The waiter arrived at that moment with the two bowls of soup. He stopped short. Dorothy Bontecou brushed by him on her way out.
“The … lady is not feeling too well. Bring me the check, please.”
Harry wondered at the telegram from his mother. She was temperamentally averse to melodrama, but here she had wired him, “PLEASE COME IMMEDIATELY. HEALTH ALL RIGHT. DO NOT PHONE. JUST COME. MOM.”
He was tempted to disregard her instructions and call her anyway, if only to establish the authenticity of the telegram. But he must guard against being suspicious, he reminded himself: Just because you work for Joe McCarthy, don’t start off by doubting that two and two make four. He called Mary Haskell. All he’d need, with Mary, was to say those few words. “Mother needs me.”
He was on the train at two and arrived at Pennsylvania Station at seven. He had wired back, “COMING APPROX 7:30. LOVE HARRY.”
She opened the door for him, took his coat, and offered him a glass of wine. He took it, closely observing her, apparently unchanged since his last visit a month ago.
She sat down opposite him in the living room.
“Darling Harry, let’s start with this. Your father, after we had been married a few years, was disappointed we had no children—”
Harry would put a quick end to the excruciating snail pace.
“Mother. I know about Dad. When I went through his trunk for the insurance information I read the letter from his doctor.”
Dorothy stared. “All this time you knew?”
“Yes. What was the point in telling you I knew?”
She paused. “I see. I see. No point. No point. Then you knew, of course, that I had a lover.”
“Obviously I had to know that.”
“Harry, the first thing I want you to know is that … my Jesse and your … father were friends.”
“That’s nice.”
The moment he said it he regretted it.
His mother simply went on. “And when your father—when Jesse—found out I was going to have the baby I so terribly wanted—oh, Harry, how I longed for a child—Jesse knew right away who it was.”
She turned her head to one side.
“He told me two things. The first was, I must promise never to see him again. The second—”now she broke into sobs—“was that he was very happy, for my sake—and for his.”
Harry, got up, went to her, and put his arms around his mother. She wept on, but finally drew breath.
“I can’t even imagine,” she managed through her tears, “what it would have been like without you, Harry.” He soothed her, brushing back her hair, and, in a while, she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. She brought it down and gripped the arms of her chair. She turned her head again. And pronounced the words metallically.
“He is Alex Herrendon.”
Harry turned slowly. He walked up the stairs to his bedroom. He sat there for a long time, looking every now and then at the telephone. Finally his mother knocked.
“You must have something to eat. And you must know that Alex agreed to speak to Robin at the same time I spoke with you. It’s nine o’clock. She knows now.”
It was when he heard this that Harry collapsed on the bed. His mother stayed outside the closed door. It was an hour before the convulsive sobs died down. She opened the door enough to see Harry, on the bed, fully dressed, face down. She prayed he was asleep. She didn’t want to find out.
48
HANBERRY, 1991
Herrendon talks of March 1926
It was the tenth day of their collaboration. Alex Herrendon and Harry Bontecou worked every day, Alex working out his passion to put his finger on what he thought the great question raised by the twentieth century: the capacity of totalitarian movements to capture the loyalty not only of multitudes of people, but of intellectuals. And Harry, the historian, wanted to tell the story of the most prominent American figure in the anti-Communist scene in America in the early fifties.
Alex and Harry worked together in the same library, the sometime Red and the sometime Redhunter. They were reaching a level of investigative conviviality that began to affect the nature of their feelings toward one another. It was after a substantial dinner by the fire that Alex brought it up.
“It’s becoming a little weary—wouldn’t you agree, Harry?—our joint inhibition, our … coping with great questions side by side with our refusal to touch on the personal questions?”
He looked over at Harry, whose hand was on the side table, his fingers playing with the coffee cup’s handle. Harry said nothing.
“Do you mind, Harry?”
“No. Not really. Go ahead.”
Harry’s voice was quiet, but Alex found in it a trace of encouragement. He was right—Harry spoke again. “No. I’d like to hear about it. When did you meet my mother?”
Alex poured himself a brandy. “My father brought me to America when I was just seventeen. When you checked in at Columbia as a freshman in those days—I don’t know whether that was true in your case, but it was certainly true in 1922—a senior student was assigned to look after you for a couple of weeks. Show you where things are, where you need to go to select your courses. My senior counselor was the tall, blond, blue-eyed, slightly emaciated Jesse Bontecou. He was a World War One veteran and had married the summer before his senior year. He was more than merely formal in the care he took of me. Jesse invited me to his own apartment for dinner. His wife—I find it easier to speak of her so, rather than as your mother—was enchanting, and thought me especially sad and lonely, a young Englishman with absolutely no one to look after him. They took me for weekends at his mother’s house on Fire Island—Mrs. Bontecou was a widow, of course.
One night Dorothy had to stay in New York, I forget why. Jesse took me fishing, and at night, sharing his room, Jesse asked if I liked poetry. I replied by quoting to him—in its entirety—I still remember it—one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, the “I come to bury Caesar” one. He was enthralled and asked if I would listen to some of his poetry. I did so, avidly. Jesse was delighted, and from that day until—until four years later, he’d send me a copy of every poem he composed.”
