On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  Meanwhile in Sumner, Mississippi, Bryant and Milam, immune under the Fifth Amendment from being prosecuted twice on the same charge, told a magazine journalist who paid well for their story how they had murdered Emmett Till.

  “That’s why it matters so much to me,” said Frank as he ended his story. “Being back in business. It’s not just my own work, it’s kind of a philosophical thing.”

  “I understand,” said Mary. “And you’re forgiven now? It’s all okay again?”

  Frank nodded. “The atmosphere’s improved a good deal, but you can never be truly sure. There’s a guy at the Times who’s never gotten off obituaries.”

  “But the political atmosphere’s easier now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We don’t have McCarthy anymore. Or Eastland, who chaired the Senate committee on the press. He was a segregationist from Mississippi who believed in white supremacy. He said the Supreme Court had been brainwashed by Communists. He had a lot of journalists sent to jail for pleading the First Amendment. That’s why my editor wanted to keep me and Billy Foy out of it all. He knew how dangerous it was.”

  “You look upset.” Mary reached out a hand to him.

  “Billy was my best friend. He came from a dirt-poor family in Columbus, Ohio. We met in the army, in the same platoon. It was his idea to become a journalist. We both went to college on the GI Bill after the war. He came to New York six months after me. He was clever as hell, but he was the sweetest guy. He loved the work, it was all he’d ever wanted to do. And he was a natural at it. But he’d written a lot of stuff about the South that got right up Eastland’s nose and he’d been looking for a chance to get Billy. The FBI, as luck would have it, had already done a security investigation on him.”

  “I thought that was only for criminals or undesirable aliens.”

  “Not then. More than fifty people at the Times had been investigated. The FBI gave a lot of stuff to the committee. Just like they did with McCarthy.”

  “And what happened to your friend?”

  “Billy was subpoenaed to attend. He took the Fifth and that kept him out of prison, but everyone who took the Fifth got fired. It made it look as though you were a Communist. Even after he’d left the paper, the FBI wouldn’t leave him alone. They harassed him, they chased him. They were blackmailing him to inform them about other people. One day he threw himself from the eighteenth floor of his apartment building. Goddammit, Mary, he was thirty-five years old.”

  Chapter 8

  Frank took the train to Baltimore with Mary. She kissed him furtively as he climbed down onto the platform, where the sun was shining with the taut early promise of summer. He stood by the exit with a portable typewriter in its brown case and a carryall he would not need to check at the airport; his first assignment with Senator Kennedy was at Hagerstown, Maryland, and Mary could sense the strain in his waiting body as he glanced back, caught between two poles.

  Mary continued the journey to Washington and was back at Number 1064 in time to welcome Charlie from Boston. She asked the Renshaws to come to dinner that night. She knew that they were almost the only couple in Washington who did not in some way exasperate Charlie and she wanted to reestablish the normal rhythm of their lives, as though nothing had changed. She telephoned her mother in London and spoke to her for half an hour; she would have taken longer but her father warned her that, despite the gaiety of her manner, Elizabeth often seemed weak. He said he would call on Mary if he needed her, but for the time being they did not expect a visit until they came to collect the children at the end of term.

  It was a warm spring evening, sunny without the heaviness that came in full summer, and they cooked steaks and chicken on the barbecue in the backyard. Charlie stood at the grill with a white apron wrapped around him, pouring sidecars from a jug into some new glasses he had brought back from a shop on Boylston Street.

  “The importance of the glass, Eddie,” he said, handing him a refill. “If I am remembered for only one thing in my life, I would be happy for it to be that. Forget my contribution to international relations, my learned papers on the Communist threat and the economy of Europe.”

  “I think I already have,” said Edward Renshaw, as he turned the squat glass appreciatively round between his fingers. “But this … this is a real discovery.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “ ‘Significance that each has lived / The other to detect / Discovery not God himself / Could now annihilate.’ ”

  “Emily Dickinson.”

  Charlie went inside to search for the book, so he could complete the stanzas of the poem they had forgotten, but returned empty-handed, cursing his haphazard shelves. The Washington night sank warmly onto the paved yard and Mary brought out storm lanterns into which the moths blundered noisily.

