“I doubt it. Why are you interested in him?”
“He’s being posted to Washington after the election.”
“Do you check out all the reporters who come here?”
“He has a history.”
“What kind of history?”
The agent shook his head.
“I suppose he’s a ‘Communist’ too, is he?” said Charlie. “I thought we’d left that game behind us.”
Neither agent spoke. Charlie watched as the larger man gently teased the piece of cotton wool away from his cut, then seemed to think better of it and stuck it back. He looked an oaf, Charlie thought, a comic figure really, but there was something about his bulk that was menacing; something unsettling also in the way that, while neither gave a name, both conveyed the impression they knew more about his own life than he did himself.
Charlie said, “Does Frank know he’s being moved to Washington?”
The larger man shrugged. “Promotion, isn’t it? Closer to the heart of things. He ever speak to you about being investigated?”
“No.”
“Ever mention Emmett Till, the Negro boy who—”
“I remember the case. But I haven’t talked to him about it. I’ve told you, I hardly know him.”
The smaller man looked round from the bookcase. “So when didya last see him?”
“A few weeks ago. In Minneapolis.”
“What didya talk about?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Don’t recall much, do you? Is that because of the liquor or because you don’t want to recall?”
Charlie said nothing. He could feel sweat bubbling out onto his upper lip; he wanted a drink, now that they both kept mentioning it: he badly wanted a drink. Years ago he had led his company in a beachhead breakout, into a tempest of machine-gun bullets, and had not hesitated; but these lumpen, unaccountable men filled him with a dread he could not manage.
“Listen,” said the smaller one, “we’re not trying to frighten you. We’re just asking if you’d be willing to help us. And I’m sure you would be.”
“Did Renzo talk about his wife?” His partner resumed the questioning.
“I didn’t know he was married.”
“Divorced. She runs some kind of store in Ann Arbor—books, magazines. D’you know the city? Kind of a hangout for intellectuals.”
“There’s a university campus, if that’s what you mean.”
“This Renzo guy, is he an intellectual?”
“No. You wouldn’t call him that. Clever enough, perhaps, but that’s a different thing. He’s a newspaperman.”
“But he went to college, right?”
“Search me.”
“What about you, Mr. van der Linden?” It was the short man, who had apparently finished his inspection of the bookcase, lighting a cigarette as he did so. “You go to college?”
“Yes. It’s considered usual in my work.”
“What year you go there?”
“Before the war.”
“You know any of those English guys who ended up defecting to the Soviet Union?”
“No. They were before my time.”
“And they were posted here, weren’t they? Diplomats here in D.C.?”
“I believe so.”
“Were you at the same college?”
“Same university.”
“Still plenty of Communists in your day?”
“I suppose there were a few. But just undergraduates. Boys, really.”
The dark man dropped his cigarette on the maple parquet floor, stubbed it out with his shoe and moved toward the door.
“Your wife tell you any more about this guy, you let us know. You know how to reach us.”
Charlie nodded.
The larger man turned back to Charlie from the doorway. “You want a lift to your office?”
“A lift? Christ, are you out of your mind?”
Charlie watched as the two men left and walked away to wherever they had deemed it safe enough to leave their car, before going on to trouble someone else’s day. He stood in the doorway, staring after them as their feet went over the sidewalk down which Frank had first laid his trail of blood back to the van der Lindens’ house.
When Mary returned late in the afternoon, Dolores passed on the various telephone messages that awaited her: Kelly Eberstadt and the dentist; Katy Renshaw, asking them to dinner; her father; and Kelly Eberstadt again.
“You ring Mr. van der Linden?” said Dolores reproachfully.
“I did. But I’m going to call again. I’m going upstairs.”
Mary carried her case up to the bedroom, hung up the dresses in the closet and threw the dirty laundry into the basket in the bathroom. She kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the bed, where, with her feet tucked beneath her, she took a picture of the children from the bedside table and stared at it. The last time she had seen them was when she had taken them out from school the day after her mother’s funeral.
