Turning back to Betty, he said, “Coughlin’s going to pay his respects to a few of the fellows and then he’s coming back and we’re going to meet the Russian for lunch, around noon. I need you to arrange a table.”
“How many will you be?” asked Betty. She was pliant with Stowe, but never subservient. She served efficiently, willingly, and most often spoke with a playfulness and irony that implied a larger purpose beyond the routines of the office, a more profound hierarchy in which Betty and the congressman were equals, collaborators.
“Me, Coughlin, the Russian, the Russian’s besotted bride, and Coleman,” Stowe said.
“And will we be setting a place for the Holy Ghost?” asked Betty.
“No, but you may as well come too.”
Betty hesitated. “Four Feathers?”
“Yes. Make certain Raymond takes care of us and let him know to water the Russian’s drinks.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Yes, but I hear the Russian’s a lush and the last thing I need in this heat is some Slav slobbering on me.”
“How about Caitlin here joining us, Elias?” asked Betty. She took a pencil off Caitlin’s desk and tapped the pinkish eraser against her own chin, smiled at Stowe, challenging him.
“Why not?” he said. He took his railroad watch out of his vest pocket and held it importantly in his small hand. “I’m going down to see what we can do to keep those damned gunboats out of the North Sea,” he announced.
At the Four Feathers, Caitlin was seated between Stowe and Anastase Vonsiatsky, the man Stowe called the Russian back at the office but whom he now referred to variously as Count, Alex, and Annie. An elderly Negro in a white jacket filled their water glasses with ice water.
Caitlin’s hands were trembling. She had an overpowering sensation of not belonging.
But there was rapture, too: the surging, egotistical joy of the outsider finally allowed in.
Betty had prepared her, telling her that all she was required to do was act young and charming. (“Should be easy for you, being rather young and charming anyhow. And to these old geezers and that little drip Coleman charm in a woman consists of listening to them with a rapt expression while they say whatever pops into their minds.”) Betty had warned her that Vonsiatsky’s wife, the former Marion Stephens, an heiress whose purse was bursting with Baldwin Railroad Works money, was obsessed with Vonsiatsky and thought every woman was mad over him, too. “And as for Coughlin, just stay downwind from him and you’ll be safe. He’s just a dumb, well-meaning, musty old priest. Coleman? Don’t even make eye contact. I suppose it’s rather late in the game to believe in evil, but that one frightens even old Betty.”
The Four Feathers served but did not exactly welcome women and the décor made that clear. The wood was dark, the prints in the heavy gilt frames and dark green mats were of the Charge of the Light Brigade variety—horse soldiers, dying comrades, all rather upsetting and strangely tiresome in Caitlin’s view. A congealed galaxy of cigar smoke hung over the center of the dining room, and the confluence of all those male voices bragging to each other simultaneously sounded indistinct yet powerful, fueled by an overwhelming sense of purpose, like the sound of the trains Caitlin used to listen to in her bed back home.
Their waiter, Raymond, brought each of them a Tom Collins. Count Vonsiatsky kept an eagle eye on the women’s glasses, never allowing them to remain empty, and Caitlin drank slowly. She didn’t want it to go to her head.
Then Raymond placed a green-tinted glass plate full of olives and tomato slices before them and Caitlin let herself go a little and ate as many of them as she pleased.
Across the table, Father Coughlin had been questioning John Coleman about his religion. Coleman was from Yonkers, New York. His mother was Catholic and his father, a policeman, was a mixture of Lutheran and Baptist.
“Ah, but you see …” said Coughlin, smiling. His glasses caught the light as he cocked his head; he seemed very aware of his own impishness. “Predominantly you’re a Catholic.”
“No,” said Coleman. There was something forceful but hollow in his voice.
It reminded Caitlin of listening to the radio with her ear pressed hard against the fabric-covered speaker.
“Ah, but when you think about it,” persisted Coughlin. He wagged his blunt finger at Coleman.
“I have thought about it,” said Coleman. “The trouble with Catholicism is that it gives consolation.”