“Yes,” Harry commented. “He kept them all. They filled three bound volumes. Low Library at Columbia has them.”
Alex continued. “His graduation present from his mother, you may or may not have been told—you may have been told and forgotten—was a month in Europe. I saw them off on the Olympic early in June. A great party, a dozen of his classmates and a few from my own class who, through me, had got to know him.
“Exactly one day after they set sail I had a desperate telegram from Jesse at sea. He had got word that his mother had died of a heart attack. He knew, because we had chatted about it, that I was at loose ends—Father had planned to take me to England for the summer vacation, but I wasn’t especially looking forward to it and hadn’t made a reservation, more or less waiting for my father to take the initiative. The long telegram—you didn’t have ship-to-shore telephone service in those days—asked me if I could go to their house in Fire Island to look after things. And added that if it suited me, I was welcome to stay there until Jesse and Dorothy got back in August. ‘PLEASE CALL MOTHER’S LAWYER AND ADVISE IF YOU CAN DO THIS.’ The cable gave the telephone number.
“I called my father, who was in Philadelphia. I think he was rather relieved that he wouldn’t have to return to England with me on the same boat—Father never much enjoyed human company. He said I could return to England for a late summer vacation—there were sailings every day back then—or, if I wished, I could remain on Fire Island and ‘travel about, get to know something about New England.’ He sent me a cashier’s check at the Fire Island address.
“So there I was, a—precocious—British student getting ready to enter sophomore year, camped down in a comfortable cottage, in the middle of June, a lovely beach, trees and rosebushes on either side of the house. The family lawyer, old Mr. Ferguson, I think his name was, came in to see me, gave
me a list of matters to look after, instructed me to forward utility bills and save all others until Jesse returned, and told me he had signed me up for a guest pass at the Fire Island Club.
“I was deliriously happy. Eighteen years old, with a private dwelling at my disposal, a beach, a village and country club within walking distance, my father’s fat check in my pocket. I found it a perfect setting to write my first contribution to the New Masses, on the excesses of the capitalist class.”
“Did you use your own name?”
“No. Not because I had any notion that twenty years later I’d be engaged in espionage. But because for all that my father was a nonconformist, he would not have liked to see an article in the New Masses by Viscount Alex Herrendon.”
“Back then the British socialists weren’t all that heated up about Soviet Communism, I know.”
“Correct, but the Communists were a revolutionary order. And Father didn’t want his son associated with socialism of that type. Anyway, I spent a fruitful and pleasant summer at Fire Island and went back to school in the fall.”
“Your father and mother and I remained close friends after he graduated. In the fall of my senior year Jesse called. He said he wanted to talk to me. He came in just after I had made myself some soup. He had been drinking. I thought, Oh, my God, there has been a family quarrel! He said he wanted to read me a poem he had just composed. I listened, but not patiently. He hadn’t come to my apartment on Ninety-second Street to read me his latest poem. So I said, after clucking my approval of his verse: ‘What’s the matter, Jesse?’ He reached in his pocket and showed me a letter from a doctor. The language was full of technical terms, I remember. But its meaning was very clear. Jesse Bontecou was infertile.”
Alex paused. Then he looked up. “Harry, do you want further details? Or can I just say that it was back at the cottage on Fire Island that spring, spending a few days of concentrated reading there. The call for Jesse came in, a former classmate, now at graduate school at Harvard. T. S. Eliot was coming to Cambridge and would give two lectures. Chance of a lifetime! Jesse could meet and talk with the brilliant poet. Dorothy insisted he go. I said I would go back to my apartment in the city. Wouldn’t hear of it! I was to stay right there and keep Dorothy … company. Jesse would be back in three days.”
“That’s when it happened?”
“Yes.”
“Were you still at the cottage when my father got back?”
“No. I told your mother to tell him I simply had to get back to New York because I hadn’t brought enough work with me.”
“But you saw him after that?”
“Yes. We both thought I should. But six weeks later she called me. She had been to the doctor. I never saw Jesse again.”
BOOK THREE
49
SEPTEMBER 1953
Professor Sherrill complains about McCarthy
The letter was addressed to “Harry F. Bontecou, Class of 1950.” Willmoore Sherrill liked to remind his former students that they were of junior rank.
Dear Harry,
You are overdue in visiting with me. I remember that you left Washington to spend your Labor Day vacations with your mother here in New York even in the hectic years 1950,1951, and 1952. This year promises to be more troublesome in the matter of the Communist world-wide offensive, notwithstanding the happy event of Stalin’s death in March, than any one of the preceding years, and it is concerning recent events and their meaning that I think you should consult with me. Now, if your plans bring you to New York as early as September 4, that is the day on which I have agreed to teach an introductory seminar for my students in the next semester. It would be instructive to them to hear you talk, and instructive for you to hear their questions, and perhaps my own. But after they are gone I’d wish a few hours with you. We can go to the West End Bar and you can pay the bill since, without knowing the exact figures, I must assume that an aide to Senator McCarthy is paid more than a mere tenured associate professor in the department of political science at Columbia. Besides which, you will recall that I was a Trotskyite at Cambridge in 1935, which datum will justify your dining with me in order to investigate my subversive past. If my understanding of the ways of Washington is correct (and I teach political science, you will remember), then that would entitle you to reimbursement for our dinner by the United States Treasury. Advise.
