I’d beached finally in the mouth of a whale, one of Disney’s exhibits evidently. A dismal cavernous maw, dark and foreboding, but under the circumstances I’d found it inviting. I’d dragged myself inside, down the throat, away from the murky insanity of the mainstream out in the Square, clutching my poor bruised nuts and glad of any sanctuary. This has been worse than Bougainville, I’d thought. I’d wished Pat were with me and I’d wondered if I should go looking for her once I’d got my pants on — but then I’d realized I’d already seen her out there, part of her anyway (or was that a dream I’d had? it was all getting mixed up in my mind), it was really my mother I’d wished were with me. Jesus, I’d sighed, crawling along, drawn toward the belly by a distant flickering light, this has been the longest day of my life!
What had I expected to find inside the Whale? I’d seen the film with my daughters, and so had anticipated the craggy cathedral-like walls, the tremulous shadows cast by a lonely lantern, eerie digestive noises. Past that? A little benevolent magic maybe? a touch of the Mission Inn, Gepetto with a stiff drink and fried fish? Probably just a little peace and quiet where, covered in darkness, I could draw myself together, stop gesturing, jerking about, come to rest. What I certainly had not expected was to find my grandmother Almira Burdg Milhous sitting there in her rocking chair, gazing sternly down upon me over her rimless spectacles.
“Pull yourself together, Richard,” she’d said gravely. “Seek the soul’s communion with the Eternal Mind!”
“Grandmother!” I’d gasped, unable to believe my eyes. “My God, what are you doing here?”
“No swearing, Richard. And put your trousers on.”
She’d sat there in her creaky old chair, gently rocking, her hair rolled up in a tight little bun on her head, her delicate white throat ringed round by a small lace collar, watching me with her sad deepset eyes, a melancholic smile on her lips, as I struggled with my pants, tearing them off, unknotting them, tugging them back on again. “I–I’m sorry, Grandmother!” For everything that had been happening out there, I’d meant, my own indecency included — just seeing her there, quietly juxtaposed against all that madness, had thrown it all into a new perspective: what must she think of us? I’d lost buttons and belt and the zipper didn’t work: I’d had to hold my pants up with my hands.
“Where are your shoes, Richard?”
“I…uh, must have lost them! I—” But I’d reached the point where I had exhausted all my emotional reserve. Tears had rushed into my eyes, and I’d pitched forward into her lap. I’d wanted to hide myself there forever. “Good old Grandmother!” I’d wept.
“Stand up, Richard,” she’d commanded. “Remember the Four Selfs!”
“But why has this happened to me, Grandmother?” I’d wailed. “I’ve always been a good man!”
“Not always,” she’d replied matter-of-factly. “What about that time your father caught you swimming in the ditch?”
“The…the others dared me!”
“And you used to smoke cornsilks, steal grapes and watermelons, don’t tell me you didn’t, and you were mean to your brother Donny!”
“He was a smart aleck, he asked for it!” Why was she challenging me like this?
“You were jealous of poor Harold and didn’t really care when he died.”
“I did!” I’d protested, drawing back, and had shed some more tears just to prove it. “And I was really sorry when Arthur died!”
The tears were real now, but she’d pressed on mercilessly: “Why didn’t you ever have any friends? Why did you go off by yourself at our picnics and not join in the fun? What’s the matter with you, Richard? Why have you always been so moody and proud and selfish and standoffish?”
“I had friends! They voted for me! But in politics—”
“Politics! Yes, I heard about that, too, Richard. All those naughty tricks you played on poor Jerry Voorhis and Mrs. Douglas and that nice Mr. Warren—”
“Nice, my foot! The world is rough, Grandmother, and when they hit you, you have to hit them back, and the best way to do that is to hit them before they hit you! I don’t apologize for that — I’m a political animal, Grandmother, and—”
“Yes, and you smell like one, too,” she’d sniffed. “You’ve lost your Quaker spirit, Richard.”
“Only on domestic issues, Grandmother! I’m still a Quaker on foreign issues!”
“Drinking, smoking, swearing, cheating, telling untruths and tricking people — tsk tsk! You never talk about God or Jesus any more, Richard — and you play cards and take money from people—”
“Not for myself!” I’d insisted. “I don’t take anything for myself!”
“And all those paragraphs about you in the college yearbooks — you wrote them yourself!”
“Not — not my senior year, I didn’t, Grandmother!”
“‘Great things are expected…’ My my! You should be ashamed, Richard!”
“Well, you…you have to be conceited in this business…”
“And what did you do up in that bell tower all by yourself? You know, Richard, your mother and father used to wonder if perhaps you weren’t a bit disturbed. You were a very strange boy. I used to defend you, just as I defended all the boys, but…”
“I… I like to go my own way, Grandmother, keep my own counsel. That’s the way I am, and one thing I always have to be—”
“You used to peck up the hired girls’ skirts. You even tried to peek up my skirts!”
“I…did—?!”
“And you harbored wicked thoughts about little Ola and Marjorie and those burlesque dancers you used to go see with your cousin—”
“That was a long time ago, Grandmother, before I was married. I—”
“Oh yes? What about that secretary at the OPA, that nurse out in the Pacific Ocean—”
“I… I was lonely—”
“And this afternoon? Were you lonely this afternoon?”
“Wha—?! How…how did you—?”
“‘Oh, Ethel! I’d do anything for you!’ Shame, shame, Richard! No wonder they’ve been punishing you!”
“I… I was just pretending! It’s true! I’d gone up there to — Grandmother! Why are you writing all this down?”
“Ah…the, uh, better to counsel you with, my dear,” she’d replied with a faint tight-lipped smile.
It was about this time that I’d begun to recall all those notes to myself about letting down too soon after crisis. For one thing, my Grandmother Milhous was dead, had been for years. For another, there hadn’t been any secretary at the OPA, that had just been — and then it had come to me, like the punch line of an old joke heard a thousand times over, who it was: “Edgar! You!”
“You know, Dick,” he’d smiled, chucking me under the chin, “the reason you’ve never been any good at making out is that you talk too much about yourself!”
“Goddamn you, Edgar!” I’d stormed, slapping his hand away. “It’s been you all along!”
There were noises out in the Square now and crowds of hostile people were being shoved toward us into the Whale. “Come on, Dick,” Hoover had said, smoothing down his heavy skirts, “I’d better get you out of here before the choice between the quick and the dead goes the wrong way for you….”
Ah, why should an honest man enter public life and submit himself and his family to this kind of thing? Of course, a man who goes voluntarily into the political arena must expect some wounds in the battles in which he engages, but it seemed to me I suffered more than I deserved to. Both Pat and I had perhaps what one might describe as an overdeveloped sense of privacy. I know, people in political life have to live in a fishbowl. Every public figure, whose most important asset is his reputation, is at the mercy of the smear artists and the rumormongers, that’s politics, but no matter how often you tell yourself that “this is part of the battle,” or that “an attack is a compliment because your adversaries never bother taking on someone who amounts to nothing,” there are times when you wonder if you shouldn’t chuck the whole business.