by Ian Woollen
“You could try, yes, separate bedrooms as experiment,” Rusalka nodded, “and remember, as my Elbert says, experiments never fail—just provide information. The boys will probably fight you on it.”
Initially labeled a gold-digger and now a spawner of hellions, Mary appreciated Rusalka’s unfettered acceptance of her difficult kids. She also welcomed Rusalka’s influence over them. As part of her ongoing Americanization, Rusalka read comic books and could talk to the boys about the unique powers of Plastic Man and Wonder Woman. Rusalka hinted that her own long, manicured red fingernails held special powers. One sharp snap of her fingers and Robbie and Duncan stopped whatever they were doing. Her stories of tapeworms in the old country made an impression. All she had to say was, “Put shoes on, or you get tapeworm!” and they complied.
In turn, Rusalka was grateful for Mary’s tolerance of her offspring. Rusalka tried desperately to normalize Vincent and Kayla with Red Ball Jets and Suzie Homemaker and a tire swing in their front yard. Vincent never learned to tie his shoes. Kayla continued eating dirt, which Rusalka explained away as a vitamin deficiency, even after the doctor diagnosed her with pica. The cruel caste system of the neighborhood children permanently marked Vincent and Kayla as “retards,” and the Wangert boys were their only regular playmates.
Ward unwittingly fed their ostracism with an attempt at parental involvement borrowed from his late father. Ward took the children to the A&P supermarket to note the prices on fruits and vegetables. Then he drove them downtown to the farmers’ market and gave each kid two dollars to buy produce to fill up their red wagons. They pulled the wagons around the neighborhood, selling the fruits and vegetables door to door for a quarter more than they paid the farmers, but still underselling the A&P, and thus learning an important lesson about profit margins.
The separate bedroom experiment lasted three weeks. “It wasn’t so much that they fought us on it,” Mary explained to Rusalka. “They did try to sneak back and forth at night and Ward and I lost some sleep. It was more about a change in their moods.”
“You mean, when they apart?” Rusalka asked.
“At first we thought Robbie was accepting it fine. Ward pitched it to him as a big-boy move. He’d go into his room at naptime and close the door. But you know Robbie. He’s not exactly a quiet child. We’d stand outside his door and hear nothing. No sound at all. I’d peek in and find him just sitting on the floor in the corner.”
“Same with Duncan?”
“No, he was different. Duncan got agitated. There were plenty of noises coming from his room, and it was usually things being ripped. He tore all the pages out of his Bible Stories coloring book.”
“I wonder what Dr. Keller would think,” Rusalka said.
“We finally decided it was doing more harm than good,” Mary sighed, “Robbie and Duncan are their own little planet and the rest of our family just orbits around them.”
“Why you not go see Dr. Keller again?” Rusalka asked.
Mary fumbled for something in her purse. They were walking along the canal towpath. She pulled out a bag of breadcrumbs for the children to feed to the ducks.
“He’s not a child psychologist,” Mary said.
“No, but very smart. My Vincent and Kayla, always vomiting in cars and trains, so we can never travel anywhere. Dr. Keller connected it to a reaction to my nomadic, refugee years, always on the move.”
“I felt like he was going to pry everything out of me,” Mary said, “and I wasn’t ready for that. Besides, I get all the psychoanalysis I need from you.”
Rusalka smiled and pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose. “Ah, Mary Wangert, pure as snow. What is there to pry from you? Where is the darkness in you? The things I could tell you.”
“But you never do,” Mary said.
Rusalka winced and lit a cigarette. “I very scared,” she replied, “and don’t remember much. Dr. Keller helped me with what he calls ‘dissociation.’ The mind—it ignores pain that is too much.”
Mary said, “That might explain my own fuzziness about certain things in the past.”
“In Moscow?” Rusalka asked.
“Yes, in Moscow,” Mary groaned .
Not until the 1970s, when she first heard the term “date rape,” did her mind produce a clearer memory.
