Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Did my father speak that way to you?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “You told him I could come aboard?”

  “Yesterday. By now, I know you better than your father does. You have nice gifts. I’ll say no more. Your father is an enthusiast, and over-extended, therefore, on occasion, in judgment, but I pride myself on a cold eye. You have qualities that your father, for all his splendid stuff, is lacking.”

  I was tempted to say, “There is nothing special about me”—is that not the most painful cry one can utter in adolescence?—but now I was gifted with judgment. I kept my mouth shut.

  “You’re planning to go to Yale?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’d say, short of a collapse on entrance exams, it can be taken for granted you will get in. Yale is perfect. I call it Uncle Eli’s Cabin.”

  I laughed.

  “Oh, yes,” said my new associate, Harlot, “part of the underground railway. One of the stations on the route. At least for a few.” He made a face. “As an old Harvard man, I don’t like to say this, but Yale is a touch niftier to our purposes. Harvard gets quiffy about recruitment. It’s a stinking irony since half of our real people did happen to go there. Well, as I always say, trust a good fellow so long as he doesn’t matriculate at Princeton.”

  Harlot held up his glass. We would drink to that. One knew all the merriment of drinking to the health of Annapurna as opposed to Nanda Devi. Then we shook hands and drove back to the Keep. In the morning, Harlot left. He would drop me a letter on a point of advice from time to time, but I was not to be in the same room with him again for several years.

  4

  THE ROCK CLIMBING LEFT ITS INHERITANCE. IN MY SENIOR YEAR AT ST. Matthew’s, I went from second shell to first on the 150-pound crew and rowed against St. Paul’s and Groton. I passed my Entrance Boards with good marks and one full leap ahead of my now domiciled dyslexia. I won the one fistfight I had in my three years at prep school. I even worked out at wrestling which was difficult for me since I was still expunging from my brain every trace of the glom-job by the assistant chaplain (who always nodded when we passed). My loins no longer felt impacted with pus. And I did get into Yale. I had had, as one would suspect, a sense of future mission all through my last year at St. Matthew’s and it continued in college. I entered Yale with the full expectation that some official at one of the freshman inquiry desks would lead me over to my undergraduate CIA unit, but as I soon learned, the Agency did not go in for college cells. No raps sounded on my door at midnight.

  At Harlot’s suggestion, I did join ROTC. “You’ll be dealing with idiots,” he told me, “but there are requirements for military service that have to be satisfied before you can join the Agency, and ROTC takes care of that. After Yale, you certainly wouldn’t want to face two years in the armed services before coming to us.”

  I did close-order drill over the next eight semesters and managed to get good enough to air out any dank memories of left-foot-club-foot with the Knickerbocker Grays. I discovered a vein of optimism in myself. As one grew older, the traumatic impasses of childhood could actually dissolve.

  Harlot would telephone from time to time and prove interested in which courses I chose. Usually it was to push my interests toward English. “Learn your mother tongue and you’ll appreciate the others.” Before sophomore year he sent me what he saw as a great gift, a first edition of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, and truth, it wasn’t bad. There was a time when I could not only locate the roots of a word in Latin and Greek, but enjoy the exotic yams and tubers that come to us from Scandinavian and Celtic. I learned of English words derived from Italian by way of Latin, as well as of Portuguese from Latin (auto-da-fé and binnacle), and French out of Portuguese from Latin ( fetich and parasol), and French out of Spanish from Latin, and Portuguese out of Spanish and Dutch derived from Latin (cant and canal and pink), and German from Latin, and French from Late Latin, and German out of Hungarian from Serbian from late Greek from Latin, all to be tapped for hussar. I learned crossbreeds of French out of Spanish from Arabic from Greek—alembic is one reward—and I will not go on at length about English that came to us from Low German, Dutch, Slavonic, Russian, Sanskrit, Magyar, Hebrew, Hindustani. Harlot, by his lights, was getting me ready for CIA. The theory? Why, look to the tendrils of other tongues that had grown their way into English. Thereby one might develop a taste for the unspoken logic of other lands.

