"He did some good things," Ma Springer says, in that voice of hers that shows hurt, tight and dried-out, somehow. Harry is sensitive to it after all these years.
He tries to help her, to apologize if he had been rough with her over who ran the company. "He opened up China," he says.
"And what a can of worms that's turned out to be," Stavros says. "At least all those years they were hating our guts they didn't cost us a nickel. This party of his wasn't cheap either. Everybody was there – Red Skelton, Buzz Aldrin."
"You know I think it broke Fred's heart," Ma Springer pronounces. "Watergate. He followed it right to the end, when he could hardly lift his head from the pillows, and he used to say to me, 'Bessie, there's never been a President who hasn't done worse. They just have it in for him because he isn't a glamour boy. If that had been Roosevelt or one of the Kennedys,' he'd say, `you would never have heard "boo" about Watergate.' He believed it, too.
Harry glances at the gold-framed photograph and imagines it nodded. "I believe it," he says. "Old man Springer never steered me wrong." Bessie glances at him to see if this is sarcasm. He keeps his face motionless as a photograph.
"Speaking of Kennedys," Charlie puts in – he really is talking too much, on that one Kool-Aid – "the papers are sure giving Chappaquiddick another go-around. You wonder, how much more can they say about a guy on his way to neck who drives off a bridge instead?"
Bessie may have had a touch of sherry, too, for she is working herself up to tears. "Fred," she says, "would never settle on its being that simple. `Look at the result,' he said to me more than once. `Look at the result, and work backwards from that."' Her berry-dark eyes challenge them to do so, mysteriously. "What was the result?" This seems to be in her own voice. "The result was, a poor girl from up in the coal regions was killed."
"Oh Mother," Janice says. "Daddy just had it in for Democrats. I loved him dearly, but he was absolutely hipped on that."
Charlie says, "I don't know, Jan. The worst things I ever heard your father say about Roosevelt was that he tricked us into war and died with his mistress, and it turns out both are true." He looks in the candlelight after saying this like a cardsharp who has snapped down an ace. "And what they tell us now about how Jack Kennedy carried on in the White House with racketeers' molls and girls right off the street Fred Springer in his wildest dreams would never have come up with." Another ace. He looks, Harry thinks, like old man Springer in a way: that hollow-templed, wellcombed look. Even the little dabs of eyebrows sticking out like toy artillery.
Harry says, "I never understood what was so bad about Chappaquiddick. He tried to get her out." Water, flames, the tongues of God: a man is helpless.
"What was bad about it," Bessie says, "was he put her in."
"What do you think about all this, Melanie?" Harry asks, playing cozy to get Charlie's goat. "Which party do you back?"
"Oh the parties," she exclaims in a trance. "I think they're both evil." Ev-iclass="underline" a word in the air. "But on Chappaquiddick a friend of mine spends every summer on the island and she says she wonders why more people don't drive off that bridge, there are no guard rails or anything. This is lovely soup," she adds to Janice.
"That spinach soup the other day was terrific," Charlie tells Melanie. "Maybe a little heavy on the nutmeg."
Janice has been smoking a cigarette and listening for a car door to slam. "Harry, could you help me clear? You might want to carve in the kitchen."
The kitchen is suffused with the strong, repugnant smell of roasting lamb. Harry doesn't like to be reminded that these are living things, with eyes and hearts, that we eat; he likes salted nuts, hamburger, Chinese food, mince pie. "You know I can't carve lamb," he says. "Nobody can. You're just having it because you think it's what Greeks eat, showing off for your old lover boy."
She hands him the carving set with the bumpy bone handles. "You've done it a hundred times. Just cut parallel slices perpendicular to the bone."
"Sounds easy. You do it if it's so fucking easy." He is thinking, stabbing someone is probably harder than the movies make it look, cutting underdone meat there's plenty of resistance, rubbery and tough. He'd rather hit her on the head with a rock, if it came to that, or that green glass egg Ma has as a knickknack in the living room.
"Listen," Janice hisses. A car door has slammed on the street. Footsteps pound on a porch, their porch, and the reluctant front door pops open with a bang. A chorus of voices around the table greet Nelson. But he keeps coming, searching for his parents, and finds them in the kitchen. "Nelson," Janice says. "We were getting worried."
The boy is panting, not with exertion but the shallow-lunged panting of fear. He looks small but muscular in his grape-colored tie-dyed T-shirt: a burglar dressed to shinny in a window. But caught, here, in the bright kitchen light. He avoids looking Harry in the eye. "Dad. There's been a bit of a mishap."
"The car. I knew it."
"Yeah. The Toyota got a scrape."
"My Corona. Whaddeya mean, a scrape?"
"Nobody was hurt, don't get carried away."
"Any other car involved?"
"No, so don't worry, nobody's going to sue." The assurance is contemptuous.
"Don't get smart with me."
"O.K., O.K., Jesus."
"You drove it home?"
The boy nods.
Harry hands the knife back to Janice and leaves the kitchen to address the candlelit group left at the table – Ma at the head, Melanie bright-eyed next to her, Charlie on Melanie's other side, his square cufflink reflecting a bit of flame. "Everybody keep calm. Just a mishap, Nelson says. Charlie, you want to come carve some lamb for me? I got to look at this."
He wants to put his hands on the boy, whether to give him a push or comfort he doesn't know; the actual touch might demonstrate which, but Nelson stays just ahead of his father's fingertips, dodging into the summer night. The streetlights have come on, and the Corona's tomato color looks evil by the poisonous sodium glow – a hollow shade of black, its metallic lustre leeched away. Nelson in his haste has parked it illegally, the driver's side along the curb. Harry says, "This side looks fine."
"It's the other side, Dad." Nelson explains: "See Billy and I were coming back from Allenville where his girlfriend lives by this windy back road and because I knew I was getting late for supper I may have been going a little fast, I don't know, you can't go too' fast on those back roads anyway, they wind too much. And this woodchuck or whatever it was comes out in front of me and in trying to avoid it I get off the road a little and the back end slides into this telephone pole. It happened so fast, I couldn't believe it."
Rabbit has moved to the other side and by lurid light views the damage. The scrape had begun in the middle of the rear door and deepened over the little gas-cap door; by the time the pole reached the tail signal and the small rectangular sidelight, it had no trouble ripping them right out, the translucent plastic torn and shed like Christmas wrapping, and inches of pretty color-coded wiring exposed. The urethane bumper, so black and mat and trim, that gave Harry a small sensuous sensation whenever he touched the car home against the concrete parking-space divider at the place on the lot stencilled ANGSTROM, was pulled out from the frame. The dent even carried up into the liftback door, which would never seat exactly right again.
Nelson is chattering, "Billy knows this kid who works in a body shop over near the bridge to West Brewer and he says you should get some real expensive rip-offplace to do the estimate and then when you get the check from the insurance company give it to him and he can do it for less. That way there'll be a profit everybody can split."
"A profit," Harry repeats numbly.
Nails or rivets in the pole have left parallel longitudinal gashes the length of the impact depression. The chrome-and-rubber stripping has been wrenched loose at an angle, and behind the wheel socket on this side – hooded with a slightly protruding flare like an eyebrow, one of the many snug Japanese details he has cherished – a segment of side strip has vanished entirely, leaving a chorus of tiny holes. Even the many-ribbed hubcap is dented and besmirched. He feels his own side has taken a wound. He feels he is witnessing in evil light a crime in which he has collaborated.