Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (6 page)

Van’s uncompromising study revealed that the exorbitant slipshod Ace of Spades helicopter had enriched the Woodheads and the Torques, but had caused hundreds of deaths in Vietnam since the war’s end. Hounded and impugned, President Torque announced he would show his faith in the accused helicopter by taking a ride in one. Its crash, and his death, threw the nation into an excruciating position, a mood of simultaneous shame and suppressed giggles. Newsmakers pointed out the irony but declined to smile. Spokesmen tried instead to focus on the future, always less shameful or hilarious because it’s unknown. A special presidential election was called.

The scandal twisted deeper when it was discovered that the President had committed suicide. The helicopter had been specially built for him to ensure normal operation, and he had tampered with it to ensure its explosion. His Vice President, Price Rice Marmot, committed suicide as well, as a gesture of solidarity with Torque’s policies.

Despairing of top officials, the public called for new answers, as if there had been old answers they didn’t like. The Republicans perfunctorily nominated ex-president August Dodd Woodhead. The press did make hay of his son Shep being in a drug rehabilitation center, which was a small but at least comprehensible disgrace, but bypassed analyzing the fiscal
amoralities of Woodhead Paper and Aircraft as too arcane for cameras. Reporters were merely confused by Win’s working for his father’s likely opponent, and all Win would say was that someday certain people would be sorry they had ignored certain children. It would have been steering into an already fatal skid to add any more liabilities to August Dodd’s campaign, though, since all he could do as Torque’s defendant was apologize for an absent monster, take his coat and tiptoe out backwards, hoping for a future invitation for himself.

The Democrats nominated Van. He’d been an orphan, he had no fortune to investigate, and he stood for Examination Before Takeoff. They even excused him for being under thirty-five. Van’s slogan was He’ll Make Sure It’s Right. It was to prove catastrophically true. Win engineered the campaign with virulent resolve, which made Van feel uneasily like a voodoo doll rather than a fair-haired boy. Also, the campaign coincided with America’s Bicentennial, and another Walker son was killed, this time by a depth charge that misfired during a waterfront rendition of the
1812 Overture
by the Pompey Pops.

Win recognized the death as a good promotional opportunity, since mourning implies rectitude, so an armada of press trailed after Van when he returned to Vertigo Park for the funeral. They were indecently delighted, though, when Charlotte Haven showed up to pay her respects, too. She had grown tired of the shiny endearments that tinkled like a line of credit from the makeshift Hollywood suitors she’d tolerated since Cliff had vanished. Reading about Van had
renewed her pride in him and her own stung idealism, and she wanted to offer her respect to a man she knew respected her. Despite his grief, Van was flourishing and self-confident, since August Dodd Woodhead’s was a lame duck candidacy, and people now thronged to Van’s blandness as to milk of magnesia after President Torque’s chili peppers of deceit. The publicity firm of Scud, Scurry, and Edgewise had convinced even Van of his worthiness, and when he saw Carlotta, he was at his most radiant. Unlike Cliff, he was grateful, lovable, and able to love in return. Win, pragmatic even about his thwarted love, arranged to have Van inspect local blackout emergency supplies by candlelight, and invited Carlotta along. She was entranced by the shrewdly romantic photo opportunity, and Van saw in her, if not his unknown mother, then his childhood, and attributed to her the tantalizing value of everything precious irretrievably lost. Their weaknesses met, orphan to orphan, and he proposed. She accepted, swept on as much by duty to drama as a conviction that this was honorable love.

CHAPTER TEN
 

An engaged candidate was a sanguine novelty for the media, especially since the couple was barely thirty and the late president had been long-married as well as grotesque. This would settle any restless
speculation about Van’s wet-eyed sensitivity, and not only was Carlotta famous, her scar could prove her seriousness even to ambassadors who spoke no English. As Win observed to an aide, she gave good headlines.

The ballyhoo of the election bolstered Carlotta, and she mistook its mood for hers. She reminded herself that she was doing the greatest good she could by joining this good man in his work, but sexual doubt crept in like mice gnawing at the bedboards, and as she lay in a succession of chastely single hotel rooms along the campaign trail, hearing the even, unending inhale of the air conditioner, she wondered if she was making a mistake.

The wedding was scheduled for the weekend before the election. It was pointedly simple, taxpayers take note, held in the basement of Pompey’s VFW hall, and instead of gifts the couple requested donations to charity. Carlotta wore a turquoise dress borrowed from the garment workers’ union—something new, borrowed, and blue—and for something old, she clutched a bouquet of dead, dried flowers. August Dodd Woodhead’s camp tried to compete by having him adopt a Vietnamese baby, but since Win, his real son, was estranged—in fact, he was Van’s best man—the heartwarming aspect was overshadowed by the gothic.

As the hired combo played the love theme from
Woman in Jeopardy
, Van’s stepfather, Big Bill Walker, approached Carlotta, his red face redder with nuptial wine. “Raise many, many children,” he told her, “so no single one will matter too much.” Then Chick
Burns, uncomfortable in a borrowed suit, approached and asked Carlotta if she knew where his son was. She honestly didn’t, but seeing Cliff’s father made a low bell toll in her carillon, and a cold vermouth breathed darkly in her happiness cocktail. Prompted by Chick’s questions, she began to imagine she saw Cliff in the shadowy corners of the hall, in soldier’s fatigues at the bar with the Secret Service men, behind a pillar or the ziggurat silhouette of the wedding cake. She shivered, feeling that chastised, funky sensation one gets from going too quickly from dazzling sunlight on the beach into a dank, dim changing booth. Van, like the sun, was scrupulous but untouchable. Cliff was the periodically vanishing moon, erotic and preceptor to danger. Her head swam, and not very well.

She faltered from the heat at the crowded reception, but she was brought back to reality, such as it was, by the sudden spectacle of Julienne arriving on the arm of Culvert Booney. Julienne had returned to traditional values, or at least to her childhood address, and set her sights, if not lower, then backwards. She had married Culvert earlier that day. The uselessness of such outdated triumph let Carlotta hope the gesture had nothing to do with her, until Julienne announced she had changed her name once again, this time to Carlotta. Somehow, perhaps numerologically, she hoped to tail Carlotta to the mansion of happiness, to get on some electrified u-dodge-em track to fulfillment. On a night already as fraught with doubt as her wedding was, Carlotta could only faintly murmur congratulations to the couple. She let
the mystery of all lives but hers pass around her, and her stepsister receded from her into the unavailing celebrants, glistening into the dark like a desperately polished nickel.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
 

Van won the election, the youngest president in history, with the youngest wife. He chose not only to walk to his inauguration, like a simple man, but to show his trust in the people’s voice, he opted to wear a blindfold. The idea was that ordinary citizens would line the streets of Washington that morning and call out directions to him as he advanced, so, through their guidance, he wouldn’t run into the curb or take a wrong turn. The gesture was awkward, and for the first time, people noticed his limp, but Carlotta walked by his side throughout, though without touching him, since that would be cheating.

His honeymoon with her, and with the nation, was brief. He did indeed try to make sure everything was right, and in his first hundred days in office mandated sweeping and expensive examinations of military equipment, commercial airlines, hospitals, infant plush toys, traffic-light suspension, escalator speeds, postal sweepstake paper cuts, and all the tangle of conveniences that add up to modern life. The result was safety, but stasis, since air flights, operations, paychecks, and even home delivery of groceries were
delayed for days in the Hamlet-slow process of systems analysis. The people, dazed by too much recklessness, now chafed under too much caution. As always, they abhorred lawlessness but decried restriction, and millions wriggled like children confined with allergies they don’t believe they have.