They spent after-school time at Rusalka’s house—the ‘Spaceship House,’ where everything was transcendently new. Mary’s kids behaved slightly better. Their destructive tendencies were curbed by awe. The house was built by a retired Lustron executive, who spent his career fabricating kits for boxy, steel houses. In this structure, he took it up a notch. Glass walls, steel arches, chrome and leather furniture, tiled floors, Bakelite veneers. Pocket-style doors wired to open and close with the touch of a button.
Anthony and Robbie and Duncan, far from regarding Vincent and Kayla as retards, envied their life of luxury. They were allowed to drink 7 Up all day. Their shelves were stocked with the best cereals, including Lucky Charms. They ate TV dinners. Nobody in their house called the TV an ‘idiot box.’ Their mom watched cartoons with them. And their father brought home Chinese food with chopsticks.
At the back of the house, just off the garage, was a padlocked room with a ‘keep out’ sign on the door. Vincent and Kayla called it a “darkroom.” It had something to with their mother’s camera hobby. Robbie and Duncan, undeterred, smuggled over a screwdriver from their basement tool-chest. The kids suffered the full wrath of Rusalka’s red fingernails and tapeworm threats when they were caught removing the padlock.
That night, under punitive cross-examination from their parents, Robbie and Duncan reported getting a peek at the contents of the darkroom. The equipment still in boxes. No chemicals. No pictures or negatives. Nothing else in the room, except for a typewriter with lots of crumpled carbon paper on the floor. It was hard to know what to believe with these cretins. They fibbed a lot.
On the subject of their scientist father, Vincent and Kayla told enormous fibs. Vincent claimed his father invented a laser beam more powerful than an “adam-bomb.” Kayla said her father invented invisible ink. Robbie and Duncan sort of wanted to believe it. They were very impressed by a framed studio portrait of Elbert Jones in a shiny white lab coat that stared down from atop the big TV set in the living area. They repeatedly suggested to their own father, whose struggles at work since Gonga died were becoming more evident, that he should wear a lab coat.
Robbie and Duncan bragged that the antique weapons hanging on the walls of their dad’s office were booty from his victims in battle. More poignantly, they also spouted a mistaken belief that their father’s black armband was a bandage for a war-wound.
Although traditional public expressions of mourning were on the wane by 1960, the widowed Constance Wangert insisted on full mourning costume to honor the memory of her late husband. The old man deserved it. Ward Jr. wore a black suit for six months and then the black armband for an additional year.
Ironically, it did have a wounding effect. So many people came up to him on the street to express their condolences. Ward recognized he would never fill his father’s shoes socially and that those connections were critical for his business. His secretary copied his father’s voluminous address book into a new Rolodex. Ward sent out five hundred Christmas cards with a family portrait, the kids in gray shorts and blazers.
Aside from Ace Properties and a few offshoots from their growth, Ward was not bringing in many new clients. He took over the daily job of polishing the Fat Man and Little Boy bronzes with his handkerchief, as if rubbing a lamp for a genie. He sat in his father’s chair at the office and looked out across the Statehouse grounds to the statue of his grandfather and wondered where he might be now, if only he’d accepted a long-ago offer from He Who Remains Classified. He indulged in thoughts of phoning his old secret-society brother to ask if the C.I.A. might still have any openings in, say, Paris or Rome for a thirty-ish husband and wife with three kids and a dog and some goldfish.
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p; Ward did attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps. He frequented Ernesto’s barbershop and listened patiently to the UFO stories. He endured the earlobe nicks from Ernesto’s trembling hands and the well-meaning introductions to the other patrons as “Big Ward’s little boy.” He bought an eye-catching family car, a Checker Cab, and painted a ‘Wangert Public Relations’ sign on the side. He designed a flashy logo. He pinned business cards to bulletin boards. He revived the social tradition of attending every home football game at Indiana University.
The Wangerts possessed box seats in perpetuity, because Roscoe Sr. —Ward’s great-grandfather—had been the first coach at I.U., after graduating from Yale in 1884. Roscoe came home to Indiana with some knowledge about this new game that everyone in the hinterlands wanted to learn. He established one of the great losing traditions in college football. Ward instructed his children: “Rooting for a losing team builds character and teaches you how to focus on the achievements of individual players.”
