Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

Time passed. Ten o’clock retired without being noticed and then eleven slipped out unseen. The imprisoned wooden bird within the cuckoo clock banged its maple beak against the door, but who could have heard it above the slide trombone, the muted trumpet, or the thrilling clarinet that every time it played made Caitlin picture a schoolmarm trying to hold her skirts down in the wind?

  And then it was nearly midnight. The rain had stopped and begun again and this time the storm was fierce, no longer falling straight down but at a windy angle, pelting the windows, rushing past the street lamps. When the lightning flashed and illuminated the nighttime street, with its black cars and swaying black trees, it seemed as if heaven and earth were joined by a moving membrane of water. Caitlin and Betty stood at the bay window and watched the rain, and when Betty told Caitlin that she would have to spend the night her words were drowned out by an explosion of thunder that sounded like a sledgehammer against a tin roof.

  And when she said it again Caitlin turned to face her and was quiet for a moment, though this was far too solemn, and so she smiled, but this made her feel exposed, a little silly, as if she were making too much of it, or taking it somehow in the wrong way.

  “It’s nice of you to offer,” Caitlin said, in a formal, almost stiff tone of voice.

  Betty furrowed her brow; her smile was puzzled. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” said Caitlin. She cleared her throat.

  Despite the storm it was too hot for nightclothes, but they could not sleep in the same bed without them and so Betty loaned Caitlin a light blue cotton nightgown and she herself wore a pair of peach silk pajamas.

  Caitlin washed her teeth using her forefinger instead of a toothbrush and looked at herself in the mirror of Betty’s bathroom. Her face looked so plain to her, so practical, so sensible. She brushed her hair back with her open hands and then breathed out deeply. Betty’s nightgown had puffed shoulders and the short sleeves were edged with lace.

  When she slipped into bed next to Betty the lights were already out. Betty didn’t say a word or make a sound. Was she trying to make Caitlin believe she was already asleep?

  Caitlin was on her back, her arms at her side. She took no more room in bed than the width of her body. She was an Egyptian wrapped in rags, closed into the sarcophagus of her own reserve. Yet she was certain Betty could feel the life in her, which was now transformed into sheer desire, certain that it radiated out of her like heat from a stove, the sound of a radio playing in the next room. Care to dance?

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Betty said, whispering, as if they were children who were meant to be asleep. “I started War and Peace.”

  Caitlin closed her eyes. A feeling of joy went through her. Betty’s following her suggestion was a benediction.

  “I was reluctant. Fourteen hundred pages. But you were right. It’s wonderful.”

  “It gets even better as you go along,” said Caitlin. She opened her eyes, let out a breath. Headlights from a passing car reflected in the window, casting a rain-spotted light across the ceiling. She felt the bed shift as Betty rolled over on her side.

  “Thanks for recommending it,” Betty said, touching Caitlin’s shoulder.

  Caitlin felt her skin come alive. She pulsated. It was as if in order to live an orderly life her body had to be anesthetized, but now the ether of the everyday was gone and she felt everything—her pores, the down on her arms, the knit of flesh along the insides of her thighs, the slight irregularities where her scalp had been stretched across her skull like a sock around a marble darning egg, the tips of her breasts, the cumbersome weight of her tongue as it sulked within her mouth like a tortoise in its shell, her vagina, her pubic hair grazing against the nightgown, the coldness of her pale, parched palms. Every part of her body wanted to be felt, heard.

  Caitlin rolled on her side. She faced Betty.

  She was used to the darkness now. She could see Betty with perfect clarity.

  Betty moved closer, waited. She seemed to be testing, to see if Caitlin would move away. They both understood that the first gestures would all have within them an element of the accidental, that they would have to be able to say, Oh sorry, or Excuse me, at any point, and then withdraw, and that the fiction that they were only friends could then be preserved.

  “You smell all tooth powdery,” Betty said, smiling.

  “I used my finger,” said Caitlin. She withdrew her arm from beneath the warm white sheet and raised one finger, her index finger, though it wasn’t the one she had used. She had used her right hand, but she didn’t dare move that arm because it was next to Betty, and if she were to try and withdraw it then Betty would have to shift away from her, if only an inch or two.

