The plot against America (9 page)

The two shook hands, and in his insurance man's best businesslike manner my father flipped through the guide's papers before handing them back to him. "Looks good to me," my father said, "but I don't think nine bucks a day is in the cards, Mr. Taylor, not for this family anyway."

"I appreciate that. But on your own, sir, you doing the driving and not knowing your way around and then trying to find a parking space in this city—well, you and the family won't see a half of what you'll be able to see with me, and you won't enjoy it anywhere near as much either. Why, I could drive you to a nice place to have your lunch, wait for you with the car, and then we can start right off with the Washington Monument. After that, down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial. Washington and Lincoln. Our two greatest presidents—that's how I always like to begin. You know that Washington never did live in Washington. President Washington chose the site, he signed the bill making it the permanent seat of the government, but it was his successor, John Adams, who was the first president to move into the White House in 1800. November 1, to be exact. His wife, Abigail, joined him there two weeks later. Among the many interesting curios in the White House, there is still a celery glass owned by John and Abigail Adams."

"Well, that's something that I did not know," my father replied, "but let me take this up with my wife." Quietly he asked her, "Can we afford this? He sure knows his oats." Our mother whispered, "But who sent him? How did he spot our car?" "That's his job, Bess—to find who's the tourists. That's how the man makes a living." My brother and I were huddled up beside them, hoping our mother would shut up and that the easy-talking guide with the pointy face and the short legs would be hired for the duration.

"What do you want?" my father said, turning to Sandy and me.

"Well, if it costs too much. . .," Sandy began.

"Forget the cost," my father replied. "Do you like this guy or not?"

"He's a character, Dad," Sandy whispered. "He looks like one of those duck decoys. I like when he says 'to be exact.'"

"Bess," my father said, "the man is a bona fide guide to Washington, D.C. Don't believe he's ever cracked a smile but he's an alert little guy and he couldn't be more polite. Let me see if he'll take seven bucks." Here he stepped away from us, walked up to the guide, they spoke seriously for a few minutes and then, the deal struck, the two again shook hands, and my father said aloud, "Okay, let's eat!" as always teeming with energy even when there was nothing to do.

It was hard to say what was most unbelievable: my being out of New Jersey for the first time in my life, my being three hundred miles from home in the nation's capital, or our family's being chauffeured in our own automobile by a stranger called by the same surname as the twelfth president of the United States, whose profile adorned the twelve-cent red-violet stamp in the album in my lap, hinged between the blue eleven-cent Polk and the green thirteen-cent Fillmore.

"Washington," Mr. Taylor was telling us, "is divided into four sections: northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest. With some few exceptions, the streets running north and south are numbered and the streets running east and west are lettered. Of all the existing capitals in the Western world, this city alone was developed solely to provide a home for the national government. That is what makes it different not only from London and Paris but from our own New York and Chicago."

"Did you hear that?" my father asked, looking over his shoulder at Sandy and me. "Did you hear that, Bess, what Mr. Taylor said about why Washington is so special?"

"Yes," she said, and took my hand in hers to assure herself by assuring me that everything was now going to be all right. But I had only my one concern from the time we entered Washington until we left—preserving my stamp collection from harm.

The cafeteria where Mr. Taylor dropped us off was clean and cheap and the food as good as he'd said it would be, and when we finished our meal and headed for the street, there was our car pulling up to double-park out front. "What timing!" my father cried.

"Over the years," Mr. Taylor said, "you learn to estimate how long it takes a family to eat their lunch. Was that okay, Mrs. Roth?" he asked our mother. "Everything to your taste?"

"Very nice, thank you."

"So's everybody ready for the Washington Monument," he said, and off we drove. "You know, of course, who the monument commemorates—our first president, and in the opinion of most, our best president alongside President Lincoln."

"I'd include FDR in that list, you know. A great man, and the people of this country turned him out of office," my father said. "And just look what we got instead."

