Landfall, p.49
Landfall, page 49
“The boxes! We put them somewhere in the back when the guy who replaced you moved on—what, five years ago? We made a couple of queries after we saw they’d been left behind. We didn’t hear back, and then we never followed up.” She led him into a tangled storeroom and they rummaged through the back of it.
“Yep! Five of ’em,” Grace announced.
Ross recognized the three cartons containing Lyle Saxon’s files from the 1930s, along with two other boxes he’d begun filling up himself.
“Any suggestions?” asked Grace.
“Would you feel comfortable consigning them to me?”
“Of course. You were the head man.”
Ross told her he’d be back for them tomorrow and would make sure they got to the proper repository. On his way out he took another look at the “Local” shelves and spotted a coffee-table book devoted to the ever-more-popular World War II Museum. He averted his gaze and left the store.
* * *
The following afternoon, six hours out of New Orleans on I-20, the boxes in his trunk, Ross called Deborah to ask if he could drop in for dinner when he got to Dallas.
“That would be fantastic!” she replied. Archer would be home and thrilled to see him, even if Caitlyn, just graduated from UC, remained in Boulder for the summer. “David will be happy to have you here.”
That was no less than the truth. Deborah’s second husband was a lovely man whose arrival in her life, like a teaspoon of baking soda dropped into a glass of red water, had almost instantly eradicated her bitterness toward Ross. For the past several years she had been wanting to meet Holley (“Let’s not wait until Caitlyn’s wedding”), rather as Elizabeth Edwards, shortly before dying, had met Rielle Hunter’s daughter.
John Edwards was one item on the long list of things Ross didn’t think much about. He had been praising the candidate’s potential to Mary Hatfield on Saturday, January 14, 2007, when his phone rang with the news from Baghdad. A year later, when he was back in New Orleans, Father Montrose and Mrs. Caine, respectively impassioned for Obama and Hillary during their presidential-primary duel, told him the story of the “bloody shirt”—the nasty little Edwards revelation they had witnessed at the end of Mrs. Boggs’s party. Touched that they had so long withheld it, he otherwise didn’t much care. Even back in ’05 and ’06 he understood the senator to have been one more spar atop the freshwater deluge that swept over him, something he grabbed on to without realizing that the fatal torrent lay farther on. Once it arrived, Edwards—and all of politics—floated far out of his mind forever.
“Where’s your bag?” cried Deborah, waving him into the house with a big smile.
“On the backseat. I’ve got a hotel near SMU.”
“No, no, no. Stay here. We insist.”
August 3, 12:10 p.m.; The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Southern Methodist University
He stared through the glass at the ornate silver samovar, a gift from Vladimir Putin. What was it that Bush used to call him? As Ross tried to remember the nickname, three girls on a school tour chattered about the contents of the next display case: a necklace, from Italy’s Berlusconi, to the First Lady; a pair of hurricane lamps from the second inaugural.
He moved on to the twisted girders from the Trade Center; the posterboards for No Child Left Behind and AIDS relief in Africa; the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it Katrina exhibit. One photo was captioned THE NATIONAL GUARD RESCUED 87,000. No mud-caked artifacts? Not even a SCREW FALLUJAH, SAVE NEW ORLEANS T-shirt?
He slept-walked through the rest, until the sight of a pistol taken off Saddam Hussein during his capture made him feel the urgent need to get out of here. He had a half hour until his appointment with the archivist he’d spoken to on the phone; he would kill the time on a bench along the Laura Bush Promenade, the brick walk running past the main SMU library, a tribute the governor had donated in 1999 before becoming president. It was a pleasant, unremarkable stretch of campus that Ross had ambled over hundreds of times before he ever came to Washington. He now sat across from a building in which he often used to teach. James Madison and the Arts (1999), his own book, still rested on a shelf in the nearby library stacks, where it had been even before he irreversibly hitched his little wagon to George W. Bush’s erratic star.
