The Lost Diary of M

by Paul Wolfe

  Cord was chief aide to the American delegate to the UN conference, who said Cord had the best mind of any young man in America. Maybe that was so. I was there as a reporter for UPI, wandering among delegates from every corner of the world. African princes in glittering robes. European prime ministers shell-shocked from a great war. American Indians, descended from the genocide that founded our country, celebrating their survival in feathers and silver and buckskin. Russian commissars devouring vodka and caviar and begging me up to their hotel rooms. On a street near the San Francisco Opera House I ran into Orson Welles—so handsome, with a voice that seemed to emanate from some grand place outside his body. Orson told me that history is a record of the folly of men, and that this experiment of the United Nations would bring that folly to an international scale. I scribbled it down while he told me I was an angel in yellow tresses. I know my smile was vast in those days, and thoroughly innocent. He invited me for a drink and I declined, though he possessed an aura of confidence that was palpable, a confidence I can still visualize, a confidence electric in nature that pulled you to stare at him in wonder, and had I not been a newly married woman on a mission in San Francisco, I could have seen falling beneath Orson Welles and having him exhaust himself in me.

  And then Jack appeared. An apparition. A spirit. An inevitability tumbling at me from the past. He wasn’t a politician yet, he was a journalist, a correspondent for Hearst covering the UN conference. I hadn’t seen him since Vassar, and one morning in San Francisco we all collided, all three of us, Cord, Jack, and me, a fated collision in the bedlam of the conference. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” Jack said with his electric grin, and I watched his words penetrate Cord’s spine, watched Cord freeze, Cord who was already showing signs of a depression that would grow deeper and eventually engulf him. He was already disenchanted with the conference, disgusted at the powerlessness of the UN charter to abolish war. Cord looked brutally at Jack with his single good eye and walked off abruptly, leaving me alone on the conference floor with Jack Kennedy, who, if memory serves, never stopped smiling at me.

  Later that week, Jack asked Cord for an interview and was rudely rebuffed. Cord may have had the best mind of any young man in America, but he also had a mean streak that would grow more vicious as the years passed. Jack never forgot the rebuff in San Francisco. Years later, when fate had performed its legendary twist and the young reporter for Hearst was president of the United States, Cord went to him hat in hand seeking an ambassadorship. Jack would not even consent to meet with him.

  Kenny O’Donnell, Jack’s minister of everything, once told me this was the difference between Bobby and Jack. Bobby would curse you, threaten you, go for your throat; Jack would always remain strong and silent. He’d never yell, never threaten, but he would never forget. And one day he would simply pull the string, and you’d be dead.

  AUGUST 6

  I spent some girlie time fussing over presidential appointment number two, rubbing L’Air du Temps into strategic places. Jack was waiting for me in the Lincoln Bedroom and told me we had two hours. Jackie’s in Burma. He hugged me and I could hear my heart beating, like every song about every girl who longed for a man to take care of her no matter how strong she was. I wondered if he smelled the perfume and considered me some sort of floozy, as I’m usually boringly natural and prefer painting canvases to faces. A canvas lasts forever. A face has to be scrubbed again and repainted tomorrow.

  Jack asked about my boys, and I was surprised. Usually he’s either fucking or running the world; he avoids matters trivial, inconsequential, or overly feminine, though he does love gossip. But sometimes he’s surprisingly sensitive, as people who live in continual pain are sensitive. His father’s ghastly voice resounds in his head, relentlessly urging him on to a toughness that is not his natural style. I can almost hear that father’s voice in my own ears and share Jack’s pain inside my own body.

  I have no idea what prompted it, but I blurted out that we should be married. I don’t know where it came from. He both grinned and winced; he was accustomed to hostile barbs from reporters, but not the domestic pleading of women.

  “Mary, marriage is an institution for children.”

  “And where did you learn about the institution, from your dad? He wasn’t a great teacher, Jack.”

  “Well, the ambassador was a character, I will say that. I still remember him trying to get into bed with my sister’s friends when I was a teenager, wearing his shiny silk robe and telling the girls to get ready for an evening they would remember their entire lives.”

