The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [30]
There was a garbage can on the corner of Forty-eighth and Park a hundred yards beyond the Asian girl. I glanced in out of habit and saw a mound of crumpled leaflets. It didn’t surprise me. Ninety percent of the leaflets I’d handed out had ended up in the nearest garbage can as well. I knew, because I used to check. It made me despair sometimes. But when you really care about something, it’s impossible not to do whatever you can, if only to keep your own sense of hope alive. I folded her handout and put it my pocket. An e-mail wasn’t much to ask.
The Columbia kids fell away as summer approached. I didn’t blame them. We’d already hit every neighborhood in the city twice. Kate and I kept going. The leafleting had become an act of solidarity, with each other and with Kyle. We ranged increasingly far afield, hanging posters and distributing handbills throughout Westchester, Connecticut, and New Jersey. We even went to Boston and Washington. We talked in the car on our travels—about serious things and not-serious things. And when we weren’t talking, we listened to audiobooks, and we followed the New York sports teams on the radio, and we worked on crossword puzzles, Kate reading the clues aloud. The time together was a gift, the only thing that kept me sane.
Eighteen months passed somehow. Alex took me to lunch, learned I was verging on money difficulties, and arranged for Walter to offer me work. Shortly thereafter, Yolanda—who’d been acting as the other functioning adult in our household—announced that she had to move home to the Dominican Republic to care for her sister. I’d been able to balance the time spent leafleting and the time with Claire, but the new job made it difficult. I curtailed the leafleting but refused to give up entirely. Giving up meant acceptance. Claire had begun volunteering at Sloan-Kettering, and Kate and I used the time when she was at the hospital to resume canvassing locally. And then Kate began making excuses not to accompany me, and I realized one day that she’d had enough. It was understandable. She was thirteen, with interests of her own. My choices were to continue alone, spending less time with Claire and Kate, or to stop. I stopped. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. Stopping felt like a breach of faith and deepened my sense of shame.
A liveried doorman greeted me as I entered the Palace hotel. There was a round red sofa in the center of the ornate lobby, and I sat down to rest for a moment before heading toward the dining room. I abandoned the leafleting because it had been the right thing for the family I had left. It was time to abandon my denials as well. I’d put a halt to Kyle’s mail, and give up my vigil at the office window, and move to San Francisco, if Claire wanted me to go with her. And I’d hide my shame. I closed my eyes, trying to steady my breathing. My son was dead. Claire and Kate were alive. I had to be strong for them.
9
I checked in for lunch with a somber plainclothes security agent who examined my ID carefully before finally admitting me to the private room where Senator Simpson was scheduled to hold forth. It was a long, narrow, high-ceilinged chamber, paneled in dark mahogany and illuminated by lead crystal chandeliers—an old New York setting, like something from an Edith Wharton novel. A number of the people already seated around the enormous oval table in the middle glanced toward me as I entered. Apart from the room, the only thing reminiscent of a turn-of-the-century power lunch was the fact that everyone was male. Other than that, the attendees were too young, too casually dressed, and too ethnically diverse. It was a typical hedge-fund group, hyperkinetic forty-year-olds in blue blazers and open collared shirts, wearing ten-thousand-dollar watches and compulsively checking BlackBerrys held in their laps. The crowd was a fair bit smaller than it had been at my last lunch with this group. The survivors looked aged but unbowed.
I nodded to the room and then spied Alex. He was sitting at the far