The Unwitting (34 page)

Did I listen to him because he made sense or because I don’t want to leave the magazine?

October 13, 1955

I can’t fool myself any longer. When I took the job, Elliot promised complete editorial freedom. Formally, he’s lived up to his word. Occasionally he calls with a suggestion, but he never insists or threatens or forbids. He doesn’t have to. He merely talks about what’s in the country’s best interests. And gradually, I’ve been co-opted by the arguments. I find myself trimming and shading instinctively. Like the article on Neruda in the last issue. I knew he wouldn’t want me to publish it, because of Neruda’s connection to the Central Committee of the Chilean Communist Party. I ran the piece and patted myself on the back to boot, but even while I was editing it, I knew I was concentrating on the erotic love poems and conveniently overlooking the political manifestos. Somehow the line about his being awarded the Stalin Prize got cut for lack of space. Guess who pointed out that it wasn’t there.

December 19, 1955

I’m just back from a weekend at Elliot’s house in the country, and I want to get this down as clearly as I can, because someday when this is over and I finally tell Nell—fuck eternal confidentiality—I want her to know that I would have left earlier, if it hadn’t been for her.
I’m not passing the buck. I merely want her to understand. *Just as I’m trying to understand what she did. April 26, 1963

It all started with an article I commissioned Frank Tucker to write on the South Vietnamese president, Diem.

“You can’t do a hatchet job on one of our allies,” Elliot said. So much for his going through the motions of not interfering.

“He’s a murderous thug who stole the election.”

“He’s better than the communists.”

“He’s exactly the same as the communists.”

It continued that way for a while, until finally he told me he didn’t know how much longer he could go on protecting me. I asked what he was protecting me from.

“Don’t be coy,” he said, and of course he was right about that. I’ve known for some time that he runs interference for me with the Agency. I never wanted to admit it, but now I have to. I told him it was time
Compass
and I parted company. This time he knew I meant it, and I have to admit the surprise on his face gave me pleasure. Then he said he thought it would be helpful—his word—if I came up to his place in the country for the weekend. “Be good for you while Nell is in Russia. And there’s someone I want you to talk to.”

I agreed to go to the country but added that I didn’t like having the screws put to me. He said no one was putting the screws to me. They just wanted to explain a few facts of life.

No one put the screws to me. Their methods are, as Elliot said in the beginning of all this, more elegant than that. Only one other guest came for the weekend, though Elliot invited some neighbors in for dinner on Saturday night. The pretense was of a civilized weekend in the country, and for the most part it was. The conversation was good, the food excellent, the whiskey and wine aged. The more civilized and gracious things got, the more anxious I became. I don’t think I’m cut out for this kind of work.

I arrived on Saturday morning, but we didn’t have the conversation
until Sunday. No point in spoiling the weekend. It was just the three of us by then, Elliot, a man named Carter Robbins, and I. Robbins must be about sixty with a mane of white hair—why are all these men so hirsute? Am I the only one destined to go bald?—a ruddy complexion, a tobacco-aged voice, and the most god-awful stained and snaggled teeth I have ever seen. Except for the teeth, he was a smooth customer. I wonder why he never got himself to a dentist.

We sat in Elliot’s study. The room is wall-to-wall dark wood and leather, but outside a hard metallic sun tinted the snow blue. It occurs to me as I write this that the comment is pure Nell. She’s always noticing stuff like that. She would have called this a Courbet snow scene. When I looked past Robbins to the stand of trees in the distance, I had to squint. I don’t think it was an accident that he had the light behind him and I was looking into it.

I’m going to try to get the conversation down as accurately as possible. Elliot didn’t speak. He said he was there simply as a mutual friend. The word
pimp
came to mind, but I didn’t say it. After all, I was the whore in the group.

“Elliot tells me you want to leave the magazine,” Robbins began.

I gave a pretty speech about editorial independence.

“I understand.” The words rolled out of those crooked brown teeth as round and soft as smoke rings. “And of course you’re free to at any time. But I don’t think this is the opportune moment.”

