After tearfully dropping Anthony off at the Rokeby School in Connecticut, Mary drove home alone, with only the dog for company. She insisted the others fly back separately. Nobody else in the car, clamoring for soda or doughnuts or a bathroom. It was both pleasant and unsettling. Mary launched into emotional monologues with Darkie the way she used to talk to Zippy, but cut herself off, realizing that she never talked to Darkie that way, and for all these years must have subconsciously forbade herself to feel close to a dog again.
She glanced frequently in the rearview mirror, as if expecting to see Anthony running after her. Maybe she wanted to see Anthony running after her. In the mirror, she also noted a faint line of gray in her hair, exactly where Loretta had one. She stopped at historical markers and scenic turn-offs, and then for no reason at all at truck-stop coffee shops.
She nursed a bottomless cup and watched the crowd for an hour. Eventually she called Ward to report another rainstorm. She insisted that she’d always hated driving in the rain, and when he claimed he didn’t know that about her, she blamed him for not paying attention.
In a joint outside Pittsburgh, a waitress asked Mary where she was headed. Mary surprised herself and the waitress with, “I’m going home to a boys’ club, where, yeah, I know they say they love me, but I’m sure taking my time about getting there.”
The waitress said, “Lady, don’t get lost.”
Mary promptly did get lost, impulsively turning south toward Washington, D.C., blindly determined to act out a scene from a recent bad dream: barging into the State Department building, not knowing where to find the office of Anthony’s father, marching up and down the broad hallways shouting his name and demanding child-support payments.
Mary came to her senses and changed course, trying to find the old highway that ran parallel to the railroad tracks she and Ward had travelled back and forth to college. Speeding alongside a lumbering coal train that was actually heading into West Virginia, Mary waved to the track bed and blew a kiss. She spoke aloud to Darkie again. “I remember my mother always repeating, ‘life is rich and full, oh, life is rich and full’ and I thought that was just an adage. Now I know what she really meant: ‘One more thing, and I’m going to flip.’ ”
Crossing the border into Ohio, Mary picked up a hitchhiker. Two hitchhikers. A teenage couple dressed in tie-dyed shirts. They tossed their packs in the backseat and piled in up front with Mary, thanking her profusely for the ride. High school graduates, they had spent the summer detasseling corn to make enough money for a romantic journey west.
Mary imagined herself phoning Ward. “Sorry, I’ll be a few more days getting home. I’m taking a couple of young lovers, possibly even more crazy than we were, out to California.”
She said, apologetically, to her riders, “I can only get you as far as Indianapolis.”
The gray City-County Building loomed on the horizon. The city’s first skyscraper. “An ugly attempt to keep the town up to date,” Ward grumbled. He joined his in-laws and Mary for a welcome-home drink and jointly bemoaned the needless destruction of the old City Hall, but he resisted Mary’s suggestion to write a letter to the editor. Despite Ward’s efforts, Wangert Public Relations failed to get a piece of the action on the contractor RFPs.
“Wangert Public Relations does not get involved in politics, other than as an intermediary. We have to be seen as neutral. I’ve explained this to you before. Governor Roscoe laid down that law a long time ago,” Ward spouted.
Something was different about Ward, other than his receding hairline. Mary couldn’t put a finger on it. Maybe it was the effect of Anthony’s departure for boarding school on the Wangert Boys’ Club. The dog moaned and scratched at Anthony’s bedroom door. His absence certainly hit Robbie and Duncan harder than anticipated. They insisted on using Anthony’s bedroom for their nightly homework, claiming they wanted to soak up his “smartness.” And maybe Ward’s preoccupied demeanor had nothing to do with Anthony’s absence, which worried Mary in a different way, as if Anthony was now a closed chapter between them.
At bedtime, sipping brandy nightcaps, Mary and Ward continued to improvise developments between Lubya and Mikel and the diplomat’s estate. The content became more fantastical. A Russian nesting doll, its tiniest inside member, clawed its way to freedom and informed the diplomat of an imminent threat from an angry creditor. A winter with so much snow that the entire village went colorblind. An impoverished church congregation who attracted new members by starting a nudist colony. It was as if Mary and Ward were trying to share coded information that couldn’t be expressed otherwise.
Until Mary found the Dexedrine.
“What are these pills in your sock drawer?” Mary demanded. She was putting away laundry and her husband was pretending to help.
“Doctor’s prescription,” Ward replied, casually.
“For what? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m not sick. It’s for, uh, quitting smoking.” Both Ward and Mary were beginning the long effort to give up cigarettes.
Mary locked the bedroom door. “Do you think I don’t know what Dexedrine is?”
“A lot of people use it,” Ward explained, “for a boost. Rusalka and Elbert say it’s just like vitamins.”
“Since when is Rusalka your authority?” Mary asked. “Did she give these to you?”
“At first,” Ward admitted. “She noticed I was kind of down. The pills make it a lot easier to put one foot in front of the other.”
Mary leaned back on the bed and groaned. “Please don’t tell me you and Rusalka are up to something.”
