by Ian Woollen
Mary sighed, “Look, Ward and I are happy for you to have as much time as you want with the baby. I know Daddy considers Anthony his replacement for Robert.”
“It is a consolation,” Loretta agreed. “Have you tried that castor oil yet? Or, is that too common a remedy for the little prince?”
“Mother, please,” Mary said, “I thought we agreed that Daddy and Ward should settle their own fuss, without us getting in the middle.”
Sadly, Mary was caught in the middle. Her husband and her father were barely speaking. At one of the Wangert Public Relations events—the Starks were always dutifully invited—Fred Stark overheard a conversation about the impending agreement between GM and city officials on a deal to replace the Interurban train system with buses. Fred was adamantly opposed to the buses. He believed the trolleys were remarkably efficient at transporting commuters and shoppers from a fifty mile radius.
Fred Stark, dark mono-brow twitching, repeatedly took his son-in-law aside and gave him an earful about the dire consequences for downtown Indianapolis, especially for the beloved City Market. Ward hemmed and hawed deferentially, and held his tongue. Mary warned him about her father’s temper, which had almost certainly contributed to her brother enlisting underage. Finally, Ward spoke up about Wangert Public Relations’ position of political neutrality.
“Fred, my job is not to influence anybody. The old governor laid down the law on this when he started the business. We’re completely neutral. My job is to bring interested parties together. If General Motors wants to hire Wangert Public Relations to arrange a few meetings with the city, that’s all we do. We set up the meeting and no more. We don’t push opinions on anybody.”
“Ha, that’s a fine load of horseshit!” Fred Stark exclaimed, adding a few more expletives. “I’ve been to these damn parties. I know what gets talked about.”
The families traded conflicting accounts about the aftermath of this exchange, about whether a glass was thrown, or accidentally brushed off a table.
Mary tried to smooth things over. When she was a child, that had been her job during eruptions between her parents and her brother. She bought her father a new recording of his favorite opera, Eugene Onegin, forgetting that it featured a duel scene.
The situation worsened along with her parents’ resentment at Mary’s growing affiliation with Constance Wangert. The younger Mrs. Mary Wangert began to recognize a useful quality of self-preservation in the senior Mrs. Wangert’s flinty elegance. She admired Constance’s habit of deftly waving away all annoyances, like a mare’s tail flicking away a fly. “A married woman such as yourself should never go to the movies alone,” Constance counseled. “I’ll be happy to accompany you, but only to the matinees.” She taught Mary how to execute bold U-turns in her Cadillac. Constance assured her that the local judges had long ago learned to exempt female Wangert drivers from the traffic code.
As live-ins with a night-terror baby that even old Meemo couldn’t soothe, Mary felt compelled to participate as much as she could in the household maintenance. Tuesday was silver-polishing day. Wednesday was dusting. Thursday meant the crystal and windows. The main house dated from 1870. Everything was elaborately wallpapered. The wing additions came later. All of it with a baffling internal symmetry, due to separate stairwells, entrances, sleeping quarters, and facilities for the servants. Mary occasionally found herself lost in the wrong stairwell or hallway.
“Miss Mary, you could leave a trail of breadcrumbs,” Meemo suggested.
Meemo instructed Mary on baking K-bars and negotiating other domestic idiosyncrasies, such as how to execute the imperceptibly small faucet turns to adjust water temperature in the claw-foot bathtubs, and which of the thick, swollen doors required shoulder-shoves to open. Mary could not bring herself to tinkle the little porcelain bell on the dinner table to summon Meemo for the next course, despite Constance’s assurances that this was how it was done.
Meemo was the only servant in residence now. She oversaw a small day staff. They were kept busy preparing for the next big Wangert Public Relations party, or cleaning up from the last one.
