“Darling!” Steed called to Ethel in the bedroom. “We’ve got to do something for the herons.”
“Are they back?”
“They were. Trying to find open water.”
“Why don’t they eat the corn? Or go where the ducks are?”
The water at the big opening was too deep for them to fish; corn was a food they did not eat. What they required was some wading place in which they could feed in their accustomed manner, and across the entire Eastern Shore there were no such places.
The Steeds would make one. All morning they sweated at the onerous job of breaking ice along the shore, and by noon they had laid open a considerable waterway. They were eating a late lunch when they heard the familiar and now-loved cry, and they ran to the window to watch their friends feed.
But in those few minutes ice had formed again and the birds found nothing. In panic they tested all their feeding places, and all were barren.
“What will they do?” Mrs. Steed cried, tears in her eyes.
Owen, studying the birds with his glasses, saw how emaciated they were, but had not the courage to inform his wife of their certain doom. The herons, stepping along like ballerinas grown old, tried one last time to penetrate the ice, looked down in bewilderment and flew off to their frozen roosts. They were seen no more.
During the first five months of residence at the Refuge, Owen Steed followed one invariable rule. Whenever he left the plantation in his car, he turned right, even though an excellent road ran to the left toward various places he would normally have wished to visit. But that road also led past the Paxmore place, and he was not yet ready for such an excursion. But in February he relaxed, and one morning told his wife, “I think it’s about time I saw Pusey,” and she replied, “I was wondering how long you could delay.”
He dressed carefully, as if for hunting, heavy shoes, rough tweed jacket, canvaslike trousers, a hound’s-tooth cap. He wanted to appear casual, with no touch of the business administrator, but when he looked at the hall mirror he felt disgusted: Totally fake. And he returned to his dressing room for khaki pants, plaid shirt and corduroy jacket: At least I look honest. He winced at the inappropriateness of this word.
He was not pleased with himself as he drove to the end of his drive, turned slowly left and headed for Peace Cliff. He had not seen Pusey Paxmore since that day in August 1972 when the prim Quaker had visited Tulsa. Who could forget that day—more than four years ago, almost five centuries away in moral significance? When he saw the plain entrance to the Paxmore lands, and the road leading up to the telescope house, he wanted to pass on, but realized that to do so would be craven. With no enthusiasm he turned into the lane, noticed favorably the crape myrtle trees which would be lovely in July, and parked by the front door.
After he knocked, it was some moments before anyone answered. Then he heard shuffling footsteps, a twisting of the old lock on the door and a creaking hinge. What happened next surprised him, for when the door finally opened he found neither Pusey nor his wife. Instead, a slatternly woman who seemed quite out of place in the neat telescope house growled, “So you’ve come to take over?” And before he could respond, she slipped past him, jumped into a ramshackle pickup and spun her tires in the gravel.
“Who are you?” Steed shouted.
“Lily Turlock. You’ll find him upstairs.” And she was gone.
When he turned back to the house he heard a fumbling at the door. “Who’s out there?” a tremulous voice inquired. Then plaintively: “Oh, it’s you, Owen. I wondered when you’d come. Do step in.”
The door opened slowly, as if the man inside had no spare strength, and then Steed saw the trembling figure. He was aghast. In the old days Pusey Paxmore had been a proper Quaker, erect, bright of eye and modest of manner; his principal characteristic had been his reserve and the heightened intellectuality he brought to any discussion. But now, his hair completely white and his cheeks sunken, he seemed almost a derelict. To compare this wasted figure with its trim predecessor was most painful. Steed, realizing that some greeting had to be offered, said quickly, “How you doing, Pusey?”
“One adjusts.”
“I’m retired, too. Bought the Refuge.”
“So I heard. Come in.” Paxmore led the way into a living room whose large windows overlooked the Choptank; they had been a renovation in the 1960s when Pusey was earning considerable sums in government. “I often wonder if we did right in breaking through the old walls,” he said querulously. “One doesn’t want to disturb old buildings, but one doesn’t want to live cooped up, either.”