  Jack laughed, but I said I would try to forget he’d told me that story.

  “Everyone has a father, Mary.”

  “Yes, but not every father is a pedophile.”

  Why can’t I shut up?

  AUGUST 11

  Everybody’s spying on everybody else. Georgetown is spook heaven. Lorraine Cooper says half the members of Christ Church in Georgetown are members of the CIA, while the other half work for the Washington Post.

  I can always tell CIA at the parties. They are the ones wearing three-piece suits, swilling martinis, and jabbering about third-world countries that annoy them. I can always tell Mossad because they pretend to be Israeli diplomats and are not allowed to drink, so by the end of the evening, they’re the only ones still on their feet. I can always tell MI6 because they’re British and try so desperately to get into me. I think my creamy skin, blond hair, and fleshy tits send Brits straight into mommy fantasies, but since I have never been particularly impressed by the accent and have my fill of secretiveness simply living in Georgetown, I have no use for British men and dispatch them with a shrug.

  And if the cup of subterfuge didn’t already runneth over, I hear J. Edgar Hoover is spying on the CIA. He sends his men to Georgetown parties as waiters and bartenders to listen for gossip. Evangeline Bruce turned to me at dinner last night and said in perfect French, “The best pastry chef I ever employed turned out to be an FBI agent.”

  AUGUST 16

  Washington is a steam bath in the summer. We are a hothouse for flowers! I met Vangie at Packer’s, and she told me that her hydrangeas are a color wheel of purple, pink, and powder blue. Her gladiola are exploding, yellow like the sun. Her peonies are as pink as a woman’s you-know-what. And her clematis are purple like the cape of the count of Monte Cristo. I said: Vangie, you’re a poet! “No,” she said. “I’m a florist.”

  SEPTEMBER 3

  Every woman either wants to mother him or marry him. That’s the cliché surrounding Jack, as related to me by Evangeline Bruce, who has no knowledge of our affair. I gather that is the word for it. Affair. What a strange, outdated word. It makes me think of Vienna. But I have begun playing both roles in Jack’s life, both the wife he never had, but perhaps someday will, and the mother he never had. I have turned forty. I have raised three sons, I know their energy and their stink, and seeing Jack so pale last night, I slipped into the mode of motherhood. He suddenly seemed like a young prince in exile, needing me to rescue him, take him back to his true home.

  Khrushchev has issued an ultimatum on Berlin. The buoyancy that usually raises Jack beyond the grip of pain is gone. I can feel Berlin reverberating in his frayed autoimmune system, in his throbbing back wrapped sadly in a corset, in his ailing stomach and inflamed intestines. And I decided simply to be there for him. A boy whose mother was never there for him. He had told me this, that when he was a young teenager, he lay months in the infirmary at Choate, alone, racked with illnesses beyond the reach of doctors. And Mother Rose visited him at school exactly never.

  So I will be there. And I will nurture peace in him, slowly, slowly, peace being the closest thing we Pinchots have to a family business. We have opposed every war the world has thrown us for a century. I will plant seeds of peace as I watch him soften from the man who led a destroyer into World War II.

  “Fuck Berlin,” I told Jack, and he smiled. Mary’s mouth again. “We can’t sacrifice the future of the planet over
a shitty city stuck in the ruins of the Third Reich.”

  This man for whom women are decor, fucking objects fashioned to fill some aching chasm within, appeared to listen. He knows I refuse to be distracted from the heart of the matter, even by matters of the heart. We must not go to war simply to control traffic to West Berlin. I said it again, point-blank.

  “Berlin is a burr in my butt” was all he said.

  “Then get out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then you don’t really want peace.”

  Pinchots are inconvenient and stubborn and I inherited this gene, but Jack apparently finds it fascinating. I once told him he was full of shit. I did. I shocked myself hearing it burst from my mouth. No woman has ever said that to him, I am quite convinced, and perhaps no man either. But it did not trigger an immediate Secret Service escort out of the White House.

