Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  There were no dues or meetings or regular communications; no written register of Shelleyans existed. The only spoken rule of membership was that every Shelleyan must grant any favor or service asked of him by any other Shelleyan “in the name of the Poet.” If a man could not do the favor or perform the service himself, then he must find another Shelleyan who could. This rule was absolute. Once requested, no such favor or service could ever be left undone.

  Shelleyans, even when known to one another by their real names, were addressed by the last two digits of their class year. Julian was Seven-Oh, Hammett Six-Nine, the man in Stamford whom Julian had called on the telephone, Seven-One.

  “How can I help you?” asked Seven-One.

  Julian said, “I want to get hold of Six-Nine to invite him to a party this weekend.”

  “I’ll be glad to do that for you,” said Seven-One. “Where’s the party?”

  “In the hills.”

  This was the Shelleyan term for the Harbor, which many members of the Society had visited. Julian’s father had been Two-Six; his half brother, Horace, was Five-Five.

  Julian continued, “My plan is to pick him up around eleven tonight at his local airport.”

  “I’ll get word to him,” said Seven-One.

  “Thank you,” said Julian, and disconnected.

  Then he smiled at his wife, who had appeared with her arms full of groceries just as he was in the act of hanging up.

  Emily got into the car and took the wheel. As she backed out of the parking space, tires spinning in the thawed and refrozen remains of the snow, Julian placed a hand on her slim thigh and said, “How would you like to go up to the Harbor this weekend? We can do some cross-country skiing.”

  She was surprised. “Leave town with all that’s happening?” she asked. “Who’ll manage the crisis?”

  “It can manage itself for a couple of days. Lockwood has already gone to Kentucky to get away from it all.”

  “Are you talking about just the two of us?” she asked.

  “Would you rather not go?”

  They were sitting close together, especially because he was so large and the car, a Fiat, was so small. Emily’s braid—she wore her hair long to please him—was caught beneath the collar of her coat. Gently he pulled it free and lifted it to his nostrils. It had a lovely, sweet weight to it, like one of her breasts, and smelled of health-store shampoo and fresh air.

  “Well?”

  “I’d love to go,” Emily said. “It should be beautiful in the woods with all this snow.”

  “Then we’ll fly up tonight,” Julian said.

  Emily maneuvered the car into traffic. Looking at him in the rearview mirror, she said, “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Ah, so I haven’t,” Julian said. “Actually, I have asked someone to join us. Archimedes Hammett.”

  “Hammett?”

  Emily put on the brakes. The car slid into the curbstone with a thump that activated the air bag. Horns blew; taxis scattered. Emily’s oversize horn-rim glasses, one bow mended with Scotch tape, were knocked askew by the inflated balloon.

  “Whoopsie!” she said. Her hands dropped limply from the steering wheel; she smiled in goofy embarrassment.

  Julian decided to regard the smile as a gesture of forgiveness. He said, “How I love you, Mouse.”

  A large tear, magnified by the lens of her glasses, appeared in Emily’s eye, then rolled down her cheek. Julian wiped it away with a knuckle, realizing, with an intensity that flooded his entire being with all the emotion he had repressed over the days just past, that he did love this woman who was too young for him, and too beautiful and too innocent. And though he fought against it, he thought about Mallory, too, and about what had happened to Susan Grant. How could any man bear such a loss?

  Emily glared at him. “Hammett,” she said. “How could you?”

  2

  That night about ten, Julian and Emily took off from National Airport in Julian’s airplane, an aged two-engine, six-passenger Beechcraft. He had learned to fly as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War, and the plane was one of his greatest pleasures. Emily was afraid of flying and hated the noise of the engines and the smelly, overheated atmosphere in the cabin, but she understood that he expected her to find it romantic, so she did her best to hide her terror. When they were courting, he had flown her in this plane to a fishing cabin in Labrador, to a party in France, to beaches in the Caribbean.

  A few moments after takeoff, they broke through the cloud cover above Chesapeake Bay. A lopsided icy moon shone brightly off to the right. On the other side of the plane, Venus glowed.

  “Wonderful sky,” Julian said.

  “What was the sky like in Vietnam?” Emily asked.

  He laughed in surprise. “Why?”

  “I always think about you in Vietnam when we’re flying.”

  “Do you, Mouse? Actually, I didn’t see much of it. We flew by instruments.”

  “There’s something else I wonder,” Emily said. “What made you go to war? Nobody else went.”

  “They didn’t?”

  “Not people we knew. How many Yale men were killed in Vietnam?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “The exact number is fourteen,” Emily said. “And twelve from Harvard. I read that in a book by a Republican.”

  Julian said, “That was the reason I went.”

  The real reason, of course, was the Shelley Definition. How could he possibly have put himself in the place of another and of many others and let the pains and pleasures of his species become his own if he did not see the war through his own eyes and understand its evil through his own deeds? But he could not tell Emily this; no wife, no woman of any kind, had ever been told about the Shelley Society, and in his heart he did not believe that any woman could understand war.

