by Ian Woollen
Chapter 7
The Dark Star
By habit, He Who Remains Classified rose early and walked from his Capitol Hill bachelor’s apartment to the State Department Building on C Street. A recent promotion to group director—thanks to his mentor in counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton—secured him a bigger office.
Glaring kilowatts of sunlight coruscated on the walls. Renovations and debugging were still in progress. He’d ordered Venetian blinds to replace the thick drapes. The bright sunlight bombarded his corner suite like a giant interrogation lamp. He Who Remains Classified plucked his sunglasses, always at the ready, from his breast pocket. The dark aviators hid his baby-blue eyes.
He lowered himself down to the floor for fifty push-ups, his way of staying vicariously connected to his grunts in the field. From floor level, he noted that none of his new desk drawers were tall enough to contain a handle of Scotch. He sat up, breathing heavily, and poured a short one into his thermos cap.
Mr. Angleton advised through-the-day pacing. Mr. Angleton’s renowned morning ritual included spinning once around in his leather chair, opening a drawer with his left hand, whipping out a bottle, and bringing it down with a decisive thump on the desktop, precisely as the wall clock struck eight bells.
He Who Remains Classified started his workday with a glimpse at the Wangert file. It was like scanning the funnies in the Post, before getting down to the serious business of supervising his stable of PsyWar scribes, currently stirring things up in Guatemala. Also, as a member of the advisory committee on the design of the Agency’s fallout bunker in rural Virginia, He Who Remains Classified appreciated reading the details of the Wangert bomb shelter décor.
Except that lately, with Mary and Ward’s removal to Maine, the Wangert reports were thinner. Sketchy notes on Ernesto’s UFO sightings and Loretta Stark’s tomato harvest. The local Indianapolis source seemed blind to the fact that Mary and Ward’s so-called honeymoon was lasting a lot longer than was typical.
He Who Remains Classified buzzed his assistant and ordered a replacement. He also demanded a fix for the island blackout. It would be harder to locate a source in Maine, but not impossible.
Chapter 8
Short Days
Clyde Salter showed up in Zippy Cove at the beginning of November in a Ford Model A truck. Clyde, a slim figure buried inside greasy coveralls, was the father of Johnny, the boy with polio.
His Model A chugged and sputtered and lurched to a stop. Great Tusk Island was a museum of antique vehicles, each one originally barged out from the mainland and kept running with improvised repairs until it was finally pushed into the thoroughfare seawall.
Clyde called out, “ ’Bout time to get the place ready. Winter will be here soon.” He looked up at the sky, as if expecting it any minute.
There were never any formal introductions or handshakes. Clyde dealt only with the immediate physical task at hand. No other common ground existed between this man and the world. His thin, sinuous neck looked like the stem of a pumpkin. He said, “I notice you got the pine boughs started. We’ll put a bed around the foundation.”
Ward did not reveal exactly why a small pile of boughs already lay beside the house. He said, “Yes, that’s right. I had sort of been planning to, uh ….”
Clyde was already at work. Ward and Clyde labored all afternoon. The next day, inside the cellar, they located the ground pipe that ran from the well to the kitchen pump and bound it up with rags and newspaper. They searched the basement and the barn for storm windows.
“Could be we never had any storm windows made,” Ward said. “Nobody in my family ever thought we’d be here during the winter.”
Clyde suggested “borrowing” some from the clubhouse after dark. He said, “Don’t need many, because you won’t be able to live out of but one or two rooms.”
He taught Mary how to replace the circular wicks in the kerosene burners and how to get a steady draw going in the fat Glenwood parlor stove. He recommended keeping a few bricks on the hearth to be used for warming their bed. Hot bricks also took the chill off a cold outhouse.
Whenever Mary tried to discuss her interactions with Johnny at school, Clyde shrugged sheepishly. The disease had left Johnny lame in one leg. He’d been out of school the preceding year, and was bravely making up for lost time. Mary’s repeated invitations for Clyde to bring his wife and son out to dinner were met with vague shrugs.
