Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  I liked the work. Things went awry and I learned to fix them. Kirkland taught me the thousand and one ways that a transmission can fail to be transmitted, and then fail to be received, and I enjoyed the range of these problems, from a squirrel nest in a transformer box to encrypted interference from navy destroyers off the coast. The air was full of radio signals.

  My roommate moved out to live with her boyfriend in Hell’s Kitchen, which meant that I had to find a new place, and that was a problem. My salary from the station was barely enough to keep me in deli sandwiches and replace my stockings when they ran. Landlords in decent buildings didn’t want to rent to a single girl anyway. The first of the month came and I found myself in a dirtier boardinghouse, a place on Columbus Avenue where I shared a room with a nurse who kept bottles of gin hidden under her bed and sang to herself when she couldn’t sleep. Before my shifts, while I tried to make coffee on a hot plate, I could hear the mice busy in the wall. Soon I was spending all my days off trying to find another place, a real apartment. I looked at a dozen cold-water flats in Hell’s Kitchen, but no one would let me sign a lease, and every time I managed to save up the two months’ rent that I would need upfront, some disaster took it away—a filling that had to be replaced, a week at home with the flu and no sick time to cover it.

  As a child I had a book, clothbound, with intricate illustrations, that told the story of a squirrel, rabbit, and chipmunk who lived in a house together in the woods. The crumbling flyleaf was dated 1918. It had belonged to my father. In each chapter, the animals met and bested another challenge. The chapters matched the seasons of the year. In the winter chapter, their stores of nuts and seeds were swept away in a late flood, and they were left hungry. The rabbit, a cheerful character in the summer and autumn chapters, grew thin and sad in the illustrations. The animals did less and less, spoke less and less. One moonlit night, the rabbit was awakened by scratching at the door. He looked out the window. A wolf was there.

  The rabbit was changed by having seen the wolf. Spring came, and there were fresh shoots and grubs and eggs to eat, and the animals got fat again. But the rabbit’s fur had turned gray.

  It was during the week I spent in bed with the flu, wracked with fever and then aching with boredom, that I saw my wolf.

  When I recovered, I went back to work. I used an X-Acto knife and the Ditto machine in the secretary’s office to mock up a letter from the First Bank of Chevy Chase claiming I had fifty thousand dollars in trust. Then I went out to Brooklyn to look for apartments. Within a few weeks, a landlord accepted the fake trust letter, and I moved into a run-down apartment with tall windows on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

  Kirkland was expected to make monthly journeys to the station’s transmitter in Queens to run maintenance checks. It was in Rockaway, out near the beach. He hated doing it; it was a long trip in the dead of night. I volunteered to go with him. By September I was making the trip by myself, finishing up at six in the morning.

  If I had some fire left in me after running the checks I would go and sit on the boardwalk, pulling my skirt around my knees, drinking a paper cup of Lipton tea from a deli and watching the sun rise over the Atlantic. Then back to Brooklyn, nearly two hours, a knish eaten as I climbed the stairs to my apartment, a morning and an afternoon in bed. In my apartment on Eastern Parkway, the floors creaked and the radiators whistled when the heat came on at night. A brightly lit, steam-filled shop on the ground floor of the building sold the knishes that I liked, alongside trays of jam-filled cookies. Orthodox women in navy coats walked up and down the parkway with flocks of red-haired children. On Tuesdays—I never worked on Tuesdays—I would rise in the afternoon and walk down to the Central Library on Grand Army Plaza, check out a few mystery novels, and sit on the steps eating a chocolate doughnut and gazing up at the arch that honored the Union Army. At the top of it a woman stood in a chariot with horses rampant, attended by angels, a bronze banner unfurling over her head.

  JULY 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  I kept busy as well as I could while I waited for Gerry’s plans to come through, cooking and cleaning, trying to fit into the domestic routines of a man used to doing for himself. I did the grocery shopping, glad to get out of the house.

  One dark afternoon late in July, I went to the vegetable stalls to buy turnips and potatoes. My walk back to the apartment took me past one of the grand old public libraries in the Centro. A few yellow leaves still clung to a locust tree in front, slowing the drift of rain over a group of huddled students. With a start, I recognized Román among them, smoking a thin black cigarette. He looked whole and well, and I was relieved, and then felt a confused flush. I thought about speaking to him, but decided to delay contact, to watch him for a few minutes if I could. I crossed to the other side of the street and ducked inside a bakery.

  I watched the students through the window, hidden by a rack of cooling challah. So Román was out of hiding. The students around him looked tense, but Román was the same as ever, smiling slightly, standing apart, as if a spotlight were on him. At the beginning of the academic year, when the afternoons were still long and hot, groups of students had stood in front of the facultad just like this, smoking and talking as they were doing now, and I had hovered nearby with Victoria’s shy friend Elena while she tried to calculate a way into the circle. It had been only four months since then, but it felt much longer. I was sweating. Behind me, the baker cleared her throat and called out, “We’ve got madeleines. Hot ones, out of the oven right now.”

  “Oh, very nice,” I said. I waved my net bag. “Madeleines, yes. A dozen.”