  “Ah,” said Betty. “Afraid of my germs?” She clasped Caitlin’s finger and then turned it around and around like a wooden spoon in a bowl of batter.

  “Oh no,” said Caitlin. “It wasn’t that.”

  She wanted to put her arm around Betty. It was as if the heat of desire had brought to life a heretofore hidden self, who was now stretching within her and with its first breaths issuing drastic, unprecedented orders. Touch her, just touch her, the voice intoned. And then it said, She wants you to, can’t you see that?

  Caitlin did not think: But this is a woman who lies beside me. She did not think: Then I will be a homosexual, a lesbian. She did not think about going to hell, or living with it for the rest of her life, or even of tomorrow. All of that seemed completely beside the point. They were just ideas—not even ideas: they were words.

  Betty released Caitlin’s finger, but rather than let her hand drop to the mattress Caitlin gently placed it on Betty’s shoulder. The feel of those silk pajamas was like putting your hand into a cool pond, the hum of water against your skin. Caitlin felt the bone in Betty’s shoulder, and then she felt the seam in the pajamas, where the sleeve was joined.

  “Mmmm,” Betty said, and moved closer to Caitlin. “That feels nice.” She tucked her chin in and pressed her forehead against Caitlin’s forehead.

  They were quiet and perfectly still. Caitlin’s hand remained motionless on Betty’s shoulder. They were Siamese twins joined at the brow.

  “That Russian frightened me so badly yesterday,” Caitlin whispered.

  “I know, I know. I’m so sorry.” Then, after a silence: “Was he touching you?”

  “Yes. I just didn’t want to make a scene. I thought everyone would blame me.”

  “Why would anyone blame you, Caitlin? It was him doing it. God, I’d like to kill him. Where was he touching you?”

  “I always think of myself as the one who gets blamed.”

  “I know the feeling,” Betty whispered. “The feeling there’s something within you and no one must ever find out.”

  “Yes,” said Caitlin. “That.”

  And Caitlin would never know how many moments passed before Betty lifted her chin and then parted her lips and kissed Caitlin softly on the mouth.

  Caitlin thought of a diagram of the body she had seen in school, with the network of arteries and veins, yet now, in her, the traffic was not blood but desire. She wrapped her arms around Betty and returned the kiss with a fervency that held within it eagerness, loneliness, and even something rapacious. She opened her mouth to the kiss and then opened it wider; she wanted to taste her friend, she wanted, really, to swallow her whole.

  She felt Betty’s hand press hard against her breastbone, ignoring the breasts themselves. It moved Caitlin, made her grateful. It was more personal somehow to press the sternum than to fondle the breasts. And then as the kiss continued Betty’s hand slid down to Caitlin’s belly and rested there for a few moments, letting the heat radiate into Caitlin, until it moved lower still, pausing for just a heartbeat and then gliding into that nest at Caitlin’s center.

  Caitlin made a noise of pleasure and surprise directly into Betty’s mouth.

  “Caitlin,” Betty said. “Caitlin.”

  Caitlin clutched a handful of the cotton nigh
tgown she wore and pulled it up, and when the nightgown was hitched up to her breasts she took Betty’s hand and laid it solemnly against her again, this time so Betty’s fingers closed like a door against her opening. A noise like a sob came out of Betty. Caitlin kept her hand on Betty’s hand and pressed it harder against her and moved her own hips up to increase the pressure.

  “I knew it,” whispered Betty. “I knew it from the moment I first saw you.”

  A jolt of shame went through Caitlin as she realized her body was writhing, moving, it seemed, of its own accord. But Betty’s breath touched her, calmed her; there was a smell, left over from the wine they had drunk, a smell of slightly overripe apricot and then Caitlin opened her legs wider and Betty’s finger was inside her and the shame was gone, leaving in its wake the merest hesitation of shyness, which Caitlin now escaped by draping her leg over Betty’s hips.

  She rolled on top of her best friend in the world. “Is it OK if I’m on top?” Caitlin asked and Betty by way of an answer kissed her with liquid enormity. The cuckoo clock knocked its beak against the little locked door in the next room as they began to make love.

