It was Elizabeth Lockridge who should be writing this article in the first place, most of the ideas in it having been generated by her, starting with that ride down to meet Bradford Lockridge three months ago, when Robert’s complacent pendulum theory had decided her his political education urgently needed to be brought up to date. The number of dinners he’d shared with Sterling and Elizabeth since then were uncountable, but at all of them the scene was the same; gentle Sterling watching in quiet amusement while Elizabeth and Robert argued their way through the last decade of American politics.
And slowly she had convinced him of the truth of most of what she believed, though he had ultimately taken her beliefs one step farther, adding his own twist of interpretation and coming up with the idea of the Fuehrer from the left. She it was who had convinced him that the American people were weary of freedom, made nervous by it, ready and anxious to give over their liberties to a man strong enough to demand them, but it was he who pointed out that the same weariness and nervousness were evident on the increasingly radicalized left, which had in 1968 turned to McCarthy not so much as a political alternative as a messiah. “And a messiah,” he’d said, “is simply a Fuehrer we agree with.”
Elizabeth had not agreed, had argued that McCarthy was not a man to allow himself to be used that way, and Robert had replied that he doubted McCarthy would have been given the choice. The whole concept of a Fuehrer from the left remained too contradictory for Elizabeth, however, and at that point they had bogged down, perhaps permanently.
But out of it all had come this article. Although his position as Sterling Lockridge’s nephew’s chum made the teaching profession’s dictum of ‘publish or perish’ not very compelling in Robert’s case, he did try to produce at least two articles a year for the historical journals, one written during the summer and the other during the Christmas recess. This one, relating to material less than a decade old, would probably be more controversial than his previous pieces, essays that he himself had termed “marching in place,” but some journal somewhere would surely make room for an article that raised the concept of a Fuehrer from the left.
The dangers. “Had McCarthy been nominated and elected in 1968,” Robert wrote, “his most vital first move would have had to be to determine his successor, since it seems inescapable that McCarthy himself would not have survived his first term of office. His death — his martyrdom, as it would with justice have been called — would undoubtedly have caused the death of the American electoral process as well, as his increasingly radicalized and isolated governmental apparatus would have been forced to a widening abrogation of liberties for the sake of public order.
“But who would be able to follow McCarthy, aside from another McCarthy, to be gunned down in his turn and followed by another doppelganger, and another, indefinitely? To make one of the obvious choices, to hand the reins to a Weimar Bolshevik like Allard Loewenstein, would simply be to form a caretaker government to await the truly strong man who would of necessity then emerge from the far right.”
Robert stopped again, drank some more beer, and studied that last paragraph. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the specific references to Loewenstein, who was a living human being, not a chess piece, and therefore more complicated and in many ways more politically valuable than his two-word summation suggested. That was why Robert preferred to work with happenings remote enough for all the participants to be long since dead; with a living man, it was too possible to see oneself in his place, reading this essay.
He made the change in pen, so that the clause in question was altered to read, “to hand the reins to one of the Weimar Bolsheviks surrounding him.” He also disliked that sort of vague phraseology — Paul O’Dwyer, for instance, now became by implication lumped under a definition that Robert didn’t believe applied to him at all — but of the two evils vagueness was lesser to nastiness.
He looked over at the clock on one of the bookcase shelves, and it was just after two-thirty. He’d been at this now since before one, and he’d done three pages. Was that enough for the first day back? Second day, really, since he’d actually left Acapulco on Friday, but yesterday he’d spent the daylight hours with details — letters and laundry, that sort of thing — and in the evening he’d gotten drunk.
Yes, it was enough for today. He pushed the chair back, grabbed the beer bottle by the neck, and left the study, crossing the hall at the head of the stairs and entering his bedroom, dim and cool, shades drawn, air-conditioner running, where a tactile memory of Kit suddenly struck him as violently as if she’d left him only yesterday.
He avoided the bed, sitting instead on the wooden chair in the corner, where he tilted the bottle against his mouth, draining it, and then stared moodily at the unmade bed, remembering when.
Kit had never been able to understand why his favorite time for making love was in the middle of the afternoon, and he hadn’t bothered to try to understand it then himself, but since then the idea had grown on him that what he’d been doing was playing at being a child. Children love to form tents of their sheets in bed, crawl under, and pretend to be on a desert island or a Saturn satellite, and it was exactly that impulse he’d been striving to follow with Kit, crawling into bed with her at one or two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun pale as cream on the drawn shade, the whole room the shadowed color of the sheet he’d pull up over their heads, murmuring, “Let’s stay all afternoon, all afternoon.” But she never would.
It was sexual encounters with other women that invariably brought back those hornet-sting memories of Kit’s slick belly slithering on the sheet, the supposed antidote never serving to do anything but cause a relapse, a freshened attack of the disease. Because it was still Kit who figured in his sexual hungers, and not all the schoolteachers in Youngstown, Ohio. From Youngstown, Ohio; in Acapulco.
He went somewhere every summer, and it was always the same. This summer he’d gone to Acapulco, and it had been the same. In summer the world outside the borders of the United States teems with American schoolteachers, out to find their own antidotes, and only finding one another. They are the slightly plainer sisters and brothers of those young men and women who worry about odoriferous breath on television. Neither handsome nor ugly, they are adventure’s equivalent of a bland diet. Every summer Robert promised himself he would not go among them to scratch his annual itch, and every summer he broke the promise, and this third summer in a row he had done so yet again.
He’d never been to Acapulco before, but it looked sufficiently like places he had been that it didn’t distract his mind for more than the first few hours. On the evening of the first day he met a girl from Seattle, due to leave at noon the next day. They spent the night together, and her stretch marks told him she had an interminable story to tell, if he showed the slightest sympathy, or even curiosity. He showed neither, having made that mistake in the past, and waved goodbye to her at the airport the next morning feeling strongly the nervous relief that follows a close shave.
His second night he spent alone, possibly through his own fault, possibly not, but on the third day he met the schoolteacher from Youngstown, Ohio, a chipper practical girl whose only triste seemed to be the freckles on her nose. She had two roommates sharing her hotel room both also Youngstown teachers, so the rest of his week she’d moved in with him. She’d been by far the best of any of his summer episodes, delightfully cheerful, astonishingly free of morbid or mournful autobiography, and even fairly pretty on the two evenings they’d dressed for dinner. Her sexual repertoire was limited, and she resisted the idea of expanding it, but after all what could a teacher be taught in Youngstown, Ohio? Nor did it make that much difference. What they did have together was carefree and fun.