“But we need consolation,” said Coughlin, as if in triumph.
“Exactly,” said Coleman. “But some of us have decided to forgo it. Some of us would rather struggle here on earth and not let our minds go fat with fantasies of paradise later on.”
“Now that’s a novel idea,” said Betty. “Religion as some sort of intellectual bonbon.”
“Let those who need a splash of holy water now and then have it,” said Coleman. He barely moved his lips when he spoke. “I love Christ and I accept Him as my savior, and I despise the Jews who took His life on Calvary. Look around you, you see it’s happening all over the world. The sins of the Jews are being punished, but not by priests—by warriors.”
“I think in recognition of where we are right now, we could all be more discreet in our remarks,” said Stowe, tapping his ringed finger against his cocktail glass.
“There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence, which gave Vonsiatsky the opportunity to begin talking about the friends with whom he was in an international league to defeat Communism. Vonsiatsky wore a khaki uniform of his own design, with a broad black leather belt around his waist and another from the waist to the shoulder and back to the waist again. His buttons were emblazoned with tsarist eagles clasping arrows in their talons.
“The great German army will crush and humiliate Stalin and freedom will be restored to the great suffering Motherland,” Vonsiatsky said, with the slight irony of one who has said the same thing too many times. He seemed at once a man in the midst of a feverish dream and a man retelling the dream. He had colorless, thinning hair, inquisitive blue eyes that looked rather small in his large childish face. “We have made our headquarters in the charming town of Manchouli, in the northwest of Manchuria. Very carefully chosen, very important spot, just three kilometers from the Red frontier.”
“That’s less than two miles,” his wife told the others. Marion Stephens was a graceful, dark woman, with modest curls and eyes that radiated emotional excess. She spoke with a sad lilt.
“Yes, in American, two miles,” said Vonsiatsky. He turned to Caitlin and rested his very warm hand on her wrist. “You must try to imagine. Every evening when the sun goes down, my friends turn on the lights of the swastika that rests on top of their building and the lights shine deep into Russia, proclaiming freedom and defiance.” He smiled. His teeth showed evidence of hard times.
Stowe sighed, tilted back in his chair. “Raymond!” he said, beckoning the waiter.
Vonsiatsky moved his foot so that his boot touched Caitlin’s shoe.
She placed her hands in her lap and squeezed them together. She felt disoriented, as if the room were slowly turning.
The waiter came to take their orders. He needed no pencil and pad. Similarly, no one had consulted a menu but the orders were made nevertheless. When it came time for Caitlin to order she felt a surge of anxiety, as if she were going to disgrace herself by ordering something naïve, or common. There was something in the way the elderly waiter looked at her that seemed to say he knew she was out of her class.
“I’ll have your Waldorf Salad,” Caitlin said. She had never had one but she’d read about them, believed they were labor-intensive, knew she would never make one for herself. She would always feel that every meal in a restaurant had to be special.
Vonsiatsky pointed at her empty Tom Collins glass and then snapped his fingers, glancing at the waiter.
“Will anyone else be wanting a drink?” asked Stowe, taking command of the table again.
“No,” said Coleman.
&nb
sp; “I don’t see how I can refuse,” said Coughlin.
Everyone but Coleman wanted another drink and once that was settled Stowe held forth on the Lend-Lease Bill. He knew how to speak without leaving any spaces for others to wedge in and interrupt him. His voice was steady and he filled the silence as a paint-soaked brush covers wood.
Caitlin told herself that Stowe was in a sense using the men around this table. Stowe’s objective was to fight Roosevelt and keep America out of the war, and right now that meant striking some alliances. Betty had said more than once that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Betty.
Caitlin glanced across the table at Betty. She was listening to Stowe as if hearing all of this for the first time. It seemed she always knew when it was time to make a wisecrack and when it was time to sit raptly at the master’s feet. Betty’s strong face was beautiful in repose. Her eyes were the blue of a bright winter sky.
