Democracy: A Novel Part 2

LET me establish Inez Victor.

Born, as you know, Inez Christian in the Territory of Hawaii on the first day of January, 1935.

Known locally as Dwight Christian's niece.

Cissy Christian's granddaughter.

Paul Christian's daughter, of course, but Paul Christian was usually in Cuernavaca or Tangier or sailing a 12.9-meter Trintella-cla.s.s ketch through the Marquesas and did not get mentioned as often as his mother and his brother. Carol Christian's daughter as well, but Carol Christian had materialized from the mainland and vanished back to the mainland, a kind of famous story in that part of the world, a novel in her own right, but not the one I have in mind.

Harry Victor's wife.

Oh s.h.i.+t, Inez, Jack Lovett said.

Harry Victor's wife.

He said it on the late March evening in 1975 when he and Inez sat in an empty off-limits bar across the bridge from Schofield Barracks and watched the evacuation on television of one or another capital in Southeast Asia. Conflicting reports, the anchorman said. Rapidly deteriorating situation. Scenes of panic and confusion. Down the tubes, the bartender said. Bye-bye Da Nang. On the screen above the bar the helicopter lifted again and again off the roof of the American mission and Jack Lovett watched without speaking and after a while he asked the bartender to turn off the sound and plug in the jukebox. No dancing, the bartender said. I'm already off f.u.c.king limits. You're not off limits from dancing, Jack Lovett said. You're off from fencing Sansui amps to an undercover. The bartender turned down the sound and plugged in the jukebox. Jack Lovett said nothing to Inez, only looked at her for a long time and then stood up and took her hand.

The Mamas and the Papas sang "Dream a Little Dream of Me."

The helicopter lifted again off the roof of the American mission.

In this bar across the bridge from Schofield Barracks Inez did not say "marvelous" as she danced. She did not say "marvelous day" as she danced. She did not say "you look marvelous," or "marvelous to be here." She did not say anything at all as she danced, did not even dance as you or I or the agency that regulated dancing in bars might have defined dancing. She only stood with her back against the jukebox and her arms around Jack Lovett. Her hair was loose and tangled from the drive out to Schofield and the graying streak at her left temple, the streak she usually brushed under, was exposed. Her eyes were closed against the flicker from the television screen.

"f.u.c.king Arvin finally shooting each other," the bartender said.

"Oh s.h.i.+t, Inez," Jack Lovett said. "Harry Victor's wife."

7.

BY the spring of 1975 Inez Victor had in fact been Harry Victor's wife for twenty years.

Through Harry Victor's two years with the Justice Department, through the appearance in The New York Times Magazine of "Justice for Whom?-A Young Lawyer Wants Out," by Harry Victor and R.W. Dillon.

Through the Neighborhood Legal Coalition that Harry Victor and Billy Dillon organized out of the storefront in East Harlem. Through the publication of The View from the Street: Root Causes, Radical Solutions and a Modest Proposal, by Harry Victor, Based on Studies Conducted by Harry Victor with R.W. Dillon.

Through the marches in Mississippi and in the San Joaquin Valley, through Harry Victor's successful campaigns for Congress in 1964 and 1966 and 1968, through the sit-ins at Harvard and at the Pentagon and at Dow Chemical plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Through Harry Victor's appointment in 1969 to fill out the last three years of a Senate term left vacant by the death of the inc.u.mbent.

Through Connie Willis and through Frances Landau ("Inez, I'm asking you nice, behave, girls like that come with the life," Billy Dillon said to Inez about Connie Willis and Frances Landau), through the major fundraising in California ("Inez, I'm asking you nice, put on your tap shoes, it's big green on the barrelhead," Billy Dillon said to Inez about California), through the speaking tours and the ad hoc committees and the fact-finding missions to Jakarta and Santiago and Managua and Phnom Penh; through the failed bid for a presidential nomination in 1972 and through the mistimed angling for a good emba.s.sy (this was one occasion when Jakarta and Santiago and Managua and Phnom Penh did not spring to Harry Victor's lips) that occurred in the wreckage of that campaign.

Through the mill.

Through the wars.

Through the final run to daylight: through the maneuvering of all the above elements into a safe place on the field, into a score, into that amorphous but inspired convergence of rhetoric and celebrity known as the Alliance for Democratic Inst.i.tutions.

Inez Victor had been there.

Because Inez Victor had been there many people believed that they knew her: not "most" people, since the demographics of Harry Victor's phantom const.i.tuency were based on comfort and its concomitant uneasiness, but most people of a type, most people who read certain newspapers and bought certain magazines, most people who knew what kind of girls came with the life, most people who knew where there was big green on the barrelhead, most people who were apt to have noticed Inez buying printed sheets on sale in Bloomingdale's bas.e.m.e.nt or picking up stemmed strawberries at Gristede's or waiting for one of her and Harry Victor's twin children, the girl Jessie or the boy Adlai, in front of the Dalton School.

