When I turned around in the kitchen, Pontrier had opened his attaché case and had put on the kitchen table his pad and pen, a tape recorder, and two sets of glasses in soft leather sleeves. “Will not wear bifocals,” he said, whinnying, showing his large teeth and pink gums. “Won’t admit my age. Shouldn’t say that to a shrink.”
Bernie walked past Pontrier to lie beneath the table.
“Hell, we listen to anything,” I said. “I once had a family—”
“You do whole families?”
“Oh, yeah. Being crazy’s a family project most of the time. I had this family, and I made them bring in their dog.”
Hearing “dog,” Bernie banged his tail against the floor.
“How’d that work out, Doc?”
“Well, I was able to help the dog. The family stayed sick.”
He whinnied again, then played back “stayed sick” on his machine. He nodded. “We’re ready,” he said. “Tell you what I know. Ask you for information we might want later on. We need the—” He waved his long hands.
“Overall picture,” I said. “Or would you say, ‘big picture’?”
“Right,” he said. “Right. You know Q & A.”
“Q & A?”
“Questions and answers. Part of your profession, right?”
“I have a Q,” I said. “How come you’re here? How come the State Department phones me up, and an official”—I gestured at him, he nodded—“leaves to fight his way through the upstate wilds? How come this attention? Were you people having her followed?”
“No,” he said, “it’s just your wife’s the second New York State citizen they’ve taken. Your senator got in on this. He wants service.”
“Politics,” I said, as if that explained something.
The coffee had dripped, and I set the pot on the table atop the terra-cotta tile Belinda had bought in Peru. Kate had told me once that Belinda’s affection for objects made of clay was a sign in her favor. He switched his recorder on and said, in a normal voice, “Briefing of Leland Dugan, four thirty pee em, January sixteen, Nineteen eighty-seven. Eight! Eight. Still not up to date.” I was afraid he was going to whinny again, but he was content with showing his gums.
“Now, Dr. Dugan.” He took off one set of glasses and put on another. “Our people liaised with representatives of the International Red Cross and certain representatives of the Druse upon notification that a Mrs. Belinda Dugan of Sherwood, New York, a member of the faculty of the State University of, ah, New York et cetera, had been taken hostage. We assume she was taken hostage. No demands have been made. Really isn’t kidnapping or hostage taking, is it, if they don’t want something in return.” He looked up. I nodded.
He looked displeased, then held up his little Japanese recorder. I said, “Yes. No.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” he told the machine, setting it down. “We have received confirmation—”
“They didn’t cut any fingers off,” I said. “Or ears? Anything like that?”
“Movies, Doctor. Movies. In our experience, this doesn’t happen.”
“It happened to Aristotle Onassis. Or Getty. One of those people. They sent him an ear.”
“Guess you’re not in the right tax bracket, Doctor,” he said. And he did draw back his gums and whinny. I set my coffee cup down somewhat harder than I’d planned to. “But not a time for levity, so let’s—” He looked at his yellow legal pad, with its green lines and red-ruled margin. I saw my name at the top of the pad, and a series of numbers arranged vertically. Beside each number were matters he’d apparently decided to set before me. As I watched, he crossed out what was next to number two. He looked up, saw me trying to read his pad, and drew it closer to him, as if we were being examined and he’d caught me trying to cheat. “No fingers or ears. Sorry you were so worried.”
“Thank you. Does it matter who has her?”
“Does matter. A lot of these people don’t negotiate. A lot of them, they’re nuts, to put it in a, well, nutshell.” Lips, then gums and teeth, then silent laughter.
“So’s Belinda,” I said.
“Clinically? Certifiably?”
“No. Although one definition of adjustment might be your ability to stay away from hostage situations in Lebanon. Or Lebanon itself. Belinda is a very, very intelligent woman of significant achievement and reputation. Right now, she hates who she is—her whole situation. She—”
“That include you, Doctor? Mind my asking? The big—”
“Yes. Big picture. No, I don’t mind. Yes, I do. What the hell. Sure, it includes me. Remember what I said before? Being crazy’s a family project. Being so sad. Disoriented. All of that. Any of that. Yes. Yes, it includes me. Yes.”
“Tough one.”
I said, “Are you married, Mr. Pontrier?”
“Twenty-nine years in two months.”
“You work at it.”
“Never had a fight.”
I cocked my head as Bernie cocks his. Pontrier replied, “Work really hard at doing everything she says!” Lips again, then gums, then teeth and the long laughed whinny.
“Will they let her go?”
“From one of the West Bank settlements, this bunch, we think. They may not be trained to negotiate. Just take people. Do whatever harm they can. Full of hate. Socialism. Radical religion. You know.”
“So what happens to my wife, Mr. Pontrier?”
“State is doing everything it can.”
“I’m very grateful.”
He crossed out two items. “Lines of communication are wide open. People out there listen hard, tell us what they hear. Friends of friends—you know what I mean?—keep asking about her. Just like the others.”
“The others.”
“You remember. Anglican. French guys. The other Americans. West German guys. Nobody’s forgetting them. Maybe you forget them. State doesn’t.”
