ii
Thursday, the twenty-second of November. Evelyn awoke at ten-thirty with her mind still full of bits and pieces of her dreams; coffins and labyrinths, quicksand and caves. She got out of bed and went over to the window and looked out on a cold clear day with a washed-blue sky and high small bright yellow sun. Three days ago she had left here for Paris with Bradford. How the world had twisted and turned in those three days, culminating in last night’s horror and its incredible release, when Peking turned into Eustace and Robert had driven her home through the woods in his old yellow Jaguar.
She washed and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. As she was finishing the meal, Howard came in and sat down opposite her and said, “I wish I knew whether Wellington meant for you to go through that hell or not.”
“He didn’t,” she said wearily. Her body was refreshed, but her mind still felt drugged. “It was what he said, the whole thing was done off-balance. We were amateurs, he was our only professional, and none of us liked him or trusted him or would believe in his answers.”
“Maybe. Do you feel like talking?”
“I suppose.”
She walked with him to a ground-floor parlor where everyone from last night was waiting for her, with the exception of Wellington. Her brother George, her uncle Joe. Robert. And the psychiatrist, James Fanshaw.
She sat down, and they explained things to her. They had solved the problem of confining Bradford while still giving him public appearances. The Vietnamese technicians would tape long interviews and speeches, and George would then edit for usable material, interpolating himself as the interviewer. Either Evelyn or one of the Vietnamese would ask specific questions whenever it was necessary to have a statement from him on a certain topic.
As to his well-being, two of the Vietnamese working with him were doctors, and both Joe Holt and James Fanshaw would stop by at least once a week to observe him through the closed-circuit television that was now in the process of being installed. (The place was so incomplete now because they’d anticipated at least ten days additional construction time during Bradford’s stay in Paris.)
Howard would be attempting, with indirect assistance from Bradford — or direct assistance, if Bradford could be persuaded to go back to work on them himself — to keep the steady flow of memoirs alive. Meredith Fanshaw and other family members in Washington social circles would in more subtle ways (“When I was visiting Brad last week...”) keep questions and suspicions from arising. With a little care, the fiction of Bradford Lockridge as a free agent and a continuingly healthy elder statesman could be maintained indefinitely.
As to feedback, Bradford would be shown occasional American magazines and newspapers with dummy pages containing stories about his Chinese exploit, mostly couched in terms of grudging respect. The “radio” in his apartment was actually only a speaker connected to a tape recorder supplied with tapes of Chinese broadcasting; occasionally he would be able to hear the re-broadcast of one of his own speeches.
And should he want to go outside, or to travel to other parts of ‘China,’ as he probably would, they’d simply explain to him that security measures still wouldn’t permit it, that the danger of assassination was still too great. He had already accepted the idea that the American government would attempt to silence him, so there should be no trouble convincing him that the danger had not as yet abated. Barring something unforeseen, the deception around Bradford was seamless and leakproof.
But it all depended on Evelyn. Would she tell him the truth about what they’d done to him, or would she work with the rest of the family to support the lie? Which is to say, would she spend some time every day with Bradford, would she pass on to him whatever suggestions or questions might come up, would she be in effect their ambassador to Bradford’s private world. For the length of his life, not her’s.
“Let me think about it,” she said, and they all said of course and left her alone. But she could feel them in the house, in this room or that room, hovering, waiting for her answer.
She really couldn’t think yet, couldn’t make her mind work in any reliable way. She went upstairs to spend some time with Dinah, the tried and true prescription for when she was depressed or confused, but the little girl was involved with her doll house, and that tiny neat structure with its plastic furnishings suddenly was full of ominous meanings and reminders. Evelyn went back downstairs and outside and walked in the cold air in Dinah’s garden for a while instead. The other Dinah, Bradford’s dead wife. The garden was also dead at this time of year, everything having receded underground to wait for spring.
Bradford and Dinah were both underground, too, with no spring ever to come for either of them. No matter how it was phrased, no matter how it was justified, what the family had done was bury Bradford before he was dead.
When kindness is so cruel, what is cruelty? To tell him the truth?
Yet what were the alternatives? There were none, only the unacceptable choice that had been there all along: to hospitalize him, let him know he was being imprisoned. Though even that wasn’t a true option, if Wellington could be believed. The possibilities had narrowed to two: this false death or some real death in its place, either this unofficial living burial or a hypocritical formal funeral following a sanitary assassination.
After a while Robert came out to join her in the garden, and she said, “Did you get the short straw? Or did you volunteer?”
He frowned at her. “Volunteer for what?”
“To come persuade me.”
He didn’t answer immediately, and when she looked at him she saw he was controlling anger. She wanted him to lose that struggle, she wanted a fight with someone and who better than Robert? But he said, finally, calmly, “Evelyn, nobody doubts for a second that you’ll help. That isn’t why I came out.”
“Nobody doubts it?”
“Wellington has us all boxed,” he said. “You as much as the rest of us. We couldn’t have saved Bradford without him, and the only way to do it was by becoming like him a little bit. I spent a week not telling you his plan, lying to you with my silence every time we were together, every time we went to bed, every time we looked at one another. I did it because I had to, even though I loved you. And you’ll go down there and lie to Bradford every single day for the rest of his life for the same reason.”
“Getting more like Wellington all the time?”
“In that one compartment of your life, yes. But in the rest of your life you can be more free than ever.”
A vision of Ann Gillespie, Carrie’s faded companion in Paris, rose in her mind, mocking her. More free? Wasn’t Bradford’s imprisonment also Evelyn’s imprisonment? Wasn’t Bradford’s burial also Evelyn’s burial? “More free,” she said, turning away.
“Of course more free,” he said. “Don’t you see that it’s over now?”
“Over!” She whirled back to him, face contorted. “It’s a death-watch! It won’t be over until he’s dead!”
“Well, it wouldn’t be anyway, would it? If he were an ordinary man, in an ordinary hospital, wouldn’t you see him as often as you could? Wouldn’t you live close to where he was staying? Would you call that a death-watch?”
“No,” she said. “But it would be. I wouldn’t call it that, but that’s what it would be. And Bradford wouldn’t be in the ground, buried already, he wouldn’t be — be—” She looked around in agitation, trying to find the way to express herself. “It wouldn’t be like this!”
“I know. This isn’t really any different, but it feels different, I know it does, it does to me, too.”