True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  “No, Daddy,” I said, my voice quaking, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I started sobbing, and as I rushed away from the table, I heard Peter ask, “What’s Nuthatch sorry about?”

  That summer, my last at home, I worked for Alex’s father’s law firm in Chicago, doing more or less the same stuff I’d done at my uncle’s in Evanston, though the cases were more interesting, and my title was one they’d made up for college-educated girls who didn’t want to be called secretaries. I was a paralegal. “You’ve heard of paramilitary forces in the war?” the office manager asked me on my first day. “It’s like that, but for attorneys.”

  The last time I spoke to Buzzy Freeman for the next quarter century was at a party during senior year. He was imitating what he called George McGovern’s “faggy preacher” voice and regretting his “piss-poor timing”—because Harvard and Radcliffe had fully merged and the number of black and Asian students was ballooning he’d be “missing out on so many fantastic new fucking opportunities.”

  Alex and I got together for drinks right before commencement at a preppy bar called the Casablanca. He had majored in Visual and Environmental Studies, but he’d always been “fairly clever at maths,” as he once said to me. After they installed a computer console in each dorm connected to what Alex called “the SDS mainframe”—I’d thought he was joking, but it stood for Scientific Data Systems—he had also become a computer whiz. After graduation, he was heading out to San Francisco for a job writing computer programs for the movies and television.

  “You’re not worried about getting drafted?” I asked. Most boys I knew were going to grad school in order to keep their student deferments.

  He’d had three gin and tonics. “Not remotely. The war’s ending. And I’m covered.”

  “What about your terrible number?” In the draft lottery, his birthday had gotten him 43 out of 366. Boys as low as 195 had been drafted.

  “What can I say, darling? I know people. I’m covered.” I assumed he meant that some of his father’s well-connected Washington friends had pulled strings.

  Another drink later, I asked about his senior thesis, a half-hour-long film I hadn’t seen. All I knew was the title, The Fourth Man, and assumed it was some kind of homage to The Third Man. Alex told me it was “actually more like Citizen Kane” and consisted of fictional monologues by him, in old-age makeup and wig, reminiscing in 2021 about his life back in the 1960s, intercut with the documentary footage he had shot of protests and demonstrations in Cambridge and Washington and New York and Chicago during the last four years.

  I was not entirely surprised that he’d done something so close to the bone. Liquored up, I welcomed the chance to talk about Operation Lima Bravo Juliet. “I’d love to see it. When he was young, did your fictional old guy plant any bombs or try to kill anybody or anything?”

  Alex’s smile became forced and fixed. He was a good actor but not a flawless one.

  “Or was your character,” I asked, “just an SDS wanker? Or what?”

  “You are a sly bitch, Hollander.” He took a long drink. “In New Haven next fall, you should get to know my friend Ed, who’s going to the drama school.”

  “You don’t need to change the subject. We can talk. Finally.”

  His smile crumpled. “I … I, oh, Hollander. I loved Chuck so much. So much. I mean loved him.” He took a deep breath. “I’m homosexual.”

  Maybe he was trying to change the subject again, but at least he was being honest. Now, I thought, I understood his lack of draft anxiety: being homosexual disqualified you. “That’s not exactly a shocking revelation, Alex.”

  “Really? Did Chuck know, too, do you think?”

  I shrugged and wiggled my head back and forth. “Probably?”

  Alex said he’d realized he was “gay”—I’d read the word but never heard it spoken—the summer after eighth grade, the night he’d gotten an erection watching Chuck bowl.

  “All he does, the character in my film, is go to the Pentagon protest and burn his draft card. He just … he feels like, at seventy-whatever, almost like an actor who had this one amazing, starring role when he was young—that being young was that starring role, and nothing in his life nearly as amazing happened afterward. His final soliloquy is about whether it would’ve been better to die young so he wouldn’t have had to deal with the anticlimax of being old.” He was crying. “God, I am a silly sod, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t think it’d be better to have died.”

  “I got him killed.”

