For a month he did nothing about Lily. The country lay encased in snow, but the Barbarians had occupied neutral territory, and it was war that occupied the thoughts of everyone. In space the Ring of Fire turned obediently, recording with little clicks and clacks the miniature movements of toy armaments far below. And were they silent, these clicking shutters, the computer counters, when there was no atmosphere to carry sound and no one in the vacuum of space to hear?
The President had no time now for luxurious reflection. He was pulled from one conference to the next, and when he was not in meetings or making speeches—either aggressive and warning or placating and negotiating—when he was not posing for the photographers on the steps of the White House with Important Men or waving from the helicopter steps, displaying the appropriate mood of the moment—serious or lighthearted, concerned or victorious—when he was not reading reports or giving orders, snatching a sandwich on the run, then he threw himself in bed, exhausted, forgetting even to be afraid.
This was not a time to think of children or beggars. The homeless no longer occupied his mind, but the armies of the dispossessed, which swept in waves, on foot, in carts, in cars, in horse-drawn, ox-drawn, dog-drawn wagons, on bicycles, and on camels. Many carried their possessions, their children, their favorite cat or bird in their arms, and they were followed by their dogs. People, moving in mass migrations, searching for safety; and starvation was imminent.
We have seen this before. Every generation has seen this anabasis accompanied by rape and pillage, brutality, bold daylight beatings, thirst, hunger, theft.
The center would not hold.
One night the President woke up shouting in his sleep.
Again Frank came in, and found him shaken, irritable.
“Just a dream. I was dreaming,” he said, and returned to his nightmares.
That morning he found he could hardly get out of bed. His legs went weak. His head was spinning. Frank helped him back to bed.
“You have a fever.”
“I feel awful.”
“Flu. I‘ll get the thermometer. Stay there,” said the faithful Frank, and when he returned, the Presidential Palace scurried with calls to the doctor and trays of tea and toast. The President was exhausted. He slept one full day. His doctor ordered rest.
It was while he was recuperating that he remembered Lily. He telephoned Scotty.
“I want to talk to your little girl,” he said. “I want to ask her what she saw.”
“She was overwrought, Mr. President. It wasn’t true.”
“Oh.” He was disappointed. “You don’t think she saw anything?”
“I know she didn’t. Is it true we’re sending troops to Norway?”
“I have no comment,” said Matt, pure reflex. “You’re out of order with that question. Anyway, I‘d like to talk to her.”
“No sir, I can’t allow that. I won’t do that to her.”
“Do what?”
“Encourage her imagination. Swell her head.”
“What?”
“Make her think she’s special. I won’t do that.”
“What would it take to make you change your mind?”
That’s how they negotiated. That’s how the President arranged the small party to his Adirondack retreat for a weekend of winter sport. He needed a few days to recuperate anyway, to get away from war. The President asked Jim and his wife Susan (their marriage still rocking weakly along), and their children, because this would be an informal family affair. He invited the mining magnate, Mr. Stanhill (a major contributor), and his wife Emily, because he wanted to talk further with the elderly woman who had been sending him books. He invited a speechwriter’s family, and a senator, an under secretary who had teenagers, and a retired general of vast reputation, as well as the Secretary of the Interior, who could help Jim work the Senator over regarding the Food and Marketing Surplus Act; and finally he invited Scotty and his daughter Lily, who would enjoy herself, you see, with the other children there. His wife, the First Lady, had other engagements and excused herself with graceful scented notes and spring flowers in the rooms of every guest.
A reporter is too low on the social scale to spend a weekend with the President, even if he covers the White House. Scotty’s ambition trapped him: the honor of the invitation, the chance to get an inside scoop. It was understood he would not write anything that happened there, but he could use whatever he learned for “background.”
The staff prepared for guests. There was to be tobogganing and ice skating and cross-country skiing, and, for those who liked to be indoors, there were billiards, or bridge, or mystery novels, or talk before a blazing fire. There was food: huge breakfasts set out on the two rough sideboards—grits, eggs and bacon and sausage, chicken livers and scalloped apples, and waffles and pancakes, biscuits and butter and honey, and several kinds of jams; coffee and teas; then mid-morning snacks, and later lunch, which was also a serve-yourself picnic laid out, like breakfast, on the sideboards. Dinner each night was seated, with various courses to appeal to healthy appetites.
Scotty brought Lily, but he had warned her as they drove up in his decaying Plymouth not to speak of the angel she thought she’d seen.