Mr. Taylor listened courteously but offered no response. "Now," he resumed, "you've all seen photos of the Washington Monument. But they don't always communicate just how impressive it is. At five hundred fifty-five feet, five and one-eighth inches above ground, it is the tallest masonry structure in the world. The new electric elevator will carry you to the top in one and a quarter minutes. Otherwise you can take a winding staircase of eight hundred and ninety-three steps to the top by foot. The view from up there has a radius of some fifteen to twenty miles. It's worth a look. There—see it?" he said. "Straight ahead."

Minutes later Mr. Taylor found a parking spot on the monument grounds and, when we left the car, trotted bandy-legged alongside us, explaining, "The monument was cleaned just a few years back for the first time. Just imagine that for a cleaning job, Mrs. Roth. They used water mixed with sand and steel-bristled brushes. Took five months and cost a hundred thousand dollars."

"Under FDR?" my father asked.

"I believe so, yes."

"And do people know?" my father asked. "Do people care? No. They want an airmail pilot running the country instead. And that's not the worst of it."

Mr. Taylor remained outside while we entered the monument. At the elevator, our mother, who again had taken hold of my hand, drew close to our father and whispered, "You mustn't talk like that."

"Like what?"

"About Lindbergh."

"That? That's just expressing my opinion."

"But you don't know who this man
is.
"

"I sure do. He's an authorized guide with the documents to prove it. This is the Washington Monument, Bess, and you're telling me to keep my thoughts to myself as though the Washington Monument is situated in Berlin."

His speaking so bluntly distressed her even more, especially as the others waiting for the elevator could overhear our conversation. Turning to another of the fathers, who was standing alongside his wife and two kids, my father asked him, "Where you folks from? We're from Jersey." "Maine," the man replied. "Hear that?" my father said to my brother and me. Altogether some twenty children and adults entered the elevator, filling it up about halfway, and as the car rose through the housing of iron pillars, my father used the minute and a quarter it took to get to the top to ask the remaining families where each was from.

Mr. Taylor was waiting outside when we finished our tour. He asked Sandy and me to describe what we'd seen from the windows five hundred feet up and then he guided us on a quick walking tour around the exterior of the monument, recounting the fitful history of its construction. Next he took some pictures of the family with our Brownie box camera; then my father, over Mr. Taylor's objections, insisted on taking a picture of him with my mother, Sandy, and me with the Washington Monument as the background, and finally we got into our car and, with Mr. Taylor again at the wheel, started down the Mall for the Lincoln Memorial.

This time, while he parked, Mr. Taylor warned us that the Lincoln Memorial was like no other edifice anywhere in the world and that we should prepare ourselves to be overwhelmed. Then he accompanied us from the parking area to the great pillared building with the wide marble stairs that led us up past the columns to the hall's interior and the raised statue of Lincoln in his capacious throne of thrones, the sculpted face looking to me like the most hallowed possible amalgamation—the face of God and the face of America all in one.

Gravely my father said, "And they shot him, the dirty dogs."

The four of us stood directly at the base of the statue, which was lit so as to make everything about Abraham Lincoln seem colossally grand. What ordinarily passed for great just paled away, and there was no defense, for either an adult or a child, against the solemn atmosphere of hyperbole.

"When you think of what this country does to its greatest presidents. . ."

"Herman," my mother pleaded, "don't start."

"I'm not starting anything. This was a great tragedy. Isn't that right, boys? The assassination of Lincoln?"

Mr. Taylor came over and quietly told us, "Tomorrow we'll go to Ford's Theatre, where he was shot, and across the street to the Petersen House, to see where he died."

"I was saying, Mr. Taylor, it is the damnedest thing what this country does to its great men."

"Thank goodness we have President Lindbergh," said the voice of a woman just a few feet away. She was elderly and she was standing apart, by herself, consulting a guidebook, and her remark seemed spoken to no one and yet prompted somehow by her overhearing my father.

"Compare Lincoln to Lindbergh? Boy oh boy," my father moaned.

In fact the elderly lady was not alone but with a group of tourists, among whom was a man of about my father's age who might have been her son.

"Something bothering you?" he asked my father, assertively stepping in our direction.

"Not me," my father told him.

"Something bothering you about what the lady just said?"

"No, sir. Free country."

