by Ward Just
They sat in silence, watching the tables, until Ned said, Tell me one thing. What was the name of the hotel?
Henriette laughed. The Grande, she said, and added after a moment’s pause, I doubt if Fernando ever returned to Vigo. It was not his sort of town. He felt superior to it. Also, he liked Franco but didn’t like Franco’s entourage. Brutes, he called them. Riffraff. Nevertheless, according to Fernando, Spain required a strongman. The population had—energetic appetites that were better off contained. They had a natural dignity. I would say a highly developed sense of self that had to be respected, except, of course, for the Reds among them. Red was not Catholic. Red was not Spain. The Reds suffered terribly after the war, so many atrocities to be counted and avenged. And the fascists had the upper hand. I don’t think Spain’s environment was good for women. I don’t mean bed necessarily. I mean daily things, the way men and women get on together hour to hour. Do you see what I’m saying, Ned? Something strict about them. And dignity has its limits. It must never seem forced. How old are you, Ned?
He said, Thirty, give or take.
You should have a girlfriend. Then, when you come here for the weekend, she could come with.
Ned said, I had a steady girlfriend but she went away. One afternoon she was there and the next she was gone.
Headstrong, Henrietta said.
Headstrong, Ned agreed.
Was it a grand affair?
It was while it lasted.
And what became of her? God, Ned, it’s like pulling teeth talking to you.
She was the one who died, Ned said.
Lord, Henriette said. I put my foot in it again. I’m sorry.
She died abroad of an illness, Ned said. Before she died she wrote a conciliatory message. I guess you could call it a mea culpa. She had become bewitched by Africa and its wildlife, its dusks and dawns. She thought we should give our romance one more try but in her heart I believe she knew that I was already taken. Unavailable because of my work. That’s not quite right. I was available but only at my own convenience. All those late nights, erratic hours generally. The scent of a story that could send you around the bend, a dog worrying a bone so that you follow the damned dog wherever it leads. It’s important. The dog is more important than you are, so you pay attention to the dog.
Ned said, Newsman died the other day in Moscow, where he had lived and reported for decades. Charming man, great raconteur. Can you imagine it? Year after year, one autocrat following another. Your telephone tapped as a matter of course. Your mail opened. Your sex life examined minutely. Newsman was meticulous. Nothing escaped his attention. He continued to look for the story that would explain it all, a story as powerful as anything Dostoyevsky wrote. But he was not Dostoyevsky, so none did. But he continued the chase. He did this every day for decades. One wife left him and the second wife left him, too. He was bereft both times, but not so bereft that he missed the evening briefing delivered by a lad who was young enough to be his grandson. By that time he was married yet again, this time to a magazine correspondent. But they quarreled and she moved out, the last slam of the door for him. He knew Stalin, you know, Ned said. It’s fair to say not well. No one knew Stalin well except possibly his daughter. And Stalin knew him. Stalin was convinced that Newsman was a spy sent by the American authorities to undermine him. This was lunatic. Newsman’s Stalin obsession was his own. No one attempted to undermine Stalin without paying a price. But our man in Moscow continued his search. Chasing Stalin had become his life’s work, and it’s fair to say that after all these years Newsman and story became one. There was no difference between them. He spoke the language beautifully. He roamed the Soviet empire, disappearing for weeks at a time, always carrying his bookbag of Russian stories, Gogol, Pushkin, Babel. And on one of his excursions he vanished, no one knew where. The Gulag, perhaps, or an accident. An entrapment? Perhaps that. Newsman’s health was precarious, so a heart attack or stroke could not be ruled out. His friends in the international press corps were convinced that Stalin had exacted his own revenge, the tyrant’s hand reaching from the grave, a coarse voice issuing instructions. In any case, Newsman was never heard from again. Left behind were dispatches, forty years’ worth, wedged into a steamer trunk in his apartment near the Arbat. One of his friends tried to interest Harvard, but no one at Harvard seemed interested. Steamer trunk? Dispatches, most of them falling apart inside the trunk? Termites? Thanks but no thanks. Someone thought of making an approach to the CIA, but that idea went nowhere. Claude was naturally suspicious of the security services. And so the steamer trunk remained in situ until one day it vanished, no one knew where. At that time the apartment was occupied by one of his ex-wives.
