“It’s a play,” said Caitlin. “My son wrote it.” She got up and stood next to Marlene, put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. It was the best she could do.
“I didn’t know you had a son, or even that you were married,” said Marlene.
“Yes, a son, just the one child,” said Caitlin.
“Your son? He’s in college?”
“Yes,” said Caitlin. It was something she was proud of: he was the first person in her family to go to a university.
“Then he’s my age. How come you never introduced us?”
“I don’t know,” said Caitlin. “I think you would find him … I don’t know. I think you are much more serious than he is.”
“I’d like to find someone to help me become less serious,” said Marlene. She quickly, almost furtively embraced Caitlin; she was small and had to rise up on her toes to place the kiss on Caitlin’s cheek.
Caitlin sat at her desk for a few minutes after Marlene left and then went to the waiting room to collect Gordon. He was standing next to the aquarium, with its few indolent goldfish floating about the murky green water. He moved his fingers on the glass and one of the goldfish followed as he did.
“Hello, Gordon.”
He turned around. He had grown a beard. His face was heavy, deeply lined, but he had a rapt expression now.
“He likes me,” said Gordon. “That fish really likes me.”
He walked toward Caitlin, who had her hands extended toward him. He clasped her and kissed her on both cheeks. He was courtly, though there were still nights, infrequent though they were, when he would show up at her apartment very late and very drunk and talk of nothing but his loneliness.
“You look beautiful, Caitlin Van Fleet,” he said.
He was wearing a summer suit. The right side of his jacket was wrinkled from carrying his camera case around.
He followed Caitlin back into her office and closed the door, took the seat where Marlene had been, slouched back, thrust out his long legs.
“Guess who I saw today,” he said.
“Can you give me some sort of hint?” She often felt prim around Gordon, as if it were up to her to maintain social barriers, tact, felicity of phrase.
“OK, a hint.” Gordon pretended to think it over. “All right. Here’s a clue. He’s your son.”
“That sort of narrows it down. How is he?”
“Amazing.”
Caitlin nodded, gestured, as if to say, Go on.
“Hair down to here,” said Gordon, touching his shoulder.
“That really is impressive,” said Caitlin.
“Oh, come on, give the kid a break, why don’t you? He’s lively, he’s creative. He’s young.”
“I worry about him. I don’t know what he’s doing.”
“You see him, don’t you?”
“I see him all the time. But I still can’t figure out what he’s doing. He’s a playwright, he’s moving to California, he wants to work with the Indians, he wants to open up a restaurant on Cape Cod. He has no beliefs. His compass is all screwy.”
“We were luckier,” said Gordon. “We had the war.”
“There’s a war right now. Plenty of wars.”
“Vietnam,” said Gordon, with a dismissive wave. “We had a real war, with no one on the sidelines. We would have been just as screwy as the kids today. But.”
Suddenly, Caitlin leaned forward on her elbows and covered her face with her hands.
Gordon was silent for a moment and then asked, “Caitlin? Are you really that worried?”
She shook her head No, but did not uncover her face.
“It’s July II,” she said. “This is the day I met Joe for the first time.”
“The world traveler,” said Gordon, with so much contempt it bordered on the comic.
“I wasn’t very nice to him,” Caitlin said, finally removing her hands from her face. Her face, older now, but still lean, still with its fierce feminine bearing, was wet with tears. “He asked me on a date and I said No.”
“The first time he met you?” asked Gordon. “Not the Joe I knew.”
“The French embassy, no less.”
“Fancy that.”
“Do you think about him?
“Yes.”
“I mean often.”
“It’s the great thing we have in common, dear. Do you think he’s still in Europe? Do you think he’ll ever come home?” Gordon smiled; his politics made him embarrassed to call America home, but really it was how he felt.
“He has no home. He’s an exile, a permanent exile,” said Caitlin.
“It’s strange, isn’t it. You’ve helped thousands of people come to this country, running for their lives.”
Caitlin reached across the desk and took Gordon’s hand. Their fingers braided and squeezed tightly.
