by Amanda Cross
“Well,” Kate said, “I’m feeling after today’s meeting that we accomplished more than we could have hoped. Maybe we became moles in the best le Carré tradition; certainly Schuyler never guessed what it was in for when they agreed to hire us. But I think we’ve made something moribund a little livelier.”
“And getting the Osborne habeas through will always be something I’m glad I did,” Reed said. “And I am convinced that clinic we started will make an important contribution to Schuyler, the students, and to some people in prison. Prisoners need good lawyers, the students learn a lot, and with Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, voting in favor of beating prisoners and letting them inhale smoke all day, we have to take some countermeasures, however few. The important thing is, I’ve got you back. I have, haven’t I, Kate?”
“You never lost me, not really. I would have fought Bobby like a tiger for my man. Is she over that, you think, not that you ever admitted in so many words that she was in it in the first place?”
“Is any of us ever over anything? We get to the point where we can claim to be over things, and that’s the best there is.”
“Really,” Kate said. “How circumspect you have become. I thought over was over.”
“How’s your over?” Reed asked. “What do you say to a ferry ride? We can climb up to the highest deck.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Kate responded, remembering a popular response from her childhood. Which shows, she thought, that even the most intellectual of devoted couples can become silly asses given the right motivation.
The next day, there was a message from Charles Rosenbusch, leaving his number. Kate called him back.
“I’ve never been so offended in my life,” he said. “Not even when some famous critic insisted that Robert Frost was a better poet than Wallace Stevens.”
“You don’t like Frost?” Kate asked.
“Of course I like Frost, but it’s perfectly idiotic to call him a better poet than Wallace Stevens. What on earth are we talking about? Do you have this effect on everybody?”
“I didn’t say a word,” Kate reminded him. “You can’t blame me if you had to reach for a comparison to Schuyler’s behavior.”
“You’re right, of course. I’m behaving badly. But by god, I’m going to make one hell of a fuss about this prize. They didn’t kill Nellie, I told that truthfully enough, they didn’t push her under the truck. But they certainly did their best to beat her down. I want you to advise me how to get the most publicity possible.”
“After yesterday’s meeting,” Kate said—and she told him about it—“you may not have to do anything. I suspect that the school is going to have to back down on all its points, except not asking Reed and me back, and we hadn’t the faintest intention of coming back anyway. Blair—you spoke to Blair—has arranged for a week to allow Schuyler gracefully to reverse itself, after which dreadful things are planned. Why don’t you wait and see what happens in that week?”
“Sold,” Rosie said. “Kate, I want to thank you. No, don’t protest, I insist upon saying this. Your coming here, which must have seemed like a fool’s errand when you did it, made a change for me. It shook me up. Not you or what you said, but just the fact of the intrusion, of speaking about Nellie, of realizing that I’d sunk into a mire of self-pity.”
“I had nothing to do with all that,” Kate assured him when he paused for breath. “I galloped off in all directions like an idiot, trying to prove a murder in the face of all the facts just because I needed to do something. If I inadvertently helped you, you helped me even more. In addition to which,” she added in a concluding sort of voice, “I was presented with a book of poems inscribed by the author. I’m waiting eagerly for the next volume, which I hope you will also inscribe.”
“You’ve got it,” Rosie said.
I didn’t hear a sound beyond the confident flow of Smiley’s voice and the eager burst of laughter at some unexpected self-irony or confession of failure. You’re only old once, I thought, as I listened with them, sharing their excitement.
—JOHN LE CARRÉ
THE SECRET PILGRIM
Eleven
IT was some days later that Kate summoned Harriet to a meeting in her, Kate’s, living room. Harriet, behaving like a perfect guest, allowed the doorman to ring up and ask for admittance.
“I wondered when you’d decide to have it out,” Harriet said. Offered a drink, she declined firmly: her hour for imbibing was still a long way off. “One has to have rules about these things,” she said.
“I somehow got the impression you didn’t believe in rules,” Kate remarked, offering coffee instead.
Harriet declined that also. “I’ve decided to ignore many rules of our society, since, as far as that society knows, I’ve died and gone to heaven. But I have my own system of morals and rules, every bit as good and sometimes better.”
Here she paused, in an attitude of attentiveness.
“Good news about Betty Osborne,” Kate said, and told her what Reed had reported.
“I’m really glad,” Harriet said. “I worked a good bit with battered women, you know. It’s horribly discouraging. I had to give it up.”
“Why?”
“They all go back. They don’t have anywhere else to go, they were probably beaten as children, or saw their mothers being beaten. No program I worked with, or any other, I bet, had the money to keep them more than thirty days at the most, and then they’d go back to the same old thing. They gave different reasons—he would reform, the children missed their father, it was home, and on through even sillier excuses, but the fact was they hadn’t been given enough independence and enough training and counseling. Our wonderful society can’t find the money to give it to them. After not very long, I got burned out, and I wasn’t even doing it except as a volunteer.”
“Are you saying that Betty Osborne hadn’t a chance?”
