“Starved—though I really shouldn’t say that, not with all the people in the world truly starving to death.” He patted his stomach, smiled shyly.
“Do you want some wine with this?” she asked. They ate in the small dining alcove; she was turning off the overhead light, putting a wooden match to the candles.
“No—well, maybe a little.”
“Good. This sweet little man gave me a bottle of Chianti at the office today. A shoemaker, in exile from Italy since ’32 but so homesick now I think he’ll go back.” She went to the kitchen, came back with the bottle and a corkscrew, and handed them to Gordon. She always at least tried to make allowances for male vanity.
“A left-winger?” asked Gordon.
“I guess so.”
“Well, he must have been pretty disgusted with how few votes Henry Wallace got this election.” He pulled the cork out of the Chianti and smiled with some satisfaction. He poured some in Caitlin’s glass and then a little in his, and then a little more.
“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “It’s all he thinks about.”
The irony eluded Gordon as he brought the food to his mouth; it was very hot and his eyes glazed with tears, but he tried to hide his reaction, feeling that gluttony had done him in again.
“Can you imagine?” Gordon said. “Truman drops the atomic bomb and all’s forgiven. This country. Red scares all around. Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat party got more votes than Wallace and the whole Progressive party.” He shook his head, took another forkful of dinner but was careful to blow on it this time.
“The thing that struck me,” Caitlin said, “is they’re all, I don’t know, hicks. The CP might have been for Wallace, but, let’s face it, the man was secretary of agriculture and lived with hens and hogs. Truman’s from some backward little place in Missouri, and Thurmond’s one of these old Southern bourbon-and-branch-water types. And Dewey, too. He’s from up where I was raised. I want to vote for someone who lives in a penthouse and has a subscription to the opera.”
Gordon laughed, took a swallow of wine, filled his glass again, this time to the very top. “You know who you sound like? Joe.” He said the name with a downward thrust of his hands.
“Joe,” she said, shaking her head, to warn Gordon away from the subject.
“His cynical sense of humor.”
“I never thought of him as cynical.”
“I’m sorry,” Gordon said, “I didn’t mean for you to take offense.”
“I’m not taking offense. I just never thought of him as cynical.”
Gordon rested his fork against the side of the peach-and-white bowl. “I got a letter from him—”
“I know, Gordon. Six months ago. Postmarked San Francisco, and he’s working for the Chronicle.”
“I forgot I told you.”
“Forgot you told me? All we do is talk about Joe. Joe, Joe at the magazine, Joe’s book, Joe in the Army, Joe gets a job, Joe loses a job, Joe and the infected hand, Joe gets better. I don’t know. Have we gone into Joe gets a haircut?”
“Well,” said Gordon, weakly, “he did introduce us.” But the notion of his and Caitlin’s relationship as central and Joe being only fifth business struck them both as absurd, pitiful.
It was Joe’s name she had affixed to her own to save herself the public stigma of being an unmarried woman with a bastard child. It was Gordon who was peripheral and he knew it. He was having dinner with Mrs. Caitlin Rose.
She loved that name.
Gordon grabbed the wine glass so quickly a bit of the wine sloshed out on his white cuff.
“How’s your mother?” he asked, once he was calm again.
“Lonely. Not doing so well. Waiting to die, I guess.”
“How does she like being a grandmother?”
“She seems completely unaware of him. She holds him for a second and then hands him right back to me. And she sniffs when she does, as if he smells bad.”
“Well, you know babies.”
“He doesn’t smell bad. He’s not that sort of baby.” She knew this sounded silly and she smiled, but maintained the point. “Really. He’s not.”
“Oh, I’m sure. After all, he must smell like a rose.”
Dinner was accomplished; Gordon helped Caitlin clear and then waited in the living room, smoking and thinking and jiggling his leg, while Caitlin washed the dishes.
She came in holding a tray with a percolator full of coffee, a plate of Lorna Doone cookies, and two coffee mugs. She glanced over Gordon, toward the slightly open door to the bedroom where her son slept. She heard a sound, a loose, phlegmy cough, the rattle of the crib’s side as he turned in his sleep.