These were people who all knew exactly what Inez Victor did with the stemmed strawberries she picked up at Gristede's (pa.s.sed them in a silver bowl at her famous New Year's Eve parties on Central Park West, according to Vogue); what Inez Victor did with the printed sheets she bought on sale in Bloomingdale's bas.e.m.e.nt (cut them into round tablecloths for her famous Fourth of July parties in Amagansett, according to W); and what Inez Victor had paid for the Ungaro khaki s.h.i.+rtwaists she wore during the 1968 convention, the 1968 Chicago convention during which Harry Victor was photographed for Life getting tear-ga.s.sed in Grant Park.

These were people who all knew someone who knew someone who knew that on the night in 1972 when Harry Victor conceded the California primary before the polls closed Inez Victor flew back to New York on the press plane and sang "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" with an ABC cameraman and the photographer from Rolling Stone.

These people had all seen Inez, via telephoto lens, drying Jessie's fine blond hair by the swimming pool at the house in Amagansett. These people had all seen Inez, in the Daily News, leaving Lenox Hill Hospital with Adlai on the occasion of his first automobile accident. These people had all seen photograph after photograph of the studied clutter in the library of the apartment on Central Park West, the Canton jars packed with marking pencils, the stacks of Le Monde and Foreign Affairs and The Harvard Business Review, the legal pads, the several telephones, the framed snapshots of Harry Victor eating barbecue with Eleanor Roosevelt and of Harry Victor crossing a police line with Coretta King and of Harry Victor playing on the beach at Amagansett with Jessie and with Adlai and with Frances Landau's Russian wolfhound.

These people had taken their toll.

By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had come to view most occasions as photo opportunities.

By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had developed certain mannerisms peculiar to people in the public eye: a way of fixing her gaze in the middle distance, a habit of smoothing her face in repose by pressing up on her temples with her middle fingers; a noticeably frequent blink, as if the photographers' strobes had triggered a continuing flash on her retina.

By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had lost certain details.

I recall being present one morning in a suite in the Hotel Doral in Miami, amid the debris of Harry Victor's 1972 campaign for the nomination, when a feature writer from the a.s.sociated Press asked Inez what she believed to be the "major cost" of public life.

"Memory, mainly," Inez said.

"Memory," the woman from the a.s.sociated Press repeated.

"Memory, yes. Is what I would call the major cost. Definitely." The suite in the Doral that morning was a set being struck. On a sofa that two workmen were pus.h.i.+ng back against a wall Billy Dillon was trying to talk on the telephone. In the foyer a sound man from one of the networks was packing up equipment left the night before. "I believe I can speak for Inez when I say that we're looking forward to a period of being just plain Mr. and Mrs. Victor," Harry had said the night before on all three networks. Inez stood up now and began looking for a clean ashtray on a room-service table covered with half-filled gla.s.ses. "Something like shock treatment," she added.

"You mean you've had shock treatment."

"No. I mean you lose track. As if you'd had shock treatment."

"I see. 'Lose track' of what exactly?"

"Of what happened."

"I see."

"Of what you said. And didn't say."

"I see. Yes. During the campaign."

"Well, no. During your-" Inez looked at me for help. I pretended to be absorbed in the Miami Herald. Inez emptied a dirty ashtray into the lid of a film can and sat down again. "During your whole life."

"You mentioned shock treatment. You haven't personally-"

"I said no. Didn't I say no? I said 'as if.' I said 'something like.' I meant you drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. You lose track."

There was a silence. Billy Dillon cradled the telephone against his shoulder and mimed a backhand volley. "It's a game, Inez, it's tennis," Billy Dillon always said to Inez about interviews. It was a routine between them. I had seen him do it that morning, when Inez said that since I had come especially to see her she did not want to do the AP interview. "Sure you do," Billy Dillon had said. "It's only going to last x minutes. Finite time. For those x minutes you're here to play. You're going to place the ball"-here Billy Dillon had paused, and executed a shadow serve-"inside the lines. The major cost of public life is privacy, Inez, that's an easy shot. The hardest part about Was.h.i.+ngton life is finding a sitter for the Gridiron Dinner. The fun part about Was.h.i.+ngton life is taking friends from home to the Senate cafeteria for navy-bean soup. You've tried the recipe at home but it never tastes the same. Yes, you do collect recipes. Yes, you do worry about the rising cost of feeding a family. Ninety-nine per cent of the people you know in Was.h.i.+ngton are basically concerned with the rising cost of feeding a family. Schools. Mortgages. Programs. You've always viewed victory as a mandate not for a man but for his programs. Now: you view defeat with mixed emotions. Why: because you've learned to treasure the private moments."

