Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  He offered an early work: Titus Andronicus. An odd choice. I would not recognize how bizarre until I knew the family better. While Dr. Gardiner did not belong to the school of scholars who thought Shakespeare had not written Titus Andronicus, he did consider it, he told us, one of the Bard’s poorest plays. Uninspired, and much too dreadful. Yet Dr. Gardiner read from it on Sunday night with a voice full of passion, choosing the terrible speech where Titus tells Chiron and Demetrius that in consequence of their vile acts on his family—they have severed his hand and cut off both hands of his daughter, Lavinia—he, Titus, will now revenge himself.

  Hark, wretches! How I mean to martyr you,

  This one hand yet is left to cut your throats,

  Whilst Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold

  The basin that receives your guilty blood.

  Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,

  And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste;

  And of the paste a coffin I will rear;

  And make two pasties of your shameful heads.

  And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,

  Receive the blood, and when that they are dead,

  Let me go grind their bones to powder small.

  And with this hateful liquor temper it

  And in that paste let their vile heads be baked.

  Come, come, be everyone officious

  To make this banquet, which I wish might prove

  More stern and bloody than the Centaurs’ feast.

  He recited it in the full sonority of a renowned lecture voice, gave it all the Elizabethan hullaballoo due vowels and consonants grappling with one another over hurdles and down falls: How he relished the conjunctive sinews of these words. Hair stood on my neck. I knew then what a sixth sense was hair.

  “I do not approve of the play,” said Dr. Gardiner when he was done, “but the bile of the ages is in the boil of this fabulous stuff.”

  Maisie had fallen asleep while he read. Her head was to one side, her mouth was open, and I thought for a moment she had suffered a stroke. She had merely taken her nightly jot of three Seconals; soon Dr. Gardiner walked her up to bed. It would also take years before I learned—how many little confessions was Kittredge eventually to make!—that Dr. Gardiner had a preferred means of connubial union: It was to investigate Maisie while she slept. Kittredge discovered her father’s habit when she was ten. She peeped and saw it all. In sleep, Maisie, a wanton of Morpheus, made cries like a bird.

  Husbands and wives have been known to discover that their separate childhoods are curiously linked: Kittredge and I had both seen our parents in the act of love. Or, more to the fact, we had, between us, seen three of our four parents. Titus and Lavinia, taken together, had lost three of their four hands. The allusion is meaningless, I am certain, except that numbers command their own logic, and Augustus Farr may have been on a promenade that night while Dr. Gardiner and his somnolent Maisie were transported to those underworlds that dwell beneath the navel.

  6

  I RETURNED TO THE KEEP IN JUNE FOR THE MARRIAGE OF HADLEY KITtredge Gardiner to Hugh Tremont Montague. My father and stepmother, my brothers, my uncles, aunts, and cousins, were there in the gathering of good Maine summer families. The Prescotts and the Peabodys came, the Finletters and Griswolds, the Herters, and the Places. Even Mrs. Collier from Bar Harbor together with half of the Bar Harbor Club took the crooked twenty-mile journey west across the fifteen miles of the island to the backside. Contingents were present from Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor, and David Rockefeller attended. Desmond FitzGerald was in view, and Clara Fargo Thomas; Allen Dulles flew up from Washington with Richard Bissell and Richard Helms, Tracy Barnes and Frank Wisner, James Angleton and Miles Copeland. One of my cousins, Colton Shaler Hubbard, who liked to see himself as the operative definition of a wag, was heard to say, “Drop a bomb on this shindig and U.S. Intelligence is gone to smithereens.”

  It is no part of my intention to expatiate on the floral arrangements chosen by Maisie, nor the sober character of our Episcopal church, St. Anne of the Trinity in the Woods (which has been quietly criticized since the turn of the century for its penurious Presbyterian air), and I am certainly not equipped to describe the niceties of the wedding-gown brocades. I speak of the nuptials because they confirmed my suspicion that I was in love with Kittredge, and that proved to be the most inexpensive, self-sustaining, and marvelous love a young man could attach himself to. For a long time, it cost me no more than the luxurious enrichment of my self-pity, which was promoted on the day of the wedding from the spiritual equivalent of a sigh to the deepest mahogany melancholy. I was in love with a beautiful, brilliant girl who was married to the most elegant and incisive gent I had ever met; there was no hope for me but, oh, the love was beautiful.

