At precisely nine o’clock Wednesday morning, Maxwell Harper knocked on the door of the Oval Study upstairs and then opened it and stepped inside. The room was empty. His immediate reaction was one of annoyance; he had called the President an hour earlier to request a private appointment, and Augustine had told him to come here at nine instead of to the Oval Office, and if there was one thing Harper detested it was a lack of punctuality.
He crossed the room and sat in one of the leather armchairs before the fireplace, placing his briefcase carefully on the floor beside him. The drapes were drawn across the windows that looked out on the south lawn, and the room seemed dark, oppressively cluttered. Too much furniture, haphazardly arranged; and too much emphasis on trains. Augustine’s collection of railroadiana-a dozen different types of switch-stand lanterns, locomotive headlamps, an early telegrapher’s outfit, a ticket-validating machine, glass cases filled with brass baggage checks and advertising memorabilia and dime novels and popular fiction dealing with railroads-made it look more like an obscure museum than a White House study. Harper himself was a neat, fastidious man whose bachelor apartment near the French embassy was a model of functional conservatism; he had always felt out of place here.
As he waited, his annoyance modulated into determination. Things, he had decided, were approaching a serious crisis point: the Israel gaffe, Augustine’s inattention to the Indian problem in Montana, his decision to run off still again to The Hollows were all danger signals not to be treated lightly. The President was backing himself into a political corner, and that did not bode well for the country or for anyone in his administration.
He was badly worn out, which was understandable because the man had worked like a demon for the past three and a half years; but that was a symptom, not an explanation. The fact was, it was not Augustine who was responsible for what was happening, it was those with whom he had surrounded himself in responsible, influential positions. Men such as Franz Oberdorfer, and perhaps Julius Wexford and Austin Briggs-men Harper had not approved of from the beginning. They had given the President poor advice or not enough advice, used him to further their own careers, even circumvented him entirely like that demagogue Oberdorfer; and Augustine, never a forceful leader, had begun to buckle under the pressure and the dissension.
This close to the convention, a wholesale firing of these people was impossible because it would completely undermine public faith in the President. What could be done, what had to be done, was to make Augustine realize both the danger and his own fallibility and then to take steps to rectify matters. Rifts with the press had to be sutured, a strong and vocal reelection campaign had to be implemented, concessions to the National Committee and to certain special-interest groups and to the Jewish electorate had to be made that would induce them to remain in the President’s corner. Then, after renomination and reelection, Oberdorfer and the others could be systematically replaced The door to the Monroe Room across the study opened, interrupting Harper’s reverie, and he glanced up. But it was not the President who entered; it was the First Lady.
Harper rose immediately. “Good morning, Mrs. Augustine,” he said.
She hesitated for a moment, looking at him, and then came slowly across the room. She wore a beige pantsuit that accentuated the slim lines of her body, and her hair was done in a casual ponytail tied with a blue velvet ribbon. Harper felt the palms of his hands turn moist; she never failed to have that effect on him.
“Good morning,” she said, and stopped a half-dozen paces away from him. Her tone was cool and curiously dull, and he realized in the dim light that she looked as tired as the President: small lines beneath her eyes, a pinched look to the corners of her mouth. He wondered if she understood the seriousness of Augustine’s position. Surely she did understand, as intelligent and perceptive as she had always been.
He said, “I had a nine o’clock appointment with the President, so I came straight up. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind… Maxwell.”
“He’s ten minutes late,” Harper said. “Do you know where he is?”
A loose strand of hair had fallen away from her temple and she brushed it back into place in that absent, caressing way some attractive women had, both conscious and unconscious of its sensuality. “He had a meeting at eight o’clock with the security affairs advisor,” she said. “I imagine he’ll be here shortly.”
She seemed to want to say something else, but did not; Harper had the impression that she was vaguely ill at ease. She was usually so poised, so self-assured, and yet in his presence she was oddly subject to fluctuating moods. Sometimes she seemed cold and distant, as if she did not like or trust him completely; at other times she was open and friendly in a way that bordered on affection. It occurred to him now, as it had before, that she intuited his carefully concealed attraction for her and perhaps responded to it. That under different circumstances she might have been receptive to him as an intimate.
Or as a lover? he thought.
Pointless thinking, damn it. Pointless.
At length she said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.”
“Of course, Mrs. Augustine.”
Harper watched her walk across to the hallway door, the play of her hips beneath the suit pants. When she got there, she paused and looked back at him, as if she still wanted to say something more; but again she did not speak. And a moment later she was gone.
Frowning, he returned to the chair by the fireplace and sat down again. He wished he understood her better, what motivated her, what went on behind that dispassionate public facade. Did Augustine himself understand her? Did anyone? She was the President’s wife, she had by everyone’s testimony more to do with this administration than any First Lady since Mrs. Woodrow Wilson-and yet, could it be that she was not working with the President so much as using their collaboration as cover for some sort of personal cachet?
He could not quite shake the pervasive feeling that she was something more and something less than what she seemed to be.