“Clyde, will we ever meet Johnny’s mother?” Mary asked finally.
Clyde shook his head. “Nobody does. She sits upstairs like a Salem witch, watching for her father’s boat to return. Good days, she ties her hair back. Bad days, she lets it hang.”
“Like a Salem witch ….” Mary echoed.
Clyde drove the snowplow and cleared the road out to the Wangert cottage after the first big storm. When Ward slid his Jeep off into a drift, Clyde pulled him out. He taught Ward how to hang an old tire in the middle of the tow-chain, so that in case it snapped, the chain wouldn’t bean him from behind. He dropped by the cottage with a replacement battery for their radio. He regularly checked the level in the kerosene tank behind the barn, a rusty 300-gallon cylinder perched on four thin metal poles.
Just when Mary and Ward had resigned themselves to Clyde and Dr. Stone being their only contact with the village community, they received an invitation to a musicale. Clyde came by one evening in late January to install a leather in the kitchen pump and said, “Oh, almost forgot, musicale at Eaton’s tomorrow night.”
The tradition of the winter musicale along the Maine coast was understood to be a harbinger of the February thaw. Loud, smoky, venting sessions that usually took place in a ‘shop,’ a tilting structure on the shore behind many lobstermen’s houses where they painted buoys and repaired traps.
“Should we bring something?” Mary asked.
“How about that Russian vodka we’ve been saving?” Ward suggested.
The Eaton house stood next to the post office. A horseshoe dangled over the front door with a greeting sign that read, “Here lives a fisherman with the catch of his life.” Fiddle music sounded faintly inside. Ward and Mary knocked unsuccessfully for ten minutes. They nearly froze and gave up and left, before locating the source of the party noise. Clutching hands tightly in the dark, they edged around a huge stack of firewood and down toward the shore to Ralph Eaton’s shop.
The musicale instruments included a concertina, a guitar, and a fiddle. Marsden’s squeezebox fit in under his enveloping gut, such that the instrument was barely visible. Two brass storm candles hung from the rafters, casting a glow over the trio of musicians and a small area on the paint-spattered floor that had been cleared for dancing. Traps, tools, paint cans, and nets lay piled against the walls. A small, open Franklin in the corner supplemented the growing heat from twenty or more indiscernible figures, all still wearing hats and oilskins.
Mary and Ward slid into the shop and took a place against the wall among the standing crowd. Older women and children sat on the nets. Aside from a few curious glances, Mary and Ward’s entrance was fairly easy, because no one was talking or socializing as such. It was all about the music. Songs that everyone knew by heart, hymns and sea shanties. Older couples occasionally sliding out for graceful turns in the confined dance area.
Ward attracted a few glances when he pushed his way around to the workbench and deposited two bottles of Russian vodka among the various jugs that comprised the bar. He returned to Mary in the shadows.
So far, so good, he thought, we’ve made our offering. They scanned the room for Clyde and finally spotted him in the opposite corner. Either he was too nervous to acknowledge them or he was drunk. After an hour went by and nobody had touched the vodka, Mary and Ward became concerned that perhaps their gift was a mistake. A lot of whiskey and rum was being consumed, with a veneer of surreptitiousness—jugs and flasks quickly tilted into coffee cups and cola bottles. Nobody tried the vodka.
Was it too exotic and unknown? “Maybe
there is a political problem,” Mary whispered. “The islanders think it’s Commie booze.”
Ward’s solution was to grab Mary’s hand and drag her out for a waltz. They both immediately recalled learning the steps together as children in Mrs. Stewart’s ballroom class back in Indianapolis. And both intuitively shared a sensation that destiny was in play, that those long-ago lessons had been meant to prepare them for this dance, this slow waltz in a wintry, island den. The unspoken awareness helped their style. It wasn’t about showing off. It wasn’t about lead-follow. It wasn’t about perfect position. Mary’s stomach was too large. It was about holding each other for five minutes in a gentle sway.
As Mary and Ward returned to their spot against the buoys on wall, the hooded figure next to Ward leaned over and muttered, “Nicely done.”
