“I noticed,” he said, but the irony wasn’t biting, and when he looked at her he was smiling. “You have two men in your life now,” he said. “Try not to forget it.”
“I’ll remember,” she said, and as he reached for her she smiled and murmured, “I won’t forget.”
vii
After Robert’s departure, Bradford had said, “When Dinah’s in bed, I’d like to talk with you.”
“Of course,” she’d said, and now, just after eight o’clock, she found him in the back library, paging through a bound volume of the former left-wing magazine Ramparts, shut down by the State of California last year.
Usually when he sat in here he used only the floor lamp behind his reading chair, so that he read in a pool of light, with the tiers of books in comfortable semi-darkness around him. But this evening the room was as bright as a supermarket. The fluorescent ceiling lights focused on all the bookcases were on, gleaming from the glossy dust-jacketed spines and the polished wood, the stacks of books seeming to lean forward into the room. A second floor lamp glared down on the second reading chair, completing the assault of light that bulged the room.
Bradford put Ramparts down on the small table to his left and said, “Dinah in bed for the night?”
“Yes.”
“Sit down, sit down.”
“Would you mind if I turned this off?” Meaning the lamp behind the empty chair.
“Of course not.” Looking around, he said, “I don’t know why I turned them all on. Trying to get light on the subject, I suppose.” He gave a crooked smile.
“The subject,” she said, and sat down.
“I want to ask your advice,” he said. “No, I don’t, either. What I want to ask is your help.”
“Anything,” she said. She was sitting on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, elbows on knees.
“I have to do something, you know,” he said soberly. “You know that. You know what I think about the future of this country.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ve thought of things I might do,” he said, glancing away from her, looking somberly across the room. “I thought if I had a platform again, a political position, that would help.”
“Running for Congress, you mean.”
“Not the running so much as the being. I’d thought, if I had a role, a position, if I were active again—” He shook his head. “That’s why I thought about Congress, about getting my old seat back.”
“Maybe you should,” she said, thinking that after all it would be better than the position he was in now.
But he said, “No. Everybody was right, I shouldn’t do it. Because in the first place I wouldn’t give a damn about this Congressional district, and everybody would have to know it. What I care about is the whole nation, what worries me is the United States in its relationships with the rest of the globe and how those relationships affect our internal matters. It would be a fraud for me to be in Congress, and it would be an obvious fraud, and it wouldn’t do me any good anyway. Because the other thing is, I do have more voice now than a freshman Congressman, even if that freshman Congressman was an ex-President. I’d only make my voice weaker, it wouldn’t accomplish a thing.”
“Then I don’t see what you can do,” she said. “I’m sorry, I wish there was something I could say, but I just don’t see what you can do.”
“There are two or three things,” he said. “I’ve been considering them, trying to make up my mind which would be best.”
The Final Glory?
“That’s exactly right,” he said. He sat back, smiling thinly in reminiscence. “You know, for a while I thought I might run for President again.”
“Bradford! You couldn’t stand the White House again, I don’t care how healthy you are!”
“Oh, there wouldn’t be much chance me winning anything, not even the nomination. But I thought I might enter a few of the primaries, the ones people pay attention to. New Hampshire, California. At least I’d be in the right arena, I could talk about the things that are important. But you know it wouldn’t be any damn good. I’d be a sideshow, nothing more. The serious contenders would get the newspaper space. That interview with George, that’s the sort of coverage I’d get.”
“That was despicable,” she said, still angry about it.
“He phoned, you know. Said he was sorry, they had to be careful about controversy since the FCC got its teeth.”
“It was just despicable,” she insisted.
“It was real life,” he said. “Rutherford says I’m a politician, and if a politician is anything he’s a man who doesn’t blink from real life. I don’t blame George, and neither should you.” He sat forward again, earnestly, saying, “Don’t you see that what happened to that interview is just exactly what I’m trying to warn people about? We’re moving into the Year of the Ostrich again, everybody’s starting to play it safe again, keep their wings in close. I really shouldn’t be surprised when the climate I’m trying to warn people about is just the thing that keeps me from doing the warning.”
“It was still George,” she said. “He didn’t have to—”
“If he didn’t have to, he wouldn’t. No television man puts on a dull show if he could put on an interesting show. Don’t be mad at your brother, Evelyn, he’s just as trapped in all this as anybody else.”
Grudgingly, she shrugged and said, “All right. But if that’s true, there’s nothing at all you can do, is there?”
He leaned back. “I think there is. I’ve rejected other ideas, I’ve thought about this for a long while. You know, I first started thinking about it when I went to work on The Temporary Peace and began to see the parallels between that time and this. Except that this time is going to be even more virulent, I’m sure of it. I started thinking about it then, and when we came back from France I knew I had to do something about it. So I’ve been considering my plans ever since, this isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision.”
She was about to say that she could believe that, she had been aware of a change in him since Paris — in the way he’d treated Harrison, for instance — but she thought it best not to refer to such specifics, and she simply nodded and said, “I’m sure it isn’t. You never jump into things without knowing what you’re doing.”
“I hope you’re right. You know, the first night we were back from France I had a dream, a nightmare.” He grimaced, and rubbed his right temple, as though it ached him. “I don’t remember the details, only that it was awful. And that it had something to do with this feeling I have about the future of our country. The future’s like that nightmare, awful, but without the details.”
She watched him, concerned, seeing the strain in his face more clearly than he had ever allowed it to show before.
His glance took in the volume of Ramparts on the table beside his chair, and he reached out to rest a palm on it, saying, “This is what it’s all about. Paranoia. Paranoia on the left, shivering and twitching in this magazine. Paranoia on the right, forcing the magazine out of business. It was paranoia that hurt us so deeply in the fifties, and it’s paranoia again today.” He looked up at Evelyn and said, “Have you read that essay of Robert’s? Fuehrer from the Left?”
“No. I guess he thought I wouldn’t be interested.”
“He showed it to me a while ago, and it’s pernicious, and more so because he himself doesn’t realize what he’s saying. He’s simply representative of the climate of opinion without recognizing the implications of his ideas.”
Evelyn said, “What are his ideas?”