She had borrowed her father’s Rover to drive up from London, a black car with shiny leather seats and an inner ring of chrome within the steering wheel that operated the horn. It was so heavy to steer that she felt the muscles of her arms straining beneath her sleeves as she slowed down for the corners.
St. Anthony’s lay at the end of a long drive flanked by dripping evergreens. Owners of some great houses sometimes planted lime-tree walks or avenues of oak, but the gentleman who had once owned the early Victorian mansion had had a weakness for spruce. The gables were intermittently visible through the prickly green foreground as she motored up the drive, the heavy Rover clunking almost axle-deep into the rain-filled potholes.
She parked in a graveled area in front of the oak front door and went quickly up the steps beneath her umbrella. She rang the bell and waited for a minute until she heard the clacking of the school secretary’s keys, which she wore for some reason on a chain against her bosom.
Inside, Mary was met with the smell of wholesale floor polish, old chrysanthemums and gravy. The secretary took her up a broad wooden staircase to the headmaster’s study and invited her to sit down while she waited. Mary inspected the school photographs on the walls. The First XI football team, 1959, looked out at her from the steps that led up to the front door: eleven boys with cold knees in woolen shorts. They did not look much of a team, she thought; some of them looked unathletic and afraid. St. Anthony’s was a rarity in offering coeducation and was favored by parents who lived abroad, people who, like Mary, felt guilty and anxious at sending their children away but comforted themselves with the thought that at least brothers and sisters would look after one another.
Stunned by her mother’s death, she nevertheless felt impatient to see the children; the anticipation made it impossible for her to sit. She found smiles of fondness twitching and passing across her face as she waited.
From downstairs there was the sound of a bell being rung, then a pregnant moment before a cacophony of voices and running feet. Mary strained to pick out the steps that were hers, the flesh she had made. Eventually there was a knock at the door. She composed herself: they might be accompanied by the secretary or the headmaster and she did not want to embarrass them. It was Richard, alone, in his gray V-neck pullover and school-cropped hair. Mary swallowed hard as he threw himself into her arms. She lowered her face to his and breathed in deeply the smell of his hair and neck, the aroma that had made her drunk with love when she had lowered him into his cot; it was complicated now by a redolence of football boots and pencils.
She laughed with the joy of seeing him and in return he seemed shy, not quite able to look at her, not sure if he should go on kissing her in the headmaster’s study; but she sensed in his averted smile the movement of the low exhilaration in his heart. He held on hard to her arm.
Then Louisa peered round the door and Mary was almost overcome. She knelt down on the carpet the better to embrace her—her beautiful inward girl, with her big, puzzled eyes and delicate engagement with the untruste
d world. She kissed her eyelids and her hair and her forearms, bare beneath the short-sleeved shirt and gray pinafore dress. She hugged her round the hips and laid her own face on Louisa’s chest, then gathered Richard also into her embrace. She could not satisfy her need to touch them.
“Now then,” she said, standing up, “that’s enough of that nonsense. We’re going out to lunch. The headmaster says we don’t have to be back till half past two. I’m afraid that means you’ll miss Latin, so if you’d like me to get you back earlier, then—”
“No fear,” said Richard.
They drove to the local town, in whose market square was a hotel called the Swan. At the back was a dining room where Mary had reserved a table, though there were only half a dozen other people; she asked the waiter for Coca-Cola for the children and a dry martini for herself, though this turned out to be half an inch of warm vermouth in a wineglass with a maraschino cherry on a toothpick.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “What’s going on?”
She had forgotten how bad at conversation children were; they could not give any general picture of their lives or their progress in work or sport or art or anything at all. They both wanted the cocktail cherry from Mary’s drink and found it difficult to think of anything else until she had summoned the waiter back and asked for two more cherries.
“What was Granny’s funeral like?” said Louisa.
“Yes, why couldn’t we come? It’s not fair,” said Richard.
