The Lost Diary of M

by Paul Wolfe

  So I have nothing to wear to the White House.

  In this matter I veer sharply from my Vassar sister, so penetratingly gorgeous on the arm of the president. For her, the sheer act of being a woman is an art form, sheathed in fascinating fabrics, all memory of blood and fluids forgotten, while I consider a minute devoted to fashion a moment of my life never again to be recovered. Long ago I decided to apply art to the canvas rather than to my closet, and I live with the consequences.

  I have nothing to wear to the White House!

  I own exactly six pairs of capri pedal pushers, four pairs of Bermuda shorts, eleven pairs of trousers (tweed, cotton, khaki), a dozen white tops, nine sweaters, two small black dresses—nothing worthy of a presidential ball. Luckily my college roommate, Cicely d’Autremont Angleton (the woman who vowed her life to James Jesus Angleton!), and I both classify as size 4. I will ask to borrow her shining gold gown covered by a copper-embroidered tunic, and I will encounter Jack for the first time as president of the United States. I will remember to treat him as a historic personage rather than the skinny lothario from Choate. I will not embarrass him, I will not criticize him, I might even let him cop a feel when we are both alone off near the restrooms. In deference to history. Or our history.

  MAY 23

  I am planting beautiful blue salvias in my yard. I am painting in the garage behind sister Tony and Ben Bradlee’s house. I am depleting the supplies of bourbon at the Alsops’, the Grahams’, the Wisners’, and the Coopers’ on a regular basis. It is a spring of renewal.

  I remember I was also planting blue salvias the day an envelope arrived. It was two weeks past my odyssey in California. It was three weeks past my divorce. It was thirty-eight years past my incarnation into the life of Mary, released finally from domination and degradation at the hands of a CIA husband. Womanhood untrammeled, planting flowers.

  The envelope was marked in a strange handwriting of blocky print. It was from Allen Ginsberg. He had written a poem about LSD, about the shattering of ourselves we had undergone together. Two people who really had no business being together in the same room at the same time, who had arrived in a medical room in California from opposite ends of the universe and then returned back to their lives, reconfigured.

  At the top of the page he had written: “To the Super Shiksa of Lysergica, from Allen Ginsberg.” The poem begins:

  I am on the last millionth infinite tentacle of

  the spiderweb, a worrier

  lost, separated, a worm, a thought, a self . . .

  I allen Ginsberg a separate consciousness

  I who want to be God . . .

  MAY 30

  The banquet was a triumph. Jack successfully turned forty-four, and those who live for the glamour of power and the power of glamour celebrated the historic event in tumultuous style. Jack’s brother Teddy emerged from the Rose Garden at one point, his hair a mess, his pants torn completely up the back. He had no idea of the cause. Jack’s friend Red McIntyre fell backward into the birthday cake while demonstrating the Twist for Jackie. Lorraine Cooper announced that her senator husband’s sense of humor was simply too dry and poured a bottle of Dom Perignon over his head. Jack chased my sister Tony into the ladies’ room—this according to Constantina de la Salle, who was in the stall at the time—and was rudely rebuffed, which I find totally amusing. The president of the United States seems to have a penchant for the women of my family. And we seem to possess an equal and opposite streak of resistance.

  We all sang “Happy Birthday,” that corniest song ever conceived by man, and then “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” Only the Irish could conceive a happy song so devastatingly morose. Then Jack’s eyes locked with mine. I moved instinctively to turn away, then looked back, and he was grinning, grinning as he had at Choate when I was sixteen and he said that at last he knew what love was. He seemed to have forgotten about my sister Tony, or simply decided he had chosen the wrong sister back in the ladies’ room, because we sat looking at each other, smiling, as Jackie stared in the other direction, her own aristocratic smile frozen as if for history. I suddenly felt Jack was my son, I felt he was my husband, I felt he was my friend. The heat of bourbon flamed in my head and places far lower, and I longed to grip him and fall beneath him. I took this chaos of thoughts with me as I rode home in the limo with Ben and Tony. “Now that’s a birthday!” said Ben, looking away oddly through the car window, his bow tie all askew over the collar of his tuxedo shirt and one stud missing. Tony was silent.

