...ter Ethridge will remain in Walter Reed Army Hospital overnight for observation and tests, but he appears to have nothing worse than a few contusions, and his physician says he’s in the very best of health. The Reverend Doctor John Mosley, Chaplain of the House of Representatives, is on the critical list at...
“...but I couldn’t very well ask it of her.”
“What?”
“Oh darling you’re not listening, are you. It doesn’t matter. I was only saying Mary’s offered to pack an overnight bag and move over here for a few days to help look after the children.”
“Might not be a bad idea, you know.”
“I think I’d rather bear my grief in private, Cliff. We’ve lost an awful lot of friends today.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
...brunt of the casualties has been borne by Washington’s press corps, for which the President is deeply grieved. At present it is known that seventy-one reporters lost their lives in the disaster...
He said, “Do you have the television on?”
“Yes, I’m watching it with one eye.”
“Doesn’t Perry Hearn look terrible?”
“I know. Midge Luke called me a little while ago, just to say Milt wasn’t hurt and she was so glad you weren’t there, and Milt told her the President looks like the last survivor of an Infantry patrol in some muddy trench. My God, Cliff, how can it have happened?”
...Capitol Building. Emergency crews under the direction of Capitol Architect James Delaney are already shoring up the chambers, but until a thorough survey has been made we’re assuming the entire building is unsafe, and all individuals and offices are being evacuated into temporary...
Jeanette’s voice continued on the wire and he wasn’t really listening to her words but he heard her voice, her tone, the soft warm nesty feeling she created so easily; it occurred to him that her real reason for calling him was not so much to reassure herself as it was to remind him of their unbroken romantic communion — to give him that to lean on; so that suddenly he felt a quick welling in his throat of gratitude and adoration.
...President will speak to the nation this evening at seven o’clock eastern standard time...
“I’d better ring off, sweet. I’m expecting word from President Brewster.”
...ordered flags to fly at half-mast until further...
“Do you think he’ll ask you to come home?”
“I don’t know. We talked about it and he said he’d get back to me.”
“What do you think you should do, Cliff?”
“If they’d hurt Dex Ethridge at all of course I’d have had to come right home, but he appears to be all right, and since they’ve caught the perpetrators I doubt there’ll be any need for me to — what?”
“I couldn’t hear you for a minute. The connection seems to be fading. I guess I’d better get off the line now. But call me when you’ve got it decided. Love me?”
“Love you,” he said very soft into the phone cupped against his shoulder. He heard the click and the static of the transatlantic cable.
...list of the dead includes Senators Adamson, Geiss, Hunter, March, Nugent...
His hand rested on the cradled phone as if to retain the thread of contact with Jeanette. He looked up. Ordway, Oxford, Robinson, Scobie, Tuchman... Perry Hearn’s mouth, moving not in synchronization with his radio voice, was an evil ugly thing and Fairlie wrenched his eyes away from the screen and carried his glass to the Dubonnet bottle.
Jeanette: soft lips and upswept hair. Not that much different from the girl he had courted back in the medieval days when you still courted girls: she had been a psych major at Vassar in pleated skirt and saddle shoes and for six months she had returned his weekend invitations unopened because when a Vassar girl received anything with a Worcester postmark she knew it was from a Holy Cross man and Vassar girls did not date Holy Cross men. Finally a classmate had informed Fairlie of this and he had had the presence of mind to drive over to Cambridge to mail the next invitation. She must have received that one: at least it was never returned to him. But there was no reply. That summer he wrote two invitations from his home outside Cheyney, Pennsylvania. These she had regretted with formal little notes. Finally in the fall he had prevailed upon a botany professor who was going off on sabbatical. The professor had taken the sealed envelope and agreed to post it. A week later Fairlie won: a phone call from Vassar — “What on earth were you doing in Alaska?”
After his first year at Yale Law she had agreed to marry him. After his second year she had married him. After the bar exams he had moved her to Cheyney and she had fallen in love with the place, the great trees, the rolling hills, the struggling Negro college and its eagerly tutorable students.
Young with childless zeal she had become compulsively tidy and organized. She took to making lists of things to do and things for Fairlie to do; she posted them on the refrigerator door, boldly penned in her expansive hand. Finally he had cured her by appending an item to her itemized list: Check likelihood of obsessive list-making on part of second wife.
They were an idyllically and atypically happy couple. The children had come soon — Liz was now fourteen, Clay was going on ten, which was to say he was more than six months past his ninth birthday — and the pressures of twenty-four-hour politics had had inevitable effects on the fabric between them, but their respect for each other’s individuality and their private sense of humor had secured them pretty welclass="underline" once last fall he had got up early to dress for a campaign breakfast and when he was ready to leave the hotel suite he had crept into the bedroom where she was half asleep, and had nibbled her ear and caressed her breast and when she made a low smiling throat-sound he had whispered in her ear, “Where’s Cliff?” and she had shot bolt upright and yelled. She had scolded him for weeks about that, but each time with laughter.
“President Brewster.”
He looked up. It was McNeely, holding the phone out toward him. Fairlie hadn’t heard it ring. At least McNeely hadn’t said, “It’s the pisspot Napoleon.”
He took the receiver from McNeely and said into the mouthpiece, “Fairlie here.”
“Hold on please, Mr. Fairlie.” Brewster’s secretary.
Now the President came on the line. “Cliff.”
“Hello Mr. President.”
“Thanks for waiting.” An unnecessary courtesy: where would Fairlie have gone? Howard Brewster’s flat Oregon twang sounded very tired: “Bill Satterthwaite’s just talked to them over at Walter Reed. Old Dex Ethridge is fine, just fine.”
“They’re releasing him, then?”
“No, they want to hang onto him for a day or so, run him through that damned battery of tests they like to do.” He could almost hear the President shudder over the six-thousand-mile telephone wire. “But there’s nothing wrong with Dex, he’s fine and dandy. I always said it’d take more than a whap on the head to do any damage to a Republican.”
Fairlie said, “It’s that elephant hide we all wear.”
There followed Brewster’s energetic bark of laughter and then a ritual clearing of throat, and Brewster said in his matter-of-fact voice, “Cliff, I’m going to talk to the people tonight. It’ll be pretty late your time but I’d appreciate it a whole lot if you’d hold off on making any kind of statement until after I’ve made mine.”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
“And then I’d be truly obliged if you’d step out and back me up. We need to have a pretty good show of solidarity on this thing.”
“I can see that,” Fairlie said — cautious, not wanting to commit himself to a blank-check promise. “Do you mind if I ask what the substance of it will be?”