On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  There were brief notes of dreams as well, though she dreamed the same thing night after night: that she was lifting her mother in her arms, carrying her weight and laying it down softly—on a bed, in a car or in a grave. Her mother was alive, but Mary’s momentary delight at this discovery was dashed when it turned out that Elizabeth was also dying, always dying, never well again.

  She wrote in her book, “I have a duty to many people and somehow I will discharge it. I have a duty also to some continuing part of myself. I have discovered this essential identity through my feeling for Frank because that emotion has ripped open my self-protective layers. I see now what I am. It’s not a question of ‘happiness.’ I don’t value my own more—or much less—than anyone else’s. It’s something more urgent than that, and more lasting; it’s a question of being faithful to an essence.”

  She scratched a few words out: it was not right. She wanted to elevate the dilemma above the mundane distinction between selfishness and altruism, but the words on that higher plane were hard to find.

  She tried from a different angle. “I’ve heard people talk of the agony of moral choice,” she wrote, “the anguish of life-shaping dilemmas. Well, I feel agony and anguish all right, often at the same time, so they make me tremble (though not weep). But I have never had much sense of choice. To have him, be with him, see him, be part of him is a natural imperative, because in some way he is me, my inner self. It’s not just him that I yearn for when I call. It’s myself, my previous life, my next life.

  “So in fact there is surprisingly little choice. The possibility of not calling does not exist.”

  When Frank had finished writing his article, he telephoned the desk in New York to see if they had any queries and, once given the all-clear, went back into the studio where many people he had not seen before were thronging excitedly about the platform. The reporters who had listened to the debate outside had gathered to compare notes, while most of Channel 2’s employees seemed to be joining in the party.

  Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s swarthy press secretary, was pushing through the crowds with a euphoric smile, trying to reach Don Hewitt on the other side of the studio.

  “It’s a triumph,” he said to anyone who would listen. “We never dreamed it could go this well. The polls are giving it to us by two to one.”

  “But, Pierre, on the tax issue—”

  “Forget the tax issue. Jack came here tonight as the underdog and he leaves as the front-runner. Nixon’s got it all to do.”

  “Didn’t you think Nixon scored some points later on when—”

  “Did you see the way the guy looked? Did you?”

  “No, I got it through the audio feed.”

  “He looked terrified, like a rabbit in the headlights. He was sweating. It was Jack who looked like the vice president. Nixon looked like someone being interrogated. And then that reporter Vanocur got him with that question, you know when Ike was asked if Nixon had come up with any policy idea in eight years as veep? And Ike said, ‘Give me another year and I might think of one.’ Vanocur sank his chances right there.”

  Frank stayed close by. He discounted most of what Salinger was saying as wishful thinking; it was quite clear to him that Kennedy had scored no decisive points in the debate. On the other hand, something was worrying him.

  Bob Finch, Nixon’s campaign manager, was giving an interview on the other side of the room in which he also claimed victory for his man, pointing out that the vice president had scored on the questions of farms—Jack Kennedy had clearly never visited a farm except to canvass support in Minnesota—on schools, on subversion and on the question of a candidate’s age. All this was true, Frank thought, but there was no smile on Finch’s face.

  He went back to the Democratic side, where Salinger was in full flow, rebuking a reporter’s skepticism, still with a smile. “You think the guy in the bar in Madison, Wisconsin, looking up at some fuzzy Admiral TV set is going to give a damn about the fine print of the budget? He wants to see a president on his screen. He wants to see a man look confident, like a naval hero in World War Two, not some poor guy writhing and sweating up like that, all desperate to please. I tell you, mister, you just saw the next president of the United States walk out that door and his name is John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

  Frank went over to a huddle of reporters at the side of the room. They had all shared his own view of the proceedings, except those who had watched it on a screen, who believed that Kennedy had made by far the better impression.

  Frank decided to go back to his room and read through what he had written to see if he should add or subtract a paragraph. He found Pierre Salinger coming the other way.

  “Hi, Frank. How’re you doing? Enjoy the show?”

  “Sure.”

  “So. Whaddaya think? Show me your copy.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What did you say about it? Let me have a look. The other guys let me see.” He began to tug at the carbon copies sticking out of Frank’s jacket pocket.

  Frank looked at him steadily. “Fuck off,” he said.

  Mary made dinner in Frank’s apartment the next night, linguine with scallopini, a dish she knew he liked at the Grand Ticino; afterward she made zabaglione, protesting that without a copper pan it would not taste right. Frank had drunk bourbon all through the preparation of the meal and was in high spirits by the time it reached the table.

  “I was worried,” he said. “I thought I’d screwed up until I read the others. Russ Baker in the Times, even Joe Alsop in the Post who thinks he’s the biggest noise on the Hill, they both called it a draw. You just couldn’t see how badly Nixon came across unless you watched it on TV.”

