by Paul Wolfe
James is a frightened man, and frightened men end up scaring everybody else.
JUNE 16
Cord was a warrior of light. That’s how I saw him when I was young, when we were postwar, postcatastrophe, and prerebuilding the world from the shards and pieces of what was. Cord had left Guam one eye poorer following the carnage of a Japanese explosion. They thought he was dead. That’s how it seemed. They telegrammed his parents to say he wouldn’t be coming home. Then they noticed he had a pulse and carried him to a coral reef and treated him and sent out another telegram instructing the family to ignore the first telegram. He returned home carrying a Bronze Star in place of an eye. We married shortly thereafter.
Surrendering half his eyesight to the phantasmagoria of war would seem payment enough, but Cord felt a debt to world peace he began paying off in astonishing pulses of energy. I told him that he saw clearer and farther with a single eye than most with two-eyed vision. He opposed war as my own family had done for generations: loudly, bravely, obnoxiously, naively, relentlessly. And I loved him. We were a husband and wife, dedicated to the eradication of the germ of death that projects itself outward into the collective slaughter known as history.
We set out on the road my father had walked, flinty old Amos Pinchot, who once told Teddy Roosevelt to go fuck himself. Amos had started the Progressive Party with the Rough Rider and written its credo: “To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” I almost memorized that credo, reading it over and over again on a pamphlet I kept in my room as a little girl, my way perhaps of being close to my father. The party’s list of demands glowed in bold red type: The right of women to vote. The eight-hour workday. Social insurance for the elderly. A national health service. All things Daddy considered ridiculously obvious for a civilized society. But third parties don’t win in America, and when Teddy Roosevelt opened the doors of the Progressive Party to what Amos called the captains of industry and the profiteers of high finance, my father walked out. Abruptly. Permanently. With profanity. Have I inherited your headstrong bent, Amos?
So we were at it again, still walking toward peace, Cord replacing Daddy beside me. We founded the World Federalist Party, in the Pinchot tradition of creating political movements that fail. The premise of the World Federalist Party was simple: What species annihilates itself?
Cord was a hero before he became a cold man. Before he brought into our life, and the life of our sons, a mentor and man who lived not on the solid ground of earth but in a strange terrain of mirrors. James Jesus Angleton.
JUNE 23
He is now godfather to my boys. James Angleton. A strange godfather indeed, with a strange name, the name of our savior squatting like a Mexican farm worker between his two Anglo-Saxon names, James and Angleton. Two proper Christian names divided by what he must consider a less Christian name—ironic, of course, since it is the name of Christ himself. But James has spent a lifetime trying to erase the shame of Jesus in his name.
Who bestows the name Jesus on a CIA head of counterintelligence? A Mexican mama. She was a dark-haired girl of seventeen in a Mexican village three miles south of hell, explained James once as he, Cicely, Cord, and I strolled an art gallery in Alexandria, Virginia. One day—James was so proud to relay this story through his Coke-bottle glasses—a force of nature rode into the Mexican town of that Mexican girl. It was his daddy, OG Angleton, a Rough Rider and a man apparently too tough to put periods between his initials. OG was a high-adventure man, storming the dusty plains of central Mexico with General Pershing in search of Pancho Villa. The Mexican bandit remained free to pillage, but OG Angleton returned home with a beautiful young Mexican bride. Upon the birth of a son, the father bestowed the names James and Angleton on his progeny while the Mexican mama slipped in Jesus. So now we have James Jesus Angleton.
Also a hunter of bandits, but Cold War bandits, bandits with briefcases and Russian accents, James is not the force of nature his papa OG was. In fact, James is unearthly, almost comically skinny. He seems to be disappearing gradually from physical manifestation, as if a belief that only the clandestine is visible has overtaken his body.
And now, because he had been named godfather to my boys, this is a man life continually thrusts at me, a force field of charged particles I can’t seem to escape, a godfather I cannot trust, a gift of some sort from Cord to his sons.
