The Unwitting (29 page)

“You’d better get a move on or you’ll be late for school,” I said.

She looked up from her cereal in surprise. I usually nagged her about finishing breakfast, not leaving it. She was on her way down the hall before I could change my mind. I let her go, without a word of warning. I might as well have neglected to vaccinate and inoculate her in infancy.

THE FIRST CALL
came at nine o’clock. The timing was a pretense of consideration. If you were calling a woman to gloat, the least you could do was let her have her coffee. The wife of an editor who had always resented Charlie’s success told me how sorry she was.

“For what?” My voice was innocent as a child’s. It stopped her for a moment, but only for a moment.

“It must have come as quite a shock to find out Charlie was working for the CIA. Unless of course you were too.”

The words surprised me. For the past ten hours, I’d been thinking of myself as a betrayed woman, but suddenly I realized I had a choice. I could admit to Charlie’s faithlessness or own up to my corruption. I could be a marital cliché, the wife who was the last to know, or a CIA stooge. I’m ashamed to admit that I even hesitated.

“I wasn’t,” I said, told her I was on deadline for an article, and got off the phone.

Next came a writer whose submissions Charlie had turned down more than once. Elliot was the fifth caller of the morning. I told him I had nothing more to say and hung up. A moment later the phone rang again.

“Now you know what I meant about sleeping with the enemy,” Frank Tucker said. “And about McClellan being no friend to Charlie.”

I admitted he was right.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why I stopped writing for
Compass
?”

“I thought you’d moved on to greener pastures, as in more green matter per article.”

“You always did underestimate me.” I knew from his tone what was coming next. “Now that you can tell your friends from your enemies we ought to have dinner.”

I had loved Charlie for his integrity, and now that I’d found it a sham, I didn’t know what to do with the love. Frank Tucker’s convictions were the real thing—he had gone to prison for them—but I still found him repugnant. The contradiction was one more cosmic joke, like Yeats’s line about love pitching his mansion in the place of excrement.

I told Frank that in view of my track record as a judge of male character, I was thinking of taking the veil. After that, I left the phone off the hook.

I spent the rest of the morning huddled in my study, still in last night’s clothing, reliving my life with a stranger I had thought I’d known. At noon, I put the phone back on the hook. It rang immediately. It went on ringing as I headed down the hall to shower and dress. I had a lunch date with Sonia. I figured I might as well start with a friend.

WE HAD AGREED
to meet in the dining room of the Metropolitan Museum. She was reviewing a show of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. Either I was early or she was late. I wasn’t sure because
after I’d showered I’d forgotten to put my watch back on. I sat waiting at a small table beside the long reflecting pool, feeling as naked and exposed as the bronze nymphs splashing in it, pretending to study the menu for fear of looking around and seeing someone I knew.

“Are you all right?” she asked as she slid into the chair across from me.

“So you saw it.”

“In a state of shock. Charlie was the last person I’d suspect of something like this.”

“That makes two of us.”

“He never told you?”

I shook my head no. “According to Elliot, he wasn’t allowed to. In other words, loyalty to a clandestine agency trumped loyalty to me.”

Surprise flickered across her face, and something else behind it. Satisfaction. I didn’t blame her. She’d spent too many years envying our marriage. I’d spent too many years flaunting our happiness. She was entitled to a little schadenfreude.

The waitress came and took our orders.

“That must have been hard on Charlie,” she said when the waitress left. “Not being able to tell you, I mean.”

“Apparently not.”

She narrowed her eyes as if she were putting me in focus. “You’re angry at him.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

She thought about that for a moment. “I’m not sure how I’d feel. I’d be disappointed that he agreed to take CIA money. It’s so out of character, so at odds with everything he stood for.”

“Everything we thought he stood for.”

“I suppose it was pretty shabby.”

“Pretty shabby! You praise with faint damnation. He sold out. He adopted the methods we were fighting to fight those methods.”

“That’s true, but …” Her voice trailed off.

