Acts of Mercy

Twelve

As soon as the President left the conference room, Harper pushed his way through the milling reporters and went straight out to the garage barns and commandeered one of the Cadillacs. Everything about The Hollows had become unbearable now; unless he got away from there, if only for a little while, it seemed as though he would suffocate.

He drove through the main gate and along the access road at a steady fifty miles an hour. There was an impulse in him to drive faster, drive recklessly, but it was checked by his innate caution and by the looming presence of trees and mountains. Two cars jammed with press people passed him; he paid no attention to them, kept his eyes locked on the roadway.

Inside him there was a cold gray void: no bitterness, no resentment, no anger, nothing at all. He had known on an intellectual level since yesterday morning that the end was near, but it was like knowing you had a terminal illness. You weren’t dead yet and as long as you were alive there was that tiny spark of hope for a miraculous recovery. But now, now it was over; the end had come at last. Just like that, with one incredible, pathetic statement delivered by an insipid old fool. Career, future, everything meaningfuldead.

Harper took the Cadillac across the western ridge, down into the first valley past the station and the railroad tracks and the Presidential Special like a waiting funeral train, onto a blacktopped country road and finally into the village of Greenspur. After that there were other country roads, a four-lane state highway that followed the course of the Yurok River, still another county road, a string of lumber mills, two more villages. And always the oppressive wilderness of trees and mountains and valleys, green and brown, green and brown, shadowed and shining in the warm May sunlight…

It became as unbearable after a while as The Hollows. What now? he thought dully. Drive all the way to Washington? Ridiculous. Drive several hundred miles to San Francisco and then take a commercial airline to the Capital? Repellent. There was nothing for him in Washington anyway, not now; there was nothing anywhere. But he did not want to go back to The Hollows either. He did not want to see Augustine, or talk to him, or see and talk to anybody else Except Claire?

No. Especially not her. Why should he want to see her? But the thought stayed with him, and because he was tired of driving and sick of the open countryside, because he had to go somewhere and he had no place to go, he turned the car around finally and started back. Got lost twice, but did not stop to ask directions. Found his way to The Hollows by trial and error, by instinct-he didn’t need anyone, he would never trust anyone again.

It was almost five o’clock when he reached the front gate and was admitted to the ranch complex. He drove to the garage barns, left the Cadillac there, and without conscious choice found himself walking straight across toward the main house. I don’t want to see her, he thought-and came around a curve in one of the south-garden paths and saw her.

He stopped instantly. Unaware of him, she was bending over a bed of flowers, clipping a bouquet of yellow-andpurple lilies with a pair of shears. She wore a blue bandanna around her hair, and gardening clothes, and there was a smudge of dirt on one cheek. Beautiful, Harper thought. His hands were moist. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.

“Mrs. Augustine,” he said. “Claire.”

She came erect in a jerky motion, shaded her eyes against the sunglare. “What is it, Maxwell?” Cold voice, distant, always so distant and unknowable.

“Where is the President?” he asked.

“Resting.”

“Yes, of course. After what he did this morning he needs all the rest he can get.”

She moistened her lips: little pink tongue glistening, flicking sensually at soft pink lips. “He did what had to be done,” she said.

“Did he?”

“You know he did.”

“I don’t know anything,” Harper said. “But I can see how delighted you are. If it had been up to you, you’d have had him resign, wouldn’t you.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why? What motivates you?”

“Nicholas motivates me.”

“That’s all? Just Nicholas?”

Uneasiness had crept into her eyes. “Why are you talking to me like this, Maxwell? What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing is the matter with me,” he said, and thought: Why am I talking like this? I don’t have any right to say these things. Control, control-but that was gone too and he did not seem to care. And the words kept coming out of him, out of the gray void. “I just want to know you, Claire. I want to know what you’re really like inside that beautiful head of yours.”

“I think I’d better go-”

“No,” he said. “Not just yet. Why won’t you open yourself up to me? Why are you afraid of me? Is it because you find me hateful and repulsive?”

She shook her head, shook it again, and began to back away from him.

“Or is it because I’m an intellectual and you think I’m incapable of understanding, that I’m just a political machine with no human feelings?”

“I never thought of you as a machine-”

“I think you did,” Harper said. “I think that’s exactly how you and Nicholas and everyone else have always felt about me. But you’re wrong, all of you. I have deeper feelings than any of you ever imagined.”

She kept backing away, seemed about to turn and flee-and compulsively he moved toward her, caught her wrists in his hands. The touch of her skin, the silky warmth of it, made him catch his breath, sent little tremors through him. He had not touched her in a long time, had never touched her except for impersonal handclasps; he had never been this close to her, had never had the scent of her heady in his nostrils, had never looked into the depths of her eyes.

“Please,” she said, and ducked her face away from him.

“Please, Maxwell, let me go.”

“I don’t want to let you go,” he said. Words still coming out of the void, and he could not stop them, did not want to stop them. “I’ve always wanted to touch you, Claire.”

Her eyes on him again, flashing messages that he could not read. “Don’t. Don’t-”

“I’m a person after all, you see that now, don’t you? I’m capable of normal desires, I’m capable of love.”

“Please,” she said again.

And he heard himself say, “I’ve been in love with you for a long time, Claire.”

She made a sound in her throat, wrenched out of his grasp, and ran through the garden to the house.

Harper just stood there. Feeling empty, feeling awed at himself and what had been hidden away inside him all these years. Thinking: I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have done it-but Nicholas shouldn’t have done it either.