The Unwitting (10 page)

“Charlie says you’re working on a piece about the coup in Guatemala and the press coverage of it.”

“Or lack thereof,” I said distractedly. At the moment I was more concerned about the meat thermometer, which had a history of unreliability.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“You wish I wouldn’t what?”

“Write the piece.”

Now I was paying attention. I slid the pork roast back in the oven, closed the door, and turned to him. “Why not?”

“Because it’s irresponsible.”

“Overthrowing a duly elected government is irresponsible. Not
reporting the facts is irresponsible. Reporting the irresponsibility is responsible.”

“You have no proof that the coup is not being accurately reported.”

“Why would the
Times
pull one of its best foreign correspondents off the story?”

“They didn’t pull him off the story. They told him to stay in Mexico City to cover the spillover there.”

I stood looking at him. “How did you know that?”

He shrugged. “I have friends at the paper.”

“And I spoke to Sydney. He says there isn’t going to be any spillover in Mexico City.”

“So Gruson is your main source?”

“One of them.”

I didn’t like his smile.

“Nell, how many reporters do you know who think their editors are justified in pulling them off stories?”

“I trust Gruson.”

“I trust Gruson’s ego. A man who collects racehorses and lives the way he does isn’t likely to take a slight gracefully.”

“Am I interrupting something?” Charlie stood in the doorway with the empty ice bucket.

“We were discussing Sydney Gruson’s character.” I took the bucket from him.

“You’re wasting your time on a wild-goose chase. There’s no story there,” Elliot said as he started down the hall toward the living room.

I thought Charlie would follow him, but he stepped into the kitchen and stood leaning against the counter and watching me as Elliot had. I began emptying the ice trays into the bucket.

“The trouble with Elliot,” I whispered beneath the rattle of ice, “is that he thinks discretion is the better part of valor.”

Charlie didn’t say anything to that, but the linoleum of the kitchen floor squeaked under his shoes, and I sensed him behind me. He reached his arms around my waist and put his hands on my breasts. The move was classic. All over America, all over the world probably, husbands spy their wives at some domestic task and cannot resist encircling them that way.

“Don’t let him get to you, Red.”

“Sydney was pulled off the story because he knows what’s really going on down there.”

His only answer was his mouth on the back of my neck where my hair had separated as I leaned forward and his thumbs against my nipples. Standing there, pressed against me in the kitchen, he turned us into conspirators, bound together against the world.

THE PIECE ON
the coup never ran. It wasn’t Elliot’s machinations or Charlie’s fault. I had no one to blame but myself, though at first I was suspicious.

“You’re sure that’s the only reason you’re killing it?” I asked Charlie when he told me I was too late.

“Why else?”

“Elliot.”

His mouth hardened into a thin line. “Elliot has nothing to do with this. I wouldn’t be able to run it for two months, and by then it will be yesterday’s news and people will have moved on.”

“I’m sorry it took me so long.”

We were in his office. I was perched on his desk, he was sitting behind it. Now he stood, crossed to the door, closed it, came back, and put his arms around me.

“You were late because Abby had a fever, and you were up half the night three nights running. I happen to think that’s more important than a piece on a correspondent who was pulled off a story.”

“Apples and oranges,” I said, but I was grateful, in a way. Though
I thought I was doing a herculean job balancing my two worlds, no one except Charlie seemed to notice. Nonetheless, I didn’t like the implication that my primary purpose in life was rocking a crying baby rather than mounting a cogent argument. Poor Charlie. Life with me was not easy.

JOSEPH WELCH
’
S COMMENT
in the Army-McCarthy hearings that June morning was, as I said, the death knell for McCarthy. Unfortunately, America turned out to be full of McCarthys, people who couldn’t tell the difference between a genuine communist menace halfway around the world and a garden-variety liberal next door. The months after McCarthy’s humiliation were the high summer of the great fear.

One night in July, Charlie called to say he was going to be late.

“What’s wrong?” I was still at the stage when I thought I could tell from the tone of his voice if he was keeping something from me.

“Everything is fine,” Charlie said. “I’m just going for a drink with Elliot.”

There was nothing unusual in that. They often had lunch or a drink to talk about the magazine. Other interests bound them as well. They had discovered a shared passion for Conrad and, more surprisingly, A. E. Housman, whom most of the people we knew, including me, regarded as soppily Edwardian. After that, the friendship flowered. Elliot took Charlie sailing, and he came home with blisters on his hands and a gleam in his eye that indicated he’d heard the call of the sea. Charlie reciprocated with a bird-watching hike through Central Park during the fall migration. Despite Charlie’s unbridled faith in America, his sensibilities were European; he had been raised by two Hungarians. Elliot was Anglo-Saxon American to the bone. His upper lip was perpetually stiff. He liked to say that he had no patience with people who treated their own minds as terra incognita. Nonetheless, Charlie persuaded him to read Freud, whom
he had always resisted. So after my initial fear that something was amiss, I decided that, in this case, a drink was just a drink.

I was in the bedroom watching the early news when I heard Charlie’s key in the lock, then the sound of the front door opening and closing and the thud of his briefcase hitting the floor. He started down the hall. Sometimes, when he was especially glad to be home, when he was eager to see Abby and me, his shoes tap-danced on the parquet. Tonight he was dragging his feet.

He stood in the doorway, his jacket rumpled, his tie loosened.

“Has it been on the news?”

“Has what been on the news?”

