The 45th, page 4
The waiter brought their order. Matson asked for a second drink. Rachael Good furrowed her brow, trying to make up her mind about something.
“What?” asked Matson, as he began to pick at his salad. “What is going on in that devious, suspicious mind of yours? You think I had something else up my sleeve?”
“Yes, absolutely! You could have insisted that it was precisely what everyone thinks it is: that one of the two has to be chosen, but you decided to insist, not just that neither of them had any claim on the nomination, but that because they did not win the primaries they should not become the party’s nominee. What I want to know is why you decided to do that?”
Matson’s second drink arrived. The noise in the restaurant now seemed like a wall, isolating them from the crowd. Matson stared into the amber colored liquid, remembering suddenly, as it were, several different things at once: the duplicity he had seen in the mean eyes of the chairman, Reece Davis; the solid good sense on the face of his physician, the only one who knew his secret; and, for just an instant, the buoyant eagerness glowing in the eyes of the girl he was about to marry, a look that in his young and innocent heart he had not doubted was true.
“You’re smiling at something, Louis. Is it your own ingenuity, the way you have figured out how to make sure no one gets the nomination unless you want them to have it?”
“Lincoln,” he said, suddenly looking up from the glass.
“Lincoln?”
“The question you asked at the end – Did I really believe that Lincoln could get the nomination. Think about that.” Matson was quite serious. “And then think about the question you did not ask. If you took that as a standard – if you used Lincoln as the measure – where would you find anyone who was even close?”
“But Lincoln – that was another time. Everything was different then.”
“I used to think so,” replied Matson, as he took another drink.
“That isn’t the reason - Lincoln, I mean,” said Rachael, dismissing the suggestion out of hand. “It isn’t some new nostalgia for the past. You’re trying to do something. You don’t want either one of them….You want someone else. Who is it, who do you want to be the nominee?”
Louis Matson shrugged, and looked down at his glass and tried to remind himself that he had to be careful not to drink too much. The thought made him laugh. What difference could it make what he did? So what if he told Rachael Good more than he should? He took another drink.
“Someone else? No, there isn’t anyone. I wish there were. And, who knows, maybe there will be if the convention goes beyond the first ballot. All right,” he said, pushing first his glass, then his plate, aside. “You want the truth, off the record, background only. I want to do whatever I can think of to pull the party back from the brink and make it see reason. I have two ways to do that. The candidates think that because I control the Michigan delegation I hold the balance. They will come to see me – each of them – and will promise anything they think I want to hear, promises they will forget the moment they have the nomination. The other thing I have is the speech, the keynote speech. I intend to put the party on notice. I am going to remind them, and the country, what the Republican Party stands for – what it used to stand for – what conservative really means. I am going to remind everyone that it does not mean the l9th century liberalism – what they used to call ‘the night watchman’ theory of the state – they disguise under the name libertarian; and that it does not mean this mindless opposition to government that all these Tea Party patriots seem to think was what the American Revolution was all about. I’m going to give our party a history lesson. At least, that is what I would do if I could find someone who could write a speech like that. Do you remember Julian Drake?”
The name was thrown out so quickly for a moment Rachael Good was not sure she had heard it right. An instant later, she was sure. Her eyes lit up.
“Remember Julian Drake? Who could forget him? He was extraordinary, unlike anyone I had ever seen. But why do you ask? Has he suddenly come back to life?”
“Back to life? He didn’t die.”
“He might as well have, the way he disappeared, vanished as if he had never existed. All I ever heard was that he had gone out west somewhere, but no one really knew, and after a while….But you knew, didn’t you?”
“I knew why he disappeared, but I didn’t know where he went, and I don’t know where he is now.”
Rachael Good had barely touched her food. She did not care about that. She was much more interested in what Matson had just told her.
“You knew why he quit, why he disappeared?”
“I’ve never told anyone; I promised that I wouldn’t. When it happened, when he knew he had to leave, to give up everything he had achieved, everything he might still accomplish – he would have won that senate race in a walk – he asked for my help. Someone had to handle things, to take care of the people who had been working for him. If I tell you now, it’s because I’m going to try to find him, and if I do, then….”
“The speech! You want him to write it; you want him….” Her mind raced back twelve years to the last time she had heard Julian Drake speak to a crowd. “Can you imagine the kind of speech he could give at the convention?” she said without thinking. She looked at Matson, ready to apologize, but Matson understood. He smiled and shook his head.
“That’s the problem. Even if I could get him to write the speech for me, I’d never be able to give it the way he could. But it would still be better than any speech I have ever given. That is the point, you see. This has to be the speech of my life.”