JULY 2
It was date night at the White House, the first of July and the first of Jack. (My mordant wit. Cord always insisted I lacked humor, but his charge ignored his own role in suppressing it.) Last night was my scheduled night, my anticipated night, the night to become a member of Jack’s bedchamber. His chamber, not his cabinet. (Another stab at humor, I fear born of nervousness.) What evolutionary purpose does nervousness serve, anyway? Natural selection. Apparently, we who survived are the anxiety-ridden ones, the ones who remain vigilant, ever prepared for the surprise onslaught. We the nervous were selected. Evolution is pathetically irrelevant to a tumble in a presidential bed, but nervousness inhabited me in the White House last night, nevertheless.
I arrived at seven sharp, a single woman in a simple dress, armed with nothing but a white satin clutch, navigating the paintings and bric-a-brac of history on her way to a bedroom. Kenny O’Donnell led me upstairs through a series of hallways to the private residence. Jack was in a rocking chair in a large formal room outside the bedroom, a briefing book spread out on his lap, easing the pain in his back and puffing on a cigar. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary.” He smiled and it all came flooding back in a romantic flurry, a dance in winter when we were awfully young. I sat on the couch across from him. Then I crossed my legs and lit a cigarette. “Can I offer you a cigar?” he said, still grinning, and I said I would start with a Marlboro and work my way up to something bigger. How naturally the language of flirtation arises of its own accord.
I remained nervous on the stiff, formal settee, admitted to the historic chamber of the American people simply because I carried with me the paraphernalia of a woman. An impostor with a posterior. Stubbing out a lipstick-smeared Marlboro in a presidential-sealed ashtray, I said that things had certainly changed from that long-ago night at Choate, and he said not everything had changed. I smiled, remembering the pebbles on my windowpane, a senator’s desire threatening to break my glass, and I knew my window was about to shatter. Jack came over and sat beside me on the couch. He continued puffing on his cigar—the stench of a cigar is the destiny of the nostrils of the women of my generation—and now his arm was around me. We could smell each other, we could smell the future, I knew it was real, I knew eventually I would be on my back with my legs up, and he would be in me. Back when Cord relinquished his hold on me, I had asked the universe for adventure, and now it seemed the universe had giggled, had overdelivered. Jack moved to kiss me, I closed my eyes and kissed him back. We merged tongues, he squeezed my thigh, and I said I needed to go. “Why would you need to do that?” he asked, unaccustomed to resistance but not surprised that the source was me. I had resisted for so long. I said I’d come back soon, I’d even return the next night if he liked, but this night in the White House I told him I needed to go.
“Mary, didn’t you hear my slogan: Let’s get this country moving again? You’re not being very patriotic.”
I kissed him and left. Is that the extent of a woman’s power: the power to say no?
JULY 5
This random falling forward of myself. Who I wound up being. The precise life I am living, with very little volition on my part. A Pinchot? A Meyer? A Vassar queen? A mom with a paintbrush? A girl named Mary who could be said to be Jack’s girl, in a very vague, roundabout sort of way? Or, simply, I am just who everyone else isn’t. I didn’t go back to the White House the next night.
JULY 10
Joe Alsop is a queer, undisclosed. One more issue unspoken beneath the vast, lubricated discourse of Georgetown.
Joe and Susan Mary Alsop’s salon is now a weekly destination for our inebriated crowd, fitting neatly between Sunday soirées at the Wisners’, the occasional blowout bash at Phil and Katharine Graham’s (Phil contributing far more blowing to the blowout than Katharine), and the more refined political gatherings at Lorraine and Senator John Sherman Cooper’s manor house.
The open secret of Joe’s sexuality is buried beneath his harsh exterior. Lorraine Cooper calls him the Grand Inquisitor of Georgetown. Alsop attendees endure rigorous rounds of questioning and political debate before feasting on his legendary turtle soup and his impeccable wine cellar. On Saturday, Joe floated through the party in a peacock dressing gown, flaunting a cigarette holder of pure ivory. Some elephant had to die just so Joe could smoke cigarettes. I pointed it out. “All in a good cause,” he replied. “All in a good cause.”
