The Unwitting (19 page)

The occasion of the conference was the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, and the organizers were pulling out all the stops for an international celebration on the island of San Giorgio. We had traveled first class before, but never like this. As soon as the bellboy closed the door of our hotel room I told Charlie I wouldn’t be able to sleep there.

“What do you mean? It’s a palace.”

“That’s my point. It’s probably costing so much that I’m going to have to stay up all night to get the foundation’s money’s worth.”

The conference was the first of two warring celebrations that year. The Soviets would hold a series of state events in Moscow in November. They were peddling Tolstoy as the precursor of the revolution, and passing off his religious concerns as bourgeois backsliding. The West was hailing him, Charlie said when he chaired a panel, as the disciple of St. Mark rather than St. Marx. He got a laugh at that.

The days were crowded with formal sessions, lunches, receptions, dinners, and late-night parties, but one afternoon Charlie and I sneaked away and took a vaporetto on our own. The sun, burning in a cloudless sky, hurled reflections of the pink and blue and green buildings into the Grand Canal, making twin Venices, one rising from the water, another floating on it.

We got off in Cannaregio. We might as well have stepped into a dream of the city. The streets baked silent and deserted in the midday heat. Two children chased each other around an empty square. Overhead, a woman sang while she hung red and yellow and blue and white laundry, gaudy as flags, on a line strung across an alley. We were the only tourists.

We wandered hand in hand, getting lost, finding our way, and getting lost again. Our shoes sounded like shots on the silent stones. The sun hammered our dark glasses and pressed down on our heads like helmets, and we ducked into shadows, came out again to thumb our noses at the heat, and escaped into a small stone church that had nothing to recommend it except air so cool it might have risen from another century. We stumbled into a cramped trattoria with rough wooden tables and a curtain-camouflaged kitchen as big as a closet, and swooned over sardines with raisins—until then I’d always thought I hated sardines—and crisp white wine that made us and the world glow like a sunset. On the way back to the hotel, we splurged on a gondola, and lay in it side by side, sweat-slicked, sun-addled, limp with pleasure.

Back in the hotel, the maid had closed the shutters, and the big high-ceilinged room lay in hushed shadows, musky with the bouquet of freshly laundered sheets, expensive soap, and the swampy humanity of the canals. Standing in the middle of the marble floor, we began to peel off our sweaty clothes. Charlie followed me into the bathroom, which was almost as big as the bedroom, a cool cave of red-veined marble with a tub the size of a small skiff. I turned on the taps. We stood side by side, watching the tub fill, grinning conspiratorially
because we had read each other’s minds. We churned up a small tempest and disturbed the hot Venetian peace with our noisy bliss.

Afterward, we lay side by side on the cool sheets, listening to water taxis purring along the canals, and waves slapping against stones, and gondoliers trying to lure tourists into postcard pleasures. The sounds reverberated through the vast room, echoing off the polished surfaces and fading into the soft fabrics. Charlie’s breathing grew more even. I turned to look at him. He was asleep.

I got out of bed, put on a robe, and padded onto the balcony. The canal lay in shadows now, the water a shimmering mosaic of a dozen different blacks, the reflection of the pastel buildings dripping into it like melting ice cream. In the distance, a church balanced the descending sun on its steeple. I leaned against the balustrade, lulled by the enveloping heat and the hypnotizing shimmer of the water and sex. But gradually voices began to penetrate. They were coming from the balcony below, and speaking English with American accents. I didn’t recognize them, but I could tell from the conversation that they were part of the conference.

“We invite sixteen Russian scholars, and what do we get? Four communist stooges. The commissars weren’t about to let the real thing out of the country. They might spill the beans or, worse yet, defect,” one of the voices complained.

“But here’s the joke,” another said. “This morning I was standing in line to get my per diem, and guess who was in front of me. That loathsome little party hack, Yermilov. Burn in communist hell, Yermilov, I wanted to tell him. You have taken CIA money.” The laughter rose around me like the rotten breath of the back canals.

I went inside. Charlie was still asleep. I sat on the side of the bed and shook him. I had to wake him in a few minutes anyway or we’d be late for dinner.

“Who’s paying for all this?” I gestured around the room in which I had, in fact, been sleeping very well.

He rubbed his eyes and grinned. “Hi, Red.”

“Who’s paying for all this?” I repeated.

“The foundation, of course.”

“They’re not usually so extravagant.”

“Right. You’d be happier in some fleabag with roaches?”

“No, but I just overheard a conversation—”

“Where did you overhear a conversation? I doze off for a few minutes, and you’re out on the town?”

“I’m serious. I was on the balcony, and I heard people talking on the one beneath us.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. But they were American, and they were obviously with the conference, because they were talking about Yermilov burning in communist hell for taking CIA money.”

He sat up. He was awake now.

“For Pete’s sake, Red, you know as well as I do that someone is always trying to recruit someone else at these things. Of course, there are people here on CIA money. But if you’re looking for honest-to-goodness spies, you’re in for a big disappointment. More like a couple of second-rate academics whose only way of getting to Italy other than chaperoning a bunch of hormone-hopped kids on a student tour is fronting for the CIA. We, however, are here on the foundation’s dime, and the only reason it’s fifty cents this time is that this is where everyone else is staying. The whole point of these things is socialization, and I don’t mean of the means of production.”

Later I found out that the foundation really had paid our expenses.

