Hillary

Chapter Two

Bobby Hart had been at funerals in other places where he had paid his last respects to relatives and friends; he had, years earlier, held his mother’s fragile, shaking hand and wiped away a tear of his own, as they stood alone at the graveside as his father was laid to rest. Those funerals had been real, the final, last goodbye, the formal ritual of grief and resignation, in which only those who knew, and even loved, the one who passed away are invited or allowed. This was different; a ritual, yes, but one that instead of serving as a catharsis for the emotions was a playhouse for a fiction, the mourners wearing faces made to reflect a sense of tragedy and loss that most of them did not feel.

Everyone who was anyone in Washington sat crushed together in the pews, come to listen in solemn acquiescence to the eulogy of a man many of them had privately despised. There were those who had hated him because he had taken what they believed belonged to them, the office that, it is fair to say, someone else would have taken from them had Robert Constable never lived. There were others who hated him because he had not given them what he had promised-or seemed to promise, because he had a genius for being vague-when he had asked them to help in what had seemed a long-shot bid for the presidency. And then there were those who thought it still the mark of virtue to keep their vices private and, call it common decency or rank hypocrisy, had nothing but disdain for someone who had let his private life become a scandal that had disgraced the office and disgraced himself. The wonder was that he had always seemed to get away with it. It drove them all a little crazy, that the man they thought one of the world’s greatest charlatans, a man without qualities or principles, had somehow managed to break all the rules and laugh at those who thought he might get caught.

Bobby Hart wondered how he would have felt if he had found his own ambitions defeated, his own dreams denied, by someone who, it was said, never remembered the name of anyone he had either hurt or could no longer use. He had barely known Constable. Most of what he knew about him, beyond the things everyone knew from reading the papers, he had learned from some of the other members of the Senate who had their own stories to tell, none of them very flattering, and always accompanied by a request that what they were about to tell him be kept in confidence. For all the president’s talk of hope and optimism, the main emotion he inspired among those who knew him best was fear.

The memorial service droned on. Crowded to capacity, with no room to move, the National Cathedral felt almost as breathlessly humid as the August heat outside. Hart tried to listen as one speaker followed another, but the eulogies seemed forced and artificial, what people are supposed to say, rather than what they really think or feel. He was there because, as a member of the Senate, he was expected to be. It was an obligation that went with the office, something you did to keep alive the long traditions of the place.

Hart’s gaze drifted away from the secretary of state, recounting the foreign policy achievements of the Constable administration, and began to run along the line of dignitaries in the first few rows. It stopped at the sight of Hillary Constable, the president’s widow, sitting in the first row on the aisle. Her face was resigned, respectful, but without any obvious trace of grief. Perhaps it had always been a marriage of convenience; but, he reminded himself, it had lasted nearly thirty years. She must have known what he was like, this need that bordered on compulsion for the company of other women. Or did she? Perhaps she had known at the beginning, one of the first times he was unfaithful, and then, because he would have been forced to admit what he could not deny, taken that confession as a promise that he would never stray again. As Hart looked at her, still attractive with those light blue eyes that seemed to tease you with some secret knowledge, and the ash blonde hair that was always cut so perfectly, he changed his mind; or rather, for the first time glimpsed a different possibility: that she knew, or could have known, everything, and not much cared. Even wearing widow’s weeds, Hillary Constable had the look of someone very much her own person. Whatever her husband might have been doing with other women, she could just as easily, and with no doubt greater taste and discretion, have been doing with other men.

The service finally came to an end. The president’s widow led the procession back up the aisle, stopping every few steps to touch the hand of someone and thank them for all they had done. Some thought she was quite brave, the way she seemed to be more concerned with the feelings of others than with her own; others had a different impression.

“Still beautiful, and now single and quite rich,” a familiar voice whispered just behind him. Hart turned around to find his only close friend in the Senate, Charles Finnegan of Michigan, raising his eyes in a way that suggested, more than irreverence, the knowledge of things best left unsaid. “You think it’s just accidental?”

Finnegan had reddish brown hair and a slightly freckled face, eyes full of laughter, and the quickest smile Hart had ever seen. Always in a state of motion, never quite able to sit still, when Finnegan took a chair it seemed it was just to have a place from which to suddenly jump up. Caught up in an argument, which sometimes seemed the main preoccupation of his life, he spoke in half-sentences, eager to start the next one before he had finished the last; and if he did that to sentences, a paragraph was even worse, collapsing in a rush of incoherence like the drunken revel of a half-mad poet. But now, moving in solemn order in the middle of the crowd, he spoke slowly, quietly, and to the point.

Hart did not respond. There were too many people around, too great a chance to be overheard. With a faint half-smile, he nodded-enough to tell Finnegan that they would talk outside.

As many as had gathered inside the cathedral, a hundred times that number were standing behind the barricades erected on the street, come to pay a final tribute to the president. The air was thick with the humid scent of summer smoke, every movement made uncomfortable, an effort that required strength; things seemed to pass in slow motion, the world become a crawl. Hart blinked into the dusty, reddish sun and felt a sudden disability, a sense of slow paralysis, a loss of all ambition beyond a cool dark place to sit and something cold to press against his lips.

“Remind me to die in winter,” he remarked. He stood next to the entrance of the cathedral as the crowd surged past.

Finnegan slipped on dark glasses and loosened his solid gray tie. A slight, caustic grin curled the edges of his mouth.

“What difference the season, if you die in the bought luxury of a Manhattan hotel in the arms of a high-priced hooker?”

“I’ve heard the rumors,” replied Hart, watching the pallbearers load the casket into the waiting hearse. Hillary Constable stood just off to the side, remote, unapproachable, her black gloved hands held neatly in front, her eyes distant and impenetrable. She had not yet shed a tear, neither inside the cathedral, nor here outside, as if she knew better than to overplay her part. It kept the mystery alive, the mystery born of the suspicion that she had never really loved him; or rather, that she had, but had understood that with a man like that she could never count on anything.

“But they’re just rumors,” continued Hart, looking back at Finnegan. “Everyone thinks he slept with other women all the time. No one wants to believe he could have died alone.”

“He has Air Force One at his disposal, but he spends the night in a Manhattan hotel. And he did it all the time. Why do you think he did that, because he thought he could get a better night’s sleep there than upstairs in the White House?”

“You’ve become such a cynic.”

Finnegan tilted his head to the side, a sense of doubt in his eyes.

“I didn’t want to be, and I wasn’t, when I first came to Washington, but then…” Finnegan’s voice trailed off, and Hart, who knew exactly what he meant, patted him on the shoulder and they both laughed softly at how much in each of them had changed.

“Did Quentin Burdick get hold of you?” asked Finnegan as they started walking away from the cathedral and the crowd.

“No. Why?”

“He’s working on a story, some investigative piece. He told me he had an appointment with Constable, an interview he had finally gotten him to agree to, but it never took place. He was supposed to meet him at the hotel, the one where Constable died, the next morning.”