All right, Ned said, An extreme case, I admit. An obsessive personality found in many lines of work, the law and banking, professional sports, the theater, professional gambling. Difference is, a reporter like Claude is a kind of poet, many of his insights found between the lines of his dispatches. His material resisted clarity. In fact, his work was dangerous. Claude was a chatterbox, though when the talk turned to methods and sources, he fell silent. Also, he was a Johnny one-note and by no means a celebrity reporter. His clients were few: two newspapers in Michigan, one in upstate New York, another in New Mexico. Honolulu as well. The editors of these papers had never met Claude, who seldom traveled abroad. “Abroad” to him meant North America. His copy might as well have been labeled: For Connoisseurs Only.
By the way, he was a slender man and barely five feet tall, always moving at a brisk trot. His wives conceded that he was a considerate lover, though tireless.
Everyone liked him, Ned said.
But they didn’t want to be him, if you see what I mean.
To which Henriette raised her eyebrows and smiled.
Ned Ayres retired early that night, not without a last look at Alger Hiss, who seemed not to have moved a muscle in the past hour. He continued to sit ramrod straight and silent, unless he was calling, raising, or folding, his voice coming from the deep pocket inside his head. He had accumulated an impressive pile of chips and yet his expression remained the same. Ned thought his mind was elsewhere, incarcerated in past time. He was chronically short of money, so his poker winnings were helpful. It was clear to Ned that he was in the game for the long haul, whatever it took. Watching Hiss, Ned was reminded of someone else, he couldn’t think who. Then it came to him, not who, but what. Ned was reminded of a great actor, minimal lines, minimal movements, an actor’s “business.” In that way he seemed to hover above the table, a kind of ghost. He had a reputation for intellectual brilliance but that was not what Ned saw. He saw cunning.
Henriette had long since said good night. Now Ned slowly mounted the stairs to his third-floor bedroom, called the Poe Room for its sometime inhabitant. He lay down on the bed at once and began to make notes of the evening, the jokes, the presence of Hiss, Henriette’s Vigo excitement. At a distant sound he put his pen and diary aside and waited. He turned off the bedside light. In a moment Henriette glided into the room. Ned made room for her on the bed. She whispered something about Poe’s ghost, present but unseen. She went on to recite a stanza of “Ulalume,” grinning all the while. She said, He is thought to have written his poems in this very room, composing at night when his nerves settled. It’s a nice room, isn’t it? I like to think that Poe wrote at night when the house was silent. His mind was not silent. Nice to imagine also that in summer the black bats came and went. They do now. Henriette scratched Ned’s foot with her toenail and apologized. Poe made her do it. Poe supervised the room. It was his room after all and God knows how many nightmares he endured in his narrow bed, alone but for the racket within. Maybe he wasn’t always alone. Maybe there was company. I prefer that, don’t you, Ned? Henriette shivered slightly, another reminder. Her voice was soft.
When she asked Ned if he believed in ghosts, he said he did. He said he imagined all the people he had known well gathered in one room, waiting for his arrival when the time came. Welcoming m
e home, Ned added. No hard feelings. No scores settled or even hinted at. A general amnesty for mistakes made, however grave. He wrapped a lock of her hair around his finger and tugged gently. She asked if he would tell her a story, a short one. So he told her a story about Poe and his many liaisons with women. It was made up. He had no idea of Poe’s life except for its turbulence, how it began and how it ended. Henriette sighed with pleasure because the story ended well, a happy ending, Poe in a state of bliss. He had looked for it all his life and now he had found it, his Eastern Shore. He could go no farther. The world he had known ended there.
But Henriette had misunderstood.