Ward fiddled with his tie rack. “Hell, no. Things are hard enough without complicating them that way. I mean, you know Rusalka. She does gossip about hanky-panky and she likes to use words like ‘swinging.’ ”
“I can’t believe she’d suggest that,” Mary scoffed. “And what do you mean, things are hard enough?”
Ward took her question as a license to vent. “Maybe you’re the one who hasn’t been paying attention. Maybe you haven’t noticed how many regrets we’ve been getting to our parties?” He croaked, “Of course not. Why would you? You get to disappear to Maine for three months every year. Disappear and pretend that life just goes on its merry way.”
“But, honey, how often have I suggested that you try to spend more time with us on the island?” Mary countered, wondering if his harshness was an effect of the pills.
Ward shook his head scornfully. “You don’t get it. That’s not possible.”
“Okay, how bad is it?” Mary asked, sitting up.
Ward rifled his suit pockets for stray cigarettes. He said, “We probably should have sold this house five years ago, along with the office building. Everyone lives out in the suburbs. Glendale, or farther, and they don’t want to drive all this way back into town to socialize anymore. And you heard what happened yesterday: demonstrators broke into our lobby and spray-painted graffiti on Fat Man and Little Boy. Wangert Public Relations is considered a stodgy old firm that keeps the symphony conductor’s name in the paper. We still have Randy and Stu’s account, and some lobbying business, the liquor distributors in Evansville and Fort Wayne who want to change the Blue Laws. I should probably try to get in on this new basketball team deal.”
“The ones who want to play in funny-colored uniforms with funny colored balls?” Mary asked. “Sounds like a gimmick to me.”
“Gimmick or not, that’s what is happening,” Wardsaid , “at least the ‘Pacers’ name is better than the old ‘Kautskys.’ ”
“Should we be inviting the basketball players over for dinner?” Mary asked. “The boys would like that.”
Ward managed a smile. Mary seized her opening. “Listen, instead of taking those pills, it would be much better to talk to somebody, a psychiatrist, or that analyst I saw way back when—Dr. Keller.”
“Don’t have time. They want to see you three or four times a week,” Ward grumbled.
“What about our minister, Father Tyler? He went to Yale Divinity School. That should count in his favor,” Mary said.
Ward knew his wife was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to throw away the pills. He wanted her to throw away the pills. He couldn’t ask her, and she didn’t do it. She trusted him in all the wrong ways. He moved the vial to a different drawer in his dresser.
The Dexedrine developed its own logic. It told him that if he complied with her request to talk to someone, it would be okay to keep taking the pills, because while he was talking to someone about the pills, he would need to be taking the pills to be able to talk about them.
He stalled for a week. He made some more inquiries about the Reverend Paul Tyler, a Korean War vet, who dramatically waved his eyeglasses in the air when preaching, and had in fact delivered a sermon on the Bomb as God’s Gift of Free Will.
When Ward arrived at the rector’s office, he wasn’t sure what to make of the loud television set on Tyler’s desk. The Reverend was watching a basketball game, the new Pacers.
“Gotta get with the local team,” Paul Tyler explained. “Have you seen them play yet?”
“Not yet,” Ward said. “My sons have been clamoring for me to take them to a game.”
“Those uniforms are something,” Paul Tyler said. “Bright as vestments.”
“And the ball looks like a big piece of candy.”
Time out, the referee signaled on the TV. End of the quarter. It was Leukemia Day at the game. The TV announcer cut in to promote Leukemia Day and to bolster public support, while the camera tightly panned a long row of afflicted children parked in wheelchairs at one end of the Coliseum court. Ward stared in dismay at the waving children in the last four wheelchairs—Robbie, Duncan, Vincent, and Kayla.
Ward prayed the minister wouldn’t notice.
“Oh, my goodness!” Father Tyler said, squinting at the set. “Are those your sons? Is that why you’re here to talk to me; they’ve got leukemia?”
Ward hung his head and shrugged, “No, I’m sorry. They don’t. They must have snuck into the Coliseum somehow. I can’t believe the temerity of those squirts.”
“I still say the choir would be good for them,” Father Tyler commented.
He turned off the television and offered Ward a flask-enhanced mug of coffee. They talked about Yale and tested each other’s recollection of professors and restaurants. It came out that Paul Tyler had met He Who Remains Classified through the current chaplain. “Before seeing the light, and the blood on his hands, our bulldog chaplain ran C.I.A. missions in Eastern Europe. And that other guy … he’s so important, he doesn’t even talk to himself,” Paul Tyler said.
They chatted about other increasingly tarnished Best and Brightest, and about the aging congregation of the Little Church on the Circle and the renegade vestrymen who wanted to move to the suburbs. Ward indulged in some historical erudition about Henry Ward Beecher, another promising easterner who had been called to Indianapolis early in his career and honed his abolitionist message, before returning to a big church in New York.
“That’s when my Wangert ancestors started using the name, ‘Ward.’ ”
“Oh, yes, the infamous Beecher,” Paul said. “He did change the course of American Protestantism. He changed the topic from Sin to Love.”