  She nodded approvingly and began to fill a box. Román had ventured a few steps away from the group to talk to a pretty girl with long, black hair. I wondered what Victoria would think of that. What did it mean that he had come back? He must have something in mind. It wasn’t safe here for someone like him.

  A smallish turnip worked its way silently through a frayed part of my bag and fell to the floor, and I bent quickly to pick it up.

  The bell rang over the door, and there was Román, dropping the end of his cigarette behind him on the sidewalk and running his hands through wet hair.

  “Anne!” he said to me, smiling, surprised.

  “Román!” We kissed hello.

  “We were worried about you,” he said. “It’s been hard for foreigners.”

  “I’ve been worried about you too,” I said.

  “They keep arresting people at the protests. The student union has been marching after evening classes. I got knocked around.” He brushed back his hair to show a dark scab at his hairline, just above his left ear.

  “A baton?” I said, wincing.

  “A fist.” He laughed. “He split his knuckles open. Victoria says I have a hard head.” He glanced back out at the street. “It’ll get worse, I think. Victoria and I won’t stay long.”

  “Where will you go?” I said.

  “Ushuaia,” he said. He paused, as if he were trying to remember something, and then he turned to me again and said briskly, “I have an uncle there.”

  “That’s far,” I said. It sounded like a nice idea, really.

  “Very far,” he said. “Very quiet. What will you do?”

  “I’m waiting for a visa.”

  “I hope you get one. Your family must be worried.”

  He squeezed my arm; he was affectionate like this with all his friends. He went to the counter to order biscuits, and I waved good-bye and went back out to the street. I walked casually in the wrong direction for several blocks, in case he had seen which way I was going, and then circled idly for a while so I could think.

  Ushuaia was a clutter of utilitarian buildings in the lap of a mountain at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. People called it “the end of the earth,” a small city facing the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Victoria and Román would have to cross hundreds of miles of cold desert to reach it. It was the kind of place where you went when you were afraid. It was so remot
e that it seemed like a myth.

  That afternoon, when I called Gerry’s service, he didn’t call back at all. I stood for twenty minutes next to the phone box and smoked three cigarettes. Perhaps Gerry could do nothing. Perhaps he had known since the coup happened that he could do nothing. Perhaps all the people he was connected to in Buenos Aires were poisoned by contact with Nico.

  I thought of Ushuaia again. A new plan was beginning to form. But first I had to be sure that Román was telling me the truth.

  James and I shared the bed now. I woke early—I had never been a good sleeper—and lay beside him until he woke up too. I liked it best when he faced away from me and I could rest against his back, as if he were a low wall or a rise in the earth, and watch the sky lighten through the uncovered window; at those times he reminded me of a girl I used to know. She and I had played house for a while once, and we had lain like this; but I had too many secrets to keep by the time I met her, and I ended it. She always pushed. There was a soft down on the nape of her neck.

  I modified a small transistor radio from a department store and sat in a park a block away from Victoria’s building, listening to the bug from her apartment. When I felt that I had been there too long, I moved to a café down the street, and then to a back corner of a Christian Science Reading Room two doors down from her, where I could listen on headphones while I pretended to study a macroeconomics textbook. I was there when I heard the phone ring, and then Victoria’s voice saying anxiously, “When will the plane be ready?”

  Román visited; I heard them discussing cold weather, the friend who would fly the plane, the grandfather who owned it. A little ranch plane, they said. There was excitement in their voices.

  They talked about the ocean, about penguins.

  OCTOBER 1962

  CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  On the morning of October 23 the telephone in my apartment woke me, clattering furiously on the wall in the kitchen. I had been deeply asleep, having arrived home at 6:00 AM, and my heart was hammering when I fumbled it off the wall. Everyone knew not to call me until well into the afternoon.

  “Hello?” came the faint Southern voice.

  “Ma?”

  “Vera, thank God. Have you been reading the news?”

  There had been no exchange between us since her last letter to me at the Barrington School. For a second I was sure that someone had died: My grandmother. Joanne. I could hear the newsroom in the background. “What’s wrong, Ma? What happened?”

  “Kennedy is blockading Cuba. They’re out there in destroyers. He was on television last night. We had to tear up the next issue of the magazine and start over.”

  My mind cleared. The Soviet missiles in Cuba. I put my hand over my heart. “Jesus, Ma, I thought somebody must be dead.”

  “You should pay attention to the news,” she said. “This could be war.”

  “It won’t be war,” I said, but I was thinking about how they had explained it to us when we were kids in school: a flash of light. They had said it that way so we wouldn’t think about the heat, I thought, or the noise, but it had not reassured me, the idea of a light at the end of the world. “How did you get this number, Ma?”

  She laughed her big laugh. “I put a reporter on it.”

  “This is what you call about?” I said. “After all this time?”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “Just now, you were? Well, I’m fine.”

  “I don’t want to be angry with you anymore, Vera. Not with all this going on. I want to be reconciled.”

  I took the phone away from my ear so that I could look at it. I turned in a circle. Then I spoke into it again. “I have no idea what you think I could do,” I said, “to make you not be angry with me anymore.”

  “An apology,” she said. “Be a human being.”