“But what?”

“Given all that, I’m still not sure how I’d feel in your place. I’ve never been married to anyone. I’ve never even been with anyone for a protracted period of time. Miles was my record, and let’s not talk about what happened with him. I guess what I’m saying is what you used to tell me about my hectic love life in my misspent youth. You could put what I know about trust and loyalty between a man and a woman on the head of a pin and still have enough room for a couple of hundred angels. I admit what he did offends me. But I’m not sure I have your scruples.”

“What does that mean?”

“If I had to choose between a husband I loved and political purity, I have a feeling I’d go for the husband.”

AS IT TURNED
out, some of Abby’s friends’ parents had seen the program, as I’d feared. Some of them had even discussed it at breakfast, though not in the way I’d imagined.

“You tell Abby,” Lauren’s father had said to her, “that she ought to be proud of her dad.”

Lauren did not ask for an explanation. She was a thirteen-year-old girl. Of course you ought to be proud of your parents, and most kids were, except when the parents were committing hopelessly embarrassing acts or saying really dumb things. And a dead parent couldn’t do that. You could be especially proud of a dead parent. And most of the time Lauren felt really sorry for Abby anyway, because she didn’t have a dad. She relayed her father’s message without thinking much about what he’d meant.

When Abby got home from school that afternoon, she came straight to my study.

“What did Mr. Dreyfus mean?” she asked after she’d repeated the comment.

“There was a program on television last night.”

“About Daddy?”

“It mentioned him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know it was going to be on. And you were asleep by the time I found out.”

“What did it say about him?”

“It talked about the magazine and Uncle Elliot’s foundation.”

“Then why did Mr. Dreyfus say I should be proud?”

Ask Mr. Dreyfus, I wanted to shout, because I sure as hell don’t see anything to be proud of in taking money from a suspect secret organization, and lying to your friends, and deceiving your wife.

She shifted from one foot to the other, but kept her eyes on me.

“I guess because Daddy thought he was doing something for his country.” My conscience inserted the word
thought
. My maternal instincts cringed at it. But she didn’t seem to notice.

“You mean like President Kennedy said, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country?”

“Exactly like that.”

They were two of a kind, all right. World-class con men.

ELLIOT CALLED TWO
or three times more. Each time I refused to talk to him. I’d had my fill of justifications as well as lies. Finally he gave up and wrote me a letter. In it, he said he understood that I did not want to see him, but he would still like to talk to Abby about her father. I didn’t answer the letter.

I HAD FINESSED
telling Abby about Charlie’s betrayal, but I could not avoid explaining why I wasn’t going to marry Elliot. I kept remembering another conversation between another mother and daughter that had occurred a few weeks earlier. I’d overheard only one side of it, but I’d been able to imagine the other.

It was a Friday night, and Abby had invited three friends for a
sleepover. Around nine o’clock, one of the mothers had called and asked to talk to her daughter. A little overprotective, I’d thought, as I’d gone down the hall to Abby’s room to get Maud.

She followed me back to the kitchen, where I’d left the phone off the hook.

“He’ll call, Mom,” Maud said. “You’ll see.”

I turned the flame under the hot chocolate back on.

“He said he’d call, didn’t he?”

I lowered the flame. I didn’t want scalded milk all over the stove. “Yeah, I know men don’t always mean what they say. I’m not a baby.”

I wanted to snatch the phone from her hand.

“But you said he said he had a good time. He didn’t have to say that.”

I took four mugs down from the cabinet.

“You know what I think? I think he probably has his kids for the weekend, and when he said he’d call you on Friday, he forgot he had them.”

The conversation went on that way for a while longer. It was a cautionary tale if ever I heard one.

On the Saturday night after I’d sent Abby off to school unprotected, I announced I had something to tell her. We were sitting at the kitchen table having dinner.

“You’re not going to marry Elliot.”

“How did you know?”

She shrugged. “He hasn’t been around all week.”

“He could be away on business.”