  JUNE 2

  Kenny O’Donnell called from the White House to say Jack wanted to speak to me. I held the phone, and there was the president of the United States, speaking through my pink Princess phone, saying I looked beautiful in gold. I said it was just a costume from Cicely Angleton. Why rave about me when Jackie was resplendent in a ruby-red velvet-and-silk gown by Cassini and white gloves extending up her arms? He told me we shouldn’t talk about husbands and wives with each other, or he would ask me how an SOB like Cord Meyer could have landed someone like me. He said he wanted to see me. He wanted to meet me privately.

  I am familiar with the urgency of men calling you, needing you, craving you, but hitherto I have never been ordered to sex by the commander in chief of the Western world. A newsreel of American history flashed through my brain. I pictured children in years to come reading about me in textbooks—Mary fucking the president, right alongside the Louisiana Purchase and the Spanish-American War.

  My heart pounded. I told Jack I needed to think about it; he said some things don’t require thought. I had to admit that was true, I was a free woman, and my long campaign of resistance ended there and then on the Princess phone. Life happens like that.

  JUNE 4

  The call from Jack has settled into my being, as all things that change the nature of your cells do, and I am reminded of the day I told Cord to leave. The day I said the marriage was over. Every loss pulls the great chain of loss along with it, and the specter of my disappearance from his life invoked, first, the loss of his eye in war, and then the death of his twin brother. And then perhaps back to the primal loss of all, being born into this world of oxygen in the first place. He erupted in tears, and all I could think was: Why do we only miss what we can’t have when we can’t have it, but do nothing to keep it when we can?

  “Why are you crying?” I asked him. “Why are you surprised I want you to leave? You’re never here anyway. You never see the boys—they are your sons on official documents only, their entire upbringing has been my job. And you never talk to me anymore, you don’t tell me what you do because you can’t tell me what you do, but not being allowed to hear something doesn’t make it any easier not to hear it.”

  The torrents came, the dams had burst. “You’re always angry,” I continued. “You’re always angry. And if I worked in the house of lies every single day with James Jesus Angleton instead of writing the prose your gifts once held out as your destiny, I would be angry too.”

  I paused, and Cord raised his hand as if to slap me, as if to slap down the eruption of bitter truths my words had summoned forth, but he stopped himself. He checked himself. Whatever was left of the man he might once have been stopped him. He finally said: “I can’t protect you if you’re not my wife.” It was an ominous retort.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I screamed back at him. “Are you threatening me?”

  “No, I’m not threatening you,” he said. “I’m protecting you.”

  “I don’t need your protection!”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Who’s following me?” I screamed. He stared at me. “I see them at the drugstore. They’re looking over their newspapers at me, they’re peeking awkwardly through their peripheral vision at me when I drink a milkshake. I see shadows when I walk down the street, there are figures on the towpath where I walk every day, even when there should be no one at the canal but me. Who’s following me?” I shook him. “You know, don’t you?”

  “I don’
t know.”

  “I don’t believe you. Do you actually have goons from Central Intelligence following me?”

  I shook him, and he lifted my hands from his body and said, “Married to me, you have the full faith and power of the United States government protecting you. Without me, you’re just a cunt with loose lips and even looser habits.”

  I slapped him. I knew he was speaking of my refusal to be a Company wife, beautiful and dutiful. I knew he was speaking of the Spaniard, the owner of the little hotel on Mallorca that Bebe Highsmith and I escaped to last summer. But I slapped him anyway, blinded by that WASP venom, the bile of his ancestors spewing out onto a woman he once loved. He grabbed my arms. I shouted at him to let go, but he held them, and I flashed upon Grey Towers when I was five years old, when my cousin Remus would pin me to the floor. I’d scream for him to let me free, but he would just lie on me, holding me down and smiling that crazy smile, and I could smell his stinky breath and thought maybe he would hold me down forever and I would never be a free-moving person again. Now I knew I could not be married to Cord a moment longer.