  “These bugs are killing me,” said Katy.

  “You need more smoke,” said Charlie, handing her a pack of cigarettes.

  “Thank you,” said Katy. “You glad to be back in D.C., Charlie?”

  “Yes, but I’m off again any minute.”

  “Boston again?”

  “God, no. Oregon. I’m required to spend some time with the Catholic senator. He’s supposed to be my special subject. I’d almost forgotten.”

  “The one you said could never win the nomination?” said Edward.

  “That’s the chap,” said Charlie. “Anyway, he hasn’t yet. There’s still Stevenson, Symington and Johnson to come.”

  “Looks like it, though, doesn’t it?” said Katy, wrapping a cardigan across her shoulders.

  “I think so,” said Charlie. “But he won’t beat Nixon.”

  He reached, smiling broadly, for a wine bottle through the mess of plates with their charred remains, melted ice cream and cigarette ends stubbed into the rejected parts of chicken that had been still pink at the joints. Mary watched him pour and could sense the largesse, the moment of equilibrium rushing through him with the wine.

  “What about you, Mary?” said Edward. “Did you enjoy New York?”

  “What did you go for?” said Katy. “Just a vacation?”

  “Yes, pretty much. I like the city. I’ve always enjoyed it. And if Charlie’s going to be away on his travels, who knows, I might go back.”

  “You sound as though you have a little project going on,” said Katy.

  Mary peered into the darkness to see what degree of playfulness was registering in Katy’s eyes; but through the smoke and the blur of the lamp she could see only the pretty outline of her jaw and the soft swell of the cardigan on her shoulders.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s funny you should say that. You know how Lauren’s always saying how cultured I’m supposed to be, coming from Europe, and Charlie’s always telling people I’m writing a book.”

  “Am I?” said Charlie.

  “That’s what you told Lauren,” said Katy. “You said she’d won prizes in college for her writing.”

  “Anyway,” said Mary, “I thought perhaps I would. With the children away and so on. I mean, why not?”

  “Would what?” said Charlie.

  “Write a book. I know it sounds ridiculous, it sounds so presumptuous, but, well—”

  “What about?” said Charlie.

  “I’m not quite sure what it’s about. I think it’s about New York. And children.”

  “It’s like a guidebook?” said Katy.

  “Not exactly.”

  “I can’t wait to read it.”

  Charlie laughed. “I think you’ll have to. The poor girl’s got to write it first.”

  “Do you like the idea of your wife’s being an author?” said Edward.

  “Sure,” said Charlie. “The new Emily Dickinson. Or more like Edith Wharton, perhaps.” He filled his glass. “Or Grace Metalious. In fact, that’s what we really need. A Peyton Place would do fine. Then I could retire from the service.”

  “Does she know enough about suburban adultery?” said Edward.

  “I’m sure I could find out, Eddie.”

  From
Maryland, Senator Kennedy flew to Oregon to address a Young People for Kennedy rally at Portland. With him on the press plane went Frank Renzo; behind them went an aircraft with the sound and camera people, dismissively referred to as the “animal plane”; and on a commercial flight the following day, in an aisle seat (“something as far from the bloody window as possible”) booked by Benton at the Embassy, went Charlie van der Linden.

  A cherry-and-white cab pulled up outside Number 1064 to take Mary to Union Station; ten minutes later the announcer called out “All aboard” and that evening she was back in New York. She had kept her room in the drab hotel in the Garment District, where she went to the manager’s office to negotiate a long-term rate. She agreed a price, calculating as she did so by how much it would further overdraw the family account.