  AUGUST 26, 1941

  Joe Rose now lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village, on Barrow Street. He had rented it under the name he now used, Fred Hollander. He had taken the false name and a leave of absence from Fortune six months ago. With the help of Gordon Jaffrey he had gotten a job working for Metropolitan of New York, something clerical. The life-insurance business was starting to boom just then. The war news, the pictures of bombed cities, the sudden phalanx of bombers you saw over bright banks of cumulus cloud in the Movietone News made people who might otherwise ignore the issue of their own mortality want to take certain precautions. It might have been acceptable work for Fred Hollander, or at least credible employment for a young man with two years of college and a meek demeanor, but for Joe, with a degree from Haverford College and a sense of himself that involved being near the center of this historical moment, the job at Metropolitan was the most dispiriting, difficult, and, really, annoying experience of his life. He and the hundreds who surrounded him seemed to be doing nothing but pushing paper around their desks, while the large, sonorous clock overhead ticked out the seconds of the slowly dying day.

  Yet if Fred Hollander was to have a convincing reality, a reality that went beyond a name on a library card, thirteen letters inked onto a piece of masking tape on his mailbox, then employment, a simple run-of-the-mill job, was necessary. How much easier it would make it to be Fred Hollander of Metropolitan of New York. The familiarity of the company would compensate for the unfamiliarity of the person when he introduced himself. Rather than people wondering where he had come from they would immediately be able to picture the Metropolitan building, the swarms of people who lock-stepped in and out of it. The benign, banal occupation would be a palliative, something to soothe any suspicions Joe might arouse when he came into a Yorkville storefront or a midtown gun club and let it be known that he was ready to devote his time, energy, heart, and soul to keeping America out of the war with Germany.

  His hair was no longer wavy. Again, aided by Gordon, he had gone to a place in Harlem called The Lenox, where a yellow-skinned man with a pencil mustache and peppermint breath straightened Joe’s hair, using a mixture of creams and chemicals he refused to identify but which smelled to Joe suspiciously of lye. He still did not have the silky, fly-away hair he thought Fred Hollander would have, but rather a thatch of coarse, straight hair that felt like the end of a whisk broom. Gordon had gone to The Lenox too, taking pictures of Joe in the barber chair, Joe with the chemical-soaked rag wrapped around his head, for they had both felt that these might be historical documents. Yet when the barber said, “Now we gonna give it a kinda color like a shellac,” and then bit down hard on his sucking candy, Gordon suddenly lost his sense of humor about the disguise and watched with a pale, sick, profoundly regretful stare as Joe’s black hair was first peroxided dirty whitish silver and then dyed with a color that came out of a bottle simply labeled BROWN.

  Joe worked days and went to rallies and meetings at night. He attended mass meetings of the Christian Mobilizers as well as more intimate kaffeeklatsches, in which arcane matters of politics were discussed under topic headings, such as “Why the International Financiers Want War” or “Whither the Balkans?” He was careful not to be too noticeable. When he had confided his plan to penetrate the pro-Hitler movement to Sumner Welles over cocktails, when the under secretary’s slight decrease in formality seemed to Joe an invitation to intimacy, Welles’s advice had been, “Go slowly, remember. Like a good fisherman. Don’t jerk the bait around. Patience, my boy, patience.”

  And it had been advice worth following. After a meeting of the America First Committee held at the Manhattan Center Opera House, Joe had stood and cheered along with eight thousand other New Yorkers, all waving flags. It had been a long evening of speeches that had alternated between the naively patriotic, in which America was portrayed as a strapping youngster wanting to enjoy itself without being dragged down by its hopeless elders, and the terrifyingly hateful, in which Jews were portrayed as maggots equipped with sinister intelligence. The speeches swung between these two notions with such relentlessness that soon there developed a kind of spider’s-web connection between them.

  After the meeting, the speakers filed off the flag-festooned stage—George Boian, of the Rumanian Iron Guard, Leonora Schuyler, recently of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who seemed in her remarks convinced that Pope Pius was a Jew, Donald B. Hillcrest of Park Avenue, who did not seem to mind being called “The Gentleman Fascist,” Gustav Elmer of the German-American Bund, and Charles Lindbergh, who had been the featured speaker. The brass band hired for the occasion continued to play Sousa marches, as well as simple tunes of boundless good spirits, such as “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” and a few members of the audience, including Joe, lingered in the aisles, as if unable to leave the site of such fervor.

