Exiles in the Garden Read Free Page A

Mississippi.
    That was Bilbo, Kim Malone said.
    One of yours, Eliot said.
    My side of the aisle, yes.
    Dumb as a post.
    That was the least of his failings, Kim Malone said.
    They had been great friends and collaborators, though on the opposite side of things politically. With the advent of the Eisenhower administration—eight green years after twenty of drought—Eliot Bergruen prospered and continued to prosper until well into the second term of the Clintons, by which time both he and Kim Malone were museum pieces. They retired to the private hospital within weeks of each other in the summer of 2003. Eventually the old lawyer stopped speaking altogether. His family no longer visited him. His firm dropped his name from its letterhead. But Alec's father continued to insist that Eliot be brought in to watch the golf, the spray of sand that announced the shot, the derisory laughter that drifted up from the sixteenth green. Kim kept up a running commentary but Eliot did not notice. His gaze was fixed on the heavy clouds approaching from the west and the cherry trees that lined the fairway, their petals scattering in the breeze. Eliot did not speak and it was impossible to know what he gathered or if he gathered anything, the look on his face as faraway as witty Lou Hoover's. Still, Kim Malone enjoyed having him in and was always sorry when the nurse arrived to wheel Eliot back to his own room.
    So long, see you tomorrow. Sleep well.
    Yup.
    When Eliot Bergruen died, Alec's father began to lose himself, concerned now only with his own unraveling condition. He insisted that he had ceased to see himself as a human being, hence his confusion, bad temper, idleness, and shabby appearance. He allowed himself to go to seed, allowed his hair and fingernails to grow like a corpse in the grave. He thought of himself now as a laboratory specimen confined to a bedlam-kennel supervised by indifferent technicians, careless vivisectionists. The vivisectionists wore half-glasses and cultivated an air of vulgar disdain. They were the sentinels of the modern world come to carry him off. They answered to no one. They were beyond the reach of any human authority. Alec's father stated that he was no longer in a situation of becoming. He was slipping backward, neither here nor there. He no longer had standing.
    He said, I live in the calm of the horse latitudes. I am from the land of lost content.
    Alec thought his father said "lost contentment."
    No. Lost
content.
Nothing there.
    Yes, Alec said. I understand.
    No, you don't. But you will.
    Do these vivisectionists have names?
    I know who they are, the old man said.
    Thin-faced? Long-nosed?
    They are my enemies, he said.
    But you've outlived your enemies. All your enemies are dead.
    Not to me they're not. Wherever I'm going, they're waiting for me, each one with a score to settle. The residue of seventy years of public life. I'm outnumbered. They're crowding me. I've lost my immunity. Things were better when Eliot was alive. Eliot could back them off, did so on a number of occasions. Oh, he was good. He had no use for the law, you know. Didn't own a law book. Eliot knew human nature backwards and forwards and that was his great secret. The old man paused at that, frowning and moving his shoulders. I do so wish now I'd gone to his funeral.
    Why didn't you?
    I don't know, the old man said carelessly. Maybe I overslept. The vivisectionists were present. However, I was told it was a grand occasion, three members of the cabinet, the British ambassador, because the British have long memories and knew that Eliot had worked for Lend-Lease. Enough lawyers and lobbyists to fill San Quentin. The vice president gave the eulogy. All Eliot's women were there, or those who are still alive. They filled the rear pew of the church and all of them were smiling through tears, according to my informant.
    His women?
    Eliot had a rough-and-tumble love life. A fact that went unremarked by our