Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  I began to pay attention to these Russians on the street. They all looked middle-aged. Even the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age. All the same, Red Square was a cheerful scene. To my astonishment, it was cheerful on this late Sunday afternoon. There was a shimmer to the air, a conviviality to the faces red with cold. Busloads of tourists—native Russians—were leaving, others were yet arriving. Hundreds of others walking through the Square were showing the simple happiness that comes to hardworking people when they are transported to an important place. These could have been Mormons, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, on a ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

  How much like a film it appeared to be. The center of Red Square rose higher than the corners, which left people in the distance only visible above the knee. Their feet had disappeared beneath the cobblestone horizon. Everyone seemed to bounce, therefore, as they walked, even as heads bob when a crowd is perambulating toward a telephoto lens. I did not know the history of Red Square, which is to say, didn’t know what old great events had produced this bouquet of the spirits, but my own were up—I felt delivered from the iron clangor of the Bronx and the walls of Moscow. I was ready, for one irrational instant, to celebrate, I hardly knew what. Maybe it was only the joy of coming to the end of a trip.

  I went back to the Metropole, received an increment more of greeting from the doorman, the elevator man, and the dezhurnaya (my floor lady), returned to the room, sat on my bed, sat on the chair next to the bed, took down my valise, looked at the neatly concealed Velcro seam to the false compartment where I kept the microfilm, put the valise up in the closet again, and realized abruptly how tired I was. I was weary from the cold outside, the scrambling of the hours, my whippings-about of mood, the rigors of the walk—everyone in Moscow seemed to stride along at top pace, and I, good American, had stepped it up to stay with them. Now I was tired with the real desolations of my mood. I did not know if I had ever felt so alone on a quiet day.

  I went downstairs to eat, but it was not much better. I was seated among strangers at a table for eight with a rumpled tablecloth, not dirty exactly, but no more immaculate than a shirt that has been worn for a few hours. The only dish available was chicken Kiev, a rubber chicken fit for a routine political banquet with a gusher of butter that tasted like lubricating oil mixed with some sour sorrow emanating from the kitchen. The kasha was overcooked, the dark bread was coarse, the fresh vegetable was a thin slice of tomato. Then came one cookie and a cup of tea. The waitress was a heavy, middle-aged woman with weighty personal concerns. She sighed a lot. It took all of the little attention she could give to the world outside herself to keep level with her job.

  After I left the table, I realized that I had supped in the equivalent of the hotel’s coffee shop, an eating hall, so to speak, exclusively for guests. The real restaurant, designed for a more prosperous gang, was entered by two glass doors off the lobby. Here black marketeers and bureaucrats, accompanied by their wives, waited on line. Inside, a dance band as full of pep as some of the prom bands that used to work the dances at Yale was hacking away, a weird, bouncy band whose sound reverberated through the glass doors.

  I went back to the elevator. I needed to sleep. I hoped I would get to sleep. At the landing, as I got off, my dezhurnaya with the blond beehive gave a real smile when she handed over the key. I understood. Already I gave every evidence of going by her desk many times a day, of being a regular customer. The comings and goings of her keys were her liveliest transactions. True hell. Homage to Sartre.

  I locked my door, undressed, washed my face, dried my hands. The sink was cracked, the soap was gritty, the bath towel was small and coarse. So was the toilet paper. This was one of the ten best hotels in Moscow. I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil.

  Then I got into bed. Sleep did not come. There was every intimation the High Holies were on their way. I decided to get up again and read Alpha. Will it tell you something of the year I spent in that rented room in the apartment of the Lowenthals that I knew the first pages by heart? But then, I knew much of the material by heart. It had taken me through many a night when I could not work on Omega. Yes, even when Kittredge appeared in these pages, Alpha was endurable. My actual love affair with Kittredge had not begun, after all, during the period I covered in Alpha. Besides, as I projected the microfilm, I would sometimes whisper the words aloud. That held off certain thoughts. Even as we and the Soviets had spent years jamming each other’s radio broadcasts, so would I recite the manuscript of Alpha whenever Kittredge became too alive. Such observances did not always work, but when they did, I could turn the corner. The ghosts of long-gone deeds would not appear, and I could live with Kittredge. Alpha was all I had of her now. I began, therefore, to recite my first sentences aloud, slowly, quietly, intoning the words; the sounds themselves came forward as forces in the unseen war of all those silences in myself that rode to war when I slept.

