Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  “Suppose you give us the translation, Annie,” Stowe broke in, with an annoyance in his voice he was trying to disguise as amusement.

  “Those simple words meant this,” Vonsiatsky said, moving still closer to Caitlin. ‘ “It was after one in the morning when Pierre left his comrade. It was one of those luminous nights in June we have in Petersburg.’I read those words, and wept. It brought it all back, my youth, my country, the simplicity of our lives then, the smell of the new-mown fields, the sound of good Russian voices and the mystery of the Russian sky at night. It was pure then, so pure.” Vonsiatsky’s hand moved further up Caitlin’s leg. “I wish I could take you to Russia, my Russia, but today it would be easier for us to go to the moon.”

  He touched the hard nubs of her garter belt through the tops of her stockings and then lightly caressed her bare thighs with his callused, corrugated fingertips. She grabbed his hand beneath the table but he resisted her. The effort shook the table and she quickly moved her hand away. She was trapped as if in a dream. The walls were closing in and somehow she was required not to scream. She must stop this man without drawing any attention to herself. She was certain that if anyone at this table were to know, she would be blamed, not the Russian.

  She turned in her chair and glowered at him. He smiled. It seemed perfectly natural to him, a game.

  “Mr. Vonsiatsky!” Caitlin said, her voice rising. Her heart was a barrel rolling down the stairs. His face, the room, everything was as unstable as a reflection in the water.

  “Count,” said Vonsiatsky. The legs of his chair squeaked on the bare floor as he slid it closer to her. He was not going to stop. Her thighs were clasped so tightly her hips ached. With a soft, barely audible grunt of effort, he jammed his hand between Caitlin’s legs and slipped his fingers into her underpants, stretching the elastic, stroking her pubic hair, his fingers moving back and forth like the tentacles of a squid.

  With a chaotic gesture she hoped looked accidental, Caitlin waved her hand and knocked her water glass, which was full, and her Tom Collins, which was nearly full, into Vonsiatsky’s lap.

  Reflexively, he withdrew his hand from her and halfstood. He began rapidly swatting at his trousers, as if all that liquid were a swarm of bees.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Caitlin, so passionately that for a moment she actually felt sorry. She stood up and handed Vonsiatsky her napkin.

  He grabbed it from her. The front of his tight khaki trousers was soaked black. “Oaf,” he said.

  She looked at Stowe but did not say anything. Suddenly, she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “Caitlin?” said Betty, softly. She was putting her napkin down, standing up.

  Marion Stephens was rising too, coming toward her husband, still holding her napkin. She seemed rather relaxed about it, as if she were used to things like this happening to Count Vonsiatsky.

  Caitlin realized the decorum she had hoped to preserve had been lost. Vonsiatsky had had his way with her; he’d made her into a fool.

  The room throbbed. Once her life had been a solid thing, durable, but here in this city it was fragile and now it was broken, and what she had wanted, the person she had longed to become, drained away, in a mess, like the contents of a cracked egg.

  “Caitlin?” asked Betty, but her voice was so far away.

  “Annie,” said Marion Stephens, reaching out for her furious husband. “Are you all right, Annie?”

  Annie, thought Caitlin. She turned away. Someone was leaving the Four Feathers at that moment and she saw a wedge of sky through the open door.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured.

  Her legs felt weak, unable to understand the suddenly foreign language of the synapses that commanded them.

  She simply could not imagine sitting down at that table again.

  Her mouth had a queer, hideously alive feeling, as if she had taken a huge gulp of hard cider but must not swallow. She felt elongated, ectoplasmic, cold. She tried to summon an inner voice that would calm her, but the creature who whispered within her was cross, frantic, entirely disoriented.

  She only wanted to be alone. She walked toward the memory of the blue sky as if it would deliver her. She knocked into someone’s chair, almost collided with a waiter. The last thing she saw in the Four Feathers was the face of the cashier, an elderly man with bright silver hair and an eye patch, who was just putting a pastel candy into his mouth as Caitlin staggered past him. Their eyes met. Caitlin must have been staring at him with apocalyptic intensity. He took the candy out of his mouth and smiled uncertainly at her, and Caitlin pushed her way out the door, and as soon as she was in the fresh air, with its scent of flowering oleander mixed with hot tar and traffic, she breathed deeply and burst into tears. She wept openly, choking on her tears and the vague sense that there was something awful deep inside of her, all the way to Peabody Street, home.