  The plane was now on automatic pilot, headed for the suffused glow of a city. Baltimore? Emily had no sense of direction even when she was on the ground. Julian put his seat back and turned to face her. “What made you think about Vietnam all of a sudden?” he asked.

  “I told you, it’s not so all of a sudden,” she replied. “Every time I wake up before you do I look at your scars and wonder how you got them.”

  His Phantom fighter-bomber had been shot down by enemy ground fire and he had nearly died; the marks of this experience, wounds and burns, were all over his body.

  “You don’t like the scars?”

  “I hate them. You don’t deserve them.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Julian replied.

  At the time, most people he knew thought that he deserved whatever he got in Vietnam. His decision to join the Navy had lost him the revolutionary (Vassar ‘70) who loved him, though not forever. After he came home from the war she became his first wife and the mother of his two children.

  “What do you mean, I shouldn’t be too sure?” Emily said. “Sure of what?”

  “I killed a lot of people.”

  “Weren’t they trying to kill you, too?”

  “Yes. With spears. Let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. … ”

  His words trailed off. She took his hand; it remained inert. She kissed it; it smelled of the machine he had been flying.

  Julian said, “On the day I crashed into the sea, I was glad to be shot down. I was sure I was going to die, and all I could think was ‘Good for you!’ ”

  “Good for who?”

  “The people who shot me down.”

  “You wanted to die? That’s why you went?”

  “It seemed appropriate.” In the eerie green glow of the instrument panel, immobilized by old emotions, he looked like the dead man he had wanted to be.

  For a moment, Emily could think of nothing to say in return. She understood what Julian meant, but the idea made no sense to her. Because of the difference in their ages, neither had ever really understood the way the other thought or felt.

  She said, “You thought that the enemy w
as virtuous?”

  “Compared to us? Yes. What else would I think?”

  “But the Viet Cong did horrible things,” she said. “The people who shot you down could have been the ones who massacred children, raped women, disemboweled village elders, couldn’t they? Such things happened in Vietnam.”

  “How do you know that? From more Republican books?”

  “Don’t condescend to me, Julian. You know it’s true.

  ” Julian said, “I’m not sure I do know that. But if such things were done by the V.C., there was always a political rationale. Always.”

  His features were once again in repose. “There was a ‘political rationale’?” Emily said. “That explains everything?”

  Julian had no chance to answer before the radio emitted some incomprehensible message from air traffic control that required him to respond. But for Julian, Emily realized, it did explain everything.

  3

  After Julian parked the Beechcraft near the passenger terminal in New Haven, Emily looked out the window and saw Archimedes Hammett walking across the tarmac with a knapsack on his back and a picnic cooler in his hand. Under a 1960s-style duffel coat with ropes for buttonholes, he wore his trademark chambray shirt and dungarees.

  Emily said, “Shit.”

  Julian switched off one of the engines. As the propeller vibrated to a stop, he said, “Come on, Mouse.”

  Emily turned her face away. “Don’t call me Mouse,” she said.

  She climbed into the backseat and feigned sleep for the remainder of the flight. After landing in Pittsfield and driving over snowy roads in a rented car, they arrived at the Harbor around midnight. The caretaker had turned up the heat and lit a fire of maple logs in the library fireplace. Emily put Hammett in a room at the opposite end of the house from the one where she and Julian would sleep. Then she returned to the library, where Julian was sitting in front of the fire, drinking the fifteen-year-old single-malt Scotch whisky she had given him for Christmas.

  Holding up the glass, he said, “Want some? It’s whisky.”

  “I can smell,” Emily said. “No. I’m going to bed.”

  He looked at her. “You are mad at me.”

  She made no reply, but when he came to bed, she attacked. When he tried to slow her down she straddled him and said, “No, now.”

  They had not made love for weeks. Now, more quickly than either of them could ever remember its happening, she uttered a long female cry, half groan, half howl, then collapsed, gasping, on his chest. In the ensuing silence, Julian could hear the wind moaning in the eaves and the nearly human noises of the shifting timbers. His father, the seventh generation of Hubbards born in this house, had said that the Harbor “creaked its bones” when the winter wind blew. All the rooms were called after ancestors; they had slept in “Fanny,” named for Fanny Harding de Saint-Christophe, a name later Englished as Christopher, who had married a Hubbard as her second husband sometime around the French and Indian Wars.

  Julian cupped Emily’s cheek in his hand, thinking to tell her this, but he realized she was weeping, so instead of speaking, he turned her over and made love to her again. Her slight body, always new to him, surprised him into a shout of pleasure and love. Or, as he thought when he was able to think again, the two made one.

  They were awakened just after first light by bursts of static and loud music as Archimedes Hammett, a news addict, fiddled with the eight-band radio that he carried with him wherever he went. Finally he found the all-news station he was looking for and adjusted the volume downward.

  Julian said, “Archimedes must be paying us back for last night. I hope he wasn’t too shocked.”