  “No, Alex, we all did what we did. It was an insane time. Buzzy and I are as responsible as you. More.”

  “Nope.” He was shaking his head emphatically. “It was my fault. In the end. It was me.” He took a deep breath. “Although maybe he wanted to die. Maybe he did.”

  As we finished our last drinks, I asked if he’d told his parents he was gay.

  “Are you kidding me? And don’t tell yours, either, Hollander, I’m serious. I mean, I’m not embarrassed, but some people prefer to be kept in the dark. People say they want to know the truth. But really? They want certain secrets to stay secret. Trust me.”

  33

  Waverly just texted, asking if she can call me.

  The last time we talked, she asked if I was suicidal in early 1968, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot. No. I did not want to die.

  However. On the other hand. That said. To be sure. But. Our scheme, given the risks—in particular, the explosive we manufactured and the high probability of arrest and long prison sentences—shows a disregard for our lives as well as for life. It was an embrace of heroic doom, of suicide figuratively if not literally. I’d been brought up to revere saints who welcomed death, including a few who killed themselves for God’s sake. As a twelve-year-old reader of Beat poems, I understood that modern saints flirted with self-destruction, and as a sixteen-year-old English student, I learned that the great Romantics died young. Maybe Che Guevera didn’t want to die, but it was his death, before he turned forty, that transformed him into a revolutionary saint.

  When I was eighteen, accepting the possibility of self-destruction was a measure of my seriousness. And then, given a last chance to step back and climb down, I did so promptly and unequivocally. Afterward, ever since, I’ve felt like one of those people who leap from a bridge but miraculously survive, who say they realized in midair, as soon as they jumped, that they had made a terrible mistake.

  Women tend to be much less successful at suicide than men. This has always made sense to me. For us, it’s the thought that counts. We want people to recognize that things are awful and ought to be fixed. Whereas men just up and fix things by definitively checking out, boom, making damn sure they won’t have to think or talk about the problems anymore, ever.

  Chuck more or less committed suicide, I think. After twisting himself into a man of action, ready to risk death for a cause he considered noble, he had too much momentum and could see no other satisfactory conclusion to the story we had all written for ourselves.

  And Buzzy didn’t take pills or lock himself in his garage with the engine running. There was no possibility of being saved. Sitting alone and holding a grenade to your chest is not a way to get people to start paying attention to you.

  The last time Alex and I spoke, he called this book my “suicide package.” I didn’t recognize the phrase and took it as a piece of Alex hyperbole. But the other day, I was reading about the FBI’s electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the ‘60s and how they mailed him a tape of secret recordings they’d made of him telling filthy jokes and having sex. “You are done,” they wrote in an anonymous cover letter. “There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” Among themselves, the FBI agents called it a “suicide package.”

  Chuck and Buzzy both died on romantic, ill-advised missions to remake the world, each of them dead set on looking like a martyred hero. At my moment of tru
th in the pathologically romantic spring of 1968, I decided I was not a romantic, and Chuck’s death cleansed my system of romanticism. At nineteen, I retraced my steps to make myself over into the person I’d started to become at thirteen, the sensible girl who wouldn’t go through with confirmation, who considered St. Gertrude’s return to Catholic dogma a sad failure of imagination, who refused to embrace the unreasonable and pretend to believe the unbelievable.

  For good Catholics, as for all true romantics, the whole point is accepting truths beyond the power of human reason, agreeing that certain mysteries must by definition remain mysterious. The closest I can come is my love for my children and my grandchild, which has an absolute unquestioning ferocity that feels irrational. Although some mysteries are probably insoluble, I take it as the human project to keep trying to solve all the ones we can. To me, ignorance isn’t sacred. A mystery is something to be figured out. Which is another reason why I’m writing this book.

  Waverly phones. “So I guess Dad was sort of right about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He always said you had some mysterious ‘unresolved inner turmoil’ that made you and him unable to ‘bond.’ Then after you left Grandpa Jack, he decided your unresolved turmoil is being a secret lesbian. He said that during the last big fight Mom and him had.”