Ward discovered a paradoxical sense of calm solitude among the crowds at the sporting events he attended with his clients and his children. For a few blessed hours the struggles on the court or field were not his own, and while nervous fans chewed their fingernails, Ward contented himself during many a fourth quarter with the thought, “Not my problem.”
The social payoff at the I.U. football games for Ward was being recognized by the large number of businessmen who motored down to Bloomington on autumn Saturdays. Ward patronized the reunion tents. Later in the week, back up in Indianapolis, someone would wave to him from across the street, remarking on a big play or the fine weather last weekend.
And his family seemed to enjoy the outings to the quaint stadium on Tenth Street. Robbie and Duncan and Vincent and Kayla ran around under the bleachers, eating fallen potato chips. Anthony sat buried in his latest book about the Manhattan Project. Mary and Rusalka huddled together, happily oblivious to the game. Ward sat next to Elbert, who claimed to be a football fan, and unfortunately, was vocal on the subject. A perfectionist in a lab coat, Elbert (a native of South Bend) could only focus on the faults of the home team.
“I wonder if we can manage to lose by two touchdowns today,” Elbert said. Or, “That lousy quarterback can probably kick better than he can throw. They should just punt on first down.”
Ward began to notice a deeper bond forming between Mary and Rusalka. He assumed that he and his wife still shared the common view of Rusalka and Elbert Jones as oddball eccentrics. Little by little, Mary no longer laughed at Ward’s jokes about Rusalka’s latest affectation—her platinum blonde hair and Coca-Cola cakes. Mary told Ward to stop pressing Rusalka for details about her refugee experience.
Ward felt displaced from his role as Mary’s confidante and regretted having no male counterpart. Glancing out from his mezzanine office on a Christmas Eve, he saw two women with shopping bags laughing gaily as they struggled to light each other’s cigarettes in the afternoon breeze. One woman pulled a camera out of her purse and snapped a close-up of her friend. Ward felt a pang of anonymous jealousy, just before realizing that the two women were, in fact, Mary and Rusalka. A not uncommon experience—needing a moment to recognize a familiar face out of context—and yet disturbing for Ward, who had never viewed his spouse as a stranger.
His pang deepened at the memory of a similar experience with Meemo. He was ten or twelve, whenever it was that his parents finally allowed him to ride a bike alone. Near Fall Creek, he noticed a mother and a boy waiting for a trolley, the Negro mother lovingly tending to the nose-blowing of the small Negro boy. Ward suddenly realized that the mother was Meemo and the child was her real son, and in that moment came a jarring realization that the world was not what it seemed.
Likewise, something felt wrong here too. He sensed something off about Rusalka being a photographer. The darkroom story lingered in his mind. A darkroom full of unused equipment, except for a typewriter …. Where did all her rolls of exposed film go?
Ward’s growing frustration, coupled with Rusalka’s continued stonewalling on the exact nature of her connection to Madame Marlovsky and her rather direct inquiries about Mary’s time in Moscow, finally led him to place a long distance call to Washington, D.C.
He was in the bar at the Morace—fortunately his eviction from the hotel did not include the bar. He listened in on Stu and Randy expounding on their Air Force duty during World War II, which included guarding a depot near Kokomo where material was flown to the Soviet Union during Lend-Lease. Stu claimed that many Russians disembarked unchallenged from the return flights. “They were sent to gather info from our factories and our brass was too chicken-shit to stop them, because we didn’t want to piss off Stalin, and we figured they were just poor peasants who wanted to learn how to manufacture light bulbs.”
Ward impulsively turned to the barkeep and exchanged a bill for a pocketful of quarters. Digging out a faded phone number on a scrap of envelope from deep inside his wallet, he dialed without knowing exactly what he was going to say. He felt like a McCarthy-ite informer. A State Department official answered the phone and took his name and put him on hold. He was passed around and transferred to a different office. He was told his call would be returned. It never came. Ward’s emotional upheaval was only exacerbated by the rude discovery that he no longer rated phone contact with his secret-society brother.