  Mr. Dulles seemed to agree. Soon after we assembled back at the Keep for the wedding party, he stood up and (very much in his function as Director of CIA) gave the first toast. I still remember how delicately he held his glass yet with what a sense of gravity.

  “The Greco-Roman concept of the healthy mind in the healthy body is personified by our good and brave colleague, Hugh Tremont Montague,” were Dulles’ first words. “Indeed, if it were not for the one prodigality he shares with me—no, let me say in which he surpasses me—at squandering the once rich crop of his hair, we could speak of the perfect fellow.” Polite but happily unweighted laughter passed gently through the room. “For those few of you who are not connected to the legends of his heroic exploits in OSS during the war, let me say that you must take it on faith. His feats, for the present, remain in the bailiwick of the highly classified. For equally good cause, I cannot begin to describe the work he does now except to hint that he is always threatening to become indispensable before he is even properly middle-aged.” Sweet, light laughter. “Nonetheless, for all his sterling attributes, he is still the luckiest fellow in the world. He is marrying a young lady of incommensurate beauty who, if I dare to grow portentous on so festive an occasion, has also become by dint of inspiration, talent, and study, a psychological theorist of a power and persuasion to inspire all Jungians and confound all Freudians. When she was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe, I happened to be shown her senior thesis and it was a wonder. I break a little confidence by saying I was quick to tell her, ‘Kittredge, your thesis is a marvel and I can promise you that some of us just might need it. You, Kittredge, are coming aboard.’ How could a young lady, confronted by such admiration, not give assent? I, holding this cup for the toast, raise high my heart as well. God bless you both. May He sanctify your marriage, handsome, half-bald Hugh Montague, and our own Hadley Kittredge Gardiner, here with us, yet remaining on such close terms with the divine.”

  Afterward, I had been introduced in a rush as the Director was leaving, and there was time to receive no more than a foursquare handshake and the friendliest smile. “Your father is one whale of a fellow, Harry,” he said with eyes to twinkle at all the rich findings between the lines. Mr. Dulles, I decided, might be the nicest man I met at the wedding. My impatience to hook up with CIA was hardly less lively.

  Of course, I was also feeling the presence of many men whose names had been legends to me ever since my father began to speak of them in the intimate tones reserved by a god for fellow gods; such names as Allen and Tracy, Richard and Wiz, Dickie and Des, were already installed in an amphitheater of my mind. While none of these personages was as handsome as my father, many were as tall, or as forceful; their persons offered the suggestion that one should not impinge on them for too little. They had bottom. “Something in me,” said their presence, “is inviolable.”

  I gave up the last semester of my senior year at Yale, making a quick decision right after the wedding to enroll immediately in summer school so that I could graduate at midterm in January and thereby apply to the Company six months earlier. It was a sacrifice, the first conscious one I had made, for I was comfortable at Yale, liked my rooms, and still had the idea f
rom time to time that I might want to spend a year after college writing fiction. I even had the means to write late at night for I had carefully chosen no classes that began before 10:00 A.M. I also had friends of all the shades and affiliations you make after three years at a good college, and was otherwise ensconced. I even had some small chance of making the Varsity Eight after slaving at crew the last three seasons. By my lights, I was giving up a lot. Yet I wanted to. If I wished to serve my country, I could start best by making a sacrifice. So, I went to summer school, and was graduated eight accelerated months later onto the slushy streets of Washington in early February, a midyear diploma-holder, a bear cub without hair. But I was proud of my sacrifice.

  I will not describe the tests I took for admittance. They were numerous, and classified, but then, given the Agency officers who may have been enlisted in support of my application, I suppose I would have had to do poorly not to get in.