  1962

  JANUARY 3

  We are the lovers who hover ever out of reach, longed for, unattainable. We are the mysteries that never get solved. Jack and Mary. Holdouts. Maybe it’s because we’re air signs. Or maybe detachment is the secret of attraction. He is beloved because he will never be found. And that is also why he loves me. One great mystery deserves another.

  JANUARY 16

  The weight of the presidency is starting to age him. The boyish looks remain, the smile that detonates in women’s hearts and thrills me, but when I kiss him I encounter wrinkles never noticed before. There is a filigree of lines etched around his eyes, the eyes of cool intelligence through which an entire country sees the future. And in those eyes last night I sensed a shimmering flicker of sadness, hidden beneath droopy eyelids. Why had I not seen it before? Sometimes I believe depression is the essential nature of human beings, and life a continual pursuit of exits. I told him his hair was turning gray, and he smiled. It was reddish brown when I was a schoolgirl, before the war turned us all into adults. It was chestnut when he won the election and still full, almost too strong to tame, bursting out from the silly little part on the left. Now it’s burnt umber streaked with gray.

  I ran my fingers through it last night, but his back was in spasm, and waves of pain rippled through his spine as he moved to pull off his back brace. I told him to leave it on, I told him to breathe, to just breathe, I just wanted to hear him breathe and I was happy. He let out a moan and sank into the gold couch, remarkably shabby for the most famous house in the world. I removed his trousers and went down on him. He let out a sigh—he never allows himself to veer far from control, even in ecstasy. He is efficient in all things, efficient in stealing momentary pleasures amid the onslaught of people and problems. He came quickly, and that was that. With Jack, a woman must be prepared for “that is that.”

  MARCH 1

  James Jesus Angleton brooded beside me at the Alsops’. I asked if he’d read any new poetry lately, but he didn’t answer. I told him Allen Ginsberg had sent me a book of poems called The Happy Birthday of Death, written by his friend Gregory Corso. It was odd going, but Angleton still didn’t respond. Then he asked me if I’d ever been betrayed. You just can’t predict James Jesus Angleton. He was in one of his strange moods.

  He whispered that he’d been betrayed by the Great Betrayer himself, Kim Philby. We had long known of Philby, of course, knew of the clandestine education James received at the MI6 offices on Ryder Street in London at the foot of this legendary British spymaster. The gangly young intellectual from Yale communed daily with the seasoned, pipe-smoking eminence of British intelligence. Angleton couldn’t inhale enough of Philby’s sinister wisdom. He used to talk incessantly to Cord and me of Philby, in art galleries, at poetry readings, over dinners, during drunken Georgetown evenings. I learned of Angleton’s education in bugging, in plowing through “the take” from bugging, in the hours and monotony and bodily noises; I learned the secrets of codes and agents and networks and interrogation in its nasty and less nasty variations.

  How excruciating it must have been for Angleton when the world discovered that the professor of lying had been lying, when Philby defected to Russia, a double agent all along.

  “What are you going on about?” Cicely interrupted. “Why are you chewing Mary’s ear off?” She knew her husband was in a mood, frozen in a memory of betrayal, and she felt tasked with lightening the load of her peculiar husband on all those assembled.

  “It was a Jewish woman,” Angleton said quietly. “A voluptuous Jewess he met in Berlin in the thirties. She ignited his sleepy English hormones. Betrayal is a chemical process. It’s lodged in the hormones.”

  “James, let’s go talk to Joe Alsop. He looks like he needs someone to talk at.”

  Angleton ignored his wife. “It’s in the hormones,” he went on. “Lodged in the neurochemistry. Someday we’ll understand it. So much more powerful than thoughts and decisions, more insidious even than feelings. That’s what allowed Kim to be a double agent. The Jewess anchored his hormones in a love of Communism. He didn’t care who he lied to, who he betrayed, or who got killed. And the Brits were easily fooled. It was simply unfathomable to MI6 that someone born into the ruling class of the British Empire could be a traitor.”

  I knew Angleton had filled the empty space where his posh English tutor had resided with an unmitigated species of paranoia, a frenzy for tracking and routing out Soviet double agents, regardless of whether they existed.

