Echo House Read Online Free PDF

Constance, he said, "To the nominees of our party, the next President and Vice President of the United States."
    The men drained their glasses. Curly threw his into the fireplace and took another from the tray on the sideboard. The others followed suit, except for Constance, who neither drank nor broke her glass, yet stood in such a way that no one doubted who presided at Echo House.

    Many years later Axel Behl told the story to his son, Alec, then a teenager. Old enough to appreciate the stakes. Old enough to grasp the ironies, as Axel said. The moment was morbidly apt. They had walked across the street from Echo House to Soldiers Cemetery and were standing before the stele that announced B E H L , a rose sculpted above the name, and below it an inscription in German, Goethe's
Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
Constance's selection, it went without saying; she had outlived the senator by five years, dying alone in the Observatory on the eve of Hitler's march into Poland.
    Axel leaned heavily on his cane as he spoke. Alec was looking at him strangely, and he guessed that his right eye was drooping, the long scar on his face livid. His voice had risen, too, and he was sweating. He reached to massage his ruined knee and continued softly, "She was fierce, fiercer than he was. When she died I was out of touch. I'd been sent to Lisbon on war business. Curly Peralta handled the arrangements, and I didn't learn the circumstances until much later."
    "I hardly remember her," Alec said. What he did remember were unforgiving eyes and a sarcastic tongue. She seemed to believe that life had let her down badly. Sylvia, his mother, called her a connoisseur of misfortune.
    Axel reached with his cane to dislodge a bit of lichen on the stele. "So there I was in the famous Observatory, a shadow witness to how grown men behaved at a private moment of betrayal. I was invisible except when my mother, God bless her, proposed her toast. The king was dead, long live the king. And this much was true for me: in some unconscious way I chose my career that night, not the precise function but the form of it, where I would place myself in the scramble to the top of the tree. Meaning the government, because that's our family's milieu. That's what we do. That's what he did, that's what I do, and you will, too, when the time comes. We don't know how to do anything else."
    And it had made them all so happy, Alec thought but did not say.
    "Why, you were born the night Frank Roosevelt was nominated. Your mother likes to tell the story that when I called from the convention floor and the nurse said you'd arrived, I didn't ask whether you were a boy or a girl. I had to tell your mother about the five ballots and how California caved and what a great day it was for the nation. You know the story, a family joke."
    Axel paused, out of breath. He took a tiny vial from his coat pocket, tapped a pill into his palm, and swallowed it dry. He sighed and bit his lip. Someone had wandered within earshot. In a moment the intruder was gone, and Axel spoke again.
    "You're in it for the long haul. You give your loyalty to the
state,
don't you see? Nothing else matters. You know what the Stalinists say. Let them starve! Let them starve! The last two left: alive will be communists for life. That's it exactly."
    Alec said, "Your face is awful pale. Are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water?"
    "My father disappointed us all, quitting as he did. And it was his own fault entirely. So inside the Observatory at Echo House that night I knew that I never wanted to be dependent on a promise that could be withdrawn over a telephone line—sorry to put it like this, Axel old boy, but I've made other plans, no hard feelings I hope, and let's stay in touch. I never wanted to learn the mumbo-jumbo and say that everything was fine when it wasn't fine. I suppose in that way only I am my father's son. I intended to be in the tree with my own juju. And I