There was a bank of pay phones two blocks from the apartment, and at two minutes and fifty seconds past eight, I put in my dime. The voice that responded no longer came to me through a handkerchief.
“Harry?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Kittredge.”
To my small horror, I could say no more than, “Yes.”
“Harry, have you ever heard of a girl named Modene Murphy?”
“Why do you ask?” But now my larynx was hardly loyal to me.
“Oh, Harry, you’re FIELD, aren’t you?”
“I choose not to answer that.”
“I knew it all the time. Harry, like it or not, Hugh has chosen me as your replacement. I’m up on your reports.”
“All of them?”
“All, and more. You don’t know the ensuings.”
Well, if it had been something like a year and a half since we had been in any kind of communication, this was a hell of a way to start up.
“Kittredge, can I see you?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to meet you behind Hugh’s back, and I certainly don’t want to have to look at the two of you en famille at dinner.”
“How is Christopher?”
“Divine. I would perish for that child.”
“I would like to see him. I am, after all, his godfather.”
She sighed. “Do you have a post office box?”
“Well, yes, I do.”
“Give me the number,” she said, and as soon as I did, she added, “I think we’re back in business again. I’m going to send you a long letter.”
“How soon?”
“By tomorrow it should go out. It’s written in my mind already.”
“And how do I reach you?”
It developed that Kittredge had a post office box as well.
“You sound wonderful,” I said.
“Patience,” she said, and hung up.
4
October 20, 1961
Dearest Harry,
While I cannot know how much has happened to you in the last year, the denouement of Pigs must have taken its toll. A good part of you so identifies with your work that each Agency mishap must come as a personal loss.
Of course, I am thinking of the old model Herrick Hubbard, circa 1959, and we have been out of touch. For that matter, I do not want you to picture me as I was after that awful morass in Paraguay.
I’ve changed. So much as one can change profoundly in a couple of years, I would say that I am not at all the same. Do you know that with the exception of a monthly visit from Hugh, and four stints a week of cleaning and Christopher-watching from a good Maine housekeeper, I was alone at the Keep, worked on my book alone, and took care of my son for over a year?
Living all-but-alone in Maine through a winter, is equal, I think, to being suspended in a diving bell. You do scrape bottom on the underwater ledges, but you’re awfully strong when you come up. I was. I had a curious year. I developed a momentous psychological theory. (Momentous for me. Might be modestly useful for others.) I don’t want to describe it to you in too much detail at this point, but can say that two of the most unresolvable problems in psychoanalysis today are narcissism and psychopathy. No one knows how to treat such conditions. The Freudians are comparable on these matters to fourteenth-century cartographers who left vast empty spaces on their maps of the world.
Well, Alpha and Omega, if one accepts the premise, does offer a good grip on the matter. I don’t feel enthusiastic enough at this moment to give you a once-over-quickly on the theory, so, will only indicate that trying to develop a book out of the above wore down my literary spirit, such as it is. Day after day, for a year, I struggled at it, and discovered that I was out beyond my powers. I have simply not had enough personal life to illumine my thesis with the thousand everyday examples it demands. I wanted to come forth with a magnum opus full of intellectual charisma, but had to recognize once again—I am simply one more bright girl too soon married, too soon motherized, my backside on the bank and one toe in the career-river. You don’t shape history with that posture.
Now about this time (which brings us close to a year ago), Hugh began to importune me to come back to Washington. Up till then, it had been a contest between his will and mine. We were both suffering acutely but not confessing to one bleat of discomfort. Finally he said, “I want a marriage. I have spent my life trying to escape the inevitable. I don’t want to end up in a monk’s cell.”
I was awfully moved. You know he adored his mother and in fact even slept in the same bed with her until he was ten years old. I suspect it was a way she had of keeping his father at arm’s length. Then, the disaster occurred. Hugh, at the age of eleven, not only had a dead father but was obliged to live with the dire possibility of a murderous mother. He drew very much away from her and spent his adolescence as a solitary. His rock climbing started then. Can you conceive of it? This private and very young adolescent off on solo hikes in the Rockies, climbing freestyle before there was a word for it. One must be in awe at the depth of the desperation that he actually managed to get under control through this drastic cure of taking great risks. Suddenly, after all our years of marriage, my husband was awfully real to me, and I was prodigiously moved.
