Echo House by Ward Just

temperament,' Sylvia said. I thought her garden looked like a technicolor pandemonium, and I'd had enough of that. I'd had enough of that to last a lifetime. Whether her poetry was any good I'm not in a position to say. She thought it was very good and she was the one who was writing it, so I suppose she ought to know. You have to take her word for it. She worked hard on her poetry during the night and on her English garden during the day. So I came back from France and didn't fit into this world she'd made and the people she'd made it with. And she didn't fit into mine, God knows." He looked at the boy, who was listening hard with his chin in his hand. "I should say
our
world, yours and mine, because we were a family after all. And it wasn't a question of not trying, on my part or on her part either. She tried, but she was working like a heretic striving mightily for faith. You have to talk yourself into it and believe that the search is worthwhile. This was an impossibility for her and for me, too. And she knew it and I knew it."
    "Yes," the boy said doubtfully. "And she left then?"
    But his father did not hear, or if he heard he gave no sign. He said, "And when the war ended we returned to Washington, back to Echo House, my work in the government. I had to give back, Alec. When you fight a war and win it, you own it. And it owns you. The price is never cheap and you have to protect the victory, as you would any investment. The winning cost too much blood, don't you see? You can't walk away from it and simply allow people to bleed to death and create the very conditions you fought in the first place. And if you don't think the government can break your heart, walk over to Mr. Lincoln's memorial sometime and look at his face." Axel opened his mouth to say something more, then didn't. It was easy to explain that government was noble work, the only work worth doing. If you had a talent for it you had to do it. If you could afford to do it, you had a duty to try. But it was not so easy explaining the way you went about it, the evasions and compromises. Sylvia called it the civics lecture that concealed the raunchy joke. Axel wanted to control things and people, and the government was the officially approved way of going about it; making the world safe for democracy meant making the world safe for him and his ilk.
    Axel, she'd said, you don't tell yourself the truth. You've gone soft in the head; you won't examine your own life, the choices you made and what you felt while you were making them. Motives, darling. Something other than "bad cards" or "mistakes were made." Government's the opiate of the patrician masses, don't you think? You've had too many'séances in the Oval Office with a movie; later, cookies and bourbon and classified talk. Too many secrets, not enough mystery. There's no beauty in it, no beauty at all. You've teamed up with the hollow men, and if you're not careful, you'll become one yourself. But maybe that's what you want for yourself. Maybe that's your beau ideal.
    That was one of their last arguments, and a week later Sylvia was on her way to London.
    "Hard to explain about the government, Alec. It's a religion, I suppose, and you either believe in it or you don't. The people who don't believe in it think it's an opiate. Too bad for them."
    The boy nodded as if he understood completely, but he didn't understand at all. He didn't know what the government had to do with his mother, who only wanted to write her poetry. She was devoted to poetry the way his father was devoted to the government, and he did not know why these two objectives were so in opposition. They seemed to be fire and ice. He looked at his father and thought that their rafts were very far apart now, and his mother's was out of sight. What would she have said, had she been present? He knew he could mediate between them if only they would give him a chance. He knew also that his father was withholding something important and was not at all