Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Hunt became my friend during that Uruguayan winter, which was the summer of 1957 in North America. Two months after I spoke across six thousand miles to Harlot up at the Keep in Maine, I was wending my way out to Carrasco twice a week for dinner with Dorothy and Howard. If the high regard I used to hold for Harlot was now buried like provisions kept for one’s return from a long journey, the habit of such respect, its shadow, so to speak, became transferred to Hunt. While he had a nasty temper, and was as easy to dislike at one moment as to like at the next, he was still my leader. I was discovering all over again that our capacity for love, when all else fails, attaches easily to such formal investments as flag and office.

  In the midst of all this, on an average cold morning, following my habit of stopping at the Central Post Office on the way to work, I pulled my hand out of the box one day with a letter from Kittredge. She had written to me directly rather than by way of the pouch.

  The Stable

  June 30, 1957

  Dear Harry,

  Got this address from your mother. I believe open mail will be all right. This is really to tell you that I am now all right. In fact, in a limited sense, I’m thriving. To my modest sorrow, the baby is off my breast and onto formula, but, on balance, it works. We have a daily nurse-housekeeper, and I am back on the job, indeed, no one over at the shop knows I was ill. Hugh managed that with great dispatch. Allen may be witting but certainly no one else. Hugh just brazened it through with a Kittredge-and-I-haven’t-had-a-vacation-since-marriage sort of stance that only he could get away with. Of course, he did work at the Keep, and damn hard while I was sorting out the little mad things for myself. Don’t repeat this, but the real trouble was not you, nor the brooch, nor the baby, nor Hugh, all of whom I was beginning to see as encircling fiends, but, in fact, was due to the most injudicious experimenting with a fabulous if horribly tricky drug for altering consciousness called LSD. Certain of our people have been trying it the last five or six years with the most fascinating but inconclusive results, and I was vain enough to decide to experiment on myself and try to trace LSD’s impact on Alpha and Omega. Needless to say, Alpha and Omega got into a frightful hoedown.

  So, this letter is apology to you. I recollect just enough of my deep dive to be certain it was unforgivable. I’ve wanted to tell you for some time but didn’t quite dare to use our old set-up on the pouch. He’s forbidden me to write to you and he’s correct up to a point. I think I was indulging a species of double life. Chaste, but nonetheless double. I vowed to Hugh I would not correspond with you again unless I told him first. Of course, I crossed my fingers as I said it, so the vow is discounted by this letter. Anyway, as you see, I wanted to take the chance.

  It is really to tell you, as I have already said, that I am all right. In truth, I love Hugh now more than ever. He was fabulous to me up in Maine, strong but so concerned. I realized how much he loves me and the baby, and I hadn’t really known that before. Hadn’t truly taken it in. The spring of his love must come from a source one thousand feet deep. I think without him I might have sunk into much more loss of time and frantic mindlessness.

  This is also to tell you that I miss you and your letters. I’m patient. I will wait another three or four months to prove to Hugh that relapses are not in my makeup, not at all. I’m back, but still I want to demonstrate it to him, and by fall—your spring—I am going to tell him that I wish to write to you again, and if he doesn’t permit it—well, we’ll see. Be patient.

  Think of me as your cousin, your kissing cousin, with whom you cannot have congress. Whoopee! Hélas. I will always love you on a most special note, but it feels warm and comfy right now, I confess, to think of you as far-off.

  Amitiés,

  Kittredge

  P.S. Hugh never saw any of your letters. I confessed to him that we had been corresponding, but only as college sweethearts who were not about to do anything about it. That much he could tolerate because he had seen the evidence when you would visit. So, my confession confirmed his acumen. I did not dare to tell him how candid we were about other matters. That he would never comprehend and never forgive.

  I lied again when I told him that the letters were destroyed by me on the night I took the LSD. Even in the midst of my madness, you see, I knew enough to lie.