  He was, as always, alone, and then suddenly a man named Joseph McWilliams touched Joe on the elbow and said, “Remember me?”

  McWilliams was about forty years old, with the air of a self-reliant bachelor, used to living within limited means but fully prepared to enjoy whatever transitory luxuries life might bring his way. He had a laborer’s useful-looking body. He had been born poor on an Oklahoma Indian reservation, and when he smiled he showed teeth that were strong but discolored. His eyes were dark blue; his eyebrows were so pale it looked as if they had been burned off.

  “We met at the Midtown Sporting Club and then again at the reception for Fritz Kuhn,” McWilliams said. “Some friends are having a late supper up on Eighty-sixth Street and I wonder, if you’re free, if you’d care to join us. I think you might be fascinated by the mixture—the salt of the earth and the cream of the crop.” McWilliams had smiled at the very small jest and then shrugged, as if to indicate he wished he lived in a world, a time, in which it might be acceptable to indulge his talent for humor.

  It was that night when McWilliams asked Fred Hollander to join the Christian Mobilizers. A month later the Mobilizers’ five-cent weekly newspaper, which had been edited by McWilliams, now said it was published by Joseph McWilliams, with Fred Hollander as its editor. Soon after that, McWilliams asked his new editor to quit working at Metropolitan and become a paid staff member of the Christian Mobilizers.

  From that point on, the velocity of Joe’s new life increased daily and his immersion into his false identity became more complete. He felt lost, with the darkness closing in around him and his point of entry a dim memory. Once, while working on a feature about the coal industry for Fortune, he had gone into an anthracite mine in Pennsylvania. He had sat backward in the small, rattling coal car that brought him and the miners into the cold, inky cave, and he had stared at the shimmering smear of light at the opening of the mine. But as the car shuttled to the left, then to the right, and then this way and that way, Joe had no idea where he
could run if there was an emergency, a cave-in, an explosion, or if it simply became impossible for him to take a real breath, for already panic filled his lungs like wet concrete. As Fred Hollander he often felt that same sense of exile and peril.

  He had his notes on his daily activities, which were a path to his real self, but merely recording the particulars of his daily work, the conversations, the meetings, the street demonstrations, the finances, the sporadic contact with probable German agents, seemed deficient. After closing his log and hiding it in the clothes hamper in his bathroom (he wouldn’t have been surprised if some suspicious Christian Mobilizer might ransack the apartment), Joe was still aware that he had not really spoken to anyone.

  And so he began to keep a diary, for the first time in his life. At first, his entries were sporadic, sparse, tending toward the exclamatory, but as they went on, his journal entries became longer, more detailed, confessional, free-associative. He even wrote poetry into it. Now, he sometimes wrote for an hour in his journal, often before he wrote his day’s activities into his log, a reversal of priorities he would have found indulgent and amateurish a few months before. He kept this diary in a paper bag in the back of his small icebox.

  Caitlin hung on to the leather strap of a humid subway car, gritting her teeth against the noise. The strap swung back and forth as the train danced its cacophonous conga through the pitch-dark tunnel.

  She was wearing a red-and-white-striped dress, white shoes, and a white straw hat. She carried a large white pocketbook and wore red enamel earrings the size of half dollars. A bead of perspiration rolled slowly down her side; she moved her elbow against her dress to blot it out. She had always perspired heavily, just as her menstrual flow was usually wrenching and prolonged, her sneezes explosive, her rare tears copious—it always felt as if there were something within her passionately eager to come out.

  Across from her, sitting in one of the tan wicker seats, a rabbi dressed in a heavy black suit sat reading the newspaper. The front page was folded out and Caitlin read that England and the Soviet Union had joined up in an invasion of Persia. They were after the oil. Caitlin could just imagine how Elias and Betty would take this news: it seemed to validate all they had been saying all along, the Brits and the Communists teaming up for a ruthless expropriation of some quiet land’s natural resources. John Coleman had even gone so far as to say that Churchill was in league with the Reds. Someone, somewhere claimed to have photographs of Churchill and Stalin on some Black Sea beach, both in bathing costumes, sharing a bottle of vodka, throwing their heads back in laughter.