This was a most unfortunate metaphor, and each man backed away from it.
“Tell me, Owen, how was life in Oklahoma?” Pusey asked, quietly changing the subject.
“One thing, Pusey. You became an ardent football fan or you withered. I helped the university to three national championships.”
“What do you mean? You helped?”
“Scholarships. I gave scholarships to brutish young men who could neither read nor write. Did you happen to follow the case of the young fellow from Texas? They cooked his high-school grades.”
“What do you mean cooked?”
“Gave him A’s when he earned F’s. So he’d be eligible for my scholarship.”
“You were always generous,” Paxmore said, and this was so appallingly inappropriate that Steed thought: Jesus Christ, you can’t say a word that doesn’t have triple meanings. He was sorry he had come.
With an effort to get the conversation onto a less volatile track, he stood by the window and asked, “Have you watched our island sinking back into the bay?”
“I have indeed! I went over there the other day and calculated that according to old maps ... Did you know that Captain John Smith drew the first chart of Devon? He did, and since his day the land has been receding at a pretty constant rate.” Pusey had been good at mathematics and liked such problems. “I figure the island has lost about thirty-five feet a year. Erosion coming at it from all sides. Sad.”
The two men looked at the faint outline of the island and a mournful silence prevailed, broken when Steed tried a new approach. “How’re your boys doing, Pusey?”
“Not well. They tried Harvard, but it must have been very difficult for them ...”
“They didn’t scuttle out?”
“As a matter of fact, they did. They’ll find their sea legs. They’re basically good boys.”
“Hardly boys.”
“I think of them as such. How are your children?”
“Clara’s in Paris, I think. She did the Torremolinos bit.”
“Your son?”
“I’m worried about Logan. Divorced. Knocking around Boston, of all places. Damnit, Pusey! Why has this generation ... You take my wife—one of the finest women Oklahoma ever produced. You’d think that with a mother like her the children ...” Pause. “We haven’t seen either of them in three years.”
“We don’t see ours much, either, although when I was in Scanderville, I’d have been satisfied for them to keep away. They came, though, that I must say.”
“Was it bad up there?”
“Jail is always bad. On some it has a worse effect than on others. At my age ...”
This was the moment when Steed should have spoken openly of the tragedy that had overtaken them in their ardent support of the President, but in cowardly fashion he shied away. Instead of broaching the subject he had come to discuss, he said lamely, “You must come over and meet Ethel. She’s a fine person, breath of fresh air.”
“We could use that on the Eastern Shore.”
“We’ll get together. One of these days I’ll give you a call.”
“That’ll be nice,” Paxmore said, and he walked his old friend to the car, watching as he drove down the lane between the myrtle trees.
When Steed reached home his wife said, “You didn’t stay very long,” and he said, “We engaged in a few pleasantries,” and she raged, “Owen, you didn’t go all the way there to s
ay nothing!”
He tried several times to explain, then fell into a chair and mumbled, “I can be a real shit.”
“Yes, you can!” she cried. “Owen, get out of that chair right now. We’re going to the Paxmores’ ...”
“Ethel! I can’t. We’ll find the right time.”
“The right time was six months ago. Now, damnit, you get cracking, and I mean it.”
She thundered her way to the door, kicked it open and waited for her husband to follow.
When he walked to the left side of the car she pushed him aside and said, “I’ll drive. You might not get there.” And she roared down the driveway, scattering pebbles, and without slackening her speed went up the Paxmore hill, where Amanda was parking her car after a marketing trip to Patamoke.
“I’m Ethel Steed,” she said, extending her hand. “We’ve come to apologize.”
With steel-like composure Amanda said, “Not to me, to Pusey.”
“I mean to Pusey. He was a heroic man, Mrs. Paxmore, and we are most tardy.”