Ever, Willmoore Sherrill
Harry enjoyed the archly idiomatic style and the hortatory voice of his former professor. And he held out for “Willmoore,” as he had been instructed to call him, sympathy and admiration, and felt also a considerable debt to him. It was he who had given him advice, in 1948, on how to frame the critical debate with the pro-Wallaceite Tom Scott: an important event on campus. Mostly, it was Sherrill who—for Harry—had penetrated the shibboleth so popular with the reigning intelligentsia. It was that the Communists were just another political party, entitled to the same treatment as Republicans or Democrats or, for that matter, socialists.
Dear Willmoore:
Look, these are hard times for the cause, and I wouldn’t want to stand two hours before twenty of your trained student assassins to answer questions about Joe McCarthy, which is what they would spend their whole time doing. I ask myself in the morning when I pick up the paper outside my door: Was there ever a time when Senator McCarthy didn’t dominate the front pages? I mean, it makes no difference what he does and says, it is blown up into a story, usually accompanied by denunciations in the editorial pages. And in the Washington Post, of course, the almost-daily cartoon by Herblock, whose portraiture is insecure these days: Sometimes, when you see drawings of Joe McCarthy, you can’t absolutely tell whether he looks like Hitler or like Genghis Khan. Yesterday he was depicted half-shaven, crawling out of a sewer. So: No, I won’t appear at your seminar, but yes, let’s dine. September 4 is okay. Unless I hear from you I’ll pick you up at your Fellows’ suite, 7 P.M.
Harry was on time. Willmoore opened the door dressed with the neat bow tie, wearing an off-yellow shirt, tweed coat, gray flannel pants, cigarette, as ever, between his fingers.
“Come in, Harry. I just got back from a faculty meeting.” He removed his jacket. “I could use a drink. Next year I’m going to put in for an increase in salary if I have to attend faculty meetings. You still drinking scotch? One of my students, Henry Gardiner the Seventh, or maybe Eighth, gave me a bottle as a Christmas present, even though his grades don’t require my subornation—I’d be giving him a good grade anyway.”
Willmoore retrieved ice from the refrigerator in the little kitchen, poured the whiskey and soda, and waved Harry toward the leather couch he had become so familiar with as an undergraduate and friend.
“Now,” said Willmoore, sitting himself opposite with his bourbon on the rocks, “let’s get down to business. Your McCarthy is hurting us.”
Harry decided to stand fast.
“What’s Joe—McCarthy—doing that’s all that different from what he was doing when you were cheering him on?”
“He’s fucking up.”
“People said that back in the Wheeling days, though their language was a little better than yours.”
“Yes, but Harry, listen to this. In 1950 we had a Democratic administration that was in charge of the future of the country.”
Willmoore rose, drink in hand. He liked to stride, forward and back, in the room where he wove his spell on his seminar students.
“Truman accepted Yalta. He went to Potsdam and confirmed the slavery of Poland. His foreign-policy advisers wrote a policy for China that gave the country to the Communists. They invited an aggression in Korea. Soviet agents stole the secrets of the atom bomb. Alger Hiss was convicted of spying even while our president was denouncing his prosecution as a red herring. Henry Wallace captured the left wing of the Democratic Party and, except for a freak, would have cost the election to the Democrats, hardening the Democratic left and putting them in control of their party. But now?—”
“I know wha
t’s happened now, Willmoore. Yeah, Eisenhower came in, we sort of stopped the North Koreans, and a lot of security/ loyalty risks have been ejected. I guess you can add that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in June, which made a symbolic point. So what you were saying back then, in June, in your letter to me—that the general will in America was working to ‘exclude’ the pro-Communists—that’s happened. So shouldn’t Joe McCarthy get some of the credit?”
Willmoore sat down again. He had brought a folder of newspaper and magazine clippings from a drawer in his desk.
“Now listen here, Harry.”
He opened it on the coffee table.
“Your boss McCarthy writes to Senator Thomas Hennings. What is Hennings? He is a Democratic senator from Missouri, a lawyer in private life. Your boss McCarthy is struggling to validate his basic case made before the Tydings Committee. Something called the Gillette-Monroney Committee is established, to review your boss McCarthy’s conduct during the Tydings campaign. One of the senators who will decide his fate will be Senator Hennings. So what does he ask Hennings to do? To disqualify himself from the Gillette committee. Why? Because Hennings’s old law firm in St. Louis represents the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. So? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized against the Smith Act and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has attacked—your boss McCarthy,” Willmoore bent his head over his clipping, “ ‘along the same lines followed by the Daily Worker,’ to use McCarthy’s language.
“Now that’s just plain stupid! And it argues against the case McCarthy has been trying to make for two years. Obviously the Daily Worker is going to sound like the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, and the Areopagitica when it opposes the Smith Act—which is designed to tattoo and disable American Communist leaders. What did your boss McCarthy—”
The Redhunter Page 31