  It was at least a half-hour walk to the Zweigs’. Caitlin was sweaty, exhausted; she had worn herself out trying to decide what to do next with her life. There was no question but that she had humiliated herself before Congressman Stowe and that she was going to be fired. Her rent was due in a week; she could pay that. It would give her another month to find some other work, and stay in Washington. She could not go back to Leyden.

  As she walked, she passed department stores and imagined working inside them. She passed the Canadian Embassy, a library, a Woolworth’s, an art gallery, and projected herself into each of them. Then she passed private homes with sprinklers sputtering water onto the smooth manicured green grass and the wind blowing a bit of the spray onto the soft gray screens around the porch, and she imagined herself working in one of those houses—a secretary to a writer, reading Brontë to an elderly woman, even working as a maid. The speculation gradually returned her to herself, and by the time she mounted the steps to the Zweigs’ house she was clear-eyed, even feeling slightly defiant.

  Screw them, she told herself.

  Her thighs grazed each other as she climbed the steps, and suddenly she felt Vonsiatsky’s fingers poking toward her center. A passing image: his finger inside her up to the knuckle, and then she turns quickly, violently, snapping it off.

  I should have ground my water glass into his face, she thought.

  She had had no idea how deeply she longed to be accepted, and it was this realization above all that made her burn with shame. The shame was so vast it was like a river overflowing its banks, irrigating heretofore fallow fields of grief. It was beginning to impress itself upon her that for her entire life she was going to feel as if there were something about her that was not good enough, that she did not truly belong in the places she wanted to go. There was a code of belonging that she could not crack. And knowing she would always be without it was like realizing you will never get a decent night’s sleep, that the hours of darkness presented to others as a smooth, unbroken ribbon night after night fall into your hands as a jumble, tatters, confetti.

  It was quiet in the house. Caitlin only wanted to sleep, but before she climbed up to her attic room she stopped in the kitchen. She was thirsty. She let the water run for a while until it became cold, but when she filled the glass she no longer wanted it and she poured it down the drain. Then she opened the refrigerator and saw that Hilda Zweig had made a fresh pitcher of orange juice. It was in a blue-and-red-striped pitcher; there was a piece of waxed paper held tightly over the top by a thick rubber band. Caitlin stared at it for a moment and then removed the pitcher from the refrigerator. She moved the rubber band down the pitcher until the waxed paper was loose, and then she picked up an edge of the waxed paper and drank a long swallow of Mrs. Zweig’s carefully strained juice straight out of the pitcher’s spout.

  “Oh, hello there,” said a voice from behind her.

  She raised her shoulders, as if in response to a blow, and replaced the cover on the pitcher, smoothed out the rubber band, wiped the corners of her mouth with her knuckle, and closed the refrigerator.

  It was J
oe Rose. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt, pleated brown slacks; he was barefoot, holding a notebook. His shoulders were smooth and rounded like a child’s. The hair under his arms was glistening black.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice a little sharper than she would have wanted. “I thought you were in New York. I got a letter from you, from New York.”

  “Oh. I was hoping to see you before you read that letter. I think I was a little out of line. Bad habit, minding other people’s business.”

  “I don’t think you realize how much my job means to me. But then, how could you? You don’t really know me at all.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes. Of course I am.” Caitlin walked away from the refrigerator, sat at the kitchen table.

  “You look a little … I don’t know. Pale.”

  She was pale. She had been frightened to be seen stealing Mrs. Zweig’s orange juice. But rather than reveal this small thing she thought it somehow preferable to give a vaster and ultimately more revealing reason for her discomfort.

  “I think I may have just lost my job,” she said.

  “Your job? What happened? It wasn’t because of my letter, was it?”