The house, which loomed above the street from a small rise at the front of a double lot, was surrounded by meticulously trimmed yew hedges. A pea gravel path from the side screen porch meandered to the new bomb shelter, located among the walnut trees along the back alley. At first glance, the bomb shelter appeared to be a square, flagstone patio, carved out of the walnut grove. Flush to the ground at the south edge of the patio, a steel covering, somewhat like an old-fashioned cellar door, opened upward to reveal a marble stairwell. As Ward predicted, the bomb shelter served primarily as a wine cellar. One design flaw was the failure to anticipate the effect of walnuts falling from great heights onto the steel door, creating noise not unlike an artillery barrage.
Constance and Ward Sr. patriotically championed the new bomb shelter. Their parties commenced with guests strolling back into the walnut grove for cocktails and guided tours of the four richly appointed subterranean rooms.
Mary convinced Constance to implement some updating of other Wangert party traditions. They no longer separated the men and women after dinner. Young Ward Jr., white towel on his shoulder, personally indulged his bartending interest, shaking martinis and mixing drinks to order. Another innovation, thanks to Mary, was targeting invitations to select members of certain industries, such as real-estate and construction, rather than a random crop of prominent citizens.
However, Constance held to the traditional format of name card place settings and equal pairings of male and female dinner partners. Mary’s first attempt to invite Rusalka Jones failed because her husband was out of town and Constance did not have a bachelor gentleman available to seat with her.
Eventually, one warm September evening, Rusalka and her doughy, scientist husband, Elbert Jones, attended a Wangert party, hosted for doctors and pharmaceutical executives. Rusalka greeted Mary with, “Oh, darling, you look better much! Especially around eyes. What cream you use? Isn’t she lovely, yes, Elbert? Not a face that jumps out, no. But on closer look, reveals great beauty. Those cheekbones! Don’t you agree, Elbert?”
Elbert made a sputtering noise with his pipe. Attired in a white lab coat, which apparently doubled as a dinner jacket, Elbert concurred. He did not have much else to say, other than dropping hints that during the war years he worked on the Norden bombsight project. His eyeballs, surrounded by large amounts of white sclera, appeared immobile, despite his head frequently bobbing in deference to Rusalka. It was as if his eye sockets were attached to little gyroscopes inside his skull.
At intervals, Ward and Mary traded perplexed glances at this odd pair. Rusalka hung on Elbert’s arm all evening and made stilted attempts to speak for him. “My Elbert always finds parking place and you should see how well he shuffles cards for rummy.”
Later, in the bomb shelter, after asking a multitude of questions about materials and dimensions, Rusalka uttered a particularly preposterous claim about Elbert’s aesthetic views: “Elbert has strong ideas about modern art, yes, and especially for bomb shelters. Is important choice. Who knows how long is necessary to live underground? Like choosing books for desert island. My Elbert very fond of modern art. His favorite is Arshile Gorky.”
Ward Wangert barely suppressed a laugh. He surprised his parents, his wife, and the other guests, by deliberately provoking Rusalka with a rebuttal. “But Gorky is a complete fraud—from his borrowed name to his slavishly borrowed styles.”
“And how do you know this?” Constance Wangert demanded of her son.
“In college, when I cut classes, I usually ended up wandering the art museum and eavesdropping on the tour guides,” Ward explained.
An awkward hush fell on the guests in the fancy crypt. Mary, still smarting from Rusalka’s opening facial cream salvo, softly elbowed Ward as a gesture of support.
A tall, bearded man next to Mary chuckled and interjected, “Yes, but aren’t we all frauds to some degree? Especially
in this modern age. Gorky simply embraced the fraudulence of modernity and it eventually led him to some rather original work.”
Rusalka reached over and pinched the man’s bearded cheek. “Ah, thank you, doctor. My analyst comes to rescue. Thank you, yes, Dr. Keller.” She leaned in to Mary and whispered, “He very brilliant. You should consult.”
The guests murmured in awkward amusement and surged back upstairs to the bar. Mary and Ward followed.
They instinctively exited together and hurried back to the main house to check on baby Anthony.
“Can you believe it?”
“What a creature!”
“The husband or her analyst?”