  “Mom and he. I’m sorry they’re fighting, but I’m not gay,” I say as I hear the buzzing and head for the kitchen, “and honey, I do want to hear all about how your Virtually Homeless thing is going—”

  “Virtual Home.”

  “—but I’ve got another call I need to take. Talk later. I love you.” I put down one phone and pick up another. “Hi.”

  “Have you told anyone I’ve helped you?”

  “Only my granddaughter.”

  “Fuck. Karen.”

  “Waverly doesn’t even know your name. She’s read my manuscript, but I call you Stewart, Stewart Jones, and don’t say where you work or have worked. Why?”

  “Weird conversation I had the other day with a gal I’ve known a long time, senior person at NGA. Maybe nothing. So you’re finished? With the book?”

  “Just about. I’ve got a couple of loose ends I want to ask Alex about face-to-face, but he’s not in this hemisphere until next month. But wait—NGA?” Sometimes I think Stewart makes up fictional government agencies just to fool with me. Such as the National Media Exploitation Center, which he mentioned a few months back; it turned out to be real. “What’s the NGA?”

  “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.”

  Sounds fictional. “Really?”

  “You haven’t said anything to him, have you, Macallister the Third, that would compromise me? I didn’t trust him the second I laid eyes on him.”

  What? “You know Alex?”

  “Early ninety-nine, the night the Senate acquitted Fat Boy, you and I were at that Moroccan joint in Georgetown, and we ran into him. He was in D.C. for some Gore fund-raiser, the three of us had a drink, you pretended we weren’t fucking.”

  Now I remember. I’d thought Alex was attracted to Stewart that night after Stewart said he had never been married. “All I’ve told him is that I’ve got documents proving he was CIA. Not how I got them.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Are we still seeing each other,” I ask, “the week after next?”

  “Uh-uh. Unfortunately. I’m going to be out of the country. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Aw, that’s a drag. Where are you going?”

  “Going to be in theater for a bit.”

  That presumably means Pakistan or Afghanistan. “Oh, Christ. Be careful.”

  “Listen, when you talk to Macallister the Third, don’t refer to me even obliquely, okay?”

  “Of course. Absolutely.” He doesn’t respond. I remember now that I also told Sarah Caputo that Stewart has been helping me. “Don’t be angry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’ve been wondering—why would the CIA keep using Alex after what happened? You said he kept doing stuff for them the rest of college.”

  “Two reasons, seems like. Keeping an eye on you and Freeman to make sure you weren’t involved in any more un-American criminal shit. And lucky timing. In the summer of sixty-eight, the White House tasked the director—”

  “Of the CIA?”

  “Yeah—with finding out if Communist governments were directing you antiwar freaks and the Weathermen. And with your boy’s help, they realized uh-uh, not.”

  “So why didn’t Alex keep working for the CIA after we graduated?”

  “Because why would they trust some guy long-term who pulled the shit he did with you? And because when you graduated college, the sensible people in Langley decided spying on American citizens in America was a bad idea and eighty-sixed Operation CHAOS. And because you don’t get to live in Bel-Air and have a Gulfstream as a fucking GS-18. By the way? I hate the name Stewart. And I don’t love Mr. Jones, either—people will think of me as the asshole square from that Dylan song.”

  34

  For hours or sometimes even days at a stretch during the last forty years, I’ve managed to forget about my nutty period and its terrible consequences, to go about my business—getting kids to school, meeting with clients, teaching, writing, going on vacations, buying shoes, all of it—as if my life were as normal as it seemed. Then I would I remember. Whatever the reminder, I would recall that I was engaged in a lifelong cover-up, an elaborate fiction, and that the Karen Hollander known to my family and friends and the world was partly, slightly, deeply false.

  In the mid-’70s, I started taking some risks again. Nineteen sixty-eight seemed far away. As a candidate for a judicial clerkship, I submitted my name and personal details to an officer of the U.S. government. I pretended to my friends and family that I was concerned only about my disorderly conduct arrest in Downers Grove. Law school was always stressful, so Jack apparently didn’t notice my extreme anxiety that spring.

