The Shadow Cabinet (29 page)

Foreman watched him go unsteadily up the walk, pause at the foot of the wooden steps to collect himself, sway for an instant, smooth his rumpled jacket, and then start to climb. He staggered twice and stumbled back to the sidewalk. On the third attempt, his hands reached forward to touch the risers, like a crawfish; he gained the top and stood up to creep very slowly across the porch.

The hall light was dim. Dorsey Combs took off his shoes inside the door and tiptoed past the open staircase to the second floor, past the dark parlor, smelling of faded altar flowers, past the cheerless sitting room and the closed doors of the transient guest rooms, and on to the tiny cold bedroom at the back of the house. An old iron bed occupied half the room; against the walls were a wooden dresser and a cardboard wardrobe where his other suit hung.

Sitting on the bed, he removed his coat and the shirt and staggered across the hall into the small bathroom. As he stood at the basin, he heard the creak of the back stairs and straightened. As the second squeak from the steps reached him, and then the third, as stealthy and ominous as the first, he turned out the light and fled frightened back across the hall and closed the door. He had pulled off his socks and was stepping out of his trousers when the door was pushed open and Mrs. Tolliver stood there. She was still dressed in black, her face as white and cold as a somnambulist's. The smell of hospital corridors and sickrooms was still in her garments.

“You've been drinking,” she said coldly. “I smelled it then, I smell it now.”

“My chest was worrying me; it was all knotted up—”

“Liar,” she said, stepping into the room. “Liar and hypocrite. Drunkard, defiler, blasphemer—” She brought the leather belt from behind her back, raised it high over her head, and struck him savagely. The first lash drew blood high on the cheekbone, the second blurred the vision in his left eye. He could no longer look up, no longer think of the words he wanted to say, but was driven to the floor, hands over his head, his drunkenness no longer shielding him from the pain of the slashing belt.

Her expression didn't change. She seemed hardly aware of him at all, even as she turned finally to go out, switching off the light, closing the door, and leaving him in darkness. He crouched there for a long time, naked shoulders and face burning with fire. At last he lifted himself and crawled blindly into bed with his pain, but he tried not to think of his agony, only hers. He tried to imagine how she might one night be released from it—he drunken and weak, she standing there with the belt, merciless and strong, but then finding him for the first time in his lifted eyes. She would know then what had become of her, what had become of him, and she would drop the flail to gather him in and cleanse them both.…

Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon
, he recalled through his agony, as if waiting for her to come. But that night, as on other nights, he heard only the creak of boards as she undressed for bed in her lonely room on the second floor—she the warden of his bondage, he the prisoner of her faith, as dark and windowless as that jail cell in Laurel, Mississippi, so many years ago.

Buster Foreman drove east through the gray overcast Saturday morning, the thoughts of the previous night's conversation dissolving in the mist and smoke as the miles rolled by under his wheels. But outside Gatlinburg, one last memory of that long evening aroused him. He saw a roadside stand, perched on a clay bank, offering souvenirs. A hundred yards beyond was a second stand, its facade scrolled in a kind of bargeboard, like the gingerbread porticoes of the old riverboats that once paddled along the Savannah and Tennessee rivers. The red letters, dim and peeling with the corruptions of the seasons, advertised Colonel Tom Pepper's fried fritters, but winter was in the air, the sky was dark, and the gravel shoulder of roadside deserted. At the front of the lot was a rusting sign mounted on an iron frame, declaring that the stand was closed until spring.

But something else caught his eye, a name even more familiar by now. The car radio was playing “I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee,” a guitar was strumming relentlessly, and a tractor-trailer's air horn was blowing furiously ahead of him; yet the small printing in hard enamel on the iron base sprang out at him like the towering
See Rock City
advertisements visible on every granite face he'd passed since leaving Knoxville.

The sign in the weeds at the side of the road had once belonged to Bob Combs's car emporium in South Carolina.

At the next intersection, the cloud-hung mountains of the Great Smokies still in the distance, Buster Foreman turned around and headed back to Knoxville.