The stranger took a long, gaping look at my father, then my mother, then Sandy, then me. And what did he see? A trim, neatly muscled, broad-chested man five feet nine inches tall, handsome in a minor key, with soft grayish-green eyes and thinning brown hair clipped close at the temples and presenting his two ears to the world a little more comically than was necessary. The woman was slender but strong and she was tidily dressed, with a lock of her wavy dark hair over one eyebrow and roundish cheeks a little rouged and a prominent nose and chunky arms and shapely legs and slim hips and the lively eyes of a girl half her age. In both adults a surfeit of prudence and a surfeit of energy, and with the couple two boys still pretty much all soft surfaces, young children of youthful parents, keenly attentive and in good health and incorrigible only in their optimism.

And the conclusion the stranger drew from his observations he demonstrated with a mocking movement of the head. Then, hissing noisily so as to mislead no one about his assessment of us, he returned to the elderly lady and their sightseeing party, walking slowly off with a rolling gait that seemed, along with the silhouette of his broad back, intended to register a warning. It was from there that we heard him refer to my father as "a loudmouth Jew," followed a moment later by the elderly lady declaring, "I'd give anything to slap his face."

Mr. Taylor led us quickly away to a smaller hall just off the main chamber where there was a tablet inscribed with the Gettysburg Address and a mural whose theme was the Emancipation.

"To hear words like that in a place like this," said my father, his choked voice quivering with indignation. "In a shrine to a man like this!"

Meanwhile Mr. Taylor, pointing to the painting, said, "See there? An angel of truth is freeing a slave."

But my father could see nothing. "You think you'd hear that here if Roosevelt was president? People wouldn't dare, they wouldn't dream, in Roosevelt's day. . .," my father said. "But now that our great ally is Adolf Hitler, now that the best friend of the president of the United States is Adolf Hitler—why, now they think they can get away with anything. It's disgraceful. It starts with the White House. . ."

Whom was he talking to other than me? My brother was trailing after Mr. Taylor, asking about the mural, and my mother was trying to prevent herself from saying or doing anything, struggling against the very emotions that had overpowered her earlier in the car—and back then without anything like this much justification.

"Read that," my father said, alluding to the tablet bearing the Gettysburg Address. "Just read it. 'All men are created equal.'"

"Herman," gasped my mother, "I can't go on with this."

We came back out into the daylight and gathered together on the top step. The tall shaft of the Washington Monument was a half mile away, at the other end of the reflecting pool that lay at the base of the terraced approach to the Lincoln Memorial. There were elm trees planted all around. It was the most beautiful panorama I'd ever seen, a patriotic paradise, the American Garden of Eden spread before us, and we stood huddled together there, the family expelled.

"Listen," my father said, pulling my brother and me close to him, "I think it's time we all had a nap. It's been a long day for everybody. I say we go back to the hotel and get some rest for an hour or two. What do you say, Mr. Taylor?"

"Up to you, Mr. Roth. After supper I thought the family might enjoy a tour in the car of Washington by night, with the famous monuments all lit up."

"Now you're talkin'," my father told him. "Sound good, Bess?" But my mother wasn't so easy to cheer up as Sandy and I. "Honey," my father told her, "we ran into a screwball. Two screwballs. We might have gone up to Canada and run into somebody just as bad. We're not going to let that ruin our trip. Let's have a nice rest, all of us, and Mr. Taylor will wait for us, and we'll go on from there. Look," he then said, with a sweep of his outstretched arm. "This is something every American should see. Turn around, boys. Take one last look at Abraham Lincoln."

We did as he instructed but it was impossible any longer to feel the raptures of patriotism turning me inside out. As we began the long descent down the marble staircase, I heard some kids behind us asking their parents, "Is that really him? Is he buried there under all that stuff?" My mother was directly beside me on the stairs, trying to act like someone whose panic wasn't running wild within her, and suddenly I felt that it had fallen to me to hold her together, to become all at once a courageous new creature with something of Lincoln himself clinging to him. But all I could do when she offered me a hand was to take it and clutch it like the unripened being I was, a boy whose stamp collection still represented nine-tenths of his knowledge of the world.