  Alpha commenced. I read by microfilm even as I whispered some of the words aloud. It was half of my past, expressed in what style I could muster after years of ghostwriting, but it was a good half of my past: “A few years ago, in disregard of the discretionary contract I signed in 1955 on entering the CIA . . .” That is how the Foreword to Alpha begins. (Of course, a two-thousand-page manuscript is always in need of a foreword.)

  So I was back in the book again, reading with my white hotel-room wall for a screen, moving my microfilm manually through my special flashlight equipped with its filmgate and lens, reading about the early career in the CIA of Harry Hubbard, a name that sometimes seemed as separate from myself as the name one repeats on shaking hands with a stranger just introduced in a room full of other strangers whose names one will also repeat. I felt as near and as removed from my original pages as if I were looking at old photographs attaching me imperfectly to the past.

  FROM THE ALPHA MANUSCRIPT, WORKING TITLE: THE GAME

  FOREWORD

  A FEW YEARS AGO, IN DISREGARD OF THE DISCRETIONARY CONTRACT I signed in 1955 on entering the CIA, I embarked on a memoir that looked to present a candid picture of twenty-five active years in the Agency. I expected the work to be of average length, but my account proliferated until it may now be the longest reminiscence ever written by anyone within the Agency. Perhaps I was captured by Thomas Mann’s dictum that “Only the exhaustive is truly interesting.”

  This attempt, then, to follow the changes in my character and outlook from 1955 to 1965 (for indeed I have managed to carry my account no further as yet) is not to be read as a memoir. It is rather a Bildungsroman, an extended narrative of a young man’s education and development. Any sophisticated reader of spy novels picking up this book in the hope of encountering a splendidly plotted work will discover himself on unfamiliar ground. As an Agency officer, I certainly encountered my fair share of plots, initiating some, concluding others, and serving as messenger for many, but I was rarely able to see them whole. By bits and pieces they passed before me. It is even a reasonable conclusion that this is the way of life for nearly all of us in CIA. One learns to live with the irony that we who spend our lives in intelligence usually read spy novels with the wistful sentiment, “Ah, if only my job could turn out so well shaped!”

  Nonetheless, I hope to offer my private insight into the nature of our daily lives and our intermittent adventures. They are sometimes exceptional for the complexity of the inner experience we encounter while spending our professional years on the team that plays this unique game.

  PART ONE

  EARLY YEARS, EARLY TRAINING

  1

  LET ME OFFER THE PRIMARY FACT. I AM A HUBBARD. BRADFORD AND FIdelity Hubbard arrived in Plymouth seven years after the Mayflower and branches of the clan are to be found today in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. To my knowledge, however, I am the first Hubbard to make public admission that the family name is not quite as impre
ssive as our share of lawyers and bankers, doctors and legislators, one Civil War general, several professors, and my grandfather, Smallidge Kimble Hubbard, Headmaster of St. Matthew’s. He remains a legend to this day. At the age of ninety, he still managed on warm summer mornings to get into his single shell and row one hundred strokes out into Blue Hill Bay. Of course, one stroke missed and over he would have gone into cold Maine waters, a near-fatal proposition, but he died in bed. My father, Boardman Kimble Hubbard, known to his friends as Cal (for Carl “Cal” Hubbell the New York Giants pitcher, whom he revered), was equally exceptional, but so divided a man that my wife, Kittredge, used him as a source of private reference for her work The Dual Soul. He was a swashbuckler and yet a deacon; a bold, powerful man who showered in cold water with the same morning certainty that others used to feel while eating eggs and bacon. He went to church each Sunday; he was a prodigious philanderer. During the time shortly after World War II, when J. Edgar Hoover was doing his best to convince Harry Truman that the proposed CIA was not necessary and the FBI could take over all such jobs, my father went on a save-our-outfit mission. He seduced a few key secretaries in the State Department, thereby picking up a flood of in-office secrets which he then passed to Allen Dulles, who promptly sent such product on to the White House with a cover story to protect the secretaries. It certainly helped to convince the White House that we might need a separate Intelligence body. Allen Dulles was fond of Cal Hubbard after that, and said to me once, “Your father won’t admit it, but that month with the secretaries was the best time of his life.”