The strange composition of Joseph Wright Alsop V. On the one hand he is an effete connoisseur who refuses to eat in a restaurant in Paris if the wine cellar is too close to the Métro. He believes the vibrations of the trains will disturb the sediment in the wine bottles. But at daybreak, the flamboyant sensualist turns into a harsh and belligerent political animal, the anti-Communist columnist. A ruthless promoter of the war in Vietnam. Obsessed with the news, he owns no TV. I don’t either. I refuse to yield my family to the forces that prepackage and manage us electronically. But Joe’s antielectronics posture is less clear to me; he is a newsman, a columnist syndicated in a hundred newspapers.
I asked Susan Mary if she missed having a TV, and she said of course, she’s addicted to Westerns, but Joe is the boss. No, I said, you are the boss. She is an elegant stick of womanhood who modeled for Balenciaga. No, I’m just the little woman, she said, filling my champagne glass, then revealing her truth with a blink of long eyelashes: “There’s just no future in being an ordinary person leading an ordinary life, is there, Mary?”
I have never asked her, but apparently she has no trouble with Joe’s sexuality. Well, clearly she has no trouble with his sexuality. Poor Joe. The world is not currently ready for pansies, an absurd mistake. I watched as Joe held up a wine bottle, explaining its vintage to Katharine Graham, when suddenly a flash of sadness seized my memory and a deep hole opened up so raw, I excused myself from Susan Mary and went to sit alone on the Chinese bench in the foyer. I thought of Hoyt Pennington, my teenage friend who attended Collegiate when I was at Brearley. He was a painter and a poet, and could even explain Wallace Stevens to me when he was fifteen. Hoyt and I used to go to the Art Students League on Saturday mornings and walk home together along the East Side, talking, talking, talking. I don’t like to think about it, but at Yale they found him in bed with a boy one day and some fraternity men carried him out to the entrance of the Yale campus and tied him to the gate. Naked. Hoyt was found hanging in his dorm room the following night. I remember something he told me one Saturday morning as we trudged up a deserted Park Avenue: “You know the definition of a faggot? A homosexual gentleman who just left the room.”
JULY 11
Joe Alsop conducted a vigorous interrogation of his guests on their perspectives on Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh. Agent Orange. President Diem. He fired questions from his perch at the head of the table, his beloved dinner table, and who of power hasn’t sat here? Twice in the century, because this massive slab of mahogany once belonged to his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and I have often wondered if my father Amos ever sat at this table too, when he and Roosevelt worked together on the Progressive Party.
I faced the shooting gallery of questions armed only with a fine chardonnay. I don’t respond well to rapid-fire questioning. Perhaps it is a matter of brain chemistry. Cord always maintained I had a slow-moving sort of mind, but his judgments take their place now in the graveyard of dead memories. Perhaps I am unwilling to think at a pace prescribed by others. My intelligence has a speed limit, and perhaps that is why I’m a painter; painting proceeds slowly, the lines of my shapes drawn so carefully.
But in defiance of the bloodshed that continues to haunt the human race, I swirled the wine and let it envelop my tongue, so buttery and fruity, and wondered how the same world could hold tastes like this and dead children in jungles. The words Vietcong and US advisors entered rapid-fire into the conversation, but I just smiled and sipped, lacking the finesse for the verbal jujitsu of politics. Debate is really just a verbal sleight of hand, each point and counterpoint a slight bend of the truth, a slight inaccuracy, a slight dishonesty, until the deflections multiply and in the end everybody finds themselves far, far removed from where the truths began. At any rate, verbal dexterity in defense of war is an immoral exercise.
“It’s just like dominoes,” Joe Alsop said, flapping his hand effeminately in a pantomime of falling dominoes. “When one falls, eventually they all will fall.”
“How free of any taint of tentativeness are his opinions!” Phil Graham whispered of our host. I repeated my belief that the more facts you know on any given issue, the more confusing the issue becomes.
