Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  A devil’s game. I believe in matrimony, you know. I do think sacraments are taken between God and oneself, and are just as binding as legal contracts are supposed to be in all of the corporate, judicial, industrial world. Such contracts can be broken, but not too many or society’s ills reach critical mass. By analogy, I think if too many sacraments are violated, God communicates less with us. So, marriage to me is a holy vow.

  I was ready, therefore, to say I love you and good-bye, dear man, but then, how could I leave you wholly frustrated by the constraints of my vow not to talk about what happened to me during the Project. I have the oddest sentiment that I must tell you something equally secret, equally important to me, or I will violate our own unspoken pledge. That covenant weighs on me as much as my vow. I do manage to travel in the heaviest circuits, don’t I, but then I am very much like my father—greedy for absolute knowledge on the one hand, and somewhat timid about the world on the other. My father solved his dilemma by stuffing all of Shakespeare into his commodious brain and thereafter subsisting on the massive snobbery of his scholarly holdings. At its worst, it was, I fear, a somewhat turdlike existence—forgive me, Father!—but then my Daddy Professor may have been a catalyst drawing down ugly forces onto others. Did I ever confide in you about the ghost of the Keep, Augustus Farr? I’ve been visited by him, and—this I have never told anyone—the first time was on that Easter night so long ago, when Daddy read to us from Titus Andronicus:

  Whilst Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold

  The basin that receives your guilty blood.

  Do you recall? Inwardly, I was transfixed. I clearly pictured my own wrists as stumps holding a basin in which was the head of my beloved Hugh. You, for some reason, hovered in the background. It made me wonder if you were the executioner, and this was the oddest way to picture you since I certainly thought you were the most attractive young man I had ever met, just as pretty as Montgomery Clift, and so solemn, so shy, so intensely filled with purpose. Best of all, you were not yet formed. It is your salvation that you had no idea how nifty you were to women in those days or you would have gone hog-belly-up, as I fear you have in the year and a half you’ve sported away in your Uruguay brothels. But, then, I am close to attacking you again, which is a danger sign I have come to recognize. I think it is because I have an implicit dread of what I am going to tell you next. On that long-ago Easter night, I had a fearful experience. Augustus Farr, or his incubus, or whatever creature it may have been, visited me in my bed at the Keep, and submitted me to horrors. I felt like a dark and dirty midwife to Shakespeare’s bloody foils and foul deeds. I was in the filthiest transport of carnality, and little beasts of the underworld inhabited my mouth. Do you recall how earlier that afternoon I had spoken so prettily of how Hugh and I had our Italian Solution? That night, Augustus Farr became my sexual guide into those dark and stinking depths where beauty also dwells, and I realized what Hugh and I were actually doing with one another while I was still ostensibly a virgin. Later, on my wedding night that same summer at the Keep, Hugh, formally and most bloodily, did at last deflower me, and I had the connubial good fortune to come into union together with him, spasm for leap, leap for spasm, and he vaulted like a goat from height to height, and knew how to fall, a most extraordinary experience, yes, I may now be hurting you, dear Harry, but I do pay cash, and when confessing, will confess all, yes, there, in the last long illimitable leap, was Augustus Farr, ensconced, limb and breath, with Hugh and me. My greed must have called him forth—my greed that went as deep as my father’s buried mountains of lust and lore. I had never known that good and evil in oneself could speak to each other with such force and by such a dance.

  For a long time I felt that Augustus Farr did not try to come near again, not after that wedding night, but I think he may have succeeded in putting his signature upon my marriage. Of course, marriage occupies so many strata in oneself that it may be overdramatic to speak of a malign imprint upon an entire relationship. On the other hand, a clove of garlic in a wedding cake is nothing to ignore!

  Farr, however, did not appear again until the sixth month of my pregnancy, during Hugh’s and my vacation in ’56 at the Keep, but then he certainly showed up on an August night as we were having sexual congress. Call it that because Hugh was more than a little backed-up before my large belly. Polly Galen Smith once told me that she was making love right up to the day before her baby was born—just so madly does she adore sex!—but this was hardly true for Hugh and me. We were having sexual congress. On that particular night of which I speak, however, I felt as if I were the plumpest concubine in a seraglio, and wholly depraved. I remember wishing that someone could watch Hugh and me.

  Such subterranean stirrings must have communicated themselves to my dear partner, because now there was nothing collegial any longer—Hugh and I were mad for one another all over again, and I felt the baby stirring and very much a part of us. Then, suddenly, we were a good deal more than that. An evil presence—call it what you will—was also with us. In the full silence of the night, I could feel the libidinous resonance that evil knows how to deliver. I find it not at all easy to relate even now, but I had rosy-hued (that is, fiery) visions of human degradation and heard cries of pleasure reverberating in the fetid pits below. Augustus Farr was as near to me then as my husband and my unborn child, there partaking of our Saturnalian rites. I felt that if I did not stop at that instant my child-to-be was going to be taken away in some fiendish exchange. I remember thinking, “It’s just a thought,” for I was fearfully excited and wanted to go on, and Hugh, I remember, took us through the plunge with a loud and inhuman cry. Then I began to weep for I knew that Augustus Farr had been there with us. I did not wish to believe it, and can hardly write this now—my hand trembles—but he had stolen—well, I won’t write down my dear child’s name. He walks at an odd pace these days, and sometimes I think there’s a devil’s hitch to his gait. He does have a very slight in-turn of the right foot, and Allen is his other godfather. We actually celebrated the idea of two godfathers, one for Alpha, one for Omega. Christopher can choose between you when he grows up. As of this writing, you are the only godfather who is aware that there is another. Please don’t feel insulted. You are certainly equal in my mind to Allen.

  Well, I won’t say any more about Farr on this occasion. I can only remark that I have not lost my presentiment that the transactions of the spirit underworld are very much connected to us here, and since then I have felt, irrationally or not, that Christopher’s safety depends on my fidelity to Hugh. This loyalty, I have come to conclude, is weakened by your letters. They are making me fall in love with you.

  Now, from the moment I saw you in my parents’ parlor at the Keep, a part of me knew that you and I could go through life together, wonderfully comfortable and intimate with one another. I’ve always loved you, you see, but it never used to count for more than a collateral enrichment to my devotion for Hugh.

  During the last couple of years, however, your letters have stolen a place in my heart. I have come to dislike you, hate you, feel horrible jealousy, and worst of all, been tormented by a cunning little sense of anticipation which speaks of sexual concupiscence. To put it plain, and I detest this piece of vernacular because it is so accurate and allows no illusions, I have had the hots for you, yes, the foul, yearning, roller-coaster hots of all the gut-bemired sentiments, exactly what used to belong entirely to Hugh. Now it was being stimulated by you as well. Alpha and Omega had shifted in their agreement, and I knew what it was to be carnally in love with two men at once. Bad enough if it is Alpha for one and Omega for the other—that is a common human condition. It may even be half natural (if also the Devil’s greatest hole-card) that all of us find it easy to be in love with one person by way of Omega, and another through Alpha. But I feel as if you have gotten into both. My poor Alpha and Omega both are damned, for they are each half in love with you, and that succeeds in confusing my balance.

  Harry, do you have any concepti
on of how monumental is Hugh’s importance to me? The part of myself that is not free of worldly desire has to respect all the strengths and powers he can and does endow me with. I could never bear living in any role inferior to the higher powers of society. (My father, who is exactly like me, turned into an insufferably pompous pedant about the time he realized that he rang no loud bell in the grand and vaulted halls.) I may be worse. And then my mother’s buried ambition might be even greater. How, otherwise, did she get so dotty?

  So, I took on the Project. I can tell you that it dealt with the manipulation and control of other humans, and the means employed soon became solemn and sticky. It was full of explosive potential for TSS if it were ever to come out publicly. Indeed, Hugh and Allen were so afraid of something going wrong that they decided to try it out in a controlled environment, governmentally speaking. Do you know where? In Paraguay. I was probably less than a thousand miles away from Montevideo. I dreamt of you every night, and lusted for you in an empty bed, horrified that my womb, yes, womb, could permit such disloyalty to Hugh. How I hated you for rooting away in the spoor of every low brothel. I know you did that. And once or twice, I almost bought a plane ticket to drop in on you for a weekend. That’s how bad it got one dip below the navel. Hugh came to visit and thought he had a wild woman on his hands.

  Anyway, as you learned by way of Chevi and Libertad and Varkhov and Zenia, yes, what a nasty little vein of crotch-turpitude (yes, I like that) is loose in us. I have discovered how harsh is my secret nature. One person, one of our subjects, was destroyed in Paraguay, and I, while not the initiator, was the monitor of the accompanying experiments, and I did not feel quite as sick over it as the occasion called for me to be. We live in a great moral truss-work, after all. To fight the Opponent, we will dare evil ourselves, and I feel as if I have. Only I did not come back with a compensating good. Our experiment failed. Have I endangered my soul?

  The answer shows in curious fashion. I feel, as I say, ten years older and bleak as hell within. As soon as I came back to Georgetown I decided, therefore, on certain measures. Since I had taken on a bold gamble, and it resulted in negative and messy results, the patina of failure was close to inhabiting my career permanently.

  I made, in consequence, two decisions. I saw Allen Dulles and asked for detached duty. I am going to try to write my postponed major opus on Alpha and Omega. He gave me, somewhat to his relief, I think, his private blessing, and I am off to Maine, where I will work all year, and conceivably for years to come. Whatever it takes—which is the expression we used in Paraguay for getting the ugly deed done.

  That was the first decision. For the second, I decided to cease living with you in my mind. I mean, by this, that we stop corresponding. Then, much as I wished to keep your letters, I decided it was too dangerous. If Hugh ever discovered them, it would smash my life. (Since I have been instrumental in smashing at least one South American’s life, I felt vulnerable to the frightful costs.) Besides, I was getting addicted to your letters. The only answer was cold turkey. I would put your correspondence in an office shredder.

  When it came to it, however, I could not, no, not destroy your offering completely. So I used my office equipment (at which I’m now a practiced soul) and microfilmed this record of Harry Hubbard’s mind, and heart, and nose, such as it is, for Uruguay and for me, and deposited the package in your new box. I’ve also just shredded the whole heavy pack, nearly a carton full of your last twenty months and more of writing to me on your dime-store stationery. And felt so dizzy and out of sorts afterward that I did something never done before and went into a bar alone after work, sat down at a cocktail table trembling at such exposure of myself in a public place (still a Radcliffe girl!), and downed two bourbons neat before I stood up, surprised that no one had accosted me, went home, and explained away the whiskey breath by confessing it had been one hell of a day. Christopher cried when I started to kiss him.

  There it is. I am serious to the death over this, Harry. We are not to communicate with each other, and I will refuse to see you when your tour is over and you come back to Washington. Pray for me to do good work in Maine. How long our separation intends to go on is beyond my intuition. I sense it will be years. Perhaps forever. I would not give you up if I did not love you. Please believe me. I must cling to my sacrament. Under it all, I believe that God still bleeds when we break our vows.

  I love you,

  Good-bye, dear man

  35

  IT WAS THE LAST LETTER I RECEIVED FROM HER IN URUGUAY. FOR MANY months, I would open my eyes with the uneasiness of those bereaved who awaken in the morning without being able to tell themselves at first what is wrong. They know only that someone is gone. Then memory presents itself like a hangman at the door.

  She had spoken of loving me. That made it worse. I could not have mourned her more if she had been my bride. A pall descended over work. My correspondence with Kittredge had allowed this far-off Station to seem part of the ongoing history of the world. Now it was merely a far-off Station. Deprived of my audience, I felt as if I were perceiving less. No longer did each small event take its place in an ongoing scenario. In desperation, I commenced a diary, but it, too, became matter-of-fact, and I gave it up.

  Attempting to rise out of such torpor, I used my accumulated leave to visit Buenos Aires and Rio. I walked for miles through lively cities, and drank in elegant cocktail lounges and at high, stand-up plank tables in steamy smoking drinking holes. I traveled like a ghost without fights or encounters. I visited famous brothels. I was for the first time aware of the distaste for men that one could find on the mouths of whores. When I came back to Montevideo, I went up the coast to Punta del Este and tried to gamble, but found myself too parsimonious. Bored, I could not even say for certain that I was bored. I even had a last night with Sally.

  Sherman Porringer and Barry Kearns, having finished their tour in Uruguay, were going back to Washington for reassignment. There were good-bye parties. At one of the last, four days before departure, Sally Porringer said to me, “I want to visit you.”

  “In years to come?”

  “Tomorrow evening at seven.”

  She had had her baby, a boy whose resemblance to Sherman was thankfully complete. “Yes,” she said, “bygones are bygones and I want to see you. For Auld Lang Syne.” She had power over a cliché. So we had a last wall-banger on the bed of my little room. She was still angry, and lay stiffly beside me before we began, but her practical nature won out. She was not a bridge player for too little. Never pass on a playable hand.

  In the middle, I discovered myself listening to the sounds we made, and realized that I was comparing them (and somewhat critically) to the climactic duets of Zenia Masarov and Georgi Varkhov. I even entertained the hypothesis that the Soviets were taping Sally and me. That did stimulate my inner life for a day or two. Could the Russians process the tape in time to get it to Sherman before his departure? Would Porringer and I throw a stitch across the wound and stand together in public for a last farewell? We owed that much to Masarov and Varkhov, who kept demonstrating their ability to work together (since neither had gone back to Moscow).

  After Porringer and Kearns were gone, replacements came in (who deferred to me as a knowledgeable veteran). Then Howard Hunt had a bereavement. One night when he and Dorothy were at a country-club dance in Carrasco, the Embassy watch officer telephoned to say that Howard’s father had died. Hunt left in the morning for Hamburg, New York, and was a somber fellow on his return. I began to like him more genuinely. He had his grief and I was living with my sorrow. It was agreeable to sit in each other’s company. Either one of us could serve as poultice to amputated sentiments in the other. I came to understand Howard a little better. Early one morning when I had driven over to Carrasco to deliver a couple of economic research papers on South America that I assumed he would pass on to Benito Nardone, he took me out for a walk while breakfast was being prepared. Across the street from his villa was a Catholic lycée. Hunt’s two daug
hters, dressed in white blouses and wide black floppy bow ties, accompanied by the Hunts’ Argentine governess, were entering the school door. He waved, and said to me, “You have to love a woman to convert to Catholicism for her.” The corners of his mouth turned sour. “My father,” he said, “was still getting used to the idea of his son as a Catholic.” Howard shrugged. “There is a heap of intense feeling back there in America. Somewhat anti-Roman, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Do you believe it reaches into our domain? Concerning, that is, decisions on placement?”

  “Well, I would hope not,” I replied.

  He sighed. He was having his troubles with Ambassador Woodward. I never did learn whether Howard’s money derived from royalties on his early novels and subsequent wise investments, or had come in from Dorothy’s side of the marriage. There was no question, however. He did live better than the average Chief of Station, and Ambassador Woodward was now envoying such criticism through the State Department and over to the Agency. Hunt learned that his scale of living was being attacked as too opulent for a man supposed to be no more than First Secretary at the Embassy.

  Last year, I might have filled more than one letter to Kittredge with the unexpected turns of such an office game. Inhabiting a depression, however, was, I discovered, not unlike camping out on the marble floor of a bank. Sharp sounds damped into murmurs, echoes told you more than clear speech, and you always felt cold. While I was party to Hunt’s side of the trouble, and even wanted Station to triumph over State, that was about all the team spirit I could muster.

  At this point, J. C. King, Chief of Western Hemisphere Division, came down on a visit, and closeted himself with Hunt. One could not labor in the vineyards of Western Hemisphere Division (which extended from Mexico to Argentina) without picking up a few stories about J. C. King. I already knew, by way of Porringer, that the Colonel had lost an eye on Utah Beach, won the Congressional Medal of Honor, and amassed a fortune after the war. It was Porringer’s tale to tell: “King decided that the people of Brazil would go for condoms. ‘There’s no demand for contraceptives in Brazil,’ everybody told him, ‘it’s a Catholic country.’ Well, King was just stubborn enough to go against the smart money and he built the first condom factory south of the Amazon. Put down his own savings, borrowed more, and who could believe it? Condoms took off in Rio de Janeiro like jet planes. King,” said Porringer, “is now one of the wealthiest men in the Agency, and has a slew of plantations on the Panaga River in Paraguay.”