I couldn’t have named one hostage. That was when I realized how politics, history, and extreme distances had taken Belinda from our three traffic lights, the hour’s commute to her campus, the stores that stocked Sara Lee pound-cake and vitamin supplements, and the house where, upstairs, Kate embraced my daughters and waited for word. Soon, I thought, people in so many lives will forget that woman’s name—the one who got snatched overseas. Remember?
He looked at his list, and then he looked at me, as if he had discovered my worst malfeasances. His eyes narrowed, his leathery wide mouth frowned. He seemed to reflect on what he was going to say. Then he looked at his legal pad and said, “Nobody usually takes a woman in the Middle East.”
“No?”
“You’re a shrink.”
“They don’t value women highly. Right. But they did take my wife.”
“If they don’t like women, except for, you know, the obvious stuff—”
“Cooking,” I said. “Child rearing.”
“Screwing,” he said. His eyes widened, as his nostrils did: he was daring me to rebuke him.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll use the State Department nomenclature.”
He snorted, but didn’t whinny. His cold eyes remained on me. “Have to wonder, Dr. Dugan, why they snatched her. If she’s just a—Don’t mean to us, of course, you or me. Woman.”
I shook my head.
“Who does she work for, Doctor?”
“SUNY. Sociology.”
“No, I mean over there. In Greece, or Beirut, wherever the cell was. Who was she working for?”
“Cell? Spies? Is that what you mean? Is that what the State Department thinks? Belinda Hosford Dugan, middle-aged spy?”
I saw Melissa walk in slowly and quietly. Her hands hung straight at her sides. She was nine, the age of perfection in childhood. She wanted nothing more than to give her love to much of what breathed. Her hair was drawn over to one side in a crooked, rearing wave. She wore the most innocent of miniskirts over dark tights, and her dark cotton sweater hung baggily to almost the hem of her skirt. Her legs were thin and strong. She came toward us,
awaiting our discovery of her. I held my arm out, and she came to it, rolled inside it as she curled it with both hands around her waist until she stood against me.
“Lissa,” I said, “this is Mr. Pontrier. He’s from the government. He’s trying to help Mommy.”
“Will they kill her? Are these the kidnappers who kill people?”
“Heavy-duty current-events awareness,” Pontrier said. “You know your civics,” he told her.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I said it as reasonably as if I were telling her that a plant was not poison oak. “Where did you hear about that, sweetie?”
“On TV,” she said. “Kate and Linda and me saw Mommy on Channel Two.”
“Mommy?”
Pontrier bent over to his case, and when his face reappeared, he was chewing on his lip and looking at the black plastic video cassette he held. “It must have leaked,” he said. “Everything does. Knew they made a couple of copies, of course. Didn’t think they would leak this fast.”
I held Melissa and furrowed her pompadour with my free hand. I kept my voice reasonable, pretending that I talked to an angry dog. Bernie, sleeping, was disturbed by my fake tranquility, and he grunted. “You’re saying that a videotape—the kind of thing—” It was what other families saw when terrorists took one of them. We were other families now, and there was no point in saying that, or almost anything else, to Pontrier, I realized. Now, at last, after the cruel arguments and breathless dark silences, after the shattered nights, finally there was nothing to say that might matter. I spoke nonetheless. I always did. I said, “There’s a tape? You people let it happen that my girls saw this tape, and I wasn’t there with them?”
Lissa said, “Kate was with us, Daddy. It was mostly like surprising. Except Mommy was crying at the end.”
“Yes,” I said. “And you’re all right?”
She nodded. She wasn’t. Kate was at the kitchen door, then. She said nothing, but held her hands out to Lissa. I kissed the top of her head and propelled her toward Kate.
I said, “Dr. Karagoulis, this is Mr. Pontrier from the State Department. Mr. Pontrier, Dr. Karagoulis.”
“House full of doctors,” he said, taking off his glasses and standing barefaced to shake Kate’s hand.
She drew Lissa to her. “Is there news?”
He shrugged. She nodded.
“She’s a doctor, too,” Kate said. “Mrs. Dugan. She has the doctorate from Chicago.”
“Isn’t that fine!” Pontrier said.
“Excuse us,” Kate said.
Pontrier looked at her as she walked away, then returned to the table, where he put on a pair of glasses, removed them, put the other pair on, and said, “My own suspicion, Doctor. They’ll kick her free. On account of she’s a woman. Messy things, women. You know. To the Arabs. Understand?”
I shook my head.
Pontrier shrugged, then looked at his list. “So what was it?” he asked. “Greenpeace? Socialist Workers? News Alliance for Jewish-Arab Amity? Lyndon Larouche? There’s so many butthead groups. Who’d she work for?”
“Work for? When she traveled? She worked for herself.”
“She free-lanced?”
“Are we talking spy novels or journalism, Mr. Pontrier?”
“Isn’t always a difference,” he said. Whinny, tooth and gum. “It make any difference to you?”