Tom Pepper admitted grudgingly that he'd once worked as a used-car salesman for Bob Combs marketing cars from Combs's wholesale lot to small operators in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, but he attached no importance to it.

“How come you're asking all these questions?” he complained loudly, but his aggravation was more for the benefit of the two truckdrivers who sat listening at the far end of the counter, waiting for their order. Tom Pepper's cap, apron, and trousers were clean, he was freshly shaven, his hair damp, but the smell of grease and boiled coffee was very much the same. “Maybe he done me dirt once, maybe he didn't, but that's between him an' me. I didn't steal that sign no ways; I borrowed it. I ain't looking for no trouble now; got a franchise business to sell. Bob Combs has done a lotta good in Wash'n'ton and that's all right by me. I ain't into politics no ways, nohow. What are you, a newspaper fella?”

Without Dorsey Combs's mediating presence, Buster Foreman was just a meddlesome stranger, in off the road. The two truckdrivers sat watching him. Tom Pepper saw their glances.

“Bob Combs is all we got going for us up there, ain't that right, boys?” he said smartly. One nodded in sullen agreement, still studying Buster Foreman. “Goddamned right,” Tom Pepper said. He picked up his cigarette from the edge of the counter, puffed on it, then drank from a coffee cup as he waited for the hashed brown potatoes. “I'm into fast food, not fast talk. They're all fulla shit anyway, all them goddamn politicians. Ask them boys what their road taxes are. You wanna hear some loud talk for your paper, ask 'em about that.”

“I didn't say I was with a paper,” Buster said, getting up. Through the small serving window he saw Cora Pepper bent forward, looking sternly at her husband.

“Even if I had anything on him, which I ain't, I wouldn't go talking to no stranger about it. I got enough troubles without the government tormentin' me. Get some little sucker from IRS on my ass, I'd really be up shit crik.”

Buster Foreman paid for his coffee and went out. As he reached his rented car, he saw Cora hurrying around the side of the building from the kitchen, a cardigan sweater drawn over her thin shoulders. “Lemme tell you something,” she called out. “Hold on a minute. You wanna find out something about Bob Combs? You go talk to Miz Birdie Jackson over in South Carolina, hear? A colored woman over there. You wanna find out what Bob Combs and some of that trash of his done? You go talk to Birdie Jackson. You tell her Cora sent you. Her name's Bertha Jackson, Miz Bertha Jackson. She's in the phone book. If you can't find her, go out to Frogtown and talk to Deacon Caldwell Taylor of the Mount Zion Reformed Baptist Church. He'll know what I'm talking about, only don't tell no one except Birdie I sent you.”

She took the card Buster Foreman gave her, turned without looking at it, and hurried back around the building.

2.

Painters, carpenters, and electricians appeared that week at the old Victorian complex in Foggy Bottom. Refurbishing the offices in the main building had been Angus McVey's idea, come to him that Tuesday evening over drinks at Ed Donlon's house after Haven Wilson told him he was willing to take a closer look at the Center's problems and submit his recommendations for its reorganization, if that was necessary. He also said that he'd need help and that he'd asked Nick Straus to assist him, not on a full-time basis, since that was impossible at present, but as a consultant. Ed Donlon had been surprised but had held his peace. McVey was agreeable to anything. Wilson proposed a sixty-day study, McVey six months, and Ed Donlon had offered the compromise, a ninety-day contract.

The subject of a permanent director was also discussed and Wilson told them he'd begin the search and make the recommendations in his final report. Wilson had Nick Straus in mind; Donlon, Haven Wilson; and McVey? It was difficult to tell. They had dinner at the Cosmos Club and afterward toured the deserted Center, accompanied by Fletcher. McVey, who'd avoided the Center for almost a year—since Foster's stewardship, he'd admitted: the man made him profoundly uncomfortable—was dismayed by the grimness of the offices in the late evening cold.

The Center's architect appeared a day later and the painters, carpenters, and electricians soon followed.