By half. My Alpha was molten. My Omega rock-hard. I amazed myself. I understood for the first time how hard I am down at Omega-core. I wrote to him that I would return only if we could shift the basis of our marriage. I would not go back to the isolation of being kept just about completely out of his work. He may not have understood in the past, but one reason I always became so feverish-minded at the Stable was that too great a need had grown up in me to find excitement and satisfaction in social relations—those vetting dinners, for instance, where we looked for a replacement for Allen. What foolishness! That could not be enough.
What did I want, then? It was to share his work. In fact, his secrets. He couldn’t agree to that, he tried to explain—I was asking him to rupture his vow. Your vow be damned, I told him. Our marriage is a sacrament. That is a deeper vow.
He agreed finally to let me in. I came back not only to Washington, but to his work. Not even to most of it, of course, but he would empower me (his term!) to collaborate with him on one or two of his projects. (Which he calls pieces.) I discovered Hugh’s skill at negotiation—I ended, you may be certain, with less than I could have obtained. No matter. What I have gained is fascinating enough. I am now his junior partner, and it is sweet to sup on a couple of the secrets. I believe he even enjoys revealing the top-drawer manifestations of his mind. Domestic tranquility threatens to lap at our feet.
Not too seriously, however. We’re still combatants. This last November, for example, we had a horrendous row. I had not even been back in Washington for more than a month when my old friend Polly Galen Smith was at the doorstep. Now, I know you remember her as our epistolary cut-out between Washington and Montevideo, but I can’t remember how much else I told you about Polly. Her husband, Wallace Rideout Smith is no longer at State but has transferred over to the Agency and is now one of our muckamucks at the other end of things—Administration. And a duller man never walked a Company corridor. Did I write to you about them once before? Polly, as I believe I’ve told you, has been deliriously unfaithful to Rideout Smith for years—not in quantity, but she does take abyss-jumper risks. I think it’s just as simple as that she enjoys men the way all of you men are supposed to enjoy us.
At any rate, Polly and I get along famously because we are so different. She came to me again about a month before the presidential inauguration to ask “one hell of a favor.” Would I let her use the Stable for an hour early Wednesday afternoon while Hugh was away working and I might be shopping? She had a friend who lived two blocks to one side of me in Georgetown, and there was Polly three blocks on the other side. Her friend was the busiest man in Christendom right now, but they had “absolute grabs” for each other. Well, wh
o was he? State secret, she answered. Impossible, I said, there’s Christopher to think of, and the maid. Not so, she said. Christopher is still in nursery school at 2:00 P.M., and the maid has Wednesdays off. She had cased my situation.
I won’t say yes until you let me in on who the man could be, I told her.
Can’t be done, she said. In that case, I responded, you and your buddy-buddy will just have to find a motel.
Oh, God, no, Kittredge. Well, why not? Too prominent, the man is too prominent, she kept saying. At last I dragged forth the name. Her beau was none other than her old senatorial pal of two years ago, now our presidential jock-elect, Jack Kennedy. The reason they needed a place just so convenient as mine involved the concerns of the Secret Service. Told in advance, they will remain a discreet half block away. Moreover, Jack can duck out of his house on N Street between meetings, then slip back without raising a stir about sizable gaps in his schedule.
I had one instant of revelation: snobbery, property, propinquity, and good old droit de seigneur revealed their trusslike interrelations in me. Harry, I had to say yes. I wanted the President-Elect of the United States infusing my rooms with his carnal presence. I think I became aware at that moment what a slut I could have been with another kind of upbringing.
How I envied Polly. Envy is mean! I found myself insisting on a particular payment. I wasn’t going to have Jack Kennedy investing my linens with his spoor when I hadn’t even met the man.
