“You see,” said the General thickly, his tongue grown suddenly too large for his mouth, “once they’re gone, your White House gang, it will be like the country was before, a real country with real values.” His wife cried agreement.

  Then Joe Bailey flung himself upon the piano and played romantic ballads while Enid sang along with him, in a loud contralto.

  When Peter left, the others were still drinking. At the door he turned to Enid. “Are those jokers serious?”

  “Serious about what?”

  “This taking over of the Pentagon, locking up the President.”

  “Well, something has to be done!” She was vehement “We all know that. I mean things can’t go on like they are. Why, do you realize that we are losing the war? Well, no, you couldn’t know that because they’re keeping it from the people, with censorship and everything. But we are losing and there’s only one person who can save us.”

  “Your friend Captain Bailey?”

  “Don’t underestimate him. Let’s face it, he’s quite a guy in a country of weaklings. But it’s not Joe. It’s MacArthur.”

  “Is he in on this, too?”

  “If I told you, you’d just blab to everybody. You never could keep a secret. Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m giving a party for Harold. He’s off to the wars.” She kissed his cheek.

  “All right.” Peter started to ask her again about the conspiracy but a sharp cry from the general’s wife discouraged him. “Good night,” he said. He paused in the open doorway. “What does Father think of ‘quite a guy’?”

  “We’re not speaking,” said Enid. “You ask him. He’s your father.”

  “Yours, too.”

  Enid gave a mirthless laugh. “I’m not so sure of that.”

  “Idiot!”

  “I mean, how can you tell, unless you were in the room?”

  V

  A cardinal fell, an arc of scarlet against green. Bees hovered in the garden. Through the deep woods of the park came a cool breeze.

  “Not an easy time, not easy at all.” In a most easy mood, Burden sat in a deck chair, feet up, wearing a golfer’s cap to shield his head from the bright June sun. Beside him, in a straight chair sat Sam Biermann, the Washington correspondent for the state’s leading Republican newspaper. In a long relationship, there had been many difficult moments. Partisan editors often cut Sam’s copy in such a way that the essential paragraph of praise was left out; they had even been known to change the text in order to traduce the junior Senator. Burden always accepted Sam’s excuses, having no choice because he needed him. But he often wondered to what extent the other did indeed admire him. If Sam had flattered him less he might have trusted him more.

  Sam wore string ties, and chewed cigars with teeth as yellow as the somewhat distressing elk’s tooth which hung from his watch chain. “Do you anticipate any trouble in the 1944 primary, Senator?”

  During the interview proper, Sam always addressed Burden formally, a warning that whatever he said was copy. Later they would chat intimately, and use first names.

  “Off the record,” said Burden, somewhat mischievously, making the interview difficult, “a hell of a lot. Franklin’s pushing a certain fellow whose name we both know. And the old WPA crowd are already working for him.”

  “Then you expect that this man will enter the primary against you?”

  Burden nodded. The thought of battle did not displease him. He was going to win. He said so, for quotation, with the usual modest qualification that naturally everything was dependent upon the good folk of the state. As he intoned pieties, Sam nodded gravely and though he took no notes, Burden knew that he would be accurately quoted.

  “Your health…?” The polite, embarrassed question to which he was now accustomed.

  “Never better!” Burden gave sudden resonance to his usual soft conspirator’s voice. “Funny thing about a stroke at a relatively young age.” He congratulated himself upon that boldness. “It forces you to take care of yourself. Which I do now. Regular hours, sensible diet. Also it makes you wonder about what really matters, after all.” He continued in that vein, convincing himself that he had undergone a sea change. But of course he had not. He was more than ever puzzled by the body and he never ceased wondering to what end this complex mechanism had been created, its terminus so implicit in its beginning. Until he had puzzled that out, he preferred not to go. Yet his old terror of extinction had lessened considerably since he had discovered how easy death was: like bath water down the drain was the inelegant metaphor which had occurred to him when he regained consciousness in the hospital with Kitty beside him. He had greeted her somewhat formally, and then slipped easily into darkness. Later, as easily, he returned as though from sleep with only a slight headache and the muddled sensation of having been trapped in a particularly confusing dream to memorialize his brief attendance upon the dark angel.

  Released from the hospital, Burden found that now daylight was everything to him, and he took to rising with the sun and walking barefoot through the damp grass, as though he were a boy again and part of the cycle of growth rather than of decay.

  Political plans? “Win the war, of course. Also clear up some of the debris of the New Deal. No need for pump-priming when the pumps are needed for a real fire.” Burden hoped Sam would get that one straight. A constant danger was Sam’s love of the qualifying clause, the informative aside which spoiled the point.

  Then Burden embarked on the one matter that did concern him and which, with an election approaching, ought not to. “The way the government has rounded up the Japanese on the West Coast is one of the most shameful, flagrant abuses of the Bill of Rights in the history of the country.” Never having made a speech on the subject, Burden was bursting with untried rhetoric. “Many of them are fourth, fifth generation Americans, no more security risks than you or I. But even if they were, then let them stand trial in an orderly manner. Don’t put them in concentration camps, without due process of law.”

