Acts of Mercy

Five

Claire was lying on her back in the canopied rosewood bed, the covers pulled up to her breasts and her hands resting palms up at her sides, when Nicholas Augustine came through the door that connected their two bedrooms. It was dark in the room, except for a pale shaft of moonlight that filtered through the south window and lay across the edge of the bed at her feet, as though it had prostrated itself there. Her eyes were closed, but Augustine could not tell if she was asleep.

He hesitated, holding the edge of the door with his left hand. But then she stirred, turned her head and opened her eyes. “Nicholas?” she said.

“Did I wake you?”

“No, I was just resting. Couldn’t you sleep?”

“No. I have a hell of a headache.” He rubbed his temples with the heels of both hands. “I suppose I drank too much wine at dinner.”

“I suppose you did,” she said mildly. “Did you want to join me?”

“Would you mind?”

“Of course not.”

Augustine crossed the room, shed his bathrobe, and moved in beside her. The sheets were warm from her body, scented with the musky fragrance of her perfume, and when she laid her hip against his he felt desire move through him. But he lay quietly, looking up at the quilted underside of the canopy; she was a very desirable woman and he wanted her, and yet his mind was so full of political matters that he could not focus on the physical need.

She turned onto her side so that her breast flattened along his rib cage, reached up to touch his temples with her cool fingers. Massaging them gently in small circles, she asked. “Does this help?”

“A bit,” Augustine said. Wexford, Oberdorfer, Maxwell Harper, Israel, the Indian problem in Montana and the meeting with Wade and Hendricks and Sandcrane that had not gone at all well this afternoon

… “A little bit.”

Seconds passed, a minute or two. Then Claire began to rub her thigh against his beneath the silk of her nightgown, in the same gentle rhythm, and he felt the need climbing within him, felt himself starting to respond. One of her hands lowered to open the buttons on his pajama top, to stroke his chest, and he rolled over to her then, and kissed her, and drew the straps of her gown away to release her breasts to his hands and then to his lips.

“Yes, dear,” she said, “that’s nice.”

But he did not have a full erection; even her touch did not give it to him. Israel, the Indians, the convention in Saint Louis… stop thinking! A little desperately, he tried to force himself to concentrate on the softness of her body, on the movements of her hands and of his own. Nothing happened. So he concentrated on himself, willing an erection, mind pleading with body-but that had even less effect, you could not begin to make love by focusing on yourself. Sex was two people, equal partners seeking to become one Claire said, “It’ll happen, dear, it’ll happen,” and guided him to her. But she was not ready, her vulva was dry, the body as always telling truths that the spirit would deny, and he felt the last of his rigidity slip away. Damn it, damn it! Angry with himself, dismayed, he pushed away from her and lay on his back again, staring up at the canopy, listening to the dry rasp of his breathing. Beside him Claire made a soft sound in her throat that might have meant anything or nothing at all.

This was the sixth time in succession and the fifteenth or twentieth time in three months that he had failed her, failed himself. For years he had been able to keep this part of his life wholly segregated, unaffected by political pressures; now he seemed to have lost that ability. Impotent, he thought, and the word lay bitter and ugly in his mind. Where did all the power go: the potency, the strength? He was the same man he had always been, and yet things kept happening that intimated he might not be.

Maybe he should see Doctor Whiting, his personal and now the White House physician. But Whiting was a somewhat supercilious little man who thought exercise and a proper diet were the answers to most medical problems and that mental strain could better be relieved by positive thinking than by any medicinal aids. No, there was nothing Whiting could do-and he would have been embarrassed discussing impotency with him in any case. What he needed more than anything was another few days at The Hollows-to be home again in California, to lie with Claire in the big brass bed with the springs that could sing like train wheels in the night…

He realized that she had moved to him again; she caught his hand in hers. “Is there anything you want me to do, dear?”

“No,” Augustine said, “it’s just not going to work tonight.” He felt irritable; his headache was worse now. He drew his hand away. “You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you.”

“Of course not-”

“You don’t have to pretend, Claire. You are disappointed in me, and not just because of what didn’t happen a minute ago.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you? I saw the look you gave me at dinner, after you put Austin in his place. You were telling me the same thing you told him, that maybe I ought to get out because I can’t handle the presidency anymore.”

She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said finally, “you’re right that I don’t think you should run for reelection. But it’s not because I believe you can’t handle the presidency. It’s because of what the office is doing to you. Do you honestly feel you can go through another exhausting campaign, another four years without…”

She broke off.

“Without what?” Augustine said.

“Without suffering any more. Without ruining your health. You’ve changed in these last few months, Nicholas. You’ve… changed.”

The irritability increased. “You’re like all the rest of them,” he said. “Pushing me with one hand and pulling me with the other. You all want something and when you can’t have it or you’ve got it and you’re afraid of losing it, you put the blame on me.”

“Have I ever said or done anything in the twenty years we’ve been married that wasn’t in your best interests?”

Her voice was soft, patient, reasonable; she was always so imperturbable, so in command of her emotions that at times like this it made him feel frustrated, inadequate. “What about your best interests?” he said. “I suppose you had no ambitions of your own, you never wanted to be the First Lady, the wife of the President of the United States.”

“I wanted to be the wife of President Nicholas Augustine, yes. But you’ve given four important, productive years; isn’t that enough work and sacrifice for one person? You’re not a machine, Nicholas. You’re a fifty-six-year-old man who-”

“Who is starting to lose his grip?”

“-who deserves a rest and a chance to live the remainder of his life in peace and privacy. It’s not as if you would be leaving politics altogether; you would still have influence, you could-”

“I’ve heard enough of this,” Augustine said. He swung out of bed, caught up his bathrobe.

“Nicholas…”

“Good night, Claire,” he said, and walked out and shut the connecting door behind him.

Alone in his own bed, head throbbing, mind working like an engine that coughed and stuttered and would not shut down, he found himself listening to the faint noises that houses make in the night. Harry Truman had once said that the White House cracked and popped all night long, and that you could imagine that old Jackson or Andy Johnson or some other ghost was walking. It was a nice prison, he said, but a prison nevertheless. No man in his right mind would want to come here of his own accord.

And maybe he was right, Augustine thought. Restoration hadn’t changed the old place any; it was still a prison full of the ghosts of long-dead presidents, wandering through the vast halls, whispering to the man who now occupied the premises, telling him things that he could not hear and dared not listen to if he could. Telling him that one day he would join them and add his voice to theirs, because no matter what he did from now on he was one of them: the presidency was a life sentence, an eternal sentence, and there was no way he was ever going to get out.