  Of course, I saw it all as preparation. For the next four years, my courses and the friends I made, were all there to contribute to my mission as a CIA man. If I had any conflict over my future occupation, it was on spring nights in New Haven, after an occasional and frustrating date with a girl, when I would tell myself that I really wished to become a novelist. Brooding upon this, I would also inform myself that I did not have sufficient experience to write. Joining CIA would give me the adventures requisite to working up good fiction.

  I was certainly single-minded. I see myself in junior year before the Yale-Harvard game, drunk at Mory’s with my peers, holding the silver bowl high. I was obliged to keep drinking Green Cup for as long as my table would continue to sing, yes, how I drank and how they chose to sing. The song was long, and I would not quit until the last bar of music was sung, and sung again.

  Words I have not thought of in thirty years come to me out of the pale, sunlike glare of the interior of that large silver punch bowl. I quaffed Green Cup at Mory’s and around me in a ring of ten illuminated voices, the song cried on:

  It’s Harry, it’s H, it’s H makes the world go round.

  It’s Harry, H, that makes the world go round.

  Sing Hallelujah, sing Hallelujah,

  Put a nickel on the drum,

  Save another drunken bum,

  Sing Hallelujah, sing Hallelujah,

  Put a nickel on the drum,

  Save another drunken bum,

  Put a nickel on the drum,

  And you’ll be saved.

  They paused for breath but I had to keep drinking.

  Oooh, I’m H-A-P-P-Y to be F-R-double-E,

  F-R-double-E to be S-A-V-E-D,

  S-A-V-E-D from the bonds of S-I-N,

  Glory, glory Hallelujah,

  Hip, Hooray, Amen.

  And I, drinking that sweet, potent, noxious, liquor-hallowed Green Cup, swallow into swallow, giving my soul to finish the bowl, knew that angels watched me as I drank, and if I drank it all before the song was done, we would beat Harvard tomorrow, we would serve our team from the stands. We would be there to offer our devotion, our love, our manly ability to booze with the gods at Mory’s. Only gods drank to the depths of a silver bowl. We would ring Yale Bowl with the might of our mission at Yale, which was to defeat Harvard tomorrow. God, didn’t I guzzle it down, and the score next day, in that November of 1953, was Yale 0, Harvard 13.

  5

  I WAS INTRODUCED TO KITTREDGE TOWARD THE END OF JUNIOR YEAR AT Yale. Just before Easter vacation, a summons came by telegram: COME MEET MY FIANCEE HADLEY KITTREDGE GARDINER. SPEND EASTER AT THE KEEP WITH KITTREDGE AND JEAN HARLOW.

  Back to Doane. I had not been to the island since my father, in need of the money a couple of years ago, had pushed and cajoled his two brothers and single sister into agreement on the sale. Why his funds needed replenishment remained one more family mystery. Among the Hubbards, windfalls, disasters, and outright peculation were kept at a greater distance from the children than sexual disclosure; all we knew (and it was talked about in whispers) was: “A damn shame. Got to sell the Keep. Boardman’s idea.” My father walked about for two weeks that summer with a mouth as tight as a South American dictator under palace arrest. I hardly cared. I loved the Keep less than the others, or so I thought. It was only over the next summer, which I spent at loose ends in Southampton with my mother, getting drunk with new, rich friends I did not like, and banging tennis balls through August days, that I came to understand what it was to lose the splendor of afternoon
silences over the Maine hills.

  The call to go back to the Keep was then agreeable; the opportunity to see Harlot spoke of more. I was still like a girl who fell in love with a man who went away to war. If he had not come back for three years, no matter. The girl went on no other dates; she did not even accept telephone calls from nice boys.

  I was in love with CIA. I am one of those types—is it one in ten, or one in fifty?—who can give up just about all of life for concentration upon a part of life. I read spy novels, made island hops from word to word in Skeat, attended foreign-policy forums at Yale, and studied photographs of Lenin and Stalin and Molotov, of Gromyko and Lavrenti Beria; I wanted to comprehend the face of the enemy. I eschewed political arguments about Republicans and Democrats. They hardly mattered. Allen Dulles was my President, and I would be a combat trooper in the war against the Devil. I read Spengler and brooded through my winters in New Haven about the oncoming downfall of the West and how it could be prevented. Be certain that under these circumstances I sent Harlot a telegram that I was on my way, signed it Ashenden (for Somerset Maugham’s British spy), and drove my car, a 1949 Dodge coupe, up from New Haven all the way to the backside of Mount Desert, where I found the house not at all as it used to be.

