Somebody (Eugene White?): “Of course we shouldn’t have had to go through this. Nobody wants to be involved in this situation. But it’s with us, and we—”
Patricia: “Why? Why do we have to be in this? The man’s crazy, isn’t he? Why can’t we admit he’s crazy, just admit it, and lock him up, the way you would with any other man?”
Joe Holt: “Because he isn’t any other man.”
Evelyn listened, she heard the argument rage back and forth, heard Patricia and then Marie insist they would not make the payments their husbands had agreed to at the meeting in Boston the day before, heard Wellington put on his little show with the drivers across the street and then explain who they were and what the true situation was. She looked at Wellington when she heard his voice on the tape say, “... there are offices within the governmental structure which will not permit an ex-President of the United States to publicly enter a mental hospital.”
Patricia: “What do you mean they won’t permit it?”
Wellington: “I mean they won’t permit it. I mean they will kill him first.”
Evelyn closed her eyes. Standing there in self-imposed darkness, she heard Wellington slowly and methodically convince the others of the truth of what he’d said. But she opened her eyes to look at him again when she heard his recorded voice say, “If you force me to kill my father, I will, because I long ago gave up the idea that I should have attitudes about the orders I was given to carry out. But through whatever small channels of influence I may have constructed for myself over the last twenty-three years, I will make sure that every one of you regrets it.”
Harrison: “You can’t put that kind of responsibility on us!”
Wellington: “I can’t?”
Click. Wellington had switched off the machine. They were all looking at Evelyn. She said to Wellington, “Why wouldn’t you tell me? You told everybody else, you browbeat them into helping you, or persuaded them, you did whatever you had to do. For God’s sake, Wellington, you’re the only one in the family who fought for Bradford as much as I wanted to, and all you’d do was make an enemy out of me!”
“Because,” he said, “I knew too much, and you knew too little. Evelyn, if I had said to you, ‘We are going to put Bradford in a cage. We are going to play the cruelest hoax you can imagine on that poor man. We are going to put him in an airplane and fly him this way and that, and when the plane lands at Thule, Greenland we’ll tell him it’s Prince Rupert on the west coast of Canada, and when the plane lands at Martinsburg, West Virginia, we’ll tell him it’s Peking. And we will take him in a closed truck and put him in a hole in the ground and tell him it’s a security measure, and surround him with Vietnamese claiming to be Chinese, who will pretend to film and record his speeches, and who will bring him fake newspapers reporting the effect he’s having in the world, and we will keep him in that hole in the ground for the rest of his life, because the only way we can keep him from going to China is by convincing him he’s already in China.’ If I had said that to you, Evelyn, you would have thought I was some sort of sadist, some evil creature, and you would have gone to Bradford and warned him against me!”
“But—” She stopped the protest, uncertain, looking at him, no longer sure of anything. “Would I have? But if I would then, why wouldn’t I now?”
“Because before it was done, you would have been able to see nothing but the cruelty, but now that it’s a fact I think you’ll be able to see the kindness in it. We are not only saving Bradford’s life, we are not only avoiding a national scandal and a family embarrassment, we have found the only way to make Bradford’s last years happy ones.”
Joe Holt said, “Evelyn, Brad is going to feel useful and valuable again. He’ll write speeches, articles. He’ll feel he’s doing something. He may even go back to his memoirs, though he probably won’t have a long enough attention span for that. But it’s possible. And one thing is certain; he’ll enjoy life, and this is the only solution where that is true. Certainly not if he’s murdered. Certainly not if he’s being turned into a fool and a cat’s paw in Peking. And certainly not if he’s institutionalized and knows he’s institutionalized.”
“But you should have told me! Somebody should have told me somewhere along the line!”
Wellington said, “We couldn’t take the chance of your love for him blinding you to what was best.”
“But why do it this way, why torture me? Tell me I’m going to Paris for a week, two weeks, then start all this mysterious shuffling around so that I’m half out of my mind not knowing whether it’s your people or the Chinese. I almost called for help in Paris, I almost blew up your whole scheme right there.”
“That’s why I called you,” Wellington said. “What I told you on the phone in Paris was true, Edward Lockridge’s son did tell our plans, what he knew of them, to the Chinese. Fortunately, he knew only about the Paris trip, what we originally intended to do there, and nothing about any of this. But I started to tell you about the change, and you left the phone.”
“Bradford was out of my sight.”
“Whatever the reason. Then, afterward, one of my men in Paris told me he’d spoken to you and you seemed to understand the situation and feel all right about it.”
“What he said was so ambiguous, it could have been a Chinese agent just as well.”
Robert said, “Do you mean you really thought you were in China?”
“Yes! I was almost dying of fright!”
Robert said angrily to Wellington, “That wasn’t the way you said it was going to be. That wasn’t what I agreed to.”
“Everything changed so fast,” Wellington said. “We’ve done this whole operation off-balance. I’m sorry it didn’t go smoothly, but the point is, he’s here. We did the job, and now Bradford is safe from everybody, from the Chinese, from his own government, from everybody.” He looked at Evelyn. “Depending, of course, on you.”
“On me?”
“You’re in China with him.”
“I don’t understand.”
James Fanshaw, the psychiatrist, came forward saying, “Let me explain that part of it. If Bradford were left completely alone down there, with only the so-called Chinese around him, there could be bad mental reactions, of a wide variety of types. But with one familiar figure around, he has a touchstone of reality, an anchor if you will. A completely artificial environment, no matter how cleverly put together, is going to have seams and blank spots and anomalies in it. Only God can create reality. So your job will be to re-confirm the reality of the world he sees, primarily by simply being a part of it.”
“You mean stay here? Live here with him?”
“You wouldn’t actually have to be around Brad much more than you usually are,” Joe Holt said.
James Fanshaw said, “Don’t make up your mind now. You’ve had a terrible ordeal, you’re exhausted, your nerves are shot. Get a good night’s sleep, let me give you something to help you calm down, and in the morning we’ll all get together again and talk it over in a sensible way.”
Evelyn said, “But stay here? In the hole in the ground? You’ve buried Bradford, and you want to bury me with him, like a slave in a pyramid!”
Howard said, “Evelyn, don’t you know where you are?”
“No!”
“You’re in Eustace.”
Wellington said, “The construction site you stumbled on the other day, this is it.”
Robert said, “Evelyn, you’re less than a mile from your own bed.”