The President's Angel by Sophy Burnham Page A

and when they did, could barely tear themselves apart. The passing years were marked by larger apartments and houses, and moves from his home state to Congress (a house in Georgetown), to Governor (the mansion in the home-state capital), and each move took something out of Anne, though she smiled gallantly and made a joke about a rolling stone. In that period she developed a twitch at the corner of her mouth. He wondered if she drank in the afternoons, but had no time to worry about it and bought her a maid instead, and got her a membership in the country club so that she could play tennis or golf with other political wives, and entertain at the club, if need be, and not bother him with her troubles.
    It was four-thirty in the morning, and no angel had appeared. His thoughts were lions roaming round their cage. Then—without warning—both his boys pounced on him, and he scrambled to recover his wits, for these were memories he never permitted to himself. Nonetheless they roared onto him: his sons, just little guys, tough and compact of body, not two feet high and swinging at baseballs or flailing at the water when he took them swimming; or later, as adolescents, wrestling one another in the pool with the splashes of whales. They were growing into fine, young, muscled men; and frantically he tried to jerk his thoughts onto another track—his work, a woman—Eileen, Rebecca—the Peruvian problem to resolve—but they pressed in on him, those two great grinning, awkward, clownish boys with their huge hands and gawky feet, the elder having hardly achieved full height, but taking out girls, starting to drink now and also make speeches in the congressional campaigns, when they took the car for that fatal ride and left their bodies under the tractor trailer on the Beltway, their blood and muscles slippery on the road.
    He screamed. The highway smeared with blood.
    His heart was pounding. His skin had broken out in sweat.
    The door opened. Frank: “Sir?”
    â€œGo away,” he growled. “Get out. I‘m thinking.” But he threw his feet on the cold floor and padded to the angry bathroom to relieve himself, and the tears were running down his unshaven cheeks as he stood before the toilet and pain seared all his joints. His shoulders shook. He could not stop the tears.
    Afterward he gulped cold water. He washed his face. He threw himself still trembling back in bed—uncoupled, he was, by his dear dead boys who had taken with them all his love and dried good, lusty ambition into dust.
    Instantly he was Anne, scorched by hate at how he’d used their deaths. His teeth began to chatter. He threw off the covers and slipped to his knees beside the bed. “God, help me. Help me,” he prayed, as if a deity were not imaginary. “Help me,” he prayed. Until suddenly he was kneeling in his imagination at Anne’s feet, kissing Anne’s feet in love and supplication. But before she could extend forgiveness, the image broke into the figure of the boys, who reached down and hauled him up, enfolded him in their great snuffling embrace, which turned to shoulder-pummeling and leg-wrestling and then to one of those wild racing rough-houses that shook the lamps as they all three thundered from the living room up the stairs and through the bedrooms and down to the basement again, the house rocking with their roars. No cushion was left in place where they had played. Laughing, they threw themselves on the floor.
    The vision changed. He was staring at the image of his half-grown sons. They stood before him enveloped in a light beyond imagining, and they weren’t doing anything, just standing, looking, smiling at the air.
    The President woke from his trance and pulled himself exhausted into bed. He was drained. Now his tears were not for the boys or Anne or even for himself (though God knows he had wept for them before), but for all suffering in this life, this short-lived, fragile,