“Is there ever an opportune moment for a decision like this?”

“I had in mind something a bit more specific. I understand your wife is in Leningrad.” He hesitated, and, when I didn’t say anything, he went on. “Several journalists posted to the Soviet Union work in close cooperation with us.”

I opened my mouth to say that she was not one of them, then closed it. Was it possible that she was? Had she been keeping her own secret? I felt suddenly giddy. Two wrongs don’t make a right, my
mother used to tell me when I was a child, but in this case they might. I’d be off the hook. I forgot about Diem and
Compass
and editorial independence. All I knew was that a weight had been lifted from me. Then Robbins went on.

“I know Mrs. Benjamin is not one of those journalists …”

The boulders settled back on my shoulders.

“… but our friends in the KGB don’t.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Our people have been keeping an eye on her. Your wife received a package, amateurish I admit, from a group in West Berlin.”

“How do you know all this?”

His smile was as wintry as the landscape beyond the window. “The point is, people over there seem to know about her connection to you and yours to us.”

“What else do you know about what’s going on over there?”

“Nothing you have to worry about at the moment.”

“You have an agent on her?”

“Not an agent, just a member of the touring group who shares our aims. As do you. Isn’t that why you signed on in the first place?”

“So what are you saying? If I bow out now, you throw her to the wolves?”

“No one is throwing anyone to the wolves. Mrs. Benjamin is an American citizen. Our job is to look after American citizens. And this man in the touring group is an old friend of hers from their days at Columbia. A negro.”

That had to be her old boyfriend, the one she was on the rebound from when I met her. It was odd that she hadn’t mentioned that he was with the troupe. Unless there was a reason for her not to mention the fact. I pushed the thought from my mind. Working with these jokers was making me as paranoid as they were.

“He’s certainly not going to throw her to the wolves, as you put
it,” Robbins went on. “But if you resign now, the Russians will hear about it. They hear everything, as do we about them. There’s no telling what they’ll make of it. They may think it’s some sort of ruse. They may think it’s a genuine change of heart and try to recruit her, especially since she didn’t take the bait from the other side in West Berlin when they tried to scare her away from the Eastern Sector. All I’m suggesting is that, in the interest of her safety, you do nothing until she’s home.”

And that’s where we left it.

Oh, no, there was one more repercussion. Elliot said he’s not opposed to a piece on Diem. He just thinks it doesn’t have to be quite so hard-hitting.

As I said, whore.

January 14, 1956

Nell is home, thank heavens. Robbins wasn’t lying. Somehow people knew who she was. A dissident approached her in Leningrad. Apparently the Russians put a quick and dirty end to that. She’s still shaken, but she says fortunately someone from the group turned up and steered her away from getting involved. She didn’t mention that it was her old boyfriend. She seems to think he turned up by accident. I didn’t suggest otherwise. How could I? An omission, not a lie. When did I begin splitting Talmudic hairs?

February 7, 1956

Nell has been safe at home for a month, but I still haven’t resigned.

I toned down the Diem piece. Nonetheless, it caused a bit of a brouhaha. That’s why I didn’t resign. My voice isn’t as loud as I’d like it to be, but I haven’t been silenced. Will the sixty-year-old man I’m writing this for believe that, or will he sniff the foul fumes of
rationalization and self-delusion? More to the point, will his wife get wind of them?

July 7, 1960

I haven’t made an entry here for some time. What is there to say except more of the same? Every time I decide to quit, something happens that makes me realize what we’re doing is necessary. But we’re just back from Venice, and I think it’s important that I record what happened.

Nell overheard a conversation about CIA funding and asked me who was paying for our trip. I told her the foundation. Again, not a lie, merely an obfuscation. The strange thing is I don’t feel as bad about it as I expected. Is it merely the effect of practice? The first time it’s a sin; after that it’s a habit. I think in this case there’s more to it than that. It has something to do with our visit to the ghetto.

Venice had the first ghetto in history, the start of a long and honored tradition. The word even comes from the Italian. A handful of white lies seems like pretty small potatoes compared to several centuries of bigotry and oppression, culminating in, but not ending with, the Third Reich. I know she’ll be able to understand that.

