Paul Robertson - The Heir

“I see. What does it mean to have a lower priority?”

“We’ll keep the file open, but we won’t commit any resources to it unless something new comes up.”

“Well,” I said, “I just wanted to know. Thank you.”

“Yes, Mr. Boyer. Glad to help.”

I could picture his mustache quivering as I took to the wind.

I have a fake driver’s license and a credit card with the same name. Melvin had them created for me so that I could travel without being a Boyer. I might be ashamed of my real name, but I’d seldom used the fake.

For this trip, though, I decided Jeff Benson of Worcester, Massachusetts, would rent cars and manage any other transactions. I was becoming shy of publicity.

I let myself in to the Boyer Embassy in Georgetown. It was two side-by-side three-story townhouses, small by Boyer standards but large enough to entertain in intimate senatorial style.

I’d been there a dozen times during the twelve-year Washington residency. As a younger child, I’d not been welcome. I only visited Melvin and Angela when they were back home. In high school and college, when there was less chance of my breaking something valuable, I came for weekends two or three times a year. It had been empty, except for short visits, for the eight years that he’d loaned his Senate seat to Forrester.

This habitation was even more hostile in my memory than the big house, and now it was mine. I would stay in it and do as I wished. Maybe I’d shatter a Limoges plate on the Dutch-tile floor.

After I let myself in, though, I tiptoed up the stairs and set my suitcase quietly on the guestroom bed. But then, standing on the balcony over the living room, I got hold of myself and spoke to the ghosts.

“You’re dead, Melvin.”

There were even echoes.

“It’s my house now.”

And that was all I needed.

I walked through every floor, sweeping the memories away like cobwebs. Not that there were cobwebs. The place was still cleaned weekly and kept ready in wistful hope of being used.

There was no pink in the house anywhere. Angela had taken her things when they moved out, and she didn’t travel with him when he came for business. Nothing there looked like she had touched it, or like anyone had touched it. Even the bedrooms were professionally furnished and barren of soul.

I found the Matisse. It didn’t look very significant.

I read for a while that evening, but I soon found my eyes straying from the pages. I finally started walking the house again, looking through the rooms more carefully than I had before.

Yes, Melvin had been a senator. I was eight when he was first elected, three years after my mother died, and Eric and I had already been banished to the boarding schools that were our childhood. He’d married Angela a year later, here in Washington. She was twenty-eight, he was forty-three. We did not attend the wedding; at our young age, we could not be trusted to act with the proper decorum.

Our teachers and classmates all knew that Melvin was a senator. Of course, everyone at the school was cut from our same cloth, but even among the wealthy families and social elites, a senator would stand out. And if Eric and I had no real father, a senator would do.

Eventually the schools had rendered me presentable enough to be shown. I don’t know whose hands I shook. There may have been cabinet secretaries and ambassadors. I know there were other senators. Those were the years the questions had started, the first Why am I here? It might have been from meeting so many important people and wondering what my value was.

The monthly checks started when I was in college. There was to be no making a living or working to put food on the table for me. No job to take my mind off the questions.

And now what? This was where Melvin had lived for twelve years. Maybe I’d find something here for myself.

I was up early Saturday to explore the neighborhood. The meeting was at ten.

No wonder Melvin had been drawn here. This was a place for the powerful. It was written in every storefront and every discreet, elegant facade. He’d had equals here who weren’t natural enemies, as well as many other powerful people who had been less than equal. Only a handful had been higher.

I walked to Capitol Hill. Melvin often had. Five blocks to the head of Pennsylvania Avenue, then four miles to the Capitol. The only thing that kept it from being a straight shot was the White House smack dab in the way, and what thoughts that must have put in his head. But he was a realist; he only owned one state, not the whole country. Ultimately he’d come back home, where his reign was unquestioned. Caesar or nothing.

And one of the few men who could question his position back home was Bob Forrester. So Melvin had lured him away, to where Bob could build his castle and Melvin owned the sand it was built on.

I came to the senate office buildings and was expected. Then I was accepted into the outer office of the senator. The greatest man is still only a man, so his wealth and power have to be visible in other ways. Big Bob was only a man-but through the window was the Capitol, and beyond it the Mall and the monuments and the departments and the great city. A man in that office would know he was very powerful.

The man stood as I entered his inner temple. “Jason Boyer,” he said, standing taller than me. “I remember meeting you before, at your father’s house.” He stood very still, like a monument himself. It made him seem unmovable.

“I remember it, too,” I said, choking back the sir. “It was after the election, at the end of his last term.”

“Long ago.” He turned to the window to make sure I had noticed the spectacle. “I want to offer you my sympathy concerning him. I didn’t have an opportunity at his funeral.” I was trying to remember. He hadn’t been at the cemetery, only at the church. He’d sung the hymns off-key.

“Thank you.” There are many shades of gray. Nathan Kern’s hair, for example, was the discreet color of rain clouds. Bob Forrester’s was light, marbled with darker veins. Each strand either black or white.

“I’ve entered a resolution in the Senate honoring his memory. There are still people here who remember him.”

“Thank you again,” I said. Since the first greeting he hadn’t faced me. “Senator, I don’t need to take much of your time. I wanted to meet you because your association with Melvin goes back a long time and was important to him.”

He turned just his head toward me for a moment, and then away. “Yes. Although I’m afraid I didn’t know him well personally.”

Then he sat, and did not ask me to.

That made me angry. This was rudeness without reason unless there was a reason. My agenda was only to introduce myself and attempt to toss in the governor’s name. The senator had his own agenda.

“I didn’t mean socially. I’ve inherited his estate and his responsibilities.”

“Indeed.” It was a dismissal! He’d accepted the meeting for the purpose of snubbing me.

I did not accept it. It was a measure of the five days since my meeting with Clinton Grainger that I was not feeling at all intimidated in this conversation. As long as I was standing and he was sitting, I was taller. “You understand what I mean, Senator.” If he would look at me at all, he’d have to look up.

He did look up and saw that I was still there. “Then take responsibility for your father’s embarrassment in the governor’s mansion. So far you haven’t been able to.” He had taken up his reading glasses. “And now, if you could excuse me. It has been a pleasure.”

“I doubt that,” I said. I walked out, but this time it was not a retreat, just a strategic move into camp, where I could begin my siege.