Polly protested as if I’d broken a bottle of stink, but she had to give in. So commenced their Wednesdays. They were going to love Wednesdays at the Stable, she said, even if the whole thing was going to take up no more than thirty minutes—an item I was to discover when we arranged how the encounter would take place. I was to pretend to come home unexpectedly, but on the minute. “If you’re two minutes late, he’ll be gone, and if you’re five minutes early, you will walk in on the finishing touches.” Polly, you can see, is to the point, and that, I comprehended, is exactly why they got together in the first place. I have not met a man who is more to the point than Jack Kennedy, unless it is his brother Bobby. (Of course, their father, I hear, leaves them both in his wake.)
At any rate, I saw him. Even as I turned my key and came through the door to my own parlor, my heart fluttered twice—once for history and once for the person. He is awfully attractive and I think it is because he is not out of measure. I was talking to a man to whom I felt equal, which I must say is bottomlessly agreeable. And he’s so direct and sure of himself that it comes off as a natural quality rather than arrogance. He is nice. And so amoral. And so unflappable. Polly was trying to keep from guffawing, which was forgivable—two of her best friends, after all, were meeting, and he—whether or not she had told him—seemed not at all surprised by my supposedly unexpected entrance. (Perhaps she did tell him in advance and he had worked it out with the Secret Service. Indeed, on reflection, they had to have done just that.)
“Do you know,” he said for greeting, “you and my wife have a slight resemblance to each other. It’s uncanny.”
I thought of Jacqueline Kennedy’s father, Black Jack Bouvier. Then I had to compare him to my father and I said, “Oh, dear, next to your wife I’m dry-as-dust,” and felt shabby suddenly, a most unexpected feeling for me, but it is all genes, isn’t it? Folio dust was coming out of my pores by way of my father’s pores. Or so I felt! “Dry-as-dust,” I repeated when he just kept smiling, considerably more comfortable in my parlor than I was.
“Oh,” he said, “we will see about that,” and offered a glint of a very good smile.
“Ho, ho, curfew,” said Polly Smith, and Jack gave a small salute and was out the door, leaving Polly behind. “Till next Wednesday,” he said.
Polly stayed for tea, and I began to feel disloyal to Hugh. I was so avid to hear about Jack.
By the time Hugh came home, I was in a confessional mode. I said nothing before we went to sleep, and nothing again on the next night, but, I was beginning to feel those unruly intimations of dread that I call “the dark wobbles.” I can’t suppose you don’t remember. They were touched off in me once by that awful brooch you sent from Montevideo. Well, it was coming on again, and I knew I had to tell Hugh. He couldn’t have taken it worse. “I feel sullied by it,” he said. Then he said, and you don’t know how much this is out of character for him, “I couldn’t feel worse if that fellow Jack Kennedy had buggered me!” Can you conceive of Hugh speaking like that?
“It was Polly, not I,” I said to him, “who was in the receiving position.”
“That will be the last time she receives in our house,” he answered. “No,” I said. “I can’t do that to her.”
“It pollutes everything here, including the child. Can you make no distinction between the relatively sacred and the wholly profane?”
Well, I was going to strike my colors. He was right, after all, and I knew it; I have also learned, however, that Hugh has no respect for you if he wins too quickly, so I thought I’d hold out till the Tuesday before the next Wednesday and let him think he’d won a major match.
Talk of presidential timing. I’m beginning to see how Jack got where he is. I did not say a word to Polly but on Monday an invitation was delivered by hand. Could Mr. and Mrs. Montague come to dinner on N Street Tuesday night?
I must say that Hugh went through a major stomach upset. I have never known him to throw up in such manner before. And I realized what it was about. He was dying to go to N Street. He wanted to be familiar with Jack Kennedy, oh, how he wanted that. If for nothing else, then for the Agency. But be damned if he was going to have his home tom-catted up. Yet, if Polly were cut off before Wednesday, wouldn’t dinner be rescinded for Tuesday? Of course, we could go and then cut the lovers off. No! You didn’t do things like that to the President-Elect!