  I do not know if I care to describe the changes. I would need to add a treasures-in-trash catalogue to the insights of a geologist: Generations of Hubbards had left their strata. We used to have oak whatnots in corners, and blonde-wood Danish in the Cunard; one fine old drafting table at the Camp had come down to us from Doane Hadlock Hubbard (who also left us punctilious drawings of a proposed lookout tower one hundred feet high that he once planned to build on the southern head of the island). Along the walls were hordes of washed-out framed photographs, spotted, glass-cracked, oak-mitred, come down to us from the 1850s on. Then there were the color prints, long sun-faded, of Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Duchamp—all introduced by my mother. They had been kept, even if she never came back. Once up on a wall, things remained; it was a summer house. No wars of selection went on—merely an accommodation of accumulation. The beds were a disaster area, summer-cottage pallets. Lumpy, broken-spring mattresses with old ticking, wooden bureaus with thick paint scored by fingernail scrapings to attest to hot bored summer afternoons; spiderwebs on casement windows, birds’ nests under the eaves, and mouse droppings in many an unused room were the price we paid for that much spread of house.

  Rodman Knowles Gardiner and his wife fixed it up when they bought it from us. Kittredge’s father, being a Shakespeare scholar (distantly related to the famous Shakespearean George Kittredge, also of Harvard), knew enough about the unwinding of plots to stipulate later in the deed of transfer to the couple for a wedding present that in the event of Kittredge’s divorce from Hugh Montague, she was to own the Keep without impediment. Which is how I returned to living in it. By way of Kittredge. But that was in time to come. Now in the Easter of my junior year at Yale, more than two years after the closing with the Hubbards, Dr. Gardiner and his wife had certainly spruced up the Keep. Retired from teaching, they moved some of their best Colonial furniture from their Cambridge home to Maine. There were drapes on the windows now and the walls bore Dr. Gardiner’s collection of nineteenth-century Victorian paintings. The bedrooms had new beds. At first sight I hated it. We now looked like a New England hostelry of the sort that keeps the temperature too high in winter and screws down the windows.

  I spent a difficult two hours after my arrival. Neither Hugh Montague nor his fiancée were there—instead, I was received by the eminent Shakespearean and his wife, Maisie. They endured me; I suffered. He was a Harvard professor of a variety that may no longer exist. Dr. Gardiner was so well established that there were tiers to his eminence. Stages of his personality, much like assistants in a descending chain of command, were delegated to conversation. We spoke of the Yale and Harvard football teams of the previous fall, then of my category in squash—I was a B-group player—and of my father, whom Dr. Gardiner had last seen with Mr. Dulles at an annual garden party in Washington: “He looked very well indeed—of course, that was last year.”

  “Yessir. He still looks well.”

  “Good for him.”

  As a tennis player, Dr. Gardiner would not have let you enjoy rallies during the warm-up. He’d drive your innocent return crosscourt and leave you to trot after it.

  Maisie was not conspicuously better. She spoke of the flower garden she would put in this May; she intoned in a dreary if nonetheless dulcet voice against the unpredictability of spring weather in Maine. She mentioned the hybrids she would plant; when I offered mention of some wildflowers to look for in June and July, she lost much interest in me. Conversational pauses expanded into extensions of silence. In desperation, I tried to charge into Dr. Gardiner’s center of strength. I expatiated on a term paper (for which I had received an A) on Ernest Hemingway’s work. The consciously chosen irony of the later style showed, I said, that he had been enormously influenced by King Lear, particularly by some of Kent’s lines, and I quoted from act one, scene four, “I do prefer . . . to love him that is loved, to converse with him that is wise and say little, to fear judgment, to fight when I cannot choose, and to eat no fish.” I was about to add, “I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly,” but Dr. Gardiner said, “Why concern yourself with the copyist?”

  We sat. After a stretch, Kittredge and Hugh Montague came back in the twilight. They had been—it was a very cold Easter—ice climbing on parts of the lower trail of Gorham Mountain. Nice stuff, Kittredge assured me, and she looked full of red cheeks and Christmas.

