The Education of Sam Seaborn:
The Worst of Times
Pat D.
May 7, 2001
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,...it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,...we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
--Charles Dickens from "A Tale of Two Cities"
I have always admired Dickens as a writer, as an historical commentator, and as a proponent for social equality, but I had never really taken him to heart so much as during the past few months. It all started with Toby's drop-in during the President's GDC speech. It was retribution for my not consulting with him about the President's appearance. We already had the environmentalists in our pocket, it wouldn't have hurt to zip it up and bask in a little rhetoric. No. Toby had to slap their hands and incite a riot within the Green Party. Now Seth Gillette is threatening to run as a third-party candidate instead of supporting Bartlet in 2002. Well, maybe we don't have a lot to worry about there. However, the whole episode was a real disappointment after what should have been a triumph for the President-and me.
Yeah, I was disappointed. That speech had some of my best writing and was damn well researched by the communications staff. I hardly ever take Toby's criticism of my writing personally because he is such a good writer. I've learned more from him in the past three years than in the previous eight in law practice, and I don't mean just about writing. Toby's given me a new appreciation of the word acerbic and an ability to deal with reality. Not that I couldn't deal with it before, just not political reality. I know now that my proposed partnership at Gage Whitney was not because I could attract new clients or because I could finesse a jury to vote in our favor. I worked behind the scenes with facts and figures, logic and reason. Even then I was putting words into other people's mouths--only it wasn't as obvious.
But that's ancient history. What is it they say about history? "What we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat." So I guess I haven't learned as much as I thought or I wouldn't be sitting here thinking about the same thing I was during those last days at GW or when I left home for Princeton. I just wanted out.
That brings up incident number two--Dad's confession. The less said about that the better. (See entry dated March 6 if you feel masochistic.) So Dad's finally moved out of the house for good, and Mom calls every week like clockwork to talk. This woman didn't have five minutes a year for me most of my life, and now she expects me to be her confidant. That was not charitable. She didn't deserve his betrayal or my desertion. I can't believe what she is telling me about their marriage, about my grandparents, about my childhood. These are things I would rather not hear in the best of times. Now they are just another layer of noise buzzing around my head, another cloud blanketing the winter of despair.
May 9, 2001
I should have known the other shoe would drop soon; I just didn't realize how soon. It actually came on the heels of good news. I was about to put the finishing touches on the Chicago education speech. The team had been working all week to craft and hone and polish over 25 pages of facts, anecdotes and policy proposals what would knock their socks off. Then the really good news came about the revised surplus projections that would clinch the need for lower income tax cuts, but dilute the argument for an across the board tax cut benefiting the wealthy.
I digress because it was downhill from there. I ticked off both the ATJ and most adolescent girls with an ill-timed remark, but that wasn't the worst part. Just as I was explaining to Toby how I was justified in my observation about the Caucus's use of rhetoric, Leo interrupted and asked me to accompany him to see the President for a few minutes. I thought Bartlet wanted an update on the Chicago speech and went to get my latest revision, but Leo said it wasn't necessary. That should have been a clue that something big was brewing.
Leo was quiet during our walk to the Oval Office; he was only quiet when he was mulling over something of national importance. So I knew it couldn't be anything that I had done otherwise he would be reaming me out. I tried to engage him in some light conversation by asking about Mallory, but that only brought a glare and a grumble. I kept silent until we reached the Oval. Before Leo could open the door, I stopped him and asked bluntly if something was wrong. Leo said that the President wanted my help to communicate an important message in a few days, and what I was about to hear should be kept in strictest confidence. All I needed to hear was Leo say, "The President needs your help Sam; he's counting on you."
May 14, 2001
Why me? Why not Toby? Toby is a much better writer than I am. Toby is more familiar with what to say in a case like this. He's the experienced spin-doctor. He and Josh should be working on this, not me. I should be free to leave right now. I didn't ask to hear about MS or impeachment hearings or political subterfuge. I didn't want to know that the President I believed in, helped elect to national office and promised to support, had lied to the American public, had committed fraud in order to win the election. I feel sorry for Josh; he had believed so strongly that Bartlet was the real thing. I can just imagine how he took the announcement. He hasn't said anything to me during the past week, but of course he couldn't.