Ward seized the opportunity. He replied, “Thanks, and by the way, not much of a hangover with that stuff, you know. Leaves you right fresh in the morning.” He pointed toward the vodka bottles, unopened on the workbench.
The man shrugged appreciatively. Word of the morning-after properties gradually spread, and by midnight both bottles were empty.
The next day, a little after nine-thirty, Ward and Mary came to town on their weekly grocery run. They passed a gathering outside the post office. The gathering waved. They passed Ralph Eaton in his DeSoto. He honked. They walked in the grocery and heard a clearly voiced, “good morning” from Marsden.
“Do you know where I can order some of that paint thinner you brought last night?” Marsden asked.
Ward replied, “I’ll look into it for you.”
“We need to ask your opinion on something,” Mary said. “You are the first selectman, correct?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Marsden said.
“I have an idea for Johnny Salter. He’s been helping me on the science projects all year. I wanted to sound you out first—”
“We don’t want this to backfire,” Ward interrupted, remembering his mother’s crude seagull-killing scheme.
Mary continued, “My college friend, Breezy, who works at the Portsmouth newspaper would like to write a human-interest story about Johnny. I told her about him overcoming polio. An article in the newspaper would give him a boost.”
Marsden thwacked his jumper cable suspenders and seconded the motion, adding that Great Tusk could gain a few tourists out of the deal.
Red-headed, garrulous Breezy Merritt piloted her own seaplane. She arrived in style, swooping low and dipping her wings over Zippy Cove. Because the pond was frozen, she landed the plane in the thoroughfare, generating much excitement among the island gearheads.
Her article was brief. One column and a single photograph of Johnny dribbling a basketball in the schoolyard. It quoted Johnny on the tides: “A southerly churns up the bottom colors, because it blows free all the way up the bay from Africa, while a northerly flattens the waves right down, coming in over the top of Blue Hill.”
The article described Johnny’s slow recovery from polio and his lively, one-room island schoolhouse. It was picked up and reprinted regionally. The 1950s being the golden-age of the pen-pal, Johnny Salter soon received admiring letters from schoolchildren all across New England.
Clyde insisted that each letter be answered. To reduce his load of thank-you notes, Johnny strategically selected a few letters from each day’s mail bag and stashed the remainder into the culvert under Bull Brook. This strategy worked fine, as long as the cold weather held, encasing the letters in ice.
In mid-March the spring rains hit. Bull Brook swelled and frothed. The ice melted and soon the brook became powerful enough to expel the hidden contents of the culvert. One morning at the beginning of April, Great Tusk Island awoke to find hundreds of Johnny’s pen-pal letters floating around the town dock, amid the fishing boats, all across the harbor.
People yakked about it for days. Clyde and Johnny devised a double-station dory rig to scoop up the letters with a seining net. They enlisted Ward and Mary, who quickly learned to row like gondoliers.
Mary’s baby was born a week later. Legend has it that the newborn, Anthony Stark Wangert, came forth smart enough to sign his own birth certificate.
Chapter 9
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified snorted and choked on his 8 a.m. whisky. Leaning back in his desk chair, he stared at Anthony’s birth announcement, clipped from The Indianapolis Star. This was not entirely unexpected.
He Who Remains Classified did the math, and knowing Ward to be a clever fellow, surmised the probable cause for the extended stay in Maine. He rose from his chair, closed his Venetian blinds, and placed a do-not-disturb sign on his door. He poured an additional jump-starter. He briefly considered ordering a baby present from Tiffany, a porringer or whatever it is one sends, but squelched that sentimental impulse.
The possibility that he was the biological father of an infant son in Indianapolis, Indiana, presented risks, especially of blackmail by the Soviets. He regretted ever having started the Wangert file and told himself this would be a good time to close it. He felt roiled in a way that he didn’t know was possible. His chest hurt, oddly tight.