All this is speculation, mind you; Hugh was vomiting so audibly that I would have held his head if I dared, but then he emerged from the loo long enough to say, “It’s clear to me. You call Polly now, or I will.”
I had to love him even if I couldn’t bear the thought of giving up dinner with Jack, but who can deny characterological integrity when it is on that scale? I called Polly. I was able to say no more than, “Hugh’s on to the game.”
“Oops,” she said, “are sirens ringing?”
“No. But cancel your venue for Wednesdays.”
Do you know, the dinner invitation was not rescinded, and Hugh, to my surprise, had a hell of a time, and I got along with Jackie Kennedy satisfactorily. Under all that false innocence, she’s awfully sensitive to what’s wrong in people and she knew there was something just a little off in me vis-à-vis her husband. Still, we got on. She knows a good bit about eighteenth-century Piedmont and Charleston cabinetwork, and had a special little slave tale to tell. It seems one of the greatest furniture makers in Charleston—Charles Egmont—was a former slave whose liberty was given to him by his owner, Charles Cawdill, who set black Charles up in his own shop and they split the profits. She tells such tales with great intimacy, as if with some maidenly pain she is offering you one of her jewels. But, oh, Harry, that’s a complex and troubled woman!
Meanwhile, Hugh and Jack were certainly getting along. At one point, Jack confessed to Hugh that it was a pleasure to meet “the mythological Montague.” “Mythological?” says Hugh, his mouth all twisted up as if he’s being asked to kiss a turkey’s tucker.
“Let’s say the apocryphal Montague,” says Jack.
“I’m only a minor factotum in the Department of Agriculture.”
“Come off it. I’ve heard about you for years.”
Well, I could see them cooking up some special understanding. Hugh was brilliant once he got going on Soviet skills at disinformation. To my horror, he started to give the President-Elect and his wife a lecture; to my large pride, he brought it off.
Now, since the inauguration, we get invited back from time to time to the White House. To the more intimate White House dinners, mind you. At th
e last soirée, Jack chose, while dancing with me, to ask about Polly.
“She pines for you,” I said.
“Tell her I’ll call one of these days. It’s not out of my mind.”
“You are awful,” I said.
He got that glint in his eye. “Do you know, for a beautiful woman, your dancing is a hint stiff.”
I wanted to cream him with my evening bag. Alas, I didn’t dare. He’s not that splendid a dancer himself, but oh so schooled. Like a rider with a cultivated seat who doesn’t really take to horses.
All the same, we get along. I think he’s wary enough of Hugh not to entertain notions about me, but we do have the next best thing—promise.
Later
I don’t want to exaggerate. We’re invited to sup with them at their House perhaps not more than once a month. And on one occasion, they came to the Stable. Relationships, however, do deepen. Between Jack, that is, and myself. Jacqueline Kennedy and I are on a plateau—awfully equal stuff passes back and forth between us, and I respect her because she does not wield rank over me any more than is implicit in the rich-mouse country-mouse syndrome, but, then, that is the price you pay for such entrée. Meanwhile, Hugh and Jack are off in a corner. You know Hugh—at his best when one on one. And Jack, no matter how furious over the Bay of Pigs, is fascinated with cloak-and-dagger and smart enough to know that Hugh is the saucier in that kitchen. And, of course, as laid out above, Jack is chummy with me.
I never realized how much this was disconcerting Hugh until one day this summer, toward the end of July, he suddenly put the BLUEBEARD dossier in front of me. “Here’s another side to one of your friends,” he said. I think he expected me to be put off by the contents, but I wasn’t; I know Jack’s nature: Promiscuity is the price he pays to open the gates to his other skills. Jack Kennedy is like a child that way. Must have his daily reward, and it’s in the forbidden jam. Good for him, I say, so long as I’m not part of the private preserve. If he can do a little more good than harm, God will doubtless forgive him for all the girls whose hearts he jiggled and juggled. I’m sure he sees it that way.
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