The Unwitting (26 page)

“I can’t believe it. Not Hugh.”

That was when I remembered that she and Hugh Baker had had a brief affair. It wasn’t the first time I wondered at the fact that a woman who was so smart about so many things could be so credulous of men.

“I don’t want to believe it,” I said. “I hate the idea that we were hoodwinked into contributing to a CIA rag.”

“Last I heard you thought it was a good magazine. When did it become a rag?”

“All right, it’s not a rag. It’s just dishonest. Which makes us dishonest. We were shilling for the government and didn’t even know it.”

“I’m going to call Hugh.”

“I already did. He’s not in his office today. I left a message for him to call me back.

“I suppose there’s a silver lining of sorts,” I added as we were getting off the phone. “We’re usually annoyed when magazines turn down our work. It’s kind of refreshing to be angry because they publish it.”

A few hours later, Hugh Baker called.

“Don’t you think I would have told you if you were working for the CIA?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Would you?”

He laughed. “Okay, then let me put it another way. Maybe you’ll believe this. I’m glad the CIA never offered me money, because to tell
the truth, I don’t know what I would have done. We’ve gone through some pretty lean times.”

The denial was a little too clever to be entirely persuasive.

THAT NIGHT I
asked Elliot what he knew about Hugh Baker. We had met at the Metropolitan Museum for the preview of a show on American craftsmanship in silver to which he’d lent two family pieces. I sprang the question on him as soon as he came up to me in the great hall. I should have known better. The place was too crowded for serious talk. Well-dressed men and women jostled one another. Before Elliot could answer, a man, whose name was often followed by the word
philanthropist
, accompanied by a woman in a Norman Norell dress my more acquisitive side would have killed for, joined us. It went on that way for some time. The galleries were even more packed than the entrance hall. Elliot didn’t get a chance to answer my question until we had gotten our coats and were standing outside the museum. A damp April wind barreled up Fifth Avenue, whipping discarded newspapers, cigarette butts, and the occasional beer or soda can into whirlpools of detritus. The city seemed to be getting dirtier and more dangerous by the day.

“What do you want to know about him?” he asked.

I told him about the article. He had seen it.

“It didn’t mention Hugh Baker or
The Thames Review
,” he said.

“It mentioned the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”

“So you’re wondering if Hugh took money that came to the congress from the CIA.”

“He says he didn’t, but I’m not sure I believe him.”

“You can believe him,” Elliot said. “Hugh Baker wouldn’t take money from the CIA.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Well enough to know that.”

“But what if he didn’t know where the money was coming from?”

“That’s not the way it works. Someone at the magazine would have to be informed, and he’s the publisher.”

“How do you know something like that?”

He took my arm as we started down the wide steps. “I run a nonprofit foundation. It’s my job to know things like that.”

THE ISSUE CONTINUED
to simmer. Speculation raged, fingers pointed, denials flew. Then, a week after the article ran, Elliot showed up with more news. Abby was in her room doing her homework. The smell of roasting chicken hung like bunting in the apartment. He put his coat in the closet and went into the living room to make himself a drink. I went back to the kitchen. A moment later he joined me there. It occurred to me as he stood leaning against the counter, watching me baste, that he’d been doing that for a long time, in one capacity or another.

“I have good news,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about
The Thames Review
or even the Congress for Cultural Freedom for that matter.”

I turned from the stove to him.

“Why not?”

“I had lunch at the club today. Everyone is still talking about the piece. And someone said there’s going to be a letter to the editor in tomorrow’s
Times
attesting to the independence of the congress.”

“I didn’t expect them to come out and admit it.”

“The letter is signed by Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Kennan, and Robert Oppenheimer. You didn’t believe Hugh Baker and you weren’t sure about me—”

“That’s not true.”

He smiled. “You’re a lousy actress. But those four are the gold standard of rectitude and gravitas, though I admit there have been some pretty ugly attempts to dirty Oppenheimer’s skirts. The point is, you can go back to writing for the review with a clear conscience.”

Nineteen

T
HREE WEEKS LATER
, on a clement day in May when the city was doused in spring sunshine, Roberto Vega went on trial. Once again, I stayed away.

I had expected the proceedings to drag on, but they did not last much longer than the previous trials, though the jury did deliberate for two days before acquitting Vega. According to Elliot, they did not find the sworn testimony of a confessed drug dealer and murderer persuasive.

“So we still don’t know who killed Daddy,” Abby said.

THAT JULY, CHARLIE
’
S
parents took Abby to the New Jersey shore for a week. When my mother lamented her inability to give her granddaughter a holiday, I sent the two of them for another week to Montauk, the town on the eastern tip of Long Island where Charlie had told me over a lobster dinner that we’d never be rich, but we wouldn’t starve.

I had more time to myself that summer but saw less of Elliot. I sensed there were problems at the foundation, though he didn’t say as much. All I knew was that he was taking the train or the new Eastern Air Lines Shuttle to Washington more often. But in August, he and I spent the week that Abby and my mother were away at his house in Connecticut. Except for the night Sonia and Miles stopped in on their way home from Tanglewood, we were alone the entire
time. We had never been together for that duration, and I was surprised at how easy it was. We read; we went off to different rooms to work; we swam; while I cooked dinner, he made drinks, opened wine, changed records, and set the table; and at night we went to bed in his big tester bed. Afterward, I slept deeply, wrapped in the silky lake-cooled breezes.

We even managed to avoid talking about the war. One evening, sitting on the porch, I joked that he was teaching me temperance.

“I was hoping for tolerance,” he said, “but I’ll take what I can get.”