"Private moments," Billy Dillon mouthed silently in the suite at the Hotel Doral.

Inez looked deliberately away from Billy Dillon.

"Here's an example." She lit a match, watched it burn, and blew it out. "You looked up the clips on me before you came here."

"I did a little homework, yes." The woman's finger hovered over the stop b.u.t.ton on her tape recorder. Now it was she who looked to me for help. I looked out the window. "Naturally. That's my business. We all do."

"That's my point."

"I'm afraid I don't quite-"

"Things that might or might not be true get repeated in the clips until you can't tell the difference."

"But that's why I'm here. I'm not writing a piece from the clips. I'm writing a piece based on what you tell me."

"You might as well write it from the clips," Inez said. Her voice was reasonable. "Because I've lost track. Which is what I said in the first place."

INEZ VICTOR CLAIMS SHE IS OFTEN MISQUOTED, is the way that went out on the a.s.sociated Press wire. "Somebody up there likes you, it doesn't say INEZ VICTOR DENIES SHOCK TREATMENT," Billy Dillon said when he read it.

8.

I HAVE never been sure what Inez thought about how her days were pa.s.sed during those years she spent in Was.h.i.+ngton and New York. The idea of "expressing" herself seems not to have occurred to her. She held the occasional job but pursued no particular work. Even the details of running a household did not engage her unduly. Her houses were professionally kept and, for all the framed snapshots and studied clutter, entirely impersonal, expressive not of some individual style but only of the conventions then current among the people she saw. Nothing of the remote world in which she had grown up intruded on the world in which she later found herself: the Christians, like many island families, had surrounded themselves with the mementos of their accomplishments, with water colors and painted tea cups and evidence of languages mastered and instruments played, framed recital programs and letters of commendation and the souvenirs of wedding trips and horse shows and trips to China, and it was the absence of any such jetsam that was eccentric in Inez's houses, as if she had buckled her seat belt and the island had dematerialized beneath her.

Of course there were rumors about her. She liked painters, and usually had a table or two of them at her big parties, and a predictable number of people said that she had had an affair with this one or that one or all of them. According to Inez she never had. I know for a fact that she never had what was called a "problem about drinking," another rumor, but the story that she did persisted, partly because Harry Victor did so little to discourage it. At a crowded restaurant in the East Fifties for example Harry Victor was heard asking Inez if she intended to drink her dinner. In that piece of WNBC film shot on the St. Regis Roof, another example, Harry Victor is seen taking a gla.s.s of champagne from Inez's hand and pa.s.sing it out of camera range.

Inez remained indifferent. She seemed to dwell as little on the rest of her life as she did on her jobs, which she tried and abandoned like seasonal clothes. When Harry Victor was in the Justice Department Inez worked, until the twins were born, in a docent capacity at the National Gallery. When Harry Victor left the Justice Department and came up to New York Inez turned up at Vogue, and was given one of those jobs that fas.h.i.+on magazines then kept for well-connected young women in unsettled circ.u.mstances, women who needed a place to pa.s.s the time between houses or marriages or lunches. Later she did a year at Parke-Bernet. She served on the usual boards, benefit committees, commissions for the preservation of wilderness and the enhancement of opportunity; when it became clear that Harry Victor would be making the run for the nomination and that Inez would need what Billy Dillon called a special interest, she insisted, unexpectedly and with considerable vehemence, that she wanted to work with refugees, but it was decided that refugees were an often controversial and therefore inappropriate special interest.

Instead, because Inez was conventionally interested in and by that time moderately knowledgeable about painting, she was named a consultant for the collection of paintings that hung in American emba.s.sies and residences around the world. In theory the wives of new amba.s.sadors would bring Inez the measurements, furnished by the State Department, of the walls they needed to fill, and Inez would offer advice on which paintings best suited not only the wall s.p.a.ce but the mood of the post. "Well, for example, I wouldn't necessarily think of sending a Sargent to Zaire," she explained to an interviewer, but she was hard put to say why. In any case only two new amba.s.sadors were named during Inez's tenure as consultant, which made this special interest less than entirely absorbing. As for wanting to work with refugees, she finally did, in Kuala Lumpur, and it occurred to me when I saw her there that Inez Victor had herself been a kind of refugee. She had the protective instincts of a successful refugee. She never looked back.

9.

OR at least almost never.

