bach fugue and watch the symmetry, the special balance, fall apart, he
reasoned. He found security in that, despite Myra's power over his future. The
question was: did Myra understand the actual limits of her power? Only he knew
where all the pieces fit in this intricate mechanism. She was clearly changing,
moving into a new dimension. He would have to watch her carefully.

Playing favorites was an old newspaper game. It had
destroyed Hearst, bringing him to the final abyss of his own megalomania. It
was not enough for Hearst to want to make presidents; in the end he had wanted
to
be
president. The ultimate power trip. Surely Myra could be deflected
with such sound examples. But hadn't someone tried to dissuade Hearst?

The logic of his arguments, by then, had softened his
suspicion. There was, after all, some good horse sense in the old girl, as the
matter of himself and Jennie had testified. It was futile to be clandestine.
His initial instinct, as his love for Jennie became apparent to himself, had
been that it might diminish him in the eyes of the people at the
Chronicle,
a revelation of vulnerability. His was an example to be set. A newspaper was no
place for interlocking passions. Emotion, especially that one, could distort
judgments.

But despite the relief of their impending "coming
out," Nick, with that persistent questioning of questions, determined to
watch for minefields ahead. Better to be cautious than exploded, he thought,
remembering arduous detours in France to avoid the tricky patterns of German
mines. Why had Myra chosen exactly that moment to tender the invitation? Was
she simply playing on the insecurity of a man in love with a girl thirty years
his junior? Was this in Myra's mind when she released her well-aimed dart?

"Don't be so inflexible," she had said, another
echo to his journalist-trained ears which trapped the inner monologue. Listen
to what she is saying, he reminded himself.