“What do you say we go to someplace very very air-conditioned and have a stiff drink?” said Caitlin.
“I know just the place.”
In the elevator going down, they were alone. They could hear the chains clanking in the old elevator; the ride was slow, full of shudders.
“I’m glad you stopped by,” said Caitlin.
Gordon was preparing to unfurl his umbrella. His camera case hung down to his knees and he stood as crookedly as Mrs. Rosenthal.
“Do you think I’d leave you alone on July eleventh?” he said, smiling. He had new teeth; it gave him an eerily youthful smile.
“You knew?”
He shook his head. “Every year you do this, Caitlin. And every year you say: ‘You knew?’ ”
The elevator bumped to a stop and the door slowly slid open. They walked through the small, scuffed lobby, toward the door to the street. Caitlin stopped for a moment to watch the passersby in the rain, some of them with their collars up, some holding soaking newspapers over their heads, some of them seemingly led by umbrellas that had filled with wind. So many, many people.
And no trees anywhere. The little snip of river filled with garbage, bodies. Concrete buildings like factories producing lives.
“Gordon,” she said, “would you do me a favor and just hold me, hold me before we go out?”
He didn’t say a word. He dropped his open umbrella on the tile floor and took Caitlin in his arms. Pressed her chastely close to him, breathed the scent of her slightly grayed hair, felt the articulation of her.
And she held on to Gordon, as if he were a childhood friend. He had gotten so large she wasn’t sure she could get her arms all the way around him. Oh Gordon, she thought, go away, get married, make a life for yourself.
SIX
AUGUST 25, 1940
One of Caitlin’s jobs in Stowe’s office was to sort the correspondence from people back in Windsor County. The letters were brought in a stack by a boy named Eddie, who had a blood disease that made him cold all the time—even in these sweltering dog days.
Today Eddie was wearing a tight sweater with a diamond pattern; his orange-red hair was combed up in a high loopy wave. He was a winker, a tongue clucker, an eyebrow wagger. He was the legendary bellhop from Niagara Falls. Yet for some reason Caitlin adored him. She cherished his dependability, his promptness, and the frailty that made his roosterish demeanor something like bravery. And somehow knitted into this fabric of regard was the fact that she did not know his last name, or where he lived, and he knew nothing about her except she worked for Stowe, sat at this desk, was young, smiled.
Eddie dropped the morning mail onto Caitlin’s desk. Congressman Stowe was back in the office and the informality of the languid, steaming summer was suddenly gone. Caitlin was at work by nine, lunch was an hour, she didn’t leave before five.
Eddie made a soft, harmless version of the wolf whistle and winked. When he placed the mail before Caitlin she noticed his hands. The skin was pale, peeling, as if he had been soaking in a tub for hours.
“Thanks, Eddie,” she said.
“You look out of this world today, Catey,” he said, in his wise-guy voice.
The
letters he had delivered were bound by a piece of twine. There was one that was separate, however, and he held it in his hand and fanned himself with it.
“This one’s for you,” he said, skimming it across the desk at Caitlin.
It was from New York City; the return address was Fortune magazine. Her name was typed by a typewriter with a half-broken letter A.
As Eddie left, Caitlin looked out of her small office. Stowe was in his office with the door closed. Betty was in with him, along with a young man, a lawyer, who had come in with Stowe this morning. The lawyer had been introduced to her briefly. He had sunken cheeks, dark, staring eyes, his hair was swept back and thinning. His name was John Coleman.
Caitlin opened the envelope. She knew it must be from Joe Rose. She knew no one else who worked at Fortune, she knew no one else who lived in New York City. She opened the letter carefully, as if it were for somebody else and she must be undetected.
Dear Caitlin,
I was going to send this note to my sister’s house but fact is she has been urging me to “ask you out” (you must forgive her: older sisters fret over unmarried brothers) and I think if she saw a correspondence from me to you she would lose her mind with happiness. (You haven’t seen that mind-losing-with-happiness part of Hill yet, I suppose.)
