Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  I could not leave her at her door, however, like a package delivered by someone else. “I’ll call you soon,” I said, and felt all the powers of extortion being worked on me.

  “Oh, you better,” she said. “That was groovy.”

  Groovy! I had been offered the key to my country. I was now a charter member of that great, unknown middle land of America that I was prepared to defend. And felt a great relief as I drove off because so far as I knew, no pedestrian had passed our automobile on that lonely street. The risk of what we had undertaken was just becoming real to me.

  Well, I had seen her since, of course. Once at her home while the children were out with a babysitter—a dreadful clammy occasion when we fornicated in fear that Sherman in full deployment of his paranoid powers would pop home, and we had certainly done better in the Cervantes despite carnal heats on a mattress that smelled of disinfectant. Finally, I dared all the gods of precaution and took her to the safe house above Pocitos Beach, where we coupled in a chair by the twelfth-story window looking down on the passing traffic and the clay-colored waves.

  No, I decided, it would have been hopeless to write about any of this to Kittredge, and I put aside the pages I had written about Sally. Because I could not ignore the part of myself, however, that pleaded for some kind of confession, I conceived of a tale to close the gap.

  Intermission for coffee and fundador

  2:00 A.M.

  Kittredge,

  Brand new subject. What I have to tell will not, I hope, affect us grievously, since our relation is dearer to me than any loyalty or pleasure I could find on the banks of the Rio Plata. You must believe that. I hope you will not be shocked if I confess that after many weeks of the most intense suffering from sexual abstention, I have at last felt bound to go to one of the better brothels here, and after a week or two of the inevitable winnowing out of choices, concerning which I will regale you someday, I have now settled on one Uruguayan girl in the Casa de Tres Árboles, and have what yet may prove to be an arrangement with her.

  It makes sense to me. While you will always be the nearest embodiment I can know of the ineluctable quest, so do I also understand that you and Hugh will be together forever, as indeed you should be. There is no one I know closer to greatness than Hugh. Forgive such sententiousness, but I just want to say that I love you and Hugh together as much as I adore you separately, which, mathematically, is like trying to equate finite numbers with infinite sums—I come to full stop: All I wish to say is we must be truthful with one another as best we can, and I just had to have a woman. I know there’s no conventional reason to ask your forgiveness, but I do. And I feel innocent, I confess. I hope you won’t think that the next observation is facetious or in any way impinges on your work, but I have found that Alpha and Omega are indispensable as tools of understanding for the sexual relationship. Sex with love, or sex versus love, can be handled so naturally by your terminology. I even presume to say that at present my Alpha and Omega are most asymmetrically involved. Very little, or maybe no Omega is present in the act—a good, fine part of me cannot bear the woman, the prostitute, I have chosen. My Alpha, however, if Alpha is, as I assume, full of clay and low mundane grabby impulses, well, obviously, my Alpha is not wholly un-engaged.

  I went on with the letter, spinning careful false tales of the mood of the brothel and finally signed off, not knowing whether I felt vicious or wise in using my original if now unsent letter about Sally as a guide to the false tale, but I knew myself well enough to feel a certain contentment at my guile even as I was falling asleep. It occurred to me with the last of my drowsing spirits that I might not be as unlike my mother as I had once supposed.

  8

  The Stable

  Jan. 26

  Dear Harry,

  I was awfully annoyed by your last letter. It isn’t the brothel. Of course, you have to explore some of the good and bad experiences these women have to offer. I confess that I did go into a silent tantrum of sheer envy at the way you men are free to explore your sexual curiosity and alter yourselves in the process. I hope not for the worse. Yet what is freedom ultimately but the right to take serious chances with one’s soul? I do believe that somewhere in sexual excess—at least for good people, brave people—there is absolution. Am I babbling? Do I sound like that smelly old libertine, Rasputin? What a swath he would have cut with some of the Washington ladies I know!

  At any rate, I’m still annoyed with you. First, for shipping off dubious pieces of jewelry whose history you are insensitive to, and now for coming in like an overfed bull to trample over my terminology. It left me grateful for the first time in moons that my theories, for all effective purposes, are sealed in TSS and I am no household name. Because I do not dare to think of how the nuances of Alpha and Omega would be crunched by the magazine public when even you expose a gross misconception of what it’s all about.

