See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  Josephine Littlejohn had a way of doing more or less everything simultaneously. She ordered coffee and cake and extra logs for Sally’s suite, instructed a maid in fluent and execrable Spanish please to take out of his bags and wash all the señor’s dirty clothing, described the book she was reading, described the book she was writing, announced who would be joining them for dinner, including one ambassador, one beautiful mosaicist, one bullfighter—“I don’t like bullfighting,” Mr. Littlejohn had interjected. “Maybe I have it wrong, dear. Maybe Juanito is a ballet dancer, not a bullfighter—I know it’s one of the two.” “I don’t particularly like the ballet,” Mr. Littlejohn said. “Mostly fags, you know.” Josephine Littlejohn beamed and said to Blackford, “Kenneth is so old-fashioned. Pay no attention to him.” This was easy to do since attention could only really be paid to Mrs. Littlejohn, but then suddenly she ushered them off to the suite. “You must be very tired, Blackford. There is your room, right across the hall from your sister’s, and,” she opened the shades, “—there. Usually we like to keep the sun out of the sitting room, but you will want to be nice and warm. The fireplace is ready to light whenever you wish. And,” she opened the door to the bathroom, “Sally will show you how to work the Rápido. It’s an old-fashioned way to get hot water, but what does it matter? All you need to do is to make up your mind a half hour ahead of time when you want to take your bath, and light the kindling. There!” she clasped Blackford’s right hand in her own. “You look just alike. The most beautiful pair I have ever seen. I hope you stay all summer. I will see you at seven. We meet for drinks. Oh, yes. Kenneth likes our guests to wear coat and tie. Those are the only rules!” she closed the door.

  “Whew!” said Blackford.

  “She’s marvelous,” Sally smiled.

  “Anyway, that was good news.”

  “What was good news?”

  “That coat and tie at dinner are the only rules of the house. Or did she mean I also have to wear a coat and tie in bed?”

  “Only when you sleep in other people’s beds,” Sally smiled, drawing him toward her.

  At first Blackford had resented the idea of sharing their first evening with a dozen strangers, but a half hour after they had convened for drinks he found himself wholly distracted. Rum and soda was Kenneth Littlejohn’s specialty, and he was visibly disappointed when a guest opted for anything else. He literally forced the rum and soda on the bullfighter, insisting that it would permit him to kill three bulls the next Sunday instead of merely two. Josephine managed at once to talk continuously and also to cause all her guests to do the same thing, so that the New York Times correspondent started telling a story to the architect only to find himself, halfway through, addressing the ambassador and then delivering the closing lines to the bullfighter, who affected to appreciate the whole thing. Dinner was served on aluminum trays set on foldable aluminum stands in front of each guest, who perched on a couch or chair, while one or two squatted down on the floor, their trays in front of them. Three maids, more or less dressed in (cannibalized) uniforms, kept an apparently endless procession of platters and trays of meats and vegetables and salads and Mexican red wine and sweets in circulation. Blackford and Sally contrived to stay close to each other, and quite suddenly Blackford reflected that he was perfectly relaxed for the first time in many months, and was even emboldened to attempt a few words of Spanish with the mosaicist, who said she would be glad to give Blackford lessons every day, beginning tomorrow, and Blackford replied that he had always wanted to learn how to do mosaics, but Josephine straightened that out, or thought she did, as no one who knew only Spanish was ever quite certain what it was that Josephine Littlejohn had said. Then, almost as suddenly as they had come, the guests left, and Josephine kissed Sally good night, declaring that they must both get a good night’s sleep because she knew of the tour Sally had planned for her brother beginning early the next morning. Blackford said good night to both his hosts and followed Sally through the door to their suite.

  Kenneth Littlejohn, a rum and soda in his hand, sat in the deep armchair looking absently at what was left of the log fire in the room empty save for Josephine Littlejohn, who was bustling about straightening out chairs.

