And then she had one.
v
Not till the end of the program did Evelyn get up and switch off the television set, the slightly green face of her brother George suddenly contracting into the middle of the tube as though he’d just fallen down a well. As he should, as he should. George became a dot, and the dot disappeared.
And then she was sorry she’d shut it off, since any chatter — a commercial, another program, even the bone-rattle of canned laughter — would have been better than the silence that now descended on the room occupied only by herself and Bradford.
The house had four television sets. Aside from this one in a small downstairs parlor rarely entered for any reason other than TV, there were sets in Bradford’s bedroom, Evelyn’s bedroom and Dinah’s nursery. (There were also, of course, sets in the servants’ quarters.) Evelyn tended to watch a lot of television — before last Tuesday, before Robert — mostly old movies and mostly on her own set in her room. Dinah’s set ran all day long, but the child rarely looked at it. Bradford probably did some viewing in his own bedroom, but what programs and what he thought of them he never discussed with Evelyn. That left this room and its set either for guests or for those rare occasions when something of specific interest to Bradford and Evelyn led them to want to watch a program together. Like tonight’s interview.
Now she understood why Howard had told her to lay off the interview, not to use it in an attempt to make Bradford feel better after the bad review. Because the interview was going to turn out to be infinitely worse.
She hadn’t referred to it again, not since his warning on Tuesday. Of course, she hadn’t seen much of Bradford in the meantime — she’d wound up staying Tuesday night in Lancashire and had then spent Wednesday there, in bed, with Robert leaping upstairs and out of his clothes between classes, so that she didn’t get home till midnight Wednesday, and then yesterday Robert was back down here again and they’d gone riding in the twilight in the woods and made love on a blanket in the vanished village — but even if she’d been with Bradford she would have honored Howard’s warning and said nothing, despite not knowing what it was all about.
She hadn’t yet looked directly at Bradford, but she did so now, and he was staring at the blank television set, brooding at it, and she knew from his expression that he wasn’t seeing that blank screen at all, he was seeing something else unreel inside his head.
The interview, of course, replaying over and over.
How could George have done it? Bradford was his grandfather, too! And he’d said many incisive things, thought-provoking things, interesting things, even controversial things. And where were they? An amiable old fuddy-duddy had appeared on the screen, his answers so chopped up and cut to pieces that they frequently didn’t even make sense any more. It sounded like a Reader’s Digest condensation as remembered ten years later by a feebleminded optimist.
There was nothing left. None of Bradford’s warning about the direction in which America was drifting, none of that at all. None of the important things, the things that meant so much to Bradford, that he was so pleased at having been given the chance to say to millions of people all at once, through television. All gone.
What was left? Inanities and commonplaces, pointless chit-chat, silly little anecdotes from Bradford’s days in the Senate. And his reference to The Final Glory, but without George’s confusion about the title.
In a low troubled voice, not looking at him, Evelyn said, “I’m sorry.”
Had he heard? She looked at him again, and he was still brooding at the television set. She should have left it on, and now it was impossible to turn it back on. In a stronger voice, looking at him, she said, “I’m sorry.” For everything from having a brother named George, to Bradford’s being old and retired, to her having switched off the television set.
He nodded. He’d heard. Then, still gazing at the blank set, he said, “I do have to do it. I can see that, I do have to do it.”
“Do what?” she asked him, but he got to his feet and left the room.
vi
“I was half afraid he meant to kill himself,” Evelyn said.
Robert, sitting beside her in the Jaguar, said, “Of course. So would I, that’s what I’d think, too.”
“When I followed him,” she said, “he understood, and he turned and told me he wasn’t going to do any such thing. He said the last thing he wanted to do was throw his life away at this stage, that the whole point was to find a way to go on being useful. He said he would want to talk to me about it very soon.”
“And he hasn’t?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
This was Sunday afternoon, the fourteenth of October, nine days after the disastrous television interview. Evelyn had been short-tempered and distracted with poor Robert all last weekend, her sexual renaissance having been snuffed out when it had barely awakened, leaving Robert baffled and gradually annoyed. They had seen each other not at all during the week, Evelyn begging off with one excuse after another, but it had already been arranged that he’d spend the weekend here, and when he’d arrived he’d obviously been determined to find out what was going on or blow up in the attempt.
The blow-up had come last night. He had wanted to go to bed with her, and she had said something stupid and irritable about how-could-he in her grandfather’s house — as though that made any difference! — and then she’d cried herself to sleep, knowing she was throwing him away by her stupidity and yet unable to stop herself.
He’d been ready to leave first thing this morning, but she had managed to gather herself together enough to ask him, humbly, to stay. Her change of pace had confused him all over again, and after lunch he’d taken her aside and insisted on knowing what was wrong. She’d understood by then she had to tell him (though her impulse was always to shield Bradford, to keep his confidences from everyone), so she’d suggested they go for a drive, that she show him the old road around the perimeter of the property that the Secret Service used to patrol during Bradford’s Presidency, and now here they were on a slight ridge from which they could see woods stretching away on both sides, the house hidden somewhere far away to their right. And she had at last told him the whole story.
A little silence settled between them once she was done, until Robert exhaled noisily and looked out at the woods, saying, “All right. I’m not crazy about it, but I can understand it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “Everything was so beautiful, it was growing and growing, and this just knocked the life out of me.”