Edge of Eternity (114 page)

‘But not a new boyfriend.’

‘No.’

‘You still live alone?’

‘I have two cats,’ she said. ‘Julius and Loopy.’

George nodded. Her being single would have helped her at the Justice Department. They hesitated to promote a married woman who might get pregnant and leave, but a confirmed spinster had a better chance.

Their food came and they ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Maria put down her fork. ‘I want you to go back to work, George.’

George was moved by her loving concern, and he admired the steady determination with which she had rebuilt her life. But he could not work up any enthusiasm. He gave a helpless shrug. ‘Bobby’s gone, McCarthy lost the nomination. Who would I work for?’

Maria surprised him by saying: ‘Fawcett Renshaw.’

‘Those bastards?’ Fawcett Renshaw was the Washington law firm that had offered George a job when he graduated, only to withdraw the offer because he went on the Freedom Ride.

‘You’d be their civil rights expert,’ she added.

George relished the irony. Seven years ago, involvement with civil rights had debarred him from working at Fawcett Renshaw; now it qualified him. We have won some victories, he thought, despite everything. He began to feel better.

‘You’ve worked at Justice and on Capitol Hill, so you have priceless inside knowledge,’ she went on. ‘And, you know what? Suddenly it’s become fashionable for a Washington law firm to have one black lawyer on the team.’

‘How do you know what Fawcett Renshaw want?’ he asked.

‘At the Justice Department we have a lot to do with them. Usually trying to get their clients to comply with government legislation.’

‘I’d end up defending corporations who violate civil rights legislation.’

‘Think of it as a learning experience. You’ll gain first-hand knowledge of how equalities legislation works on the ground. That would be valuable if ever you returned to politics. Meanwhile, you’ll be making good money.’

George wondered if he ever would return to politics.

He looked up to see his father approaching across the restaurant. Greg said: ‘I’ve just finished lunch – may I join you for coffee?’

George wondered whether this apparently accidental meeting had, in fact, been planned by Maria. He also recalled that old Renshaw, the senior partner at the law firm, was a boyhood friend of Greg’s.

Maria said to Greg: ‘We were just talking about George going back to work. Fawcett Renshaw want him.’

‘Renshaw mentioned it to me. You’ll be invaluable to them. Your contacts are matchless.’

‘Nixon looks like winning,’ George said dubiously. ‘Most of my contacts are with the Democrats.’

‘They’re still useful. Anyway, I don’t expect Nixon to last long. He’ll crash and burn.’

George raised his eyebrows. Greg was a liberal Republican who would have preferred someone such as Nelson Rockefeller as presidential candidate. Even so, he was being surprisingly disloyal to his party. ‘You think the peace movement will destroy Nixon?’ George asked.

‘In your dreams. The other way around, more likely. Nixon isn’t Lyndon Johnson. Nixon understands foreign policy – better than most people in Washington, probably. Don’t be fooled by his dumb-ass talk about Commies, that’s just for the benefit of his supporters in the trailer parks.’ Greg was a snob. ‘Nixon will get us out of Vietnam, and he’ll say we lost the war because the peace movement undermined the military.’

‘So what will bring him down?’

‘Dick Nixon lies,’ Greg said. ‘He lies just about every time he opens his damn mouth. When a Republican administration came into office in 1952, Nixon claimed we had discovered thousands of subversives in the government.’

‘How many had you found?’

‘None. Not a single one. I know, I was a young congressman. Then he told the press we had come across a blueprint for socializing America in the files of the outgoing Democrat administration. Reporters asked to see it.’

‘He didn’t have a copy.’

‘Correct. He also said he had a secret Communist memorandum about how they planned to work through the Democratic party. No one ever saw that, either. I suspect that Dick’s mother never told him it’s a sin to tell a lie.’

‘There’s a lot of dishonesty in politics,’ George said.

‘And in many other walks of life. But few people lie as much and as shamelessly as Nixon. He’s a cheat and a crook. He’s got away with it until now. People do. But it’s different when you’re President. Reporters know they’ve been lied to about Vietnam, and more and more they scrutinize everything the government says. Dick will get caught out, and then he’ll fall. And you know something else? He’ll never understand why. He’ll say the press were out to get him all along.’

‘I sure hope you’re right.’

‘Take the job, George,’ Greg pleaded. ‘There’s so much to be done.’