  Of course, you were expected to do well. Only a few out of every hundred who applied were able to make it all the way through the IQ tests, the personality tests, the lie-detector, and the security questionnaire. I remember that in the Personal History Statement, there was the question: On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your dedication to this work? I put down a five and wrote in the space allowed for comment: I have been brought up to face ultimates.

  “Explain yourself,” said the interviewer.

  “Well, sir,” I said, and I had been waiting to make this speech, “I feel that if I had to, I could stand trial before an international tribunal.” When my interlocutor looked at me, I added, I thought not unadroitly, “The point I’d like to make is that although I am a moral person, I am ready to get into activities where I might have to stand trial for my country, or, if it ever came down to it, die for ultimate purposes.”

  I had more trouble with the lie-detector. It was the test to dread. Although we were warned not to talk about it with applicants who had already taken it, we met with them as soon as possible after the drear event; usually they said as little as they could and consumed prodigies of beer.

  I still see my polygraph interview in transcript. It is an imaginary transcript. What the interviewer and I said to one another at the time cannot be what I now remember. I offer a false memory, then, but it is imprinted. The face of the interviewer has, in recollection, become long-jawed and bespectacled; he looks as gray as a personage in a black-and-white film. Of course, we were installed in a dingy-white cubbyhole off a long crowded hall in an edifice called Building 13 off the Reflecting Pool, and much of my memory of those wintry days is, indeed, in gray and white.

  I offer what I recollect. I do not vouch for anything in this reconstructed transcript other than its ongoing psychological reality for me.

  INTERROGATOR: Ever had a homosexual experience?

  APPLICANT: No, sir.

  INTERROGATOR: Why are you having such a large reaction?

  APPLICANT: I didn’t know I was.

  INTERROGATOR: Really? You’re giving the machine what we call a flush.

  APPLICANT: Couldn’t the machine make a misinterpretation?

  INTERROGATOR: You are saying you are not homosexual.

  APPLICANT: Certainly not.

  INTERROGATOR: Never?

  APPLICANT: Once I came close, but held off.

  INTERROGATOR: Fine. I can read you. Let’s move on.

  APPLICANT: Let’s.

  INTERROGATOR: Get along with women?

  APPLICANT: I’ve been known to.

  INTERROGATOR: Consider yourself normal?

  APPLICANT: You bet.

  INTERROGATOR: Why am I getting a flutter?

  APPLICANT: You’re asking me to volunteer a response?

  INTERROGATOR: Let me rephrase it. Is there anything you do with women that community consensus might consider out of the ordinary?

  APPLICANT: Do you mean—unusual acts?

  INTERROGATOR: Specify.

  APPLICANT: Can I be asked a specific question?

  INTERROGATOR: Do you like blowjobs?

  APPLICANT: I don’t know.

  INTERROGATOR: Overlarge response.

  APPLICANT: Yessir.

  INTERROGATOR: Yessir what?

  APPLICANT: Yes, to the blowjob.

  INTERROGATOR: Don’t look so unhappy. This won’t keep us from accepting you. On the other hand, if you were to lie in this test, it could hurt you a lot.

  APPLICANT: Thank you, sir. I understand.

  I get a whiff of the old perspiration. I was lying to the lie-detector: I had still not lost my cherry. Even if two-thirds of my class at Yale could probably say the same, anything was better than such confession. How could a CIA man be a virgin? Down the line, I would learn that many another applicant lied to protect the same green secret. That was all right. The tests were looking to screen out men who might be vulnerable to blackmail. Well-raised college graduates, however, claiming more amatory experience than they’d earned could be accepted just as they were.

  During those weeks of testing, I lived in the YMCA and shared meals in drugstores with other applicants. They, for the most part, had come from state universities and had taken their majors in government, or football, or languages, in foreign affairs, economics, statistics, agronomy, or some special skill. Usually, one of their professors had had an exploratory conversation with them, and if interest was there, they received a letter that spoke of an important government career with foreign duties, and were told to reply to a post office box in Washington, D.C.