Toby was the first to find out. I'll bet he exploded. Then, he's the only one who can do that in front of the President, not even Leo allows himself that luxury. CJ learned about it a day before I did; she's been like a ghost wandering the halls. Leo asked me to work with the new White House Counsel to help prep the President and Mrs. Bartlet for the barrage of questions from the press. I wish that Tribbey were still Chief Counsel. We had developed a good working relationship even if he didn't appreciate my correcting his Gilbert and Sullivan allusion. At least all the senior staff knows now; we all share the secret; we are all part of the conspiracy.
"Let us all hang together, for surely we shall all hang separately." Benjamin Franklin certainly had a way with an aphorism. Maybe we should have asked him to bring the funny. Dickens' sense of humor never impressed me, it was dark even at its lightest. So, here I am procrastinating again when I should be drafting the President's "message" to the American people. Actually there are two messages, one that expresses his regret at announcing his resignation and one that makes his apologies with no intention of resigning. The baseline is the same: I lied to win an election, it was wrong, but I felt that as a private issue it would not be relevant to the public's decision. However, the melody changes based on the results of a poll that Joey Lucas is conducting. I feel like I'm back at Gage Whitney constructing a liability shield only this time it's to protect the Chief Executive of the United States rather than the CEO of Kensington Oil.
Perhaps, we are doomed to repeat history, and Dickens was also a psychic.
May 16, 2001
It's over. Toby put the finishing touches on the last draft of the message, and Bartlet threw the whole damned thing into a cocked hat by speaking from his heart. What were we thinking? What did I imagine would happen? Could he do anything but stand up for himself? If he had told the truth, the real truth, we would all be cleaning out our desks now and I would be booking a flight to wherever it is that out-of-work speechwriters go. Instead I packed HR 3109 neatly into my briefcase and went home to ruminate over what still might be.
Once into my apartment the telephone rang, not my cell phone, the one connected to my message machine. The machine picked up and I heard a familiar voice, familiar but different, hoarse and distant and abandoned. The voice left a name and a number and went silent. By the time I realized who it had been, it was too late to pick up. Why I'm going into such detail I don't know except that I want to remember very detail--how it began and how it ended. I want to be able to remember it all when I am feeble and have no memory left.
I called back immediately and a stranger answered. She identified herself as his "care-giver", a euphemism for hospice nurse. She refused to let me speak to him since he had just received his medication and needed his rest. I asked when I could see him. She said that she would have to get permission from the family. Family, that was a laugh! As far as I knew, there was no family except a den of legal lions who looked after his trust fund. His parents had died when he was sixteen and he had no siblings. The remaining relatives had deceived the trustees into believing that Vincent was unfit to inherit and waited for the inevitable to happen. Apparently it was about to. I had to see him; it was his dying wish.
May 18, 2001
Toby understood. I was shocked, but he let me take a few days off without a qualm. I waited until Friday to ask him and rehearsed a number of arguments to counter his expected reluctance. I didn't explain everything to him. How could I? The time was out of joint, and I would not add shame to infamy by telling Toby the whole story. So I lied, lied like the President had lied to preserve my privacy and spare my friends. Maybe it was the timing, but the man who red-penciled every speech I ever drafted and admonished my every false step, accepted my lie. Maybe he knew I was lying, or maybe he wanted to believe that I was still incapable of lying.
Josh was not so willing to let me go. He suspected the truth and made it clear that it was a bad idea, a very bad idea, personally and politically. Leave it to Josh to recognize the reality of the situation. I had never really told Josh much about Vincent. There had never been any reason. He was part of the dim past before I met Josh, before I courted Lisa, before Josh and I became brothers in arms to find the real thing, before I was introduced on the public stage.
Some people believe that history is actually one time continuum that twists in on itself, like a Mobius strip. At certain points along the way, we can observe glimpses of our past in the present or actually cross from one path to the other. That is why we experience déjà vu. I was at that point on the strip crossing over into a past that would inevitably affect my future. With his intuitive grasp of theoretical physics, Josh saw this and was apprehensive. I should have bowed to his greater wisdom, his profound experience, his extreme charm, but I was pissed as hell at him. I left on the next flight to Boston.