  I loved my father outrageously and thereby had a frightened childhood, worried, strained, and cold within. I wished to be the salt of his salt but my stuff was damp. Much of the time I came near to hating him because he was disappointed in me and I did not hear from him often.

  My mother was a different matter. I am the product of a marriage between two people so quintessentially incompatible that they might as well have come from separate planets. Indeed, my parents were soon separated and I spent my boyhood trying to keep two disjointed personalities together.

  My mother was small-boned, attractive, and blond, and she lived, but for summer at Southampton, in that social nucleus of New York which is bounded by Fifth Avenue on the west, Park Avenue to the east, the Eighties to the north, and the Sixties to the south. She was a Jewish Princess but the emphasis can be put on the second word. She could not have told you the difference between the Torah and the Talmud. She brought me up to be ignorant of every Jewish subject but one: the names of prominent New York banking houses with Semitic roots. I think my mother thought of Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers as ports of call in some future storm.

  It was sufficient that my mother’s great-great-grandfather was a remarkable man named Chaim Silberzweig (who had his name streamlined by immigration officials to Hyman Silverstein). He came over as an immigrant in 1840 and rose from a street peddler to the clear-cut status of a department-store owner. His sons became merchant princes and his grandsons were among the first Jews tolerated in Newport. (The name by now was Silverfield.) If each generation of my mother’s family was more spendthrift than the one before, it was never at a catastrophic rate: My mother was worth about as much in real money as the first Silverstein had left for his immediate heirs—and she possessed about a quarter of his Jewish blood. The Silverfield men married golden gentile women.

  That is my mother’s family. Although I saw more of her when young than of my father, it was my paternal grandfather with his single shell that I deemed to be true kin. My mother’s side I tried to ignore. A man on death row once said: “We owe nothing to our parents—we just pass through them.” I felt that way about my mother. From an early age I did not take her seriously. She could be charming and full of interesting follies; she was certainly a lot better than average at giving merry dinner parties. She was also, unfortunately, the owner of a terrible reputation. The Social Register dropped her a few years after Jessica Silverfield Hubbard became an ex-Hubbard, but it took another ten years before her best friends stopped seeing her. The reason, I suspect, was not her succession of affairs so much as her propensity to lie. She was a psychopathic liar, and finally her memory became her only lasting friend. It always told her what she wished to remember about the present and the past. In consequence, you never could know what anyone was up to if you listened to her. I make this point because my mother equipped me, I believe, for counterespionage, a field where we do, after all, attempt to implant errors in our opponent’s knowledge.

  At any rate, I can hardly pretend that I ended as any good fraction of a Jew. My only kinship with “that herring baron,” as my mother referred to great-great-grandfather Chaim Silberzweig, is that anti-Semitic slurs made me tense. I might as well have grown up in a ghetto for the size of the fury aroused in me. For I would then feel Jewish. Of course, my idea of feeling Jewish was to be reminded of the strain on people’s faces in the rush hour on the New York subway as they stood prey to harsh and screeching sounds.

  I had, however, a privileged boyhood. I went to the Buckley School and was a Knickerbocker Gray until asked to withdraw, a reflection of my serious incompetence at close-order drill. While marching, I would generate headaches of such intensity that I would fail to hear commands.

  Of course, the bad reputation of my mother may have been another factor, and I take confirmation for this suspicion by the manner in which my father had me reinstated. As a cold-shower warrior he was not inclined to ask for favors for his progeny. This time, however, he called on people one saves for emergencies. The Hubbards had well-placed friends in New York, and my father took me to meet a few alumni of the Grays. “It’s unfair. They’re blaming the boy for her,” was part of what I overheard, and it must have done the work. I was reinstated, and managed to soldier my way thereafter with fewer headaches, although I never knew one relaxed breath as a cadet.