  “Concentration camps?” Sam looked startled.

  “Yes, concentration camps. There’s no other description for it.”

  “You want me to use that phrase exactly, ‘concentration camps’?” Sam looked mournful, like a croupier taking the last of a friend’s life savings.

  For a moment, Burden’s sense of survival struggled with his sense of justice. To his horror yet secret pride, justice won. “Yes,” he said, “concentration camps are what they are, so that’s what we’ll call them.”

  “Are you planning to hold any hearings in the Senate?”

  Burden nodded. “Judiciary Committee, as soon as possible.”

  “This is not what you’d call a popular issue.” Sam looked wretched. He had spent a quarter of a century cultivating this particular Senator. He obviously could not bear the thought of having to begin again, at his age, with a new Senator.

  “American citizens are being deprived of their Constitutional rights. They are being treated in the same way the Communists treat their unpopular minorities. I’d rather lose the war than have us turn into that sort of country.”

  Sam was close to tears. “You really mean you would rather lose the war than…”

  Burden laughed, and said the magic phrase: “Off the record.” Same sighed with relief as the suicidalist stepped back from the window ledge. “But you must say how strongly I feel about this abuse of justice, and how particularly ironic I find it that an administration which prides itself on its liberalism should have committed the most illiberal act in our history.” Sam nodded, almost happy. That was more like it. One could defend the rights even of Japanese if the issue was plainly partisan. The Senator might yet be saved.

  Then through the screen door of the side porch, Diana appeared, accompanied by an Army officer. It took Burden a moment to recognize Clay. Greetings were warm. Clay looked lean and hard and somewhat ill at ease, as though he might inadvertently break something, clumsy from too much physical strength. Diana was equally uncomfortable; obviously she was doomed to love Clay hopelessly for life, like a Victorian heroine. Burden was rather proud of her madness which seemed to reveal strong passion, if not strong character.

  “I see she’s taken my place,” said Clay.

  “Oh no, not really.” Diana spoke too quickly. “I’m just helping out at the office.”

  “Because, she maintains, I’m too cheap to pay for a new assistant.” Burden winked at Clay.

  “You mean, let the government pay?” said Sam hopefully.

  Burden played up to him. “She’s not on the government payroll.”

  “Wonderful.” Sam was admiring. At one time Jesse Momberger had four relatives working in his office, all drawing government salaries. When questioned by Sam, he had said, “Hell, I’m a good family man.” The voters had agreed; nepotism had not hurt him.

  “When are you replacing Clay?”

  “After the election. As if I could,” said Burden fondly. “Maybe the war will end. Maybe he’ll come back.”

  “If only it would. If only I could.” Clay responded in kind. Then he told them that he was on final leave before being sent overseas. A captain of infantry, he has been assigned to a division in Hawaii. Presumably he would be involved in the Pacific campaign. “But they tell us nothing.”

  “Do you still have an eye on the Second Congressional District?” Sam came to the point.

  Clay hesitated. Smoothly Burden answered for him. “Let’s say we’re keeping our powder dry.” The interview at an end, Sam departed, escorted by Diana.

  “How does it look?” From force of habit, the two men reverted to their old relationship of conspiring politician and devoted accomplice.

  Burden frowned. “Not good. Primary fight.”

  “Republicans?”

  “Don’t know yet. Doesn’t get easier, this business.” But then he recalled that he was an old man saying farewell to a young one, on the eve of battle. The role had possibilities. “Has it been…difficult, Army life?”

  “No. Rather lazy. But now I’ll be with a division headquarters, and that ought to make a difference.”

  “War Department help out?”

  Clay smiled. “It’s not as if I had connections.”

  Burden laughed, as a matter of form. “Actually, I suppose I am a handicap to you.”

  “Fortunately Blaise is not.”

  Burden was suddenly jealous. “I’m sure Blaise can do anything.” He praised his rival. “The Administration is terrified of him. But,” he questioned his rival’s sincerity, “will he do anything?”

  “Who knows? Anyway, it’s academic. There’s nothing I want. Now we’ll see what happens out there.”

  Suddenly in the green garden, there was a tumbling of bodies in gray. The sound of arms stilled the chatter of birds. The bullet struck his father, tore gray cloth, white skin, red flesh, shattered the bone. Burden clutched his left shoulder, felt the bullet burning.

  “What the matter, Senator?”

  Burden let go his arm. “Neuralgia,” he said easily, and asked for news of Enid.

  “I think I’m going to divorce her.”

  “You divorce her? Or the other way around?”

  “Me divorce her. She’s living with…practically living with a Navy captain.”

  Burden squirmed in his seat. This was not at all the sort of conversation one ought to have with a young warrior departing. “I see,” said Burden, hoping Diana would return. There were details in the lives of others which he took no pleasure in knowing.

  But Clay was obviously bent on giving him pain. “I’ve got to make up my mind before I go. Before I leave tonight. I’m seeing her this afternoon.”

  “Does she want a divorce?” Burden went through the expected catechism.

  “She does if I don’t. She doesn’t if I do.”