May 19, 2001
The flight was excruciating. All I could think about was the last day we had seen each other. It was graduation and Vincent was standing at the podium delivering the valedictory address in his own inimitable style. He had threatened to rip off his robe at the end and expose himself to all the highbrow parents and honored guests. What could the Dean do at that point, take away his diploma? Besides the university's new library addition depended on his graduating. No matter what else he had accomplished during his four years at Princeton, they would always remember him for the Vincent M. Royce Annex.
The night before Vincent and I had pondered the incongruity of it all-that a library should eventually be his memorial. The codicil had been part of his parents' will, and the trustees would carry out his parents' wishes to the letter. Vincent thought it strange that he should have a library named after him since he had hardly entered one during his stay at Princeton. I joked that maybe they could bury him under the floor of the reading room. I laughed with him that night feeling silly and quite drunk. Vincent never got drunk, never had a bad day, and never stopped believing in the future. He could afford to rest on his laurels and his parents' wealth and still live the good life. Instead, he chose to join the Peace Corps and headed for Zimbabwe a week later.
That decision was the beginning of the end. It's strange how the best intentions can turn horribly wrong.
The nurse wouldn't allow me to see him on Saturday. His condition had worsened overnight and only the family could visit. I spent the rest of the day calling everyone I knew who had any influence to grant me a dispensation. I finally convinced his cousin Denise. She admitted to having had a crush on me from the one time we met at a beach party in Hyannis. She had twin boys now and a summer home on Martha's Vineyard and a hefty divorce settlement from her last husband. She hinted that perhaps we could get together after my visit to her cousin. I gritted my teeth and agreed. She phoned the lawyers and arranged for an hour on Sunday afternoon. I hoped that Vincent would hold out until then.
May 20, 2001
Saturday night I hoped and Sunday morning I prayed. I located the church nearest to my hotel and entered by the side door. I found a seat in a remote corner and tried to remember the proper words. No inspiration came. The Lord's Prayer should be simple. Everyone knows it. However, my parents never belonged to an established church. My grandparents were Methodist, and they took me to Sunday services whenever I visited. My nanny tried to instruct me in the Catholic doctrine as learned in some dim past. So my religious education was spotty at best. The words would not come. Perhaps it was too late to ask; perhaps He would not listen; perhaps there was nobody there to hear.
I had misjudged one person throughout this whole mess. Josh was waiting for me in the hotel lobby. He took me by the arm and wheeled me back into Copley Square. The cool morning had turned into a warm spring afternoon. Josh was hungry and found us a small café on Newbury Street where we could "talk". My appointment was for 2 o'clock, but we were within walking distance of the Royce family home. I grew nervous that he would try to talk me out of seeing Vincent.
Josh only sat there stirring his coffee and glaring at the bloody rare hamburger defying him to eat it. He finally pushed the burger away and moved closer to my side of the table. The mirrored sunglasses and surreptitious movement gave him the appearance of a conspirator plotting the overthrow of Capitol Hill. His voice was no more than a whisper passing by my ear. I leaned in closer to hear him, which only made the picture more suspicious. He repeated one word, Laurie. I knew what he meant and shook my head. It wasn't the same; there would not be any photographers this time. There was no need for concern. He insisted on coming with me as insurance.
The Royce townhouse was really a mansion once belonging to old money Boston Brahmans. The Royce family was new money fresh from mercantile and Wall Street successes. I never understood why Vincent despised his roots until I met his guardians and relatives. They had banded together now in the front parlor, the library, the kitchen, the solarium, all on death watch. I felt Josh shiver as we walked through the central hall past their once mobile faces, now frozen into silence. Josh quipped something about playing statues that did nothing to relieve the tension.
The nurse led us up to Vincent's room and opened the door without knocking. She mumbled something about "needing his rest" and "only one hour." All I could hear was the rhythmic sound of a compressor and the beeping of a heart monitor. Josh turned expecting me to rush toward the bed, but I was pinned to the spot. The sight of Vincent attached to equipment similar to that which had sustained Josh resurrected those horrible images of a year ago. Josh nudged me with his shoulder as a sign of encouragement. His whole demeanor was calm. He had no visual of himself lying in that hospital bed. All he had was the memory of its pain.