“You like packaged cookies, don’t you?” she said, as she sat in the velvet easy chair across from Gordon.
Gordon reached for one, bit it in half, dusted the shortbread crumbs from his lapel.
“I finally got that family out of Greece today,” Caitlin said.
But Gordon did not hear her because at the same time he was finally saying something he had been trying to get out for a few months. “I’ve met someone,” he said. “Her name is Arlene Zeiring, she’s a schoolteacher. She lives—” He pointed nervously at the iced-over window, behind which the blur of a street lamp hovered like an angel. “Not far from here, actually. On Waverly, with her sister. Her sister is very political, but Arlene isn’t. Oh, I mean she wants all the right things, but she isn’t what you could call a committed person.” He shrugged and looked at Caitlin, giving her permission to criticize this woman.
“I’m sure you’re committed enough for two, Gordon,” Caitlin said.
He smiled. His face was scarlet but his eyes looked grateful. “That’s what I think,” he said. He seemed relieved she had seen it his way and deflated that she was so willing to let him go. “Anyhow,” he said and then fell silent.
“Would you like some coffee, Gordon?”
He shook his head, shifted in his seat, but did not get up—not yet. “I sort of told her I would drop by for a visit, after we had dinner.”
“That’s OK, Gordon,” said Caitlin. And truly, she was glad. Gordon pined for Joe, longed for him, his real emotional range was as a best friend, not a husband. But he deserved every happiness. “You sure you wouldn’t like a cup of coffee to keep you warm for the walk over there? Waverly Place can seem a far distance on a winter night.”
“Oh, Caitlin.” His eyes blazed with tears.
She smiled warmly at him, but the truth was she was a bit irritated. There was nothing in their relationship, as far as she was concerned, that warranted this sort of emotional farewell. She felt abandoned, brittle, and she knew it was an awful thing to think, but she suspected Gordon was using the occasion of his announcement to give her the baleful looks he would not dare indulge normally, like those men who use the occasion of weddings or funerals to choke you with the slobbering kisses they have the sense, any other time, to keep to themselves.
“You know if I’d had my druthers,” he said, standing up— to take her in his arms?
“Gordie,” she said, lightly. “Shame on you. I’m a mother.”
“He should have married you,” Gordon said, solemnly.
“As far as the world is concerned, he did. And I certainly don’t intend to give them any more reason to doubt it than they already do, seeing me living alone all these years. As far as my landlord and the people at work are concerned, I am a poor, deserted wife, bravely raising her son alone.” She clutched her breast, batted her eyes, like somebody in the worst movie.
“Why don’t you come over with me, Catey?” Gordon said. “I’d like you to meet Arlene and she’s heard a lot about you.”
“Are you crazy or something? You want me to come courting with you? And sit there while you drool over her?” She couldn’t believe or understand what she had just blurted out. She covered her mouth with two fingers and whispered. “I have to be careful with the restless one in there. I think he hears everything. I think he’s a spy.”
When
Gordon left for the schoolteacher’s house, Caitlin poured his coffee and hers back into the pot and put it on the gas stove to warm up again. She recognized this as one of the habits of solitude, like drinking milk out of the bottle, or carrying her reading glasses in an envelope after the leather case for them was lost, but loneliness seemed no longer to hold any special terrors for her. It turned out that her greatest fear had always been to live and die in Leyden, and now that she was securely out of there, nothing else held any real power over her—not the fear of a thousand nights alone in her bed, nor the fear of poverty, of growing old and sick alone. She was conscious that her most fervent dream had come true, and she accepted that in life, if we are lucky enough to get what we most desire, we must accept that other comforts might not come our way.
The percolator sent up fragrant steam through its spout and Caitlin turned off the gas, poured the hot coffee into her cup. Holding it, she walked into the room where her son was sleeping.