  “We were having lunch with some of his friends. I behaved like a fool and now he’s furious with me.” But it wasn’t my fault, she wanted to say.

  “Stowe’s friends are half the trouble with Stowe. Who were you with?”

  He asked the question in an offhand way, a boy tossing stones into a pond. He didn’t even make eye contact with her.

  “Father Coughlin,” said Caitlin. “And this Russian. Vonsiatsky.”

  “Ah,” said Joe. “Him.” He went to the refrigerator and took out the pitcher of orange juice, then to the cupboard for a glass. “Thirsty?” he asked.

  “No, thank you.” She watched him as he poured a glass of juice, just like that. But of course he really belonged there.

  “Was Vonsiatsky with his wife?” asked Joe.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s bankrolling him, you know. He’s got the largest private militia in the history of America. Jerks, for the most part, but a jerk with a gun can kill you just as thoroughly as a genius can. Was that it?”

  “And a guy named Coleman,” said Caitlin.

  Joe was quiet for a moment. He ran the glass beneath the faucet. “John Coleman?” he asked, his back to Caitlin. Steam rose from the sink, clouding over the window, making the yard with its weeping willow tree disappear. Joe turned the water off, put the glass in the rack to dry.

  Caitlin had never before seen a man perform the slightest domestic task.

  “You know him?” she asked.

  “No,” said Joe, “but I’d like to.” He walked slowly toward her, sat at the table, turned his chair, and faced her, let his knees graze against her. “Can you introduce me?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Nobody does. He has names, extra names. What do you call them?”

  “Aliases.”

  “Yes, aliases. Earl Kingsbury. William Mason. He has pretended to be a Jew. He knows Hebrew. He’s studied it, he knows the Torah. Better than I. Morris Fiegenbaum. He wears a black overcoat, a homburg.”

  “Not today.”

  “Morris Fiegenbaum was for Cleveland.”

  Caitlin conjured up Coleman’s face, the hollow cheeks, the moody eyes, the prim, somehow girlish smile. She saw his long fingers on his water glass. She remembered what Betty had said: That one is evil.

  “Is he a spy?” Caitlin asked.

  “I don’t know who he works for,” Joe said. “I’d like to. He may work for the Germans; he certainly gets some money from them. I can prove that. But he may be independent, for the most part. Wherever the Nazis operate they find men like him, men with poison in them, willing to do anything. Coughlin, Vonsiatsky, they’re the same, but not so selfless. They want their roast beef and their feather bed. Coleman could sleep on nails. He doesn’t have a cynical bone in his body. In his own mind, he’s a hero. He sets a bomb and feels as if he’s cleaned up something dirty.”

  “A bomb?”

  “I can’t prove any of this.”

  Caitlin nodded, not wanting to seem too curious, not entirely wanting to know. It was too large; she had no structure to contain it.

  “I love this country,” she found herself saying, apropos of nothing.

  “So do I,” said Joe, without a moment’s hesitation. He moved his hand toward her, but they did not touch. “But so what? John Coleman does, too. And the Soviets are saying fascism is a matter of taste. It’s like musical chairs out there and when the music stops Hitler ends up on your lap.”

  “His voice was soft, his eyes intimate. He had a deep, slightly sharp masculine scent, new-mown hay, an iron skillet drying in the sunlight.

  The phone rang in the front hall.

  “That might be Sumner Welles’s office,” said Joe. “I’m supposed to meet him. For cocktails, tonight.” His voice was suddenly youthful, reedy. The phone rang again; he didn’t bother to excuse himself.

  Caitlin sat at the kitchen table and listened to Joe’s voice on the telephone. The late-afternoon sun cast a shimmering square of light on the table’s polished surface. She moved her fingertips into the light and they became translucent. She could see the blood beneath her fingernails, pink and bright. Her heart was beating out a steady telegraphy of sadness and exhaustion. What would she do if Stowe were to send her home?

  “Well, whatever would be most convenient for Mr. Welles,” Joe was saying in the foyer. “Five o’clock, six, I’m at his disposal.”