  “I don’t care about your secrets,” I said. “The secrets are killing you, they’re devouring your soul, they’re eating the vital organs of your body. You were always a human being, a humanist being. We spent our fucking honeymoon at the United Nations charter conference. It was you who wanted to build a just world, and now you’re just half human. You’re just an employee of secrets, and secrets are cancer. Don’t you know that?”

  “Mary.”

  “Don’t say my name!” I yelled. “Don’t say my name! I can’t stand it when you say my name.”

  “Mary, secrets are what protect us. When Quentin and Mark are playing in the field and don’t have a care in the world and the sun shines on them, it’s because of secrets. It’s because of James’s secrets and mine, and you don’t want to know anything about them. But secrets are all that stand between America and a force worse than anything you can imagine.”

  “Yes, the Communists have made you angry. The Communists have made you ignore your children. The Communists have made you a rotten husband who treats his wife like shit when we once stood together at the founding of the United Nations.”

  He went quiet and walked off to his study. There he sat for an hour. With what spirits he communed during that hour, and who exactly he spoke to in his mind—because whenever we are quiet, we are speaking to somebody in our mind—I have no idea. All I know is that when he came out again, he said he didn’t want to leave, and I told him it was already decided and he would be leaving.

  JUNE 8

  It is a week since we spoke. Jack has entered my life without my even entering his bedroom. Now we may not be able to get together till July. How can twenty years pass by with barely a flicker of a thought of him, and yet three weeks now seem like eternity?

  JUNE 9

  I had lunch at Rive Gauche with Lorraine Cooper and Evangeline Bruce. I feel style- and marriage-challenged around these two queens of Georgetown, both famously married to important men, an ambassador and a senator, both annually victorious on everyone’s best-dressed list. While I’m just Mary.

  Evangeline commanded the restaurant’s attention with her crown of brunette hair and multipatterned stockings that accentuated legs that needed no accentuation. The limbs upon which Evangeline Bruce stands begin at ground level and seem to proceed somewhere up into the stratosphere. We were just beginning our gin and tonics when Lorraine Cooper burst into the restaurant—Lorraine doesn’t enter, she bursts in. She had a swirly blue-and-pink parasol resting on her shoulder.

  “It’s not raining,” I said.

  “What does rain have to do with parasols?” She closed the parasol adeptly with gloved hands.

  Vangie Bruce smiled at Lorraine as if she were a prized work of sculpture. What did I think she’d seen, she asked me, when she arrived at the Harrimans’ pool on Sunday?

  “What did you see?” I felt robotic for answering this artificially induced question, but I also felt the warmth of belonging, as if I finally belonged to the tribe of women who eat lunch and chatter, women who stride beside commanding men on the world stage and then compare notes over Parliaments and highballs.

  “I saw Lorraine here standing on a rubber raft in the middle of Pamela Harriman’s pool, holding a parasol in one hand and a cigarette and cocktail in the other.”

  “It was a pool party!” yelled Lorraine, removing her pink hat with its overlarge pink bow atop and veil and depositing it carefully into the hands of the eager young waiter who had sprinted over to retrieve it. “What’s a pool party without a parasol?”

  JUNE 11

  Jack is back from a summit with Khrushchev, and according to news reports, it did not go well. Khrushchev is something of a bully, but soon Jack and I will have our own summit. I will be a far more sympathetic comrade.

  JUNE 12

  Georgetown spring. The covert men, the overt men, the senators, ambassadors, spies, and scribblers, with their overeducated and under-attended-to wives, the whole Georgetown “family,” was gathered at the Wisners’ for Polly Wisner’s birthday. Polly is a devoted Central Intelligence wife and a quintessential Georgetown hostess. Here at the headquarters of the Cold War, in these early days of Jack’s presidency, birthdays are a good excuse to test the limits of the human liver and to acquire political intelligence. You don’t breathe air in Georgetown so much as inhale information.

  I gave Polly a music box from Prague, one of the more exquisite from my collection: a chirping bird flutters up when you open the cover. She listened for a moment to the tiny tinkling melody, kissed me, and told me the box would sit beside her bed forever. Polly is not beautiful, but she is the model of refinement, refinement in a chemical sense, as if her essence has been distilled repeatedly until what remains is clean, is tremblingly delicate.

