The Palace Thief (25 page)

As the whistle subsided I heard the thump-thump of his helicopter, and through the door a moment later I saw the twisters of dust as it hovered into view from above. How clever was the man I had known as a boy! The craft had been repainted the colors of military camouflage, but he had left the sponsons the red, white, and blue of their previous incarnation. He jumped from the side door when the craft was still a foot above the ground, entered the hall at a jog, and was greeted with an explosion of applause. His aides lined the stairs to the high platform on which the microphone stood under a banner and a flag, and as he crossed the crowd toward them the miners jostled to be near him, knocking their knuckles against his hard hat, reaching for his hands and his shoulders, cheering like Romans at a chariot race.

I do not need to report on his eloquence, for I have dwelled enough upon it. When he reached the staircase and ascended to the podium, stopping first at the landing to wave and then at the top to salute the flag above him, jubilation swept among the throng. I knew then that he had succeeded in his efforts, that these miners counted him somehow as their own, so that when he actually spoke and they interrupted him with cheers, it was no more unexpected than the promises he made then to carry their interests with him to the Senate. He was masterful. I found my own arm upraised.

Certainly there were five hundred men in that hall, but there was only one with a St. Benedict’s blazer over his shoulder and no hard hat on his head, so of course I should not have been surprised when within a few minutes one of his aides appeared beside me and told me that the candidate had asked for me at the podium. At that moment I saw Sedgewick Bell’s glance pause for a moment on my face. There was a flicker of a smile on his lips, but then he looked away.

Is there no battle other than the personal one? Was Sedgewick Bell at that point willing to risk the future of his political ideas for whatever childhood demon I still remained to him? The next time he turned toward me, he gestured down at the floor, and in a moment the aide had pulled my arm and was escorting me toward the platform. The crowd opened as we passed, and the miners in their ignorance and jubilation were reaching to shake my hand. This was indeed a heady feeling. I climbed the steps and stood beside Sedgewick Bell at the smaller microphone. How it was to stand above the mass of men like that! He raised his hand and they cheered; he lowered it and they fell silent.

“There is a man here today who has been immeasurably important in my life,” he whispered into his microphone.

There was applause, and a few of the men whistled. “Thank you,” I said into my own. I could see the blue underbrims of five hundred hard hats turned up toward me. My heart was nearly bursting.

“My history teacher,” he said, as the crowd began to cheer again. Flashbulbs popped and I moved instinctively toward the front of the platform. “Mr. Hundert,” he boomed, “from forty-five years ago at Richmond Central High School.”

It took me a moment to realize what he had said. By then he too was clapping and at the same time lowering his head in
what must have appeared to the men below to be respect for me. The blood engorged my veins. “Just a minute,” I said, stepping back to my own microphone. “I taught you at St. Benedict’s School in Woodmere, Virginia. Here is the blazer.”

Of course, it makes no difference in the course of history that as I tried to hold up the coat Sedgewick Bell moved swiftly across the podium, took it from my grip, and raised my arm high in his own, and that this pose, of all things, sent the miners into jubilation; it makes no difference that by the time I spoke, he had gestured with his hand so that one of his aides had already shut off my microphone. For one does not alter history without conviction. It is enough to know that I
did
speak, and certainly a consolation that Sedgewick Bell realized, finally, that I would.

He won that election not in small part because he managed to convince those miners that he was one of them. They were ignorant people, and I cannot blame them for taking to the shrewdly populist rhetoric of the man. I saved the picture that appeared the following morning in the
Gazette
: Senator Bell radiating all the populist magnetism of his father, holding high the arm of an old man who has on his face the remnants of a proud and foolish smile.

I still live in Woodmere, and I have found a route that I take now and then to the single high hill from which I can see the St. Benedict’s steeple across the Passamic. I take two walks every day and have grown used to this life. I have even come to like it. I am reading of the ancient Japanese civilizations now, which I had somehow neglected before, and every so often one of my boys visits me.

One afternoon recently Deepak Mehta did so, and we shared
some brandy. This was in the fall of last year. He was still the quiet boy he had always been, and not long after he had taken a seat on my couch, I had to turn on the television to ease for him the burden of conversation. As it happened, the Senate Judiciary Committee was holding its famous hearings then, and the two of us sat there watching, nodding our heads or chuckling whenever the camera showed Sedgewick Bell sitting alongside the chairman. I had poured the brandy liberally, and whenever Sedgewick Bell leaned into the microphone and asked a question of the witness, Deepak would mimic his affected southern drawl. Naturally, I could not exactly encourage this behavior, but I did nothing to stop it. When he finished his drink I poured him another. This, of course, is perhaps the greatest pleasure of a teacher’s life, to have a drink one day with a man he has known as a boy.

Nonetheless, I only wish we could have talked more than we actually did. But I am afraid that there must always be a reticence between a teacher and his student. Deepak had had another small heart attack, he told me, but I felt it would have been improper of me to inquire more. I tried to bring myself to broach the subject of Sedgewick Bell’s history, but here again I was aware that a teacher does not discuss one boy with another. Certainly Deepak must have known about Sedgewick Bell as well, but probably because of his own set of St. Benedict’s morals he did not bring it up with me. We watched Sedgewick Bell question the witness and then whisper into the ear of the chairman. Neither of us was surprised at his ascendence, I believe, because both of us were students of history. Yet we did not discuss this either. Still, I wanted desperately for him to ask me something more, and perhaps this was why I kept refilling his glass. I wanted him to ask, “How is it to be alone, sir, at this age?” or perhaps to say, “You have made a difference
in my life, Mr. Hundert.” But of course these were not things Deepak Mehta would ever say. A man’s character is his character. Nonetheless, it was startling, every now and then when I looked over at the sunlight falling across his bowed head, to see that Deepak Mehta, the quietest of my boys, was now an old man.

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Ethan Canin
is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collection
Emperor of the Air
and the novels
For Kings and Planets
and
Carry Me Across the Water
. He is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa, California, and northern Michigan.