She was hating everything today. She didn’t want to go back to the city, but she’d refused to be left behind in East Hampton. She gave no sign now of awareness of George’s return, but continued to glower, arms folded, out at the sunlit pastel day.
“Howard’ll be out in a minute,” George said, tentatively, but when that news produced no response he said, more directly, “Let’s stop fighting now, okay?”
“Oh, you’re ridiculous,” she said savagely, and kept staring straight front.
“I suppose I am,” George said, with the gentle irony that was his only real counter-weapon — his audience was supposed to understand that he was negating the possibility by appearing to absorb it — and turned to see the screen door opening and Howard coming out with his brood. If Marie were to die, would George find someone nice like Grace for his second wife? But on the other hand, Howard’s first wife, Beatrice, had also been nice. (She’d died giving birth to Howard’s first child, Donald, now twelve and the tallest of the three boys in bathing suits bounding around their father as he kissed his plump wife goodbye and came walking toward the chilly car.) The implication seemed clear to George; if Marie were to die, he would marry another one just the same. Or maybe worse. The devil you know, he thought, and was pleased at how angry she would be if she knew what he was thinking. But his thoughts always ran in complex chains, it was impossible to clip out one link and arrange it into a coherent one-liner. How did other people do it?
Howard was dressed more appropriately for the season, in a blue blazer and gray slacks, white shirt open at the throat, blue-and-gray ascot, black loafers and black socks. His and George’s sunglasses both had black frames, Marie’s had orange.
Of course, Howard could dress any way he pleased, he wasn’t going to be on camera. It might be August twenty-first out here, but in front of that camera in Manhattan it would be some time in October, and George had to dress accordingly.
Would Bradford? The question hadn’t occurred to him till now, and all at once he got a picture of the interviewer in autumnal gray asking questions of an elder statesman in a Hawaiian shirt, and all he could think was how much mileage Marie would be able to get out of it.
Phone? Too late, Bradford and Evelyn had left Eustace yesterday and were at their hotel now. If Bradford hadn’t brought along anything appropriate, a last-minute panic call from George just before the interview could disrupt the whole tone of the proceedings. He’d have to simply hope for the best.
Howard was carrying a black attaché case, the only visible sign that he was bound for New York. With his free hand, he opened the rear door of the Chrysler, letting in a rush of heat and salt and the shouts of his three boys, and tossed the case ahead of himself onto the back seat. He followed it, slammed the door, and waved through the window at Grace, shading her unsunglassed eyes back by the house. (Grace made no secret of the fact that she couldn’t stand Marie.)
George put the car in gear at once, and they started off. They weren’t late, exactly, though Marie had dawdled as long as she could before leaving the house, but George liked to be on the safe side.
After Howard said hello to Marie — George suspected him of having, like most men, a low-intensity letch for Marie — and she had responded with neutral warmth — having learned long ago that the one way to push George too far was to flirt with other men during a domestic quarrel — a silence settled down on the car. In it, George heard the snaps of Howard’s attaché case click open, and then a rustle and sigh of papers. “I’d like to mention a few points I think you ought to stress in your questions,” Howard said. “If you don’t mind.”
In front of Marie. “Not at all,” George said amiably, and even smiled at Howard’s brisk reflection in Cinemascope in the rearview mirror. No one on earth would suspect how much he hated Howard at this moment.
ii
The midtown tunnel. It turned out that neither George nor Marie had a second quarter, so Howard’s freckle-blotched hand stretched forward with plug’s lovely counterfeit, the silverless twenty-five cent piece. True to Gresham’s word, no pre-65 quarter was any longer in circulation. At least, though, they couldn’t blame Bradford for that.
There was enough in any case to blame Bradford for, from his one term in the Presidency. He was blamed for the on-going mess in Asia, along with Johnson and instead of Kennedy. He was blamed for the continuing (though currently simmering) racial unease, along with Nixon and instead of Eisenhower.
But Howard would prefer that George not get onto that sort of topic, and so would Bradford, and so undoubtedly would Coe-Stark Associates, the packager for whom George worked. (Usually a producer, George was occasionally also an interviewer, particularly in the case of his ex-President grandfather. On the current project he was wearing both hats, and would get a co-writing credit in addition, for making up his own questions. Bradford would get no writing credit at all, though he would be expected to make up his own answers.)
Where did all the trucks go? All the way in across Queens they had thundered around the chilly Chrysler, but once through the tunnel and actually on the island of Manhattan George found himself virtually alone. The city broiled empty in the August heat. The occasional bright yellow cab was painful to look at in all that sun.
The studio was across town and up, on Broadway in the seventies. Once a movie theater, the building had been converted to a supermarket during television’s first heyday (an epidemic had swept away many of the nation’s neighborhood movie houses then) and its marquee had heralded asparagus for nearly a quarter of a century, before the television/film industry, constantly in need of more and more space, rousted the rutabagas and laid miles of cable under the new floors instead. Now the marquee read BACK PAGES, the name of a soap opera taped there five mornings a week.
An extra advantage was the parking garage half a block away. George gave an involuntary grunt when he opened the car door and the city’s magnified heat fell in on him like an invisible bale of old newspapers. “Good God,” he said, and beside him Marie said, “Oh, I love to be in the city in August.”
They would have liked to hurry to the studio, which would be air-conditioned, but hurry was impossible on the granite griddle of the sidewalk. They swam the half-block, George even too hot to take off his suit jacket, and went gratefully through the glass doors and into the cool dim interior. They stripped off their sunglasses as they passed through the empty lobby, like temple worshipers performing a ritual disrobing, and then George led the way down the hall to the right and then to the left, and into the Naugahyde-and-hunting-prints reception room, where they would all meet and collect themselves before getting to the actual taping.
Bradford was already there — in conservative suit and tie, thank God — and so were George’s sister Evelyn and a tall, somewhat burly man introduced as Robert Pratt, who seemed to have no function.
George was about to take command when Howard did, saying, “Brad, I went over some of the topics with George, some of the things we want to cover. Just remember that the point of all this is The Temporary Peace. The book will be just out when this interview is shown, and that’s what we want the viewers to think about. Right, George?”
George smiled his soft smile and said, “Well, up to a point, of course, the book publication is what gives us our topicality. But I don’t think Bradford wants to come on peddling his new book like some exposé writer on The Tonight Show.”