He had not meant to say anything about Julian Drake’s disappearance, and he certainly had not meant to tell her that he would tell her why it had happened, but he realized suddenly that it was exactly what he wanted to do. He had carried the secret with him for twelve years. He had kept the promise he had made late one autumn night in the privacy of his study when Julian Drake had told him what he had to do. He knew Rachael would understand, and he trusted her to keep a secret that in a strange way had become a private possession too valuable not to be passed on, and perhaps become an example others might one day want to follow.
“It was because of a woman,” he began, remembering the rumor that earlier in the day Ismael Cooper had repeated. “Not some woman he was involved with. It was nothing like that at all. It was his sister. She and her husband were killed. They had two small children, a girl and a boy. There was no one else, no other relatives, no one who could take on the responsibility of raising them. Julian had to do it.”
Rachael Good stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment.
“That makes no sense at all. Why would he have to give up his career, why quit a senate race he was about to win? There are all sorts of people – single parents – who raise children while they work.”
“That was exactly the argument I tried to use. Hire someone, get whatever help you need. I could not understand it, but then, as I quickly learned that night, I had never really understood him, who he really was. I don’t think anyone ever did. He said something that makes more sense to me now than it did then: You can only do one thing well. That was it – one thing. He had to make a choice: continue what he was doing, only now with small children to raise - which would mean he could not spend all his time in politics and government - or devote all his time and attention to the two small children of his sister, a sister he adored. For him it was no choice at all. His sister had helped raise him after their parents died; he was not about to do anything less than all he could for her two orphaned children. That was the reason, not just why he quit the senate race and put an end to his political career, but why he disappeared. He did not want those children exposed to the kind of public attention they would have attracted. He wanted them to have as easy a transition as it was possible for them to have.”
“And did they – the children, I mean - have a normal life with Julian Drake as their surrogate parent?”
“I don’t know. I never heard from him again. That isn’t quite true. I got a long letter from him a few months later, thanking me for what I had done, and telling me that he was even more certain than he had been before that he had done the right thing. And then, after that, after that letter, nothing, nothing at all.”
“You said his sister and her husband had been killed. What was it – a car accident?”
“No; they were murdered. That is what he told me. Somewhere out in California, where they lived. I did not ask him anything about it. I was too shocked by what he was going to do. I don’t even know what his sister’s married name was. I don’t know why they were murdered or if the murderer was caught. All I know is that Julian Drake, who would have been elected to the senate, and who might have become president, was willing to give it all up because he loved his sister. I’ve been in this town a long time and I can’t think of anyone else I’ve ever known who would have done that. Can you?”
Chapter Four
There were more than three hundred passengers on the flight from Washington to San Francisco but Ismael Cooper, so far as he could tell, was the only one wearing a coat and tie. He had come straight from his office, but even if he had had time to change he would not have bothered. No one dressed for anything anymore, except for weddings and funerals, and sometimes not even then. It was everywhere now, the breakdown of propriety and decorum, the common obligation to conduct oneself in a certain way. Scarcely anyone even spoke in sentences anymore, just the fragmentary, abbreviated incoherence with which three words become the equivalent of a whole paragraph, and words themselves replaced by single letters that symbolized things best left unexpressed. Everywhere he looked, passengers who were not eating or asleep were watching on thin well-lit screens movies without even the pretense at dialogue. And here he was, flying across country to convince someone he had not seen in years to write a speech that no one would forget. It made Don Quixote seem the most reasonable man who ever lived.
The plane landed on schedule, a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon. With only a single overnight bag, Cooper did not have to wait for the baggage to be unloaded. The rental car was waiting and ten minutes later he was heading south on Highway 101 toward Monterey and, beyond that, to the wilds of Big Sur. The traffic was not too bad, and he was glad he had not taken a later flight when he might have had to deal with the nightmare of the daily commute in and out of Silicon Valley. An hour after he left the airport, Cooper passed through the outskirts of Salinas where a sign on the highway said something about John Steinbeck. Cooper wondered at the irony of posting a reference to the author of East of Eden in a place that was now full of gas stations and cheap roadside motels. Heavy trucks thundered by him as he slowed down, careful not to miss the turn he had been told to take to the Monterey Peninsula. The road ended, twelve miles later, at a highway running along the Pacific shore and he headed south on Highway 1. He passed Monterey, and then, just beyond it, Carmel, the village where artists used to live in the 30s and 40s, when rents were cheap and there was no one else around. Then the tourists started to come to see what the artists did, and those with money thought it might be a good place to have a summer home, and then, soon after that, the first resort was built with a golf course by the sea, and then the writers and the artists, the real ones, the ones who had come here to try to do something serious, found somewhere else to go.
