The Unwitting (18 page)

MOSCOW WAS UGLY
, gray, brutal. Or was that only my guilt hanging over it? I managed to avoid Woody, and he let me. I felt as grimy and soulless as the city.

I HAD NOT
been frightened on the flight over, despite the letter that sounded like a last testament to be opened after my death. I was terrified now. I envisioned the plane crashing into a mountain, going down in a fiery ball, disappearing into an icy sea. Surely there would be divine retribution. Only I knew there wouldn’t be. I was my own punishment.

In the days after I got home, I swung through great arcs of emotion, affectionate and clingy one moment, withdrawn and brooding the next; rattling off funny stories about the tour, railing against the Soviet system. I snapped at Abby, then scooped her up in outbursts of apologetic love. The first time Charlie and I made love, I cried. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He blamed it on Darya. I let him.

He said he had never received the telegram I’d sent telling him when I was going to call. If he had, he would have wired me to call him at Elliot’s house. I asked him who had been there. He said no one I knew.

“No one?”

“Mostly just some locals in for dinner. And someone connected to the foundation. Elliot wanted me to put on my
Compass
dog-and-pony show.”

“He’s never asked you to do that before.”

As Sonia, primed by her psychiatrist, might have said, it was a classic case of projection. Addled with guilt for my own actions, I was trying to find something to pin on Charlie.

“Are you suggesting I wasn’t at Elliot’s?”

“It just seems odd that you’d be at a house party with no one I knew.”

“Nonetheless, I was. If you don’t believe me, ask Elliot.”

I didn’t ask Elliot. Charlie knew I wouldn’t. Trust isn’t a cup of sugar you can borrow from a neighbor when the household supply runs out.

The hardest part was keeping my mouth shut. When I talked to Charlie about Darya’s abduction, and I could not stop going over it, I kept saying
we
. I was dying for him to ask who the other half of the pronoun was. He never did.

Sometimes I tried to put my transgression in what I called perspective. I was making too much of a fleeting physical encounter. All I had to do was look around me to know that. Sonia’s life was a revolving door of affairs. Mary McCarthy, whom I had seen long ago in the honeymoon suite at the Waldorf and met occasionally over the years, boasted that she’d once slept with three different men in a single day. Neither of them went around beating their breasts and shouting mea culpas. But they weren’t married and in love with their husbands.

Little by little, we mended, or perhaps I should say I did. That summer I got pregnant again. It wasn’t the old saw of having a baby to save the marriage. Abby was three, and we wanted another child.

CERTAIN EVENTS, SOME
public, some personal, etch indelible marks on the steel plate of memory. The entire world can tell you where it was when it heard of President Kennedy’s assassination. I cannot remember, though I’ve been told where I was. But I can pinpoint my position when I knew I’d lost the baby. I was in a taxi on my way to give a talk to the American Association of University Women. I can also tell you where I was when I had my second miscarriage, and my third. On my way to a party with Charlie the second time; in my study in the apartment the third. The doctor had warned I’d better take it easy. I did take it easy, but I still lost the baby.

I mourned my unborn babies. Sometimes at three in the morning, when the world was at its bleakest, I was sure they were divine retribution for my night with Woody, though usually by the time the sun rose, I was an unbeliever again.

Charlie took the miscarriages even harder than I did. I wanted another child. He had a world to repopulate. He could have blamed
me. My body was the culprit. In certain societies and religions, he could have put me aside. The phrase is chilling, especially since on occasion I was sure I deserved it. Instead, he clung to me, to Abby, and to the life we were patching back together. Occasionally I felt even more guilty that he didn’t know that was what we were doing.

Certainly, the polished surface of our lives showed no cracks. Charlie won a prestigious editorial award. The articles I wrote for
Compass
about my trip to Russia were such a success that a publisher brought them out as a book, a thin book, but a book nonetheless.

To my surprise and unabashedly egotistical glee, I got an honorary degree. It was from a tiny women’s college I had never heard of, but from the way I swaggered across the stage to receive it, I might have been crossing Harvard Yard. In my speech to the graduates, I warned them against the widening schism between communism and what was called the free world. Bombs were not the solution, I told them. Fallout shelters would not save us. The only hope was the will to peace on both sides. The mosaic of innocent faces gazing up at me suggested they saw the future in more personal terms.

Compass
was prospering. We had become part of a loose association designed to improve distribution abroad known as the world family of magazines. It included
Partisan Review
,
The Kenyon Review
,
The Sewanee Review
, and several others. We were in heady, if not particularly polite, company. Feuds raged. Sniping was endemic. Dueling reviews drew metaphorical blood. Each issue of the other magazines arrived in the office like a grenade with the pin already pulled.

Charlie bought first serial rights to publish an excerpt from a book by Richard Wright, and we decided to run an interview with him as a sidebar. At first Wright refused to see me. He relented only after I agreed to let him approve any quote I wanted to use. I learned why during the interview.

We had agreed to meet for lunch. At the time, I wondered if he
was testing me. I’d heard a story that a few years earlier, his agent, worried about the reception a negro would get in a midtown restaurant, had ordered sandwiches, which they’d eaten in the agency office. I was determined to take Wright out for lunch. The only problem was where. Charlie suggested the Algonquin. A literary watering hole was likely to be more welcoming to a celebrated negro writer.

