Echo House (12 page)

But Axel was already rising to his feet, bending forward to take Sylvia's arm as if it were fragile as porcelain. She rose with him, and standing there in the aisle, they looked like two sleep-walkers.

Axel!
Billie said loudly, mustering all the indignation that had been building inside her these many minutes.

But he did not seem to hear and when he turned to look at her fully he gave no sign of recognition and indeed looked questioningly at her hand, still resting on his shoulder. From the expression on his face, she might have been a block of wood.

You must excuse us, he said pleasantly.

Yes, Sylvia said.

There's been some mistake, Axel said.

Mistake? Billie said.

We're expected, you see.

What?
Billie began.

Now they turned and moved up the aisle at a run, swaying a little because the train was under way. It gathered speed, rocking definitely now, and the last Billie saw of the Lion and the Ram was through the window of the rear door of the bar car, wrapped tightly, kissing ferociously. The girl was massaging Axel's head, standing on tiptoe to reach him, leaving Billie—as she admitted to an enthralled Alice Grendall many years later—as lonely and forlorn and chaste and discouraged as any sullen little virgin.

Bastard, she said. Who did he think he was? He looked through me as if I didn't exist.

What did you do? Alice said.

If you think I went back to my compartment and wept bitter tears, think again. I had heard about the
coup de foudre
but I'd never seen one. Now I had seen one and it was just about what I imagined. So I had a cocktail and then another cocktail and after the cocktails I had dinner and went to bed alone. Truth was—and these many years later Billie was able to summon a strangled little laugh—I think I was envious. I still am.

The community watched the affair with fascination and delight, the strait-laced prince of Echo House and the ravishing princess of Gramercy Park, who at a certain angle bore such a startling resemblance to one of Modigliani's demimondaines, an oval face with eyes turned down at the corners, a lovely long neck that sprouted from sloping shoulders. She was trim and voluptuous at the same time. She was so very young and unselfconscious, her bright laughter an antidote to Axel's grueling solemnity. Harold Grendall believed they made a superb match, not the first time nor the last that he let his head rule his heart. Axel had always had just a little bit too much of everything and it was good for him—eat your spinach, Axel—to want something that couldn't be had at the snap of a finger or his signature on a check. If Sylvia was a little too cavalier about the capital—well, it had to be admitted that Washington took itself too seriously and often closed in on itself in unhealthy ways. It was essential that she learn about the government and how it functioned, and to that end someone suggested some courses at G.W., a suggestion laughingly declined; and that was a storm warning. Whatever would Sylvia
do
? Their circle was tight and when she vowed to let some air in, introduce New York's cosmopolitan spirit to the monotonous city of government, people objected. Washington liked its own spirit. It had something of the satisfied atmosphere of the undiscovered resort and didn't need blasé New Yorkers telling everyone how to behave.

They were the couple that other couples talked about, the word spread by the usual tom-toms, Harold and Alice and Ed and Billie tapping out the messages; there was nothing to be done about it. They all had connections, each to the others—as Judge Justin Aswell tactlessly pointed out at the rehearsal dinner. Justin had been given the chore of keynoter and took the occasion to instruct Sylvia and her family on exactly how connected everyone was. Ed Peralta's father, Curly, was Senator Adolph Behl's closest friend. Harold and Ed and Axel had been in school together. Billie and Alice grew up around the corner from each other. Justin's charts showed just how close they all were, related by blood or by marriage or by school or university, in-laws and stepchildren and stepparents and cousins, roommates, clubmates, teammates, friends from summers on Cape Cod or Long Island or Mackinac. Justin had connected Alice Grendall to Sylvia, via Sylvia's great-aunt and Alice's brother's first wife's grandmother. Axel and Lloyd Fisher were related in some fashion that Justin found difficult to explain, perhaps the bar sinister. By then he had taken on so much Champagne that his attention had begun to wander.