  I pretended to have been approached like the others, but given my lack of gov, ec, pol-sci, or applied psych, I pretended to have made some studies in Marxism instead. None of my new acquaintances knew much about that. I got away with it until I met Arnie Rosen, whose father was a third cousin of Sidney Hook. Rosen, in homage, perhaps, to this family tie, had read Lenin, Trotsky, and Plekhanov in his adolescence, not, he assured me, to become an advocate of such ideas, but to set himself up as their future antagonist. As he put it to me one morning over pancakes and sausage, “From the word go, I knew the cockamamie elements in V. I. Lenin.” Yes—Rosen, Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia. I disliked him to the quick.

  For those four or five weeks, my life in junction with other applicants was spent in promenade from one processing building to another in the I-J-K-L complex, a set of four long buildings in a row that ran from the Lincoln Memorial for more than a quarter mile along the Reflecting Pool toward the Washington Monument. On gray and barren winter mornings those buildings looked not wholly unlike pictures I had seen of Dachau, same long, two-story sheds that went on forever. We were jammed into quarters thrown up for government offices during the Second World War. Since we had other facilities dispersed over many a side street, and in many a fine old house, special bottle-green government buses took us from building to building in Foggy Bottom. We filled out questionnaires and walked in self-conscious groupings, obviously inductees.

  All the while, I pretended, as I say, to be just like my new friends. In truth, so dislocated was this existence from all I had known at Yale that I felt myself a stranger in my own land. Such feelings were most likely to come over me in the course of listening to a lecture in one of our ubiquitous classrooms with its beige walls, blackboard, American flag in a stand, and its dark gray stain-compatible carpet and portable lecture chairs with their small one-arm writing tables attached. My classmates showed the same good American crew cut as myself (good for at least 80 percent of us), and if our collective demeanor was somewhere between the YMCA and the Harvard Business School, it did not mean I was yet like anyone else. I was discovering how little I knew about my countrymen, at least those who were trying like me to get into CIA. Nor did I feel altogether real to myself. That, on reflection, was a familiar wind in my lonely harbors.

  Occasionally I voyaged out to the canal house in Georgetown which Kittredge and Harlot had bought in the first year of their marriage, and such evenings were full of stimulation for me. Some of their dinner gues
ts were grand. Henry Luce was there one night, and he took me aside long enough to inform me that he knew my father. Mr. Luce had white hair and hugely heavy black eyebrows. His voice turned husky as he said to me, “It’s a wonderful life you’re going to have. Momentous decisions, and the best of it is that they will count! I’ve worked on occasion on endeavors much larger than myself or my own interests, and I can tell you, Harry, since we share the same diminutive, whether from Herrick or Henry, that there’s no comparison. Doing it for the larger dream is what it is all about, Harry!” Like a reverend, he did not release me until he took his hand from my shoulder. Nor could I pretend to myself that I was ungrateful for the speech, since after evenings at the Montagues, I would go back to my brother dogs at the Y to find them worrying where the next bone was going to be thrown. I, however, would feel like a radioactive dog. I would glow within. I had seen the Company, and it was there. The CIA was not merely long, shedlike buildings, or the dead-tank smells of people crowded into impossibly small office spaces, nor leering inquisitors who strapped belts and instruments to your body; no, CIA was also a company of the elegant, secretly gathered to fight a war so noble that one could and must be ready to trudge for years through the mud and the pits. Ah, those evenings at the canal house! Indeed, it was Harlot who was the first to tell me I was in, certified and in, on the day after my last test. My roomies at the Y would have to wait three more days to obtain as much knowledge, and I suffered with the secret I could not relate to them, and so discovered that holding a confidence when one wishes to let it out is comparable to thirsting for a shot of liquor on an awful day.

  After acceptance, we reported one morning for our orientation lecture. Perhaps a hundred of us were taken by bus from the 9th Street Personnel Pool to an old five-story house with a Queen Anne roof behind the State Department. There we crowded into a small basement auditorium. A man sitting up on the stage whom I would have taken for an Ivy League professor stood up to welcome us and said, “In case any of you are wondering, you will now be working for CIA.”