It had been strange, but not yet disturbing. The Chinese had kept the talk strictly in the area of reminiscence, not only of his and Bradford’s scanty acquaintance over the years, but also of world events as they had affected the two of them. He had, for instance, given detailed information on his whereabouts and personal doings at the onset of such-and-such a specific world crisis, and elicited similar memories from Bradford. “Where were you when the word came of John Kennedy’s assassination? What were you doing when you first heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor?” That sort of thing, endlessly.
And yet Bradford was hopeful. It had seemed to him that here and there in the meandering course of the conversation he had detected gleams of light. “He’s leading up to something,” he told Evelyn.
On Sunday there was a cocktail party at the American Embassy in Bradford’s honor. Evelyn attended, and was approached with more or less subtlety by two Frenchmen and three Americans. She brushed them all off without a qualm, and didn’t even take her usual pleasure in being considered a woman worth making a play for.
Monday was Bradford’s second meeting. Ann Gillespie called in the late morning, her voice dry as dust on the phone, and invited Evelyn to join her for lunch and an afternoon at the Louvre. Evelyn went with her, and it turned out what Ann wanted was merely an ear into which to pour her troubles, of which Carrie was only incidental. Ann’s primary problem was her son Charles who, she said, was being unduly and badly influenced by Edward Lockridge’s son Eddie.
“But Eddie’s four years younger than Charles,” Evelyn said.
“Charles isn’t strong-willed,” Ann said. “I suppose he got that from me, God help him. Anyone can push either of us around.”
Eddie Lockridge was a radical, it seemed, of the type which had flowered briefly a few years before in the United States. It was an extremely nihilistic radicalism, craving apocalypse for its own sake, and it had not taken root in the eternally optimistic American soil. European history, however, leads almost inevitably to at least a recognition of some sort of nihilistic philosophy, so this new wave of youthful nihilism had not worn itself out on rock music and drugs and teen-age sex play, as it had in the United States, but had gone almost directly into the arena of anti-political action, with the Scandinavian Provos showing — but not necessarily leading — the way.
So long as Charles had had Princeton, the influence of Eddie Lockridge had been only sporadic and temporary, giving Charles merely transient periods of feeling that he should be “doing” something, the something never quite defined. But last month Charles was graduated, and now he had come to a decision point in his life. Ann, of course, wanted him to go on to graduate school, as did Carrie.
But now Eddie Lockridge’s evil influence was at last coming into its own. Eddie wanted Charles to give up schooling — in the brave new world after the apocalypse, what would a master’s degree be worth? — and to stay in Europe, in Paris. There was some sort of group to which Eddie belonged, and he wanted Charles to join it. They were going to “do” things. What things? No one would tell; no one seemed to know.
Evelyn asked, “Haven’t you talked to Eddie’s father?”
“Of course. Edward doesn’t take it seriously. You know him, he doesn’t take anything seriously.” She sounded bitter, and Evelyn could hear in her voice that over the years Edward Lockridge had failed to take Ann Gillespie seriously on more than one subject. “He says,” she went on, “you have to let children go their own ways, make their own decisions. Up to a point, of course, he’s perfectly right. But it is possible to ruin one’s life, one can make wrong decisions.”
Evelyn looked at her, and Ann’s words seemed to spread like an opening, ever-widening umbrella, covering far more than she had intended or would ever suspect.
Evelyn returned to the hotel in the early evening with weary feet — the Louvre, with its endless miles of halls lined with paintings, exercised the legs much more fully than the eyes or the mind — and a depressed emotional attitude, the afternoon with Ann having held up the same cruel mirror yet again.
Bradford was there when she arrived, and this time he too was depressed. They went out to dinner — the restaurant was world-famous for its decor, but because Bradford was also world-famous they had to eat in a private room — and during the meal he told her what his second meeting with Kwong Lan Quey had been like.
“I suppose I made a mistake,” he said. “I pushed. I’m out of practice, I know better than that, particularly with an Oriental. He’ll come out in his own time, but, God, it’s a painful process, waiting.”
“Was it the same today? Reminiscences?”
“Not very much. Mostly today it was philosophy, in as abstract terms as possible. He would describe a Chinese attitude toward something, and then ask for the equivalent attitude in our part of the world, but he used such vague general terminology I sometimes had no idea what on earth he was trying to say. Then he would get irritated if I didn’t have a Western philosophic concept to contrast with whatever it was he’d been talking about, so finally I asked him what it was all leading up to, what was the point, and he closed right up. We went on for another twenty minutes, but it was just weather and airlines and restaurants. Then he declared the meeting closed.” Bradford shook his head, looking at the food he hadn’t started to eat yet. “I’m too rusty. I should know better than that.”
Tuesday Bradford met with the French Premier and three members of his cabinet, and Evelyn went shopping with Janet Lockridge, the terrible Eddie’s mother. Janet Lockridge had been born Janet Canby, the elder sister of Evelyn’s dead husband, and there was a strong familial resemblance between the two that Evelyn found at times troubling and depressing, but not today. Janet was a bubbly open woman, the perfect counterpart to her amiable husband, and the shopping spree was Evelyn’s most enjoyable day so far in Paris.
It had apparently been so for Bradford as well. Even though his meeting with the Premier had been an afterthought, window dressing, they had in fact discussed two or three substantive issues — overlapping French and American spheres of influence in Central Africa, for example — and Bradford had come away with specific proposals to present to the State Department on his return to the States.
That evening they dined at Edward Lockridge’s. Eddie was not present, and Evelyn took the opportunity to hint at Ann Gillespie’s concern about Eddie’s influence on her son Charles. Edward, as expected, brushed it all off as harmless boyhood rebellion, but Janet took it much more seriously, to the point that she and Edward tensely skirted a bitter family argument right at the dinner table, with Bradford and Evelyn both embarrassed and making attempts to gloss it over and change the subject, which at last they succeeded in doing without any resolution of the Eddie-Charles problem at all.
They changed the subject by segueing to Chairman Mao, the recently-dead Premier of China, and the semantic probability that Mao would remain alive as part of the language for some time to come, in the word Maoist. As Edward said, “There are people around to this day calling themselves Trotskyites, and half of them hadn’t been born yet at the time Trotsky was killed. The same thing will happen to the word Maoist, you wait and see.” This change of subject had come about when Edward mentioned casually that the group his son belonged to considered itself Maoist without having any real idea what a Maoist philosophy entailed.
“Maoism in the West,” Bradford said, “has never meant the same thing as Maoism in Asia. There it’s expansionist, doctrinaire, favoring a strong central government. Here it’s fragmentary, almost entirely devoid of doctrine, and opposed to government in virtually all its forms.”