  “Do you know something, Josephine?”

  “What, dear?”

  “If that boy and that girl are brother and sister, I am Antony and Cleopatra.”

  “Kenneth, now how can you say anything like that? They are so darling. They wouldn’t pull your leg. Did you know that Jane Austen only wrote six books? I’ve written seven, and I just know it, Kenneth, that this one is going to be published.”

  Six

  It was day three of their holiday and they were staying at the Hotel Victoria in Taxco, high up the cobblestoned streets of the antique silver-mining village saved in the 1920s from architectural plunder by an American silversmith with an aesthetic eye for more than his artistically original silver artifacts. The streets were never widened, nor the roads paved, nor the central square enlarged, nor skyscraper erected. Only the bougainvillea grew with unregulated abandon, along the stone walls that lined so many of the streets, and up the wooden walls and pillars fondling the upper reaches of the two-story open-porched houses, in several of which, around the village square, tourists were served. Here and there in the shadows elderly Mexican peasants and artisans and shopkeepers leaned over their game boards or sipped their tequila. Outside, by the huge sixteenth-century church, an elderly woman fried her tortillas, stuffed them with chicken and beans and onion, and peddled them smilingly for a peso apiece. They climbed up the narrow road from the square to the hotel, not easy work at 5,500 feet of altitude, so that they arrived at the Spanish-style open lobby a little winded, eager for the half-hour snooze before dinner to which they had treated themselves on three consecutive days.

  Sally, the room key in her handbag, went directly to their quarters, while Blackford paused at the concierge’s bureau to pick up the Mexican daily paper, The News. He was interrupted. “You have had three telephone calls from a Mrs. Littlejohn in Mexico City, Señor Partridge.” Blackford felt the freeze in his stomach. Only the Duty Officer knew where he was, or rather what his principal address in Mexico was. Blackford decided to use the telephone in the lobby before joining Sally.

  He reached Josephine Littlejohn, who told him that a gentleman in Washington had telephoned urgently for Blackford Oakes, and that she assumed of course that he meant Blackford Partridge, that she had not written down the exact itinerary described to her by Sally, so that one after another she had telephoned to hotels in Puebla, and then Cuernavaca, and then Taxco, the three hotels she had recommended to Sally, and finally she had tracked him down. Blackford listened, waiting for his message, which finally came. “Dear, it was a Mr. Longford who called, leaving a number. He said he had some urgent news regarding your mother. I do hope all is well with your mother, dear Blackford, and if there is anything I can do, you must advise me. I know the very best doctors in Mexico, and if she needs some care, she should get down here right away. Where is she now?”

  Blackford told her their mother lived in London, and it turned out that Mrs. Littlejohn knew an excellent doctor in London, an old beau of one of her daughters …

  Finally she was off the line.

  Blackford recognized the telephone number. Any message involving the health of his mother was a code to call in immediately. He did this, and was put through to the Deputy Director, who asked where exactly Blackford was.

  “Taxco,” said Blackford perfunctorily, “—a hundred miles from Mexico City.” There was a pause at the other end of the line, and he was asked to hang on. A moment later:

  “We’ve made reservations for you on Eastern Flight #203 departing Mexico City tomorrow at 1405 for D.C. But alternative arrangements may prove preferable, so call in at noon tomorrow from Mexico City. Okay?”

  He knew it was probably foolish even to try, but he felt he should at least make the effort. “Sir, is it possible to get someone else
? I am—heavily engaged.”

  “It is impossible, for reasons you’ll soon know, even if you will not understand.”

  He broke the news to her right away, and for a tense hour before dinner she did not speak to him. At dinner in the candlelit outdoor patio overlooking the city and the illuminated church tower he said, “What do you want me to say, Sally? That I don’t believe organizations should exist that do not have the right to summon their members in an emergency?”