  In a drugstore on Seventh Avenue she bought some ballpoint pens and a large blue exercise book with a high school daily schedule printed inside the front cover. She pictured Charlie beaming over a mugful of Wild Turkey: “My wife can’t join us tonight, Ambassador. She has to be in New York, where she’s doing ‘research’ for the book she’s writing.” It was impossible to count the number of inverted commas with which he would surround the word “research.” How preposterous, how absurd it sounded: she, herself, an author. The Ailanthus Tree: A Memoir by Mary Kirwan; and on the back flap: About the Author: “Mary Kirwan was born in London, England, in 1920 and is married to a British diplomat. They have two children and are presently living in Washington, D.C. Her hobbies are reading and listening to music … Her husband’s hobbies are drinking liquor, taking barbiturates and Benzedrine tablets, smoking cigarettes and misquoting poetry. She wrote this book so she could pursue a platonic but passionate adulterous love affair in New York City with a newspaperman she barely knows, who is mostly out of town. Miss Kirwan, a British university honors graduate who enjoys the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, is already hard at work on a sequel: From the Outside Inwards: Cutlery Conundrums and Other Scenes from Diplomatic Life …” Hmm … Better a novel, really, she thought: something with a title that suggested an elegant melancholy—A Shaded Street, or perhaps The Reluctant Dancer.

  It was ridiculous, but she started anyway, and watched the coarse paper of the book, that should have filled with some schoolchild’s homework, clog up with lines of spilling reminiscence. The coming death of her mother had provided the frame in which all else was now contained and intensified: matters that had seemed provisional or capable of endless procrastination had acquired the dull imminence of fact: death happened, death was coming and she herself was going to die, inexplicably, unsatisfactorily, like her mother, like everyone else, with burial, extinction, no questions answered and no ends tied off. And in the middle of all this weight, of all this duty that accompanied her previously denied middle age, there had come this rapture. At this moment, for the first time in her life, she had experienced the transcendent combination of the fierce tenderness, such as she felt for Richard and Louisa, with the physical desire that had once before raged, many years ago, with David Oliver, and which she had resigned herself never again to know. The simultaneous experience of the two feelings was not a simple addition of their respective effects; it felt to Mary as though the force was squared. She could not imagine how she was supposed to deal with it; but it felt like death—imperative, unavoidable, the only issue.

  She had found a deli called Nathan’s, where she had breakfast every morning. The elderly waitresses with blue hair soon lost their initial gruffness as they refilled her coffee mug (too hot and too weak—Charlie was right), brought fresh orange juice (“oring juice,” they called it, as though unable to manage two “j” sounds in succession) and plied her with eggs over easy, sunny side up, home fries, wheat toast, omelettes, brittle strips of bacon, paper tubs of pale butter and miniature containers of jelly (“Raspberry? Grape? Whaddaya like today?”) that they pulled from the pockets of their aprons.

  She read the paper, lighting a cigarette, trying to prolong the pleasure of being there, as she looked for Frank’s byline. She liked it, she would have been happy never to have any other breakfast than that provided in the wooden booths divided by their low partitions with patterned panes of brown and crimson glass at head height, with Sadie hovering at her elbow with a coffee refill, Mike the bearded cook in his crumpled hat beneath a sign that read: “Special. Don’t Cook Tonite. Whole Roast Chicken. Plus One Pound Kasha Varnishkes. Plus 1lb Potato Salad or Coleslaw.” She liked it all as though her life depended on it.

  After breakfast she returned to her hotel room and settled down to write in the exercise book till about noon, when she would take the subway downtown to Sheridan Square. Frank had passed on a piece of advice he had received from a woman friend: she should smooth the back of her skirt down carefully before she sat down, as the seats in some subway cars had rough rattan surfaces that tore your nylons, “And you know what it’s like when you get a run in one of a new pair.”

  Trees, trees, she thought each time she emerged in the Village: trees, and streets with curves and names; yet in this temporary escape from right angles there seemed a decadence, a flexed temptation. She followed a regular course: from Seventh Avenue South down West 11th Street, a peaceful, tree-lined thoroughfare of Italianate row houses with half-basements and pink geraniums in the window boxes. There were one or two plaques on the walls that suggested the street had long been too grand for the bakeries, Mexican craft shops and blue jeans that Frank despised. Then she looped onto Bleecker Street and paused to look at Frank’s apartment building. She gazed up to the top floors, unable to make out which window was his, with its view of the Hudson and the Jersey shore. She went back a block to West 10th and looked again. There, behind that square of impersonal upper window, that was where her life had changed.