You look gloomy, she said. Shall I tempt you from your gloom? They rolled together in Poe’s disheveled bed, in shadows from the light of a half moon, a rocking-chair moon. They went on and on, and when they were done the moon was out of sight in the western sky. Henriette sighed and spoke a few words into Ned’s ear. She must go. She had stayed longer than she intended. She searched for her slippers, then remembered she had come barefoot. Ulalume would be a barefoot girl . . . Ned lay on his back listening to Henriette. She slipped from the room as easily as she had slipped into it. Ned heard the creak of the staircase, then silence. He stepped to the window and looked out. A light breeze had come up, so weightless, random, he could not sense its direction. Ned realized then that he was slick with sweat, his own and hers, too. The night air was cool but he was sweating all the same. Ned lit a cigarette, whistling the tobacco smoke though his teeth, the smoke hanging in a cloud before drifting slowly to the open window, where it hung before dissolving into the Maryland darkness. A sliver of light was visible to the east, a waterman homeward bound, his engine barely audible. An early hour even for watermen, so perhaps he carried contraband. Nothing much was audible in the manor house. Ned wondered if this room, Poe’s room, was Henriette’s designated assignation place. She certainly knew her way around in the dark. Probably the Eastern Shore was her American Vigo. And now it could be his, too, for this one night and other nights to come. Ned closed his eyes and imagined himself as master of the manor house and all that went with it, including the myths. Perhaps he would write a book there sometime in the far distant future. If Henriette was to be believed, Poe’s spirit could be summoned at will. She did not explain how one went about that, the summoning. He had no reason to doubt Edgar Allan Poe’s spectral presence. There was the evidence of the poem and the room itself, Poe-sized and dark. Still, the stories were well worn—Poe wandering through the gardens at midnight, Poe disappearing into the village and returning half clothed, Poe howling at the moon. The stories had been handed down, buffed and elaborated by a hundred retellings, a myth of the region. There seemed to be no reason to doubt Poe’s occupancy of the third-floor bedroom.
Ned listened to the waterman’s boat recede, its engines withering away into silence. He himself could buy a boat, a small one with a sail and an outboard engine. He had never skippered a boat, but Earl Bosenquet could give him lessons. How to tack. How to come about. The meaning of the ominous and rare southeast wind. He would give house parties once a month, always with a mystery guest like Alger Hiss. Ned Ayres lit another cigarette. Now the outdoor silence was complete and unnerving, too. He had stepped away from his normal sphere. He preferred cities with their ambulance sirens and three a.m. laughter and a newspaper to set the day’s context. Retirement was years off and Ned was a present-moment man, though it was fair to surmise that today’s moment was very like yesterday’s. They were kin. That was the way personal history worked out, or a town’s history or a nation’s. Everyone lived to the tick of a clock. There was little sense in trying to imagine the future. He supposed he could continue with his bachelor’s life, now as natural as his flat Indiana accent and his size-twelve shoes and, more to the point, his twelve-hour workdays. His world was the office. He had had a dozen Vigos in his life and none of them were in Spain. If your passion was news, you need never dine alone. Ned Ayres stood at the open window a very long time, and when the wind shifted he heard, far away, the ding of a buoy bell.
Two years later Lester Golden lost his Senate seat, and he and Henriette departed Washington and the Eastern Shore for Beverly Hills. In due course the property passed into the hands of the lawyer Fitts, who held on as long as he could until his nerves broke down, just a year before Ned Ayres bought it and began his extensive repairs. He and Henriette maintained a correspondence for a year or so and then the correspondence languished. Reading between the lines, not at all difficult to do, Ned concluded that Henriette had a new boyfriend. In any case, Lester was ill and failing.
Ned phoned once to ask Henriette if she would ever return to the East, and she said probably not. Washington’s a place to which, once you’ve left, you rarely return. Washington changes colors, so many people moving in and out. Good ones, too. Charming when they choose to be. Lester’s finished there. So am I. What’s there for me?
Me, Ned said with a laugh.
We had our fling, she said. Good fling, too, and longer than most. But it’s old news. It’s history.
