Robert looked at Dr. Holt and Leonard Orr and saw them both watching him, mildly curious but no more, neither of them suspecting a thing. He said, “He stood for election to the House of Representatives.”
“And he won,” Lockridge said, his manner as satisfied as if he personally had bet and made money on it.
“Yes, sir,” Robert said.
“So I’m not exactly without precedent, am I, Robert?”
“Well, sir, 1830—”
“Andrew Johnson, out of the Presidency in 1868,” Lockridge said, “became Senator from Tennessee in 1875.”
“A lot has changed since then, Mr. Lockridge. The concept of the Presi—”
“I’d prefer you to call me Bradford. And I know the concept of the Presidency. An ex-President is supposed to be a walking museum, with historical markers tattooed on interesting portions of his anatomy. I don’t believe there’s been one ex-President this century who hasn’t chafed under that. Wasn’t it Harry Truman who complained that people were calling him a statesman and he wasn’t dead yet?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“Eisenhower didn’t like it, Johnson hates it. Herbert Hoover spent the rest of his life begging his successors to appoint him to commissions.”
Dr. Holt and Leonard Orr had been listening to this conversation with growing bewilderment, and it was Dr. Holt who got the glimmer first, suddenly saying, “Wait a second! Brad, what are you up to?”
Lockridge turned his amused expression from Robert to the doctor, saying, “Odd you should ask that, since it’s exactly what I intended to ask you. What am I up to, Joe, what am I capable of?”
“Mentally, anything,” Dr. Holt said. “Physically, that’s another matter.”
“You mother-henned me on the Paris trip, and nothing happened. No attack, nothing. In fact, I haven’t had a bit of trouble since the time you were here, Robert, when was that?”
“In May, sir. May twelfth, I think.”
“May twelfth. What’s today, August sixth. Almost three months.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s over,” Dr. Holt said. Lockridge was still talking in a half-joking manner, but the doctor was now in deadly earnest.
“I’m not over either, Joe. I’m not dead yet, and I’m frankly sick of being buried.” He looked at Leonard Orr, sitting opposite him, and said, “Len, what’s the only elected post of any significance around here that we don’t have?”
Orr pursed his lips, as though the subject required study, but he answered quickly enough: “Representative. And we’ll never get it, not while George Meecham is alive.”
“You could with the right candidate,” Lockridge told him. “How long’s he been in now, Len?”
“Nine years, since he defeated my Dad.”
Lockridge’s expression shadowed for a second, but then he smiled again, a bit grimly, and said, “That’s right, I’d forgotten. I took a number of Congressmen with me when I went down to defeat, including Walt.” Turning to Robert again, he said, “I held that post for eight years, till I was elected Senator. When I left the House, Len’s father took my place. Stayed there twenty-four years.” To Orr again he said, “How’d you like to dump George Meecham next year, Len?”
“I’d love it,” Orr said, flat, declarative, not joking at all.
“Given the right candidate,” Lockridge told him, “you could do it.”
“But where’s the right candidate, Brad?” Orr, astonishingly enough, still didn’t know what was going on.
Lockridge now told him. “Right here,” he said, and pointed at himself.
Orr frowned at him, failing to understand for another half a minute then suddenly sat back — the chair groaned beneath him — and cried, “You?”
Lockridge just smiled.
Dr. Holt said, “Brad, it isn’t done. It just isn’t done.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Orr said.
Lockridge said to the doctor, “John Quincy Adams did it. Andrew Johnson did it, too, didn’t he, Robert?”
“Yes, he did,” Robert said. “Of course, that didn’t work out as well.”
“He died in office,” Lockridge said. “I can’t think of a better way to go.”
Dr. Holt, grasping at straws, looked across at Robert and said, “How old was Adams when he went into Congress?
“After his Presidency?” Robert did some quick mental arithmetic, and said, “Sixty-three.”
Lockridge said to the doctor, “If I know anything about medicine, sixty-three was older in 1830 than seventy-one is today.”
“It depends on the individual,” Dr. Holt said.
“George Meecham is how old now, Len?”
Orr was still recovering from the shock of Lockridge’s announcement, and it took him a second to reorganize his thoughts. Then he said, “Seventy-five, I believe.”
Lockridge chuckled and said, “Time for that old man to retire, let some young blood in. Wouldn’t you say so, Joe?”
Still clutching gamely at the same straw, the doctor appealed to Robert again, saying, “How much longer did Adams live? And how many terms did he serve?”
Robert shook his head, having no help to give him. “He lived eighteen years,” he said, “And he died in office.”
“They didn’t bury him till he was dead,” Lockridge said.
Dr. Holt finally abandoned that straw, saying, “Age isn’t the issue anyway. It’s your position that’s the issue, Brad, and you know it. I realize you chafe at the bit—”
“Do you, Joe?”
The doctor stopped, and studied Lockridge’s face for a minute. Then, more soberly, he said, “Well, maybe I don’t. Not completely.”
“I’ve been active all my life,” Lockridge said, and once again he seemed to be talking more to Robert than the other two, both of whom probably already knew most of what he was now saying. “Out of Harvard Law School,” he said, “I went straight into my father-in-law’s law firm up in Boston, and believe me I didn’t marry into any soft job. They worked their young men in those days.”
Robert said, “Was that Collins, Wellington, Smart?”
Lockridge was surprised. “You know them?”
“A friend of mine works there now,” Robert said. “John Bloor. He married Deborah, Walter Wellington’s daughter.”
“I haven’t kept in very close touch with the Wellingtons the last few years,” Lockridge said.
“Anyway,” Robert said, “he tells me they still work their young men up there.”
Lockridge smiled in reminiscence. “I’ll bet they do.” He looked serious again and said, “All right. I stayed there eight years, and then came down here and stood for Congress. I was in the House for eight years and in the Senate for twenty, and during most of that time I was a pretty active party man as well. Wasn’t I, Len?”
“You certainly were,” Len said, and it was clearly sincere.
“State and national,” Lockridge said. “I tore my hair through I can’t tell you how many conventions. Then the Presidency for four years. I was sixty-two years old at the end of that, and believe me I wasn’t ready to retire. I wouldn’t have tried for a second term if I felt like quitting. But I was retired, whether I wanted it or not. I’ve been active, I’ve been interested and involved, I’ve been in the absolute middle of the action all my life, and all at once it stops, as though somebody turned a switch. Now I’m the old man of the mountain and the middle-aged boys come to me every four years at convention time to try to get my endorsement, and it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether they get it or not. In between times I sit around writing my memoirs — I’m the museum and the curator — or every once in a while I’ll go in to New York City and make a thirty second television film for physical fitness. If somebody important dies, they may ask me to the funeral, and even if they do I don’t get that excited about it. I’ve been put out to pasture while my legs and my lungs are still good, and this fellow here says he understands why I chafe at the bit.”