Similarly with his marriage: could any man have aura's love bestowed on him and remain impassive? Then Cochrane thought of the knife that had once been held at Laura’s throat, the steel point to her jugular. He shuddered, grew angry, and looked out the window of the DC-3.
His boyhood flashed before him. He saw stretched it beneath him the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and as he peered very carefully he could see the Rivanna River. He turned excitedly to the woman next to him.
"Look, look," he said to Laura, taking her hand and towing her. "That's Virginia. That's where I grew up." She unbuckled the seat belt and rose slightly, leaning forward toward the window and looking down. Even in December, there were blue mountains capped with white, the land was extraordinarily beautiful.
There was ice on the Rivanna. Cochrane could see it. But then, in a quick flash, time spiraled and he saw himself barefoot and in dungarees some thirty years earlier, pitching stones into the river, watching the circles form in the water, and his own father was standing beside him.
The vision faded and was replaced by ones of the College of William and Mary, his first wife, and his lonely first days at the Police Academy.
Then white clouds suddenly covered Virginia and inevitably Cochrane saw in them the billows of cotton, smoke that were always present from Dick Wheeler’s pipe.
Wheeler's fascism had been on a more sophisticated level than Reverend Fowler's, Cochrane decided. That perplexed him, because Fowler seemed the more sophisticated man.
But where Fowler had rejoiced in Hitlerism, the late Dick Wheeler had wrapped himself in stars and stripes.
"A patriot," as he had termed himself in the final hours before his suicide. Where Fowler was a disguised monster of international terrorism and totalitarianism, Dick Wheeler was nothing more than a dark mirror held up to the American psyche: racism and lynching, isolationism and gun-wielding violence, all with a genteel cover.
Roosevelt had betrayed Americanism, Wheeler had concluded, and that, like horse theft in the Old West, was a transgression worthy of hanging. Frontier justice.
Where Cochrane had grown up there had been man in Charlottesville named Jim Horsely. Jim Horsely was a deputy sheriff and owned a candy store. By day he tipped his hat to ladies in the street and gave penny candies to the children who flocked to his store By night, he was the most notorious Ku Klux Klansman in Albemarle County. After his own death the stories surfaced: Jim Horsely had personally beer responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen black people over the last two decades.
Cochrane as a teenager had been struck with that realization.
There had been two Jim Horselys, just as now there had been two Dick Wheelers. And two Stephen Fowlers.
"You're very quiet," Laura said as the DC-3 banked to the southeast.
He turned to her. "I'm sorry. Just thinking. And I'm very tired."
She nodded. So was she. Physically and spiritually drained. They were nearing Havana two hours later when she spoke again.
"Do you think Stephen believed in God?" she asked.
"In his way, yes. I think he did."
"If there is a God," she continued, "I hope He's merciful."
"We all do," Bill Cochrane said.
She was silent again for many minutes, then bravely asked, "What about me? Do you think Stephen ever loved me?"
He replaced his hand on hers. "I know I do," was his only answer.
Then the airplane began its descent for buoyant dazzling Havana.
*
As almost all Americans know, almost five and a half years later, at 3:35 in the afternoon of April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage. When stricken, he was having his portrait painted at the Little White House in Warm Springs.
The explosion on the presidential yacht in November of 1939 took no fatalities at all. But it might have changed history, had it not been for a quirk of events.
Mrs. Roosevelt disliked ocean voyages of any sort in November. At the last moment, she decided to stay behind in Washington for the weekend, appear at a pair of political functions for her husband, and travel to Warm Springs by train the following Monday.
The President himself, on the night the explosion mysteriously erupted off the Sequoia, was safely off the forward port side of the vessel -- as far from the explosion as possible -- in the ship’s reading room. His insomnia had kicked up again; or, more accurately, it had never abated.
Someone from the F.B.I. had sent him a copy of a naval volume entitled The Fighting Liners of The Great War, published in London and not yet available in the United States. Roosevelt had been transfixed by the notion of the great ocean liners becoming troop ships. He was halfway through the book when the explosion rocked the Sequoia.
Mike Reilly, the head of the President’s Secret Service detail, was the first to locate the president. Bursting into the reading room in his pajamas, and bearing a handgun, Reilly was stunned to see Franklin Roosevelt calm and engrossed in his book. Finally at sea, in fact, the President looked better than he had in weeks. His face was fresh, his body relaxed, and his eyes twinkled.
“Now, Mike, my friend,” asked the President, looking up with a sly grin, “I know this silly world is at war, but unless we are several thousand miles off course, we are a long way from a battle zone. So what the blazes was that?”
For a moment, Reilly could not bring himself to speak. “A boiler malfunction, I’m told, Mr. President,” Reilly answered at length. “Possibly a serious one.”
Roosevelt nodded. “Michael, this is a fascinating volume,” he added. “You must find out who at the F.B.I. sent it to me.”
“Yes, of course, Mr. President.”
Reilly stared at the Commander in Chief. He awkwardly nestled his revolver to his pajama pocket. He wondered at what point the President would have to be told that his bed chambers had been destroyed and that two US Navy vessels were about to evacuate The Sequoia.
Finally, when Reilly did not move, Roosevelt looked up again.
"Are you all right, sir?" Reilly pressed, still staring.
"I'm just splendid, Michael!" Roosevelt answered with a huge grin and a laugh. "Good to get out of Washington! How are you?"
"I'm okay, sir." Reilly answered. "Fine, actually. Thank you."
Then the President of the United States returned to his reading. As everyone knew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fascination with naval matters was one of the paramount concerns of his life.
PART EIGHT
FORTY-SIX
On the wall of Memorial Hall, the hour, minute, and second hands of the clock came together at the twelve. Dr. Cochrane had run ten minutes past his time. But few students had complained.
He looked to his left and the Englishwoman with the gray hair smiled and motioned to her watch. Suddenly Bill Cochrane was aware of the time. He apologized to the class. They were in a forgiving mood.
Over the last two hours Bill Cochrane had told them about what might have been. It had gone like this, or so Dr. Cochrane had speculated:
With Roosevelt dead or disabled on the presidential yacht, the 1940 election might have been between Wendell Willkie, the bright young star of the Republicans, and John Nance Garner, who had split the Democratic Party by wresting the nomination away from Henry Wallace.
Willkie, the internationalist, had defeated Garner. The Republicans had gone into office. Lend-Lease had happened anyway, only it had come several months later and only in time to repel an invasion of Great Britain.