  Nothing happened. No terrifying calls or letters, no unusual requests for further information, no visit from federal agents. It turned out they did no background check at all, and I got the clerkship. Which encouraged me to go through with my pregnancy and with marrying Jack. Normal life was inviting me to step on in.

  My year in our Hyde Park apartment, clerking for the 7th Circuit, was splendidly normal, because my mother and dad, with Peter off at college, were eager to come down to the city to babysit for Greta whenever we asked.

  Jack did notice my months-long spike of stress when I applied for a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice William Brennan, but he attributed it to the high stakes and the presumed sexism—only about a dozen women had ever clerked for the Court. I figured they—the Supreme Court—would do background checks. Once again, nothing, no call from a special agent, no mysterious request to withdraw my application, no blackball cast. I got the job. I think two things about me—my Roman Catholic upbringing and my baby, born the year after he’d signed on with qualms to Roe v. Wade—gave me an edge with Justice Brennan, who was the only Catholic on the Court.

  Sarah was single and living in D.C. when Jack and I were there, so we lucked out again on babysitting. Jack was also an astoundingly good father, especially for 1976, getting up in the middle of the night, letting me sleep late every Saturday and Sunday morning, changing diapers, bathing Greta, mixing up homemade baby foods.

  I remember one Saturday night on DuPont Circle, sitting on the living room floor surrounded by stacks of briefs and books, drafting an opinion on illegally obtained evidence in a criminal case—I’d offered to recuse myself due to the 1968 disorderly conduct arrest—and looking up at Jack in the kitchen, holding Greta in his arms as he boiled her pacifiers. I was fine with picking the binky up from the floor, wiping it off and sticking it back in her mouth. Not Jack.

  He looked over. “Are you crying?”

  “You’re an excellent dad.” If I ever go to prison, I was thinking, Greta wi
ll be okay.

  I came to regard my diabetes as punishment for what I did at eighteen and nineteen, a soft life sentence—which is crazy, since I got it when I was seventeen. I’ve had only one terrible diabetes incident, the result of my rigorous commitment to normality, blood-sugar-wise. As I’ve explained, avoiding high blood sugars—what wrecks your blood vessels, your eyes, your kidneys—has its price, increasing the risk that your level drops too low, making you “spaz out” (as Greta used to say) and become confused, scared, scary, even unconscious. In 1987, when Jack was in Europe at a music festival and I was alone in Brooklyn Heights with the kids, who were twelve and three, in the middle of the night I had flailing convulsions and went into a coma. Greta awoke—I have no memory of any of this—after I knocked over and smashed the nightstand lamp, and called 911.

  When I regained consciousness in the hospital hours later, in the middle of that familiar movie-scene netherworld of ultra-bright lights and medical equipment, physicians leaning in and gingerly asking if I knew the date and where I was, my first cogent thought was the fear that I’d talked about what I’d done in 1968.

  Later on, I asked both the emergency room doctor and the surgeon who’d wired my separated left shoulder back together if I’d said “anything strange.” The ER guy smiled and said yeah, but that was standard, and I shouldn’t worry about it.

  “What did I say?”

  “Are you a big James Bond fan?”

  “When I was a girl.”

  “You were shouting, ‘I don’t have a license to kill, I don’t have a license to kill.’ You made everybody in the ER crack up.”

  Is it meaningful that I’ve been “so completely out” about the diabetes, as Waverly says, testing my blood and injecting in public, never treating it as an embarrassing secret? Is it my compensation for the giant secret I’ve chosen to keep all this time? Confessing everything but the one great sin? Maybe. (Maybe that’s also why, at law school, I told Hillary Rodham when we met that I recognized her from eight years earlier—that I was the snotty fifteen-year-old who had, with two snotty fifteen-year-old boys, heckled her and her fellow Goldwater canvassers on that fall afternoon in Kenilworth.)