  I will lecture you, then, one more time. I promise not to go on too long. The key principle in Alpha and Omega is that they are not to be seen as the equivalent of containers for the psyche, the one to the left collecting whores and business routines and baseball games and drunken evenings, while the other broods on philosophy and reads your mail. That’s the pitfall for everyone. They start to see it that way. As two carry-all bags. Put part of your experience into one, other part into the other.

  Nothing to do with it. I am saying: Multiply by two the complexities of human personality. Postulate two complete and different persons in each of us. Each of these characters is more or less equally well developed. Trickier to grasp is that each is as complex and wholly elaborated as what we usually think of as a complete personality. So, Alpha and Omega can not only be neurotic, but possess the power to form vastly different neuroses. (That dire situation is, of course, reserved for terribly sick people.)

  All right, I next postulate that one of them, Omega, originated in the ovum and so knows more about the mysteries—conception, birth, death, night, the moon, eternity, karma, ghosts, divinities, myths, magic, our primitive past, so on. The other, Alpha, creature of the forward-swimming energies of sperm, ambitious, blind to all but its own purpose, tends, of course, to be more oriented toward enterprise, technology, grinding the corn, repairing the mill, building the bridges between money and power, und so weiter.

  Given these highly delineated and separate personalities of Alpha and Omega, we should be able, if we possess the skills—which, alas, we do not at present—to separate them out from the murky confusion with which we pretend to analyze individuals. In psychology, we try to understand patients by the aid of schemata that are equal to plumbing systems (Freud), or blunder about on the assumption there is only one psyche and it is oceanic (Jung). Harry, I am beginning to think that the world is filled with geniuses, but only a few survive. The rest perish in the desperation of having to repeat themselves. (Since I am certainly no genius, perhaps I will endure.) But I certainly must repeat, over and over, that Alpha and Omega are individual people. Each Alpha, each Omega, is different from all others. One Omega can be artistic, night-dwelling, a seer; another Omega can be Omega only in name, even as you can find a Sicilian, I suppose, with blue eyes, a cheerful manner, and blond hair. Ditto for Alpha. Sometimes Alpha and Omega borrow or steal each other’s properties. They are, after all, wed together like the corporeal lobes of the brain. They can influence each other, or spend their lives in all-out strife for power over the other. The model is marriage. Or, if you prefer, the Republicans and the Democrats. Or the Czarists and the Bolsheviks—is that why the Russians tear themselves apart, and get drunk all the time? Your Chevi Fuertes is a superb example of Alpha and Omega in constant tug of war. You say it yourself when you remark that he is 51 percent with us and 49 percent against, and functioning in great depression. All right, sir, fundamental concepts in place, let us take up your whorehouse capers. “Very little or maybe no Omega is in the act,” you write squiffily, as if you were a parson trying not to sniff his fingers after touching a dog turd. T
hen you are crass enough to go on about Alpha and his grabbies. God, you are a farce. Forgive me if I’m rude, but I’m also becoming aware of how irascible is the territorial imperative in me. So, don’t make weak gropes at my terminology. The point about sex is that both Alpha and Omega enter the act and digest the separate experiences they receive. Indeed, they digest them as individually as two people at a play for an evening can sit side by side and come away with separate critical reactions. And somewhat different memories of what they saw. When you say, therefore, that Omega was not in the act, you reveal merely that in sexual matters, Alpha is ruling your ship with an iron hand. Alpha does not listen to any of Omega’s variant interpretation of the experience. This is analogous to fascism. Your smug acceptance of a full half of sexual indifference in yourself is a way of stating that you, unbeknownst to yourself, are a sexual fascist. There, it’s true, and I’m glad I said it.

  Do you find me vengeful? I’m a mother now. Each time Christopher begins to scream in the middle of the night, and this has happened on several inexplicable occasions since your brooch popped up in the mail, I have been ready to curse you, and once almost did, but then didn’t—curses are a serious matter with me.