Peace, thought Caitlin. All Stowe wants is peace. In the end, what they were trying to accomplish was good. Even the Communists wanted peace. Caitlin had been walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with Betty a few days ago and they had come upon a Red rally. A skinny man with bristly hair was on a hand-fashioned stage in front of a microphone, leading the group in singing “The Yanks Aren’t Coming.” “With friends like these …” Betty had said, taking Caitlin’s arm, hurrying her along.
She took a sip of her drink. She was further at this moment from Twin Ponds than she would have ever dared to hope. Even as a girl when she had studied geography and dreamed one day of becoming a cartographer, she had not imagined herself so far from Leyden as she had now come, in this restaurant, with its horse-soldier prints and tobacco smell, with its lazy ceiling fans. Treasury Department people at one table, Republican National Committeemen at the next.
She felt a flurry of gratitude and a kind of romanticizing of herself. And then she realized she would not be at this table were it not for Betty. Betty was shaping her as Caitlin had longed all her life to be shaped. She stared at her friend and thought her name over and over, louder and louder within her, until Betty looked over and smiled and Caitlin felt her own face scald with pleasure.
“I’ve never been more firmly convinced than I am right now,” Stowe was saying, “and the Gallup Poll bears me out on it, I dare say. Did you happen to see it, any of you? Betty? What were the percentages again?”
“Eighty-eight percent of the American people say they want no part in the European conflict,” said Betty.
“Yes, indeed, I did read that,” said Father Coughlin. “In fact, I read those findings well before they were published. In fact, I was the first person ever to read them.” He nodded emphatically.
Marion Stephens touched her throat with her delicate, nicotine-stained fingers. “There is so much at stake, Congressman Stowe. Annie and I and the American people cry to heaven for peace.”
Annie, thought Caitlin.
Vonsiatsky shifted in his seat and pressed his leg against Caitlin’s.
“We’ve become so used to polyglot cities and outsiders running our lives,” said Coleman, carefully placing his fingertips together, “I think we have forgotten the American dream. The American dream is alive, in me, and in others.”
“We all believe in that dream, sir,” said Coughlin, as if offended. He seemed to feel that Coleman was besting him in some way, claiming the territory Coughlin himself was used to occupying. “I think every man and woman at this table burns with the belief in that dream. But I must say I find it curious to hear you decry the mongrelization of America, as I myself have called it, when you are a confessed hybrid, religiously speaking.”
Coleman tensed his jaw but smiled.
“And what’s more,” said Coughlin, as if preventing Coleman from speaking, though Coleman gave no indication he wished to reply, “I think it’s in questionable taste to be making remarks about polyglut—”
“Glot,” corrected Coleman.
The priest’s stout, creased face colored for a moment. “With a man who has graced our shores,” he said, pointing to Vonsiatsky, “sitting right here with us at this table.”
“I was hardly speaking about royal Russian blood coming here,” said Coleman, with a small, tactical laugh.
“Oh, John and I are old friends,” said Vonsiatsky. “Often Marion and I have had him home with us, isn’t that right, John?”
“Annie,” said Coleman, bowing his head slightly.
“We have showed to him our militia, our arsenal.”
“I would say the finest private army in the land,” said Coleman.
“And John has given us the benefit of his knowledge of munitions, sharp-shooting, and explosives.”
“There is no one who shoots better than this man,” said Coleman, pointing at Vonsiatsky.
Coughlin, apparently discouraged by this repartee, sank back in his chair. “Do you know Roosevelt used to call me Padre?” he said to Marion Stephens. “When I was organizing for the race against him in ’36, he called me on the phone and said, ‘Padre, I thought we were friends.’Asked me to see him, so I went to Albany and Joe Kennedy picked me up in a Rolls-Royce. First thing I saw when I got off the train was a headline saying Huey Long was dead. Bless his soul. Joe Kennedy and I shot the breeze all the way down to Hyde Park—”
Vonsiatsky’s hands were beneath the table. He patted out a rhythm on Caitlin’s knee, keeping a beat on music only he heard.
“… And when we got to Hyde Park, it was five in the morning. The door was wide open, no servant or guards. Roosevelt was sleeping so Joe and I just went to the kitchen and helped ourselves to breakfast.” Coughlin took off his wire-rimmed glasses and inspected them for dust, then brushed the back of his hand against his eye.