He ended by saying that in times of crisis these connections were an advantage, everyone pulling together believing that an attack against one was an attack against all. Moreover, the connections were not coincidence. They represented a kind of natural selection. Justin had an idea that there was a specific gene that predisposed a man to public service, a life inside the government, a gene not unlike the one that determined musical talent. Otherwise, why did so many men of the same woof and warp opt for the judiciary, the foreign service, or the military, badly paid posts that were under the scrutiny of a venal Congress and the wretched newspapers, and the answer was the gene and the determination to participate in the political life of the nation.

They finally pulled him down and Axel rose—out of turn, it had to be said—to deliver a graceful little essay describing the tremendous affection he had for his wife-to-be and her charming parents, who represented the best of old New York, and how many happy afternoons he had spent at their lovely apartment on Gramercy Park. Axel's words were an attempt to reassure Sylvia, but everyone there could see the stricken expression on her face, the look of someone who has heard a dismal weather report; she had thought that it would be she and Axel against the world and now believed it would be the world and Axel against her. She smiled a little at her father's brief and pointed response: Harry Walren hoped and believed that his daughter would be well protected in such a—he paused here, showing steel for the first and only time that evening—serious and important and strenuous environment, so charged with possibility, so vital to the American democracy. Axel and Constance applauded heartily, but old Senator Behl did not, knowing cosmopolitan sarcasm when he heard it.

After the honeymoon that took them halfway around the world they returned to Washington, where Axel worked on German affairs for the State Department when he was not raising money for Franklin Roosevelt's presidential campaign; young Alec was born the night Roosevelt was nominated. They were living then in a house near Dupont Circle, Axel walking to work each day and Sylvia remaining at home with the baby. She began to write seriously for the first time and in due course began to publish. She told no one, not even Axel. The poems were private; they were between her, her pen, the page, and her anonymous audience. Axel was often away, and despite the community's best efforts, Sylvia withdrew, traveling frequently to New York and leaving the baby in the care of a nanny, whose only instructions were to be present at all times when Grandmother Constance came to call.

I don't give that marriage six months, Alice Grendall said. Poor Axel.

Poor Sylvia, Billie Peralta said.

Things seemed to improve when Axel was posted to England, but almost immediately he left for Spain with Fred Greene, who was not a suitable companion for such a journey. Sylvia was disgusted by the Spanish adventure, though she conceded that the stakes were high and the Republicans worthy of support. When she asked Axel what happened to Garcia Lorca, he replied that he did not know. Who's Garcia Lorca? After he returned to ' England, things were very bad and only got worse when he was wounded in France.

Both Grendalls were in England during the war. Sylvia had pleaded with Harold to allow her to do something serious for OSS. She thought she had a natural talent for codes and ciphers; perhaps there was something in that line or in propaganda. She had done some writing—it was the first anyone had known of that—and wanted to contribute. Was it true that the British had faked the photograph of Hitler doing a jig outside the railway car at Compiegne? Anything sensitive was out of the question—Sylvia Behl, my God no, the woman's unreliable—so she was put to work as a file clerk. Rebuffed, she slipped into London's wartime demimonde, where everyone arrived without a past and left the same way. Harold and Alice saw less and less of her, and when someone finally noticed that she had not shown up in Files for a week, she was quietly let go.

Sylvia was unrecognizable as the girl who had walked into Axel's life fifteen years earlier, younger than springtime and oh so naive. Suddenly she knew too much. Her high spirits had been replaced by weariness or fear or boredom or some combination of the three; no doubt she had realized that her marriage was a misalliance, the white dove evolving into the black sparrow and vice versa. Harold thought that she and Axel and the boy were like a ravaged nation in the aftermath of a war, disoriented and without leadership or hope for the future, or resources to begin the reconstruction.

After the war they returned to Echo House, Axel wasted, looking starved, ten years older than his age at least—degraded, Harold said. Axel was seen here and there between visits to Walter Reed, and in time did seem to improve. But Sylvia had virtually disappeared, "in seclusion," she said. Naturally the rumors multiplied and as usual Alice Grendall brought the news.