Chapter 21
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified stumbled into his office, exhausted from a marathon in the Situation Room about the Saigon mess. He’d been driven to the White House directly from the air base after a six day supervisory drop-in with the Asian station chiefs, including a long night at the White Rose nightclub in Vientiane. On his desk he found Ward’s phone message, which hit him like a judo kick to his hungry belly.
It was the opening he’d desired and dreaded. He poured a neat one. Caution dictated that he consider any potential threats. No … no … a call from Ward’s attorney might have meant trouble, but Ward himself would not initiate a personal contact unless he was in need.
Okay, so dial the number, chat up your old bud, and insert yourself into the life of your boy, Anthony. Your own son, your flesh and blood! Recent photographs of the kid proved it. Same jaw, same forehead.
The file reports on Anthony were better than booze. The descriptions of his precocious interest in all things thermonuclear brought uncharacteristic grins to a veteran Cold Warrior, along with an occasional drunken guffaw.
And, oh, the photos! He relished every single Kodachrome. The local source deserved another bonus. Above and beyond the call of duty. Excellent pictures.
Using a magnifying glass, He Who Remains Classified hunched over crisp, clear images of the charming house. The beautiful lawn. Mary with Anthony planting flowers along the sidewalk. Ward playing catch with the boys. Anthony on the swing set. Mary reading in a Barwa lounger on the stone patio.
He enjoyed the exquisite pain of almost being able to recall similar scenes from his own childhood. Like a snake, he had shed many skins, and the earliest ones had decomposed to the point of only superficial recognition. He knew, yes, he’d grown up in Manhattan. Home was a hotel on Fifth Avenue. He sang treble in the Men and Boys’ Choir at Trinity Church. Aunts and uncles in furs and diamonds. One hazy memory of an admired older cousin who sailed a little Bullseye in New York harbor, bravely dodging the river traffic—killed later on at the Battle of the Coral Sea. He knew, yes, he’d played lacrosse at Rokeby and Yale, and somewhere along the way aspired to a Nietzschean ideal of self-mastery. It all existed somewhere in the gray matter archives, but the key was no longer in his conscious possession.
He Who Remains Classified reached for the telephone and groaned and faltered. The exhaustion was deeper than he realized. It had been going on too long. Grasping for a reliable sense of poised detachment, he stepped over to the window and peered at the passersby below in the street. Somehow a pair of binoculars materialized in his hands. He focused on a young couple
pushing a stroller. Near the bus stop, a teenage girl holding hands with her boyfriend turned and kissed him on the cheek. A bicycle messenger rode by. A nurse sat down on a park bench and unwrapped a sandwich. They all looked uncomfortably close.
He Who Remains Classified stumbled back to his desk. He struck a match, lit a cigar, and with the tiny flame still clinging to the middle of the match, burned Ward’s phone message.
* * *
PART IV
* * *
Chapter 22
Mary and Ward’s Nighttime Tale
A cold west wind rattled the bedroom windows. Mary and Ward sorted coins from Ward’s change bowl into paper sleeves to use for the boys’ weekly allowance. Although cuddling under a thick Feathered Star quilt, they could still see frosty breath when they spoke:
In addition to his job as the diplomat’s chauffeur, Mikel worked part-time as a bartender in a local tavern, The Happy Owl. He mopped and swabbed and chatted with strangers. When the diplomat’s creditors appeared in town, they usually showed up at the tavern first, and Mikel was able to warn the diplomat.
Nobody fought during Mikel’s shifts, and he allowed ladies to sit at the bar. The village women vied for his attentions, although everyone knew he had a soft spot for Lubya.
Except Lubya. She did not consider herself worthy of his attentions. The drive to Yalta was different. They whistled and played the alphabet game, and her headache gradually disappeared. She admired the H-O-L-D F-A-S-T tattoo on the knuckles of his fingers that clutched the large steering wheel of the diplomat’s big-finned Cadillac.