by Ian Woollen
The key his classmates admired most in Anthony’s collection was the one to the school van. As a senior, Anthony scored the unique privilege of driving to the Hartford airport to pick up visiting luminaries for the school’s lecture series. Anthony lobbied the Big E for this permission. “As editor of the newspaper, sir, I can use the driving time for one-on-one interviews,” he argued. The speakers included prominent alumni and distinguished relatives of current students, who journeyed to Rokeby to inspire and fulminate.
In the late fall of 1971, Anthony Wangert found himself driving a buzz-cut diplomat with an austere face, lined with heavy smoker’s creases. He Who Remains Classified. Anthony didn’t know that aspect of his identity. He knew the visiting lecturer as ‘Mr. Ambassador,’ his most recent rank.
Chapter 34
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified engineered the appearance at Rokeby for two reasons. First, it was an opportunity to meet his son. Under the guise an avuncular figure spontaneously offering sage advice, he would provide the young man with some corrective guidance. Secondly, a speech to a small group of boarding school kids—low pressure, low profile—would fly under everyone’s radar and offer a chance for He Who Remains Classified to develop his fledgling public persona.
The assumption that agency spooks could never enter the bright light of politics was slowly losing its sway. The nation’s voters cried out for strong leadership, and who better to grab the helm than a veteran of the global struggle for democracy. Or something like that. He was still working out the finer points of his positions on the issues.
Excited by the prospect of some real-time subterfuge, He Who Remains Classified did not anticipate an immediate encounter with his son at the Hartford airport. It threw him. He’d expected to be met by a flunkey from the alumni office. The kid was a spitting image. But the kid didn’t realize it. No curious glances. No hint of blood-kin aura. He Who Remains Classified was confronted by a tough interview from a preppie know-it-all.
“How did you pick the topic for your lecture, ‘A Diplomat’s Adventures’?” Anthony asked, after explaining his role as the newspaper editor.
The ambassador said, “We’re always looking to inspire bright young men to think about a career in the Foreign Service.”
“As you may be aware, this semester Rokeby offered an entire block of classes in International Relations and there’s a rumor that the program is being funded by the State Department. Would you know anything about that, sir?” Anthony asked.
“No, I don’t,” replied the ambassador.
“Your career has focused primarily on Russia and the communist Eastern Bloc?”
“That’s correct.”
“What about Southeast Asia?”
“I’m occasionally consulted.”
“Do you see any hope in Dr. Kissinger’s views on détente?”
“I never traffic in hope, only results.”
Anthony stated, “I read recently in The New Republic that our problems in Vietnam were caused by the State Department firing many of its experts on Southeast Asia during the McCarthy era.”
“Don’t believe everything you read,” the ambassador grumbled. He lit a cigar. This was awful. Like all agents, he’d imagined being captured by the enemy and undergoing interrogation and he’d pictured himself enduring all manner of torment. This was too much. He muzzled a voice in his chest crying out, “Please, please, let’s cut the crap and just confess who we really are. Dear boy, I’m your father!”
Anthony said, “President Eisenhower died last year and since then we’ve been hearing more and more about his private opinions on the dangers of the arms race, which can seem to be at odds with his administration’s public positions. You were part of that administration. Do you have any comment?”
“No comment,” replied the ambassador.
Anthony changed course. He said, “Coming back to the typical career of a diplomat. How would you describe the personal side of it? Is it difficult to raise a family abroad?”
“It can be,” the ambassador said, “but living abroad also offers many opportunities.”
“Are you married? Do you have any children?”
“Uh, no, I am not married,” the ambassador grunted, and added strangely, “No children that I know of.”
“There may be some children you don’t know of?” Anthony inquired.
“Just a figure of speech. Let’s strike that from the record,” the ambassador ordered.
“Yes, excuse me, sir.”
“Tell me your name again,” the ambassador said abruptly. He became the interlocutor.
“Anthony Wangert.”
The lines on the Ambassador’s face swirled into an impassioned stare. He puffed on his cigar. Anthony cracked a window.
The ambassador cleared his throat and said, “Ah, yes, the Wangerts …. I knew your father briefly at Rokeby. I was a class or two ahead. We spent more time together later at Yale.”
Adopting a friendly tone that was supposed to appear as ‘pass-the-time’ curiosity, the ambassador posed innocuous questions about Anthony’s background, his home, his parents, with a particular focus on his mother—as the Rokeby van sped along Route 44 from the airport up into the autumnal Berkshires.
He contained himself with difficulty. He asked Anthony about his mother’s favorite movies, and then made a potentially serious misstep, impulsively blurting, “Oh, you forgot to mention one—The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
Chapter 35
Family Talks
Anthony recounted this meeting on the next Sunday evening phone call. Long-distance calls were special events for the Wangerts. The weekly operator-assisted call home had become a forum where the family connected better than face to face.
Everyone got on the line. Anthony participated in conversations with Rob in the kitchen and Mary on the upstairs phone, Duncan in the basement and Ward in the downstairs hallway, conversations about mundane details and domestic events—the health of the dog, Father Tyler’s sermons, the types of masks worn by this year’s Halloween trick-or-treaters. Typical dinner table banter, but the Wangerts did it better telephonically, each in a separate location, speaking on a collect call.