“And you’re hoping to change the topic from Love to, uh … Urban Renewal?” Ward said.
Paul’s dogged face darkened. “Let’s just say I’m trying to expand the definition of Love to include impoverished cityscapes. As for changing the topic, how about we get to what really brought you here today?”
“Right, of course,” Ward sighed. The dim church office suddenly felt like a confessional. For the Wangerts, members of this congregation since before the time of Henry Ward Beecher, church was still about Sin.
“My wife sent me to talk about Dexedrine pills.”
“Just Dex, or painkillers too?”
“No, but there is more.”
Ward grimly described his sense of impending failure with the business and his struggles with the family—the boys’ expulsion, his mother’s widowhood, his dependence on the pills, his resentment of Mary’s time in Maine, his stupid suspicions of Rusalka. Tyler listened and poured more doctored coffee. Ward’s confession evolved in an unexpected direction. He admitted that his heart had never been in the business, especially with his father gone, but it was too late to do anything different. Ward spoke for the first time about Moscow, without giving all the details, and described what he realized was a long-simmering grudge against He Who Remains Classified. “That jerk is riding high in Washington, and I’m out here barely keeping my head above water, all because I chose to clean up one of his messes.”
“His day of reckoning will most certainly come,” Paul Tyler said.
“Not soon enough,” Ward said.
The minister mused, “I learned an interesting Hoosier-ism from my secretary this morning: ‘Resentment is like swallowing rat poison and expecting the other person to die.’ ”
“I’d do worse than swallow poison, if I thought it could knock him back,” Ward snapped.
“Hmm … are you saying you wish you hadn’t married your wife?” Paul asked.
Ward paused and loosened his tie. “No, no,” he groaned, shaking his head emphatically, “I don’t know what I’m saying. Without Mary, I’m more than nothing.”
“More than nothing ….”
They crossed and re-crossed their legs and both stared silently out a narrow, leaded Gothic window onto Monument Circle. “The Black Moth of Meaninglessness,” Paul Tyler announced. “That’s my diagnosis. It flaps inside many a head these days. Mine included. The only reason I’ve got this collar on is that nothing else makes any sense either, especially after the Army.”
Ward nodded and added a feigned salute.
Paul slowly leaned across his desk. A flat silver cross on a silver chain slipped out from inside his jacket. “Listen, if I could somehow manage to help you, would you do the same for me? We both bet on the wrong horse. On the fate of this city’s downtown. In the year or more since I’ve been here, it’s deteriorated badly.”
Ward growled, “And now the radio station is sponsoring a contest for the best completion of the sentence, ‘Downtown Indy is deader than ….’ ”
“The winner will probably be unprintable,” Paul said, and added, “Of course, twenty square blocks of urban decay provides a fertile backdrop for my sermons. I can make Jesus come alive out there on those miserable streets as well as any old-time revival preacher.”
“So how do you think you can help me?” Ward asked.
“Next time we meet, bring all your pills, and I’ll flush them down the toilet for you,” Paul said.
Ward groaned and glanced up at the ceiling. “I thought you were only supposed to talk to me.”
Paul explained, “I spent a year in a VA hospital after Korea. I know about pills.”
Ward found a cigarette in his breast pocket. “And how do you think I can help you?” he said.
“Join my vestry. I need some fresh blood. If we’re at least going to make this place an oasis in the desert, we’ve got to stop the faction that wants to move the church to the suburbs.”
Ward closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “I’m afraid such a position might violate my firm’s policy regarding political neutrality.”
“I thought you told me your father was dead,” Father Tyler said.
Ward flushed the pills that afternoon, in Mary’s presence, and also destroyed the vials. Without either accepting or rejecting the vestry position, Ward phoned the church to invite Father Tyler to an event that would heighten the new minister’s visibility with other prospective supporters—the annual downtown pigeon shoot, one of his late father’s favorite gatherings.
“A pigeon hunt in downtown Indianapolis? Explain this to me again, please,” Paul said.
“It’s a public health function that dates from a nineteenth century campaign against the ills of pigeon poop. One autumn Saturday each year the city fathers cordon off several blocks around the Circle and blast away with birdshot at the pigeon roosts under the eaves of department stores, the post office, the Columbia Club.”
Ward waited while Paul finished laughing. “Downtown Indy is deader than the dead pigeons that deaden it,” Paul cracked. “I’d love to join you, but there is one problem. I’ve taken a vow never to lift a rifle again.”
Ward offered an ethical hedge. “My firm owns a collection of antique firearms, some of which predate the invention of rifles, per se.”
The next Saturday, the Reverend Paul Tyler and Ward Wangert Jr., vowing to eradicate the Black Moths of Meaninglessness, joined the troop on the corner of Market and Meridian Street. The two Yalies carried muskets. They managed to withstand the guns’ sharp recoils, which garnered approval for the new eastern fellow over at the Little Church on the Circle. He was quoted afterward in the newspaper as saying, “Truly, brothers, this is the New Frontier!”