“Did you know Kennedy’s grandfather lost a race to Lodge’s father for the same Senate seat?” Charlie whispered to LaMontagne. “The very same one! In 1916.”
“Jack’s around here somewhere, I saw him hobble in earlier,” LaMontagne said. “I’m hearing a lot of chatter about him making a play for VP in ’56.”
“Good thing we fought that war against royalty.”
“My overprivileged friends,” Lodge began, prompting disproportionate howls of laughter.
“What’s the ratio going to be tonight of laughter to quality of joke?” LaMontagne quietly asked.
“Twenty to one, I’d wager,” Charlie said. He was enjoying LaMontagne’s company as well as the liberal supply of cocktails.
Kefauver, sitting to Charlie’s left, shot Charlie a look that seemed to suggest that he and his new friend needed to pipe down.
“Once I am elected,” Lodge said grandly, “I can guarantee you one thing: It will always look as though big things are happening. Maybe they won’t be happening, but it will look that way!”
Riotous laughter.
“I may be doing nothing to stop the war in Korea, or nothing to balance the budget, or nothing to solve anything, but there’ll be a lot of name-calling, there’ll be all sorts of headlines!” Lodge pledged. “The trivial will reach a new place in American politics and believe me: when you consider the place it has had in previous administrations, that is no idle boast!”
Hysterics in the crowd. Kefauver actually wiped tears from his eyes. LaMontagne slipped Charlie a business card.
“I can only take so much of this,” he whispered. “Give me a call, let’s tell war stories.” He got up and then leaned in one more time. “Enjoy yourself if you can.” He swiftly exited the ballroom, as graceful and stealthy as a leopard. Charlie felt woozy from the booze and the bullshit and the conversational whiplash. He wanted desperately to talk to Margaret, but he’d never felt further away from her.
Chapter Nine
Thursday, February 18, 1954
Georgetown, Washington, DC
“You’re up early,” said Margaret, not looking up from her book as Charlie walked into the kitchen.
“I have meetings and an early committee vote,” he replied. He yawned and removed the Maxwell House percolator from the cupboard. “The defense spending bill—thankfully without any money going to Goodstone this time.”
In the three weeks since the Alfalfa Club dinner, Chairman Carlin had told Charlie that he would remove the earmark for Goodstone if Charlie would just drop the matter and entrust it to him. Sensing no other option and disarmed by Carlin’s responsiveness, he agreed and told his fellow veterans that all was well.
“You’ve no doubt been up for hours already?” he asked, reaching for the tin of coffee grounds in the cabinet.
She shrugged. The early pregnancy had meant not just morning sickness but also insomnia. She’d been awake since before dawn, vaguely troubled and uneasy.
A silence hung in the air, but it wasn’t the normal one born of comfort. Since Margaret’s return from Nanticoke Island and Charlie’s official baptism in the DC swamp by the Alfalfas, she felt that they’d drifted apart a bit. She suspected the pregnancy was a likely culprit, or at least an accomplice; every evening when Charlie returned home from work or from one of the various fund-raisers and social functions he had to attend, she was often sound asleep. But there were grievances too, growing stronger and healthier.
She felt exasperated and stretched thin, trying to work with the research team’s notes and conclusions from their first outing to the Maryland island. Plus she was finishing up a paper for the Journal of Zoology comparing the health of giraffes at the Bronx Zoo with those at the Philadelphia Zoo, based on research she’d completed the previous November, plus unpacking their moving boxes and decorating their new town house, plus keeping a home for Charlie—who meanwhile was consumed with his new job. They were on completely different tracks and traveling in opposite directions.
Margaret watched Charlie pour himself a cup of coffee from the percolator, surely their most useful wedding present, and she thought about the space that had grown between them. It didn’t seem unbridgeable. She imagined Charlie as being like a beach ball in the surf that a sudden breeze had carried away from shore—retrievable, but it would require effort. They had been married for almost nine years now, so the notion that marriage was work was hardly revelatory, but she felt further away from him than she had in years, perhaps even since those early days when the war was too much with him.
She thought about their life in New York. Conversations had been lively and frequent, and they shared a genuine interest in each other’s lives and careers. She had loved to hear his stories about the ridiculous, vicious battles within the Columbia University faculty; his odd brush with intellectual celebrity visiting What’s My Line? and other shows to promote Sons of Liberty; the few memories that he was willing to share of his time in the army. And he was as good a listener as he was a storyteller; she could lay out a knotty research problem or writing challenge and he was eager to talk it through with her until she arrived at possible solutions. He was her sounding board for her frustrations with her mother and sister, and though Charlie never spoke an ill word about his parents, he laughed when she did.
But somehow, all that had changed a few weeks after their move. Beyond her unavailability after seven p.m., she knew some blame lay with her and her growing impatience with the political world he seemed to find increasingly seductive. Or, if not seductive, irresistible. Its rituals and caste systems were abhorrent to her, and sometimes she couldn’t help reacting to Charlie’s stories with eye-rolls and crossed arms.
She’d been bitterly disappointed in him when he told her he had backed off his behind-the-scenes campaign against Goodstone because the chairman had made a noncommittal remark about taking care of matters. And the comic-book hearing seemed like the height of nonsense to her; she’d given up pretending to understand why he was taking part.
Margaret held her tongue as often as she could, but he made that difficult by confiding in her and telling her everything—about his moments of unctuousness with Kefauver and Carlin, about each of his compromises. Each instance of confessed deference became a presence in the house, an ugly piece of furniture they had to walk around. Charlie eventually stopped telling her about his day in anything but the broadest and most positive outlines, and she in turn felt less inclined to tell him about hers. She was sure that he resented her refusal to join him in his new world, but she just couldn’t make herself comfortable in a place where compromise and obsequiousness were as much a part of the landscape as traffic circles and monuments to long-dead generals.
Charlie sat down at the table with his coffee, picked up the Washington Times-Herald, and folded it lengthwise, as all New York subway commuters learned to do, no matter that he’d be leaving it behind to drive to work shortly. She felt a burst of affection for him suddenly, for his predictable habits; now he was adding milk to his coffee and as he reached for the small sugar bowl, she counted down silently—Three, two, one—until his daily utterance “I forgot to get a spoon.” He got up to retrieve one.
He sat back down and looked over at her. “What’s that you’re reading?”