On this Sunday evening, Anthony mentioned the ambassador’s lecture and interview. He read a draft of a critical op-ed piece for the Rokeby Record, focusing on the ambassador’s statements about Southeast Asia. “I’m highlighting his imperialist stance,” Anthony stated. When he mentioned the ambassador’s question about Mary’s favorite movies, she gasped and dropped the phone.
“Hello?! Mother, are you all right?”
Ward, on the downstairs line, covered for her. “She’s had a bad cold recently.”
Rob, on the kitchen line, said, “Mom’s not sick.”
Duncan, on the basement line, said, “She’s such a spaz. You should have seen her the other day. She fell off her bike standing still at a stop sign.”
Mary, back on the upstairs line, coughed and sputtered, “Sorry, dear. I don’t know what came over me.”
Ward knew. She had just come as close as ever to admitting the truth. Other than cryptic acknowledgments in their long-running pillow talk tale, Mary and Ward rarely touched on He Who Remains Classified in private conversation. Occasionally, when perusing the newspaper together during cocktail hour, Mary pointed to an article about the latest foreign fiasco and muttered, “Got his fingerprints all over it.”
Ward said, “Anthony, son, I know you take pride in writing hard-hitting articles and reviews, and I’d love to read your critique of the ambassador’s lecture. But it’s not worth jeopardizing your future. That guy is tough. Yes, I knew him at Yale, and believe me, you do not want to get on his bad side.”
“Why would an article in a school newspaper matter to him?” Anthony asked.
“Listen to your father,” Mary echoed.
“He asked me a lot of personal questions, especially about Mom,” Anthony said.
“What the heck wou
ld this guy care about our mom?” Duncan said.
“My thoughts exactly,” Mary sighed.
“He’s a right-wing hawk, but I sort of liked talking to him.”
Rob cracked, “Maybe you knew him in a past life.”
“What?” Anthony asked, “Past life what?”
“That’s Rusalka’s latest craze—reincarnation. I keep hearing about it from Vince,” Rob explained.
“Who’s Vince?”
Duncan said, “Vincent. He wants to be called ‘Vince,’ now that Robbie has become ‘Rob.’ ”
“And I hear about it all at the office,” Ward added, with forced jocularity. “Unfortunately Rusalka’s past lives haven’t brought in any new business lately.”
They all chuckled nervously into their separate receivers.
In 1972, when Duncan joined Anthony at the Rokeby end of the connection, the topics changed slightly. The rest of the family listened in while Duncan and Anthony—squeezed into one booth, holding the receiver between them—talked to each other about boarding school stuff: waiter duty in the dining hall, the Big E’s speech against playing holiday roulette, Duncan’s latest pinball score.
Other than these weekly phone booth conversations, Anthony and Duncan did not interact very much. Their dorms were on opposite sides of the campus. In fact, some faculty members did not even know they were brothers.
Chapter 36
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified carefully threaded the thin tape into his reel-to-reel Sony. In 1972, he entered a new phase of Wangert surveillance. Wiretaps. Why the hell not? Everyone else was doing it. He listened devotedly to all the phone calls that came in and out of the Wangert house and Ward’s office. The wiretap recordings sounded a little scratchy, with a little hiss, reminding him of the weekly radio serials of his childhood. The arrival of a fresh batch of tapes briefly transformed him into a regular citizen with a sitcom to follow.
After the face-to-face with Anthony in Connecticut, he felt hooked on these people and their dime-novel lives. The sounds of all their voices—Anthony’s staccato earnestness, Duncan’s deep croon like his father’s, Rob’s teenage bleating, and Mary’s mellifluous birdsong—relaxed him and took him far away from the chronic stress of international skullduggery.
He Who Remains Classified respected Mary for not responding to his caviar come-on, and he listened closely for clues to her interests, for ideas on what might be a more meaningful gift in the future. With his political aspirations still taking shape, he considered the Wangert tapes part of his education. He wanted to learn more about the demographic that President Nixon referred to as the ‘Silent Majority.’
He also rationalized the wiretaps as a way to monitor the local source. He contracted them out separately. The Indianapolis plant was doing solid, consistent work, providing intimate details on the Wangert family. But maybe too intimate? Was she becoming too close to the target?
Chapter 37
A Boarding School Dorm Room, Circa 1972
An American flag hung upside down. A tie-dyed sheet tacked over the ceiling light fixture. An altar of empty Almaden wine bottles. Backgammon board. Lava lamp. Bong hidden in a bag of golf clubs. Electric shoe polisher. Students from the Midwest had a harder time bringing furniture and decorations. Duncan’s walls featured a lone Indiana Pacers poster.
Duncan’s career at Rokeby started off very differently from Anthony’s. It began with a fist fight. Ward and Mary had just driven out the main gate, after a series of surprisingly long hugs and goodbyes from their middle child.