  “I would have predicted you’d come up with an original way of putting it. So that if I object to the Central Intelligence Agency arbitrarily calling you back from the first vacation you have had in one year, I am obliged also to object to the right of Parliament to summon its members for a vote on a declaration of war. In logic it is called the fallacy of division: Government has emergency powers, therefore the Library of Congress, which is an arm of government, has emergency powers … Thank you, I reject the ambush. Let’s just leave it that we are reminded, once again, of what keeps us apart.”

  But her mood softened, and soon she was—Sally, dining with him for the last time until they could be reunited; and tenderness overcame her, though she had lost appetite for food, only nibbling the chicken croquettes and the little dumplings and the sherbet. They walked back down to the square, climbed up to Bertha’s and took a margarita and listened to the brass band, and then watched the excited children who chased after a man wearing a monk’s cassock and cowl and carrying over his head a scaffolding made from plywood with a bull’s horns jutting out on top, Roman candles and other fireworks attached to the wooden frames. He would charge like a bull at the little children who darted off screaming and yelling as the firecrackers provided a pyrotechnic spume for the bull’s cavortings. “You will be in Washington this time tomorrow,” Sally said. Blackford did not look up.

  “I expect so.”

  She studied his profile against the lighted square. In the dark she could see no signs of the little creasings one expects in thirty-five-year-olds. His hair hung over his forehead, glints of blond visible when the fireworks were especially luminous. A drinking straw reached from his lips to the wide rim of his margarita glass. She felt a shiver of longing to keep him with her, to protect him. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Wait just a minute. The bull is almost out of gas.”

  Soon it was so, the final firecracker spent; and they left, climbing up the steep road and moving directly to their room. She opened first the shutters, then the shade, and turned off the light. The moon supplied the illumination the fireworks had previously provided, and soon they were in each other’s arms and she felt him hug her more tenaciously than ever before, and harder than ever before, yet more tenderly. He moved, then, beginning to alternate practiced and spontaneous actions of his body, bending hers to his and kneading her desire until the spasm came. His hands behind her ears, he could discern her smile, her eyes closed.

  “Get kind of winded at 5,500 feet,” he said.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re out of practice.”

  “Well—how high is Mexico City?”

  “Seventy-three hundred feet.”

  “Well, that’s the highest I ever did it—but tonight is something else …”

  She smiled again. She would flirt with the subject of her Blacky’s other lives, but never probe, never probe.

  “Why don’t we get married?” Blackford said.

  “What would be the use of our getting married if you continued in your present job, which keeps you out of the country half the time?”

  “I would need to make arrangements.”

  “Inside your Agency, or outside it?”

  “Whatever. I think we should have a family.”

  “In due course.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.”

  “Where did you pick up that line?”

  “Jane Austen, where else?”

  “What comes after that?”

  “You’re supposed to say: ‘Me?—yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.’”

  “Are you against having children?”

  “No. It’s just that I am against procreating them.”

  “Well I’m afraid, Sally, we have here an insuperable problem.”

  She laughed.

  He continued. “I suppose we could always adopt a child. That way you wouldn’t need to take any time from your study of the eighteenth century.”

  “I tell you what, Blacky. Let’s do this. Let’s agree to marry on June 1, 1964. No matter what.”

  “No matter even if we don’t want to?”

  “That’s right. No matter if we don’t want to.”

  “What does this mean for our professional lives?”

  “It means that we have three years in which to tame those lives. My book will be out and published, you will have contrived a coup d’état in the Kremlin and a restoration of the Romanov dynasty, and we’ll just take it from there, and have lots of children.”

  “And meanwhile?”

  “Meanwhile, my darling Blacky, we will simply stay in touch.”

  “Is this,” he slid up between her legs, “what you mean by staying in touch?”

  “I call that staying in touch à outrance.”

  “No French. Except kissing.” Later, when she slept, Blackford felt that their relationship was somehow consecrated. They had, so to speak, exchanged vows.

