Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“We’re going to get our picture taken,” she said, a meek offering that started as a fib but now seemed organic, believable.

“What for? I mean, you get a school picture each year, don’t you?”

“That was September.” Mary Beth had forgotten about picture day. She’d shipped Gabriel off to school in a worn but serviceable Spider-Man T-shirt. Among his scrubbed, starched, and ironed classmates, Gabriel stood out, the cowlick at the crown of his hair giving the illusion of another inch of height. Her forgetfulness was a mark against her, a sign of inattentiveness, a warning that she’d been distracted from the important things. The picture took up residence in her office and on her refrigerator at home as if it were proof of her parental inadequacies. “Kids change so fast at this age.”

MOST OF the neighborhood around Capitol Hill stood quiet, the only sound the grinding of the taxi’s ancient brakes, metal against metal, as it slowed through the circles along Massachusetts Avenue. At the turn onto North Capitol Street, Richard spotted the familiar corner window of the Russell Senate Office Building and smiled; on television, the window had belonged to Oscar Goldman, the bureaucrat who kept the Six Million Dollar Man in line. These bits of knowledge made Richard feel proprietary about his city.

The news bureau was squirreled away in a bland office building, a common late-1960s box with a marble facade. Outside, a custodian sat against a concrete planter full of boxwoods and ornamental cabbage, waving a garden hose in front of him, the insistent stream of water pushing cigarette butts, stray leaves, and the foil wrappers from chewing gum off to the curb. He was the only person Richard passed on his way inside.

At the empty receptionist’s desk, Richard ventured a few half-shouted hellos before Toni White came out to greet him. He felt the taut muscles across her upper back as they embraced in an A-framed hug.

“How do I look?” Richard smoothed his lapels, tugged down on his jacket hem.

Toni fingered the lapel of Richard’s jacket, a discriminating shopper examining high-end merchandise. “Top-notch. Like a trusted newsman. Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet,” she said, glancing at her watch.

Toni led him past the newsroom, where desks were pushed together in clumps of four, as in a fourth-grade classroom; sometimes during the workday, correspondents did live fills sitting at their desk. Behind each cluster you could see the dominant curvature of the Capitol’s marble dome through the two windows at the back of the room. Richard thought it was funny that his interview would be conducted in front of a green screen that would be filled with a graphic to make him appear as if he too were just outside the Capitol, when the real one sat across a grove of trees and two streets, less than six hundred yards away.

In the rear corner of the studio, a folding table covered with a blue tablecloth had been set up, and a decent party spread of crudités sat at one end, opposite a dozen bottles of top-shelf liquor.

“Leftovers?” Richard asked as two stagehands busied themselves making drinks. One poured a Bloody Mary from a pitcher into a clear plastic cup, tracing his finger up the side of the cup to catch a stray drop.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell. A little bonus compensation for having to work today. Most of these guys came in at four o’clock this morning. They get twelve hours at double-time to pay for all the Christmas presents they’ve bought. Or they’re pulling a double shift, like me. I’ve worked every day for nineteen straight days. So what’s the big toy this year, anyway?”

“How would I know? The last time I got wound up about that sort of thing was 1977. Mattel electronic football. I didn’t get one, but my next-door neighbor Dale Whiteis did.”

“Do you want something to eat?” Toni steered Richard to the buffet table.

He picked through the dozen or so fifths, grabbed a bottle of Pimm’s, and read aloud the printed instructions from the side panel, how to make a Pimm’s Cup. “What is this stuff, anyway? You’re supposed to know these things. Australians are part of the empire, right?”

“Castoffs of the empire. At university, I did a summer program at Cambridge, and we drank gallons of that stuff at brunch. You put a splash of seltzer and a cucumber stick in it. I’d ask the guy who owned this pub near Christ College what Pimm’s was, and he’d say, ‘Brilliant. It’s brilliant.’ And then I’d ask what was in it, and he’d say, ‘Genius.’”

Richard let the bottle settle in his hand, then replaced it on the table and took a bottled water from a tray of ice. “I don’t know about brilliant. But this open bar could make some good reality TV. Bring on some members of Congress, give them a few drinks, let them fight it out. Last man standing wins.”

Toni gave Richard a look that he took to mean something along the lines of get serious. “What’s the latest with your Texas kiddies?”

Richard poured himself a cup of coffee. “Oh, the subversives. A city councilman keeps saying they were planning to go Columbine on everyone. And the principal found out that they used the computers and printers in the journalism room to make the newsletter. Then they broke into the faculty lounge to photocopy it. He wants them to reimburse the school district at forty cents a copy.”

“How’s this all going to work out? Litigation? Do I need to send a camera crew somewhere?”

“Doubtful. The kids are going to go to college and become even more disillusioned with me, the principal, the whole system. If we’re lucky, they’ll continue on to law school.” Richard snorted out a laugh, hoped this wasn’t how Toni saw him, just another well-paid cynic. “Don’t worry about these kids,” Richard told her between sips. “They’re pretty resilient. In the end, the smart one runs for Congress and gives his life over to children’s issues and winds up with a post office or a courthouse named after him.”

“Are you sure? Why can’t this be the beginning of the long downward spiral? They barely make it out of community college, end up selling Chryslers at the auto mall, get picked up for drunk driving every four or five years.” Toni pinched her banana peel in half, tossed it in the small steel can.

“That’s not how this is going to end,” Richard said. “The dean of some journalism school is going to sweep in and give these kids a scholarship, liberate them from Texas. This is their ticket out, the admission to a life of comfortable northeastern liberalism. They’ll buy corduroy suits at the Salvation Army thrift shop, join Students for a Democratic Society, intern for some network. They’ll report from war-torn Beirut, work for the Christian Science Monitor or NPR.”

“You sound pretty confident,” Toni said.

Richard laughed. “I’m a firm believer in the happy ending.”

MIKE WAS aware that he rarely thought about the practical issues of child-rearing, just as he was aware Mary Beth might see it as a deficiency in his character. Perhaps that would explain her minor outbursts, the fact that all morning, her expression had consisted of wetter-than-usual eyes and the slight downturn of her lips that usually led to a full-on quiver. He had no idea how to interject himself into that part of Mary Beth’s life. He’d been an only child, had no children of his own. In his heart, the begrudging confession to himself: children were inconvenient, alien. But a more recent portrait of the boy seemed both motherly and practical. The boy. How often did he even say his name? Even in his deepest thoughts and especially in his conversations with Mary Beth, Gabriel was always the boy. And what was the point of another formal picture? School pictures were artifacts that came in the mail a few times each month, postcards in search of abducted children, bearing the heartbroken plea Have you seen me?