“Fine,” Robert said.
“As for the rest of us,” Eugene said, “at the moment I think there’s nothing for us to do but cudgel our brains. We want to stop Bradford without publicity, and we’ll have to do it without his cooperation, which is a tall order. I’m willing to serve as a clearing-house for ideas, a sort of liaison within the family. I don’t know if we’ll want any more large meetings like this, but if we do I can handle the arrangements. For now, I think we should adjourn for lunch and start to think things out. Unless there’s something else to say?”
They were all silent, waiting for someone to speak, and in their silence Holt heard a strange small sound, a kind of rustling or scuffing. He glanced around for the source of it, as others also started to do, and then he saw Howard and George looking across the table, and when he followed their eyes he saw that BJ was crying.
It was the damnedest thing. There he was, the total military man, ramrod-straight, strong-faced, iron-gray hair brushed straight back, uniform severe and immaculate amid all the civilian business suits, and he was crying. Seated at attention, the way he always was, shoulders back, spine straight, head erect, hands flat on the table, and he was crying. His face was red and distorted, tears were wet on his cheeks, the odd scuffing sound was his labored breathing, but through it all he made no movement. His hands didn’t go to his face, his head didn’t bow, his shoulders didn’t fold inward, he made none of the physical adjustments that people make when they weep. But he was crying.
Holt felt vast embarrassment and pity, and didn’t know what to do. There was nothing to do. BJ faced front, meeting no one’s eye. He seemed oblivious of the nine men around him.
None of them knew what to do. When Holt finally looked away from BJ he saw that everyone else had also been staring at him, embarrassment and pity were on every other face, and they were all equally helpless to find something to do.
But at least he could be left alone. Holt slid his chair back, and though the move made practically no sound on the carpet, everyone immediately turned to look at him. He got to his feet, saying nothing, looking at no one, and walked around the table to the door. As he did so, Eugene and Robert got to their feet, and then Howard, and then Sterling and Wellington together, and then Meredith Fanshaw, and then George, and finally Harrison. They all walked silently out to the hall, leaving BJ in there, sitting at attention, hands flat on the table, eyes straight ahead, crying.
In the hall, they didn’t look at one another. Eugene said, “This way,” his voice muffled, and they all followed him down the corridor.
4
Wellington had lunch with Meredith Fanshaw, who didn’t really want to talk about the problem of Brad, but who wanted instead to talk about another problem, one involving a defense appropriation that was having some unexpected trouble in the Senate. Wellington understood that Meredith was simply on another of his fishing expeditions, trying to find out exactly where Wellington stood in the Washington hierarchy, where his protection was, essentially, and he parried the leading questions with the deadpan skill of long experience. Still, coming right after this morning’s bombshell, it was more of a strain than usual, so as unobtrusively as possible he cut the luncheon short. Besides, he’d be getting a phone call soon, and he wanted to be home for it.
“Remember me to Carol,” Meredith said. Wellington was married to a niece of Meredith’s, but blood was all the two had in common. Wellington said he would, knowing he wouldn’t, and also knowing that Meredith didn’t really give a damn whether he did or not.
It was a cloudy day, and getting cooler. Wellington, who drove a Chevrolet station wagon, turned on the car radio for the two o’clock news and heard that rain was anticipated toward morning. For the first time this season, Wellington switched on the car’s heater.
Wellington’s home was a large white structure on an acre and a half of clipped greenery in Bethesda. As he drove up the precise blacktop he reached into his glove compartment for the remote control box and depressed the button, and ahead of him the middle garage door (of three) retracted smoothly upward. He drove the station wagon inside, noticing that both other cars were out — Carol would be shopping, seventeen-year-old Deborah was at school — and pressed the button again to shut the door behind him.
The housekeeper was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee that probably contained a dollop of rye, a copy of Ebony open before her. Wellington said, “If there are any calls, I’ll be in the den.”
“Yes, sir.” She barely acknowledged his presence. Wellington suspected that she knew about Carol’s affair with the Congressman from Kentucky, and therefore despised Wellington. Assuming — as Carol did, as the Congressman did, as everyone always did — that he knew nothing and was therefore a fool. Did they suppose his life could be private? The OA maintained a dossier on Carol’s extramarital affairs — four, in nine years — as a matter of course. Wellington hadn’t ordered it, but couldn’t stop it, nor could he stop himself from reading the dossier from time to time.
The den was a small many-angled room on the third floor of the house. The ceiling was the underside of the roof, and slanted down at various angles. There was a dormer window that began at the floor, and the available spaces of vertical wall had been covered with bookcases, all hammered together by Wellington himself. The books were as various and nondescript as the contents of a used bookstore on a side street in an old city, ranging from the Kuran and The Mayor of Casterbridge to The Wind in the Willows and The Story of O.
One shelf contained two dozen dark blue loose-leaf binders. Within the binders was Wellington’s stamp collection — North American, mostly, plus a few specialties like Andorra and the Third Reich — as well as his only secret. The one thing no dossier knew about him, nor ever would.
Entering the den now, he reached unhesitatingly for the seventh blue binder from the left and carried it across the room to the small battered desk near the dormer window. A wooden kitchen chair stood before the desk, a telephone and a water glass full of pencils and ballpoint pens stood on it.
Wellington sat down at the desk and opened the binder. Canadian stamps, mountains and moose. The formation of the binder was this: Within a clear plastic sleeve the stamps were mounted on sheets of white paper, two sheets in each sleeve, back to back. There were approximately fifty plastic sleeves in each binder.
Wellington flipped about halfway through the volume, then turned a few pages more slowly, studying the stamps. At last he stopped, and inserted his fingertips into one of the sleeves, and pulled out the sheets of paper. Separating them, he revealed a third sheet, containing hand-printing in neat lines with ballpoint pen, reading:
Wellington read over several times what he had written, then opened a side drawer of the desk, and took the top sheet of a stack of yellow paper lying there. Lifting a pencil from the glass, he bowed his shoulders over the sheet of scratch paper on the desk, and slowly began to write.