I only wanted to add something further to the words we had about your boss down in Hill’s kitchen. I hope you have forgiven my Sieg-heiling like that. These days, Hitlerite salutes are hardly a laughing matter. But most of all I didn’t want you to think that I was grouping you with your boss. I may not have had the right to criticize your working where you work. Working for Fortune isn’t exactly making the world safe for democracy. But I’ll be leaving Fortune soon to work on a book. (Every hack journalist says he’s going to be writing that book, pretty soon, but what makes my claim more creditable is mine ain’t The Great American Novel and, also, that I’ve already served notice.)
Caitlin, what I mean to tell you is keep your eyes open. Your boss might not be a dangerous character himself but he pals around with some pretty unsavory types. He’s in control now and everything he says about keeping us out of the war and even about being more “understanding” about the New Germany might sound OK, but one day, I hope, it won’t. It’ll sound rotten through and through and everyone will know what these guys are really made of. And when that happens, I don’t want to see you caught on the wrong side.
I suppose I sound pretty arrogant. Don’t worry, I’m used to being thought of as a know-it-all. Look, I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. I thought Paris would stand up to Hitler and I thought the Phillies would win the pennant. But I’m damned sure that one day Stowe will show his true colors. If there’s an ounce of justice left in this terrible world, one day every decent person will know that the man you work for is a moral gangster.
Caitlin folded the letter in half, and then in half again and shoved it into her wine-colored handbag. She clicked the bag closed and sat there quietly, without moving.
Suddenly, she felt a hand on her shoulder and she turned, startled, as if she had been caught at something.
And there was Betty Sinclair. “Boo,” she said, in her round, amber alto. She was wearing a green skirt with a broad belt, a white blouse, a strand of her grandmother’s pearls. She was tall, blonde, very, very blonde. The down on her face looked silver in the sunlight.
Caitlin looked at her friend with a feeling of relief. There was no feeling of loneliness that Betty could not dispel, no feeling of doubt she could not make seem absurd. Betty was as confident as Jamey Fleming but without his snobbery, his petulant insistence that the world owed him the seat by the window.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Betty. “You’re pale.”
“You startled me, I guess.”
“I hate it that he’s back,” Betty said, gesturing toward Stowe’s closed door. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her skirt’s hip pocket. She smoked mentholated Spuds in the summer, Chesterfields when the heat broke.
Betty had been working for Stowe since she was twenty-three years old. She’d come to Washington with a degree in history from Temple University and the job in Stowe’s office was her second on the Hill. (The first had been with a Michigan congressman named Eliot Conners, who had kissed Betty hard on the mouth one evening while they were both working late and then had stood there in crimson astonishment as Betty had stalked out of his office, forever.) Now she was twenty-eight. Officially, she was Stowe’s administrative aide; she made fifty-five dollars a week. But there was no one who was closer to Stowe than Betty. Half the day she was in his private office with the door closed. They traveled the chicken-and-peas circuit together, going to Windsor County, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis.
She offered Caitlin a cigarette and Caitlin accepted. She wasn’t buying her own yet but Betty had gotten her into the smoking habit. It was all a part of life as Betty’s pal: Scotch and soda, club sandwiches, theater in the round, listening to old blues records.
“Elias just loathes being here, and this Coleman character he’s brought along—this is a chap who makes Bela Lugosi look like Will Rogers.” Betty laughed and waved the smoke away from her face. She had the gestures of a girl who had sneaked a lot of cigarettes.
“But you like him, don’t you?”
“Elias? Sure. Compared to most of the guys in this city, he’s a prince, a philosopher-king. At least he sticks his neck out for what he believes.”
“Would he stick his neck out for Hitler, then?”
“Hitler. Oh, please. No one gives a hoot about Hitler. I mean, the mustache alone. Old Adolf is strictly a transitional figure, there’s no doubt about it. He’s like a charwoman sent in to clean up a mess.”