The boy had been born on June 2, 1946, the day the Italians voted to abolish the monarchy, and since the doctor who delivered the child was Italian, Caitlin had been tempted to give her son a sort of Italian name, like Anthony, or perhaps a middle name like Ignazio, after Silone, whose Bread and Wine was one of the few novels Joe had ever read. But finally it had seemed too complicated, too fancy, and she settled on something plain. Ever since, however, she had made up for the last-minute conservative impulse—which she now thought of as a kind of degrading deathbed conversion—and the boy had gone through an uninterrupted stream of extravagant nicknames, beginning with Thor, continuing with Juan Domingo, Chou En-lai, Junior, Tennessee, and now Ardo, which was how he pronounced olive, his favorite food.
Ardo had thrown his toys out of his crib. Caitlin saw them in the dim light—the child could not sleep in darkness yet— and she picked them up, arranged them around him so they would look entertaining when he awakened and perhaps occupy him for a few extra minutes while Caitlin slept.
She kissed her fingertips and then pressed them to Ardo’s head. He sweated when he slept, profusely and coldly; he felt like a rock in a cave.
She walked slowly back to the living room and sat with her coffee, reading through a file she had brought home from work that day. There were still requests for entry coming in from Jews, some of them bearing postmarks from China, India, Cuba, Palestine, though with so few Jews left alive and with so many of the survivors focused on a Jewish state, the bulk of the requests for help came from a new kind of immigrant. In fact, the Combined Emergency European Relief Committee was at war with itself over the would-be immigrants who now held out their beseeching hands from such places as Yugoslavia. It seemed that many of these people had been Nazi sympathizers during the war, and now that their countries had been dealt to the Soviets they feared reprisals. If the committee wanted to stick to the original spirit of their charter, they would help these refugees, too, no matter how unsavory their politics. But Mr. Lehman and most of the others chose instead to more or less ignore their cases. Caitlin was basically in sympathy with this position, but she was the only one who went over those politically questionable requests with any care: you never knew if someone decent might be inadvertently lumped with the collaborationists seeking asylum.
Suddenly, she heard the rattle of what sounded like hailstones against the window. She leaned back in the chair, felt the thick fabric beneath her palm, closed her eyes. The noise against the window repeated, more insistent this time, and she realized it was not hail at all, but someone throwing stones.
She went to the window and pressed her hand against the ice until she could see through.
And there was Joe, standing under the street lamp. He saw the oval of her face through the patch of defrosted glass and he waved his hand over his head, a child at the edge of the train tracks flagging down the enchanted engineer. He wore a black overcoat, a fedora; he had a small mustache.
She hurried down to the entrance to let him in. As she ran down the stairs, she did her best to discover exactly what it was she was feeling at that moment, but all she could find was a kind of frantic, rattled excitement that had as much in common with nervousness as it did with happiness.
Joe was waiting for her. She opened the door to him; the night, like a crowd of panicky refugees, rushed in.
“I don’t have a key,” he said. He hugged himself and shivered.
“Was that you throwing stones?”
“It’s so late. I didn’t want to wake … the baby.” His voice was gentle, shy, rather hurt, the voice of an outsider who accepts the terms of his exile.
She stepped back, looked him over. It had been more than three years since she’d seen him but he seemed to have aged more than that. There was nothing boyish in him. His skin was a little loose and the pallor came from months of indoor work—not even the December night had brought color to his cheeks. The mustache made him older, too. It drew his face down in a kind of sorrowful scowl.
“Joe,” she said, “I didn’t even know you were in New York.”
“I’ve found John Coleman,” he said. “At least I think I have. Can I come up?”
“I was just having some coffee,” she said.
As they climbed the stairs, Caitlin resolved to tell Joe he could stop sending money to her—those checks for ten or twenty dollars that arrived now and then, sometimes with a note that said, How is he?, sometimes just folded into a small blank piece of paper, the emptiness amounting to a withering eloquence. Now that he was here, she realized that having the child, or keeping it, was her idea, and so her responsibility. Perhaps even that time in bed on the day the war ended was more her doing than his: she had taken him in hand and placed him directly inside of her, with the sacred deliberation of a farmer planting the last seed.