A guttering scholarly impulse had motivated him to bring the boxes here. It was where the records, at least the modern portion of them, ought to be; the Bush archivist would figure out wherever else Lyle Saxon’s old stuff should go. Only the museum portion of the Bush complex was open on Saturdays, but Matthew Lang, the research-library archivist, had agreed to come in and take possession of the material this afternoon. At one p.m., as they shook hands in the lobby, Ross judged him to be twenty years younger than himself. He tried, with incomplete success, to make conversation about his NEAH days while they rode the elevator to the reading room.
“It’s not very different during business hours,” Matthew informed him, gesturing toward all the empty desks. The building had been open only a matter of months, and while the museum portion of it might already be going full tilt, no more than the tiniest fraction of the administration’s documents had been processed and catalogued for researchers coming to the library. “It’s going to take many years,” said Matthew.
A porter, who’d been dispatched to Ross’s car with keys to the trunk, soon came in with the boxes on a dolly. While being shown their contents, the archivist asked Mr. Weatherall if, on his tour of the museum, he’d seen the display devoted to the NEAH’s medalists in the arts and humanities.
“I didn’t explore as thoroughly as I might have,” Ross confessed.
“Maybe you’d like to sit for an oral history sometime?” Matthew suggested. “That’s one of the projects I’m hoping to get up and running soon.”
“Uh, sure,” said Ross. “But I don’t think I’d have much to contribute.” His desire to be back on the road to New Orleans now felt overwhelming.
“Will you excuse me?” asked Matthew, who went to answer a phone in the adjoining office. In the moments he was gone, Ross explored the still-scant collection of published books and finding aids on the shelves running past the pristine work stations.
“Mr. Weatherall,” said Matthew, reentering the reading room in a state of considerable excitement, “your cell phone is going to ring in about one minute.” He told Ross to feel free to take the call here; he would go to a desk at the front of the room to sit—and overhear.
“Hello?” asked Ross, once the phone rang.
“This is one hell of a surprise, Weatherman.”
* * *
Three hours later, looking out the windows at some of Prairie Chapel’s cedar trees, he thought: This was something that she saw. Maybe exactly what had been in her field of vision three days after Christmas in ’06, when he’d talked to her from that coffee place on Decatur.
I need to make one more trip to Iraq.
He walked from window to window in the big living room, standing before each for several seconds, wanting to be certain that before he left here he would have had the precise view she did. He had been invited by an aide to sit down and make himself at home while he waited for the ex-president, but he was too nervous for that, and the room’s totems—Afghan rugs, somebody’s oil portrait of Tony Blair—interested him less than everything beyond the glass.
“Laura’s in Dallas,” said the familiar voice now coming up behind him. “Want one of these?”
George W. Bush handed Ross a Lone Star and poured himself some iced tea from a pitcher on a sideboard. The two of them sat, and Bush said, “It’s good to see you again.”
“Thank you, sir. It’s good to see you, too.”
The president explained the coincidence that had allowed for his short-notice invitation. About once a month he had to call the archivist at the insistence of Harriet Miers or Freddy Ford, who ran his little Dallas office; it was usually about some FOIA request they were urging him to oppose. “They found Lang-Lang at the Library this morning, and when we made a minute of small talk he mentioned that a guy had just come over from New Orleans with some records from the NEAH. I knew it was you.”
It had taken Ross a couple of hours to drive here, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Bush filled the silence: “I’m sorry—I’m still sorry—for your loss. How is your little girl?”
“Not so little anymore,” Ross replied, automatically. “She’s crazy about ballet. She goes to a charter school just outside the French Quarter.” He hoped he hadn’t hit the word “charter” too hard. He hadn’t meant to sound sarcastic—or had he? “She’s as calm as her mother was volatile.”
“You’re angry at me. It’s okay.”