  In the living room, James Jesus Angleton was situated strategically in the corner, staring through owlish glasses and a penumbra of cigarette smoke. He must smoke five packs a day. He is ghostly, angular, and otherworldly, looking like someone who has spent years searching in fetid underground caves for moles and Russian spies, emerging into the light only to attend Georgetown dinner parties.

  Dean Acheson and Allen Dulles faced each other in club chairs, holding forth on the recent Bay of Pigs fiasco, the issue du jour in Washington. Acheson was crusty and irritated. “It doesn’t take Price Waterhouse to discover that fifteen hundred Cubans aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand Cubans,” he said.

  Dulles removed the pipe from his mouth, the stem glistening disgustingly in the chandelier light, and shook his head solemnly, oblivious to Lorraine Cooper and me sitting languorously just a few feet away, sipping martinis and staring straight at them like observers in a zoo.

  “Doesn’t he look like the British captain in those war movies?” Lorraine asked, nodding toward Acheson, and I laughed and agreed, though I have never seen any of those war movies. I was concerned with Allen Dulles. I cannot get near the director of the CIA without a shudder. It takes a day for me to recover from simply being in his atmosphere, the obscene electricity of his vibrations. Though that has never stopped numerous women in Washington from opening their mouths to his mustached, pipe-tobacco-polluted lips and their legs to the central intelligence of his cock. Poor Clover Dulles. Or maybe lucky Clover Dulles. Maybe she cherishes abandonment’s freedom.

  “Stylish shoes,” said Lorraine, nodding toward the velvet bedroom slippers Dulles wore on a Saturday night due to gout. Were his swollen, throbbing feet retribution for a life too privileged? Or perhaps medical science will discover one day that deceit is a toxin that turns to uric acid in your veins and corrodes your circulatory system. Joe Alsop came padding by, nodding toward Dulles with a smile and then turning to Lorraine and me and whispering conspiratorially, “He cares more about learning secrets at these parties than dispensing them. Fuck him!”

  I got up, and Dulles grabbed my hand. I felt a shudder go
through me, I felt his eyes pierce mine and reach down into my uterus. “I know I hired your ex-hubby, Mary, Mary, but we can still be good friends, right?” His mustache was yellow and rancid. His blue eyes were composed of ice from a dead planet, frozen behind wire-rimmed spectacles. I pulled my hand from his grip and felt the brutal cold of unsafety. There will be no man to provide for my safety, I thought, I am a woman who has meticulously burned every bridge to the protective custody of a man, and now I am on my own. This is the deal I have cut with life. I pulled my hand away and walked off. I was not polite about it.

  Passing Joe Alsop, who nodded, amused and impressed by my abruptness with the director of Central Intelligence, I walked into the kitchen, where Rowland Evans and Walter Lippmann were also bloviating on Cuba, as most people are these days. The bearded man in Havana, the uncouth denouncer of all we stand for, seems to have driven half the world crazy. The other half wants to fuck him. Evans insisted that Fidel had to be removed immediately: a cancer only metastasizes if left alone. Lippmann advocated a grander vision for the containment of Communism. Art Buchwald, the funny man, came up to me, smiling, sweating around the mouth, a bit soused, it seemed to me, a bit horny as well, and asked me if I’d seen the new Castro record player. I played along and said I hadn’t. “It delivers High Fidelity!” he said. I laughed, giving him a sexy, girlish push on the chest with my hand.

  I returned to the living room, still feeling a chill from Allen Dulles. Inexplicably, James Jesus Angleton had emerged from his fog, from his penumbra of smoke and secrets, and was singing “Happy Birthday” to our hostess. He was loud and passionate, gazing at Polly Wisner as if it were for the love of Polly and Polly alone that he had emerged from his cave. Polly smiled politely, a CIA wife ever dutifully restrained. In front of a blue-and-pink cake, he seemed an emaciated ghost. There was little left now of whoever he once was. He spends his days chasing imaginary double agents. Were they hiding now in the birthday cake as he sang? Secret agents of blue sugar reporting back to a devil’s-food command post at headquarters in Moscow?