“Both.”
“Goodness, I wonder what those two talk about. Do you think she married him for citizenship?”
“It doesn’t seem like Elbert does much talking.”
“I’m not sure who needs analysis more—Rusalka or him.”
“Rusalka Jones has an analyst,” Mary repeated.
“You sound a wee bit jealous,” Ward said.
“No, not exactly, but I have been thinking—”
“It’s so silly,” Ward interrupted.
“You think analysis is silly?” Mary asked.
“I meant … them. I don’t really know that much about psychoanalysis,” Ward confessed.
“Well, I’m glad to hear there’s something you’re not an authority on,” Mary teased.
Ward asked her more soberly, “Were you just trying to tell me … that you want to see a head doctor?”
Mary slowly nodded, as if she didn’t quite yet want to admit it. “For the baby,” she said.
“A child analyst? Anthony can’t even talk yet,” Ward said.
Mary shook her head. “It would be for me. I must be doing something wrong. He’s so sweet during the day, and then at night come these wrenching cries that seem beyond a baby’s ability to cry. And, by the way, Anthony spoke his first word this morning.”
Ward said, “That’s impossible. He’s not old enough.”
“I’m telling you, I heard it.”
“Why didn’t you let me know sooner?” Ward asked.
“Because it was ‘bomb.’ ”
“His first word was ‘bomb’?” Ward growled, “No, it must have just been a noise he made that you thought sounded like ‘bomb.’ ”
“I’m just saying, it might be time for me to consult someone,” Mary sighed.
In the dining room on their way back outside, Mary stealthily rearranged the name cards on the table to put herself next to Dr. Keller.
Chapter 14
The Appointment
Dr. Keller’s office was not what Mary expected. She drove out 10th Street past the Irish bars and butcher shops, past the turn for Clem’s Sausages all the way to Irvington, a very old neighborhood on the east side, named for Washington Irving.
Dr. Keller’s consulting room floated in the turret of a sprawling Victorian house. It overlooked the Kile Oak, a fat, virgin-timber landmark covered with pioneer dates and carvings and limbs curving down into the ground and growing back out again. Dr. Keller called it, “the wise baobab.”
They sat facing each other in rocking chairs. Dr. Keller offered tea and informed her that he did not allow smoking. After some chitchat about the party, Dr. Keller clapped his hands and said, “Okay, let’s get down to business.”
Mary promptly spoke for almost an hour. Everything about her brother and his locked bedroom and her father’s tantrums and her nesting dolls with the fangs inside and the pressures of being Mrs. Ward Wangert and the struggles with baby Anthony. Dr. Keller refilled her teacup twice. On she went about Moscow and the incident with Dmitri and Zippy being poisoned. And yet, when she finally paused to catch her breath, Dr. Keller scratched his beard and said, “I sense there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Mary bit her lip and countered, “You probably say that to everyone. One of the tricks of the trade. Of course, there’s a lot I’m not telling you. How could I possibly say it all?”
Dr. Keller said, “No, something specific.”
Anticipating this moment, Mary had promised herself to reveal nothing about He Who Remains Classified and the circumstances of Anthony’s birth. At least not today. Dr. Keller’s sudden probe irritated her and only reinforced her decision.
“Please,” Mary spouted, “how do you know there’s something specific I’m not telling you?”
“Just a sense,” Dr. Keller said.
Mary huffed, “I’m not telling you how absolutely worthless I feel at night, walking around with a wailing baby and nothing I do seems to help. All I want to do is scream with him, to show him I could scream even louder.”
Dr. Keller stroked his nose and thought for a long minute. He said, “It sounds like you’re blaming yourself.”
“Aren’t I supposed to?” Mary answered. “Isn’t that how it works? The pediatrician says there’s no physical cause. I must be responsible for his trouble somehow.”
Dr. Keller turned to the window and the great oak swaying outside. He mused, “Not necessarily. If there is a connection … it could be that the baby is expressing your own unvoiced horror at the war and your mixed feelings about your brother’s death and the sad demise of your dog and the way young lives, including your own, never go forward as expected.”