I clasped my hands on the edge of the table. I sat up straight and looked him in the eye. I didn’t like the intimacy any more than he did, and I wound up looking at the door of our refrigerator, studded with fruit-shaped magnets holding shopping lists and Lissa’s drawings and Linda’s reminders (all of them ending with exclamation marks); it was our accidental map. I said, “My wife—Belinda is not entirely well.”
“She need medication? We can try and work something out with the Red Cross.”
“Psychic well-being,” I said. “Her soul isn’t well.”
“You a religious guy, Doctor? Is this about religion?”
“Worse than that,” I said. “I’m a Freudian. He never meant to talk about the mind. Not only. He was always saying soul. That’s what analysis is about.”
“Sounds a little ripe.”
“Doesn’t it. Look. Belinda’s unhappy. I would call her clinically depressed. She’s been doing—she’s looking for something else.”
He was making notes. “For what?”
“She’d love to know. So would I.”
“Doctor, did she walk out on you?”
“She got as many commissions from as many magazines as she could. We’re not talking whacky politics, you understand. She’s a pretty typical left-wing, feminist, institution-distrusting intellectual. She wanted to find a lot of serious action and write about it. She’s been giving papers on women in cultures where the politics are basically life-and-death.”
“Washington, D.C.,” he exploded, whinnying, showing all his teeth, every wet gum, the membranes of the linings of his lips.
“Belfast,” I said. “She went there first. She did a piece for The New Republic. Then she went to Turkey. The next thing I heard, she was going to Lebanon.”
“The next thing you heard,” he said. He was a better listener than I’d thought. “So she took off on you.”
“We hadn’t lived comfortably together for several months.”
“She did move out?”
“Can I ask you: is this relevant?”
He shrugged. “Hard to know what matters,” he said. “Can’t know what’ll make a difference sometime down the road. We can drop it.”
He made a note. His pen was thin and silver, and he had turned it to make the point emerge. Now he retracted the point. “Kind of hard not to pry,” he said.
“Belinda was probably asking the same kind of question when they took her. Probably some out-of-work guy with an old gun and an older rage got tired of hearing some American woman asking his woman about her influence on his daily political life.”
“We fix it at two months she’s been gone?”
“That’s about right. You checked at Kennedy?”
“We got her going into London, then out and into Ireland. She was recorded entering Athens.”
“She went to Greece?”
He nodded. “Good place to hook up with radical elements.”
“Look she isn’t a spy.”
“That’s what Julius said about Ethel.”
“What?”
“Rosenberg. The atom spies.”
“For Christ’s sake, Pontrier, my wife is a burnt-out, sad, searching, decompensating person who used to think she struck a blow for freedom if she didn’t shave her god-damned legs!”
“She won’t be shaving her legs in Beirut,” he said, showing some quick lip lining. “Maybe it’ll bring some peace to town.”
“Are you going to tell me what you’re doing for her? What can I do? Can I see somebody?”
“Me,” he said. “Unless the President or the Secretary needs a photo opportunity with bravely smiling families of hostages and the main man trying hard not to cry while he says we’re doing everything we can. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll be your contact for our saying that.”
“No one’s life should come to that,” I said. “A case. That people forget.”
“Never mind going there,” he said. “Get ignored for a month and come home broke. Or get yourself kicked raw, die in a collapsed house with busted legs, skull fracture. Stay here. Wait. Write letters. Listen to people tell you they’re doing what they can. They will. We spring one, especially a woman, it’s political fat city. Gold.” His long hand patted my fist on the table. I recoiled from the intimacy, and he seemed surprised at what he’d done. “Doctor,” he said, putting his other glasses on, “let’s go to the movies.”
In the living room, when I turned on a reading lamp, I saw Linda at the end of the sofa, smoking. She didn’t tap nervously into an ashtray. She drew it in until the ash glowed, and she held it deep, then let it out slowly, in a long luxurious sof
t plume. That’s when I was sure that she’d smoked dope. I wondered if she and Belinda had smoked it together in the name of the mother-daughter bond.
“That’s bad for you, baby,” I said.
She nodded.
“I could give you statistics about strokes. We could talk about cancer. I hope to God she didn’t put you on the pill.”
She stood. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Linda Dugan. I don’t think my father will be doing a Pap smear right now. If there is any personal information you don’t know about me yet, he’ll be happy to fill you in.”
Pontrier whinnied. So did I. So did I. “How are you?” I asked her.
“Linda’s fifteen,” I said to Pontrier, as if something were explained. I seized her before she could flee. She let me hold her into me, and she hugged back. With her hot cigarette behind my neck, I thought of Joan Crawford. Linda had always reminded me of her; she had my broken-looking nose and the wide mouth that on Belinda was often cruel, but that on Linda was mean and sexy at once. She was smart, tough, and damaged by life with me and Belinda. And because she was fifteen, she lived secretly. I always missed her. It was as though she too had fled to another country. She smelled a little sour, like the sweat you sweat in nightmare-heated sleep. Into her cheek and stale hair I whispered, “Baby.”
She gave in and leaned on me for an instant. Her arms tightened and then let go. She stepped back and put the cigarette in her lips. “I’ll go sit with Kate and Lissa.” She said to Pontrier, “Are you going to leave a copy of that videotape with us?”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 19