Duncan and Anthony waved until the car disappeared. Anthony helped his brother carry bags up to the third floor of Bissell Hall. Duncan’s room smelled faintly of vomit. The bed sagged under two standard issue blankets. The desk chair was missing an arm. “At least the mirror on the back of the closet door isn’t cracked,” Anthony observed. A single window funneled in a strong wash of sun that somehow made the room feel emptier than it was.
“I’ll be back in an hour to get you for dinner,” Anthony said.
It was a long hour. Duncan tried to unpack, but couldn’t. He sat on the bed, clutching his new lacrosse stick. He imagined himself still in the backseat of the family car with Rob. He wished now that he hadn’t been so dismissive of his mother’s last-minute offer of a Hudson Bay blanket. He missed Geneva and their woodland make-out sessions.
The other kids on the floor, several of whom seemed to know each other already, cruised room to room, checking out each other’s stuff. Somebody wanted to start up a hall hockey game. A shaggy head appeared around the edge of Duncan’s door and said, “Oh, hi. You play lacrosse?”
“I want to learn,” Duncan said. “When’s the first practice?”
“Not for a long time. It’s a spring sport.”
“Oh,” Duncan said, unhappily.
The shaggy head disappeared. To be replaced a few minutes later by a different shaggy head that peered around the half-open door and said, “Are you a jock?”
In 1972 the slang use of the word ‘jock’ for ‘athlete’ was not yet common. Duncan thought he was being insulted. He glanced up and said, “What?”
“Are you a jock?”
Duncan didn’t answer. It could be a trick question. He thought about it more and decided he was being ‘hazed,’ another new word he had just learned from his father. On the drive down from Great Tusk, Ward explained ‘hazing’ as teasing behavior similar to what went on with the probationers in Boys’ Choir. Already upset and disoriented, Duncan could not tolerate it. He kicked the door into the face of his hazer.
The hazer kicked the door back. Duncan jumped up and took a swing. The other kid grabbed at his hair. Duncan whacked him with the lacrosse stick. They grappled, kneed, exchanged punches. The fight spilled out into the hallway, just as Anthony came up the stairs to retrieve his brother for dinner.
Anthony couldn’t believe it. The little jerk couldn’t be left alone for an hour? “Stop!” he yelled. It was too much like the old troubles at home. No, it was worse. Anthony’s reputation was more at risk here.
The master’s door opened at the end of the hallway. “Wangert … what the devil!” the master bellowed. Anthony cringed. Assuming the fight was Duncan’s fault, Anthony intervened in an accusatory manner to demonstrate his obeisance to Master Nagle, thus eroding any chance of an improved brotherhood. “Stop, you punk! What is your problem!?” Anthony shouted, as he pulled Duncan off the other kid.
Fortunately for Duncan, the master hulking in his apartment door at the end of the hallway was an institution in and of himself. Crowbar Gus Nagle. Master of English. Master of keeping a pipe lit all day. Master of dealing with homesick kids. Master of that tried and true sanctuary for all high school misfits—the Theater Department.
Crowbar Gus summoned Duncan and the other kid, Teddy von Kelp, (the two, of course, later became friends) into his chambers. He thanked Anthony for stopping the fight and sent him off to dinner. This was an easy decision based on forty years of witnessing the oddities in rich kids’ families.
Crowbar Gus quickly got to the bottom of the ‘jock’ misunderstanding. He tried to calm the boys by offering up recollections of having taught both their fathers.
“Von Kelp, your father liked fish. Strange fish. He used to charge people fifty cents to watch his piranha gobble down guppies.”
“I’m planning to charge a dollar,” Teddy said.
“Duncan, I remember that your father, Ward, also got into a dust-up on his first day of school,” Crowbar Gus said.
“He never told me that,” Duncan mumbled.
“A chip off the old block,” Gus reflected, “unlike your older brother.”
“What do you mean?” Duncan asked.
Crowbar Gus waved his pipe. “I met your grandparents last year when they came to visit Anthony. And I got the distinct impression that they think Anthony takes much more after them.”
“They just don’t like my dad very much,” Duncan said.
>
Crowbar Gus shrugged and said, “I’ve watched many brothers come through here, and it can be hard when the older one carries around a lot of keys.”
This exchange laid the groundwork for Duncan, intimidated enough by Anthony’s reputation, to involve himself with activities that had nothing to do with his brother. Crowbar Gus was always angling for new recruits to his set-building crew.
“You signed up for what?” said Rob on the weekly call home.
Duncan said, “The first play is Romeo and Juliet.”
“Sometimes young people try completely new things when they get to high school or college,” Mary explained from the upstairs phone. “Sort of like me going to Moscow.”
“And that really worked out well,” Ward chimed in from the downstairs phone. He and Mary had reached a stage in their marriage marked by the right to call each other out on blind spots.
Anthony, in defense of his mother, said, “What completely new thing did you ever try, Dad?”
“Ask her,” Ward said.
Rob butted in, “Wait, Duncan. You signed up for what, acting?”
“No, I work on building the sets,” Duncan said. “It’s like the hammering we used to do in the basement. And, by the way, Dad, Crowbar Gus says that you got into a fight on your first day here too.”
“Impossible. Your father would never start a fight,” Mary interjected, tit for tat.