April 23, 1963

Again, a long hiatus in journal entries. I thought I was getting accustomed to the situation, but something just happened that puts a new perspective on it. That sounds a lot calmer than I’m feeling. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! That’s a more accurate description of my mental state.

This morning I got a call from a lawyer at the NAACP. The name Woody Jordan struck me as vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. He said he’d been in touch with an attorney at the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and had something I might be interested in running in
Compass
. The American Friends Service Committee is planning to publish it as a freestanding pamphlet, he explained, but it demands a larger audience. It’s called “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

I knew what he was talking about immediately. The demonstrations in Birmingham, or rather the suppressions of them, have been getting uglier by the day. Hundreds have gone to jail, including Martin Luther King, Jr. They had him in solitary confinement for a while, and I’d heard rumors of a letter he’d written in his cell. Now this Woody Jordan was saying it was no rumor. King started it in the margins of a newspaper with a pen his lawyer smuggled into the jail, continued it on scraps of toilet paper, and finished it on stationery slipped to him by a negro who works at the jail. Then his lawyers smuggled it out page by page. Now they’re trying to get as much publicity for it as possible.

Jordan asked if I wanted to see it. I told him I didn’t have to. I’d run it in the next issue.

As we were getting off the phone, I placed the name. He was Nell’s old boyfriend, the one who’d stopped her from getting involved in that mess in Leningrad.

“Thanks for thinking of
Compass
for the letter,” I said. “And thanks for Leningrad too. Nell told me you got her away from that ugly business at the Hermitage.” She hadn’t told me he was the one, but I couldn’t very well say that a CIA handler had delivered the information.

Jordan could have made any number of responses. None of them would have been incriminating. But his silence was. It went on for too long. And it brought to mind an incident I hadn’t thought of in years.

Shortly after Nell and I were married, we went to a party in the Village. Gloria Evans, the librarian I’d known after the war, the one the FBI had grilled me about, was there.

“How long did it go on?” Nell asked me on the way home.

“How long did what go on?”

“If that’s your story, you stick to it, but the two of you gave yourselves away as soon as you were introduced. The way you both said you already knew each other.
Delicious guilt
would be the operative phrase.”

At the time I’d wondered at her perceptiveness. Now I was the one with insight. Sitting there, listening to Woody Jordan’s silence, I put it all together. Her failure to mention that he had been on the trip. Her anger at my not being home when she called that weekend. Her constant repetition of
we
in her account of what had happened, as if she was trying to cover her tracks but dying to confess. I knew, because I walked around day and night with the same urge.

After we got off the phone, and I have no idea what we said at the end, I sat at my desk as if in a soundproof cell. I knew the noise was still going on around me—the clatter of typewriters, the ringing of telephones, the horns blaring outside the window—but I couldn’t hear any of it. I had gone deaf with anger.

I don’t know how long I stayed that way while my mind ricocheted through possibilities. I imagined confronting her. I schemed retaliation with another woman. Not just any woman, her best friend, Sonia. I envisaged calling a divorce lawyer. Then suddenly it came to me. The burden I had imagined being lifted off my shoulders during the meeting with Carter Robbins in Elliot’s house really was gone. Perhaps Nell would not see it that way—no two people ever box their moral compasses precisely the same way—but that was how it felt to me. We were even! The cry was infantile, but show me a man with a grown-up heart and I’ll show you a cadaver. I was still furious, but I was no longer guilty.

I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes after noon. I had a lunch date in the Village at twelve thirty, and outside my window rain had stalled the traffic to a crawl. I grabbed my trench coat off the coatrack in the corner and began putting it on as I hurried down the hall to the office Nell uses when she’s working at the magazine.

As I came through the door, she looked up at me, then at her watch, and said I was going to be late for my lunch date. I stood staring at her, and for a minute all I could see was an image of her in bed with that son of a bitch Jordan. It was ridiculous. I didn’t even know what he looked like. But I couldn’t blot it out.