Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just Page B

seen-it-all faces of his colleagues in the newsroom. This new garden was spacious as a prairie yet carefully manicured, fussed over, the dimensions all wrong. The garden was didactic, a schoolmarm's finger-in-the-face, violence at hand. It looked professionally laid out by a horticulturist who lacked humanity, an appreciation of asymmetry and chiaroscuro, the shock of the unexpected. The ensemble reminded Alec of anonymous passersby on any city street in America, banal as polka dots. He was profoundly disappointed and concluded that he and Lucia had made a terrible mistake buying this new house. Alec saw no way to remake the unfortunate garden, owing to the dimensions and what had gone into it. The garden put him in mind of a nation governed by a tyrant, and it was too late to put things right. Surely it was wrong to tear out the roots of perfectly healthy plants. They would have to live with a mistake.
    Alec regarded his old garden with the greatest affection for the rest of his life.

ALEC
    L ET ME TELL YOU a story, said Alec to Lucia.
    My father was elected to the Senate when he was young, not yet thirty-five years old. He had the bearing, one might say the standing, of a much older man. He habitually wore three-piece suits, a gold watch chain strung across the vest, but the Phi Beta Kappa key that went with the chain he left at home. His hair was prematurely gray and his voice a confidential baritone, quite soft. He won in an upset against an unpopular Republican, sullen, unclubbable. That was what the political community was then, a club. Everyone knew each other. So word preceded my father: sound man, reliable, tended to business. A workhorse, not a show horse. Good poker player, knew when to hold and knew when to fold, and so forth. Everyone liked Kim Malone, he was in for the long haul, a serious man. I never knew him to listen to a baseball game or read a novel. His world was politics, specifically the Senate. He spent the ten weeks between the election and the inauguration reading the Senate rule book because he knew that the rules were the keys to the realm. The consequence was that from the beginning he was an inside man, drinks in the majority leader's office after hours, golf with committee chairmen on the weekends. After a year or so he became friendly with members of the White House staff and eventually the president himself. Kim Malone knew how to return a favor and keep his mouth shut. He never spoke to the newspapers until much later in his career, when it became unavoidable, and to his advantage.
    This occurred when I was very small, seven years old, a Saturday afternoon in summer. My mother explained that she had a bridge tournament and my father would look after me. We drove to the Senate Office Building in her convertible, the top down. The day was very warm, heat rising in waves from the asphalt. The empty lobby was cool and our voices echoed in the great space. We mounted the marble staircase to my father's second-floor office. When we walked into his reception room there was no one about and the door to his private office was closed. My mother was not put off by closed doors so she knocked once and walked in to find my father with a visitor, the two of them in close conversation around his desk. He looked up with an expression of open alarm. Of course he had forgotten that I was his responsibility for the afternoon. I remember that he and my mother had a quick word sotto voce and that he gave her shoulder a squeeze before he kissed her and wished her good luck and asked her to telephone when she had news. They're better players than I am, my mother said. No they're not, he said. And call me, please. She left at once and I was directed to the leather couch and told to make myself comfortable and not make one sound.
    You can take your jacket off, my father added with a wink to his visitor.
    The visitor was staring at me with a baffled look. What was I doing there, a child in a senator's private office