“Not at all, my dear. Ms. Osborne shot the bastard. He isn’t there to go back to, and anyway, she took charge of her own life, in a manner of speaking. Once she got into jail, I thought she would probably just rot there, punishing herself, but you see, you and Reed have made a difference. She’s got a chance, one of the few.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“Tell me again why you came to New York,” Kate said, breaking the silence.
“I told you that, dear Kate. Are you having memory lapses, and you so young and spry?”
“I know; the catalpa tree. Well, once in New York, what made you decide to sign on with Schuyler Law?”
“They offered to pay me well.”
“With your organizational skills, any law firm would have been glad to hire you and pay you much better. Schuyler is hardly the most attractive ambience in the city.”
“For one thing, I guessed that they wouldn’t look too closely at my credentials; but the real reason was that I think clumps of mediocrity may be the sign of doom in our world, certainly in the academic world, and even more certainly in the world of law. I decided to have a go at it.
“I’ll tell you how I see it,” Harriet said, smiling at Kate. “They—mediocrities—decide to cling to a certain sense of what they are pleased to call principles. Always beware of people with principles. I don’t mean general principles like the Golden Rule, or that Hebrew who stood on one foot and said something about treating one’s neighbor as oneself. I mean people who grab on to a structure, usually one that’s been in place, untested, for years, maybe for centuries, and feel so cozy inside it that they don’t want to be moved out. That’s why women have become so threatening, don’t you see? If women move out, the whole structure has to be reorganized, and it might in turn lead to men being shoved out of their padded lives. My male academics decided to cling to some past system, whether of lit crit or patriarchy or Freud or law doesn’t really matter, and to see any attempt to transform it as the beginning of the end. It certainly would be the end of them, the bastards, and they’re smart enough to know it.”
&n
bsp; “So here you are in New York, fighting stupidity and evil at Schuyler Law,” Kate said.
“I hope you aren’t growing testy, Kate. It doesn’t become you. I’ve always admired your cool. Anyway, as I frankly told you, I’ve taken a leaf from John le Carré and decided to act like George Smiley. I think, I brood, I organize. You know, the way he went after Karla in the end. I’ve taken Smiley as my model. I’m not as fat, probably taller, female, and with no intelligence service behind me, but I do my best with what I have. If Schuyler is really changed, as that meeting seemed to indicate it would be, I’ll have performed my final act as part of the academic world. Smiley used many different names, and rented cars which got smashed up, and all sorts of other things I haven’t been able to attempt. I’ve just done my best.”
“And would you say that you’ve won, like Smiley?”
“I’d say we’ve all won. But Smiley knew, and I know, that no victory is final. Still, he got Karla and we got …”
“What did we get, Harriet? Do please say it.”
“Really, Kate, you’re not only having lapses of memory, you’re repeating yourself. We all know what we’ve accomplished, we were all there at that wonderful meeting. Perhaps we both need a drink. The day is wearing on nicely, isn’t it?”
“Let it wear on a bit longer.”
“You’re the hostess, you’re the summoner,” Harriet said, composing herself like patience on a monument.
“In all that time you were talking about the catalpa tree,” Kate finally said, “and even today, talking about mediocrity, you never mentioned whether you and your husband had any children.”
Harriet, abandoning her pose, stretched her legs out. “Ah,” she said, “I wondered when you’d think of her.”
“Her who?” Kate asked rather incoherently.
“Demeter, of course.”
“Demeter.” Kate, repeating the word, recognized that Harriet would always have the ability to spin her off balance.
“I thought you were familiar with Greek myths,” Harriet said in a tone of disappointment. “Particularly that one. I thought you had it in mind all along. I really am disappointed in you, Kate.”
They sat a moment in silence.
“It’s not as though you ever mentioned Demeter,” Kate said, light dawning.
“Well, hardly.” Harriet sounded put out. “After all, I couldn’t stop the crops from growing or make some other sort of bargain with the powers that be. Women haven’t got that much leverage these days; I assumed you realized that.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “I think you had a right to assume I would remember Demeter. It’s one of my favorite stories from the Greeks.”
“Well, I would hope so.” Harriet seemed to feel her point was made. Stretching out her legs still farther, she leaned back and closed her eyes, suggesting, it seemed to Kate, that they both contemplate Demeter.
Kate stared at the ceiling. She could remember reading the story herself in a book on mythology by Edith Hamilton when she was quite young—ten, perhaps, around that. Demeter had an only daughter, Persephone, who had been carried off by the lord of the underworld, carried off significantly, Kate now realized, because she had wandered away from her women companions, as women did yesterday and do still today, enticed yesterday by the beauty of the flower narcissus, today by stories of romance and other accounts of false idylls between men and women. The lord of the underworld, Kate remembered, had risen up through a chasm in the earth and borne Persephone away, weeping, down to his dark dungeon of a kingdom.
But Demeter had power; she controlled the fecundity of the earth, all that grew on it; and to get her daughter back she threatened famine. Nothing grew; nothing could be harvested. Zeus sent emissaries to her; they pleaded with her, trying to turn her from her anger. But Demeter would not let the earth bear fruit until she had again seen her daughter. In the end, Kate remembered, they had made a bargain, which is why there are four or five months of the year when nothing grows. This is the time when Persephone must return to the underworld. But the rest of the year she is with her mother, and the earth once again bears fruit.