He stepped into the room and handed me a copy of the
World-Telegram and Sun
open to an inside page. The headline jumped up at me.

RED WRITER INDICTED

I skimmed the rest of the article. It wasn’t long. Frank Tucker had been found in contempt of Congress for refusing to give the investigating committee the names of people with whom he had attended certain meetings in the past.

I sat staring at the newspaper. The moral equation was out of whack. How could a man who had tried to put his penis in the mouth of his good friend’s sleeping wife risk going to prison for refusing to name names? I was still young enough to believe individuals were of a piece. But for the first time since I’d met Frank Tucker, I respected him.

TUCKER WAS NOT
the only one being hauled on the rug. All across the country, writers, professors, movie stars, lawyers, civil servants, trade unionists, and most of the people we knew were worrying about youthful indiscretions, old love affairs, and friends they hadn’t seen in years. Some people tried to save their skin by turning in others.
Most waited in dread for a letter from one or another of the committees set up to investigate the loyalty of American citizens or a knock on the door by two men with hard blank expressions on their faces and FBI identifications in their hands.

We belonged to the second group.

Seven

T
HE LETTER LAY
on the coffee table between us. It was chilling in its brevity, only three lines, if you didn’t count the date, salutation, and signature. It gave away nothing. I picked it up and read it again, although I had already committed it to memory. I kept looking for something I’d missed.

This is to inform you that you are to report to the Office of Security on Wednesday, September 15, 1954, at 10:00
A.M.

An address ran below, and that was it.

“What’s the Office of Security?”

Charlie shrugged.

“And who is this William Atkins who signed it?”

He shrugged again.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

He stood, walked to the armoire we used as a bar, refilled his drink, and carried it back to the chair across from me.

“You know as much as I do.” He held up his right hand. “Scout’s honor.”

Odd that I didn’t believe him when he was telling the truth but that I fell for his lies. No, not lies, evasions and omissions.

“You’re sure you’re not trying to protect me?”

“If I were trying to protect you, I wouldn’t have shown you the letter. I would have told you I was going to Washington on some other business.”

He was right. I would have believed him. I looked down at the letter again. “Couldn’t you refuse to go? It’s not a subpoena.”

“It will be if I don’t show up. Besides, Elliot thinks it’s a good idea to go and get it over with.”

“What does Elliot have to do with it?”

“I mentioned it to him because he knows a lot of people in Washington. I thought he might be able to help.”

“Can he?”

“He says if he gets involved, it will only make things worse. These people don’t like interference.”

“Who are ‘these people’?”

He shrugged again. “Who knows. HUAC? The Senate Internal Subcommittee? The Senate Permanent Investigative Subcommittee? The FBI, which is working with all of them? It’s worse than a Byzantine court.”

“Or Stalin’s show trials.”

“Not quite. They murder people. We just blacklist or jail them.”

I looked down at the menacing three lines again. “It’s ridiculous. They don’t tell you who they are. They don’t say what they want to talk to you about. They don’t give you any information at all.”

He reached over, took the piece of paper from the table, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “You’re going to wring as much information from that thing as you would casting chicken bones on the living room floor. Let it go.”

I HAD NOT
planned to say anything to Elliot, but when Charlie brought him home for a drink the following evening and then went in to say good night to Abby, the opportunity seemed too good to waste.

“About the letter from Washington,” I began. I wasn’t whispering. Charlie could hear me if he was listening. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

He shook his head. “I already told Charlie. When you start trying to pull strings, you only make matters worse. The best course of action is for him to go in, answer their questions, and get it over with. He’ll clear himself, and it will all be forgotten in a few weeks.”

“Tell that to Frank Tucker.”

He sat looking at me for a moment. “I’m not the one who wanted Charlie to run a story on the Guatemala coup.”

“It never ran.”

“Other pieces did. Look, I’m not blaming you—”

“Of course you are.”

He shrugged. “All the same, it’s not the worst thing that could happen. Charlie will clear himself. And in the long run, it will be good for
Compass
.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Maybe once they clear him, they’ll stop going over every issue with a fine-tooth comb.”

“Do they go over every issue with a fine-tooth comb?”

“Are you saying that comes as a surprise to you?”

It didn’t, but something struck me as not quite right. I didn’t figure out what it was until the following morning, just before dawn, when the sliver of bedroom window visible beneath the lowered blinds began fading from black to gray. Charlie was lying on his side with his back to me, but I knew he was awake. In sleep, his breathing was as steady as a metronome. Now the room was so quiet he might have been holding his breath. The predawn terrors were gathering force around us. I told myself they would be gone by the time the sun came up. They always were. The unpaid bill that heralds financial ruin turns out to require only a small late fee. The ache that must surely be the final stages of cancer has stopped hurting by the time the alarm goes off. But I knew these threats would not fade with the
light, because I knew suddenly what had struck me as off-key about Elliot. The line about their going over every issue with a fine-tooth comb had given him away. Elliot had refused to help because he was the one who had turned Charlie in. That was the way the world worked these days. The only way for Elliot to clear himself of his association with
Compass
was to serve up someone else on the magazine. And who better than the man in charge?

I turned on my side and wound myself around Charlie. He hooked a leg back over mine and held my hand to his mouth.

“It’ll be okay,” he murmured into my palm.

“I know,” I lied. Then I went on, though I had sworn I wouldn’t. “Just one thing.”

He waited.

“Don’t trust Elliot too much.”