“It wasn’t an occasion for children. There weren’t any others there. It was sad, it was very sad.” That was all there was to it, but she thought she should put a better gloss on it. “We sang some lovely hymns and there was a very nice speech saying what a wonderful person she was and I think Granny would have been very proud and happy.”
“Did you cry, Mummy?” said Richard.
“Don’t be silly,” said Louisa. “Grown-ups don’t cry.”
“Well, they do sometimes, darling, but anyway, I didn’t. I wanted to look after Grandpa. And afterwards we all went back and had a nice lunch and everyone was very kind. And although it’s very sad that Granny’s dead, it’s natural and proper. And she was quite old, and we all said goodbye nicely and we’ll all meet again one day.”
“I never got to say good-bye properly,” said Louisa. “I wish I’d just been able to say good-bye.”
“Well, Granny said good-bye to you. She sent you her love. She particularly asked me.”
Richard said, “I wanted to see the coffin.”
The waiter brought egg mayonnaise, grapefruit cocktail and pâté with thin, curled-up toast; Mary always ordered a variety of things on the grounds that the children would like one of them and she could eat what they didn’t want. She asked the waiter to leave the food in the middle of the table. He looked puzzled, but did as she asked; he was a youth of about eighteen with a black bow tie and a white drip-dry shirt.
“They’ve got some lovely-looking puddings,” she said. “Meringues and cakes and fruit salads.”
She ate some of the pâté, which had been rejected by the children. “Washington’s looking lovely,” she said. “All the trees on Connecticut Avenue and the Mall going up to Capitol Hill. It’s a beautiful time of year. And soon it’ll be Christmas and we’ll all be together.”
“Christmas is not for years,” said Louisa. “And when will we see Daddy?”
“Well, you’ll definitely see him at Christmas. And maybe he’ll be over on business before then. It’s possible.”
“Richard was crying in the boot room the other day.”
“Can I have some more Coca-Cola?”
“What’s the magic word?”
“Can I have some more too?”
“More what?”
“More, please.”
The waiter asked if he should clear the plates. Mary nodded. “Why were you crying, darling?”
“I wasn’t.”
“You liar. You were.”
“Ssh. Why were you sad?”
Richard sighed and stuck out his lower lip. “Nothing. It was just … Payne and Radford.”
“Who are Payne and Radford?”
“They’re boys in his class.”
“Shut up, Louisa, you don’t even know.”
“Ssh,” said Mary. “Were they being horrid to you?”
Richard mumbled something and looked down. Mary was appalled. Something had happened to him; some light had gone out in him. To think that he of all children, with his physical ebullience, could somehow have given off the sense of weakness—the smell of it—that had drawn boys in to bully him …
The waiter arrived with roast chicken, a delicacy almost unknown to the children, expensive and modern, with its lean meat and golden colors. She had ordered steak and kidney pie as a reserve, but it was not necessary.
“What about you, Louisa? Are you having fun?”
“I don’t like it. I miss my friends in Washington. The girls here said I had an American accent.”
“I don’t think you have,” said Mary. “I think you’ve lost it completely.”
“I have now. I did it on purpose.”
“And do you see lots of each other?”
“Not really,” said Louisa. “We’re in different classes and different dormitories.”
“But in playtime.”
They looked at one another with the old lag expression she had noticed in Brittany: a shrugging grimace. There was no tenderness between them; both appeared so intent on survival that they had overlooked the fact that they were there as a comfort to one another.
Mary looked away quickly. The two demands of motherhood she found hardest to manage were the illness of either child (always fatal until proved otherwise) and the spectacle of them being unkind or indifferent to one another. She was happy that Louisa and Richard looked well and ate hungrily from the desserts that the waiter slid off the trolley, but she became aware that they had moved away from her. She could no longer rearrange their lives and set them right by the sheer force of her benevolence; her cajoling smile was too far away to influence the world in which they lived, with its demands and codes and techniques of self-protection.