  She was lovely beyond any measure I had for a woman. Her dark hair was cut short like a boy’s, and she was wearing pants and a windbreaker, but she was the most wonderful-looking girl. She could have been a heroine out of her father’s collection of painted Victorian damsels, pale as their cloisters, lovely as angels. That was Kittredge—except that her color today after the afternoon’s ice climb was as startling as a view of wild red berries in a field of snow.

  “It’s wonderful to meet you. We’re cousins. Did you know that?” she asked.

  “I suppose I did.”

  “I looked it up last evening. Third cousins. That’s no-man’s-land if you get down to it.” She laughed with such a direct look (as if to speak of how very attractive a man younger than herself might be if she liked him) that Hugh Montague actually stirred. I knew little enough yet of jealousy, but I could feel the wave that came over from him.

  “Well, I must tell you,” she said, “all the while Hugh was taking us up this dreadful pitch, I kept saying I wouldn’t marry him until he promised never to do such a thing to me again, whereupon he said, ‘You and Harry Hubbard are in the same boat.’ He banishes us equally from his grubby art.”

  “Actually,” said Hugh Montague, “she’s a little better than you, Harry. All the same, it’s hopeless.”

  “Well, I should hope so,” said Maisie Gardiner. “Fool’s play to risk your neck on ice.”

  “I love it,” said Kittredge. “The only thing Hugh would bother to explain was, ‘Ice won’t betray you until it does.’ What a husband you’ll make.”

  “Relatively secure,” said Hugh.

  Rodman Knowles Gardiner had a coughing fit at the thought of his daughter in marriage.

  At precisely that moment Kittredge said, “I believe Daddy thinks of me as Desdemona.”

  “I don’t see myself,” said her father, “as a blackamoor, nor espoused to my daughter. You have rotten logic, darling.”

  Kittredge changed the subject.

  “Never did any ice climbing?” she asked of me. When I shook my head, Kittredge said, “It’s no worse than the awful thing they do to you at the Farm when you have to leap out of a mud ditch and scramble up a link fence in between sweeps of the searchlight.” She stopped, but not in caution, more to calculate when I would be eligible for that chore. “I guess you’ll be getting in
to it year after next. The fence is modeled on the Grosse-Ullner barrier in East Germany.”

  Hugh Montague gave a smile with no amusement in it. “Kittredge, don’t practice indiscretion as if it were your métier.”

  “No,” said Kittredge, “I’m home. I want to talk. We’re not in Washington, and I’m tired of pretending through one blah-blah cocktail party after another that I’m a little file clerk at Treasury. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘what do you file?’ ‘Oodles of stuff,’ I tell them back. ‘Statistics.’ They know I’m lying. Obviously, I’m a madwoman spook. It stands out.”

  “What stands out is how spoiled you are,” said her fiancé.

  “How could I not be? I’m an only child,” said Kittredge. “Aren’t you?” she went on to ask.

  “By half,” I said, and when no one responded, I felt obliged to give a summary explanation.

  She appeared to be fascinated. “You must be full,” she said, “of what I call ghost-overlays.” She held up a marvelous white hand as if she were playing traffic cop in a skit at a charity ball. “But I promised everybody I would not theorize this weekend. Some people drink too much. I never stop theorizing. Do you think it’s a disease, Hugh?”

  “Preferable to drink,” he offered.

  “I’ll tell you about ghost-overlays when we’re alone,” she declared to me.

  I winced within. Hugh Montague was possessive. If she smiled nicely at me, he saw the end of their romance in her smile. Ultimately, he was right—it is just that lovers condense all schedules. What would take us more than fifteen years looked like immediate danger.

  On the other hand, he was bored. Carrying on a conversation with Rodman and Maisie Gardiner was equal to taking dinner in a room where light bulbs keep going off and on. Most of the time we talked as if there were rules against logical connection. During drinks I kept track of a few remarks. Ten statements were uttered over ten minutes. Three belonged to Dr. Gardiner, two were by Maisie, three by Harlot, one from Kittredge, one from me. There are limits to memory. I offer a reasonable substitute.