Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  Finally, during the third week, he sat at the breakfast table and told her that Weir was gone, that he was being questioned. Ginnie stood at the counter with a stunned look, an oven mitt on her hand. What does that mean, she’d asked, and Henry had said that he didn’t know.

  * * *

  On the fifteenth day, he sat alone with Marist in the conference room. No polygraph, no notebooks, no papers on the table. Marist was relaxed, sitting back in his chair, looking at Henry as if they were two friends sharing a drink.

  Marist said that they had reached a conclusion. They were confident that Henry hadn’t been involved in the deception in any way. He would be returned to his normal duties. His office would be open to him again. Everything would be as it was.

  Marist stood and Henry stood. As Henry left the room, Marist stopped him, said that he had some good news for a change. That he, Marist, had been promoted. He was moving to Henry’s department. Starting that Monday, he said, he would be taking Arthur Weir’s place.

  8

  San Francisco, Spring 1956

  Henry thought that he had entered the wrong apartment. He stood in the living room, disoriented, almost dizzy. Heavy burgundy drapes covered the windows. A chenille sofa and chair sat where the secretaries’ furniture had been. Paintings hung on the walls, nude women reclining and bathing, white and Negro, Oriental couples in various sexual positions and combinations, all lit with small electric pin lights clipped to the wood of the overly ornate frames. The walls were still wet with paint, a dark, nearly blood red. Drop cloths covered the floor, color-stippled along the edges.

  In the bedroom, the twin beds had been replaced by a large four-poster covered in a gold spread, with an assortment of fringed velveteen pillows. The utilitarian dresser under the mirror had been replaced with something massive and baroque.

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t screw up any of your stuff.” Dorn stood in the doorway, dressed in spattered painter’s overalls, holding a paint roller in one hand and a martini glass in the other. “You should give me a key, it’ll make it easier to get in.”

  “Who else was here?”

  “You don’t think I’m capable of doing this? I have an eye for this stuff.”

  “Who else was here?”

  “I already told you, Hank. Nobody.”

  Henry walked back through the living room, crossed the vestibule, and unlocked the south door.

  Dorn followed at a distance. “You don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  Henry went through the office. All seemed to be in order. The recorder, the shutter controls for the cameras. He unlocked the top drawer of his desk. The ledger was still in its place.

  “Nothing else changes,” Henry said. “Nothing else comes into the apartments without my approval.”

  Dorn raised an eyebrow, nodded.

  Henry said, “Understood?”

  “Aye-aye, Captain.”

  Henry backed out of the south apartment, locked the door, brushed past Dorn on his way to the stairs.

  “Don’t start worrying already.” Dorn sipped his drink, called down over the railing. “We haven’t done anything yet.”

  9

  On her way home, Hannah tried to remember the same walk in Arlington, the long stands of birch and ash trees, the familiar houses, the neighbors’ cars in welcoming colors, but all she could see was the new town, its paint-peeling weathered ugliness, and then back over her shoulder the imagined crash and glow, the city in flames across the bay.

  They’d shown a civil defense film at school, footage of atomic bomb tests cut together with a projected aftermath, images from the San Francisco earthquake standing in for the next great destruction. Hollow shells of buildings, piles of brick and glass, smoke rising to the sky. A narrator warned of the dangers in the city after the bomb: radiation in the air, in the water; desperate criminal activity; still-falling masonry.

  She couldn’t get the movie out of her head. She could picture her father at work in the city, the building in which he sat crumbling from under him, his desk and chair tipping, other desks tipping, men in suits grabbing for their hats as they fell. She reached the house, their new house, tried to imagine it as the house in Arlington, but the light from the explosions across the bay flickered in the windows.

  She didn’t want to talk to her mother. Her mother wouldn’t understand. Her mother would say what she always said, that it wasn’t worth thinking about the bad things. As if that made them go away. She wouldn’t let Hannah walk to school alone again after a scene like this, coming home in tears. Hannah would be forced back into the ridiculous parade of those first weeks here, she and her mother and Thomas ambling down the hill.

  She would wait for her father. He had always been the one to take her fears seriously. He was different now, she knew this, something had happened that had made them move, something had happened to him, he was further away somehow, but he was still the one she went to when she was afraid.

  Inside the house she marched straight to her room, ignoring her mother’s questions, closing the door and crying until the light outside dimmed and she heard the front door open, her father’s footsteps in the hall. It was the only thing she had really learned about this new place. She could tell the sound of him in the house.

  When he opened her door she ran to him, clinging to his waist, blubbering about the movie, embarrassing herself but unable to stop, tears and snot on the belly of his shirt, the tail of his tie, gulping air from hiccuping sobs, pleading with him not to go back into the city. He sat with her on the bed, listened to her recount the story of the film. He didn’t try to convince her that what she had seen wasn’t real. He considered everything she said. She could see him working it over in his head, so when he told her, finally, that she didn’t need to be afraid of this, she knew she could believe him, that there was some truth there, something to hold on to. Exhausted, she lay back onto the bed and he covered her with the blanket, her hand in his, her breathing slowing, deepening.