She lit a cigarette to go with the dusty hotel coffee while the children went off to play in the garden. Louisa’s gentleness was being layered over by a kind of hostile reserve; for a moment Mary had a picture of what she might be like when she was a grown-up, and it was not the ravishing creature she had known as a small child but a marked, suspicious woman. She would still love her unreservedly, but she wanted her love to be a prized addition to a glorious life, not a consolation.
Back at the school, she gave them the presents she had brought from America: for Louisa, a View-Master with a circular reel of 3-D photographs and a book called Eloise, about a girl who lived in the Plaza Hotel in New York; for Richard, a coonskin Davy Crockett hat and a Lionel train with a boat-loader freight wagon. She hugged them tight, one at a time, as they stood beside the car; she fought hard to control herself as they turned away and walked meekly up the steps, clutching their toys. She wished that they would hold hands as they had done before, when they came home and jabbered about their first day at school in Washington. Just a hand on the shoulder would do, Mary thought, as she watched them slowly mount the steps.
When she got back to London she would have to see what she could do for her father. Her company alone seemed to bring him little consolation, but she knew that it would be worse for him alone. She pressed the starter button on the Rover’s walnut dash. Then, before going to sleep, she would call Charlie, to see that he was safely home and make him promise not to smoke in bed.
She breathed in deeply, dry-eyed, feeling the air catch in her chest. Through the car window, she saw the children turn and wave, briefly, then vanish into the darkness of the school, going their separate ways.
Chapter 18
Charlie did not tell Mary about the visit he had received, but the implications of it fermented slowly in his thoughts. It
was not what the two men had said; it was what they had not said. It was not the stated object of their visit that swirled in the back of his cloudy mind, but some of the implications that lay behind it. There was something destabilizing, but perhaps appropriate, in the thought that the heavy-footed agents of public secrecy could precipitate such intimately private suspicions.
He worked late in the new Embassy building, where he had been given a corner office overlooking Massachusetts Avenue. Mary saw little of him for a week or so and she saw nothing at all of Frank, who was accompanying Nixon on his final frantic swing. Then, as polling day approached, she and Dolores began to prepare for an election-night party. The TV repairman was called in to improve the snowy picture; cases of gin, bourbon and scotch were delivered from the commissary at the Embassy, followed by Californian wine, beer and cartons of potato chips from the Spanish-owned grocery on Woodley Road. Since Eisenhower’s administration had granted citizenship to her family, Dolores was herself a passionate Republican, but she was evenhanded in her decoration: she pinned photographs of both candidates above the fireplace—Kennedy, airbrushed, narrow-eyed; Nixon, candid, purposeful—and looped a string of miniature paper flags along the mantel beneath them. She took a map of the United States from Charlie’s small study at the back of the house and stuck it, in place of the landscape, on the wall between the windows with two boxes of colored map pins underneath. Knowing the party was expected to last into the small hours, Dolores also volunteered to make a pot of chili; Mary cooked chicken fricassée to an ancient recipe of her mother’s for those whose constitutions might not be robust enough to take the searing meat-and-bean mixture on top of the electoral excitement.
In the kitchen Mary listened to the radio while she shredded vegetables for coleslaw. It was playing “Mack the Knife” by Bobby Darin, as it had been, she remembered, when she prepared for the wedding anniversary party they had had eleven months before. In those days she had moved with light, automatic purpose; if she was disappointed by her husband or worried for his health, the doubts were not sufficiently developed to trouble her serene preparations. She spooned mayonnaise from a jar over the strips of cabbage and carrot in the deep mixing bowl. She was now so besieged by worry, so surrounded on all sides by clamorous uncertainty, that she could not raise her eyes from her emotional redoubt. She went through the day from one item of physical routine to the next, concentrating on whether she should add onions to the coleslaw (she did not like them but the guests probably would), if her pink cardigan really went with the navy slacks she had put on that morning and on whether she had time to dash out and buy stamps for her letters to Richard and Louisa.
On Green Dolphin Street Page 28