by Robert Stone
He took the Belt Parkway northward and fought his way into the traffic around the King’s County Courthouse. He had not been to Brooklyn for years and being there gave him the mild elation that came with a new and unfamiliar town. The restaurant was on Court Street; it had valet parking and a few sumac trees out back and he found it on the first pass. He brushed the cigarette ashes from his jacket, put his suitcase in the trunk and handed the keys to a uniformed Puerto Rican attendant.
McDermott’s was the name of the place, three huge rooms of cut glass, oak and dusty ceiling fans. McDermott’s, Holliwell decided, was great fun—and when he thought back on the business later, it seemed to him that it was largely the prospect of dining in downtown Brooklyn that had persuaded him to lunch with Marty Nolan in the first place.
A captain in a tuxedo escorted him among the seated landlords and deputy inspectors, leading him to a round table on which reposed a half-finished martini and a rumpled paisley napkin. He ordered a martini for himself and admired the huge mirrors on the paneled walls. The drink had arrived and Holliwell was taking his first sip when he saw Marty Nolan step out of the gents’ in the next salon and proceed nearsightedly across the hall.
As Marty walked, his left hand absently brushed an area below the belt of his double-knit trousers; he was checking to see if his fly was unzipped. When he saw Holliwell, his round face brightened. Holliwell stood up to shake hands with him.
“Herr Professor,” Marty Nolan said.
His hand was damp, his thick horn-rimmed glasses seemed almost about to steam and although it was not at all hot in McDermott’s there was a band of perspiration below the line of his fair curly hair.
“Good to see you, Marty,” Holliwell said.
It would be possible, he thought, to describe Nolan as fastidious—yet there was always something faintly gross about the man, the suggestion of unwholesome secrets.
Nolan raised his glass and they drank.
“I’m delighted that you made the time for lunch. I’m honored.”
“Not at all,” Holliwell said. “I looked forward to it.”
He was privy to a few of Marty Nolan’s secrets. One was that during the Tet offensive, the Viet Cong forces who overran Hue had buried him alive—and he had lain in the earth half conscious for six hours until a party of German medical missionaries dug him out.
And on one occasion, Holliwell, visiting from the Central Highlands, had found a manuscript sheet in Nolan’s portable typewriter with a single sentence at the top of the page and the sentence had read: “The Jew is at home in the modern world.” Whether or not this was a libel depended entirely upon one’s sense and experience of the modern world—but the business about “the Jew” was distinctly sinister. Can of worms there, Holliwell had thought.
But his ties to Nolan were old and strong. They had both gone to Regis in the fifties—it was a Jesuit high school that took in the smartest kids from the city’s parochial grade schools. They had both been released into the nineteen sixties from prestigious secular universities. They had both been to Vietnam on their government’s service.
Marty was peering over his glasses at the room in which they sat.
“I’m in transports of Brooklyn nostalgia,” he told Holliwell. “I come from Bay Ridge, you remember.”
“Of course I remember. What brings you up here? I thought you worked down in Washington.”
“Oh yeah,” Marty said, “in the Washington area. I’m visiting my mother.”
Holliwell inquired after Marty Nolan’s mother, wondering if he had ever married and whether or not to ask.
“Mom’s O.K. She gets around.”
“Well, it’s a great place, this,” Holliwell said. “It’s really old Brooklyn.”
They ordered more martinis, a bottle of Barbarousse. Holliwell asked for a steak and salad, Nolan the veal piccata.
“Did you know,” Nolan asked as a waiter opened the wine, “that Paul Robeson died this morning?”
“I thought he died in Russia about ten years ago.”
“This morning,” Nolan said. His eyes flashed a thick whimsy which Holliwell remembered very clearly from the past. “It was on the radio.”
“Well,” Holliwell said, cutting his steak, “I hardly know how to react.”
“I wasn’t trying to goad you to malicious satisfaction, Frank. After all, everybody dies. It just brings back old times. I’d like to go to his funeral.”
“You mean officially?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’d just like to go. To see it.”
“Think the FBI will be there? Taking everybody’s picture?”
“I wouldn’t think so. But who knows with those guys?”
Holliwell, chewing his steak, became aware of Marty’s eyes on him again.
“How’s your life, Frank? Quiet desperation? Self-fulfillment?”
Holliwell nodded and finished chewing.
“Last month,” he told Nolan, “my oldest daughter burned herself slightly. It was the winter solstice and she was jumping over a flaming log with her boyfriend.”
“Is that the way they get married now?”
Holliwell poured them both some Barbarousse.
“How about you, Marty? Ever get married?”
“I was married in Nam, didn’t you know that? In the Saigon cathedral.”
“It must have been after I left,” Holliwell said. “What’s the lady like?”
“Neat,” Marty said.
Holliwell found himself touched. “Is she Vietnamese?”
“From Worcester. We’re separated now. We don’t have any kids.”
Holliwell nodded to convey comprehension, sympathy, whatever might be called for.
“And you,” Nolan said. “You’re off to Compostela for a little something different.”
“I fiddled it. I invited my friends at the university down there to invite me. How did you come to hear about it?”