We both jumped when Vincent's hand gestured to us from the bed. He tried to speak as well, but the respirator mask muffled his already shallow voice. I moved toward him while Josh kept guard near the door. What does one say to a friend who had disappeared for ten years and then resurfaced in the guise of a stranger? You say something totally inane and watch as a smile crosses his face revealing the friend once more. He started to cough behind the mask and struggled to remove it. For some reason I looked at Josh for permission to help, but his concentration was focused on rubbing a spot out of the carpet with his shoe.
I lifted the mask over Vincent's head and grew less anxious when the coughing stopped. Vincent's smile engulfed his whole being as he reached out to request a hug. I embraced him tentatively at first and then with the fullness of years. We had never been ashamed of our mutual feelings for each other. We knew that people wondered and gossiped behind our backs in college. No one questioned our relationship more than the trustees who not only protected the family fortune, but its reputation. They breathed a noticeable sigh of relief when Vincent and I went our separate ways after graduation.
They needn't have worried since it was not sexual attraction that bound our friendship. We found each other both orphans of the storm, abandoned rich kids, one literally and the other figuratively. Even then I had been suspicious about my father's late night business meetings and my mother's periodic visits to Tucson. At least Vincent knew that his parents were dead, I never knew where mine were. Vincent would often accuse me of excessive whining when I complained about this. His sybaritic philosophy was "Better in bed than dead" and proceeded to convince me.
Vincent's mouth was moving again barely allowing the air to escape his lips. I bent down to hear him, and he repeated the first three words of his mantra. After a moment I caught his meaning. I glanced over my shoulder at Josh who still guarded the door like a Roman centurion. I asked him to leave and lock the door behind him. Josh hesitated and finally asked if CJ should be concerned about the White House Press Corps tomorrow. Not front-page news this time, I assured him, only the obituaries.
Our time was short, too short to recollect ten years across two lives. None of the past mattered, of course, since for one of us there would be no future. Only the here and now mattered, here in Vincent's bed, my arms encircling his thin frame, my body transferring whatever energy it could to extend his waning hours. He asked about my present life and loves. He already knew everything about my career. I wanted to know why he hadn't written after that first year. He said he had met someone, someone very special to him. He didn't want to confuse my life any more than it had been. He wouldn't describe the course of his disease for that would forever poison my soul. So we clung to each other and he spoke of the now. He told me he wanted to die; he was ready to die; it was the waiting to die that terrified him.
Yet with all the pain, he wouldn't "sleep" until he had seen his brother again. I was glad that I had come, glad that I had lied to come, glad that I had deceived his watchers to be here for him. I could never be true to myself if I had not. There was one thing I had to do to complete our histories. Maybe Josh would understand some day; I wished that I could make him understand. Vincent died at 2:47 PM, EDT, on May 20th in the year of our Lord 2001. The lawyers would have already prepared the obituary with an appropriate headline: "Heir to Back Bay Fortune Succumbs after Long Illness". All the politically correct code words used to announce how the rich and not so famous die from AIDS.
May 21, 2001
Today was my mother's 60th birthday. I know this because she left a message on my answering machine telling me not to expect her home tonight in case I called. She was out celebrating with the rest of her friends, her coffee klatch or bridge club or golf foursome or whatever clique that mattered this month. She didn't mention my father at all. So nothing had changed really, except a beautiful spirit had passed from my world remembered only by six column inches of text and a youthful college photo on page 63 of the Boston Globe.
I awoke early, called in for messages and opened the newspaper looking for the inevitable. Josh had slept through all this, oblivious to my movements and the sun that slowly drifted into the hotel room. He had stayed with me last night in case I wanted to talk, but I had already said all that was really important. I had nothing to share with him unless it was the continuum of our history--Vincent's past winding into my present and crossing into Josh's future. He had tried his best to comfort me, but neither of us was ready for that yet. Maybe when the wounds have healed and the scars have faded, there will be a chance. At this time and in this place, I had to write an epitaph for another friend:
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
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