“The arrogant devil’s got you hypnotized, Father,” said Stowe with a laugh.
“You should have gone to his bedroom and shot him,” added Coleman.
The waiter came with their lunches. Caitlin was the last to be served. It made her feel somehow exposed. She edged toward Stowe to put herself out of Vonsiatsky’s reach. But it didn’t discourage him in the least. He reached his long arm under the table until he was touching her again and this time with a brisk, utterly proprietary gesture, he flipped up the hem of her skirt.
“Your employer tells me you are a great reader of literature,” Vonsiatsky said to Caitlin, looking at her brazenly.
She could only nod. She saw herself throwing her drink in his face, but she held herself back. She believed there were alternatives still open to her.
“What are you reading now?” asked Vonsiatsky.
Caitlin didn’t say anything. His fingers touched her stocking and then playfully walked up her leg, like a fool skipping up the hill.
“Caitlin?” asked Stowe, raising his sparse eyebrows.
“Listen, the Wind,” she said, in a voice so unstable that Betty put down her fork and looked at her inquisitively.
“Ah, Mrs. Lindbergh’s wonderful book,” said Marion Stephens. She was looking directly at her husband, who looked back at her and smiled in a false, cruel way.
“Charles Lindbergh is a great patriot,” said Father Coughlin. “Where a lesser man would be resting on his laurels, Lindbergh has crossed this land a dozen times over, speaking of our historic friendship with the German people.” He put his fork down with a piece of steak speared on the tines. “Charles Lindbergh is an aviator not only of the skies but of the soul,” Coughlin said.
“And how that family has suffered,” said Marion Stephens. She clutched her napkin; she hadn’t touched the breast of chicken before her. “The loss, the tragic loss of their child. Oh, I think I know how they must feel.”
“But how could you know, Marion?” asked Vonsiatsky, with a laugh. “You have no children.”
Marion Stephens’s face colored but she didn’t respond to her husband’s remark.
“But you must tell me,” Vonsiatsky said, looking boldly into Caitlin’s eyes. “Your most beloved book, not just
what you are reading now.”
“Ah,” said Betty, “now you’ve got her number. She reads like a real bluestocking.”
Vonsiatsky smiled at Caitlin, cocked his head, as if to say, Well? Prove yourself to me.
“My father and I used to read Great Expectations together,” said Caitlin. She was aware that her voice sounded weak, nervous, as if nothing could have been further from the truth, as if she had had no father, or a father who was an ignorant brute.
“And that is your most beloved book?” said Vonsiatsky, seeming to lure her further into making a fool of herself.
“Dickens,” said Marion Stephens. “The great Dickens.”
“I don’t know,” said Caitlin.
“I thought War and Peace,” prompted Betty.
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Caitlin.
“War and Peace,” said Coughlin, who seemed to be hearing the title for the very first time. “Sounds like a story of today.”
A look of nostalgia that looked almost like a species of kindness spread across Vonsiatsky’s wide, deceptive face. “Tolstoy,” he said. “Tolstoy would be with us, working with us, were he alive today. You know, when I was forced to leave my home, to leave Russia, and live like a common refugee in strange and unfriendly lands, I carried Tolstoy with me, wherever I went. Yet I was for years afraid to open the book, I knew it would, it would—” He took a deep breath, shook his head.
“Then, in Berlin, preparing to come here, I cut the pages of an edition that I had taken from my father’s library. He had a most tremendous library. You would have liked him.” Vonsiatsky was not even pretending to include anyone else at the table in his conversation. “And I opened it up, near the beginning, and I read these words.” Vonsiatsky closed his eyes for a moment and then recited a line in melodic, though woodenly paced Russian. “And do you know what those words mean? They are nothing, of no great importance, they are trifles, but they broke my heart, Count Vonsiatsky’s heart was broken as if these simple words were a message telling me of some great tragedy, that my mother had died.”
Secret Anniversaries Page 11