I KNEW THAT
we had become a couple in the eyes of others, but at a party at Gideon Abel’s, Frank Tucker brought the fact home with special force.

Gideon was still married to his second and fourth wife and still giving parties in her duplex. Or perhaps it was the same party that he had kept going for the better part of four decades. The room was crowded with familiar faces and some new blood, and I was willing to bet that when he invited the men, he still told them to bring a pretty, leggy girl. The only difference was that I was no longer a pretty, leggy girl. My daughter was becoming one. I was a widow, pushing forty-one. Sonia, who was two years younger, called us women of a certain age. She also said that women of a certain age were just beginning to get interesting, but I had the feeling she was whistling in the dark. Lookers have a harder time aging. The rest of us don’t have as much to lose. The fact that two weeks after their weekend at Tanglewood, Miles suffered a mild heart attack in the bed of his twenty-two-year-old secretary made her whistle in the dark sound even more shrill.

I usually tried to avoid Frank Tucker at parties, but that night I sought him out. He had just published a long piece in a popular counterculture—that was the new term—magazine exposing CIA
backing of the National Student Association. It had stirred up a hornet’s nest in high places. When the CIA found they couldn’t suppress it, they scheduled a press conference to scoop it. But Frank and the magazine scooped the scoop by running full-page ads in several newspapers announcing the article. It ended up attracting even more attention. I had seen Frank preening in a television interview.

“How often in life,” he asked the interviewer, “do you slay the dragon with a single thrust of the sword?”

I didn’t much like his smug air, but I admired, and envied, his achievement, and when he was alone for a moment, I went over to tell him as much.

I held out my hand. He grabbed me in a bear hug and planted a damp sour-whiskey-smelling kiss on my mouth. His tongue made a feint at forced entry. I warded it off. My lower body arched away from his instinctively.

I extricated myself and told him how much I admired the piece.

He grinned down at me. He’d put on weight, and it made his eyes look smaller in his puffy face, like two raisins in a doughy cookie.

“How often in life do you slay the dragon with a single thrust of the sword?” he asked.

“I’m not sure you finished him off, but you definitely delivered a body blow.”

He said I was damn right he’d delivered a body blow and asked how I’d been. I said I’d been fine.

“Still scribbling?”

“Every now and then I even manage to get something into print.” I regretted the words as soon as they were out. I should not have risen to the bait.

His grin grew wider. “That’s the Nell I know and love. And speaking of that, how’s your love life?”

The question was intended to provoke, but there was something else behind it as well. The exposé had made him even more of a celebrity,
and he could have his pick of younger prettier leggier girls, but I had the feeling some atavistic stubbornness made him regard me as unfinished business.

“Not in need of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, thank you.”

“Then it’s true what I hear?”

“What do you hear?”

“That you’re sleeping with the enemy.”

I stiffened. “The enemy?”

“McClellan. I couldn’t believe it when I heard. Not Nell, I said.”

“Why not Nell?”

“I told you. Because he’s the enemy.”

“Charlie and Elliot were good friends.”

“Charlie and I were good friends. At least in the old days. McClellan was no friend to Charlie.”

“That wasn’t the way Charlie saw it.” I congratulated him again and moved off.

“What does Frank Tucker have against you?” I asked Elliot a few nights later as we were putting on our clothes. No matter how often I told him that he did not have to come downstairs with me, that the doorman and I were capable of getting a cab without him, he insisted on getting dressed, going down to the street, and putting me in a taxi. Perhaps he knew that, for all my talk, once I was standing on Park Avenue, scanning the sparse late-night traffic for an empty cab, I’d think of him dozing off in a sex-warmed bed and feel a flash of unreasonable resentment.

He sat on the side of the bed and began pulling on his trousers. “What Frank Tucker has against me is you.”

“Me?”

He looked up at me. “Coyness does not become you.”

“I think the issue is Charlie, not me. He says you were no friend to Charlie.”

He stood and zipped his fly. “Do you believe him?”

I had to think about that for a moment. “No.”

He shook his head and smiled. “At least it wasn’t a knee-jerk response.

“I suppose you know this is ridiculous,” he said as we stood in the hall waiting for the elevator.

“You really don’t have to come down with me.”

“I meant that it’s ridiculous for either of us to be climbing out of bed in the middle of the night—”

“Ten thirty is scarcely the middle of the night.”

“A figure of speech. We wouldn’t have to if we were married.”

The idea did not exactly blindside me. In those days, women like me did not sleep with men for protracted periods of time without speculating about marriage. Maybe they still don’t. Nonetheless, the suggestion did sound perfunctory. I wasn’t a romantic, but laziness did not strike me as grounds for marriage.

“Oh, you hot-blooded Lothario, you. I’m tired of getting up in the middle of the night, so let’s get married.”

“If I were a hot-blooded Lothario, you would have run for the hills a long time ago. You said yourself how easy that week in Connecticut was. We were like an old married couple.”

Clichés usually harbor a kernel of truth, that’s why they become clichés, and maybe this one did, but not in my experience. Charlie and I had never been easy. Fanatical, giddy, scrappy, abject with apology, dopey with love, but there was always too much current charging between us to be easy.

“Think about it,” he said, as he followed me into the elevator.

“Fine, I’ll think about it, and you reconsider in what is called the cold light of morning, when”—I went on as we crossed the lobby—“you’re not getting up out of a warm bed to put me in a taxi.”

He called me the next morning, though he rarely did that.

“I just wanted to tell you that it’s not the middle of the night, I’m not facing going out into the streets, and it still seems like a good idea to me.”