“I am angry,” said Ross. “I’m angry whenever I manage to feel anything at all. But no, I don’t have a right to be angry with you. I know you were trying to keep her at home, that you’d come up with that museum job—”
“But it was my war.”
“Yes, it was. And she went back to it willingly.” I’m trying to be honest—I want to make one more trip. “She would have hated that we lost it,” he added.
“Who told you we did that?” Bush’s eyes narrowed, as if talking to an interviewer.
“Look at ISIL,” Ross countered, halfheartedly. The terror group had just freed hundreds of prisoners from Abu Ghraib. “They say they’re heading for Fallujah.”
“If my successor had gotten a status-of-forces agreement—what Allison was over there to get started—we’d have been able to keep some troops behind and save everything the surge accomplished. But the current president, the one I never criticize in public, couldn’t be bothered. Check the record: you’ll see that Biden said we left Iraq in good shape.”
“I guess the historians—I’m not really one of them anymore—will sort it out. And maybe they’ll take a second look at you, like they did with Truman. I hear that’s what you’re hoping for.” Unable to keep an edge off his voice, Ross knew he sounded like the angry subset of bereaved families that had sometimes excoriated the president through the mails or over the phone or while standing next to him in a hospital room.
Bush wanted to pull back from all this, to be himself, not his policies. His next words came with an entirely different tone, from a very different place: “Where is she buried?”
A kind of laughing sob, loud and all-consuming, burst from Ross: “In Lubbock!” He paused to get hold of himself. “About a hundred feet from where we had our first kiss.”
“Buddy Holly’s grave?” asked Bush. “She told me about that.”
“I was too paralyzed to do anything for about six months. Mrs. O’Connor, her mother, thought I’d probably wind up staying in Texas and decided it was okay to bury her there. But I went back to New Orleans that fall. Since my own mother died, I’ve never once been to Lubbock.”
“I tried to call you.”
“I know, sir. You sent a nice letter.”
He was remembering the plane, with her body and three others, landing a few minutes before midnight at Dover, that polite, well-swept charnel house. He could remember Mrs. O’Connor’s arm around him, and the sight of Rumsfeld, there unofficially, at a great remove, opaquely grieving for her, guessing wrongly that Ross and Mrs. O’Connor, whoever they might be, were connected to somebody in one of the other coffins.
“Another beer?” Bush asked him.
“I’ll switch to the iced tea. I have to drive home.” He had eight hours ahead of him on I-10.
“We can put you up in Waco. Or here.”
“No, sir. Thank you.”
Bush winked as he poured the tea. “I suppose I should apologize for having made beer drinkers out of you both.”
Ross thought: Actually, that would have been your mother’s doing. And the charm in the wink made him realize why she would have tried to set this man outside the false validations of politics by a small mischievous means that became available. The iPhone in Ross’s pocket still carried a jpeg of Ann Richards’s letter and one of Barbara Bush’s check to her friend in Lubbock, what Bill Bright had finally shown him early in ’08 when Rukia Hasani closed on her house—a place she’d now outgrown as Mrs. Michael McNichol, a prosperous truck dealer’s wife. Rukia had two young sons and an adjunct-language-instructor’s job, in Arabic Studies, at Texas Tech.
It was this American success story he chose to tell Bush rather than the secret of the Bash. To do otherwise seemed somehow wrong: Allie had died before he could tell her the details. And, as with so much else, what would be the point?
“Is there a lady in your life?” the president asked.
“They come and go. Mostly go.”
“Still have any contact with folks from your agency?” It was clear to Ross that Bush couldn’t remember the name of the Chairman he’d appointed.
“I’m sometimes in touch with a pal in the counsel’s office there. He tells me Donald Trump has just leased the building; the Endowment is going to be evicted so that Trump can turn the place into a hotel. My friend’s seen the plan for my former office—‘enough gold-plating for one of Saddam Hussein’s old bathrooms,’ he says.”
“Come on outside,” said Bush, as if fearing the conversation might turn back to Iraq.
