“You and Austin Pearce seemed to be having quite a conversation. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“I’m not sure what it was about. He wants to see me about something. Maybe I’ll find out then,” replied Hart, glancing at Finnegan in a way that told him that was all he could say. “Have you done the honors?”
“Yeah, I went through, mumbled a few words about what a great man he was. I don’t envy her, having to stand there like that, forced to turn private grief into a public ceremony. She called me by my first name. They were always good at that, weren’t they?-making you feel you were someone they especially liked.”
Finnegan checked his watch. He looked around the room in case he had missed someone he wanted to see or needed to speak to.
“A few more minutes,” he said to Hart, “then I’ve got to go.” He nodded toward the receiving line. It was shorter than it had been. “You haven’t yet, have you?”
“No, but I guess I better. I’ll catch up with you later. We’re on for dinner tomorrow, right?”
Hart took another glass from a passing waiter and made his way to the back of the line. He tried to think of what he was going to say, but all he could think about was the great inconsequence, at times like this, of saying anything. He had never yet found words that did not sound empty and false when he tried to express sympathy and support to someone who had lost a husband or a wife, a parent or a child. He was too honest to imagine that anything could make much of a difference to someone who was suffering the unspeakable agonies that come with the knowledge that someone you loved, someone who loved you, was now gone forever. Forever, that was the point. The journey had come to an end and there was no starting over, no chance to make amends for the things you wish you had not said or done, no chance to do what you had always planned to do once you had the time, because time was over, time had died.
The line kept moving forward, and then, suddenly, he was standing in front of her, and he still did not know what to say. The words came automatically.
“I’m very sorry,” he heard himself saying as he held her hand for a brief moment in his own. “If there is anything-”
She stopped him with a look, a slight, enigmatic smile that seemed to acknowledge the awkward futility of saying anything with words. She bent toward him.
“Stay. Don’t go. I have to see you.”
She whispered an instruction to a young man standing just behind her, and looked again at Hart to let him know that, whatever she wanted to see him about, it was important. Then she was taking the hand of someone else, and, in that way she had, making them feel that they were the one she had been waiting all the while to see.
“This way, Senator,” said the aide as he led Hart out of the room and down a long corridor.
The house was a labyrinth, hallways that seemed to turn left and turn right, hallways that seemed to turn back on themselves; stairways that spiraled somewhere out of sight and that, from the look of them, had seldom been used in the hundred years since the house was first built. They passed a dozen white varnished doors, all of them shut and probably locked, like the vacant rooms in some grand decayed hotel that were only opened when someone ventured in to clean and air them out. After making at least three different turns, they climbed a narrow back staircase to the second floor. Hart was shown to a suite of rooms where, he was told, Mrs. Constable would join him as soon as she could.
“She asked me to tell you,” said her aide, “that it’s a matter of some urgency.” He paused as if he wanted to be absolutely certain he did not forget even the smallest part of what he was supposed to do. “She wouldn’t ask you to wait like this if it wasn’t.”
It seemed odd, once he was left alone and had time to think about it, that he had been asked to wait here, this far away from the main part of the house. He was in a sitting room, richly furnished with a sofa and two easy chairs arranged in front of a marble fireplace. Through an open doorway, he could see a large bedroom with heavy drapes drawn across the windows. A second doorway led to a book-lined study. Restless, and with nothing else to do, Hart pulled a leather-bound volume off a shelf. The pages had not been cut. He pulled down another and discovered the same thing. Hundreds of burnished leather-bound books, the pride of any collector, some of the books hundreds of years old, and none of them ever read. They were like the furniture in a roped-off room, there to be seen and never used. Hart wanted to laugh. It was Robert Constable all over again, life as a magician’s trick, the illusion of things that never were.
The drapes were closed in this room as well, and Hart, who did not like dark places, pulled them open. To his astonishment, he found himself staring down onto the backyard lawn and the circling crowd that had left the house and gathered outside. For all the twists and turnings that he had been made to follow, Hart was just one floor above where he had started. Whatever Hillary Constable wanted with him, she seemed strangely intent on making certain no one else knew about it.
A few minutes went by, and then a few more. Hart paced back and forth, wondering how much longer he would have to wait. He looked at the long rows of priceless, unread books and the desk on which, instead of pen and paper, were a number of framed photographs, each of them a different size. He walked over to get a closer look. All of the pictures were of Hillary Constable, but never alone, always with someone else: a friend, a relative; photographs taken at ski resorts and tropical islands, photographs taken at different periods of her life; a history, as it were, of life outside of Washington and the usual corridors of power, and not one of the pictures a picture of her with her husband. It was as if Robert Constable had never existed; or, rather, that her time with him had been a public property, an exploitable advantage, something she had not allowed to intrude into what she had had of a private, personal life.
There was a soft whirring sound from the sitting room. A door slid open and closed. It was an elevator, the means by which Hillary Constable could move quickly and easily from whatever commotion was taking place in the first floor public rooms to what, Hart had now determined, was her own private sanctuary. The books that lined the shelves in all their unread splendor, those books belonged to her.
“Damn,” she muttered with what seemed like quiet desperation. Holding her arms straight down at her sides, she clenched both fists. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” she cried. She shook her head, quickly, abruptly, as if to force herself to stop, to get control again. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. Then, suddenly, she opened them with a look of consternation. She had forgotten that Bobby Hart was there. She started to pretend that he had not noticed what she had done, and then she gave it up.
“Yes, that’s how I feel.” Her eyes glistened with defiance. “Do you think I wanted to stand there, spend two hours acting the grieving widow, so that they can all talk about how brave I am, how much I am to be admired for the way I’ve conducted myself, holding back my emotions, holding back the tears? The truth of it is that the hardest part has been pretending that I care at all that he’s dead.”
She walked across to the open doorway to the study where Hart stood watching her.
“You always knew he was a fraud, didn’t you? Don’t bother denying it. If there is anybody in this town who can cut through all the cheap lying, all the stupid hypocrisy, it’s you.”
She touched him on the arm and then moved past him to an open cubicle in the book-lined shelves where three crystal class decanters sat on a silver tray.
“Scotch?” she asked, as she poured two glasses. She handed him a half-filled glass and then touched hers to his. “Cheers,” she said in a voice tinged with weary cynicism. She stood at the window, looking down at the crowd. “You think any of them are talking about what a great president he was?”