“You can’t set up an either-or propo—”
“I can’t? I just did.” Bradford leaned forward suddenly, pointing a finger up at Robert. “Let me tell you something, young man. You come here with professions of selfless concern for my — don’t interrupt me! — for my reputation and my future, but I tell you your hands are not clean. You have not merely one ulterior motive, you have two. In the first place, you don’t want to be proved wrong in your fashionable theory of pessimism, you want a dictatorship, you are just exactly the internal enemy I fear, the man who talks of freedom but who inside himself craves to be led and protected and absolved of responsibility. No, let me finish! And in the second place, you fear what my actions will do to your relationship with my granddaughter.”
“Sir, that isn’t—”
“I said, let me finish!”
“But you’re making a speech!”
“Yes, I am!” Bradford shouted, and lunged to his feet. Standing there, head thrust forward close to Robert’s face, he shouted, “The first speech of many, young man, only the first of many! I will be heard, I will force the world to pay attention to me and to turn its back on the nay-sayers and the fatalists like you who would seduce not only this nation but the entire world into a Dark Ages from which the human race might never recover!”
Evelyn, coming forward in panicky concern, called her grandfather’s name, but Bradford turned off the anger at once, smiled at her and said, “Oh, I’m all right, dear. Don’t worry about me, I’ll stay healthy. I have too much to accomplish.” He looked again at Robert. “And don’t you try to stop me.”
2
Evelyn stood in the open doorway and watched the red tail-lights of Robert’s car flicker in undecipherable semaphore as he drove away out the blacktop road amid the trees. Then darkness, then one light winked briefly through the tree trunks like a low-flying red star, and then darkness again, this time complete.
Evelyn shook her head. How she would like to be beside him in the other bucket seat of the elderly Jaguar now, going outward in a straight line forever, with no problems, no terrible decisions, no responsibilities. Instead of which, a chauffeur was riding in her place, traveling to Lancashire with Robert in order to drive her Mustang back.
She stepped inside and shut the door and listened for a moment to the silence of the house. It was nearly ten, and Dinah was long since in bed; otherwise, Evelyn would have gone up there now for the psychological bolstering, the calming, that an hour or two in the child’s presence always gave her. As it was, the house seemed empty, the servants all away in their own section, only Bradford still moving around upstairs, in the back library.
Bradford. She was afraid to see him now, and yet she had to see him. But what was she going to say to him?
She hadn’t been able to talk about it with Robert. The minute they were alone he’d wanted to start making plans, deciding whom to go to for help, how best to handle Bradford, and she hadn’t been able to hold that kind of conversation, not now. Her mind was too confused now.
Could it be that Bradford was right, after all? Robert’s article had shaken her, demonstrating as it did just exactly the fatalism Bradford had been talking about. Bradford and Robert were in agreement about the nation’s illness; it was only in the cure that they parted company. And even then, what was the disagreement? Only that Robert was afraid Bradford’s gesture would be ineffective, he would be throwing himself away. And what alternative did Robert offer? For Bradford, continued retirement and inaction. For the nation and the world, nothing.
Perhaps Bradford should be allowed to try his plan, perhaps throwing himself away would still be better than stagnating to death. The things he’d said to Robert tonight had been harsh, some of them, but they’d made sense. And if the current danger to democracy was as extraordinary as both Bradford and Robert agreed it was, then why not an extraordinary cure? Why not a gesture so grand it couldn’t be ignored?
There were moments like this when it seemed absolutely right that Bradford should do what he planned, but then the whole problem tended to make a sudden shift into another perspective, like those stacks of boxes in Ripley’s Believe It or Not that sometimes seem to angle one way and sometimes the other, and she would find she was arguing against herself.
Now, for instance, she was remembering France and what had happened to Bradford there, and she was realizing it would be the same thing all over again this time, only much worse, on a much larger scale. No matter how good Bradford’s motivation, no matter how accurate his diagnosis of the world’s ills, all that could happen would be that the Chinese would use him for their own propaganda. And the United States would have to disown him, turn from him in repugnance as a traitor, no matter how he might try to explain things. The world would listen as George had listened during that interview, nodding all the way and then cutting out the parts it didn’t want to hear.
But what was the alternative? For Bradford, stagnation and uselessness. For the country, if Bradford and Robert were right, the beginning of the decline from democracy.
No, she couldn’t make up her mind about anything now, she couldn’t think clearly now. But she did want to see Bradford and reassure him that she was still on his side, that much she had to do, whether or not it was the truth.
Always be sincere, the old joke ran, whether you mean it or not.
She carried that thought with her up the stairs and down the long corridor to the closed door of the back library. She knocked, heard his muffled response, and opened the door.
He had been reading again, this time The Making of the President 1972, and he smiled as Evelyn came into the room, and tapped the book and said, “This could have been written by Robert. It’s fascinating how widespread that fatalistic attitude is.”
Should she try to argue with him, talk him out of his ideas? No. If Robert, who was so much better prepared, had failed to turn him, Evelyn didn’t stand a chance. All she could accomplish would be to make him suspect he couldn’t trust her any more, and that was the one thing she knew she couldn’t permit. She had to remain his confidante, she had to know his plans.
She said, “I read his article today. The one about the Fuehrer. I hadn’t known people were thinking that way at all.”
“From the highest to the lowest,” Bradford said. “I think perhaps that’s the advantage of retirement, one can step outside the action and see it from a different perspective, not get caught by the received truths that everybody else absorbs without noticing.”
“I’d never known that was possible, to have a whole shift in the way people think, without anybody noticing.”
“Look at a ten-year-old fashion magazine,” Bradford said, “and you’ll see the same thing operating on a different level. The clothes will look foolish to you, you’d be embarrassed to be seen wearing any of them. Try to remember how much you admired clothing like that at the time, and you can’t do it. The memory is gone. You know you must have liked that clothing, you can remember owning things very much like it, but to remember your attitude then is impossible.” He transferred the book from his lap to the table beside his chair and said, “I hope you won’t be telling anyone else, Evelyn. What I said to you I said in confidence.”
Suddenly nervous and frightened, Evelyn said, “No, of course not. I’m sorry about that, Bradford, I shouldn’t have done it.”
“I hadn’t realized you and Robert were so close,” he said, and smiled a bit sadly at her. “Naturally, if marriage is in prospect—”