  Mary smiled at him as she carried the food over to the table. Frank was in full flow. “Have you noticed, you can always tell a bullshitter by the way he introduces his own name into a story. Like Alsop, he says, ‘So the President called me at home and he said, “Joe,” he said, “I’m sorry to call you at home, Joe, but you’re the only man who can help.” ’ ”

  He drained the straw-covered bottle of Chianti into their glasses and opened another one. “Come and sit here,” he said, when he had finished. He put his arm round Mary, as she sat poised on his knee, then slid his other hand up her thigh.

  “Zabaglione,” she said, standing up and straightening her clothes.

  Frank laughed. “I love the way you do that thing with your skirt.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The kind of shaking down the hem in that schoolmarmy way.”

  He liked to watch her in the morning; even when she appeared fully dressed and on the point of leaving the apartment, she would suddenly lift the skirt to refasten a stocking or straighten the hem of the petticoat, then tug down the skirt itself again with a reproachful, wriggling movement. She could never be ready enough for the day, he thought, for all its eventualities. Mary, Mary: what was she expecting out there?

  She brought the dessert to the table and stirred the pan over a candle.

  “Just to make you feel you’re in one of those Village places you so dislike,” she said.

  Frank stretched out his legs and watched her. It was a miracle that this woman had come for him from the other side of the world, from that antique world of England, kings and fog, and that they had found each other. He had not known what was inside his head until she revealed it to him.

  He took their wineglasses into the bedroom where the warm air was pumped from the furnace hundreds of feet below them; it was hot enough for him to undress her without her having to reach for cover, and she let him take his private pleasures of her. For once, Frank felt sufficiently euphoric that no shadow hung over him, no knowledge that the indulgence of his feeling for her would end. The drink made him feel powerful, as though he could make love to her indefinitely; he heard her sigh and call out to him. Perhaps at last, he thought, he had touched the core of her.

  He took her face within his large hands, the hands with which he had dragged
himself, almost literally he sometimes thought, from boyhood, the hands with which he had fashioned himself a life; he raked his fingers through her hair, down to the skull, as his body filled hers. All the way, he thought, I will go all the way, till I find her; and with her head between his hands he too let out a cry, because he felt pity on her soul.

  Chapter 17

  Frank took some teasing in the office over his evenhanded report of the televised debate. “Hey, Frank, they fired Cordell for being up Kennedy’s ass. Maybe they’ll have to take you off Nixon for the same reason.” “Call for you, Frank. It’s Pat Nixon. You free for dinner Friday?”

  He did not worry; he did not bother to quote the rival reporters coming to the same conclusions. If he had called it the same way as Joe Alsop, how could he be wrong? The editor asked him to write a follow-up piece on an inside page that explained the mechanics of how the press had worked and tried to estimate the future power of the new medium. Frank raised a casual finger to his tormentors, or smiled. It was not necessary to point out that he had almost lost his job and had spent six years in journalistic exile for writing articles that opposed all that the younger Nixon had promoted, as congressman, lawyer and counsel for various committees, because everyone in the office knew it.

  When he returned to the Nixon campaign, his only misgiving concerned his absence from New York. He did not want to be separated from Mary, yet the residual elation of her company was enough to sustain him for a while. In his forty years or so of being alive, he had not actively sought happiness; he had experienced it most often as a byproduct of striving after something else. What he had felt since knowing Mary had redefined his view of the future, because he had not previously considered anything so abstract and unstable as emotion to be worth the effort of pursuing.

  As he sat on the plane one late October morning, watching a brownish pattern of Midwestern prairie drift slowly by beneath them, hearing the chatter of reporters in the row behind, he admitted to himself that he could never see anything in the same way again. If Mary should die, or leave him, or in some less dramatic way deprive him of her presence, he could neither recover from the loss of her nor deal with the unfulfilled capacity for love that she had created in him.

  He thought back to the morning he had recognized Charlie at the Spanish Embassy party in Washington. He remembered him quite well from Dien Bien Phu; he recalled liking Charlie’s rough indifference to the French army’s dilemma in the elephant trap it had dug for itself. Perhaps Charlie had exaggerated his infantry officer’s cynicism, but his attitude was appealing to Frank, who had been forced to cultivate a worldliness he did not feel in the Pacific. It didn’t matter what your childhood was like; nothing in Chicago prepared you for Guadalcanal, where everyone, from the hoariest marine sergeant to the freshest army reinforcement, was making it up as he went along.

  He had been glad to accept Charlie’s invitation to Number 1064 that evening, even though he suspected Charlie had no clear recollection of who he was. When he first saw Mary standing in front of the table in her sitting room, his response was the exact opposite: although she was a stranger, he had the sense of already knowing her profoundly well. The way that he then behaved, forcing a reentry to her presence, was unprecedented, but that was inevitable because she had opened up in him a depth of anxiety and desire that he had never previously known, and a new fever demanded a new remedy.

  As the weeks went past, he did not scrutinize his feeling too closely; he felt a little ashamed of it. It seemed to show that in his marriage to Roxanne—sincerely enough undertaken, he believed—he had been ignorant. He seemed to have lived all his life until this point as though in some restrictive dream. The things that had driven him—a desire to escape, to have money, respect, education—appeared in retrospect to have been coarse and unambitious urges, hardly better than those of the man in the Levittown house who yearned for a larger tail fin on his car each year.