“Dien Bien Phu on you too!” said Vangie Bruce, igniting her cigarette with a solid gold lighter. She commanded our end of the table, unintimidated, six feet of woman, crowned by a sculpture of jet-black hair and tossing off bons mots like bonbons. I sat in sharp contrast to her: husbandless, heightless, the crown on my head but a short blond bob.
But Joe fancies me, and I am a regular at his Saturday dinners, his resident bohemian. I have no penchant for politics. I am one half of no distinguished couple, except for the far less than half portion I occupy of a secret, forbidden relationship, no evidence of which I carry to dinner at Joe and Susan Mary Alsop’s.
But once Joe said to me: “Mary, you just don’t give a crap. I love that in a woman.”
Once he said to me: “Every man here dreams of sleeping with you, and you don’t even realize it, so they keep dreaming.”
Once he said to me: “Mary, you speak so filthy yet enunciate so elegantly.”
Once he said to me: “Mary, you’re not a bore. To rid the world of bores, that is my passion. I want you to populate the next Earth.”
As he lit my cigarette, I confessed I would be thrilled never again to hear the words Mekong Delta and napalm. I stopped short of the truth, that I feel the war is simply a massacre of innocents in a jungle, because Joe is too fervent a cold warrior. The Anti-Communist columnist. That is a conversation I am saving for a bed in the White House, the conversation I dream that will put an end to war. I will be a peace whisperer to the president. Until then, I remain the antiwar blonde of Georgetown, sipping bourbon and flirting with fools in the salons that are the secret engines of the Cold War.
JULY 23
The pounding of the president. These are the strange words that unspooled through my mind as Jack came into me for the first time. We had chatted away, both aware that the long-ago promise of a winter dance would soon be kept beneath presidential sheets. He had held my hand—it was a tender moment, actually, as if we were dating, or some proper matchmaking friend had simply suggested we meet and see if we hit it off.
He told me a book would soon be coming out about his election, called The Making of the President. I asked if the book was about me. He laughed and started removing his clothes. Once he started, he was in a terrible hurry. We made love very quickly that first time; it had taken us past the age of forty to consummate a desire lodged in our bodies as teenagers, and now it proceeded with the speed of teenagers. Barely enough time for my mind to say those peculiar words: “The pounding of the president.” And then it was over.
I felt a raging force in him, as though the universe depended on his coming into me at that moment, and I was willing simply to let him spend himself. We were officially lovers. Or unofficially lovers. But I had a flash. I thought the time would come when we would be together forever, which made no sense. No woman had ever made Jack Kennedy say the word forever. Yes, he had pledged a death-do-you-part in a church in Newport, Rhode Island, but that was in a commitment to a
masquerade marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier, my Vassar sister. I knew he had learned from Daddy Kennedy that marriage was a stage set. He had learned from Daddy that women were compensation for the pain men undergo as they take charge of the world. So maybe he would never be willing to dismantle the stage set, and maybe he would never divorce Jackie. But I thought audaciously that the relationship might change the world, might influence world affairs, that I would become Jack’s collaborator, a cheerleader for peace in the White House. As if I was married to the future but cheating with Jack. And if anyone ever heard my thoughts, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.
AUGUST 1
I am hungry for that truth that sets us free. So it has been called. I am hungry to return to the truth I experienced in a medical room in Palo Alto with Allen Ginsberg. Browsing this morning at the Savile Book Shop, I came upon an old book called Light in Distant Realms by someone named Roxanne Arcturis. She claims to derive her secrets by channeling the Akashic records, “the etheric archive of every thought-form and desire of every human soul ever incarnated.” It seems the thoughts and experiences of every human being through endless time are recorded and logged, like some CIA of infinity. Arcturis writes that a new astrological era will soon overtake us all. It’s called the Aquarian Age.
AUGUST 3
Time has been unkind to our dreams. That is the nature of dreams, the shelf life stamped upon each fantasy. The United Nations Charter Conference of 1945 was our honeymoon, my young marriage to Cord Meyer a microcosm of the greater union we pledged ourselves to in San Francisco. We whispered of world peace the way other newlyweds speak of family homes by the lake and springer spaniels running free.