  When she woke it was dark in the house. She was still in her school clothes, though her shoes were off and her hair was down, had been brushed. She sat up and thought she could see explosions again out the black window, fire across the water, but then her father’s hand squeezed hers and she lay back down beside him, closing her eyes in the safety of his arms.

  10

  The girl leaned across the bed, tapped her cigarette against the wall to pack the tobacco. She found a box of matches in her purse and lit the tip, inhaling, blowing smoke in a long steady stream. It was part of some kind of show, Henry knew. She was establishing her character for him. A hard-edged woman of the world.

  She was twenty, maybe, skinny and pale and angular. Her hair was blond, showing dark at the roots. She wore a thin blue dress that matched her eyes. There were bruises on her knees, and one on her thigh that Henry could see when she crossed her legs.

  She said her name was Elizabeth. The first time she had buzzed at the front door he had turned her away. She’d had his name wrong, had asked for Mr. Stonewell. An hour later she returned with the correct name and he let her in, followed her up the stairs to the north apartment.

  “What has he told you?” Henry passed her an ashtray, stood back by the dresser while she sat back on the bed.

  “About what?”

  “About this.”

  She looked around the room, caught her reflection in the mirror, pushed her hair behind her ears. “That I’ll be bringing men here a couple times a week.”

  “And then what?”

  “Slipping them something, maybe. In their drink.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Yes.”

  “A couple of years.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “A couple of years.” She looked to the mirror
again, then back at Henry. “There’s going to be someone else? Another girl?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Will we be working together?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean will we be working together.”

  “That’s yet to be determined,” Henry said. “What did he tell you about me?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything. Just your name: Mr. Gladwell.” She gave a smart-aleck smile, getting the name right.

  “Nothing else?” Henry said.

  Elizabeth leaned across the bed again, tapped the end of her cigarette into the ashtray. She looked back at Henry. “He said that you’re someone who likes to watch.”

  11

  At night, he sat at his desk in the basement of the house in Oakland and worked on the biography. He believed he had been away from Washington long enough to think clearly, that there had been enough time since Weir’s betrayal and what happened after.

  During the interrogation he was so unsettled that he couldn’t remember everything. What he could remember, he didn’t want to give to them until he’d had time to go through it himself. If it were anyone else involved, he would have been the one asking questions, and he saw no reason why things should be different in this case. During the weeks of questioning he came home every night and spent hours writing, making sense of the memories their questions had triggered. Then there was the thing that happened, the indiscretion at the Christmas party, and after the indiscretion he went back to those notes and realized that they made no sense. Some of the memories were obviously false; some were confused amalgamations of unrelated events and discussions. It wasn’t until he was away from Washington that he was able to try again.

  There were nearly ten years to recount—the years during the war and then the years in Washington, with Chicago in between. He started to tell the story in chronological order, but found himself remembering things in no particular sequence. He wrote on loose paper so that he could physically move memories around, changing the shape of the whole. He asked himself questions, letting the answers lead to other recollections. Hours spent this way at the desk in the basement. The small window high on the cement wall, ground level outside, moonlight on the grass. The quiet house a soft weight above.

  They had discussed everything. Weir was a voracious consumer of gossip, eager to hear what was said at the rare cocktail party he missed, what was whispered out in the secretarial pool. His favorite spectator sport. Henry learned early on that there was more than a prurient interest, that even the most mundane-seeming quarrel or liaison was information to be filed away, whether true or not. Rumor carried its own currency, had its own uses.

  Weir had given him many books over the years, poetry and poetry journals, most with Weir’s comments and opinions scrawled along the perimeters of the pages. Henry read through the books again at the desk in the basement. Auden, Pound, Cummings. Lesser-known poets in hand-sewn chapbooks. Student work from university journals that Weir found promising or laughably pretentious. Clippings from poems that surfaced in popular magazines. Weir’s notes often longer than the poems themselves. Smudges of cigarette ash on the pages, coffee drips and rings. His own or Weir’s, impossible to tell.

  He’d thought that he had known Weir’s thinking inside and out, but he had been wrong, so he spent hours with the books, reading and rereading poems he had memorized long ago, forcing himself to see them stripped of his long-held interpretations. Reading Weir’s comments as if the man was sitting beside him, as if they had resumed their daily conversations, but this time with Henry aware of the truth, or part of the truth, Weir’s double life, and looking for clues to the deception.

  Weir pored over Eastern Bloc poetry, Soviet poetry. Much of it was by-the-numbers propaganda, but there was almost always something deeper to find. It’s hard to write a poem and not include some truth, Weir would say. Look for what slips through. Weir with his cigarettes and coffee and stack of Russian verse, saying, I’ll take a bad poem over a good newspaper any day.

  First light at the window. A thin, golden glow. Henry reshuffled the papers. Conversations from six years ago, eight years ago. Weir’s words and then Henry’s words. He heard footsteps from above, the creaking of floorboards. Ginnie waking, the house coming to life. There was no telling how long this would take. Weeks, months. No one back east was waiting for this, no one was expecting it. It was his alone, a project of one.