“I had a letter from Oscar Ocampo. He said you’d be coming down.”
Holliwell realized then that there would be a pitch. He must, he thought, have realized all along that there would be one. But it would not disturb him, he decided; it was part of a game, an artifact of his friendship with Nolan, a little fencing between gentlemen. Neither of them would take it too seriously.
“How come Oscar’s writing to you? I thought he was a leftist.”
“Sure he’s a leftist. But we’re not enemies. We have a dialogue going.”
Ocampo was a government anthropologist with a sinecure in the university at Compostela, a gambler and a great womanizer. Holliwell had always known him to be a passionate sympathizer with revolution.
“Oscar and I used to have some great arguments,” Holliwell said. Apparently Oscar had stopped arguing. They had turned him—either with money or with the offer of a job in the States. It was a shame, Holliwell thought, and Oscar must feel very bad about it.
“I suppose,” Holliwell said, “that in a couple of years, you’ll be asking me to get him a job up here.”
“Frank—how about doing us a favor while you’re down there?”
Holliwell buttered some French bread and said what he had decided he would say.
“If you approach me with something like that, Marty, I’m supposed to publicize the approach. My professional association passed a resolution against doing favors for you guys.”
“Your professional association,” Marty Nolan said humorously, “is a bunch of long-haired disorderly persons. Pinkos, Frank. Red rats.”
“All anthropologists are brothers,” Holliwell said.
“Suppose I ask how you voted on that resolution?”
Holliwell put his bread down and set his fork beside it.
“I abstained. I was in favor of the resolution but I felt compromised. Because of what I did in Nam. The favors.”
“God,” Marty said soberly. “You’re an honest man, Frank.”
“Well,” Holliwell told him, “there it is. As they used to say. What do you
hear from Ho Chi Minh City?”
Marty looked at him for a moment and finished his wine.
“Not much. They arrested the Hoa Hao. A lot of them were friends of ours and nobody bothered to get them out. Look—what can I say? You want to know if I’m bitter? I’m not. Neither am I repentant. The other guys fought hard, they earned it.”
“If you were bitter I wouldn’t blame you. You really came through the whole thing damn well.”
Nolan put his own fork down. They had both stopped eating.
“What should I do—run for Congress? Get myself a tent show in Orange County—I Know the Red Terror Firsthand? I’ll tell you something, Frank—the night they dug me out I was in a hospital compound with this old Spanish priest. The guy was walking up and down chain smoking and they’d had him under the ground longer than I was. He said to me—Hombre, this was nothing. They buried me alive in Murcia in thirty-eight and it was a lot harder.”
Holliwell laughed and shook his head.
“Frank,” Marty Nolan said, “let me tell you about what’s going on down south. I guarantee, you’ll love it.”
Holliwell shrugged; Nolan was leaning across the table at him, his eyes shining with good-natured intrigue.
“Down in Tecan, on the east coast, even as we sit here—some of our countrymen find themselves in a state of social and spiritual crisis.”
“Let’s let them work it out for themselves,” Holliwell said.
“All I want to know, Frank, is what they’re really up to.”
“Ask Oscar what they’re up to—he’s on the payroll, right? Speaking as an American taxpayer, I don’t give a shit.”
“Oh, Frank,” Marty said. He sat back in his chair as though scandalized. “Information is a positive force. It furthers communication. It reduces isolation and clarifies motives. The more everybody knows about what everybody else is doing, the less misunderstanding there is in the world.”
“I’m going to Compostela. I’m not setting foot in fucking Tecan. It’s a rathole and it gets on my conscience.”
“Nonsense,” Marty said, “it’s a wonderful place. They have American-style hardware stores and the President speaks English just like we do here on Court Street.”
“And he’s wonderful too.”
“He certainly is,” Marty said. “He’s a Rotarian.”
“Marty,” Holliwell said, looking around for the waiter, “get off my back. I’m not going there and I’m not doing you any favors.”
When the waiter came near, Nolan ordered them both a stinger. A busboy took their unfinished lunches away.
“On the Caribbean coast of Tecan there’s a little place the locals call French Harbor. A couple of clicks down from Puerto Alvarado. For the last thirty years the American Devotionists have had a mission there but they’re on their last legs now and they want to close it down. The only people left there are a priest in his sixties and an American nursing nun. Now the Devotionists have been asked about this and their provincial in New Orleans is being very cagey—but it seems that these characters won’t come back.”
The drinks arrived; Marty raised his glass in salute.
“There’s a lot of medieval church diplomacy going on. The provincial says he’ll cut off their funds but he hasn’t. The priest and nun say they’ll come back presently but they won’t. Also the Tecanecan government has become aware of their presence and the Tecanecan government is extremely paranoid.”
“And extremely murderous,” Holliwell said.
“O.K.,” Marty said, “they’re murderous troglodytes and we put them in. But there it is. The Tecanecans suspect that the two of them are somehow mixed up in subversive activities but it hasn’t got a line on them and it doesn’t want a hassle with the church.”
“And what do your sources say?”
