Echo House (36 page)

A few weeks after the divorce became final, Leila and Hugo Borne were married at the registry office in Alexandria, so well known to the community that its address was given as the Street Without Joy. That night Alec and Sandrine planned a celebration, Champagne and chicken with the famous vindaloo sauce. When he arrived, she came to him from the telephone, clinging to him longer than usual, her fingernails digging into his back. When he asked her what was wrong, she avoided his eyes, excused herself, and left the room. A moment later he heard her on the telephone. My brother, she explained when she returned. He found her uncharacteristically distracted and careless in the kitchen. She drank one glass of Champagne and another and a third. He watched her intently as he told an especially gamy story about a senator and his secretary, the secretary threatening suit and the senator up for re-election. The secretary had letters and what she cheerlessly described as fashion photographs. How much did she want? And did she want it in small unmarked bills? No, she wanted her day in court.

He said, You can tell me now, whatever it is.

Sandrine looked away and said she was returning to France at the end of the week. Her doctor had given her bad news, news that she would rather face in the country of her birth, among friends. She was dreaming again of Montparnasse and the Seine at dusk and her little blue car at the family farm in Normandy. She stood with her shoulders hunched and her eyes averted, as she was when they first met.

She said, I'm terrified. I'm scared to death.

He said to her that she had to see American specialists, the best in the world. He would find out who they were and take her to them, at the National Institutes of Health or Mass General or Sloan-Kettering or wherever they were. We cannot allow this to defeat us without a struggle. She listened to him, smiling politely, amused in some region of her mind that he thought expensive doctors and mortal struggle the answer to a calamity. They had given her a death sentence with no appeal, which she had accepted quite calmly as she had been taught to do, really very calmly under the circumstances. The American doctor had been brusque. She never wanted to see another American doctor as long as she lived, though she knew that was a fantasy that would be unfulfilled. Still, there was not much time left and she would avoid them as long as she could. She drank another glass of Champagne, looking sideways over its rim out the window to the house next door, his house, all lights burning as if the family were still present. He was describing the very great advances American medicine had made, was making every day, brilliant researchers probing the very limits of biology. He held her hand while he spoke. His words tumbled over themselves in his rush to convince her of miracles. Finally he stopped talking and they embraced for many minutes while he listened to the beating of her heart.

Alec came to Paris at the end of the month. By then, Sandrine was in the quiet wing of the Hótel-Dieu. He was with her every day for three weeks and then she was dead. The funeral was in a country church near St. Aubin, a Catholic service that seemed interminable, the priest speaking in a low incomprehensible mumble. The hymns were unfamiliar. He felt he had intruded. Her brother was cold to him, as if he were somehow responsible for her illness. Alec barely knew her parents, and they spoke no English and he no French. The ambassador's wife helped with translation, but she too was distraught and Sandrine's parents eager to return to their farm. They nicely asked him to join them for a meal and a glass of something but when he declined they said they understood. The ambassador's wife said they must get together in Washington. Sandrine cared very much for you, she said.

He drove away from the cemetery mad with grief, not knowing where he would go. He could not bear returning to his house in Washington with her empty place next door. Looking at it, he would always see the tricolor at half-staff. Where did he belong? Washington seemed now the leaden capital of a foreign country, as baffling as Sandrine's funeral service. Alec drove all night to Biarritz and then to Bilbao. Bilbao to Vigo, Vigo to Lisbon. He remembered that his father had visited Lisbon before the war, so he checked into the Ritz and stayed a week, driving to the racetrack at Estoril each afternoon and wagering absurd sums of money. The weather was dry and cool and he enjoyed standing at the rail watching the horses run, and returning to the hotel and having a drink at the bar, occupying the stool at the far end where his father had probably sat forty years before. He realized he was conducting a kind of vigil and in time he would have to return to the life he had made. His last night in Lisbon he called Axel from the bar, a rambling conversation that ended with the old man saying how sorry he was, that life was unkind and incoherent and lived always on the margins of chaos. Alec remembered the evening in Springfield so many years before, looking at Adlai Stevenson's bald head and tired eyes, and deciding he would never know anything of the spirit beneath the skin, the man himself forever unknowable, and finding satisfaction in that thought.

