“But it can’t be entirely political,” she said. “There isn’t enough water, is there?”
“Not for the city they’d planned on. For a much smaller, less fashionable, less valuable community there’s probably enough water. Those individuals who have already bought homes there have paid too much for them, that’s about the extent of the injustice.” Bradford shook his head, saying, “No, the indictment isn’t the point. I could spend an hour on the phone to California this afternoon, find out what they want, and settle that part of it. The point is, what will Harrison do with this opportunity?”
“Why don’t you?” she asked him.
He didn’t understand. “I beg your pardon?”
“Why don’t you call? Spend the hour on the phone, settle the indictment.”
“Because it’s so irrelevant. Why don’t any of you see this? A city in the desert! For God’s sake, epic poems have been written about an accomplishment that Harrison did almost inadvertently! He’s on the threshold of greatness, and the damn fool can’t grasp the fact. Some have greatness thrust upon them, and Harrison is one of them.”
“If the indictment was off his back—”
“No. The indictment is the goad. Remove it, and Harrison will settle back into the same easy acceptance as before. With the goad, there’s a chance he may attain greatness.”
“There’s no greatness in Harrison, Bradford, why can’t you see that?”
“Possibly,” Bradford said, his voice colder than Evelyn had ever heard it before when addressed to her, “because I have more faith in my brother than the rest of you.”
viii
Friday night, Herbert Jarvis hanged himself. The body was discovered Saturday morning by one of the maids, who came white-faced and terrified to report it to Evelyn, who had been having a quiet breakfast upstairs with Dinah. “No,” said Evelyn, but it was yes.
Bradford seemed as shaken as everyone else, when the news reached him, and it was Evelyn who had to take over the details. She dealt with the local police through the Secret Service men assigned to the house, who spent most of the morning on the phone to Washington before it was finally decided to keep the fact of the suicide private, and announce Herbert’s death as from natural causes.
Dr. Holt — Uncle Joe — had been phoned early in the morning, and he came by private plane from Philadelphia to Hagerstown, where Evelyn had a car waiting to pick him up. He signed the perjured death certificate, and the body was taken away by a local undertaker sworn to secrecy, a man whose family and business ties with the Lockridges ran deep into the past of Eustace and who could therefore be relied upon to keep the truth to himself.
Harrison and his family had planned to leave on Saturday, but now they would stay on till Monday for the funeral. Even the Simcoe girls seemed to be affected by the atmosphere in the house, and their screeching was infrequent and muffled. Patricia — the elder Patricia, Harrison’s wife, Herbert’s sister — was bitter and enraged. She blamed Bradford for her brother’s death, blamed him loudly and often, and refused to be quieted by Harrison or anyone else. The rest of the family was subdued and vaguely frightened.
Bradford himself kept away from them, taking his meals in his office and alternating his time between that room and the back library. Whenever Evelyn had to see him about some detail, he was always into some book on John Quincy Adams: Samuel Flagg Bemis’s John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, James Truslow Adams’s The Adams Family, W. C. Ford’s seven-volume compilation of Adams’s writings, Bemis’s John Quincy Adams and the Union, and the biographies by John T. Morse and Bennett Champ Clark. He seemed remote when he and Evelyn talked, and made no comment about Herbert’s death.
The funeral was Monday morning at nine. Bradford did not attend, and when the others returned to the house — they would be leaving for home after lunch — a maid told Evelyn that Bradford wanted to see her in his office.
He was sitting at his desk, and he extended a folded sheet of paper toward Evelyn. When she took it he said, “Give that to Harrison. Tell him I’ve been on the phone and it’s taken care of. He should call that man in Sacramento tomorrow morning. He won’t get out of it without a little mud on his skirts, but he will get out.”
“Thank you, Bradford,” she said, but he looked away from her, and his expression reminded her of the way he’d looked on the plane coming back from Paris. She went away to tell Harrison, who tried to restrain the expression of his joy and relief out of respect for his dead brother-in-law, but who couldn’t keep the wide joyful smile from spreading across his face.
Bradford remained in his corner of the house and didn’t see them off. There was no bus this time, Evelyn having ordered three cars to take the family to Hagerstown, and she stood in the sunlight and watched them all clambering aboard, waiting for the opportunity to wave them goodbye.
Harrison was the last to get into the car. “I want to thank you for talking to Brad, Evelyn,” he said, and took her hand. “If only Herbert could have waited it out. If only he hadn’t gotten so discouraged.”
Evelyn considered telling him what he should have realized but obviously hadn’t, that it was Herbert’s death and not Evelyn’s talk that had induced Bradford to act. He’d needed a stronger push this time than Evelyn could give, and Herbert had done the job. But it would only confuse Harrison to point that out, so she said nothing, only smiled and accepted his handshake, and then stood waving until the three cars were out of sight.
The house seemed huge, and echoing, and eerily empty. Evelyn could feel Bradford, tucked away in his office or the back library at the second floor rear, and she knew he would want to continue to be alone. And there was Dinah, who had been neglected these past several days.
Her legs were very heavy as she went upstairs.
2
Robert Pratt sat at the typewriter and tried to ignore the call of the August sun outside his window. The air-conditioner kept this second floor study cool, but just beyond the glass summer beckoned, a sunny August Sunday that wanted no one indoors. His one concession to the season was the bottle of beer beside the typewriter on his battered desk, but the bottle too kept distracting him from the paper he was writing.
He re-read, for the tenth time, the last sentence on this page: “America is moving inexorably toward a Fuehrer, possibly by the end of this decade, certainly by the end of the century.” Did he actually believe that? Not as surely as he’d made it sound, though he did think the erosion toward an omnipotent leader was well under way and would only with great difficulty be stopped in time. Still, in any case, it would be best to copper his bets a little; he changed the period at the end of the sentence to a comma, and added, “Unless unforeseeable changes take place.”
Yes. Now to the subject of the piece: “Eugene McCarthy was probably our only chance for a Fuehrer from the left. With his apparently irreversible defeat, the political left has reverted to its usual rudderless structureless condition, and left the field open for a Fuehrer from the right. The dangers in, say, a successful George Wallace are self-evident, but what are the dangers in a takeover by a Fuehrer from the left?”
Robert took a swig of beer and studied the typewriter moodily. What are the dangers? For that matter, what are the dangers in speculation built on speculation built on speculation? If it were really possible to guess what sort of President a man would be, who would have voted for Lyndon Johnson? The concept of Eugene McCarthy as a Fuehrer from the left rested on such an array of interlocked suppositions that Robert felt himself afraid to take a deep breath, for fear the whole conceit would collapse like a vampire in the sun.