  An hour later—I’ve just fed Christopher

  Now I’m fond of you again. I just gave Christopher the best of both my temperamental jugs, and he seemed to like it. We drew closer and closer and by the end were spanning little universes. His fingers kept tapping my breast like a fat man rubbing his own belly after a good meal. This never happened before.

  Suddenly I realized I’m in debt to you. I was sweet with the baby because my nasties had been liberated by writing a letter bound to wound you in all your soft places. Well, as Hugh might say: It’s time you toughened up.

  I will reveal that I’ve been keeping a plum for you in absolute velvet wrappings. You won’t believe how fortunate you are. Hugh and I decided a couple of weeks ago to find out a little more about your Chief of Station Designate, so we invited Howard Hunt, and his wife, Dorothy, to dinner. Oh, Lord and sweet peas, do I have stuff to tell you. Now, you must wait for the next letter. My husband’s key is in the lock.

  After midnight

  Hugh, for once, is asleep ahead of me, and I want to present you with your plum.

  Not instantly, however. You do need the background. You see, Howard and Dorothy were invited to dinner as part of the Montague Plan. Hugh never does anything without a reason. While this is certainly not one of his charms, I confess I’m amazed at how often he can get me to carry on like a loyal subaltern, considering how spoiled I was when we commenced our marriage. I do end up working away for his notions, grand or silly. In this case, concerning the Hunts, Hugh, while not about to admit it, did resent the now-legendary High Thursday when his peers came so close to pulling off their palace revolt. I’ve never talked to you about this, but there is an unspoken War of Succession going on as to who, eventually, will replace Allen. The old boy’s gout is getting more frequent in its attacks.

  The next question obviously is who will replace him? Is it to be a bang-juice paramilitary and propaganda specialist, a Wisner? Or Dick Bissell? Or, says Hugh to me, do we try to remember what we’re all about, and continue to gather intelligence? Since we’re not really supposed to fight those small nasty wars the Joint Chiefs are always looking to pass on to us, Hugh keeps tugging on that side of Allen which is responsive to espionage and counterespionage. Hugh feels the Russians are preparing deceptions on a grand scale, and the Berlin tunnel, for example, may have been stage-managed by a KGB mole in MI6 from the beginning. Of course, I don’t know when my poor ice-climbing goat is going to find time to mine that Berlin mountain of files. He has so many urgent tasks. My father used to be a prodigious worker, but Hugh does put him to bed.

  Yet, with all this work load, and me coming to term with Christopher last fall, why, no matter, “Let’s have some candidates over to dinner,” he said to me soon after the near-fiasco of the High Thursday.

  In consequence, a group of worthies has been arriving in twos and fours for dinners twice weekly ever since you’ve been gone. Hugh’s passion is to find someone in the line of succession who will be reasonably sympathetic to his purposes, and by now he has been able to take a look at just about all of the leading possibilities for the next Director. Poor Hugh. Having gotten everywhere by his excellence, he’s now telling himself that he should play politics. He may be right. Once Allen goes, the Succession becomes all important to our Montague. Hugh’s present role is perfect for his talents. Only a romantic like Allen Dulles could ever have set Hugh up in the role that Allen, if younger, would have chosen for himself. You spoke half-facetiously about GHOUL. Oh, dear boy, GHOUL! I’ve told Hugh a hundred times to change it to GATES or MANSIONS or MEWS, but no, his grottos call for GHOUL. Well, GHOUL is top-drawer. Am I drunk? I’m sipping a fair lot of sherry as I pen away on this. Hundred-year-old sherry makes me love the very wood of the table I’m writing on. So there we have Hugh and Allen with GHOUL—both boys got their wish. A sanctum sanctorum for two. GHOUL’s outer office, however, contains scores of super-equipped specialty people with super-secret files all working for Hugh, one nonattributable step removed from Allen. They are ferreting out little trouble spots all over our Company universe, and Allen’s successor must prove able to comprehend the value of GHOUL. So, Hugh invites people over to size them up, and his present but glum choice is Dickie Helms. Helms will never come down with two feet on one side of a dividing line until he’s located all the shoes on either side. On the other hand, Helms will be inclined, thinks Hugh, to support the continued existence of GHOUL.