Cables from Lloyd Fisher followed him to Madrid and Seville and Ronda, urgent matters requiring his immediate attention,
return at once.
In Ronda he met a painter and his wife and slept with the wife. Then he drove to Granada to see the Alhambra and finally to Barcelona to look at Gaudi's architecture. He spent a week in Barcelona, prowling the Ramblas at night, gratified that he understood nothing that was said around him; then he got into a scuffle with a cab driver he thought was bent on assault, when all the man wanted was a light for his cigarette. He remembered Sandrine's tremendous affection for Paris, not for who she was in it but for the place itself, its essence; and then he admitted to himself that Washington was the reverse and that affection did not come into it except as a dividend. For himself, his work was all he had and Washington was home. In a sense the town was his, his own creation. He still could not believe she was dead.

Alec returned to the capital, sold his house, and moved to a place in Kalorama within walking distance of his office. There were bedrooms for his children on the weekends. Then the children went away to school and when they came home went to Leila and Hugo's place in Cleveland Park, seeing him occasionally for meals. The house grew smaller as it emptied until it seemed to him the size of a squash court with the charm of a squash court. One night he looked around the place and knew it had no future; its only advantage was that it was near his office. So he called Axel and moved back into Echo House.

"The usual," he said to Virginia Spears.

"Irreconcilable differences?" the reporter asked.

"I suppose so," Alec agreed.

"Funny, that's what Leila said."

Alec looked at his watch and frowned.

"She said you both had different ideas of virtue." When Alec did not respond—indeed, his body was motionless—she smiled slyly and said, "Arguments about Nixon. Your role."

"I didn't have a role "

"Not what Leila said. And that your role helped bring down the marriage."

"Nixon was responsible for a lot. Not that."

"I'm trying to reconstruct the arguments about virtue, what you said and what she said and so forth and so on. I suppose it would boil down to who believed in what and why they believed it and how Nixon figured in. Wouldn't you say?"

"The marriage ended years after Nixon quit."

"Gotcha," Virginia said, with a sharp laugh. "Don't worry, I know Leila's off base. Still, we had a nice chat in that fancy office she has with the Twomblys on the walls and that desk the size of a tennis court. God, she's put on a lot of weight. Hugo, too. It's disgusting."

"They live well," Alec said mildly.

"After the irreconcilable differences there was a rumor you took a leave. Clients were left in the lurch. On the hook."

He said, "I took a vacation. People do that, even in Washington." And it had taken a year to repair the damage and longer than that to assure the faithful clients that he had not had a nervous breakdown.

"Have you had one since?"

"Of course," he lied.

"People say you're a lawyer who's always on call. Day or night, you can always reach Alec."

He turned to watch the horses break from the gate. He was trying to remember whether he had won or lost at Estoril, but the week was a blur. He had the idea that he had won again and again, betting hugely, returning to Lisbon with his wallet stuffed with escudos. The horses rounded one turn and another and came beautifully down the stretch. He looked at his ticket to see which one he'd bet on and saw it was number six. He and the reporter were sitting at the same table he and Sandrine had occupied one Saturday afternoon when she won a daily double, nine hundred dollars. She was yelling at the horse in French. Sandrine had brought him to the races, and her enthusiasm won him over and thereafter they went often when Pimlico was in session. The horses were reined up now and he looked at the tote board. The winner was number eight and both he and Virginia dropped their stubs in the ashtray.

"Who do you see now?"

Alec looked at her blankly.

"Women," Virginia said. "You're an eligible bachelor. You're as eligible as bachelors get in this town. Trust me, it's something I know about."

He wondered what sort of personal life Virginia Spears had, or if she had any personal life. He realized he knew almost nothing about her except what she did for a living. He said, "What about you? Do you have a boyfriend? A life after-hours? What do you do when you're not working?"

She looked at him, surprised. She said, The usual. She traveled in a crowd, mostly journalists and sources. There was no one special in her life at that moment. She supposed she lived a typical Washington life, an hour at the gym each morning, lunch, interviews, a party in the evening. She picked up her pencil and said that lately she was helping out at home. Her father was terribly sick and wanted her near him. She wanted to be there, too. You're lucky to have Axel, she said.