I saw her car the other day, Alice said to Billie Peralta. She's visiting someone in Falls Church.

Alice explained that she had had to drive her maid home and saw Sylvia's car, the dinky green MG with the right-hand drive, parked in front of a nasty little bungalow, shades drawn and a dog on a chain in the front yard. When Billie said she couldn't believe it, no one they knew lived in Falls Church, for heaven's sake, Alice replied that army sergeants lived in Falls Church. Her maid's husband was an army sergeant. So Mrs. Sylvia-more-mysterious-than-thou Behl had found herself an army sergeant.

Billie was silent. The story was implausible.

Of course you couldn't see in the house, Billie said.

So it could be anything, she added.

I suppose she thought no one would discover her in Falls Church.

Still, Billie said. A sergeant?

It was predictable, Alice said.

To which Billie replied with an obscure remark about lambs lying down with lions.

When Alice informed her husband that night at dinner, Harold Grendall sighed and muttered something complicated in German. He said, Wir müssen
wissen; wir werden wissen.
We must know, we will know. Their community was so tight and everyone knew each other so well. Curiosity was natural. And of course Sylvia had to drive a bottle-green MG with right-hand drive, a vehicle no less conspicuous than a fire engine, and had to park it on that specific street the day Alice drove by.

What did you say? Alice said.

Nothing. I'm thinking, Harold replied.

About her? Alice said.

Harold sighed again. The women had excellent instincts and a natural nose for scandal, not unsurprising, since most of them had volunteered for intelligence work during the war and were trained to be suspicious, working always on the sound assumption that nothing was as it seemed. They were quick to judge Sylvia because they sensed her otherness, her incongruity and appetite and independence, her refusal to play along. Poor, frustrated Sylvia; you would have expected her to pick the tosspot columnist who was always at Echo House for Sunday lunch or even the dissolute South American ambassador so deft with the tango.

Yet Harold doubted that an army sergeant figured in Sylvia's afternoon disappearances. Sylvia lived by her own strange standards, but he could not imagine her driving to Falls Church for a liaison in a bungalow. Of course you never knew for a dead certainty; people's private lives were always mysterious and there were skeletons in every closet, his own included. Bad luck all around.

I hope you keep quiet about it, Harold said. We don't need another scandal. There's very little of consequence that goes on in this city that Axel doesn't know about, so the odds are good that he knows about Sylvia and her sergeant, if that's who it is. Personally, I doubt it. I'd say it's another set of crockery altogether and that Axel has decided, for his own reasons, to do nothing about it. Say nothing and do nothing.

They've had a hard time lately, Harold said at last. But they've been together a long time and there's every possibility that they'll fix things up. Stories get out and the fact that they're out changes things. The people involved look at the problem differently when they know it's common coin. Same thing in government. When the secret's out it's a different secret because it's no longer confidential. Daylight gives it a different shape and significance and it's hard to see the thing as it was originally, as a secret. So keep quiet. Axel and Sylvia are quality people and have to be given a chance to work things out themselves, with no interference from friends.

Alice looked at him skeptically.

That's what we do in Washington, Harold said with sudden emotion. We fix things up. We compromise; that's the essence of our society. We give a little and get a little and out of the chaos comes an order that we can live with. It isn't perfect. But it's what we do.

As it happened, Axel knew everything; and Alice's lurid speculation was false, at least the part about the sergeant. On Thursday afternoons Sylvia drove across the river to Falls Church to see Mrs. Pfister, a clairvoyant whose uncanny observations were attracting an eclectic clientele. Sylvia first heard her name from Belle Aswell, who had heard it from her son-in-law. Belle did not approve of her son-in-law and cited the weird Mrs. Pfister as evidence of his unreliability. Axel had heard of her, too, the expression on his face bemused when he disclosed that she was in vogue with the wives of several Asian specialists at the State Department. The specialists sometimes went along to listen to the uncanny observations. She's odd, Axel said, indicating vaguely that she had come to the attention of intelligence officers.