Exiles in the Garden Read Free Page B

I-don't-know-and-I-don't-care vice president, who preferred to concentrate on his services to the party. Eliot was quite a fine piece of work. And what I want to know is, where did he find the time?
    Eliot?
    Women loved him. That elfin look, his boutonniere, his habit of sending flowers, and inside the vase along with the flowers a little blue box from Tiffany's. He was a beautiful dancer, you know. The waltz, the tango. When he danced he was light on his feet. And he always had his hand up some woman's skirt. The old man made a gesture with his hands as if he were shooing away insects, and then he laughed. He said, Besides the elfin look and the dancing he had a cynical outlook on life that appealed to women. Eliot maintained that most Washington women were cynics. That was because they knew their men intimately. What was said at night in the darkness as opposed to what was said at the televised news conference or on the Senate floor. For God's sake be the man I married instead of the man I almost didn't marry. Words of that kind from the wife to the husband. Personally I never found that to be true, the cynicism of women. But that was what Eliot said, and he ought to know. I mostly spent my time in the company of men.
    I'll be damned, Alec said.
    You didn't know that? I thought everyone knew, common knowledge. He loved chasing women and he loved the Republican Party. I don't know in which order. Maybe they came in no particular order, merely situational. Republicans in the daylight, women after hours. The old man sighed and when he spoke again his voice was pale, losing timbre with each word. He said, Eliot got started with women during the Second World War when he was working for Lend-Lease. Washington, so gray during the Depression, was a wide-open town during the war, everyone working dawn to dusk and loving it. That was the first time in memory that we had a government that everyone looked to, even Republicans, much as they despised Franklin. Most of the men were away in the service. Their wives and girlfriends stayed home and went to work at places like OSS and the War Department and found that they liked it. They were women who were attracted to masculine atmospheres, high stress, sometimes profane, wisecracking, footloose. Also, the wages were good. I think it came as a surprise to women, how much they liked the work and how good they were at it. At any event, Eliot was Four-F owing to a bad heart. So he stayed home, too, dancing the nights away. And he lived to a hundred and three. My oldest friend.
    I didn't go to the funeral because I didn't want to hear the eulogy, the old man added. I hate that p-prick.
    Politics trumps friendship.
    Eliot would have understood. Daylight rules.
    The old man smiled wanly as the half-light of afternoon began to fail, the room growing dark. He mumbled something that Alec didn't hear, all the while scratching at his wrist. His skin was paper-thin and began to bleed. Alec took his father's hand but the old man was tremendously strong and continued to flay his wrist. At last this unexpected burst of energy began to ebb and he lay still. Alec felt in his pocket for the Leica, the beautiful machine he had owned for more than forty years, a birthday present from his father. It did not seem correct to turn it against him now, and Alec did not favor catching subjects unawares, their attention elsewhere. This seemed to him an invasion of privacy. The truth was, he preferred stationary objects, the Confederate infantryman or a garden at dusk.
    I hope you don't hold it against me, that argument we had.
    Alec smiled. Which one?
    You know darn well which one.
    Yes, of course.
    I was out of bounds, the old man said. I admit it. But my God, son, you were a mystery to me. You were an enigma. Enigmas trouble me.
    Alec had it now. That was the argument that had its origins at Arlington Cemetery—as it happened, the first time he had used the Leica professionally. A military funeral, a bright day