“Did see,” she said.
“Okay.” He shrugged, in no mood to dispute the point.
They drove through security checkpoints on a long and winding driveway and came to a group of rustic-looking buildings, covered with snow. Scotty could imagine Jim Sierra inside, busy controlling the communications network, talking on three phones at once, smoothing over, patching up, doing in, putting out, sounding off. For this so-called “retreat” was a nerve center of power once the President arrived. At the door, Scotty admonished Lily again: “I want you to have a good time. Just be careful. Remember your manners. Be on your best behavior.” Lily rolled her eyes to the open sky. “Don’t talk about you-know-what.”
But she had no intention of talking about it.
That was why, when the President greeted her in the lodge, she shied off like a skittish deer. He frowned and drummed two fingers imperceptibly on his thumb.
That evening, the group convened for dinner, grown-ups at one table and the youngsters at another in another room, and the President made no effort to approach the little girl. But he observed with amusement how Jim’s wife, Susan, seated next to Scotty, bent her head toward him as he talked. She crumbled bread pills on the white tablecloth, staring intently at the table, hardly looking at him.
It was a queer match, he thought, and glanced at Jim to see his reaction; but Jim was busy with the Senator, and the Senator with the General, and later, after dinner, Scotty joined them too, and their discussion of political affairs.
After lunch next day, while her father was away, Matt approached Lily for the second time.
There is nothing like a child to make a grown man feel inadequate. Lily and Jim’s kids were building a snowman. Matt joined the game, although the children felt uneasy at the intrusion of their host, who came with his pack of followers. These watched from varying distances according to their rank: secret service agents, bodyguards, shadows behind trees, the Under Secretary leaning on two canes. The President dropped on his knees in the snow, organizing the kids a little more than they wanted, since he couldn’t contain his habit of authority. (The Under Secretary, arthritic, stayed only a short time at the pretty winter scene before hobbling back indoors; the aides remained respectfully back.) At a certain moment the President found himself hunkered on his heels, patting the snowman next to little Lily.
“I need to talk to you,” he said quietly, working intently on the snowman. He did not look at her.
“No, you want to ask me about the—about what I saw,” she challenged. “But I didn’t see anything. Everyone wants to ask me about that.”
“You didn’t.” He was disappointed. “You didn’t see anything?”
“Daddy says I‘m not to talk to you,” she said. “Go away.”
“But it belonged to me,” he whispered back. “I have a right to know. It was my angel you saw!” He glared at Jim’s two daughters, who had stopped their work to listen in surprise at his vehemence. “I need to know. What did it look like?” What he wanted to know was whether it looked like the ones he’d seen. Was it friendly or fierce?
“No.”
He caught her tiny wrist. “Lily, wait.” Then to the other two: “Why don’t you two go inside?” His voice was soft. “I need to talk alone to Lily. Go along. Desmond will get you anything you want. There are marshmallows you can roast over the fire. Do you want to see a movie?” He knew children’s ways.
It was an order, though. The smile did not light his eyes. The children scampered back to the main cabin at a frightened run. From the trees the secret service observed their President kneeling beside the little girl in a red snowsuit. He patted the snowman’s body into shape.
“I saw an angel once,” he confided. “I wonder if yours was the same.”
Lily darted a suspicious look at him.
“She was very beautiful,” said Matt. “I think of it as ‘her.’ All radiant colors. And brilliant white.” The sun glittered on the snow. An icicle, hanging from the gutter of the house nearby, flashed iridescent in the sun. Lily said nothing.
“Did yours say anything? Did it tell you anything?” he asked.
“I know it was an angel,” said Lily defiantly. “It was so beautiful! It was the most beautiful of anything I‘ve ever seen.” The words came tumbling from her lips so fast he could hardly keep up. “It was huge. It filled up the whole room right up to the ceiling. Only it was actually only in that one side of it, that corner, and it was all kinds of colors, shimmering. It didn’t have no wings.”
“Mine didn’t speak,” said Matt humbly, and he found his heart was beating too fast. “Did yours? Did it say anything?” Something for me, he wanted to ask.
She patted the snowman with both hands, concentrating on her task, and then suddenly turned to him, as if she had made up her mind. “Now,” she said definitively, as if she had reached a decision, taken him into her confidence: “You mustn’t tell. Promise?” And she smiled flirtatiously, sharing secrets, the delight of little girls. He nodded quietly.
