Exiles in the Garden Read online

  ExilesInTheGarden

  Ward Just

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON NEW YORK

  2009

  Books by Ward Just

  NOVELS

  A Soldier of the Revolution 1970

  Stringer 1974

  Nicholson at Large 1975

  A Family Trust 1978

  In the City of Fear 1982

  The American Blues 1984

  The American Ambassador 1987

  Jack Gance 1989

  The Translator 1991

  Ambition & Love 1994

  Echo House 1997

  A Dangerous Friend 1999

  The Weather in Berlin 2002

  An Unfinished Season 2004

  Forgetfulness 2006

  Exiles in the Garden 2009

  SHORT STORIES

  The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert 1973

  Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women 1979

  Twenty-one: Selected Stories 1990

  (reissued in 1998 as The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert: 21 Stories

  AND NOVELLAS)

  NONFICTION

  To What End 1968

  Military Men 1970

  PLAYS

  Lowell Limpett 2001

  Copyright © 2009 by Ward Just

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhpub.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Just, Ward S.

  Exiles in the garden / Ward Just.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-19558-2

  1. Photojournalists—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.U75E95 2009

  813.54—dc22 2008049572

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  As always, To Sarah

  and to John and Symmie Newhouse

  and to Jon and Genevieve Randal

  and special thanks to Larry Cooper

  PART I

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER

  ESPECIALLY when he was alone Alec Malone had the habit of slipping into reverie, a semiconscious state not to be confused with dreams. Dreams were commonplace while his reveries presented a kind of abstract grandeur, expressionist canvases in close focus, untitled. That was how he thought of them, and not only because of the score in the background, German music, voices, trumpets, metronomic bass drums, and now and again the suggestion of a tango or a march. The reveries had been with him since childhood and he treated them like old friends paying a visit. The friends aged as he did, becoming increasingly abstract now that he had begun to lose sight in his right eye, a hole in the macula that began as a pinprick but was now the size of an o. That eye saw only the periphery of things with any clarity. The condition was annoying, not disabling, since sight was a function not of one eye but of two and Alec's left eye was sound. However, driving at night was an adventure. He did not permit himself to drive in fog because objects had a way of vanishing altogether. And there was some amusement—when he closed his left eye and looked at a human face with his right, that face appeared as an expressionist's death's-head, an image very like Munch's The Scream.

  Alec had the usual habits of one who lived alone: a fixed diet, a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced checkbook, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA Tour. He worked when he felt like it. He described himself to himself as leading a chamber-music sort of life except for the Wagnerian reveries. They were neutral fantasies, meaning they had nothing to do with the life he wished he had led—Alec was quite content with the one he had—or might lead in the future. He did not count himself a prophet. He returned often to his childhood but rarely lingered there. His childhood was so long ago that the events he remembered most vividly seemed to him to have happened to someone else and were incomplete in any case, washed-out colors side by side with ink-black holes, a half-remembered country governed by a grim-faced man with a long nose, a figure from antiquity, perhaps a bildnis from Durer's sketchbook. Alec considered the long-nosed man a family heirloom, grandmother's silver or the pendulum clock on the mantel, the one whose ticks and tocks sounded like pistol reports. He lost his footing in those early years in which the domestic life of his own family was usurped by the civic life of the nation. That was the life that counted. The Malone dinner table, his father presiding, was a combination quiz show and news conference.

  Quick now, Alec. How many congressional districts in Iowa? Which nations were signatories to the Locarno Pact? Who wrote "Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears"?

  What was Glass-Steagall? Who was Colonel House?

  Where is Yalta?

  Question: What's the difference between ignorance and indifference?

  Answer: I don't know and I don't care.

  Hush, Alec. Don't disturb your father when he's talking to Mr. Roosevelt. Don't you know there's a war on?

  À la recherche du temps Roosevelt. The president inhabited the house in Chevy Chase like a member of the family or a living god, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Alec's father called him the Boss. The Boss wants this, the Boss wants that. The Boss sounded a little tired today but he's leaving for Warm Springs tomorrow. In his reveries Alec conjured the president in his White House office, talking into the telephone in his marbled Hudson River voice, commanding an entire nation—its armies, its factories and farms, all its citizens great and small. Yet Alec had no sense of him as a man—not then, not later—and when he tentatively asked his father, the reply was bromidic. He was great. He was the greatest man his father had ever met, and he had met many, many of the highest men in the land, shaken their hands, spoken tête-à-tête, worked with them, worked against them. The Boss was different. The Boss lived on a different level, deriving his strength and his courage from—and here his father faltered, uncomfortable always in the realm of the mystical. Finally he said, His legs are useless, you know. He can hardly walk. But he likes a martini at the end of the day just like the rest of us, and there the comparison ends. Alec, I'd say he's Shakespearean. That's the best I can do.