  Well, by the time we used up every likely in-town GS-18, Hugh had developed a taste for the game and we started inviting some second-rank people to cast new light on the top-drawer faces. That was when I decided to put all this up for some use by my team. “Let’s have Howard Hunt,” I said.

  “Do you mean E. Howard Hunt?” Hugh asked. “How will we address him? As E? E Howard? How Eee?” This is Hugh’s private humor. That is why you never see public signs of it. He’s about as funny as a hee-haw cowboy. Don’t forget—Hugh, along with all else, could ride a mustang before his legs were long enough to reach the pedals on his kiddie bike. Just a Colorado cowboy.

  I talked Hugh into inviting How Eee. Pointed out to my beau that Hunt was in on the Guatemala move. Hugh thinks that may yet prove to be the most catastrophic American victory of all. Smash an oxymoron, and you will encounter the Light! Yes, darling, catastrophic victory. Hugh feels it has pointed us in the wrong direction for decades to come. He wouldn’t speak to Allen for weeks after the Agency, via Hunt and some of his pals, got Arbenz pushed out. So I had to talk Hugh into studying Mr. E. Howard Hunt, and wife.

  Darling, I can’t go on. I’m not being a bitch. I will finish tomorrow. Don’t know why I got into the sherry. Yes, I do know. I’m revealing too much, and feel unfaithful to Hugh. But I do want secret letters from you and must pay the price. On that note, I excuse myself. Christopher is stirring.

  K.

  9

  January 28th, 1957

  Harry Dear,

  I didn’t mail yesterday’s letter until I could reread it. It’s not as bad as I feared. Indiscreet, but didn’t we agree to be just that?

  Now, to the occasion. E. Howard Hunt. It’s clear after the first five minutes that Hugh and I have invited to dinner a very ambitious man. Afterward, we agreed that if there’s anything in the world Mr. Hunt wants in years to come, it is to be DCI. This desire is, I hope, more pathetic than frightening.

  “No hard feelings, I hope,” is the first bloody thing Hunt said as he came through the door.

  “Dear boy,” replied Hugh, though he can’t be more than five years older, “no hard feelings about what?”

  “The ruckus. I’m afraid I opened a birdbath for you on a certain Thursday.”

  “Howard,” said Mrs. Hunt, “Hugh Montague may have thought of other matters since.” She did it nicely. S
he’s tough. Dark—I found out she’s one-eighth Sioux—and determined. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s the engine behind Howard’s ambition.

  Hugh could have left it there, but he’s a pertinacious dog. Self-imposed civility is as agreeable to him as dysentery. “Why, Mrs. Hunt,” he said, “Howard is right. I haven’t stopped brooding. I assumed it was all part of a clockwork plot, and they wound Howard up.”

  Can you conceive of this conversation opening our evening? But Howard is breezy. “No sir,” he replied, “I did it on my own. You are looking at an honest-to-God espontáneo. That’s my vice.”

  “Have a drink,” said Hugh, “we’ll measure vices.”

  I was debating whether to booze a little—would the relaxation sweeten my milk more than the liquor would sour it? Afloat in such primary questions of motherhood, I hate the first twenty minutes of any of these evenings. But Hunt is a talker. By the time we sat down to dinner, I could see that this was his event-of-the-week. Harry, I have to tell you that in no way am I a snob except for the endless amusement of it. It is fun to observe a climber trying out new steps on the slippery slope. Nothing makes such people more nervous than to be observed, and of course, I’m not all that encouraging from my catbird seat. I offer an assortment of blank smiles.

  Soon enough, he makes the mistake of bragging about his family background, which is, in the main, New York State. Although I grew up in Cambridge, my father happens to be good old stock from Oneonta, N.Y., and that, while nothing to make you hold on to your hat, is still leagues above Hamburg, the particular suburb of Buffalo where the heraldic seat of the Hunts, bless all, was located. Now, Howard does have a few credentials. You may be certain he trots them out. His ancestor, Captain James Hunt, served in the Revolutionary War, and Hunt’s Point in the Bronx is named after him. “That’s so sweet,” I say. Tomorrow I expect he will look up my pedigree and discover Maisie and the ancient relatives on the Mayflower.