“But—”
“The important thing, Caitlin, is to keep out of the war.” She smiled. “It’s really pretty elementary.”
“But the President’s already said we aren’t going to get involved, at least not militarily. It would just be a matter of helping out the democracies—”
“Roosevelt’s better than Edgar Bergen in talking without moving his lips,” said Betty. “He says he wants peace but in the meanwhile he’s getting ready to spend billions sending planes and ammunition to the Brits. He says it’s a loan. But how do you loan someone an antiaircraft shell? It’s like loaning someone a piece of gum.” She pantomimed taking a piece of gum out of her mouth, handing it to Caitlin. “Here, thanks ever so much.”
The door to Stowe’s office opened and a stocky, middle-aged priest came out. He went to the water cooler, filled a paper cup, and then dabbed his handkerchief in it. He mopped his face with the wet cloth and then drank the water, crumpled the cup, and went back into Stowe’s office.
“Who was that?” Caitlin asked Betty.
“Father Coughlin,” said Betty. She made a face; she never had much use for Catholics.
“The radio priest?” Caitlin said, for a moment genuinely impressed. Sparked by the sound of a familiar name, a name connected to the vast invisible hierarchical world of celebrity, she had forgotten she had once actually heard Coughlin on the radio and thought he was hateful. One of her father’s friends back home, Russ Sauer, listened to Coughlin on the radio, quoted him. Sauer claimed the Jews manipulated the wholesale prices for apples and made him lose his farm. Then, after that, he found work as a low-paid handyman in one of the Jewish resorts across the river, and used to leave copies of Coughlin’s magazine Social Justice in the cabins he cleaned out before the next wave of Jewish vacationers would arrive from the city.
“Father Coughlin is a sentimental, scheming old windbag,” Betty said. “Elias took me to one of his mass meetings at Madison Square Garden and I swear it, Caitlin, if you added the IQ of everyone in the hall it would have come out to a hundred and six. He plays to the rabble. Like a ham actor, so vulgar, pitching his gestures to the cheap seats in the back rows.”
“Then what’s he doing here?”
“Talking to Elias. Coleman arranged
it.” Betty tapped her finger against the side of her head and raised her eyebrows, as if to say Smart Move.
“I don’t understand why Mr. Stowe would even let him in the office, if he’s so disgusting.”
“Coleman’s point is, with Roosevelt already dipping his quill into the ink getting ready to loan England all that money, we need all the help we can get. Stopping short of the Reds, of course, who now claim to be against America getting into the war, too, but they’ll change their tune when Moscow tells them. I mean, really, Caitlin, do you want American soldiers spilling their blood over in Europe?”
“No. But my daddy always said you have to be careful who your friends are.” This was a locution she had picked up recently from Betty: you could always express an opinion with no fear of contradiction if you preceded it with “My daddy always said.”
“Well, your daddy would have made a lousy politician,” said Betty. “Elias isn’t the only man of taste and breeding—” Betty could put words within quotation marks with only a quiver of an eyebrow “—Coughlin is seeing here. He’s got friends all over Washington. Lemke, Patman, O’Conner.”
“And what’s this about my illustrious colleagues?”
Caitlin and Betty were both startled to hear Stowe’s voice. He had come in without their noticing and now stood there in his shirt sleeves, his maroon suspenders twisted on the left side. Betty had once said that Stowe wore elevator shoes, but if he did it was hard to say what they did for him. He looked like a very independent, wizened child. His gray hair was combed neat as a puppet’s and there were deep grooves in his narrow face.
“I was wondering where you’d disappeared to,” Stowe said to Betty in his inquisitive tenor.
“I thought you boys wanted a little privacy,” said Betty, sliding off Caitlin’s desk, smoothing her skirt.
“Malarkey,” said Stowe with a wave. He glanced at Caitlin for a moment and noticed the residue of emotion on her face. “What’s with you?” he asked, in a voice not wholly lacking in kindness.
“Nothing, sir.”
Stowe shrugged. His insights were penetrating but hit-and-run. He left the follow-through to others.
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