When he was finished, a reporter stood and said, “Mr. Lockridge, you said you didn’t want to answer questions about your trip. But would you answer a question about this?” He held up a newspaper.
Bradford squinted at it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know to what you’re referring.”
The newspaper was passed forward, from hand to hand. Evelyn could see only that it was The New York Times, but could read none of the headlines.
Bradford looked at the paper, and his expression, if anything, grew even more grim. He shook his head and looked up and said, “This is the first I’ve seen of this. I don’t have the facts, of course, but I would naturally presume his innocence. I’ll be in touch with him at once. In the meantime, you can understand I don’t want to say anything else on the subject.”
They thanked him and trooped out, and Bradford turned wordlessly to hand the paper to Evelyn, who held it in two hands and looked at the headline, top left, one column:
HARRISON LOCKRIDGE INDICTED IN CALIFORNIA
Innocent of All Wrongdoing, Says Ex-President’s Brother
9 Others Indicted in Land Transaction
viii
The car was waiting at the airport in Hagerstown, and when he boarded, Bradford asked the chauffeur to turn the radio on and find a station that would fill its between-news interludes not too offensively.
He’d phoned Harrison from Kennedy, but Evelyn hadn’t asked him about the conversation and he hadn’t volunteered. In the old days in the White House, whenever he was angry with the failure of a subordinate, Bradford had never looked angry in the normal sense, but only jaw-clenched determined, as though thinking not about the man who had failed but about some extremely difficult task that he himself had promised himself to perform. He had that look now, and the flight from New York to Hagerstown had been mostly a silent one.
News came on the radio shortly before they reached Chambersburg. It mentioned Harrison, but only the bare bones of the story, not even as many details as had been in the first two paragraphs of the Times. After the news Evelyn finally broached the subject, saying, “What happens with Harrison now?”
“God knows,” Bradford said. He stared straight ahead. “He’s the same damn fool he always was, of course, he’d like to bluff it through if he could. Of course he can’t, the only thing for him to do is admit that he was wrong, he was hasty, he went into the thing without finding out the true facts of the case, and now that he knows he can only hope to help the courts in finding an equitable solution.”
“Doesn’t he want to do that?”
“Of course not. It’s the sensible thing, so he’s against it. How many times have I been on the phone with him the last few months? But he wouldn’t get out of it, he wouldn’t get out of it. And now he still won’t get out of it. It would be disloyal to his partners, for God’s sake. There’s a case of late-blooming and terribly misplaced loyalty if there ever was one. They’re going to sink, the lot of them, and he has a chance to avoid sinking with them, and I’m having to beg him to take it.”
“Do you think he will?”
“Harrison usually manages to get himself rescued in the nick of time. We’ll see if he works the trick this time. I’ve told him to come see me next week.” He turned his head to give Evelyn a smile of condolence. “It means having that whole incredible family descend on us,” he said, “but it is important.”
“Oh, I realize that,” she said, and smiled back, saying, “Besides, if it gets too bad I’ll just take Dinah and go visit somebody else.”
“What?” he said, in mock alarm. “And leave me alone with them all?”
She patted his arm, smiling now in deep affection. “I won’t leave you alone,” she said.
6
Sixty percent of all cerebral thrombosis, the most common form of stroke, occurs either during sleep or shortly after arising. In Bradford Lockridge’s case, the thrombosis heralded by his previous transient ischemic attacks struck at twelve minutes past three on the morning of Tuesday, the tenth of July, the night after his return from Europe. The attack was swift and harsh. At its onset Bradford groaned in his sleep, he frowned, the skin of his forehead wrinkled, but he did not awaken.
The stroke began with a sudden blockage in the anterior cerebral artery, that artery which, through its cortical branches, furnishes the blood supply to the frontal four-fifths of the middle surface of the cerebral hemisphere, a vital sensory and intellectual area of the brain. The anterior cerebral artery also supplies the medial part of the orbital surface of the frontal lobe, the frontal pole, a strip of the superomedial border, and the front seven-eighths of the corpus callosum, those white fibers which connect the two halves of the cerebrum.
The blockage attacked the anterior cerebral artery along its narrowest part, where it curves upward over the corpus callosum. Atherosclerotic formations had been building in that area for some time, narrowing the artery further and further, causing those prior temporary attacks, Dr. Holt’s “coming attractions.” In the previous attacks there had been only very short-term blockage before the blood pressure forced a re-opening, so that damage to brain cells from blood starvation had been minor, and the effects both temporary and comparatively small in scale. But this time the blockage was much more severe. In addition to the atherosclerotic formations narrowing the artery walls, a full thrombus had formed, a fibrous clot, which now became wedged by the pressure of blood behind it into the too-narrow segment of artery, and in less than one minute all blood flow in that area came to a stop.
Bradford was lying on his back. It was two nights since the full moon, and clear thin white light spread in a pale trapezoid on the floor near the window. In the dim uncertain reflection of that light, Bradford’s head on the pillow looked essentially unchanged, except that his expression was slightly frowning as though in disapproval. For two minutes, three minutes, he did not move, he gave no exterior sign — other than the frown — to indicate that anything was breaking down within.
In the infracted artery, blood strained against the thrombus like water in a tunnel pressing against a wall of sandbags, but the blockage held, and in fact became wedged even tighter against the soft deposits that had been building up within the inner membrane of the artery. Beyond, the emptying artery sagged slightly in on itself, striving against vacuum. The brain cells fed by the artery and its branches began to dry, began to feel the lack of oxygen and blood, began to wither.
In the pale moonlight, Bradford’s face could at last be seen to change, but only slightly. The right cheek seemed somehow flatter, the closed right eyelid was depressed just a little deeper, and the jawline became gradually softer and less clearly defined. The right corner of the mouth sagged, and a few seconds later a thin trickle of saliva ran from the right corner of Bradford’s mouth and down the line of his jaw, to become absorbed in the sheet.
The stroke is silent. It is violence without noise, a sledgehammer without sound. The middle area of the left cerebral hemisphere in Bradford Lockridge’s head was starving, it was strangling, it was dying for lack of blood and lack of oxygen, but there was no trace of sound, no murmur, no cry, no crack, no rattle. After that first groan at the very beginning, a sound that had been more petulant about sleep disturbance than anything else, Bradford lay silent while the silent stroke sliced its way through his brain.