Understood, Ned said. A pity all the same.
It’s in the past. We’re in retreat.
The past with a happy edge, Ned said. We had good times.
Conceded, Henriette said.
Why, when we were rolling around on that third-floor bed even Poe got up to dance.
Let it rest, she said. We’re too much alike, Ned.
I don’t think so, Ned said.
Then you haven’t been listening. You always said you were a good listener.
I’m a hell of a good listener.
I am with another, she said, her voice rising.
Already? he said. I had no idea.
Yes, she said.
Often when a conversation went off the rails Ned introduced a fresh thought, what he called a spinner. He said, When you’re in Washington, give me a call. We can dine together. Catch up with each other, nothing more than that—
But Henriette had already rung off.
What on earth was she talking about? They were not the least bit alike. They were as unalike as Beverly Hills and Herman, but that did not mean they could not get on. He had thought of them as an expressionist painting, clashing colors but harmonious the longer you looked at it. “I am with another,” such an archaic phrase. The phrase was unworthy of her. So they were quits. Ned would miss her company, her anecdotes of life in Southern California and enigmatic Vigo, her easy ways of lovemaking. She had led an interesting life. She told a good story. She had a light touch and a beautiful smile. She traded back tales of the capital, but in time it was clear she trusted her own stories more than she trusted Ned’s stories. She had never taken Washington seriously, a city that made even Los Angeles seem self-effacing. She was there because Lester was there, a senator at last. He had always wanted to be one. But that was finished now. She did not believe the newspaper either, so leaden, so without humor. This became clear as the romance rolled along and then fell to pieces and finally came to an end with her harsh word, “Conceded.”
Ned did not know it then, but Henriette was his last serious love affair, meaning one that had legs, here today and here tomorrow. He believed now that it was time for a change, so he put the Dupont Circle apartment on the market and went in search of a house, perhaps something in nearby Georgetown within walking distance of the office. His own gait was slow motion and, by and by, Ned began to think of retirement, though not in any self-conscious way. Time seemed to accumulate, so much garbage. The business side of the paper became ever more intrusive. Milo Passarel’s mood darkened. The newsroom budget was cut and cut again. Ned promised Milo he would make do with less. The mood in the newsroom soured and a number of the senior reporters took early buyouts and moved away to be close to their children and grandchildren. And in due course Ned followed them out the door. He left a typewriter behind as a memento, but the new man disposed of it at once. The Smithsonian was happy to have it, a Ned Ayres original.
Royal by marque. The new man believed there was altogether too much nostalgia in his newsroom. He wanted things forward-looking, tomorrow’s technology, strictly up to date and beyond.
Seven
Ferris Wheel
NED’S OWN LIFE on the Eastern Shore no longer included Washington, a marathon drive for a man his age. He was now close to eighty years old with failing eyesight. Ned returned to Washington a few times, taking the bus from one of the Maryland towns and returning the same way. Once he stayed with friends, twice at the Willard. So many good friends were gone or ailing. He paid one visit to the newspaper office, the paper struggling now. Milo Passarel had sold it at an advantageous moment and was said to be living happily in his villa near the Alhambra, his extended family installed nearby. Milo was near ninety and Lana was dead, her ashes spread over the pretty garden that caught the morning sun. Susan Griffin was dead. Ned had sent a note to Milo on learning of Lana’s death and received a postcard in return, Milo’s jerky handwriting all but indecipherable. On reading about Ned’s memoir-in-progress his script firmed up: Keep me out of it. Ned was pleased to find his own name still on the masthead of the newspaper, along with four predecessors and the short-lived successor. At an appalling cost Ned received the paper daily by mail, so he was able to keep up with the changes—not that he understood the precise nature of the changes, since they were announced in computer-speak. All the better newspapers were struggling, as if the news were no longer a priority or even a convenience. News was now a function of the mill called social media, as if it were the proletarian version of the Social Register. But what did he know? He was an old man living in a very old part of the world.