“It waved to me,” she said. “But it was so sad. I just wanted to stand there with it, that was all, and comfort it. Because it was so sad. Just the way it looked at me. Like this,” she continued, attempting the expression. “It was looking that way at everyone. As if it wanted to cry. And then I waved to it, and that’s when it smiled.”
“Did it have a message for me?” he asked, and this time his voice cracked.
She stared at him, a guileless child. “It said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ And I wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid at all. Then the others came.”
“The others?”
“Lean down,” Lily whispered, and when the President bent down, she cupped her mouth to his ear with one red-mittened hand, talking confidentially. “I didn’t tell anyone. Except Daddy. First there was the big one, looking so sad, and after she said, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ that’s when the singing began, like a big crowd. That was the singing you could hear. Could you hear it? There was singing everywhere, and then the angel disappeared.”
Matt looked at her. It said, Don’t be afraid. But were those words for him? He wanted to cry out in frustration.
She nodded solemnly. “And it was an angel. And you can’t say I didn’t see it, ’cause I did!”
“I know you did,” he said. “That’s why I need to know if the angel is always there, invisible to us, or whether it comes and goes at special times. And was it saying ‘Don’t be afraid’ to you, or did it mean for all of us? For me? I wish I could see the angel,” he confessed.
Lily stared at him thoughtfully. “Why don’t you ask?”
“Ask what?”
“Ask to see it,” she said seriously. “It will come if you ask.” Matt broke out laughing at her childish innocence.
At this moment the photographers arrived, alert to a good picture when they saw one. Jim’s two daughters were called back outside (the Under Secretary’s teenagers and the Speechwriter were off skiing), and the photo of the President romping with three children in the snow appeared in every newspaper in the country.
Meanwhile, Jim’s wife, Susan, was skiing along the gentle rolling golf course. Her legs and shoulders moved in ceaseless rhythm, hands reaching forward on her poles, her skis hissing in the snow. She was following, mesmerized, the flat, strong shoulders of Scott, their easy rotation, and the dark snake of his tracks unwinding from his skis before her. She thought she had never been so happy, though she could not imagine why. She wished he would stop and look at her, pause for a time and talk.
Scotty slid on through the blue-gray light. He set his concentration on the thrust of his knees, the lift of his heel in the shoe, as he tried for smoother and more rhythmical strides. He was acutely aware of the woman behind him, and decided that at the holly tree up ahead he would stop. It was a pleasure to him to impose on himself the discipline and anticipation of waiting; he could not stop until he reached the holly. He attributed to exercise his pleasure with himself, his delight in the glittering snow, the cold air scalding his nostrils at each breath, the soft shooshing of his running skis, the tense silence of the snow. Soon, though he did not know it, he would kiss her, and tilt the course of world events.
The President was at that very moment smiling his engaging grin into the camera’s eye, his head thrown back with laughter, and the children pelting him with snowballs.
The Stanhills were walking hand in hand by the frozen lake, still affectionate after forty-five years of marriage. It would be nice to have a photograph of them at that moment too. And if we had one of Jim Sierra, it would be indoors as he poured whiskey in a glass, preparing to buttonhole the Senator and impress upon the poor trapped man the need to organize votes for the Farm and Marketing Surplus Act, and what benefits would accrue to the Senator if he voted right and helped the President out.
Later, over cocktails by the fire, the President snagged Scotty. “I was talking to your daughter,” he said amiably, and remarked the curious tensing of Scotty’s jaw.
“What did she say?”
“She said to ask,” said Matt.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He laughed. “She had her picture taken. She’s a fine little girl. You’re a lucky man.”
“If my stupid ex doesn’t spoil her,” said Scotty, who naturally preferred the negative.
“Oh. Do you want custody?”
“I can’t take custody. I don’t have time. I‘m just worried the woman isn’t taking care of her. I only see Lily every other weekend, so I don’t get a lot of time to spend with her. I don’t think her mother’s feeding her right. I‘ve told her so. She doesn’t listen.”
Susan joined them, smiling over the lip of her glass at Scotty, who turned to include her warmly. (The President remarked it all.) Across the room, Jim was on the phone trying to control the pacing of the treaty negotiations. It would be another day before it registered on him why his wife’s eyes were shining, and another day after that—back in the White House—before the rage that consumed him led him to close the borders between the two countries, the treaty quashed. He was chief of Domestic Affairs, but not afraid of extending his frontiers.