  Afterward she took a different route each day, looking for a bar or café where she would feel at home. On this morning she walked for a few blocks down Bleecker, then turned south. Houston was not a street, but a highway of crosstown traffic, and a division, too, a Delaware, below which was Hell’s Hundred Acres, an industrial district of cast-iron buildings, sweatshops, strikes and factory fires. A block or so down she saw a neon café sign and decided to brave Houston to reach it.

  Installed at the bar, she took out a magazine and leafed through it as the barman presented the requested Bloody Mary with a casual flourish. She was only the second customer in the place, which had a clean, morning smell and an atmosphere of expectation. Behind the bar an enormous selection of bottles was ranged on a wooden counter, beneath which was a row of brass-handled drawers. An indolent, two-bladed fan rotated in the ceiling, and behind the stool where Mary sat, on the other side of the long, rectangular room, was a row of tables set with red gingham cloths. On the wall above were photographs of prizefighters, many signed to the bar: watchful faces, some African in reluctant origin, some Slav, like Fritzie Zivic, staring with violent monochrome trepidation, fists raised, at their new unconquered homeland. You could almost hear the roar of their endeavor.

  Mary was too happy in her surroundings to read the magazine, but flicked through the advertisements, with Frank’s voice in her ear. The men’s clothes all promised something more impressive than pants and coats. “Glen Guard: the trademark of the confident man!” “The Bowler Homburg—the new Hat of Influence,” at Saks. “Strook—for the self-assured look. Some men are born relaxed, some achieve relaxation through Yoga or Zen and some find relaxation thrust upon them via suits of Folkweave Tweed.” The gentleman in the picture had certainly achieved a self-assured air; so much so, Mary noticed, that next to his Folkweave Tweed suit he was clutching a nine-inch upright model of a U.S. Navy Polaris missile.

  Every page seemed to have some relevance to her own unusual circumstances. She could send a Western Union candygram, a two-pound box of chocolates with a telegram attached—five dollars plus the cost of the words—to Eugene, Oregon. But to whom would she address it?

  Her small anguish a
t the thought of Charlie staggering once more across the tarmac to the waiting plane was replaced by a shameful idea: she could volunteer to accompany him. And if he was going to be close to Senator Kennedy for a time, then inevitably she would come across others who …

  The bar was slowly filling with workers from the factories, regular customers known by name to the barman, also with one or two office clerks in suits and neckties who had ventured down from the Village into the cast-iron neighborhood. Mary felt she should vacate her stool for these people whose claim was superior to her own, but she was enjoying being there and ordered a sandwich to justify her presence.

  The barman brought another drink, which she sipped, feeling not so much a weakening effect of alcohol as a slight intensifying of the moment. She flicked the page and read the words “Hold That Tiger with an Easybaby Car Belt” over a picture of a cross little boy standing on the backseat of a car. His face reminded her of Richard’s when he was two or three, and from her purse she surreptitiously slipped the wallet with two photographs and gorged her hungry gaze on them beneath the cover of the mahogany bar rail.

  “Club sandwich, ma’am.”

  Mary looked up with stinging eyes. “Thank you.”

  After lunch she went back to the hotel and wrote a long letter to each of the children, describing the wonderful city of New York. Then she wrote to Duncan Trench, explaining that she planned to be out of town so much in the near future that she would regrettably be unable to help him with his request.

  There was no flight number for the press plane, no check-in; you walked across the airfield apron, left your bag beneath the open hold if you wanted it stowed, then climbed aboard, found a seat and, when the attendant had shut the cabin door, you took off. There were seat belts, but no one wore them because they prevented you from turning around and sharing drinks and notes with the reporters in the row behind.

  There was a murmur of anticipation as the small aircraft reached the steepest angle of its climb. The curtain at the front parted, Senator Kennedy emerged and sat down on a wooden tray; he joined his hands around his feet and tobogganed down the aisle into the restraining arms of his junior press secretary at the rear of the plane.