Often, after a twelve-hour day, he paced at his office window, staring down at the citizenry in the street, practicing an extreme sense of detachment from their pedestrian lives. He was married to his work, as they say. It was very important work. The security of the nation was at stake. Despite being reviled and misunderstood by lefty reporters and eastern intellectuals, he kept the flame of higher duty alive. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. He was proud of his Soviet nickname—The Vulture—recently deciphered on an intercepted cable. He hoped Comrade Ivan did not know about the existence of this baby boy. For everybody’s sake.
* * *
PART II
* * *
Chapter 10
Mary and Ward’s Nighttime Tale
They whispered to each other in bed by candlelight, year after year. Spinning the tale out in brief, gossamer-like episodes:
Lubya’s illegitimate son was born in the attic of a musty carriage house, with mice scurrying in the rafters. Unpinned, Lubya’s hair reached to her waist. She wore lime green bloomers and dressed the boy in a sailor suit. A cigarette always hung from the lip of Mikel, the chauffeur.
Lubya and her son, Peter, worked on the country estate of the diplomat, who commuted to the Foreign Office in Moscow during the week. The dacha overlooked a thousand acres of rolling hills and forested ravines and several ponds.
Peter’s favorite toy was an abacus. He was a young math prodigy, although nobody realized it. He scrambled to stay out of the grumpy diplomat’s way.
The diplomat, a widower, wore dark glasses, even indoors. Once, he tried to humor Peter by bringing a puppy from Moscow.
“Just what we need here, another dog,” Lubya complained to Mikel.
The diplomat told the assembled staff about a young woman in the American embassy who traveled across the ocean with a poodle, only to arrive in Moscow and discover that her dog was pregnant. The birth of the puppies was an international incident. A litter of twelve. The young woman solicited homes for the newborns in all the embassies, and ambassadors from around the globe vied to acquire one of the pups.
Chapter 11
The Crossroads of America
In the 1950s, Indianapolis still justifiably claimed that moniker. The city was laid out like a giant wagon wheel, its main avenues radiating forth from Monument Circle. Indiana Avenue still hummed with jazz. A hundred trains stopped at Union Station daily. The Budapest Quartet flew in to play the tea parties of their patroness, Mrs. Fessler. The 500 Mile Race lasted all day.
The Wangert Building appeared on postcards as a local landmark. It stood on the corner of Senate Avenue and Washington Street, across from the Statehouse. Wangert Public Relations, in operation since 1920, was founded in retirement by Governor Roscoe Wangert. The building featured five grand stories of neo-Palladian proportions, rendered in large sl
abs of limestone and marble.
From his office, young Ward Jr. could see the statue of his grandfather on the north grounds of the Statehouse. Roscoe’s political career was notable for his strike-breaking fervor, his opposition to entry into World War I, and for a scary set of front incisors used to devour entire fried chickens at every campaign stop. For him, “public relations” was a nicer name than “lobbying.” Upon leaving the governor’s office, a very well-connected man, Roscoe envisioned a practice that would be more gentlemanly than lobbying. Its scope included all areas of civic life that required a mediator to sit down with a couple fellows for a little chat.
To simplify billing procedure, Roscoe demanded a large, monthly retainer. Clients gladly paid the hefty fee, because they knew it included invitations to the gala parties hosted regularly at the Wangert manse on North Meridian Street.
Clients also admired the firm’s collection of military art and armaments, displayed on the walls of the Wangert Building’s offices and conference rooms. The collection was started by Roscoe’s father, who served in the Union artillery with Captain Eli Lilly and came home from the Civil War with a lurid fascination for the hardware of battle—cavalry sabers, Bowie knives, Hotchkiss guns, muzzle-loaders, tomahawks. As Roscoe once explained to Ward, “the reason we put armaments on the walls is to make our clients feel it would be prudent for them to reach an agreement before the blood-letting begins.”
Ward Jr. was only a little surprised, upon his return from Maine, to find that his father had expanded the collection by commissioning a full-size bronze replica of the first atomic bombs—Fat Man and Little Boy—for the Wangert Building’s main lobby. It was the talk of the town. Tourists came in off the street to gawk and pose for pictures. Ward Sr. encouraged touching, and he personally polished the bomb sculptures nightly with a monogrammed handkerchief.