Wilson began at the Center the same week, installed in a small office behind the director's suite, which was converted into a conference room. There, all the various Center committees held their meetings, which Wilson attended as a silent observer, and there, too, he met each morning with individual members of the Center staff, inquiring about projects, schedules, and organization, as well as soliciting ideas. His afternoons were usually devoted to organizing his morning notes, to dictation, and, as the weeks continued, to interviewing candidates for the directorship.

His meetings with the various specialists of the thalamus group left him uneasy. He knew little about the behavioral sciences and decided he should learn more. The relevance of some of the special studies the Center was conducting for the Institute of Health and a few other government agencies escaped him completely.

“Like much that goes on in Washington, you have to take it on faith,” Dr. Foster advised him one morning as they were discussing it.

“That really doesn't answer the question, does it?” Wilson had said. “The fact is, the Center, as Angus McVey conceived it, is now doing things that have absolutely no relationship to its original purpose.”

“The condition of modern life,” Foster said sorrowfully.

“Sorry?”

“The condition of modern life,” he continued, “is to live with questions so complex that the questions are as obscure as the answers. Life lives on the margins.” He'd smiled, pleased with his aphorism, but Wilson had grown tired of Dr. Foster's evasive tautologies. Foster had returned to his old office in the building across the quadrangle and had left behind a cabinet drawer filled with unresolved administrative problems, including the coming year's budget, appointments of fellows, and three folders of unanswered correspondence. Wilson had sat him down one morning and gone through the folders item by item, suggesting how Dr. Foster, still the acting director, was to respond. By the end of the second week, those daily administrative sessions with Foster had become part of his routine.

“Simplicity,” Nick Straus had counseled. He'd taken up evening residence in a dark office across the hall from the director's suite. Once set aside for Angus McVey's use, it hadn't been occupied for over a year. A large oak desk sat at the rear of the room, in front of a wall of empty bookshelves. At the other end of the faded Persian carpet was an arrangement of leather chairs grouped about a gas-fired hearth. In the corner behind the desk was a pair of combination safes, now filled with the confidential and secret material Nick had transferred from his house in McLean. Wilson had a vague idea of what they contained, but asked no questions. Nick still clung perilously to his job with the DIA special watch, waiting for the ax to fall. He hadn't yet worked out a strategy for bringing to public attention what conscience demanded of him, and Wilson, besieged by other problems, left him to grapple with it alone. Nick's advice on the Center was straightforward enough—simplicity. Haven Wilson should cut boldly through the entanglements that obscured the Center's activity—including the dismissal of the entire thalamus group—and return it to its original purpose.

Rita Kramer called Wilson unexpectedly one dark, windy afternoon, a curious reprieve.

She was waiting for him near the front entrance to the Watergate Hotel, standing out of the raw wind, shoulders hunched, knees together the way some women stand when they're cold and miserable.

“You sure took your time,” she said, her jaw stiff, her watering eyes leaking a shadow of mascara down her cold cheeks. “I'm freezing. Which way?”

“There's a coffee shop over there,” he told her, looking down the street toward the familiar orange roof of the motor hotel. They didn't speak as they walked, heads averted from the punishing wind. He had no idea what she wanted to talk about. Inside, she disappeared into the powder room while he got coffee from the serving line. Her make-up was intact when she joined him at a booth in the rear.

“Artie wants to talk to you,” she said as she opened her purse and took out her cigarette case. “He's going back to L.A. for a few days and he wants to talk to you. He said something about a rain check.”

“Matthews is back now.”

“So I heard. He doesn't want to talk about real estate.”

“What's he want to talk about?”

“Just talk.” She lit the cigarette and studied him, disappointed. “Try not to look so enthusiastic.”

“The last time I talked to him, it didn't make much sense.”

“Don't be a nebbish.”

He had nothing to say, and so they sat in silence, looked disapprovingly at each other. “Don't be so thin-skinned,” she said finally.

“I'll try,” he said.

“Maybe he's not your kind—”

“I didn't say that.”

“Yeah, but I know what you're thinking. Maybe he fractures the king's English, maybe he's a little hard to take sometimes, but give him a chance. What do you want me to do—turn him off?”