  Alec nodded, wondering all the while which of Shakespeare's kings his father had in mind—Macbeth, Richard III, Coriolanus? Henry V, no doubt, though that comparison did not seem apt. Shakespeare's kings suffered the consequences of their will to power. The will to power was the evil in them, not that they did not have ample assistance from others—wives, false friends, rivals, the Fates. When the president died Alec's father was inconsolable. Washington was suddenly a darker, lesser place. Then he was summoned by Harry Truman—they had never gotten along—who extended his hand and asked for help, not an easy thing for him to do. Mr. Truman was a prideful man, often vindictive. Of course Senator Malone agreed to do whatever Mr. Truman wanted done. There was a war on. Each man did his part willingly. But it wasn't the same.

  For years Franklin D. Roosevelt figured in Alec's reveries but eventually faded as Alec drifted upward, forward to his young manhood and early middle age and beyond, what he considered his meridian years—when he was out of his father's house, out of his orbit, out from under, married to Lucia Duran and working in what his father dismissively called "snapshots" but which everyone else called photography. His father wanted his boy to follow him into politics, commencing a dynasty; st
ate attorney general, his father thought, then governor, and after that anything was possible. The Boss had been a governor.

  No, Alec told his father.

  But—why ever not?

  I don't believe in dynasties, Alec said, which was the truth but not the salient truth. The salient truth was that the civic life of the nation held no attraction. He preferred Shakespeare's life to the life of any one of his kings or pretenders, tormented men always grasping for that thing just out of reach. Deluded men. Men adrift on a sea of troubles, some of their own making, some not. In any case, the Fates were in charge, part of the human equation along with ambition and restlessness. Alec was satisfied with his photography and his reveries, including the mundane, the look of ordinary things and the time of day, what the weather was like outside and who was present at the occasion, a cat slumbering in a splash of bright sunlight, red and yellow roses proliferating. Life's excitement lay just outside the frame of reference, grandeur felt but not seen yet grandeur all the same. Alec's reveries were his way of bringing life down to earth, so to speak.

  It is reliably reported that the people of Milan, where Verdi lay dying in the winter of 1901, put sheaves of straw in the street outside his hotel to deaden the sound of horses' hooves so that the great composer might have peace in his last days. Alec liked to believe that Verdi was composing a melody up to the end, another opera or requiem, surprised that his street was so quiet; annoyed, perhaps, because he was accustomed to commotion, shouts, arguments, even a burst of song. Alec imagined the residents of the neighborhood laying straw before dawn, even the children. Verdi honored the Milanese by choosing the hotel and they would repay the honor. If God granted him another month he would give them one last opera, but if that was not God's plan, then at least the maestro would have silence. That was the least they could do. Verdi had given them much pleasure, many occasions for laughter and tears, cries of Bravo! And his own life had been marked by terrible tragedy, his wife and young children dying within a few years of one another. Verdi found happiness and repose in his music. The Requiem alone was sufficient for any man's creative life on this earth.

  Alec was thinking of the musician Verdi because his thoughts had turned once again to his father, slipping away at last at a private hospital in the Virginia countryside. His father was a composer of sorts, a maestro in his own way. He would describe himself as a composer of laws. A law needed allegro here, adagio there; no crescendo if it could be avoided. Legislation was ensemble work. Soloists had their place, but the ensemble came first. The ensemble enabled the soloist. He had been a senator for nine terms, fifty-four years, retired now for a decade and still alert on good days. The old man was well content at Briarwoods, with its cheerful staff, well-stocked library, four-page wine list, and relaxed attitude generally.

  The hospital was situated atop a low rise approached by a road that worked through farmland and hardwood forest and stands of cherry trees in furious bloom this April afternoon. The mansions and outbuildings of gentleman farmers, their barns and stables, tennis courts and swimming pools, were well off the main road and were not visible except for a chimney or flagpole. Horses moved about in fields bounded by whitewashed fences. A mile or so from the hospital a small cemetery enclosed by an iron fence appeared suddenly and Alec pulled off the road to look at it, as he often did when the light was good. The grounds were deserted, as they often were. Here and there flowers were placed next to gravestones, causing him to wonder if survivors arrived at night or early in the morning, paying their respects in a private fashion. Confederate dead from Second Bull Run were buried there along with local residents. At the far corner a statue of an infantryman, eyes north, his Sharps rifle at port arms, stood guard. From that distance the infantryman's attitude was one of truculence but up close his face was blank, unreadable below the visor of his forage cap. He was a muscular young man, his forearms balancing the Sharps as if it had the weight of a feather. His name was Timothy Smith, no rank or unit, his dates given as 1845-1863. Beloved son of Andrew and Constance Smith.