  14

  EVEN WHEN WE WERE ONLY THREE FOR DINNER, OUR SETTING WAS FORMAL. At their long, handsome table, Howard always sat at one end and Dorothy at the other. If he and she were absolute snobs, I was learning nonetheless that to be accepted by such people is not unlike receiving an award; one is bathed in balmy waters. Since Howard’s visit to the Stable still smarted, all the more appealing was I, not only for the Hubbard ancestors, but as someone to steal from the Montagues. Howard did not yet comprehend the impossibility of certain social desires. I believe one reason I liked him was that I often felt more than equal to him.

  Back at the office, I paid, of course, for these attentions. One of my tasks was to bring the day’s reports out to Hunt’s house in the evening whenever he had spent the afternoon hobnobbing with Uruguayans at the Jockey Club. I had not been doing it for long, however, before Porringer and crew arrived at the intuition that this was not merely a chore, but that I was a steady guest for dinner. On nights when I was out working as a case officer, Gatsby or Kearns or even Oatsie himself would take the twelve-mile drive along the Rambla out to Carrasco Beach where the Hunts lived in a white stucco villa with red roof-tiles just two sweepingly curved streets away from the sea, but my colleagues were not often asked to remain for the evening meal. Kindness to social inferiors was not one of Dorothy’s virtues. Indeed, I winced at the thought of Sally in her clutches. Nor was the thought of Kearns at table any happier. He had the tiniest wife and they looked bizarre when together. Disproportion was enough to dilate Dorothy’s nostrils. If Jay Gatsby had graduated from The Citadel and his wife, Theodora, come out of some good Southern ladies’ emporium of education called Atkins Emory (or some equivalent concatenation of consonants), that may have been enough to elicit a second invitation from the Hunts, but no more.

  The worst afternoon I spent with Sally was the day preceding Howard and Dorothy’s arrival at the Porringers’ for a payback dinner. Sally’s most formidable asset, the ability to say farewell to her mind for thirty wholly concupiscent minutes, was subverted. I made love to a woman with a rigid body and a mind teeming with social fear. Hunt might throw himself into MARXISMO ES MIERDA and ship cartons of pelleted Who-Me’s up to the front without a backward look, but he could not enjoy a repast with people who did not know how to serve the damn thing. And Dorothy was worse. To the stern blood standards of her one-eighth of Oglala Sioux and the Harrison ancestors could be added Mrs. Hunt’s relinquished title. Dorothy had been married to the Marquis de Goutière, and had kept house with him in Chandernagore, which happened to be, Howard could tell you, “the family seat of the de Goutières. It’s near Calcutta.”

  I never knew if the de Goutières were Franco-Hindu or Indo-French, and if I heard the sound of “Marquesa” from time to time, I barely knew how to spell it. But allow Dorothy her due—she was aristocratic. With dark hair, large dark eyes, a large and aquiline nose, and lips that could curve into many a nuance of displeasure, she was curiously attractive, and rarely lacking in inner sentiments of self-worth.

  Whatever were the virtues and shortfalls at the home of the Hunts, I paid for their hospitality by absorbing a concomitant chill from my brother operators at the office. No matter. I accepted the transaction. I was learning a good deal about Hunt’s view of the Station. While dinners in Carrasco adhered to Dorothy’s edict that no outright business could be transacted at table, the half hour before dinner invariably installed me in Howard’s study, and there I was used as a sounding board. An audible meditation, minutes in length, on the defects of Gatsby and Kearns would issue from the thriving hive of his thoughts. I rarely had to reply as Hunt conducted me through each loose drum skin in our Station. I knew it was only a way o
f warming me up for a new job. Porringer was liaison to each of the Uruguayan journalists and editors we paid to plant our pieces in the Montevideo press. Last week, however, Porringer had spent more time writing for the Montevideo periodicals than reading them. “Khrushchev, Butcher of the Ukraine,” went the theme.