“It’s difficult,” Amanda said. She led the way back into the house, called for her husband, and stood waiting with the Steeds until Pusey appeared, head down and shoulders bent. Steed’s performance earlier in the day had distressed him, and he had been brooding in his room.
“Pusey,” his wife began, “the Steeds have come back.”
“I haven’t met Mrs. Steed,” he said, assuming that the evasions of the morning were to be repeated. They were not.
“We’ve come to apologize,” Ethel said, and she approached with hands extended. “You were heroic,” she said, grasping him by his frail white fingers.
“I think we should sit down,” he said, going to a chair by the window, and there the four sat, quietly, without displayed emotion, as they reviewed in painful detail their misbehaviors.
“You bore the brunt for all of us,” Ethel said, “and Owen should have been here six months ago to tell you how much we honor your sacrifices.”
“Rewards and punishment fall unevenly,” Paxmore said, and with this breaking of the dam he began the therapy of exploration, speaking without interruption, unleashing a veritable flood of memories and assessments:
“I was honored, any man would be, to have been taken into the White House, and at such a high level. To be close to power is not a trivial thing, and to influence both legislation and executive operations for good is something that any reasonable man could aspire to. During the first term I am not being immodest when I say that I accomplished much. Take the water legislation, the study of Arab rights, the increased contributions for widowed mothers. I felt that I was continuing the work of Woolman Paxmore and Ruth Brinton. It was Christianity in action, and I am still proud of the things I attempted.
“But I was not an ordinary political agent in Washington. I was set apart. For I had seen my family’s business go up in smoke during the civil riots. I had seen the hatred in the streets. I had lived close to real revolution. Better than anyone in the White House, I understood how close to disaster we were in 1969 and 1970.
“So when the ’72 election approached, I saw it as my duty to reelect Mr. Nixon, to give him a chance to save this nation. I had seen the fires. I had tasted the revolution, and I was determined that it should not spread. When I talked with you in Tulsa in the summer of 1972, with the possibility staring us in the face that George McGovern might be President, with bombings and disruptions threatening from all sides, the danger was very clear and very present. Nothing less than the safety of our nation was at stake.
“I was most relieved, Owen, when you assured me that you would contrive some way to pass us two hundred thousand dollars of your corporate funds. This would enable me to support good men in New York and California and Texas, three states we thought we must win. Don’t forget, it was reasonable for you to give the money, too, because your way of life was imperiled. All good principles were being corroded and only our victory could stay the drift.
“If there was one terrible error in the Watergate fiasco, it was that Mr. Nixon never found a platform from which he could state the true condition of this country in 1969 through 1972. We tottered on the brink of anarchy, and if we had not held fast, we would have lost this nation. You told me that day, Owen, that your own two children were making bombs, and devastating the university, and preaching rebellion. It was everywhere, and it was my conviction that if we had lost the election in November ’72, revolution would have been upon us.
“Well, I did what I could to stem it. I collected the money. I arranged for its laundering in Mexico. And I lied to save my country’s destiny. I have no regrets, except a foolish one. At the hearing they treated me like a sad old clown, made me laughable as the eyes of the nation looked on. Sam Dash, head of the interrogators, didn’t even bother to question me. Turned the job over to a young fellow just out of law school. It was his big moment, and he played me like a trout. So I allowed myself to look the bumbling idiot, the serf loyal to his knight. And do you know why? Because then I didn’t have to tell the whole truth. I was able to protect my President and my friends.”
He stopped. This last sentence brought the monologue into the present, and Ethel Steed looked meaningfully at her husband, who said, “Pusey, those of us in debt to you will never forget the burden you bore.”
“Mr. Nixon forgot,” Amanda Paxmore said. “All the time Pusey was in jail, not one word of condolence. Not to him, not to me.”
“We didn’t do it for praise,” her husband said, his jaw tightening as it had before the television cameras. “We did it because the nation was threatened.”
