Exiles in the Garden Read Free

ago that bunker the size of a strip mine looked like a little kid's sandbox and even then it took us three, four shots to get up and down. The other day I looked out my window and saw the usual three lobby boys from AIPAC , guns, and motion pictures, with a newspaper reporter. Can you believe it? All four beautifully turned out, creases in their trousers, shoes shined, straw hats. They never spoke a word, those four, concentrating on their shots. Newsman laid one up three feet from the pin from two hundred yards out, beautiful shot, just superb. My day, no newsman played golf. They couldn't afford it and no club would have them if they could afford it. Eisenhower played golf. Newsmen bowled, like old Cactus Jack Garner. Or they played handball at the Y. Maybe one or two of them played tennis. Wasn't tennis Adlai's game?
    They probably learned golf at Princeton, where they all go to school now because their daddies are rich.
    Come to think of it, Adlai went to Princeton.
    Newsmen go to Harvard.
    It's the presidents who go to Yale.
    Where did you go to school, Alec?
    Two years at the university. And then I went to work.
    What did you do?
    You remember, Alec said. Snapshots.
    I was always sorry you didn't go to work in politics.
    I'm not good at politics.
    You aren't?
    No, Alec said.
    I always thought you were.
    Often in the past when Alec came to visit, the old man was watching the play with a friend who occupied the adjoining suite. Listening to them was like hearing one of Harold Pinter's wayward domestic dramas. Eliot Bergruen was a lawyer who had been in and out of government for fifty years but whose memory had stopped somewhere in the 1930s when he had been minority counsel to the Senate Finance Committee. He had gone on to become one of the capital's most successful lawyers, rarely the lawyer of record but essential at the table, saying little until called upon to sum up, which he did with scrupulous accuracy. Exactitude, he called it. Someone was in trouble with one of the federal agencies or commissions or the Justice Department itself; someone was on a hook and Eliot got them off the hook or made the hook disappear or turned the hook into a ladder. But of those years he had no memory at all. Neither did he remember his own name or the names of his children. He did not remember his wife, dead now many years. He did remember to address Alec's father as Senator, though for half of the previous century he had called him Kim. They had collaborated on numerous projects, reaching across the aisle, as it were. Collaboration was the essence of the legislative craft, half a loaf a kind of sacred grail or golden mean.
    Eliot Bergruen and Kim Malone knew so much and had forgotten so much that younger men, seeing them years ago tête-à-tête at their downtown club, called their corner table the Graveyard. Eavesdropping was useless because their gossip was decades old and the names and situations were unfamiliar. Muscle Shoals, Trygve Lie, Warren Magnuson, Clayton Fritchey. Eliot had only a few tricks up his sleeve now and they were well thumbed, not always to the point. Occasionally he came up with a startling fact. Watching golf in the senator's room one afternoon Eliot remarked that Herbert Hoover was an eighth cousin once removed of Richard Nixon. Moreover, Lou Hoover was the greatest of all the first ladies, dignified and witty at the same time, well read, a radiant smile, nice legs, certainly a damn sight better than the harridan who followed her and the nonentities who followed the harridan, though he could not at this precise moment recall their names.
    We've seen the best of it, he said.
    What was the harridan's name?
    Eleanor, Alec's father said.
    That's the one, Eliot said. That voice! Those shoes!
    She had a beautiful voice, Alec's father said. She was a beautiful woman.
    No, Senator. She was not.
    Bore a passing resemblance to Garbo.
    Who's Garbo? Eliot asked.
    Never mind, he added. I know. Senator from