They ran out of the rainstorm over mid-Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes before landing at Hagerstown. It had been raining there, but had stopped about half an hour before. It was very cold after the rain, a wet cold that cut right through to the bone, and Evelyn shivered as she walked across the tarmac beside Bradford from the plane to the car, another black Cadillac limousine, twin to the one they’d left at LaGuardia except that this one had a Pennsylvania license plate. The same number: BL-1. (During Bradford’s Presidency, the press had habitually referred to him by his three initials, BGL, Bradford Gregory Lockridge, but that was only a journalistic tradition, suffered by every President since Roosevelt with the sole exception of Eisenhower, who had a handy three letter nickname instead. Bradford himself never used his middle name nor its initial.)
From Hagerstown it was a short thirty miles to Eustace, most of it north on Interstate 81, out of Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Then off 81 to Chambersburg and seven miles west on county 992 to Eustace. It was done and over in twenty-five minutes.
And yet to Evelyn it seemed the longest part of the trip. The day was gloomy, Bradford continued silent and grouchy, and there was nothing to occupy her mind. She’d traveled this road a hundred times, and though much of the scenery was green and pleasant even at this time of the year, she had seen it too often to be intrigued any more. She was also impatient to see Dinah again, and to be home.
Bradford was still absorbed in his work for part of the time, muttering to himself and making notes on a yellow legal pad, but as they neared Chambersburg he dozed off for a few minutes, which Evelyn didn’t notice until a dozen sheets of manuscript slid off the attaché case on his lap and fell to the floor amid their feet. She glanced at him in surprise and saw that he was asleep, head tucked back into the corner, mouth slightly open.
She gathered up the fallen sheets, carefully opened the attaché case, trying to make her movements small enough and silent enough not to disturb him, and put all his materials away. She left the case on his lap, and then noticed that a little trickle of saliva was coming from the right corner of his mouth. She knew how easily that could happen when one took a daytime nap sitting up, and how embarrassed Bradford would be if he woke up and discovered he’d been drooling in his sleep. She took a tissue from her bag and gently patted his mouth dry. He moved slightly at the touch, but didn’t wake up, and after that there was no more saliva.
The car’s rhythm changed when they switched from the Interstate super-highway to the two-lane blacktop county road, and the change awoke Bradford, who sat up blinking and swallowing and making faces as though he were tasting something foul. “I fell asleep,” he complained.
“Just for a few minutes,” Evelyn told him. “I felt like falling asleep myself. This part is always so long.”
“Where are we?” He squinted out at the cloud-dark day.
“Just past Chambersburg. Almost home.”
He looked at the closed attaché case on his lap. “Don’t tell Howard,” he said, “but I’m through with this for an hour or two.”
“I won’t tell him,” she promised.
Ten minutes later the limousine pulled to a stop in front of the house and they both got out. “Stiff,” Bradford commented, and stretched and yawned.
“God, yes,” Evelyn said. “Let’s not go anywhere else for a year.”
“You’re on,” he said.
They walked up into the house, and he was limping slightly, favoring his right leg. “My leg must have gone to sleep,” he said.
“I should have taken the case off your lap,” she said, immediately contrite.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’ll go away.”
4
Robert Pratt stood looking out the window at the thin oval of picketing students in the main parking area. With the window closed and the air conditioning on, it was impossible to hear what they were chanting, so that except for the words on the signs what they looked most like was an advance publicity stunt for a circus or a movie or some such attraction. But the signs made it clear that this was serious business, which in some way made it more comic.
Sterling must have been feeling the same, standing beside Robert and looking down at them, because all at once he murmured, “Poor things.”
Robert looked at him in surprise, not expecting that sort of empathy from a man whose name was being so mistreated on signs twenty feet away, and saw that Sterling had made the comment more to himself than to Robert. He was looking out the window with a brooding, pitying, somehow sad expression on his face, as though watching something die.
Which they were, in a way. The great student demonstrations of just a few years ago, the captured buildings, hostage deans, firelight marches, all the brave panoply of the bloodless revolution of the affluent young, had withered in a very short time down to this rump remnant: two dozen shaggy students shuffling in a long oval defined by gray police sawhorses. There were two ovals of sawhorses, forming a thick long letter O, with the protesters marching between the lines. Was it an accident that the oval of sawhorses was so much larger than the protesters available to fill it, making their ranks seem even thinner and more ineffectual than they were, or was it conscious police mockery?
The police themselves were there in merely token strength: two uniformed and helmeted patrolmen leaning in boredom against the side of their car, one riot gun waiting negligently atop the car’s white roof in the sunlight. In that gun would be a lone tear gas projectile, and everyone participating understood that one movement beyond the permissible would result in that projectile being lobbed over their heads and into the middle of the oval.
It had been nearly two years since tear gas had actually drifted across the Lancashire University campus.
In those two years, a lot had happened to the student protest movement, but it could all be brought down to two terms: diffusion and extremism. When the movement merely had the twin goals of international peace and racial justice, there was a certain amount of confusion and contradiction inevitable but not enough to destroy the movement entirely. But when the goals became more diffuse, and less morally secure, the effectiveness of the protest movement began to wane. And with diffusion came the steadily increasing influx of extremism, the movement being taken over more and more by nihilists who claimed to see no possible way to repair the inequities in American life except by destroying American life and hoping something better would rise from the ashes. This vague hope lost the movement much of its membership, as did the proliferation of causes. A student interested in racial justice tended to be discouraged when rallies were taken over by destroyers on the one hand and cultists for drugs or sex on the other.
When the shake-out was done, there was almost nobody left. The truly concerned and productive students had retired from the fray and were back to concerning themselves exclusively with themselves, as had their predecessors of the fifties. The extremists, their power waning, had grown more and more shrill and provocative, and most of them by now were in jail for one thing or another, usually some symbolic and silly gesture of destruction. The twin touchstones of this group had become Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, with its suggestion of the purest revolutionary act being the blowing up of the Greenwich Observatory (the murder of time), and the trio of real-life revolutionaries who had, in the early sixties, actually attempted to blow up the Statue of Liberty.