  She heard the phone slide off its mahogany table and could picture Joe nervously pacing back and forth, then reaching for the heavy phone as it swung from its black cord, suspended above the loomed lions of the maroon-and-purple Oriental runner.

  “Just a second, just a second,” Joe was saying. “Let me, ahh, straighten something out here.”

  Caitlin got up. She was light-headed, her extremities were cool and heavy. She took a deep breath and then walked slowly out of the kitchen, into the dining room, the parlor, and up the stairs to the attic.

  Once in the attic she closed the door behind her. Even in the middle of the day, the diamond-shaped windows let in little light. Now it was nearly five o’clock and the late-afternoon shadows were on everything, soft as moss. The heat filled the room like smoke. Caitlin sat on the edge of her bed and turned on the rotating fan. She called it her man in an iron mask. The beige blades pushed the warm air around the room. She slipped off her shoes and let them fall to the floor and then she pulled back the dotted Swiss bedspread to expose her parsimoniously stuffed pillow and then she stretched out on the bed. She pressed her heels into the mattress and held her toes straight up. They looked hard and wooden through the dark-brown of her hosiery.…

  Caitlin awakened with a gasp. Someone was touching her arm. She opened her eyes. The lamp screamed yellow light. Then Betty’s hand reached for the lamp, turned it off, and the sloping attic room was indigo.

  There was the smell of Betty’s cigarette. The smell of Betty’s April Showers talc.

  “Were you sleeping?” Betty asked, taking the book from Caitlin’s hands, gently closing it, placing it on the table.

  “I guess.” Her voice was webbed. She lifted herself on her elbows.

  Betty touched Caitlin on the side of the face, tucked a strand of hair behind Caitlin’s ear.

  A feeling of sluggish unreality. She could not come properly awake.

  “What time is it?” asked Caitlin.

  “A little after six. I came as soon as I could.”

  “I guess I’m going to be fired.”

  “Never in a million years, Caitlin.” Betty’s voice was solemn; you could never break a promise made in that true and ardent voice.

  “I just walked out.”

  “I’d call it running for your life. That goddamned Russian wanted to roger you.”

  “Roger?” />
  “The thought of that oaf touching you,” said Betty, “that it would even cross his mind…”

  “And Mr. Stowe isn’t mad.”

  “He’s completely humiliated.” She tucked a few more strands of hair behind Caitlin’s ear. “I saw to that.”

  “He’s not going to fire me?”

  “If you asked him for a raise tomorrow morning he’d probably have to give it to you.” She clasped Caitlin’s hand; slowly their fingers entwined. “Elias knew Vonsiatsky was flirting with you. We just need him right now. Anyhow, what kind of friend do you think I am? Do you think I’d let Elias fire you?”

  And with that she quite casually bent over Caitlin and kissed her lightly on the top of the head, as if this sort of gesture was quite natural to their friendship. And perhaps it was to Betty, but Caitlin was raised in an atmosphere of emotional illiteracy, where tenderness was rare, and was followed by gestures of negation as the groan of thunder follows the ecstasy of lightning.

  Yet here was this kiss, this gentle kiss placed on the top of her head in this virtually airless room. It shook her. She felt a wild and terrifying aliveness where Betty’s lips touched her hair, felt her friend’s breath. She looked up at Betty, who was staring at her with the great seriousness of love.

  Betty seemed as if she was about to say something but instead she craned her neck and slowly, slowly moved her face toward Caitlin until their noses touched and then their foreheads, and Caitlin did not move, either forward or back, left or right, and Betty seemed to understand that remaining poised was assent because her breath broke within her like an icicle snapped in two and she grabbed Caitlin’s shoulders, not to embrace her but just to hold on, as if she, Betty, were suddenly doubting gravity’s promise to keep her in place.

  “Oh dear? Dear?”

  Caitlin and Betty turned toward the sound of Hilda Zweig’s maternal soprano, with its slightly foolish interrogative swoop. A guillotine-shaped wedge of yellow light raced up the wall as Hilda opened the door to Caitlin’s room. She held a pewter tea service; the teapot, cups, and saucers trembled as she walked. She wore a girlish summer dress, a small yellow hat cocked to one side of her head.