Ismael Cooper remembered that. He had been here several times before, and on one of those visits had picked up a copy of something Henry Miller had written about living in Big Sur in the l940s. Cooper remembered a conversation he had with Julian Drake about it. He thought it strange that he would think about that now, just as he left Carmel behind him and started into Big Sur on a two lane road of twisting hairpin turns through the coastal mountains that fell straight down to the Pacific; strange the way that one thing could suddenly bring back a conversation, a brief exchange of words, he had had with someone fifteen or sixteen years ago. They had been standing outside a committee room in the Capitol. Drake had told him that he had just come back from Big Sur, that he had spent a week out there visiting. And then – and Cooper remembered this as if it had just happened – he got a look in his eyes, the look of someone who has just discovered the one thing he wanted, the place where he could spend his whole life, a place he would never leave.
Cooper hoped it was true, hoped that Julian Drake had come back here, to Big Sur, for that very reason, and that it was everything he had thought it would be. He had never quite understood Julian Drake, never understood the nature of his ambition. There was no question but that he had been ambitious. He had run for congress and he had run for the senate, until he quit. You did not do that unless you were ambitious. But there was something different about it, something Cooper wished he had: a kind of indifference to his own success, as if it did not really matter to him if he won or lost.
He studied the road, careful to slow down each time he saw a signpost or a numbered address at the top of a long driveway that led from the narrow two lane highway down toward a lonely looking house perched on one of the rocky promontories high above the swirling water below. He must have gone fifteen miles before he finally found it, a dirt and gravel road that cut through a small grove of windswept cypress trees for about a quarter mile and then dead ended at a large single story house that, as he knew immediately, had to belong to Julian Drake. That day, years ago, when he had seen the look in Julian’s eyes during that brief conversation about his first visit to Big Sur – he understood now what that look meant. Cooper felt it in himself,the sense of perfect peace, complete contentment, a place that from the moment you first arrived you never wanted to leave, because you knew, in a way you had never known anything before, that there was no other place that would ever give you this same feeling again.
“Shangri-la,” muttered Cooper, as he got out of the car and stretched his arms.
The house, all glass and weathered gray siding, was cantilevered out above the sloping ground, which made it seem almost as windswept as the trees that towered high above it on the landward side. The living room, a long rectangle with three glass walls, had a massive fireplace built of light colored flat stones in the tapered shape of a pyramid. The distant murmur of the ocean underscored a silence so profound that the cry of an eagle circling somewhere high overhead seemed as if it were coming from just a few feet away.
“Did you come to tell me that I was elected to the senate after all and they have only now noticed my absence?”
Too caught up in his own impressions, too entranced by what he saw, Cooper had not been aware of anything until he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard the voice that in an instant took him back twelve years in time.
“Most of them don’t know where they are. Why would they notice someone missing?” He turned and found himself face to face with someone who seemed not to have changed at all.
“I heard you come,” explained Julian Drake. “I heard the car turn off the road.”
“You heard…? It must be a quarter of a mile; it must….”
“Live here long enough, you know when something is different. But never mind that,” he said, as he gave him a searching glance. “How did you find me? How did you know where I was… and why?” Suddenly, he seemed embarrassed. “That isn’t what I meant to say. Don’t misunderstand. It’s good to see you. I never thought….But, come along, let’s go inside.”
They started toward the house, but before they had taken three steps Julian stopped and shook his head.
“No, there is something wrong. You didn’t just decide to drop by to say hello. What is it? What’s happened? Is it something about Louis – Louis Matson?”
Julian Drake was in his late forties but could have passed for thirty-five. There was not so much as a touch of gray in his light brown hair and the only lines visible on his face were the ones that appeared on his forehead when he furrowed his brow. The gray green eyes were as full of light and quiet laughter as they had been when Ismael Cooper first met him, nearly twenty years before, though lit now with what seemed a deeper intelligence. It was uncanny, inexplicable, but Julian Drake seemed almost to have become both older and younger at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” said Julian, apologizing again. “I don’t get many visitors. Many visitors!” he laughed. “I think you must be the first.” He shook his head, amused at how awkward he had suddenly become. “I mean, people I’m not expecting. No one from the life I used to lead.”
It was Cooper’s turn to apologize, and to explain.
“I would have called first, but….”
“But I don’t have a telephone. I have one,” he added, cryptically, as he started again for the front door, just a few steps ahead. “It isn’t listed. You could have written – but that….”
“No one could find an email address.”
“An email…? No, I meant regular mail. But you wouldn’t have known …. Never mind. It doesn’t matter. You’re here, and I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.”
They went inside and for a second time Ismael felt he had entered into a different world. The house, designed almost certainly by an architect who had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright, had an immediate hold on him. Everywhere he looked, from the wooden floors that glowed like fire to the vaulted ceilings that seemed to climb straight up; from the clear glass windows that made the difference between inside and outside all but disappear, to the bookcases that lined the walls with cloth and leather volumes of every shade of color, everything about it was a magician’s secret: a house, a thing of wood and glass and stone, somehow given life. Ismael thought he could hear it breathe.