WE GOT HOME
in time for the July political conventions. Charlie and I sat in bed in our air-conditioned room watching perspiring delegates singing, cheering, and stomping around the convention floor; senators, congressmen, and governors strutting and posturing for the camera; and Chet Huntley explaining it all to us. I wrote a piece
on the power of television to keep politicians if not honest then at least in line. I should have known better. People had said the same about radio, and look at what Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Hitler had done with that.

In August Abby turned seven. On a steamy Saturday afternoon, ten six- and seven-year-old girls in beautifully ironed sundresses and polished Mary Janes giggled and whispered and finally ran rampant through the apartment. The next evening, her three adoring grandparents—my mother was making up for her shortcomings as a mother by overplaying her role as a grandmother—celebrated with us at a dinner with more gifts than any child should be permitted to open in a single sitting.

In September, we watched a tanned young man with a lock-up-your-daughters smile debate a gaunt Vice President with an unsightly five-o’clock shadow. The next morning I wrote a piece calling televised debates between candidates—this was the first ever broadcast—the hottest thing in electioneering since the campaign button. The writing was a little vivid for
Compass
, but the young man with the tan was infectious. We were all succumbing to the virus.

Four months later, on an icy day in January, after an eight-inch snowfall that softened the contours of the city and muffled its cacophony, we took the train to Washington and sat in the audience—the new administration had invited scores of writers, artists, and intellectuals to the inauguration—as the same young man, hatless, coatless, and heedless of the frigid weather that numbed the extremities and reddened the noses of the rest of us mortals, told Americans to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. I wrote about that too.

He called it the New Frontier, but his wife got closer to the public psyche when she christened it Camelot. Of course, that came later, after the optimism had darkened to the bloody stain of tragedy on her pink suit. But on that snowy inaugural day, the future thrummed
with promise. In place of a stodgy old military man and a dowdy woman, who was rumored to drink too much and have White House staff flatten against the wall in an effort to make themselves invisible when she passed because she didn’t like to have to see servants, we had a worldly first couple, who spoke German to the Germans, even if it was only a simple four-word sentence, and French to the French. In place of a ludicrous inauguration act in which a Hollywood cowboy lassoed the President, with the permission of the Secret Service, we had Robert Frost reading poetry. Instead of Lawrence Welk blaring his saccharine oompah music in the East Room, we had Pablo Casals playing Mendelssohn and Schumann. And we had people like us being invited to the White House. I never got to fly on Air Force One as Frank Tucker did, but I went through a receiving line, shook the President’s hand, and heard that he had read something I’d written in
Compass
and found it interesting. For days afterward, Charlie teased me that he’d thought he was going to have to catch me as I swooned.

But behind all the dazzle and seduction were the ideas and the ideals. The bad old days of blacklists, witch hunts, and government skulduggery were over, though that did not mean the world had suddenly turned into a good and just place.

In May 1963, Americans sat in front of their television sets and watched film clips of children in Birmingham, Alabama, being rolled down streets by fire hoses and mauled by attack dogs. In June, a white fertilizer salesman, enraged by a presidential speech on civil rights, fired an Enfield rifle into the back of a negro civil rights worker as he made his way to a ranch house that looked like home to millions of Americans. In August, on a more promising note, Charlie and I, holding Abby’s hands, stood with a quarter of a million other Americans in front of the Lincoln Memorial and listened to a negro minister sing out the words of an old spiritual.
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

My life was whole again. I hadn’t forgotten Leningrad, I still
cringed with shame and regret when I thought of it, but I thought of it less often. The marriage was patched, made even stronger, I sometimes thought, by its testing. The magazine was successful. Abby, who turned ten that summer, was becoming a person. She had Charlie’s sense of humor, and my tendency to moral indignation, and her own brand of compassion, not the compassion of a child for a stray kitten but that of a human being for her fellow man, or in this case woman.

I had just gotten off the phone with my mother, and was grumbling about something or other. I had been talking to myself, but Abby interrupted the conversation.

“I feel sorry for her.”

The surprise must have shown on my face.

“I do,” she insisted. “Grandma Sarah has Grandpa, and you have Daddy and me, but Grandma Claire is all alone.”

Where had this child come from?

WHEN I LOOK
back at that year, 1963, at the world before it turned rotten, another event stands out. In May, Charlie published a letter from the same minister who would lead the march on Washington that summer. He had written it in the margins of newspapers and on toilet paper in the cell of a Birmingham jail, because his jailers had denied him paper. Elliot didn’t want Charlie to run it. I was there when they argued about washing the country’s dirty linen in public. But Charlie stood firm. I was proud of him, if not of myself, but that had to do not with the letter but with the way Charlie had gotten his hands on a copy. When he came into the office to tell me about it, he said he’d had a call from a lawyer at the NAACP. “The one you were with in Leningrad,” he added.

Thirteen

November 22, 1963

“I
S THIS MRS.
Benjamin?” the man on the other end of the phone was asking.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Charles Benjamin?”

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Dr. Schwartz. I’m calling from the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital.”

I saw Abby bouncing off a car fender, pinned under a truck, pursued by a pack of young thugs, cornered by a middle-aged pervert. I never should have let her go to school with Susannah, a feckless teenager leading a careless ten-year-old.

“There … has … been … an … accident.”

He could not possibly have been speaking as slowly as I was hearing, but that was the way his words sounded, like a slow drip, drip, drip of fear.

“What happened to her?” I had not meant to shout.

“Your …” And now the wait between words was interminable. I looked at the clock on my desk. The minute hand had stopped. I tried to pull out my desk chair to sit, but my body was trapped as if in a dream, weighed down, glued, paralyzed.