But none of that had happened yet—not the kiss Jim interrupted the following day, not the bellowing fistfight that broke out between himself and Scotty, while his screaming wife tried to separate the two. Not Jim’s threats to kill Scott if he saw him again, or Scotty’s to lay off him, that Jim couldn’t tell him what to do—no, nor Scotty and Lily’s hurried departure from the camp, nor Jim and Susan’s long, silent, sulking drive in the station wagon back to their house from the airport, with the children feigning sleep in the back, nor Jim’s subsequent terrifying collapse. For the moment, Matt lounged gracefully before the fire with Scotty and Susan. He rested his elbow on the stone mantel and, for those precious moments, he forgot the war and his responsibilities. They were joined a moment later by the elegant Emily Stanhill, and then by the Under Secretary, who lowered himself into a chair from his canes.
The President looked around the comfortable room at the antlers over the fireplace, at the rough and rustic furniture, and felt a wave of inordinate fondness for this place, for these people, each driven by their virtues and vices. The Senator was absorbed by a consuming need to be reelected, and the Speechwriter burdened with the depression that had haunted him since childhood, and Jim by his need to control. Matt, in his newfound calm detachment, was amused to see that Susan had chosen for a lover her husband in a different guise. The two men did not look alike, but Scotty was motivated by the same high-octane energy as Jim. Both were angry, both determined to set the world to rights. Jim’s rival was his emotional twin.
At dinner the President made a joke of having no desire for peace.
“It would be a tragedy,” he laughed, looking around at his guests, entertaining them with his flippancy, “to have no war. People love to make war. It staves off boredom. Listen: Of men and arms I sing! Look at the Turks and Greeks, the English and Irish, the Jews and Arabs—excuse me, Stanhill, but they love to fight. They’ve been fighting each other for all of recorded time. They’d feel deprived if they couldn’t fight.”
The group erupted in dissent.
“When I was little,” said the President, “there was a man who raised fighting cocks down the street from me. Completely illegal, of course, but he used to throw his cages in the back of his car and take off for Arizona or Florida or Chicago or Georgia—all clandestine fights. He’d bet twenty thousand dollars on a single cock. He claimed he was doing them a favor, that it would be cruelty to the animals to deprive them of a fight, when that’s all they wanted to do.”
“Are you saying humans are like fighting cocks?” asked the Senator.
“I’m just saying we’d be doing a disservice,” teased the President, “if we didn’t encourage certain groups to fight. What would they do with themselves? Imagine! No war. No glory. No heroism. No literature. No purpose in life. No sorrowing over wasted lives, no men cut down in their prime—which is a mother’s greatest boon, undoubtedly.”
He was in prickly high spirits, explaining the need for Sacrifice to Freedom, Justice, Honor, Truth; and you could say it was in damned bad taste. “Disgusting!” Scotty murmured to Susan.
“I’ve become cynical,” Matt said to Emily, and he passed one hand across his eyes, a gesture that had become habitual now.
“The trouble is, you’re not,” she answered, lifting her chin with the sparkling flirtatiousness that had marked her as a twenty-year-old.
“Everyone wants peace,” he said in a low voice, privately to her. “And look around the table. How many have it in their hearts? They want it on their terms, beating the enemy to a pulp, which isn’t peace at all now, is it? And I‘m expected to impose world peace. Let them fight, I say.” They rose from the table and adjourned to the poker room, where another fire blazed.
Never again would all these people be gathered in one place. For the moment, however, one flicker in time, the members of this party challenged one another to billiards, or sat around the fire and talked, or played cards, or strolled on the squeaking snow under a cold, pale, passionate moon. And each heart held the world in microcosm, each moment held in it a teardrop of eternity. Yet none of them knew it. Not a person there, unless it was the lovely, elderly Emily, guessed that in his or her own hands hung the totality of life and time. Not a single one of them except perhaps the President, who was still groping toward the understanding, guessed the secret: that we get to choose our lives—not what happens to us, necessarily, but how much we see. We get to choose our responses—whether to be enslaved by desires and fears, or to let go, to trust, to take life’s dare, and in that willingness to experience, if only for the briefest moment, the release that comes with the opening of the heart.
The other part of the secret is how hard it is to do this, how much practice it takes to make it into a habit, so that we are no longer held hostage by our instincts. There’s no harder struggle in the world. But it’s there to be chosen if we wish.
So, everything was going as it should. The world was burning up with joy and love, with anger and grief, with creation and destruction, and the people who were gathered on that weekend were burning with their own desires and delusions, hatred, fears, and love.