“And I appreciate it, Pusey.” Steed wanted to let his apology go at that, not through any meanness of spirit but because the memory of that dreadful summer when John Dean was testifying was too anguishing to relive. It was Ethel who conveyed the real apology, and like Paxmore, she spoke without pause:
“We sat paralyzed before the television, wondering when the vast bubble of make-believe would shatter, leaving us in headlines across the country. Greasy Thumb Polewicz brought no laughter in our family, because the money he lugged about in the paper bag came from us. When they traced the funds to Mexico City, it was our money they were talking about. And when we heard that you were going on the stand, Pusey, we shuddered. Because you knew the facts.
“On the night before you were to testify, Owen and I tried to make a brave face of it by going to the country club, as if we weren’t living on the edge of a volcano. It was rather pleasant, as I recall. Mr. Nixon had a lot of support in Tulsa. I don’t believe there could have been a single person there that night who had voted for McGovern, so we were among friends. I suppose that’s what got to us, for we realized that if next day you told where the money had come from, illegal corporate funds from us, these very people would have to act shocked and fire Owen, and he might well have gone to jail. Suddenly—”
Owen Steed was not in the habit of allowing his wife to make excuses for his misconduct, and now he felt obligated to interrupt her narration regarding that summer of 1973:
“What happened was simple. I fainted. The realization that my world was collapsing and that I might go to jail overwhelmed me, and I fainted. Not flat on the floor. Just my head in my plate. Mayonnaise in my hair. Waiters explaining to the other tables that I had choked.
“Pusey, when you were on that stand we died with you. But damnit, even as we died we kept praying, ‘I hope he doesn’t talk.’ And you didn’t.”
No one spoke. The men looked out at the Choptank, and after a while Pusey surprised the Steeds by lapsing into the Quaker speech. “Would thee like something to drink?”
“That’s a charming phrase,” Ethel said.
“As I withdraw from the battle ...” He did not like this imagery and changed it. “I’m an old man now. I grow closer to my origins.”
“I came back for the same reason,” Owen said. “To be closer to my origins ... and because I was fired.”
“You
were fired?”
“Well, eased out. I was so shaken by Watergate, I couldn’t focus on the job. Six or seven members of the board had to know I gave you the money. Hell, they arranged it. And they knew that if you testified openly, I’d be the one they’d throw to the wolves. I wasn’t happy with them and they weren’t happy with me. So they paid me off and kicked me out.”
“But with thy name intact,” Amanda Paxmore said, not acidly but with a directness which could not be misconstrued.
Pusey did not wait for Steed to defend himself. “No sensible man expects even-handed justice. But can thee guess what gives me my severest punishment?” He seemed driven to castigate himself. “To sit in this room day after day and realize how far I strayed from what I was. Did thee ever know my father, Woolman Paxmore? A living saint. He used to tell us children in his wonderfully simple manner, “Thee has only one obligation to society, to bear witness.” He warned me that before my life ended I would face every moral dilemma the Bible speaks of. And I did.”
Owen started to interrupt, but the flood continued. “I wonder if young men attending their ethics classes in university realize that in later life every abstraction they discuss will become a reality. I was called upon to face every dilemma ... save murder. And the other night as I was reviewing the White House days I even began wondering about that.”
He pondered this ugly possibility, then said with a half-chuckle, “But the big lesson of my life I didn’t learn in college or from my father. It came in high school from my Aunt Emily, the one who fought against the disfranchisement of the blacks. She was an old woman when I knew her, old and funny, and we paid her no attention. But she insisted on memorization, and the passage I speak of came in a play I’ve never seen. I doubt if anyone ever sees it, King Henry the Eighth. Cardinal Wolsey ...” He stopped abruptly. “Didn’t thy family have dealings with Wolsey?”
“We did. Toadied to him while he was in power, turned against him when he was not.”
“Wolsey is departing, on his way to exile and perhaps to the scaffold, and as he leaves his White House, where he had exercised such power, he reflects: