Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  To my surprise, she did not throw her arms around me and burst into celebratory tears, but broke out weeping instead with sorrow that came out of so deep a place in herself that she could have been the vehicle for all the grief collected in Gesu Catholic Church on NE 2nd Street.

  “Oh, darling,” she said, “I can’t,” and left me waiting for her next words long enough to recognize the true horror that sits like a phantom at the root of every lover’s wings. It was coming in on me that the higher I had flown, the more I had been traveling alone, so high on my long-hoarded love that the profound sweet calm in which she received me could have been—now, and much too late, I knew—the whole numb body of grief itself.

  “Oh, Harry,” she said, “I tried. I wanted to get near to you again, but I can’t. I just feel so sorry for Jack.”

  MOSCOW, MARCH 1984

  LIFTING THE WINDOWSHADE, I looked out on the courtyard. The sky, leaden in hue, seemed closer to twilight than dawn. My watch, corrected to Moscow time, said six o’clock. I had read through the night and it was morning. Or had I read through the night and the day? No chambermaid had knocked on the door. Did I not hear her?

  Had I slept? I felt no hunger. I must have read and slept, read and slept, sitting in my chair, the converted flashlight in my hand, the filmstrip pushed forward frame by frame upon a white wall. Had I read every page? I did not know that I had to. It is possible I had drowsed, read again, and passed through many a frame without seeing a word. Whether I had read or merely advanced each strip of film, the events had entered my mind. I was not dissimilar to a blind man who is led by a guide down a path he knows well enough to take by himself.

  As I looked into the courtyard, the sky was darkening. I had been living in the early years of my professional life for close to twenty hours. Yes, for twenty hours, not eight, I had been at it and nothing untoward had stirred. Was it possible that I had found the sanctuary of a magic circle? The anxiety of my last weeks in New York, that urgent and unendurable anxiety, was quiescent. Perhaps I would read and sleep through this night. In the morning I could return to the coffee shop of the Metropole and have some breakfast. They were bound to serve some sugared and soured species of fruit drink, and there would be black bread, and one sausage looking like a finger that had spent a month in water. There would be coffee that tasted like coffee grounds. Accursed country of whole incapacities! Yes, I would eat my breakfast tomorrow morning and come back here to read about Mongoose, and our further attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Just so far had I advanced in my memoir before that catastrophic night in Maine that overtook my writing and my life, and left me to spend a year in New York writing about no more than that night. Memories wheeled about me like matter from an eruption in space. Such memories would return to me again so soon as I had no more to read.

  I was grateful then for each envelope of microfilm still unprojected. For another day at least, I would not have to leave my room. Even as I had found a burrow in the Bronx, I could hole up here. Indeed, the feeble daylight that made its way down the airshaft reminded me of the gloom of the other airshaft in the apartment building on the Grand Concourse.

  Yes, I was alone, and I was in Moscow, and I was all right so long as I kept to the narrative. It would move, frame by frame, on the old white plaster wall of this old hulk of a hotel. Leading Bolsheviks had once gathered here in the early years of the Russian Revolution. Now I had three slices of bread saved from dinner nearly twenty-four hours ago, and a full night before me in which to sleep and to read in my small room with its high ceiling deep inside the wings and corridors of the Hotel Metropole.

  PART SIX

  MONGOOSE 1961–1963

  MIAMI WASHINGTON PARIS

  1

  ON THAT MORNING FOLLOWING THE BAY OF PIGS, WHEN ALLEN DULLES returned from Puerto Rico with a case of gout, my father was to describe him as looking as if he had died.

  I do not know whether Cal’s remark shaped my view, but in the months and years that followed, I always thought of Mr. Dulles as a man who, by some inner measure, was dead, even if it would take seven more years before he passed away, and that event was going to provide a notably unhappy Christmas week for those who were still close to him. I remember that on the evening he took ill I was in Saigon. It was Christmas Eve of 1968 and I was writing a letter to Kittredge who would send me details of his demise in the return mail, and I would hear more of it in the late spring of 1969 at lunch with her in a crab-and-beer hutch of a roadhouse on the Virginia Tidewater. Our affair had by then begun, that affair which was yet to uproot our lives and send tragedy plummeting upon us.

  That, however, lay ahead. In the spring of 1969, Christopher was still alive and Harlot most certainly had the full use of his legs. He might be a cuckold, but, not at all witting of that, he remained a priapic prodigy, more ramrod than the lover who had, to a degree, replaced him—that younger lover whose ability to woo Kittredge originated in the felicities of his mouth and lips, offering “delights so rare one knows the rapture of a feather’s fall,” a phrase Kittredge uttered once in passing, and I never dared to ask if it came from a poem I ought to have recognized; but then, I hardly cared—the words were accurate. We adored each other. No two friends could ever have been more dear. Our lovemaking was as close as the little turns of our talk, curving in and out of our mood like the fine and artful ridges of a well-formed ear.

  That afternoon in a roadhouse shack, cracking our crab claws with lobster pincers on an unpainted trestle table, she told me again of Allen Dulles’ final and much-delayed death, and “the way it came was as bizarre as his birth.” I had all but forgotten that he was born with a clubfoot, his toes curled into the same black warp as Lord Byron, but she reminded me that his father, the Reverend Allen Macy Dulles, Presbyterian, who had been so liberally advanced in the early 1890s as to preside at the remarriage in full church ceremony of a divorcée, could not, nonetheless, endure the sight of his son’s deformity. Did it speak of caverns of damnation? He had the infant operated upon before baptism would expose him to the gaze of the Foster and Dulles relatives. “Once Hugh told me about Allen’s foot, I have never been able to see him otherwise,” Kittredge remarked. “No other man stood so securely with one foot in the full glory of the sun while the other was stuck in the mucky dark.”

  Dulles began to die his last and corporeal death on the evening of the large party he and his wife, Clover, gave on Christmas Eve of 1968, and if the best of Langley’s seventh floor was present, the Montagues, the Helmses, the Angletons, the Tracy Barneses, the Lawrence Houstons, the Jim Hunts, as well as old friends from the State Department and a few chosen foreign dignitaries, it was a tribute, finally, to Dulles’ old reputation that a full seven years after his retirement his guests could find the generosity to come out on the last night of what had been a week, after all, of pre-Christmas drinking, but they were paying him the honor of confirming that Allen Dulles might be off the board, yet his chair had never been filled; they would commemorate him one more time even if he was old, bent, and kept his gouty foot in a carpet slipper. Yes, remarked Kittredge, they had all popped over to salute him, but he did not make an appearance. Only his wife, Clover, was present to receive the guests and lead them over to the drink and the reliably good food—fluttery, once beautiful Clover, slender and as unfit for combat as a violet—“ditsy Clover, never quite there,” Kittredge would say and then remark that Clover was as vague as the desire for vengeance when there is no real desire, only the marks of old matrimonial rancor. Allen had made love to half the women he knew in Washington, and Clover had even done her best to make friends with some of her husband’s more serious mistresses; yet through such bouts and rounds, Clover had exacted only the smallest, most systematic revenge, although it must have jabbed like a spear in Allen’s gouty foot: Clover spent money with the full license of a financial illiterate. The Dulleses were invariably in debt or nibbling on their principal. Each affair produced one more ballroom gown; one too many affairs, and the
living room would be redone. They had been married for close to fifty years and she loved him, but she detested him. “Very long marriages develop divinely opposed strata of Alpha and Omega,” Kittredge could not resist adding.

  Now, at the party, guests began to notice that Allen had still not come down. Kittredge was perhaps the first to detect his absence. There had not been a meeting, after all, in the eighteen years since Allen first encountered her that he had not flirted like the Devil discovering his own true angel; Kittredge, in turn, loved the hearty promise of all that had never been embarked upon; they loved each other in the wholly enclosed way that will allow love, on occasion, to be perfect. They could count, instantly and dependably, on an improvement in their mood when they encountered each other.

  So, Kittredge was the one to notice. Allen was most certainly not to be seen at his own party, and she told Hugh, and insisted, since Clover remained vague about his absence, that Hugh take a reconnaissance of the upper floor of the house. There was Allen in his bed, unconscious, the color of a wax effigy, and in a deep sweat.

  Hugh came down to convince Clover that her husband was frightfully ill. “No,” said Clover, “it’s just flu and spells. He gets these things.”

  “On the contrary,” said Hugh. “He has to go to a hospital at once.”

  Hugh called an ambulance while Kittredge whispered a few words to hasten the drink-up and departure of the guests, and the ambulance came, but Clover almost did not go along, and then rushed out in such a hurry that she forgot to take her coat. Allen proved to be very ill, and Clover was obliged to leave him at the hospital, coming home by herself at midnight. Chilled by the return trip in a poorly heated cab, she ran hot water for a bath, but was feeling so cold that she got into bed while waiting for a full tub, and fell asleep, thereby waking on Christmas morning to discover that the overflow had taken down the sculpted moldings of all the ceilings on the downstairs floor, and her furniture was buried in a blizzard of wet plaster. It would not be known for certain until the next day that the Hartford Insurance Company did not, under the circumstances, consider itself liable for the damage.

  “I don’t care,” said Clover, “what it costs to fix it. I just don’t want my husband to find out.”

  He did not, said Kittredge. He had died in the hospital.

  That may have been his end, but since I had thought of him as near to dead for many years, I pondered his slow extinction. Had his soul died years before his heart and liver and lungs? I hoped not. He had enjoyed so much. Espionage had been his life, and infidelity as well; he had loved them both. Why not? The spy, like the illicit lover, must be capable of existing in two places at once. Even as an actor’s role cannot offer its reality until it is played, so does a lie enter existence by being lived.

  If this is a poor epitaph for Allen, let me say that I mourned him devoutly and most enjoyably through all of my illicit lunch with Kittredge in the spring of 1969. But let me stop at this point for I am already eight years ahead of myself.

  2

  ON TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 1961, THE SECOND DAY OF THE BAY OF PIGS, ROBERT Maheu had seen fit to inform the FBI that the arrest of the wiretapper Balletti in Las Vegas last October 31 had indeed involved the CIA, and that he, Maheu, had been told by Boardman Hubbard to refer all FBI inquiries on this matter to him.

  Well, of course, my father had promised Maheu that if all went wrong, there would be rescue. Obviously, Maheu had decided—“prematurely,” remarked my father—that it had gone wrong. Now the FBI wanted to talk to Cal Hubbard.

  My father knew what was to be done. He would inform the Bureau by letter that the CIA would object to Maheu’s prosecution since that was bound to reveal sensitive information regarding the invasion of Cuba. It was also decided that such a letter would be even more effective if Boardman Hubbard was not available for interviews. “Overnight,” Allen Dulles said, “I grew too old to protect you.”

  Telling it to me, my father said, “I didn’t reply, ‘I’m the one who’s there to protect you,’ but what the hell, it was exactly what I was doing.”

  It was agreed that Cal would take up a post in the Far East once more. “Japan,” said Cal when asked what he wanted, and added to me, “I’ll pry Mary loose from that little Jap she’s looking to marry. Banzai!”

  So, changes commenced. I, who did not know at that moment whether I wished to go back to Miami, stay in Washington, or become assigned to a far-off station, inherited my father’s apartment, and, in acknowledgment, I expect, of Cal’s present services to the Director, I was assigned to Mr. Dulles’ office as one of his assistants. I would help to oversee the move from the I-J-K-L to the new mega-complex in Langley now being completed fifteen miles out on the Virginia side.

  It was nepotism. I only objected within, and then by half. If I knew that I could never respect my own career until I brought off something impressive for the Agency on my own, free of father and godfather, I was ready all the same to remain in Washington. I wanted to see Kittredge. I had the hope she would not continue to keep herself apart.

  My job took me through the late spring, summer, and fall. Alan Shepard, our answer to Yuri Gagarin, became the first American in space, and on that same date, May 25, a number of Freedom Riders in Mississippi were attacked, beaten, and arrested. On June 4, Kennedy and Khrushchev had a summit meeting in Vienna, and there were other rumors that Khrushchev had been derisive about the Bay of Pigs. By late in July, sharp increases in military spending were being called for in Congress.

  I cannot begin to describe how separated I felt from these events. I list them in the order they occurred; it offers the character of my reaction. Events went by like signposts. I was discovering that one’s wounds need not be visible nor personal, and I was mending from the Bay of Pigs. I was not too unhappy to be busy with the endlessly detailed but essentially modest scenario of moving Mr. Dulles’ office over from Foggy Bottom to Langley. The hot working days went by in a Company car. The Virginia forest was burgeoning by the Potomac, and the shade trees of a Southern summer offered their presence.

  One approached the citadel of Langley by taking a turn off the highway at a small sign saying no more than BPR (for Bureau of Public Roads), and the approach drive was on a narrow two-lane that went a half mile to the guardhouse, which gave no more than a glimpse of a red-and-white-checked water tower. Beyond was Leviathan itself. To me, it looked not unlike a huge, maladroitly designed passenger liner. Langley was, if encountered less metaphorically, merely a mammoth building seven stories high with a continuous band of windows running all the way around the second floor and the seventh floor; this may have given the illusion of upper- and lower-class decks. Fields and trees and immense swatches of asphalt parking space surrounded the area; we were on 125 acres; we had cost $46 million. It was whispered—for the architect was never allowed to know exactly—that more than 10,000 people were going to be using it before long. Sometimes, when my car would be trapped on the George Washington Memorial Parkway behind an endless file of green shuttle buses carrying people from the I-J-K-L to Langley, I would swear that total was too small. The Mausoleum, for that also became its name, was in fulfillment of Allen Dulles’ dream that all of the CIA might operate someday in one edifice, to the vastly improved efficiency of us all—it was a common criticism that Allen Dulles was a remarkably inefficient man. He was, at the least, possessed by too many ideas and liked to pursue them all, as was visible to anyone who encountered the clutter on his desk; such men dream of efficiency.

  We were given it. There were those who said that from inside, the Mausoleum looked like a set of corporate halls and offices, forever debouching into more halls. There were intimate lobbies and wings that reminded one of a bank, or of a hospital. We had a great white marble lobby by the entrance with our seal embedded in the floor, and on the wall to the right was a bas-relief in profile of Allen Dulles, and a wall of stars on the other side honored all those who had died for us in the line of duty. High on the wall was an inscription
from the Gospel According to John, eighth chapter, second verse: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” The truth, I told myself on one of the worst moments of the summer, was that in order to be free, we had put up a building that made you feel as if you were working in a fascist state. Immediately, I regretted the extreme metaphor of such a remark, but there was enough unhappy evidence to keep the thought lurking. Once the monumental task of bringing over our records, division by division, branch by branch, Desk by Desk, was accomplished, it was no longer feasible to get around in the place. You had to muster different badges to get by different guards. On the first floor, where the corridors were wide, the Agency housed its service functions—infirmary, travel office, credit union, the cafeterias for different ranks, and the vaults for records management; we had another wide corridor for all the clubs in CIA—photo club, art club, hiking club, chess club; we had shops; we were a foretoken of all the small-town shopping centers that were yet to come with their closed-in, all-weather malls.

  Upstairs, our corridors went on forever, and as we moved into offices through summer and fall, problems arose with air-conditioning. If one of the unspoken reasons for leaving the I-J-K-L was the smell of drains in the Washington lowlands, now, unhappily, despite advanced designs carefully installed, the offices still stank. Our thermostats did not work, and we perspired. That is, the thermostats did work, but since the heat was now adjustable for every room, people were always turning the temperature up and down until the system overloaded. Administration then turned off the individual thermostats and we were air-conditioned as a gross whole, which in practice meant that some offices became too hot and some too cold. Before long, many of the younger officers, retaining the skills acquired in Locks and Picks, found ways to take the little padlocks off the levers. After all, we were people with a taste for manipulation and control. So we put our heat levels back on individual choice, and the system as a whole broke down again. The contractor was finally sued for faulty installation, but the case went nowhere; the Agency was not ready to supply the data necessary to make its brief for fear of revealing collateral matters.