  Julian humorously pretended to believe that the reclusive Hammett was a virgin. Emily’s womanly instincts told her that this joke might well be the reality. Hammett suffered from a pathological fear of germs and infection. He would not shake hands, even with an old friend like Julian. He never touched money or mail but did all his banking and correspondence by computer. He carried an atomizer of disinfectant in his pocket and sprayed it on telephones and toilet seats when he had to make a call or relieve himself while away from home. A whiff of tobacco smoke in the street or the dust from a construction site sent him into a near-panic. For his weekend with the Hubbards he had brought his own sheets, his own towels and hospital soap, and, in the picnic cooler, even his own food. Everything he ate or drank, including water, came from a farm in the Connecticut Valley that was operated on strict organic principles by two female ecolawyers, former students of his who had a practice in Hartford. When he was on the road lecturing or defending a client for longer than a day or two, this couple sent him his daily rations, cooled by blue ice, via overnight mail.

  Up close, Hammett looked to Emily like a Richard Avedon photograph of Muammar Qaddafi. He was a short, scrawny person with a large Old World nose and burning dark eyes. For breakfast he ate an orange and a bowl of homemade granola and drank a cup of herbal tea made with bottled water from the organic farm. He used dishes he had brought with him—plastic, because paper plates contained microscopic pits and fissures in which bacteria might lurk. All this Emily knew from earlier encounters. “Hammett,” she said, without preamble, “how old were your grandparents when they died?”

  Warily, for these were almost the first words she had spoken to him and he knew how she felt about him, he replied, “They were in their nineties.”

  Emily said, “Funny they lasted so long when you think of the stuff they must have eaten as kids. No refrigerators in Macedonia.”

  “The Peloponnesus,” Hammett said firmly.

  “Sorry. But the fact remains.”

  “Actually, the diet was very healthy. Low fat all the way. Olives, bread, wild herbs, vinegar, a little wine. Meat only at Easter. They fasted the rest of the year. Because the Turks had cut down all the trees, they had to bring wood up into the mountains on donkeys, hundreds of donkeys loaded with twigs to roast the lamb. Sometimes the Turks would attack the donkey train. Break their legs, shove them over the cliff.”

  “Oh. Well, that certainly explains the longevity. They always had something to look forward to.”

  “What?”

  “The paschal lamb.”

  “You can make a joke of it,” said Hammett, “but that egg you’re eating will kill you.”

  “I know—lots of cholesterol.”

  “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. They put chemicals and hormones in the hen’s food—in the water, in the grit, in everything it touches—so the chicken can’t escape having its body converted into a mechanism for profit.”

  “Wow,” Emily said, mopping up the yolk with a piece of toast. “Doesn’t sound like the hen is going to live forever. Did you speak Greek at home?”

  Hammett was reluctant to answer; he hated trivia and personal questions. Finally he said, “Yes, always.”

  “Can you still speak it?”

  “Yes, but only the Maniátes can understand me.”

  “The who?”

  “My grandfather’s people.”

  Hammett told her no more. Idle conversation annoyed him, and of course he realized that Emily was teasing him. He looked around the kitchen, as if fixing the location of the exits in his mind.

  Before Emily could ask another question, Julian interrupted. “Emily, my dear,” he said. “why don’t you wax the skis? I’ll take Archimedes for a ride on the snowmobile and make a trail.”

  This made sense. Skiing through the woods was easier on a trail that had been packed down by the treads of a snowmobile.

  “Okay,” Emily said, “but please don’t be the whole morning about it. It’s too nice to stay in.”

  Sunlight, reflecting off the enormous snowdrifts that lay around the house, burst through the kitchen windows. Emily brought the skis and wax kit out of the cellar while Julian got out the snowmobile, checked the gas and oil in his methodical way, and started it up. Wearing a red knitted cap that made her scalp itch, she waited inside until he put it
in motion. She hated this machine, which smelled even worse than Julian’s airplane and made a noise so deafening that it blotted out not just hearing but all other senses as well. You couldn’t see or feel your own flesh as it roared through the woods, generating a freezing wind in the face, bucking like a mechanical bull, and threatening to plunge over a hidden cliff at any moment. She was amazed that Hammett, who lived in fear of breaking his skin, let alone his bones, got on behind Julian and let himself be driven through the trees at thirty miles an hour.

  As soon as the men were out of sight, she took the temperature of the snow with the wax-smeared thermometer from the kit, chose the right wax for the temperature and snow condition, and began to apply it to the narrow skis. Julian’s, of course, were immensely long; they had to be made to order and were so expensive that he and Horace, who was exactly the same height as his younger brother, frugally shared the single pair. Despite the sun, it was bitter cold, so that when Emily breathed deeply, the air seemed to contain invisible shards of ice that produced a slight pain under the breastbone, as if she had swallowed a bite of sherbet too rapidly. This weather and the beautiful snowbound wilderness all around her made her happy.

  She finished waxing Julian’s skis and started working on her own. Somewhere on the mountain, miles away probably, the snowmobile stopped whining as Julian throttled down and parked. After a few moments, the engine started again, but she could tell that the machine was not moving. Because the wind blew in her direction and the mountain itself acted like an amphitheater, causing sound to rebound into the valley, she could distinctly hear the irritating pop-pop of the idling engine.