  Seven

  From the Littlejohns’ he called the number in Washington and was told to proceed to the airport. “Before you board, someone will introduce himself. He will ask after your stepfather by name. Follow his instructions.”

  He told Sally there were no changes in his plans to fly to Washington, and that he desired to go to the airport by taxi.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s better that way.”

  They shared a quick lunch with the Littlejohns. Kenneth wanted to know why, if their mother was ill, it fell to Blackford to look after her, rather than to Sally? Blackford decided to demonstrate to Sally the ease with which an experienced agent handled such provocations.

  “You never told Kenneth and Josephine about—you and Mother?”

  Sally swallowed and said quietly, “No.”

  “Well, Ken, it’s one of those terrible things. Psychiatrists have tackled it, two sisters, a brother, we even got a letter from J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “What? What?” Kenneth Littlejohn looked up.

  “McCarthyism. You lived out of the country during those days, Ken, but McCarthy had all of America in his grip, and he just sowed suspicion, you never saw anything like it. Well, after listening to McCarthy for a year or two Mother became absolutely convinced that Sally is a Soviet agent. And refuses to see her, or even to discuss the matter. She says she expects to see Sally next on the day Sally comes in leading a red brigade and confiscates Mother’s house.”

  Josephine sighed and said she was certain that if she could spend a few hours with Mrs. Partridge she, Josephine, could convince her that Sally was a good, red-blooded American. Blackford said that he would be glad to sponsor the effort. “But not now, not when she’s ill. Later.”

  Kenneth held his peace. And soon Josephine was embracing Blackford, and Blackford embraced Sally, and then Josephine embraced Sally to console her on her brother’s departure, and Kenneth felt it would be appropriate if he too embraced Sally to console her. Blackford managed a smile and a fraternal wave when he got into the taxi, and they all stood there, just before the rain began, and waved him goodbye as the 1956 yellow Studebaker taxi drove off, though only after Josephine had negotiated the fare—“in Mexico you must always arrive at an understanding with the taxi drivers,” she warned Blackford, blowing him one final kiss.

  He was fourth in line to the ticket window at Eastern Airlines when the man approached him.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Oakes, but I am a friend of Sir Alec Sharkey, and he asked that you c
ome with me. Here, let me help you with your bags.”

  The agile little man grabbed the heavier of the two bags with his right hand, transferring his cigarette to his left hand. And said matter-of-factly, “I have canceled your reservation. We’ll be driving to an apartment where I hope you will be comfortable until we get things sorted out.”

  The stranger was a careful driver, though he used primarily a single hand, reserving the other for his cigarette. He indulged nonchalant challengers the right of way except, Blackford noticed, in the two situations when the challenger was being provocative. When that happened, the stranger simply stepped on the accelerator, giving the challenger the obvious option of braking or facing instant death, along with the stranger and, Blackford calculated detachedly, Blackford. The rain had long since stopped, and the vernal freshness was back as they muscled their way across the density of the city toward the Reforma and up onto the Lomas of Chapultepec. “I used to live in Mexico City,” the driver said, again betraying his accent, and adding nothing more, as though it was clearly up to Blackford to signal an interest or not in this datum.

  Blackford complied. “You were born here?”

  “No. I was born in Spain. I came here in 1939, when I was thirty-nine. I left here—let me see—seventeen years ago. The changes are extraordinary, but then there are almost three million more people living in Mexico City than in 1943. It is quite haunting to be back. On the other hand, the Lomas have not changed all that much.”

  The reference was to the comfortable “lomas” of Chapultepec—the extensive hilly pastures that lay at the northwest end of the palace, and belonged to it when Maximilian and Carlota reigned as emperor and empress, until Maximilian got himself executed. The eight square miles were something like the middle-class suburbs of America, with substantial houses, each one on an acre or more; only in Mexico, unlike Scarsdale, they were all tended by servants. And the homes were lush with summer flowers, like the whole of the Mexican valley.