  He reshuffled the papers. There were ten years to analyze, looking for what he had missed.

  12

  There were three or four bars in the neighborhood where girls hooked johns, Dorn said. He gave his briefing in the north living room, walking a slow perimeter as he spoke. Elizabeth watched from the window seat, smoking. Henry sat on the burgundy sofa, looking at the heavy matching drapes, the boudoir paintings. The apartment looked like the movie set of a low-rent Parisian bordello.

  The girls also met men on the street, Dorn said, but these encounters were less desirable than the bar meetings. There was more danger on the street. The possibility of being pushed into an alley, pulled into a doorway.

  Elizabeth finished her cigarette, stood and crossed the room. She was wearing another short, loose cotton dress. She walked barefoot across the rug, arching up on her toes with each step, betraying a dancer’s grace, maybe, somewhere years ago, a previous life.

  Some of the girls were skilled at slipping mickeys into johns’ drinks, Dorn said. It was a lucrative side business, almost foolproof. Most johns wouldn’t go running to the cops when they came to and found they’d been rolled.

  Elizabeth stood in front of the couch and Henry handed her a cigarette. She leaned in for a light, giving him a clear look down her dress, the absence of undergarments, and then she straightened and walked to the record player by the bedroom doorway. She began flipping through the secretaries’ abandoned crate of LPs, Glenn Miller and Lester Brown and Frank Sinatra.

  Dorn lit his own cigarette, watched Elizabeth’s behind as she bent over the crate.

  “You ever see a magician?” Dorn said. “Whadotheycallem? Street magicians. Close-up magicians.” He smiled at the retrieval of the proper term. “They can find a canary in your pocket or a nickel behind your ear. That kind of shit. Prestidigitation. Some of these girls are like magicians.”

  Henry lifted his cup to his lips. He stopped, just shy of a sip, looked at his coffee, now shot through with a faint white swirl, the new liquid rapidly disappearing into the old.

  Henry looked up. Dorn was watching him with a smile. An old Benny Goodman tune began from the record player. Elizabeth began to hum along.

  “I’ve always loved magic,” Dorn said.

  * * *

  They crossed the Embarcadero in Dorn’s big blue Lincoln. Dorn drove slowly, close to the curb, his arm hanging out the open window. The stretches between streetlights were dark; the smell was strong: salt, fish, cigars, urine, garbage. Spilled beer when they passed a bar with an open door. Every few blocks Dorn lifted his hand and pulled on his Lucky Strike. The thing looked tiny in his beefy mitt, like a child’s candy cigarette. He had the radio on, a late-night classical music program playing low.

  “Prostitutes, pimps, vagrants, queers,” Dorn said. “There’s nobody else down here. Let me know if you see anybody different. You won’t.”

  Most of the bars were full, men spilling out onto the sidewalk to laugh and smoke and argue. A few girls walked alone or in pairs, stopping to talk with groups of men or to lean into the open windows of cars that pulled to the curb.

  The people on the street eyed them warily. Henry couldn’t tell whether they recognized the car, if they saw Dorn’s big bald head in the red dashboard light, or if they were just in a constant state of vigilance.

  “Every guy down here is carrying something,” Dorn said. “A knife, a gun, a bottle he can’t wait to crack over your head. The girls, too, most of them. This
is another place entirely. The rules are different. The rules are pretty much the opposite of the rules where you’re from. Remember that and you’ll be fine.”

  Dorn brought his cigarette to his mouth, left it burning between his lips. He took a hard turn onto a pier access road, cut his headlights, and let the Lincoln coast. Men and women moved in the shadows. Some lay on the sidewalk, passed out or sleeping something off. Small groups huddled around trash-can fires, passing bottles. After about a hundred feet the pavement ended at the pier. The water beyond rolling and purple-black, striped with thin veins of moonlight.

  “These people aren’t like us,” Dorn said. “You can talk to them and sometimes they sound like human beings, but don’t get fooled. They don’t have families. They don’t have mortgages, kids in school. They’re drunks or dope fiends. Nut cases. I spend all day with these people and none of them is worth a damn.”

  The Lincoln slowed to a stop. More movement in the shadows ahead.

  Dorn turned to Henry. “You don’t believe me yet,” he said. “I can see that. But you’ll come around.”

  Dorn switched on the headlights. Men scattered in every direction, half dressed some of them, wild-eyed and flailing for cover.

  “These people are barely even here,” Dorn said. “Nobody’ll miss them when they’re gone.”

  13

  Sometimes she woke and found herself alone. Dawn an hour away, Henry down at his desk in the basement. Ginnie didn’t know if he’d slept, or for how long if he had. An impression from his body on the other side of the bed, cool to her touch.

  She cleaned the basement when he was in the city. She was careful not to disturb anything. She knew that he was writing a history of his time with Weir, their relationship. He kept the pages he had written locked in a drawer in the desk. The sensitive nature of his work. The things the two men knew. This was what she reminded herself while she was cleaning, that the lock had nothing to do with her.