“Women no longer have so much power, so much to bargain with,” Harriet said after a time, into the silence. “You might say, all I had was you.”
“I see,” Kate said. “But I will still repeat my question; did you have any children?”
“Yes. We had one child, with whom I’m rather out of touch. We’re more than out of touch. We haven’t seen each other in years.”
“I see,” Kate said. It seemed to her that, not inappropriately, she was saying I see in every other sentence. “So your main aim wasn’t to be a le Carré spy.”
“I never said it was. I said I took a hint from le Carré, that’s all. To be a le Carré spy, you have to belong to an intelligence service. You have to talk yourself into a dirty frame of mind. You have to think anything you do, any lies you tell, are justified. I am not a le Carré spy, much as I admire George Smiley.”
“You seem to feel any lies you tell are justified.”
“I resent that, Kate; I deeply resent that. I have told no lies.”
“To allow people to draw the wrong conclusion and remain silent, that is to lie.”
“It’s to spy.”
“Well, you have to admit I have a point. It’s to use your friends rather than to trust them. True, I might have thought of Demeter. But don’t you think Reed would have done exactly the same thing if you had told him the truth?”
“Well, admittedly, I do sometimes suspect that I have a passion for spying. I think we all do, in a way. Spying isn’t lying, and that’s where spies go wrong. Spying isn’t worrying more about your allies than your enemies, which I never did.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “If you consider us your allies, you certainly withheld information from us, as you did from your daughter.”
“I most certainly did not,” Harriet replied hotly. “I can’t help it if you didn’t catch on; if you’ve forgotten your Greek myths. I just put a few plots in motion that might help my daughter or might not. I never withheld anything from my daughter in my life. We might have got on better if I had.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I never liked that man she married, and I liked him even less when he began beating her. She hid it for a long while, but she couldn’t hide it forever, even during my infrequent visits. And then when the kids got caught up in it, she really cut me out. I wanted her to leave, you see, and she couldn’t quite make up her mind to that. And then, when she shot him, she wouldn’t let me see her. She just went limp, she just gave in; I think she really believed they had a right to take the children away from her. I offered to take them, but she wasn’t letting me do anything.”
“Why not?”
“Who the hell knows why not? Because I opened my big mouth too often, because of something going far back into her childhood, because she just died to herself for a while? I had to get her to agree to a defense.”
“You may not be Demeter, but you certainly planned the whole thing with great cleverness.”
“Believe it or not, the amazing part isn’t that I planned the whole thing; I couldn’t plan it. I just played the cards as they came along. The amazing thing is that it all worked out. Anyway, don’t forget, Kate, that we helped to make that dump into a better law school, we goosed them and the students; we accomplished a hell of a lot, if you stop to think of it. You’re feeling used, that’s your problem; but you weren’t used. All I did was get to know you by picking you up at the Theban, after I got the Schuyler job.”
“Why did you pick me up? Why did you decide that I could be of use to you?”
“Of use is a damn offensive term. I didn’t have Demeter’s powers. I had damn few powers. In fact, the only power left for women today after they’ve made a fundamental mistake, is the power to disappear in the old self and reimagine oneself into something, someone, else. That’s what I wanted for me and for my daughter. She was in the underworld,
you know.
“I remembered that Betty had admired you in graduate school,” Harriet went on. “I knew that Reed was going to run that clinic. Okay, I persuaded Blair that it would be neat to have Reed’s accomplished wife to teach the course with him. I had to hope that Betty might ask for you, that you might reach her as no one else seemed able to do. Damn it to hell, Kate, can’t you see that if Reed had agreed to take her case ten times over, he couldn’t have done anything if she didn’t want him to, and there was no way I could see apart from you to make her want to wake up and decide to face life again. So if that makes me a spy and a criminal and the equal of Karla, who, you will remember, gave up everything for his daughter, I guess I’d better say good-bye, it’s been nice knowing you, I’ll send you my regards when I see Reed in court.”
“Sit down,” Kate said. “You wanted a drink, you said the day is wearing on, and it’s worn on even further. I’ll get us both a drink, and if you try to budge so much as an inch, I’ll tackle you.”
“I’ll only have that drink,” Harriet said, “if you promise not to forget Demeter, who had wide dominion. I only had you, and then only on the slimmest of chances. With some hints from George Smiley, of course. Don’t you see, Kate, after I got the job at Schuyler—and it was obvious I had to start there, at the place that had condemned her—when, after I got there, I heard that Reed was doing a clinic at prisons, it became obvious that I had to get to you; you were the thread that could lead me through the labyrinth to Betty. To my daughter.”
“That’s another myth,” Kate said.
“Yes, I know. I hope you don’t mind being compared to a thread.”
“I’m honored,” Kate said. “It’s humbling of course, being just a thread. Usually, I’m more than that, or convince myself I am. But really, all we detectives do, amateur or professional, even private eyes, even the police, is change the direction of events. None of us really solves anything anymore, do we? We do just try to alter history, however slightly. Now, let me get that drink.”