They say that to talk of love is to make love. All that night Emily Stanhill and the President danced a conversational minuet around the meaning of evil and the nature of God. For Emily, to talk of God was to talk of love, and Matt could not help but be moved. She described to him how to pray in such a way that your prayer is heard and answered. “It’s a law,” she said, “a simple, esoteric exercise. It’s what Christ was talking about, and it’s rarely taught in church. But done that way, it’s always answered.” (And he would remember this conversation much later, when she was dying of cancer and asked him for his prayers.)
“But you have to ask,” she said, echoing the words of the little child, “otherwise the help can’t come.” He was struck by the coincidence of hearing this direction twice in the same day, once from a five-year-old, and once from a woman of seventy-two. “And finally, after making your request, ask for the Highest Good for all concerned, say thank you, and be willing to let go.”
“Be willing not to get the prayer?” He laughed. “I thought you said it was always answered.”
The fire dimmed. The other guests joined them at times, contributing snatches of poetry or their own noisy beliefs, and Emily observed (laughing to the President) that each person considered his opinion as the One True Word. Each one thought that he (or she) was right and the others mistaken or misinformed.
Her husband, the mining magnate, went to bed. The children had long before gone up. The others followed, trailing off in twos and threes or one by one. Emily danced a fox-trot with the President to the radio, then a stately and old-fashioned waltz. Susan and Scotty came inside from their moonlight walk, blowing on their fingers and casting lingering sidelong looks at one another; they could hardly break apart, and walked upstairs to their respective rooms, shoulders brushing like butterflies, leaving the President and Emily alone, still talking on the couch.
He confided in her. He told her about the angels in his bedroom (first compassionate, then angry), and about the beggar. What did it mean? He spoke haltingly at first, anticipating ridicule. Instead she listened, nodding as if his story were as natural as pine trees, and once she gave a startled exclamation of delight. He told of his confusion, his longing for solitude, his boredom with much of what he had to do, his obsession with the angel, the vagrant, the desperate wilderness he was in.
“Dark night,” she murmured.
“What?”
“Dark Night of the Soul. St. John of the Cross.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said stiffly, a little annoyed at not being found more special. He didn’t want just a common, everyday mystical experience. She laughed.
“It’s all right, Matt. Every single person is unique. Isn’t that a miracle? And each experience of God is utterly unique. Yet, still, we all follow a similar path. You are so lucky.”
“Yes?”
“To have this anguish. It means your shell is cracking. It’s going to be wonderful, Matt.”
“Yes?”
“Yes,” she repeated. “You should give thanks for this gift. God is reeling you in like a fish. But you have to go through the darkness before you find the light. It’s going to be wonderful.”
“I don’t even know if what I saw was real.”
“No. You’ll only know by its effects.”
“What do you mean?”
“By whether you change, and how the new knowledge is manifested in your life.”
She actually spoke like that, and he thought, listening to her lilting sweet voice, that he had never heard such lovely turns of phrase. He didn’t laugh.
“But what’s wrong with me?” he asked. “I’m raw feeling. I look at the simplest thing—two lovers,” he added, these being the last objects he had noticed, “and tears well up in my eyes. I can’t control myself.”
She said very little. Nodded. Mmm. Simply talking to her made the President feel better.
“So, then, do you go to church?” he asked, interested.
“No. But I believe in God. I have had experiences of my own. I guess many people have. And, yes, I believe you, first because I‘ve seen some of what you’re describing, secondly—because I believe you, that’s all. Only you need a guide. You can’t take this journey without a spiritual guide.”
“What journey?”
“The spiritual journey. To your soul. Who was it who said that when you find your Self you find God? Was it Jung? That’s what’s coming to you.”
“God?”
“God. The Self. Once your soul catches fire, once it has seen into that other dimension, you can’t put the fire out. It’ll never be the same again. That’s all that’s happening. It’s not extraordinary.”
“It is,” he said stubbornly.
“Well, I mean no more than the other miracles around us: like a tulip or a terrier dog. Or the constant recurrence of love. Those are miracles!” She laughed.
Later, at the end of the evening, when they traced their steps to their respective rooms, she kissed his cheek good night; or morning, for it was three A.M.
“Good night, Emily.”
“Good night, Mr. President. God bless you.”
“He has. I hope He has.”
Then he entered the room and went on his knees beside his bed as she had directed and said his prayers. Innocently. Like a child.