  So I saw my new task shaping up. While Porringer’s contacts with journalists were as sacrosanct to him as an Oklahoma dirt farmer’s forty acres, I would now be given a heavy share of the writing and editing. Hunt’s litany of imperfect execution of projects by Gatsby and Kearns was, I knew, the mirror image of their complaints to him that I was not taking on my proper load. The oldest game at every Station, I had begun to learn, was to slough dull tasks onto the new man at the next desk, and Hunt, who could hardly be unaware of what it must cost to be his favorite, must have decided to unload more of the shopwork on me. When I agreed, therefore, to put my hand in on the material Porringer sent over to his three best journalists, AV/ARICE, AV/ENGE, and AV/IATOR, Hunt had obtained his purpose, and could feel expansive.

  “Harry, when all is said and done,” he told me now, “propaganda is half of what we do. Sometimes I think it’s the better half.” He opened his desk drawer and shut it as if to take a spot check on whether the Sovs had left a sneaky there recently. “Hate to tell you,” he said with his hand to the side of his mouth as if to hold off all alien ears, “just how many newspapers back home also take plants from us. Journalists are easier to buy than horses!”

  The maid knocked on the door of the study. It was time for dinner. End of business and commencement of history. Dorothy, who was considerably less talkative than Howard, was always ready to accept his monologues at table, and converted them, I expect, into periods of meditation for herself. After all, she had heard the tales.

  I, however, had not, and thought he told them well. Let one suffice for the many.

  “Back in Tokyo about two years ago . . .”

  “More like a year and a half ago,” commented Dorothy.

  “You’re keeper of the clock,” said Howard. “All right, eighteen months ago, the Chinese Communists had the effrontery to announce that they were going to open their first trade fair in Japan. Show off their advanced machine-tool equipment. This set up a hell of a ripple. We knew better, but still! What if they were actually competitive? American interests had a lot of ducats in the pot, so we certainly didn’t want the Japanese people looking to China. Well, I managed to slip into their preview and the ChiCom stuff was pathetic. Poor copies of our machine tools. The few good products were hand-crafted. Obviously, they were going to make no dent in the bacon-and-beans department, no, sir, no Almighty Dollars would have to be spent competing with them. All the same, I decided to bomb their exposition.”

  “Did you employ Who-Me’s?” I asked.

  “Not at all. This job called for finesse. So I authored a nifty op. Hundreds of thousands of leaflets floated down on Tokyo one night from a plane. ‘Come to the Chinese Trade Fair,’ said the invitation. ‘Free Admission, Free Beer, Free Rice, Free Sashimi.’”

  Hunt began to laugh. “Harry, the ChiComs were inundated with Tokyo citizens waving these leaflets. They had to close their doors. They didn’t have any free anything. Terrible press. Had to slink their Chinese butts out of town.

  “Speak of Brownie points,” said Howard. “I think one reason I’m sitting in a COS seat right now was the success of that coup. Of course, I might also have to thank Dorothy.” He lifted his glass to her. “Friend,” he said, “when you look at your hostess, what do you see?”

  “A beautiful lady,” I interjected.

  “More than that,” said Hunt, “I also glimpse the female persona at its most elusive. Ask yourself, Harry, would Dorothy make a spy?”

  “None better,” I replied.

  “You are on course.” He sipped his wine. “I’m going to let out one I ought not to. While in Tokyo, she managed to cop the Argentine code books.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said to Dorothy.

  “Well, Howard had to bring it up, but I will say it was no great feat. I was working, after all, for the Argentine Ambassador.”

  “Her Spanish is impeccable,” said Howard. “She was his speechwriter.”

  “Part-time,” said Dorothy.

  “Part-time just managed to be enough,” said Howard, “for Dorothy to pick up the code books during the midday siesta. We had a little team around the corner who photographed her take faster than you can skin a rabbit, and Dorothy got them back before the first siestero returned. That was worth a private salute from the North Asia Command. Darling, you are the real article,” said Howard. “Why, if we hadn’t met in Paris, I would probably have encountered you in Hong Kong on some enchanted evening.”

  “And what would I have been doing there?” asked Dorothy.