  He was worried, too, that his feeling for Mary was in some way decadent, unmanly, though he felt man enough not to flinch from it. While the passion that he felt strongly intensified the experience of being alive, it also felt inexplicably dangerous, as though if he pushed through the feeling—forced his hand through the web—or orchestrated it to its natural climax, what lay beyond was annihilation.

  The stewardess brought him a glass of orange juice, which he drank quickly as he looked out of the window over the torn wisps of cloud. What Charlie had told him in Minneapolis had worried him. The FBI was no longer as powerful or belligerent as at its high noon, when its uncorroborated suspicions, fed to and repeated by ambitious men on Senate committees, could deprive a man of his livelihood, his passport, his friends, his bank account or, in Billy Foy’s case, his life. Yet Frank knew how tenacious the agency still was in questioning people, how large and random were its powers. Charlie had manifestly passed the day when he could withstand such an inquisition; Frank worried for his state of mind and, more pressingly, that Mary might somehow become entangled. The thought that she might, to save her husband, be obliged to become some sort of informer was not something he could bring himself to imagine. Could he still love her? Would it be worse to lose her, or—with all it would mean for his integrity—to keep her?

  Nor could he resolve what Charlie had told him, as the dawn was breaking, about how much he depended on his wife. Of course Charlie loved Mary; of course she was his light, his child—whatever the word was he had used: you would not be married to Mary and not feel that, Frank thought. The fact that Charlie valued her so much made Frank like him more, but there was nothing he could do to resolve their impasse. He was locked into it, like the other two, and the trivial questions of adultery—to tell or not to tell; to know or not to know—were of no interest to him. Perhaps, when Charlie spoke to him that night of his feelings for Mary, he had been warning him that he already suspected something; perhaps it was an appeal to Frank’s finer feelings.

  Frank swallowed and looked down at the cracked shiny leather of the empty seat next to his. He had “finer feelings,” all right, a “nobler nature,” all sorts of impulses toward fairness; but the intensity of his passion for Mary had banished them to some mental Alaska, far beyond reach.

  Charlie was scanning the newspapers, about to leave for work from Number 1064, when there was a ring at the front door. A large man in a raincoat with a bovine face was leaning against the doorjamb; on his chin, a piece of cotton wool was stuck to a shaving cut. He opened a wallet to reveal an FBI card.

  “You Mr. van der Linden? We’d like to talk to you.” He nodded his head toward a second, smaller man with a felt hat.

  Charlie sighed. “You sure you’re meant to be here? Do you think there’s been a crossed wire? I don’t see O’Brien anymore. That’s all over.”

  “I don’t know any O’Brien. Is it through here?”

  Charlie stood back from the door and followed them into the living room. He picked up his coffee cup and drank what remained in it.

  “Your wife here?” The taller man had reddish hair, a Celtic look, Charlie thought, though well enough Americanized by now.

  “No,” he said.

  Neither agent sat down; the smaller one took off his hat and looked about the room, picking up photographs and papers. The one with the shaving cut leaned against a radiator.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s in New York.”

  “What’s she doing there?”

  “She’s writing a book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I don’t know. She hasn’t told me.”

  “Shouldn’t she be here with you?”

  “She is. She only goes for a couple of days at a time.”

  The agent picked up the newspaper. “You come across a guy named Frank Renzo? A reporter.”

  “Yes.”

  “Know him well?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you first meet?”

  “In … I forget. At a party probably. Embassy recepti
on, that kind of thing.”

  “You sure? He’s not a D.C. man. He’s based in New York.”

  “Maybe in New York then. I meet a lot of people in my work.”

  “Maybe you met him someplace else. Maybe you met him in Vietnam.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “You seem a little nervous. You want a drink?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Sure about that? I got some Wild Turkey in the trunk of the automobile if you’re out of it.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What were you doing in Vietnam?”

  “My job.”

  “And what was Renzo doing?”

  “I’ve no idea. I don’t recall meeting him.”

  The smaller man pulled a book off the shelf. “The Man with the Golden Arm,” he said. “You like this writer? Nelson Algren.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “He’s a Communist.”

  “Is that so?”

  “This guy Renzo,” said the man with the cut. “Your wife know him well?”

  “She’s met him three or four times.”

  There was a silence. The two agents walked round the room, their paths crossing by the doorway. Neither went near the window. Eventually the larger one said, “She see him in New York? On these visits of hers?”

  “It’s possible. I doubt it. She works. She writes this book.”

  “You’re not worried about her all on her own there? She an attractive woman?”

  “I am a little worried.” Charlie paused and looked at the man’s blank eyes for a moment while he fought among his conflicting thoughts to assemble a response. “She’s had a difficult time,” he said. “With the family. That’s all.”

  “Think she could tell us a little more about this guy?”