She was writing in her notebook. She explained that she was old-fashioned and never used a tape recorder, too cumbersome and intrusive, and so much had to be edited out. Alec wondered what she was writing since nothing of value had been said.

"So there are no women. And now you live at Echo House."

"Axel and me, two old farts all dressed up with no place to go"

She shrugged and made another note.

"Don't make more of it than it is," Alec said.

"I wouldn't do that," she said.

The drinks arrived and Alec paid. The reporter continued to write. Alec imagined her notebook as an orphanage at recess, the illegitimate and unruly facts competing for attention. In the rough and tumble the weaker facts were mauled by the stronger ones, as the superintendent attempted to impose order.

Virginia looked up and said, "Have you had any success with Axel? I'd be grateful if I
could have an hour with him sometime soon. I'm filing next week."

"I'll talk to him tonight."

"I'd appreciate it."

"Don't get your hopes up."

"Never, Alec."

"Maybe it'll work out; probably it won't."

"I've got these blank spots, you see."

Alec hesitated and then said the first thing that came to mind. "Don't forget we're a very long-lived family."

The reporter looked at him strangely and turned the page of her notebook. "I'd like to return, if I could, to the relationship you've had with Red Lambardo. When did you meet? I mean the date and the circumstances, and what exactly Red was doing way back then in the Kennedy administration."

"Lawyer-client privilege," Alec said, and when he thought to say he was sorry about her father, Virginia nodded and thanked him.

Ed Peralta's suicide left Axel worried and depressed. He refused to understand how a man could do such a thing, put a gun to his head in his own living room with his wife asleep upstairs, and leave that maudlin note. The event left Axel brooding about his own mortality, since Ed was younger and in better health, at least physically. Axel's aches and pains had multiplied and his world narrowed since the Republicans had come to power. They now had a thirst for government and the authority that went with it. So many of his old friends were gone, and the ones who remained were retired and living on memories. Feeding off memories was worse than feeding off the wretched food they served now at dinner parties, arugula, tofu, and raw fish; thin gruel, and it didn't look any better than it tasted. Ed was gone, Harold Grendall retired, André Przyborski returned triumphantly to Poland, and Lloyd Fisher obsessed with his golf game, though it had to be said that Lloyd still kept his hand in. Wednesday lunch was lively only when Alec or Red Lambardo stopped by to retail the latest gossip.

Moreover, the fortieth anniversary of D-Day was approaching and Axel wanted to attend the ceremonies, if to do nothing more than sneer at the broken-down movie actor who had inexplicably become heir to FDR and Harry Truman. That bastard Reagan was trying to repeal the modern world; only in America could such a catastrophe occur. And he would go to Omaha Beach and give his ghost-written speech and accept the applause of heroes, he who had never heard a shot fired in anger, he who had spent the war on a sound stage in Los Angeles. The man had no shame, yet there were those in Washington—serious people, men who had been around—who insisted that he was undervalued, both as a politician and as a man, and that was one other reason to journey to Omaha Beach, to see him eye-to-eye. Axel did not believe his health would permit a transatlantic flight, even on the Concorde. The seats were narrow and cramped, and when he arrived in Paris, what would he do? He wanted a place front row center with the other OSS characters and the veterans of the landing and the breakout. He wanted to put flowers on Fred Greene's grave. He did not see how he would be able to do this, so he sat in his Adirondack chair under the great elm next to the croquet court and brooded.

He often walked with two canes now, swinging his hips to accelerate. Arthritis combined with the other pains to render him at times immobile; he thought of himself as a collapsed stick figure, a puppet abandoned by the puppeteer. At least he was still active; he was at the table, and now and again was even able to raise the ante, when the ante wasn't too high. In the last election his money was responsible for the election of at least one senator; one of his protégés was an assistant secretary of state, and another counsel to a Senate committee. He had placed Carl Buzet's boy in the Treasury. His black eyes were bright as ever, the skin of his face tight as paper. The long livid scar had the effect of narrowing his jaw. His nose had grown so that at a certain angle its tip seemed to touch his chin. But he radiated confidence and a kind of grandeur, a relic of a bygone golden age. Why was it then that he was never invited to the White House?