“He hasn’t called. You haven’t mentioned him. And the giveaway. I saw the dress Sonia finally convinced you to buy in a Saks bag in your room, which means you’re going to return it.”

“I’m living with a latter-day Sherlock Holmes.”

“What happened?”

“We disagreed about some matters.”

“S.O.S., as Daddy used to say. You and Uncle Elliot have been disagreeing about some matters ever since you’ve known him.”

“I wish you’d reminded me of that a few months ago.”

Her lower lip jutted out the way it used to when, as a little girl, she was scolded for something.

“A joke, kiddo. It’s not your job to take care of me.”

“Maybe you’ll make up.”

“It isn’t the sort of disagreement you can make up.”

She didn’t ask me what kind of disagreement it was, and I was glad, not only for myself, but for her. Adult intimacies were none of her business, and she wanted to keep it that way. But after dinner she said she didn’t feel like going to Lauren’s with a bunch of other girls from her class.

“You don’t have to take care of me.”

“I’m not taking care of you. I just thought we could go to a movie.”

I told her I was game, and she went down the hall to get the newspaper for the listings.

“How about
A Man and a Woman
?” she said when she came back.

“How about
The Sound of Music
?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Right. But I figured if you were shooting for steamy, I’d counter with saccharine, and we’d compromise somewhere in between.”

We settled on
Doctor Zhivago
, which was being revived. I’d seen it when it had come out two years earlier, but she’d been too young.

I had trouble sitting through the movie that night, not because I’d seen it before, but because I suddenly remembered the review I’d written for
Compass
when the book was published. Since I was the only one at the magazine who had been to Russia, Charlie said I was the logical reviewer and assigned two thousand words, which was longer than most of the reviews
Compass
ran. Now I understood
why. The novel painted such a brutal picture of the Bolshevik state that it could not have been more to the CIA’s purpose if it had been dictated by one of their agents. Once again, Charlie reached back into the past and strangled a memory.

DURING THE DAYS
and weeks that followed the television broadcast, I felt as if I had been plunged back into the turmoil of the McCarthy years. Accusations and recriminations flew, feuds broke out, and on two different occasions, two different people snubbed me. Sonia witnessed the second incident at a book party.

“Smug little prig,” she said after the man had ostentatiously turned away from me.

“I can’t really blame him. In his shoes, I’d probably do the same thing.”

She shook her head. “No, you wouldn’t. You’d intend to, but at the last minute, you’d start feeling sorry for him and go out of your way to be nice. Then you’d end up getting angry at yourself for your lack of moral fiber.”

Nonetheless, I found myself lifting my chin and straightening my shoulders as if girding for battle before I walked into a room full of people. But I did not have to worry about the school dance that Friday evening. Except for a handful of other parents, everyone there would be underage and uninterested in me.

Three Friday nights during the academic year, the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades from several private girls’ schools and their counterparts from boys’ schools met in the gym of one of the schools or the rented basement of a church to eye one another warily, feign indifference, and shuffle sweatily around the floor. When the request for chaperones had gone out in September, I had agreed to act as one at the last dance in May.

The night was soft and still, but as I cut through the gated garden of a church on Lexington Avenue, I could feel dirty weather brewing. Boys shouted, shoved, and hit one another. Girls giggled, clung, and
oohed and aahed over one another’s dresses, shoes, and hair. Abby was among them, but I kept my distance. The only adult worse than a chaperone was a chaperone who happened to be your mother.

I parked myself behind a table spread with trays of pastel-iced cookies and a foul-looking pink punch and tried to keep my back to whatever part of the room Abby fetched up in. Once, I caught sight of her dancing with a skinny boy who came up to her nose and looked as if puberty were a distant horizon. My heart ached for both of them. Fifteen minutes later, I got a glimpse of her in the arms of a six-footer whose dark shadow of burgeoning mustache was visible halfway across the room. Something in his grin when he caught the eye of another boy made me think of Frank Tucker. My sore heart turned to stone.