“That these people are wrongos, Commies et cetera. That’s what they always say. You know, Tecan is a special situation—it’s still the fifties there. Our ambassador is a Birchite moron. The cops lock you up for reading Voltaire.”
“Another corner of the free world.”
“Don’t give me clichés, Frank. Save them for the meetings of your professional association and someday they’ll make you their president.”
He finished his drink looking pained.
“Listen, old chap—I want to know what these people are up to. They’re my compatriots and erstwhile co-religionists and they’re fucking with El Toro down there. Somebody may have to bail them out.”
“I’m not going down there to spy on them.”
“Spy on them? Are you crazy? They’re already being spied on seven ways from sundown by people who’d love nothing more than to mess with their private parts.”
Holliwell signaled for another pair of stingers.
“You’re going to Compostela. It would be the easiest thing in the world for you to get a Tecanecan visa and check out French Harbor. Go diving, go bonefishing. There’s even an Old Empire ruin a few miles from there for you to scramble around. The thing is,” he went on, before Holliwell could protest, “it’s me that wants to know about these people. Not so much the outfit as just me. And I’d like to get it not from some informer or right-wing spook—but from somebody with some sensitivity. Somebody who could give me a real insight into what they think theyre doing down there. You might be in a position to help everybody out.”
“The last time I thought I was in that position things didn’t work out very well.”
“So what do you want? A perfect world? Tell me something, Professor, have you stopped believing that people have to take sides?”
“No,” Holliwell said. “People have to take sides.”
“What side are you on then? Do you really think the other guys are going to resolve social contradictions and make everything O.K.? Worker in the morning, hunter in the afternoon, scholar in the evening—do you really believe that’s on, Frank?”
“No,” Holliwell said.
“Well, it’s them or us, chum. Like always. They make absolute claims, we make relative ones. That’s why our side is better in the end.”
“Is that what you believe?”
Marty shrugged. “Sure I believe it. You believe it too. Anyway I’m not recruiting you and it’s not some kind of hostile operation. I told you what I wanted—just a little insight. It could be that we have something to learn from these two people in Tecan.”
“Why don’t you just write them a letter. Ask them what it is they want down there.”
Nolan exhaled slowly and let his narrow shoulders sag.
“Give me a brandy,” he told the waiter. “Two brandies.” He turned from Holliwell to look around the room, at the wainscoted ceilings and the dwindling crowd of heavy-faced, hard-eyed diners.
“Jesus, I picked this place because I thought the atmosphere might discourage moral posturing.”
“It must be you and me, Marty. We’re spoiling the atmosphere.”
Nolan took his brandy without ceremony.
“This conversation depresses me,” he said, “because it reminds me that we live in the land of total vindication. T.V. T.V. or nothing. I mean twenty years ago we had the total vindication of William Jennings Bryan, and Father Flanagan and apple pie. Secularism”—he made a little equals sign in the air with his fingers—“was Communism. Modernism was godlessness. Bolshevism … All the eggheads were Commie stooges and you had to go to Fordham or Darlington, South Carolina, to find a loyal American. Then we get fucked up in Nam and Saigon falls and the whole card’s reversed. Hiss didn’t do it, the Rosenbergs didn’t do it, nobody fucking did it and Truman started the cold war. Total vindication.”
“Well,” Holliwell said, “there’s nothing like total vindication.”
“Exactly. See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts. In many ways it’s a very stupid country.”
“Is this the patriotic approach?”
“Hell, no,” Nolan sa
id, “the patriotic approach is out of date.”
They sat drinking in silence for a while. When the check came, Holliwell moved it to his own side of the table and kept it there.
“We’re at a very primitive stage of mankind,” Nolan declared, “that’s what people don’t understand. Just pick up the Times on any given day and you’ve got a catalogue of ape behavior. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you’re reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another.”
Holliwell paid the check with his BankAmericard and Nolan did not move to prevent him.
“Sorry,” Holliwell said. “Not this time.”
They walked to the front door together and stood beside the parking-lot fence. The brisk wind raised whirls of dust from the sidewalk and Nolan shielded his eyes with his right hand.
“When you’re down there you may feel differently. So if I may, I’ll ask you again through a third party.”
Holliwell only smiled and they shook hands. It was not until he was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge that the suggestion of a threat in Nolan’s final words struck him, making him think of the man entombed beside the Perfume River, the involved observer of the modern world. A chill touched his inward loneliness. He was, he knew at that moment, really without beliefs, without hope—either for himself or for the world. Almost without friends, certainly without allies. Alone.
He drove toward Manhattan facing the squat brutality of the new buildings that had gone up around the bridge; he was depressed and too drunk for safety. The drive uptown left him tired and anxious. Gratefully, he turned the Volvo keys over to the hotel doorman and once upstairs ordered a bottle of scotch from room service. When the drink arrived, he sat with his feet on the windowsill looking out over the midtown rooftops. On a day in May, he and Marty Nolan had once walked from the library on East Seventy-ninth Street all the way down Second Avenue to the bridge and then across it, ending up in a bar on Clark Street. It would have been about 1955. Hour after hour, block after block of talk.