I arrived first. After the maître d’ seated me, I told him I was waiting for Mr. Richard Wright. He smiled and bowed. Either he was broad-minded or he didn’t read. A few minutes later when he showed Wright to the table he looked less sanguine. As Wright and I shook hands, I felt other diners glance at us curiously, then quickly look away.

As he settled into the chair, I made mental notes for my description of him. His face was strong with a high intelligent forehead and dark wary eyes beneath heavy, almost sleepy, lids. The somnolent lids were misleading. I had the feeling he didn’t miss much.

He began by reminding me that I had agreed to let him check any quotes I might want to use. I said again that I had no problem with the arrangement.

“Did you see the piece in
Time
magazine?” he asked.

Time
had published an article about the many negro artists living well in Paris these days. Wright was one of them.

“I never said any of those things about America’s treatment of negroes,” he told me. “They didn’t even interview me.”

I was skeptical. A misquote seemed likely, an entirely fabricated interview improbable. The doubt must have shown on my face. He took a telegram from the pocket of his tweed jacket.

“I sent two copies,” he explained, as he handed it to me, “one to them and one to myself.”

WORDS ASCRIBED TO ME IN YOUR ARTICLE ENTIRELY FABRICATED STOP WAS NOT INTERVIEWED BY ANY TIME REPORTER STOP A CLEAR LAPSE IN JOURNALISTIC ETHICS STOP YOU ARE COPYING COMMUNIST TACTICS OF CHARACTER ASSASSINATION STOP RICHARD WRIGHT

I looked from the telegram to him. “You didn’t even talk to an interviewer?”

“They claim the photographer they sent to take my picture was also an interviewer.” He took another slip of paper from his pocket. It was a statement by the photographer that she had been hired only to take his photograph.

“I plan to sue,” he said, in case I hadn’t gotten the message from the telegram. I had, but there was one thing I didn’t understand. Why was he objecting to a series of statements that he might have made, and in fact had made in a variety of forms over the years? It was not one of the questions I’d prepared, but it was too good to pass up.

“Because,” he explained, “I might think it, but I didn’t say it to a reporter from
Time
magazine. It was a plant.”

“A plant?”

“The CIA is trying to discredit me.”

“I would think the CIA would be delighted with you.” In the past, he had warned Western powers to keep their hands off their former colonies. In the excerpt we were running, he urged those same powers to offer financial and technical assistance to their former colonies, because if they didn’t, the Soviet Union and Communist China would.

“They’re delighted with me when I speak out against communism. They’re less happy when I don’t toe their line. Like the petition they wanted me to sign against the invasion of Hungary. I told them I’d sign it if it also protested French and British aggression in Egypt. In other words, I’m a troublemaker. Uppity.” His smile was self-mocking, but the rage behind it reminded me of Woody’s grin when
he’d told me about being recruited in Leningrad. “This country can’t make up its mind who it hates more, communists or colored people.”

I was writing rapidly as he spoke. When he finished, I looked up from my notebook. “Can I use that?”

He thought for a moment, then laughed. “Sure.”

I USED THE
quote. I also told of his anger at the
Time
article. Charlie ran the interview. The letters to the editor were generally positive. Even Elliot rang in. He said he liked the way I let Wright hoist with his own petard.

“What do you mean?”

“The guy is obviously paranoid.”

“Which just might be a logical state of mind for a negro in this country.” I was sorry as soon as I spoke. I hadn’t made up my mind whether Richard Wright was paranoid or on the mark.

ABBY STARTED KINDERGARTEN
in a private school across the park. Charlie and I had agonized over the decision. Was it morally responsible to buy her a superior education? Was it fair to deprive her of one to assuage our consciences? On rainy or cold days, she and I took a taxi; in clement weather, we rode the bus; sometimes we walked. One morning shortly after she began first grade, when I was under the gun with a book review that Charlie wanted to run in the next issue, he said he would take her to school. That doesn’t sound shocking now, but in those days it was.

He had offered to take her so I could get down to work, but after they left the apartment, I couldn’t resist going into the living room to stand at the window waiting for them to come out of the building. They emerged from under the awning and started north. He was holding her hand, and she was looking up at him. Even at this distance, I could see that she was talking a mile a minute. Suddenly she stopped and pointed to her shoe. Charlie put his briefcase on the
sidewalk, knelt on one knee, and tied the shoelace of her regulation brown oxford. As he did, she reached around him and made donkey ears behind his head. He finished tying her shoe, turned his head, caught her in the act, and held his fingers behind her head. She opened her mouth in what must have been a shriek and twisted away. I stood watching as they chased each other back and forth. Only when she got dangerously close to the street did he swoop her up. She threw her arms around his neck, clung to him, then lifted two fingers behind his head to make ears on him again.

Twelve

L
OOKING BACK AT
it now, I see the conference in Venice as the turning point, though marriage is rarely such an orderly proposition. In the four and a half years since Leningrad, we’d had good times. In the future, we would have bad times again. In the future, I would have a terrible time. But that summer week in Venice, I felt as if we were living inside a perfectly cut, multifaceted gem. Life was shot with light and depth and brilliance.