Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda.
An equally indefensible idea of a real life.
She had been thinking that over when Catherine called back.
I had my father thank you very much.
She was even about to just walk away from Catherine.
She knew she was. She knew the signs. She was losing focus on Catherine. She was losing momentum on Catherine. If she could even consider walking away from Catherine she could certainly walk away from this house in Sweetwater. That she did not was the beginning of the story as some people in Miami came to see it.
10
“I have frequently stated that I did not intend to set down either autobiographical notes of any kind or any version of events as I have witnessed and affected them. It has been my firm and long-held conviction that events, for better or for worse, speak for themselves, work as it were toward their own ends. After reviewing published accounts of certain of these events, however, I find my own role in them to have been misrepresented. Therefore, on this August Sunday morning, with a tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia, I have determined to set forth as concisely as possible, and in as much detail as is consistent with national security, certain actions I took in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.”
So begins the four-hundred-and-seventy-six-page transcript of the taped statement that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley with instructions that it be sealed to scholars until five years after his death.
Those five years have now passed.
As have, and this would have been his calculation, any lingering spasms of interest in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.
Or so it would seem.
Since, seven years after Treat Morrison’s death and two years after the unsealing of the transcript, I remain the single person to have asked to see it.
MORRISON, TREAT AUSTIN, ambassador-at-large; b. San Francisco Mar. 3, 1930; s. Francis J. and Margaret (Austin) M; B.A., U. of Calif. at Berkeley, 1951; grad. National War College 1956; m. Diane Waring, Dec. 5, 1953 (dec. 1983). Commissioned 2nd lt. U.S. Army 1951, served in Korea, Germany, mil. attaché Chile 1953-54; spec, asst to commander SHAPE Paris 1955; attaché to US Mission to E.C. Brussels 1956-57
So Treat Morrison’s Who’s Who entry began.
And continued.
All the special postings enumerated, all the private-sector sojourns specified.
All there.
Right down to Office: Dept. of State, 2201 C St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20520.
Without giving the slightest sense of what Treat Morrison actually did.
Which was fix things.
What was remarkable about those four hundred and seventy-six pages that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library was, as in his Who’s Who entry, less what was said than what was not said. What was said was predictable enough, globalism versus regionalism, full Boland, failed nations, correct interventions, multilateral approach, Directive 25, Resolution 427, criteria not followed, nothing Treat Morrison could not have said at the Council on Foreign Relations, nothing he had not said, up there in the paneled room with the portrait of David Rockefeller and the old guys nodding off and the young guys asking pinched textbook questions and the willowy young women who worked on the staff standing in the back of the room like geishas, shuttle up and hop a flight back down with one of the corporate guys, maybe learn something for a change, you’d be surprised, they’ve got their own projections, their own risk analysts, no bureaucracy, no commitments to stale ideologies, none of those pinched textbook questions, they can afford to keep out there ahead of the power curve, corporate guys are light-years ahead of us.
Sometimes.
Four hundred and seventy-six pages on correct interventions and no clue that a correct intervention was for Treat Morrison an intervention in which when you run out of options you can still get your people to the airport.
Four hundred and seventy-six pages with only a veiled suggestion of Treat Morrison’s rather spectacular indifference to the conventional interests and concerns of his profession, only an oblique flash of his particular maladaption, which was to be a manipulator of abstracts whose exclusive interest was in the specific. You get just the slightest hint of that maladaption in tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling, just the barest lapse before the sonorous recovery of outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia.
No hint at all of his long half-mad gaze.
Wide spindrift gaze toward paradise, Elena McMahon said the first time she was alone with him.
He said nothing.
A poem, she said.
Still he said nothing.
Something galleons of Carib fire, she said, something something the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
He studied her without speaking. Diane read poetry, he said then.
There had been a silence.
Diane was his wife.
Diane was dead.
Diane Morrison, 52, wife of, after a short illness, survived by, in lieu of flowers.
I wasn’t thinking about the Carib fire part, Elena had said finally.
Yes you were, Treat Morrison had said.
11
What we want here is a montage, music over. Angle on Elena. Alone on the dock where her father berthed the Kitty Rex. Working loose a splinter on the planking with the toe of her sandal. Taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair, damp from the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Cut to Barry Sedlow. Standing in the door of the frame shack, under the sign that read RENTALS GAS BAIT BEER AMMO. Leaning against the counter. Watching Elena through the screen door as he waited for change. Angle on the manager. Sliding a thousand-dollar bill beneath the tray in the cash register, replacing the tray, counting out the hundreds.
No place you could not pass a hundred.
There in the sweet heavy air of South Florida.
Havana so close you could see the two-tone Impalas on the Malecón.
Goddamn but we had some fun there.
The music would give you the sweet heavy air, the music would give you Havana.
Imagine what the music was as: Barry Sedlow folded the bills into his money clip without looking at them, kicked open the screen door, and walked down the dock, a little something in the walk, a definite projection of what a woman less wary than Elena might (might, could, would, did, wanted to, needed to) mistake for sex.
Close on Elena. Watching Barry Sedlow.
“Looks like you’re waiting for somebody,” Barry Sedlow said.
“I think you,” Elena McMahon said.
Her father had begun to run the fever during the evening of Saturday the sixteenth of June. She had known something was wrong because the drink he had made at seven remained untouched at ten, its color mottled by melted ice.
“I don’t know what that foul ball expected to get out of showing up here,” he said about midnight.