The beginning of a sunset was catching the cedar trees and the clusters of firewheel flowers. Amidst the porch furniture Ross was surprised to find an easel supporting a blank stretched canvas. A box of paints sat on a wrought-iron table.
“I was out here before I got my orders to talk to Lang-Lang at the library. Never really got going today.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Ross asked.
“Since last summer. I’m better than you’d think. And I’m teachable. Sit down.”
The chair he offered Ross faced his own straight on.
“Do you mind?” asked Bush, picking up a pencil.
“No, sir,” answered Ross, not sure what else he could reasonably say.
The president sketched some lines that he soon began painting over. He was using oils, but Ross’s mind went to the Afghan watercolor of the father and mother and child—the repaired picture whose arrival had preceded, by a day, the repatriation of Allie’s body. It now hung, her Post-it placed under the glass of the frame, in the living room on St. Ann Street.
“How much does your little girl know about it?” Bush eventually asked, not looking away from his work.
“A lot of it,” Ross answered. “About six months ago she started asking more questions—she now knows what a mortar attack is. She knew her mother ‘lived in the Green Zone.’ She thought it was painted green, but…”
“You don’t have to,” Bush said softly.
Abruptly coming to life, Ross asked: “Would you paint them, too? Not just me?” He took out his iPhone and brought up a picture of Allie and Holley that Emile had taken in New Orleans during their last and only Christmas together.
“Come in closer,” said Bush. “Hold it up and hold it steady.” He exchanged his brush for the pencil and began adding to his plan for the picture. He worked very fast, with a relaxed confidence; he soon went back to the paintbrush. Ross kept his gaze straight ahead, except for one stolen glance at the firewheels, ablaze in the lowering sun.
Bush said nothing, painted steadily for a considerable while, until without any urgency he said to Ross, “I’ve learned something since I started doing this.” His eyes went from Ross’s face to the iPhone and then to the canvas. “I’ve learned that shadows have color.”
What he didn’t tell him was that painting had let him discover a whole world of in-between. It had begun to slow him down, to stop the alternations that for so many years had enlivened him and worn him out, made him succeed and made him fail. He now lived along a continuum instead of on a whipsaw. He had started to understand that gray was as real as green, doubts as solid as certainties.
The ex-president’s eyes glistened, and for a moment Ross thought he might wink again. But Bush turned his head away from Allie’s unnerving digital smile and looked out past the porch. He pointed, with the brush, above and beyond the cedars, to some clouds.
“Weatherman,” he said softly, “it’s gonna rain.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In narrative and dialogue, Landfall tries not to reconstruct actuality but to reimagine it. As I’ve noted in earlier novels: “I have operated along the always sliding scale of historical fiction. The text contains deviations from fact that some readers will regard as unpardonable and others will deem unworthy of notice. But this remains a work of fiction, not history.”
I didn’t realize I was writing the last volume of a trilogy until my editor, Dan Frank, encouraged me to see Landfall as the concluding portion of a political narrative that began with Watergate (2012) and extended itself through Finale (2015), two novels I had conceived of as discrete entities. Dan’s calm and incomparable guidance on matters large and small has sustained me over ten books and across twenty-five years—a publishing era as tumultuous as our political one. This quick expression of my gratitude doesn’t begin to cover my debt to him.
Within the walls of Penguin Random House, I also owe thanks to Sonny Mehta; Edward Kastenmeier; Altie Karper; Nicholas Latimer; Michiko Clark; Betsy Sallee; Vanessa Rae Haughton; and many others. A couple of blocks away, at my agent’s office, I am grateful to Andrew Wylie, Kristina Moore, Jessica Calagione, and Katie Cacouris.
A residency at Yaddo during the summer of 2017 helped me to write this book; I would like to thank Elaina H. Richardson and the colony’s staff.
Ed Cohen has once again been my dogged copy editor, and Thomas Giannettino my sharp-eyed proofreader.
