After his visit to the Lincoln Memorial, he wrote these words on the pad of yellow paper:
Once, Jocelyn, I asked you a pair of questions. I asked you, first, whom most Americans regarded as their greatest president. Without hesitation you named Abraham Lincoln. Then I asked you who you thought was the greatest American president. You thought for a moment. “Lincoln,” you said.
There was a man named Henry Clay who never became president, his hopes notwithstanding. For a period of thirty years Henry Clay prevented the Civil War from taking place. Almost single-handedly he drafted one compromise after another. He adhered to no particular principle and made himself roundly despised as a man without principles. But for him, the South would surely have seceded at a time when the North could have done little to prevent secession.
Of course the election of Lincoln made secession inevitable, and war in turn was an inevitable consequence of secession. I often wonder what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had not been elected. Mechanical developments, such as the cotton gin, would have made slavery obsolescent as an institution in not too many years. Other causes of sectionalist rivalry might have smoothed themselves out in much the same fashion.
Perhaps not. But it hardly matters, because Abraham Lincoln was in fact elected, and the South did secede, and war followed. And the North won, and the Union was preserved.
I was at the Lincoln Memorial this morning. I looked into the marble eyes of the most sorrowful face I have ever seen. It struck me, looking into the fact of that deeply troubled man, that Booth’s bullet was an unintentional kindness.
There is no memorial to Henry Clay. I asked you once if you had heard of him. You knew the name.
One night Dorn went to a rally of the New American Patriots. The speaker was James Danton Rhodine. At the entrance to the auditorium Dorn was searched by two well-built and neatly groomed young men. Both wore the now standard royal blue shirts and khaki trousers. They were very well-mannered, and smiled as they apologized for the necessity of searching the men and women who had come to hear Rhodine.
This had become standard practice at NAP rallies ever since an unsuccessful attempt on Rhodine’s life a month earlier in San Francisco. Dorn took it for granted that this attempt had been staged. He found it increasingly difficult to believe that genuine assassination attempts ever ended in failure. It seemed as unlikely as a politically prominent person’s dying a natural death. Possible, to be sure, but not likely.
Dorn found himself paying very little attention to the speech. He amused himself at the onset by anticipating the words before they were uttered. This palled before much time had elapsed. Thereafter, he found himself paying more attention to the crowd and the Blueshirts than to Rhodine. He remained until the address was over and left the hall with I the sound of rhythmic applause ringing in his ears. He went back a to his hotel and went to sleep.
Every night, every single night, dreams woke Dorn. These dreams were rarely confined to a single language. Characters would begin a sentence in Serbo-Croat and end it in English. Then another character would respond in German or Russian. Heretofore Dorn’s dreams had always confined themselves to one language at a time.
He interpreted this new element as another sign of confusion and anxiety. It thus distressed him, as such signs must, but he could not regard it as surprising or as cause for special worry.
He rarely had a dream without Jocelyn in it. In many of the dreams she died, most often at his hands. These dreams were the worst.
He never tried to return to sleep after a dream had awakened him. Each time he would wait until calm returned. Then he would shower and shave and dress. Then he might read from a paperback anthology of English poetry. Or walk through the predawn streets. Or move the dresser and take up the pad of yellow paper and add another passage to his endless letter to Jocelyn.
He never once read over what he had written. Nor did he ever discard a page or cross out a line. There were times when he wanted to do this last, times when he felt he had made a point badly. But he had decided that everything must stand as written.
Today as I was walking back to my hotel a fire engine passed me, siren open. My first thought was of a policeman in Philadelphia who could not understand why people would throw rocks and bottles at firemen fighting a fire.
I thought next of my hotel. It is an old building, and no doubt would burn like a torch. I froze at the thought of this manuscript burning. Not that it might be discovered in the rubble but that it might simply turn into a cinder.
There would not be time to write all of this again, Jocelyn, nor do I think it likely that I would have the heart to try. I stood on the pavement and visualized a lifetime of work going up in smoke. “The work of a lifetime.” Those were the words that came to mind.
And, however grandiose they seem, I would not change them. Jocelyn, I am drowning in Washington. My whole life passes before my eyes, takes its form on these sheets of lined yellow paper.
Of course it was not this building, nor even a building very near to this one. My manuscript was not even warm to the touch.
One afternoon he bought a bag of bread crumbs and went to a park to feed pigeons. He threw out the bread crumbs in huge handfuls so that the birds would not have to fight over them. But no matter how fast he scattered the crumbs, so many more pigeons kept coming that there was not standing room for them all. They shouldered one another aside, pecked at each other, puffed themselves up.
He left the park as soon as the bag was empty, not waiting to watch them finish the crumbs.
It occurred to him from time to time that his letter to Jocelyn was similar to Penelope’s shawl. The letter would never end, and until it ended he would not do the deed which had brought him to Washington. But Penelope had unraveled each night what she had knitted during that day. Dorn did no unraveling.
One day he wrote:
You are the only person whose judgment matters the slightest to me. I have never loved anyone but you. No one else has ever truly known me. No living person but you has ever known me at all. I realize that it is not unusual for a man to care deeply about the opinion that strangers hold of him. I cannot understand why this is true. I know that it is not true of me.
Perhaps I ought to be tempted by the thought that History will vindicate me. But in the first place I doubt that History’s judgment will be kind, and in the second place I do not care in the slightest whether it is. The Judgment of History! The phrase itself is a joke, a contradiction in terms. History has no judgment. History is all blind men and elephants. Not a one of us, Jocelyn, knows much more than a very little about the peripheral facts of our own small lives. Yet History, removed in time and place, presumes to judge. The perspective of History is that special perspective afforded by a glance through the wrong end of a telescope. No man lives in History. Death is absolute.
Shall I then fear Death? I can only say that I do not. I have lived too long, Jocelyn, and to too little purpose. I find nothing very awful in the prospect of ceasing to be.
And yet. And yet one fear gnaws at me, Jocelyn. It eats at me like cancer. And that is the fear that you will hate me.
Before I met you, Jocelyn, no action of mine ever stemmed from a selfless purpose. Since then everything I have done has grown out of love for you. So I write these lines, these endless lines, to you. To gain your understanding. To win your forgiveness. To keep your love. You are my afterlife, Jocelyn. Your love is my Heaven, its absence all I need of Hell.