  “Good luck with the new issue.” I pressed the phone back into the cradle.

  Five days after my mother called me, Khrushchev started taking apart the missiles and the tabloids stopped shrieking about annihilation. But I still felt that flinch in the air.

  SEPTEMBER 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  New morality laws had been passed, and they were printed in the papers every Sunday, in case anyone might forget them. Onganía’s prudishness seemed sincere, a rare thing for the military men. He forbade kissing in public, dim lighting in bars, miniskirts. In each of these new statutes, I saw the shadow of the vice-squad raids back home, although homosexuality was mentioned nowhere. I caught myself checking mirrors before I left the apartment, putting on more lipstick, as if carefully reviewing a disguise.

  I saw a group of young women getting official warnings for their skirts one unseasonably warm evening. They all had black hair teased up into beautiful bouffants and eyes lined thickly with kohl, like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, and they stood with their arms crossed while a very young and pink-faced cadet lectured them. They made me think of my days at eighteen, the first summer after the Barrington School, walking back to the boardinghouse arm-in-arm with a friend who later stole ten dollars from my purse and bought me lunch with half of it. There were so many young men and women around me then whom I wouldn’t leave alone with my wallet. And yet I took those betrayals so lightly. How inconsequential they seemed compared to the force and energy of our interest in each other, because we had read some of the same books and grown tired of the same schools and we had all run away from our parents. What was ten dollars when you had the same blood in your veins? I wished for the girls in miniskirts to have the same chances in their lives to injure each other and be injured.

  There was a club on the corner of James’s street where we went a few times to dance when we were beginning to go stir-crazy in the apartment. They had a house band: a girl singer in blue sequins and a blonde wig that glittered like tinsel, a quartet of young men behind her in black jackets. Whenever one of the boys took the microphone, they would sing covers of the Stones.

  The clientele was young, many of them barely out of high school. In the corners, girls in outrageous makeup gathered, too shy to talk to boys. The boys smoked constantly, their backs to the room. James and I would sit by the door, drinking pale beer in tall glasses. Many of the younger patrons of the bar ordered nothing but Coca-Cola all night, and I was touched by it. The caffeine and sugar gave them energy to dance, and they had no money for anything stronger. If the place got too loud, the owner—a small, fat man with sideburns razored to points—would become apoplectic, waving his short arms and demanding quiet from a jostling throng that couldn’t hear him.

  The law said that the lights in bars had to be bright enough to read the labels on the bottles. One Friday night in the club, as James and I were dancing to a cover of a Zombies song, the lights at the back of the house switched on. There was an immediate impression of dust and concrete in the yellow light; we were in a basement, which we easily forgot when it was dark. The band stopped playing. The girl in the blonde wig bit her lip and muttered “Hijo de—” into the microphone, then set it down on top of the amplifier and stared down at her feet. Police filed in through the narrow street door.

  “Out, out, out,” they called, shining flashlights around the room. Two officers led a group of boys and girls outside. The girls were stone-faced, the boys sullen. There was a scuffle near the bar. James put his arm around me and we moved through the uncertain crowd, trying not to draw too much attention to ourselves.

  We had to push through the group of police to get out, which made my heart pound, but they parted before us. Their attention was occupied by the fight at the bar, which was drawing in more young men. We slipped out onto the quiet street, and I stopped to take a deep breath. The night air was humid and cool, smelling of the river. Halfway up the block, waiting and smoking a cigarette, was the man in the gray raincoat.

  We saw each other. James didn’t notice. I stared at the man and then turned quickly away. James was saying that he hoped the kids were okay. He was softhearted.
I rubbed my face, pulled my jacket on. My head hurt and I was afraid. It was over. I was out of time.

  NOVEMBER 1962

  CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  One afternoon not long after I spoke to my mother, I was trying to handle a short circuit in an electrical closet at the station during a rare day shift when a man with a pomaded wave in his hair appeared at my elbow and introduced himself. He was a consultant, he said.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “What are they paying you?” he said cheerfully. “I bet it’s not enough.”

  I took a closer look at him.

  “I might have some work for you,” he said. “An electronics outfit in Jersey. They’re looking for people. Something on the side.” He glanced up and down the hallway as if anxious that we not be seen, and I couldn’t be sure if this was a joke or not. He handed me a card. “I’m not poaching you. It would be extra.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you.” I examined the card. Consulting. An address on the east side and a phone number.

  The man shook my hand and irradiated me with his smile. “Really, give me a call,” he said.

  The fact was, I didn’t make enough money, and my landlord was threatening to terminate my lease if I bounced another check. It had been keeping me from my sleep. I called the number on the consultant’s card and a secretary gave me the address of a shop in Jersey City.

  I appeared dutifully at a storefront on Warren Street on a foggy Tuesday morning and rang the bell. The blinds were closed and the place looked deserted. At last an old man opened the door and ushered me through a front office that looked abandoned and into a large back room. It was a place that could have been used comfortably for car repair, with raw brick walls, a poured concrete floor, and high cobwebbed windows facing a narrow alley and the back of a church. Four workbenches were piled with wiring, sheets of copper, switches, and Mylar.