For the next twenty minutes, he was totally absorbed. When he was finished, he had used three sheets of the yellow paper, he had crossed out line after line, and he had written three more stanzas, which he now carefully transferred to the original sheet of white paper, beneath the first three:
Done with the copying, he slowly reread the entire poem, moving his lips, his head moving also with the rhythms. Satisfied, he put that sheet between the two sheets containing stamps and returned the whole sandwich to the plastic sleeve. Moving the binder to one side of the desk, he withdrew another sheet of yellow paper from the drawer and began to write again in penciclass="underline"
The phone rang. He put down his pencil at once, but waited for the second ring before picking up the receiver. “Hello,” he said.
“Wellington?”
“Yes,” he said. “I thought you’d call.”
“How soon can you be here?”
Wellington closed his eyes. “Thirty minutes,” he said.
“Good.”
Wellington hung up. He pulled the binder close again, leafed through it, and stopped at the page one past the one he’d withdrawn before. He removed the sheets of white paper from this next plastic sheet, and once again there was an extra piece of paper in the middle, this one blank. He reread his yellow paper draft, crossed out the last two lines, and copied everything down to and including the line He would never be a child. Then he put the sandwich of white paper back together again, reinserted the papers in the plastic sleeve, and closed the binder.
Next he got to his feet and carried the binder over to its bookcase and put it away. Back at the desk, he put the pen and pencil back in the glass and gathered up the yellow worksheets. These he carried out of the room and across the narrow dark hall into the bathroom, where he burned them in the sink and ran water to carry the ashes down the drain. He then went downstairs, told the housekeeper — still reading Ebony at the kitchen table — to tell Carol that he might be late, and left the house. He got into his station wagon, backed it out of the garage, and drove back to Washington.
ii
The man at the desk was listening to a tape recording when Wellington walked in. Wellington heard, “... without making him suspicious. I’ll see what I can find.”
That was Howard’s voice. It was followed by Joe Holt saying, “I’ll be there by the end of the week, Howard. I’ll have to make an excuse to give him a medical onceover.”
Black leather sofas faced one another from the left and right walls. Currier & Ives prints were massed on the walnut paneling above the sofas, and large framed portraits of George Washington and the current President frowned and smiled down from the wall behind the desk. The carpet was dark green, and on it stood a dark wooden chair with a spindle back and flat arms, facing the desk. Indirect lighting in gutters under the acoustical ceiling supplemented the fluorescent lamp on the desk.
On the tape, Sterling was saying, “Robert, I think we should arrange a leave of absence for you from the university, and that you should take a place in Eustace or Chambersburg, somewhere close by, so you could be reached in an emergency.”
Wellington sat down on the wooden chair. He watched the man behind the desk, who was watching the reels turn.
Robert Pratt’s voice came from the machine: “Fine.”
Wellington looked at his watch. Thirty-five minutes since he’d been phoned. So this was an act. Pointless.
Eugene White said, “As for the rest of us, 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?” Then there was silence, in which a small sound gradually became apparent, a faint rasping noise.
The man at the desk said, “What’s that sound?”
“My brother crying,” Wellington said.
The other man glanced at him, lifting an eyebrow. “Bradford, Junior? The military man?”
In a toneless voice, Wellington said, “His fixation has always been on our father’s invincibility, and his own inability to measure up to the old man. He should probably be watched for a while now. Adolescent rebellion can be severe when it strikes a man of forty-three.” There were other faint noises on the tape now, rustlings and scrapings. Wellington said, “That’s all of it. They’re leaving now.”
The other man reached over and switched off the tape. He had a yellow legal pad on his desk — like Fanshaw’s — and he now picked up a yellow pencil and made a notation. Wellington sat and waited, watching the pencil move, and when he was done writing the other man said, “Tell me about Eugene White. He seemed to be running things.”
“He’s with the State Department.”
“I know all that business. Tell me who he is, and what makes him family.”
“Marriage makes him family. His wife is Bradford’s wife’s niece, and his daughter just married Bradford’s son-in-law’s nephew. There’s also some family relationship through my uncle Sterling’s wife.”
The other man shook his head. “I can’t trace out these families,” he said. “You all intermarry in the same tight circle, and after a while everybody’s in the same family.”
“It seems that way,” Wellington said, deadpan.
“I come from... the midwest. We didn’t have families like that. But then, we weren’t upper class.”
Wellington said nothing.
The other man peered at him. “Don’t start understanding me, Wellington,” he said.
“You come from Omaha,” Wellington said. “Your father was a grocer. You know I know that.”
The other man shrugged. “Habit,” he said, his tone betraying his irritation. “Eugene White,” he said.
“The jolly good boy,” Wellington said. “He has a place in Florida, and a boat, and he goes sailing. Very casual man, but an organizer by nature. Likes to put things in rows, with tags on them. That’s what he does for State, he’s a China watcher. He’s too casual to be a scholar, otherwise he’d be a college teacher now. Treats his work like a jigsaw puzzle, meaningless fun, and doesn’t take his job home with him.”
“Home life?”
“All happy families are alike,” Wellington said.