  I suppose people who were happy when young may recall their childhood well. I remember little. Summary disposes of the years and I collect memories by subjects. I can always answer such absurd essay questions as “What was the most important day you spent with a parent?” I would reply: “When my father took me to Twenty-One for lunch on my fifteenth birthday.”

  Twenty-One was the perfect place to take me. While my father did not know “one superior hell of a lot”—his phrase—about boys, he knew enough to be standing at the bar waiting for me.

  I cannot swear in all confidence that the downstairs dining room has not been altered since 1948, but I might bet on the possibility. I think the same model toys are still suspended from the low dark ceiling, same steamships, 1915 Spad biplanes, railroad locomotives, and trolley cars. The little coupe with its rumble seat and spare tire in the white slipcover is still above the bar. Above the bottle cabinet hang the same hunting horns, cutlasses, elephant tusks, and one pair of boxing gloves small enough to fit an infant. My father told me that Jack Dempsey gave those gloves to the owner of Twenty-One, Jack Kriendler, and while I would hope the story is true, my father did not mind polishing legends of his own devising. I think he had concluded that good feeling was always in danger of being wiped out; ergo, he gilded the stories he told. He had, by the way, a degree of resemblance to Ernest Hemingway—he was at least equally vivid in presence—and he cultivated the same large dark mustache. He also had Hemingway’s build. Sporting relatively spindly legs for a man of strength, he often said, “I might have made first team All-American fullback if not for my pins.” He also had a great barrel of a chest which bore a distinct likeness to the antique bronze cash register on the bar at Twenty-One. My father’s heart beat with pride.

  Of course, the pride was for himself. If I state that my father was vain and self-centered, I do not wish to demean him. While he carried the complacent look of a successful college athlete, his fundamental relation to others was a reflection of his concealed but endless negotiations with himself: The two halves of his soul were far apart. The deacon and th
e swashbuckler had miles to walk each night before they slept; I think his strength was that he had managed to find some inner cooperation between these disparate halves. When the headmaster’s son, impacted with Cromwellian rectitude, was able to hook up with a venture that the conquistador could also applaud, well, the energy poured forth. My father, while not uncommonly reflective, did say once: “When your best and worst motive agree on the same action, watch the juices flow.”

  On this day in December 1948, my father was dressed in what I would come to call his “battle tweeds.” That once had been a suit of light brown Scotch tweed (light in hue, but as heavy and hard to the touch as a horse-blanket). He bought his suits from Jones, Chalk and Dawson on Savile Row, and they knew how to outfit a horseman. I had seen this same suit on him for ten years. By now, patched with leather at elbows and cuffs, and become more malleable, it could still stand on its legs when taken off. It fit him, however, with a comfortable surround of dignity to suggest that these two materials—his manly flesh and that iron cloth—had lived together long enough to share a few virtues. In fact, he no longer owned a business suit and so had nothing more formal to wear until you got to his black velvet dinner jacket. Needless to say, on such nightly occasions, he was a lady’s vision. “Oh, Cal,” they would say of him, “Cal’s divine. If only he didn’t drink so much.”

  I think my father would have broken relations with any friend who dared to suggest Alcoholics Anonymous was waiting for him, and he could have been right. His contention was that he drank no more than Winston Churchill and held it as well. He never got drunk. That is to say, his speech never slurred and he never staggered, but he did move through moods powerful enough to alter the electromagnetic fields through which he passed. It is a way of remarking that he had charisma. He had no more than to say “Bartender” in a quiet tone, and the man, if his back were turned, and had never heard my father’s voice before, would nonetheless spring around as if starting a new page in his bar accounts. My father’s emotional temperature seemed to rise and fall as he drank; his eyes, by the shift of the hour, could blaze with heat, or install you in a morgue; his voice would vibrate into your feet. Doubtless I exaggerate, but he was my father, and I saw him so seldom.