AT THE CAPITOL, V stood outside the carriage with an umbrella. The equestrian statue of Washington rose high above the proceedings. Very heraldic—rampant, dexter—all those conventions of honor. The bronze statue glowed wet and dark as obsidian above its pale, stone base. Behind Washington, clouds churned patterns of gray and black, ominous or meaningless. Trying to decide which of the two prevailed, V kept looking up toward Washington and his hat of ancient vintage. Knowing many eyes turned her way, making judgments against her slightest gesture, she collapsed her umbrella and stepped back into the carriage. She had been here before.
The band honked anthemic marching tunes from their bright horns—the flaring bells of trumpets and French horns, bright brass and at the center a black vortex. Most people stood under umbrellas—a field of tight black satin domes—and hunched shoulders against the cold and wet. From behind the crowd, V’s perspective, the arching ribs and scalloped canopies of umbrellas lapped each other into a cloud of descending batwings.
The platform—the stage, the scaffold—had been hammered together suddenly and raggedly from raw yellow pine like a coffin at a July Mississippi funeral, but elevated in tone by bunting drooping lower moment by moment in the rain, the red and blue bands beginning to stain the white.
V rested in the morphine and watched. A play—something medieval and full of morality—began unfolding on the stage before her, a story that ended bad, a tragedy. Raindrops on umbrellas beat faint Celt clan rhythms.
Jeff climbed the steps to the stage, ascending to the scaffold, a willing victim throwing himself onto the wrong pyre. A volunteer. At the podium he looked ashen, skeletal in the depth of his eye sockets and the prominence of cheekbones and hollowness of flesh below.
But when he began talking, his voice swelled. He stood in the rain speaking strong and clear. Projecting. It was a learned skill, a vibration in the vowels sounding completely natural but impossibly loud, a frequency riding over the hum of the audience. A matter of breath, muscle, volume of air pumped from the gray sacks of lungs across the vocal cords. Operatic, and yet just a matter of physics. From times she had sat onstage looking sideways at him against the light, V knew that spittle spewed with his effort. All his thin body leaning forward, muscles clenched. A fighting stance, ready to clash.
Drops of spit and rain mixed and fell on the paper. V imagined the large words she had penned for him dissolving before his weak eyes, the blue ink on the exposed page becoming like a faint precious watercolor depicting the surface of a pond, a distant mountain range. Finally Burton Harrison thought to step forward and hold an umbrella over him.
V hardly noticed individual words, only the music of Jeff’s speech. He believed in things—that much was clear from the rhythm and tone of his voice, the rise and fall of volume, the urgency. With those slight implements, he meant to shove a hot iron rod up the backbone of an entire collapsing culture.
He talked so much of God and the sanctity of property and the absolute rights of those who possess it this instant under a certain set of rules heretofore fluid but henceforth fixed. And no limitations allowed on the nature of property—land, gold, silver, houses, people, livestock. A deep belief that your moment in time is the pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently—those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum.
As the speech trudged on, nearing its halfway point, V kept having to suppress a cough or a laugh or a yawn or a scream. Or an expression of mourning one degree short of weeping. Untoward remarks flooded into her mind. Funny and dreadful. Such as the feeling that if she were writing a review she would have to note that Jeff played his role with much less conviction than in her execution dream. She thought about how the flow of morphine through the human organism always carries with it so much clarity, so much objectivity.
Jeff stood up there minuscule and shouting, unreal in the distance, at the center of a parody of an inauguration. But not amusing, only terrifying. The wet black statue of Washington gleamed and expanded, a dark and indifferent god hiding behind his nose and strange hat, unwilling to pass judgment beyond his mere stern presence.
V felt a sort of vibration, a rattle, and wondered for a moment if this was what an earthquake felt like in its early seconds. She touched the window frame of the carriage and it felt still. She leaned out the window and saw the horses standing calm, resting and waiting, half asleep with their ears relaxed. So the vibration, the rattle, the unease rose from inside.
Still half out the window, she said to the driver, Home, please.
The driver twisted around, looked at her, and said, Right now?
V abided within herself a space of time until the driver grew uncomfortable and needed to say something.
—Ma’am, the mister’s talk’s not over. The president.
V said, Now, please. Now is the time to go home.
The reins snapped and the carriage lurched forward and rattled across the cobbles. Eyes closed, V took three breaths through her mouth and then three through her nose and then tried out an idea, a hypothesis. You’ve led an easy life. But everybody suffers. Judgment and punishment have hit with a light touch so far. The tap of a finger.
BY EVENING—the inaugural reception at the