  “At least you know where you stand.” Burden asked the next question. “Do you want a divorce?”

  “I think so. There’s not much point in living the way we do now, with me in a hotel and her in the house, with the child, and that Navy bastard.”

  “Then you really want her back.” Burden was blunt “In that case, make up with her.”

  “It’s not that easy. She’s not easy to make up with.”

  “Clay.” Burden detested those who for emphasis addressed other men by name, but now he must be as emphatic as possible, if only to end this dialogue and regain the vision of soldiers wounded in the garden, first his father and now Clay, gold curls clotted with blood, blue eyes glazed with dying. Ah, the sweetness of it! and the honor. “Clay, you cannot be divorced, by her if you want to represent the Second District in Congress. You might conceivably divorce her and be elected, but why make a difficult election more difficult?”

  “The alternative is that I live in a hotel while she lives in our house, having affairs? Don’t you think the voters will find out about that?”

  “But you’re not in a hotel, you’re in the Army. You’re going overseas. You’re going to be legitimately separated from her. And who knows what she’ll be like, what you’ll be like in a year or two?” Burden was a devotee of inaction, always the best course in private matters. He had yet to break off with Irene; he had simply not gone on and as a result there had been no recriminations, no final scene, only a mutual sympathy on the rare occasions when they met on neutral ground in someone else’s house. He doubted if he could ever return to that room where he had so unexpectedly fallen into the pit and, lying among the cups and saucers and spilled tea, saw his own death plain.

  “Then,” with finality, “there is Blaise. You’ll need him. But will he help you if you’re not his son-in-law?”

  Diana and Kitty returned. Both made a fuss over the departing soldier who did depart at last, led by Diana through the rose garden to the driveway. Kitty looked after them a second. “I wish she had married him.”

  “Ah,” said Burden in wistful agreement.

  “Instead of Billy.”

  “Ah!” Burden struck a richer chord. Upon a light wind, the scent of roses.

  “I wonder if Clay’s sorry he married Enid. He ought to be. He has far more in common with Diana. Made for each other, they were. Now she’s nothing but a Communist married to a cripple. Oh, it’s sad! It is sad, what life does.”

  VI

  “How does Billy like the paper?”

  “Very well. How is Enid?”

  “Oh, fine. She’s living in Georgetown.”

  “That’s nice. We’re out on Wisconsin Avenue now.”

  “Do you like working in the office?”

  “It’s interesting, yes. Except for the constituents.”

  “They can be hell. How is Mrs. Blaine? Miss Perrine?”

  “Miss Perrine is married now. They miss you.”

  Clay got into his car. Talking to Diana had never been easy. It was now impossible. The fact that neither could look the other full in the face did not help matters. “Be careful,” she said. “In the war, I mean.”

  “I shall. Take care…of your father.” They shook hands. He started the car. She turned to go back to the house, then turned again to wave goodbye as he circled the fish pond in the center of the driveway. He waved to her, and then trees separated them as he drove down the wooded driveway to the main road. At least he had not married her and spent a lifetime trying to make conversation. Even Enid was better, or at least different, unexpected.

  “You could be killed!” She was vehement.

  “That would solve everything.”

  “I’d never forgive myself if they killed you, never! I’d feel it was me somehow that had done it. Joe likes you, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was very impressed by something I told him you said. Joe is a marvelous judge of people and of course he plays the piano like nothing you’ve ever heard.” Enid took a long swig of Coca-Cola from the bottle. She had been, she declared, on the wagon for some weeks. “Until the war is over. That’s my war effort.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll stop seeing him while I’m gone.”

  “If you want me to, really want me to, I will.” She looked at him very straight. Unlike Diana, she always looked him in the eye. Her gaze was most constant and candid when she was lying. He wondered if she was lying now.

  “I really want you to.” Clay fell into the familiar rhythm.

  She sighed. “You are the most selfish person I’ve ever known. All you can think of is your own convenience. If you’d ever thought of me for just one moment, this would never have happened.” She indicated the drawing room. “This” was apparently the Georgetown house.

  He raced through the next few moves. “If I’d taken you out every night to parries, you’d never have gone to bed with Ernesto. But because I preferred my career, which is a failure, to being with you twenty-four hours a day, you went to bed with Navy Joe. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  She looked at him reproachfully. The game was sacred. Neither was allowed to skip moves. “If you’re going to take that tone,” said Enid, taking it herself, “why did you come here at all?”

  “To leave you the car and say goodbye to the baby.”

  “She’s out, with the nurse. At the zoo. They’ll be gone until five. You could always come back of course. I don’t need the car. I suppose you want free garage space.”

  Both found a good deal to be said about his motives for wanting her to have the car while he was overseas; the subject was far from exhausted when Blaise arrived.

  “Quarreling again?” Blaise looked cool and compact in a summer suit, the red face not shiny with heat but merely red, his usual ensign.

  “Daddy! You’re supposed to be in Watch Hill!”

  “Well, I’m not.” Blaise kissed Enid’s cheek amiably, eyes on Clay. “Off to the wars?”

  “Yes, sir. Tonight.”

  “Hawaii?”