I know of one occasion on which Inez Victor did in fact try to look back.

A try, an actual effort.

This effort was, for Inez, uncharacteristically systematic, and took place on the redwood deck of the borrowed house in which Harry and Inez Victor stayed the spring he lectured at Berkeley, between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Inst.i.tutions. It had begun with a quarrel after a faculty dinner in Harry's honor. "I've always tried to talk up to the American people," Harry had said when a physicist at the table questioned his approach to one or another energy program, and it had seemed to Inez that a dispirited pall fell over what had been, given the circ.u.mstances, a lively and pleasant evening.

"Not down," Harry had added. "You talk down to the American people at your peril."

The physicist had pressed his point, which was technical, and abstruse.

"Either Jefferson was right or he wasn't," Harry had said. "I happen to believe he was."

In fact Inez had heard Harry say this a number of times before, usually when he had no facts at hand, and she might never have remarked on it had Harry not mentioned the physicist on the drive home.

"Hadn't done his homework," Harry had said. "Those guys get their n.o.bels and start coasting."

Inez, who was driving, said nothing.

"Unless there's something behind us I don't know about," Harry said as she turned into San Luis Road, "you might try lightening up the foot on the gas pedal."

"Unless you're running for something I don't know about," Inez heard herself say, "you might try lightening up the rhetoric at the dinner table."

There had been a silence.

"That wasn't necessary," Harry said finally, his voice at first stiff and hurt, and then, marshalling for second strike: "I don't really care if you take out your quite palpable unhappiness on me, but I'm glad the children are in New York."

"Away from my quite palpable unhappiness I suppose you mean."

"On the money."

They had gone to bed in silence, and, the next morning, after Harry left for the campus without speaking, Inez took her coffee and a package of cigarettes out into the sun on the redwood deck and sat down to consider the phrase "quite palpable unhappiness." It did not seem to her that she was palpably unhappy, but neither did it seem that she was palpably happy. "Happiness" and "unhappiness" did not even seem to be cards in the hand she normally played, and there on the deck in the thin morning sunlight she resolved to reconstruct the details of occasions on which she recalled being happy. As she considered such occasions she was struck by their insignificance, their absence of application to the main events of her life. In retrospect she seemed to have been most happy in borrowed houses, and at lunch.

She recalled being extremely happy eating lunch by herself in a hotel room in Chicago, once when snow was drifting on the window ledges. There was a lunch in Paris that she remembered in detail: a late lunch with Harry and the twins at Pre Catelan in the rain. She remembered rain streaming down the big windows, rain blowing in the trees, the branches brus.h.i.+ng the gla.s.s and the warm light inside. She remembered Jessie crowing with delight and pointing imperiously at a poodle seated on a gilt chair across the room. She remembered Harry unb.u.t.toning Adlai's wet sweater, kissing Jessie's wet hair, pouring them each a half gla.s.s of white wine.

There was an entire day in Hong Kong that she managed to reconstruct, a day she had spent alone with Jessie in a borrowed house overlooking Repulse Bay. She and Harry had dropped Adlai in Honolulu with Janet and d.i.c.k Ziegler and they had bundled Jessie onto a plane to Hong Kong and when they landed at dawn they learned that Harry was expected in Saigon for a situation briefing. Harry had flown immediately down to Saigon and Inez had waited with Jessie in this house that belonged to the chief of the Time bureau in Hong Kong. The potted begonias outside that house had made Inez happy and the parched lawn made her happy and the particular cast of the sun on the sea made her happy and it even made her happy that the Time bureau chief had mentioned, as he gave her the keys at the airport, that baby cobras had recently been seen in the garden. This introduction of baby cobras into the day had lent Inez a sense of transcendent usefulness, a reason to carry Jessie wherever Jessie wanted to go. She had carried Jessie from the porch to the swing in the garden. She had carried Jessie from the swing in the garden to the bench from which they could watch the sun on the sea. She had carried Jessie even from the house to the government car that returned at sundown to take them to the hotel where Harry was due at midnight.

There in the sun on the redwood deck on San Luis Road Inez began to think of Berkeley as another place in which she might later remember being extremely happy, another borrowed house, and she resolved to keep this in mind, but by June of that year, back in New York, she was already losing the details. That was the June during which Adlai had the accident (the second accident, the bad one, the accident in which the fifteen-year-old from Denver lost her left eye and the function of one kidney), and it was also the June, 1973, during which Inez found Jessie on the floor of her bedroom with the disposable needle and the gla.s.sine envelope in her Snoopy wastebasket.

"Let me die and get it over with," Jessie said. "Let me be in the ground and go to sleep."

The doctor came in a sweat suit.