Joe looked around the apartment. Nothing in his face to betray that these rooms had once been his own. He was a stranger here and perhaps a stranger everywhere. He sat with his overcoat unbuttoned but still on while Caitlin hurried to the kitchen to pour the rest of her coffee back into the pot and reheat it. He peered toward the partially opened bedroom door but didn’t get up to look in, nor did he ask after the child who was sleeping there.
“So tell me about John Coleman,” Caitlin said, bringing the coffee in along with a plate of those Lorna Doone cookies. It was perfectly all right for him to talk about John Coleman before even seeing the child, or talking about anything more personal.
“Well,” he said, “I think he’s in New York. And I think he’s a cop now, working on what they call the Red Squad, doing undercover work, spying on radicals, disloyal professors, that sort of thing. He lives in Brooklyn. Married, two kids. And his name now is John Donnelly. Someone has gotten him new identity cards, an honorable discharge, the works.”
“Can you prove he put the bomb on the plane?”
“I think I can. And more besides. Train derailment. Passing secrets to the enemy. He’s a regular Kate Smith now, of course.”
“Fat?”
“Patriotic. God bless America, that sort of thing. But let’s not talk about it now. Not now.”
“It would be great if you could get him, Joe,” Caitlin said.
Joe nodded, relaxed a little, and the slight withdrawal of tension made him seem more exhausted. He took a long drink of his coffee; when he put the cup down, his mustache was dripping like a dog climbing out of a pond.
“Very distinguished,” Caitlin said. And when Joe cocked his head as if to say What? she added, “Your mustache. It’s new to me.”
“Oh, this,” he said, wiping it off with his fingers. “I grew it when I went for the job at the Chronicle.”
“So. How’s life in Frisco?”
“They hate it out there when people call it Frisco.”
“Sorry.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me. Just a point of local pride.”
“The first person from San Francisco I ever met was Jamey Fleming’s Uncle Roscoe. He had white, white hair, and he
was on his way to Europe to see this Hungarian man about a patent for a pen, or something. I can’t remember right now. But he had this great braying voice, like a rich donkey, and here’s how he described the Hungarian: ‘He’s as queer as Dick’s hatband.’ ” Caitlin delivered this in a loud, deep voice and then laughed. Yet even as she laughed she wondered why she told this story, if she wanted to prod Joe in some way.
And Joe did seem faintly uncomfortable, though he hid it by smiling and looking puzzled.
A silence settled over the room, but it did not make them nervous. It was a comforting silence; it seemed to tell them they were all right now, that this room wanted to be their shelter.
“It’s so good to see you again, Joe,” Caitlin finally said. She felt her heart pounding as if she had said much, much more.
“Thank you,” he said, and then laughed because it was an odd thing to say.
“Where are you staying. With friends?”
“Midtown, at the Hotel McAlpin,” he said.
“In a hotel? Why are you wasting your money? Or is the newspaper paying for you?”
“No, no. I don’t work at the Chronicle anymore. I didn’t much care for San Francisco.” He paused. “I wanted to come back to New York. I had the tip about Coleman. And I wanted to see you.”
“Are you going to stay here until you find him?”
“I thought I’d go to Europe. Maybe Paris. I liked it in Paris an awful lot. It’s not any of that Lost Generation bullshit. I could really work there, is what I think.”
“Oh. I could never live away.”
“Why not? There’s plenty of better places.”
“I don’t know. This is my home.”
“This country?”
“Yes, it’s my home.”
“Well, it’s not mine. This country doesn’t want people like me in it.”
“What’s so bad about you?”
“I’m just not … ” He made a fist and shook it, like a college boy at the big game.
“You can stay with us, you know,” said Caitlin. “It is your apartment, in a way.”
“No, it’s not,” said Joe. His eyes seemed to fill and come forward for a moment, but then they were distant again. “Are you with somebody yet?”
Secret Anniversaries Page 24