  “You and all your boys in the white shirts and ties over in Langley are convinced you’re doing God’s work, aren’t you, James?” I said, but he just looked off into the same place he’d been staring all evening.

  Then he turned to me and said, “A giant aerospace company once wanted to sell Howard Hughes a few hundred transport planes. Hughes insisted that the entire transaction be discussed only between midnight and dawn, by flashlight, in the Palm Springs municipal garbage dump. Now that’s secrecy.”

  MARCH 23

  I stared at a framed portrait of Lincoln as Jack pulled off my bra and sucked on my nipples. The ancient paint accurately captured the places where the pain of the presidency had hollowed Lincoln’s face like a ghost. I had no power to undo Jack’s hollowing out, so I told him to stop for a second, and I pulled a joint from my purse. Passing it back and forth, we quickly relaxed. My two creamy ladies were still hanging out, exposed. Jack grinned. He said he would be addressing a drug enforcement conference the next week, and even I laughed at the absurdity of it all, the transparency of the cloud of seriousness I carry wherever I go. Then we sat holding hands.

  “Well, think about our future a little, when you have nothing else to think about,” I said as I fell into his arms, bare breasts touching his suit jacket. It was the first time I’d ever felt vulnerable with him, perhaps a bit of an idiot, but I’m never sorry when I feel idiotic. It means I have taken a chance and gone beyond my usual domination of myself.

  “Mary, Mary,” he said in response. “You know what the Irish say: Why make one woman unhappy when you can make many women happy?”

  I held my breasts up with my hands. “OK, make these women happy.”

  APRIL 1

  Kirkland and Mary Jennings arrived at the Alsops’ at the precise moment I reached the door, and it was a disagreeable comingling. The Jennings comprise a marriage of darkness and light. Mary is a Vassar sister of a quality so pure, it feels we actually are sisters. We breathe an effortless air together, we share a name, and our sons grew up inseparable. She writes a poetry of nature so delicate, I have fallen in love with stones. But her husband, Kirkland Jennings, seethes in bitter contrast, a bald and bullet-headed Company man so virulent in his disdain of contrary points of view, so cast in granite as to the righteousness of his cause, that any discussion of war and peace with him is pointless. Which means Kirkland Jennings is no fan of mine.

  He is Cord’s squash partner. I actually played squash with Cord a few times, but by and large he refused to play with me, a woman, though I had been a tennis champion in my college years. And with the exception of a differe
nt approach to the wrist, my tennis skills translated very effectively to the squash court. But Kirkland continues as Cord’s squash partner, though with Cord’s voluminous intake of alcohol, relentless cigarette habit, and only one eye, I find it hard to imagine him a serious challenge on the court. I am being cruel, of course. I can feel my nervous system grow defensive in the face of Kirkland’s distaste. He views me as the tart of the town. Cord has shared drunkenly and openly his despair and loneliness over our divorce, now going on three years, and Central Intelligence, in its wisdom and insight, blames me and me alone for the rupture. Kirkland’s loyalty is unquestionably to the secret brotherhood and to Cord. Not to mention that once, under rapid-fire questioning at Joe Alsop’s dinner table, I expressed skepticism about America’s secret operations in Latin America. Channeling Daddy Amos, I said we have given a name to our profits: we call them Democracy. This generated such instant and perilous elevation to Kirkland Jennings’s blood pressure that Mary Jennings had to take me aside and urge me never, ever again to speak against the Unites States within his earshot.

  So at the door of the Alsops’, I felt Kirkland as a profound weight in my solar plexus, a weight that says either he exists or I exist but not both. But I insisted on greeting him cheerfully nevertheless, even pecked him on the cheek, refusing to grant the past dominion over the present. Kirkland nodded imperceptibly, frozen in a manner that nothing in my feminine arsenal could melt. I was a radioactive woman, loved by the poet wife, reviled by the cold-warrior husband. Kirkland removed the ever-present cigarette from his mouth and nodded about a thousandth of an inch, about as much acknowledgment as I could hope for. I had the comical thought that I could probably beat him at squash, but then I would really fear for my safety.