  “Running a large espionage mill. Contract players at every price. All nations welcome.”

  Dorothy said: “Pass the wine before you drink it all.”

  “Another bottle,” said Howard.

  We got very drunk that night. Long after Dorothy had gone to bed, Howard kept talking to me. I had never had an older brother, but Hunt was beginning to present some notion of one.

  Back in the paneled wood study after dinner, he took out a bottle of Courvoisier, and we honed our after-dinner sentiments. Hunt’s study must have had fifty photographs on the wall, silver-framed shots of himself and Dorothy in their separate childhoods, then together in Paris; pictures of their children; pictures of Howard playing the saxophone in a college band; Ensign Howard Hunt, USNR; Correspondent Hunt at Guadalcanal; Hunt at the typewriter for one of his novels; Hunt in a Chinese dugout with a sniper’s gun; Hunt on a ski lift in Austria; Hunt with a brace of pheasants in Mexico; Hunt at the beach in Acapulco; Hunt in Hollywood; Hunt with antelope horns in Wyoming; Hunt with ram’s horns in I don’t know where—he grew tired of the tour by the time we got to Greece. He gave a wave of dismissal to himself at the Acropolis, settled in one big leather chair, and, obviously provident, was able to offer me its mate.

  The more we drank, the more confidential he became. In a little while, he began to call me Hub. I could see a long career for Hub and quickly offered an explanation (which had no truth) that one of my twin brothers had such a nickname.

  “Back to Harry,” he said equably. “Good name, Harry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What do you see for yourself, Harry, down the road?”

  “Down the road?”

  “Thirty years from now. Do you see a Director’s chair, or is it fur-lined slippers on Retirement Lane?”

  “I like this work. I learn something every day. I just want to get awfully good at it.”

  “No attacks of conscience?”

  “A few, perhaps, but I’m in need of seasoning.”

  “Good,” said Howard and opened his desk drawer. “What I show you next is in whole confidence.”

  “Yessir.”

  “These are personnel evaluations.”

  “I see.”

  “We can skip Gatsby and Kearns. I can’t send back anything very good about them.”

  I couldn’t either, so I was silent.

  “Porringer gets his B-minus. You do better.”

  He must have had some second thoughts because he closed his drawer without removing any papers. “I give Sherman good marks for hard work and agent-recruitment initiative, but I have to pigeonhole him. He’s Deputy COS level. Can go no higher until he learns to run a happy Station. That, I am afraid, is going to stick to him, but my job is to evaluate without tilt.”

  “I can see the difficulty.”

  “You present more of a problem. Bill Harvey is a vindictive son of a bitch, we can all agree, but something unique came out of him. He labeled you untrustworthy—which is a slash to the jugular. Then he withdrew it a week later. ‘On reconsideration,’ he wrote, ‘this man is unorthodox but talented and trustworthy.’ When you come up for promotion, the examiner could begin to w
onder what caused Harvey’s 180-degree change of heart. That does you no great good.”

  “Yessir.” I paused. “Wow,” I heard myself say.

  “You need a firm, unequivocal yes from me.”

  “I would think so.”

  “I believe you’re going to get it. I see something in you that a lot of good young officers don’t have, good as they are. You anticipate. I am going to say that while still inexperienced, you show potential for high echelon. ‘Worth keeping an eye on,’ is the plus I intend to put in for you.”

  “Thank you, Howard.”

  “It is because you have ambition.”

  Did I? Knowledge versus power had never seemed a painful choice for me. I preferred the first. Did he see something I did not perceive in myself? I do not know if it was the Courvoisier or Hunt’s large assessment of my qualities, but I knew the warmth of flattery in all my limbs. As for Harvey’s evaluation, I would brood on that tomorrow.

  “The key thing, Hub—sorry! Harry!—is not to kid oneself. We all want to become Director of Central Intelligence. To me, that means more than being President. Do you feel that way?”

  I could hardly answer in the negative. I nodded.