Mary felt a surge of exasperation and a familiar flush in her face, like her father just before his explosions. “You’re telling me that Anthony’s night terrors are really my own? That’s just ridiculous! I knew this wouldn’t help. That’s all you have to say to me?”
“Yes, for now,” Dr. Keller nodded. “As an experiment, you could try unlocking your brother’s bedroom. Air it out and set up a crib and see if the baby sleeps in there.”
“Absurd!” Mary scoffed.
In the parking lot, Mary slammed her car door. She grabbed the steering wheel and shook it and convulsed with sobs that threatened to bring up the contents of her stomach. Her keys fell somewhere under her seat. She heard a knocking on the window beside her.
“Darling,” a faint voice said.
Mary rolled down the window. “Rusalka!?”
“Yes, my crying one.”
“What are you doing here?” Mary asked.
“Smoking in my car, waiting for appointment. Dr. Keller not allow smoking in his office. Not even in his waiting room.”
“I know,” Mary sighed.
“You came running out and ….” She paused to offer Mary a cigarette. “Yes, many times I sit exactly where you are now after session, in exact same mess.”
“Why? What do you talk to Dr. Keller about?”
“My state of things,” Rusalka said. “Unlike what you Americans think, oceans not made of saltwater. The ocean is full of tears.”
Chapter 15
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified should have seen it coming. Loose lips sink ships. All his colleague’s wives were mad about shrinks.
He Who Remains Classified received the news about Mary’s psychiatrist in the middle of an irksome GO game with an attaché from the Vietnamese embassy. An order from some asshole at the White House required his team to educate themselves on the culture behind the governments they were trying to undermine. Always proud of his chess skills (a KGB rival once sent him a custom-made set), He Who Remains Classified assumed he could master this Asian board game with ease. Not so. The little black stones and little white stones were driving him to distraction. The closest he’d come was a thirty-point loss and that was with a six-stone handicap.
He Who Remains Classified, gritting his teeth, welcomed the knock at his office door and the interruption from his assistant marching in to deliver a stack of updated files. He casually reached over and glanced inside the top folder.
“Mary Wangert what!?” he blurted.
He angrily backhanded the stones off the board. They clattered into the corner. “You can take that as a resignation,” he said to the attach�
� and added, “Leave now and don’t come back.” He ordered his assistant to remove the board.
Up to this moment, He Who Remains Classified trusted that Mary knew it was in her family’s best interests not to confess her story to anyone, especially not an expert at wheedling out personal information. Sure, psychiatrists promised confidentiality, but they had agendas too.
He Who Remains Classified grew more concerned when a background check on Dr. Keller revealed that he graduated from Antioch College, and everyone knew what that meant. Pinko.
Stealing psychiatric records, like everything these days, could get messy. Fortunately, the acquisition of such information was becoming standard procedure among the professionals, and He Who Remains Classified knew exactly who to call.
* * *
PART III
* * *
Chapter 16
Mary and Ward’s Nighttime Tale
Together in bed at 3 a.m. after one of their parties, Mary and Ward balanced drinks and ashtrays on their knees. They smoked and shushed each other, worried that their eager chatter would wake the baby:
When the seasons changed, Lubya was plagued by headaches. She carefully coiled her hair around her aching skull. Whistling sometimes helped. She remembered her mother’s warning, “Whistling girls and crowing hens, all come to very bad ends.”
Mikel drove the diplomat home from the train station in a thunderstorm.
Lubya feared the dark moods that often accompanied the diplomat home from the Foreign Office. She prepared the diplomat’s supper and served it on a tray in front of the library fireplace. The diplomat thanked her with a wave of his hand and stared into the fire. He saw things in the dancing flames. Fears. Regrets. Abominations. Debts. The diplomat gambled on insider tips from the Ministry of Defense about developments in the explosives and munitions business.