  Alec focused and shot two pictures but he thought the light was not correct and lowered his camera. He wondered if the Smith family still lived in the region. Probably not; there was no sign that anyone had ever visited the boy's grave. And then he saw a spent cartridge, twelve-gauge from the look of it. Someone had used the boy's statue as a blind for bird-shooting. Far away Alec heard the rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker. He stood for a few minutes more, looking at the cartridge and listening to the bird but thinking again of his father and wondering if he contemplated a statue as a gravestone, the old man standing at his desk on the Senate floor, his hand raised, an accusing finger pointing skyward, an image from the nineteenth century, Daniel Webster or Henry Clay denouncing perfidy—but no, his father rarely rose on the Senate floor except to deliver an encomium to his state and its many sound-minded hard-working God-fearing citizens. He was a cloakroom man, his arm around someone's shoulder, a whispered confidence, a promise, often a threat. Ensemble work, hard to capture successfully in limestone or marble—though Time magazine once published a profile titled "The Violinist" with an inspired cartoon of the Senate as an orchestra, Senator Malone the concertmaster whose bow was attached by threads to all the instruments of the ensemble, the old man smiling benignly as he sawed away. Alec could see in his mind's eye the words on the plinth: Erwin Harold "Kim" Malone, 1905-200-, United States Senator. The old man had been called Erwin until he was five, when his mother became enthralled by Kipling's daring lad. She began to call her son Kim, and the name stuck.

  The hospital's slate roof was visible beyond the cemetery. Alec thought it tactless to build a hospital so close to a graveyard. Old people were superstitious. But while the hospital was visible from the graveyard, the graveyard was not visible from the hospital. The old man's doctor made the point quite forcibly. The architects knew what they were doing. They promised a secure and cheerful environment and that is what they delivered. Rest assured, Mr. Malone. The view from your father's window will be pastoral, a comforting vista for him to contemplate in his last days, however many there are. Alec squeezed off one last shot of the Confederate sharpshooter and returned to his car for the short drive to Briarwoods, private road, no trespassing. He had been making this journey once, often twice a week for five years. Each time his father had something new to say, but his words came less confidently and there were long minutes when he did not speak at all. Alec had come to realize that his father was an erratic narrator of his own life. But that was mostly a consequence of the life he had led, a leader of the Senate ensemble. There were so many violins that it was sometimes hard to identify your own; the music was dissonant and naturally there were occasions you preferred to forget on grounds that one bad apple must never be allowed to spoil the barrel. Alec believed that life was, for the most part, involuntary.

  From his wide bow window the old man could see the sixteenth hole of his old golf club, the long undulating fairway and the tiny green guarded by bunkers, one bunker so deep that when a player stepped into it he disappeared and when he struck the ball you saw only a great fan of sand, the ball rising from it as fragile-seeming as an eggshell, and it landed softly as cotton. The course was championship caliber and its members mostly scratch players, a different environment entirely from the years when the old man belonged and played on weekends. The course was easy then and only a few members played to a handicap of less than twenty. A scratch handicap meant that a man was not tending to business. He neglected his homework. He was not a serious man. Instead, he was a sport. With the exception of a few doctors the membership had always been political, members of Congress and their senior assistants, cabinet secretaries and their deputies, White House staff. Ambassadors were welcome if they called ahead. A quarter of the membership were lawyers or lobbyists. Kim Malone was puzzled by this new environment, so frivolous and so self-important at the same time. Where did they come from, these new members? Where did they find the time to hone their games
to such perfection, booming drives and crisp iron play, twenty-five-foot putts rolled true. They worked out. They spent hours on the practice range, whole mornings with a five-iron. They played golf like professionals, even the women. And now and then when he looked from his second-floor window he saw a familiar face from the PGA Tour playing in a high-rolling foursome, hundred-dollar Nassaus and sometimes much more. Washington had always been a gambler's town, football, horseracing, backgammon, stud poker, golf.

  My God, Alec, we wouldn't've been caught dead playing with Snead or Sarazen. They were too good for us. We'd've been embarrassed by our play. We were weekend duffers. And they would not have understood our conversation, always politics and government, the merits of a judicial nomination or the conference report on the minimum wage or the little river project the majority leader had tucked away in the supplemental appropriation for the army. Also, we spoke of confidential personal matters that even a golf professional could understand and take back to the locker room at Shinnecock or Medinah, and that talk was none of his business. When I played here years ago that bunker the size of a strip mine looked like a little kid's sandbox and even then it took us three, four shots to get up and down. The other day I looked out my window and saw the usual three lobby boys from AIPAC, guns, and motion pictures, with a newspaper reporter. Can you believe it? All four beautifully turned out, creases in their trousers, shoes shined, straw hats. They never spoke a word, those four, concentrating on their shots. Newsman laid one up three feet from the pin from two hundred yards out, beautiful shot, just superb. My day, no newsman played golf. They couldn't afford it and no club would have them if they could afford it. Eisenhower played golf. Newsmen bowled, like old Cactus Jack Garner. Or they played handball at the Y. Maybe one or two of them played tennis. Wasn't tennis Adlai's game?