George nodded. ‘Maybe I will.’

*  *  *

Claus Krohn was a redhead. On his head, his hair was a dark reddish-brown, but on the rest of his body it was ginger. Rebecca was particularly fond of the triangle that grew from his groin up to a point near his navel. It was what she looked at when she was giving him oral sex, which she enjoyed at least as much as he did.

Now she lay with her head on his belly and tangled her fingernails idly in the curls. They were in his apartment on a Monday night. Rebecca had no meetings on Monday nights, but she pretended she did, and her husband pretended to believe her.

The physical arrangements were easy. Her feelings were harder to manage. It was so difficult to keep these two men in separate compartments in her head that she often wanted to give up. She felt miserably guilty about being unfaithful to Bernd. But her reward was passionate and satisfying sex with a charming man who adored her. And Bernd had given her permission. She reminded herself of that again and again.

This year everyone was doing it. Love was all you needed. Rebecca was no hippie – she was a schoolteacher and a respected city politician – but all the same she was affected by the atmosphere of promiscuity, almost as if she were inadvertently inhaling some of the marijuana in the air. Why not? she asked herself. What’s the harm?

When she looked back on the thirty-seven years of her life so far, all her regrets were for things she had
not
done: she had not been unfaithful to her rotten first husband; she had not got pregnant with Bernd’s child while it was still possible; she had not escaped from the East German tyranny years earlier.

At least she would never look back and regret not having fucked Claus.

Claus said: ‘Are you happy?’

Yes, she thought, when I forget about Bernd for a few minutes. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be toying with your pubic hair otherwise.’

‘I love our time together, except that it’s always too short.’

‘I know. I’d like to have a second life, so that I could spend it all with you.’

‘I’d settle for a weekend.’

Too late, Rebecca saw where the conversation was going. For a moment, she stopped breathing.

She had been afraid of this. Monday evenings were not enough. Perhaps there had never really been a chance that Claus would be satisfied with once a week. ‘I wish you hadn’t said that,’ she said.

‘You could get a nurse to take care of Bernd.’

‘I know I could.’

‘We could drive to Denmark, where nobody knows us. Stay in a small seaside hotel. Walk along one of those endless beaches and breathe the salt air.’

‘I knew this would happen.’ Rebecca stood up. Distractedly, she looked for her underwear. ‘It was only a question of when.’

‘Hey, slow down! I’m not forcing you.’

‘I know you’re not, you sweet, kind man.’

‘If you’re not comfortable taking a weekend away, we won’t do it.’

‘We won’t do it.’ She found her panties and pulled them on, then reached for her bra.

‘Then why are you getting dressed? We have another half-hour at least.’

‘When we began doing this I swore I’d stop before it got serious.’

‘Listen! I’m sorry I wanted a weekend away with you. I’ll never mention it again, I promise.’

‘That’s not the problem.’

‘Then what is?’

‘I
want
to go away with you. That’s what bothers me. I want it more than you do.’

He looked baffled. ‘Then . . . ?’

‘So I have to choose. I can’t love you both any longer.’ She zipped her dress and stepped into her shoes.

‘Choose me,’ he pleaded. ‘You’ve given six long years to Bernd. Isn’t that enough? How could he be dissatisfied?’

‘I made a promise to him.’

‘Break it.’

‘A person who breaks a promise diminishes herself. It’s like losing a finger. It’s worse than being paralysed, which is merely physical. Someone whose promises are worthless has a disabled soul.’

He looked ashamed. ‘You’re right.’

‘Thank you for loving me, Claus. I’ll never forget a single second of our Monday evenings.’

‘I can’t believe I’m losing you.’ He turned away.

She wanted to kiss him one more time, but she decided not to.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, and she went out.

*  *  *

In the end, the election was nail-bitingly close.

In September, Cam had been ecstatically confident that Richard Nixon would win. He was far ahead in the polls. The police riot in Democratic Chicago, fresh in the minds of television viewers, tainted his opponent, Hubert Humphrey. Then, through September and October, Cam learned that voters’ memories were maddeningly short. To Cam’s horror, Humphrey began to close the gap. On the Friday before the election, the Harris poll had Nixon ahead 40–37; on Monday, Gallup said Nixon 42–40; on election day, Harris put Humphrey ahead ‘by a nose’.

On election night, Nixon checked into a suite in the Waldorf Towers in New York. Cam and other key volunteers gathered in a more modest room with a TV and a refrigerator full of beer. Cam looked around the room and wondered excitedly how many of them would get jobs in the White House if Nixon won tonight.

Cam had got to know a plain, serious girl called Stephanie Maple, and he was hoping she might go to bed with him, either to celebrate Nixon’s victory or for consolation in defeat.

At half past eleven they saw long-time Nixon press aide Herb Klein speaking from the cavernous press room several floors below them. ‘We still think we can win by three to five million, but it looks closer to three million at this point.’ Cam caught Stephanie’s eye and raised his eyebrows. They knew Herb was bullshitting. By midnight Humphrey was ahead, in the votes already counted, by 600,000. Then, at ten minutes past midnight, came news that deflated Cam’s hopes: CBS reported that Humphrey had won New York – not by a whisker, but by half a million votes.

All eyes turned to California, where voting went on for three more hours after the polls closed in the east. But California went to Nixon, and it all came down to Illinois.

No one could predict the Illinois result. Mayor Daley’s Democratic Party machine always cheated brazenly. But had Daley’s power been diminished by the sight of his police bludgeoning kids on live television? Was his support of Humphrey even reliable? Humphrey had uttered the mildest of veiled criticism of Daley, saying: ‘Chicago last August was filled with pain’, but bullies were thin-skinned, and there were rumours that Daley was so disgruntled that his backing for Humphrey was half-hearted.

Whatever the reason, in the end Daley did not deliver Illinois for Humphrey.

When the TV announced that Nixon had taken the state by 140,000 votes, the Nixon volunteers erupted with joy. It was over, and they had won.

They congratulated one another for a while, then the party broke up and they headed for their rooms, to get a few hours’ sleep before Nixon’s victory speech in the morning. Cam said quietly to Stephanie: ‘How about one more drink? I have a bottle in my room.’

‘Oh, gosh, no, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m beat.’

He hid his disappointment. ‘Maybe another time.’

‘Sure.’

On his way to his room Cam ran into John Ehrlichman. ‘Congratulations, sir!’

‘And to you, too, Cam.’

‘Thank you.’

‘When do you graduate?’

‘June.’

‘Come and see me then. I might be able to offer you a job.’

It was what Cam dreamed of. ‘Thank you!’

He entered his room in high spirits, despite Stephanie’s refusal. He set his alarm and fell on the bed, exhausted but triumphant. Nixon had won. The decadent, liberal sixties were coming to an end. From now on people would have to work for what they wanted, not demand it by going on demonstrations. America was once again going to become strong, disciplined, conservative, and rich. There would be a new regime in Washington.

And Cam would be part of it.

Part Seven

TAPE

1972–1974

46

Jacky Jakes cooked fried chicken, sweet potatoes, collard greens and cornbread. ‘To heck with my diet,’ said Maria Summers, and tucked in. She loved this kind of food. She noticed that George ate sparingly, a little chicken and some greens, no bread. He had always had refined tastes.

It was Sunday. Maria visited the Jakes house almost as if she were family. It had started four years ago, after Maria helped George get his job at Fawcett Renshaw. That Thanksgiving, he had invited Maria to his mother’s house for the traditional turkey dinner, in an attempt to cheer them up after all their hopes had crashed in Nixon’s election victory. Maria had been missing her own family, so far away in Chicago, and had been grateful. She loved Jacky’s combination of warmth and feistiness, and Jacky had seemed to take to her, too. Since then Maria had visited every couple of months.

After dinner they sat in the parlour. When George was out of the room, Jacky said: ‘Something’s eating you, child. What’s on your mind?’

Maria sighed. Jacky was perceptive. ‘I’ve got a hard decision to make,’ Maria said.

‘Romance, or work?’

‘Work. You know, at first it seemed President Nixon wouldn’t be as bad as we all feared. He’s done more for black people than anyone ever expected.’ She ticked off items on her fingers. ‘One: he forced the construction unions to accept more blacks in their industry. The unions fought him hard on that but he held out. Two: he helped minority businesses. In three years, minorities’ share of government contracts has gone from eight million dollars to two hundred and forty-two million dollars. Three: he desegregated our schools. We had the laws in place already, but Nixon enforced them. By the time Nixon’s first term ends, the proportion of children in all-black schools in the South will be below ten per cent, down from sixty-eight per cent.’