Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

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  Secret Anniversaries

  Scott Spencer

  For Esther and Hougan,

  Charles and Jean

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In researching the historical dimensions of this fiction, I found several books immensely informative. In particular, I am grateful for Sabotage, by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn (Harper and Brothers, 1942); Under Cover, by John Roy Carlson (Dutton, 1943); and Wunderlich’s Salute, by Marvin D. Miller (Malamud-Rose, 1983). And to Terence Boylan, George Budabin, Coco Dupuy, Tom McDonnough, Alice Quinn, and Victoria Wilson, who read and encouraged along the way:

  thank you.

  The holiest of all holidays are those

  Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;

  The secret anniversaries of the heart.

  —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  A BIOGRAPHY OF SCOTT SPENCER

  ONE

  JANUARY 5, 1940

  She knew and she knew it well that there was nothing but shame waiting for a girl of her class who even thought about romance with one of the river people. But loneliness and frustration with the narrowness of her life engendered in Caitlin a kind of emotional adventurism, and it wasn’t as difficult as perhaps it ought to have been for her to turn a blind eye to all the wisdom and all the advice that girls of her station were born knowing: there were two kinds of people in Windsor County—the rich in their mansions and then everybody else.

  Jamey Fleming was home from college. Caitlin had known him all her life. Not only were his parents river people but they owned the estate on which she was raised.

  Jamey was going to school in Princeton and he was having a difficult time of it. He was not studious; no Fleming ever had been. Their money came from import and export, and their social position, though it was for rather obscure reasons insecure, seemed lofty to Caitlin and her family.

  “You are the most beautiful girl I have ever known,” Jamey said to Caitlin the day after Christmas. Caitlin was helping her father remove the Flemings’ empty gift boxes to the rubbish heap. And he told her as much again a couple of days later, as he skied past her house at the bottom of the hill. “More beautiful than any movie star,” he added, having noted that his first fling at flattery had fallen short of its mark: she was used to people remarking on her looks and it irritated her as much as it pleased her.

  Jamey was a tall boy with reddish-brown hair and pompous, defensive eyes. He dressed like his father in tweed suits and heavy workman’s shoes. There was a neediness in him that did not exactly touch Caitlin’s heart but that set her at ease. Today was the last night of his holiday break, and though asking Caitlin to dinner was out of the question, he did ask her to the house for what he called “a couple of drinks and some boring conversation.”

  “You can come to my house, then,” she told him. “After dinner, and we’ll walk up together.”

  “I’ll be there at eight-thirty,” he said.

  And he was as good as his word about that. Caitlin was in her small, slanted room. She wore a dark brown woolen dress with a blue cardigan the color of her eyes.

  She lay on the bed, beneath several quilts, reading Wuthering Heights. She could hear Jamey as he made his way down the long, curving road that led from the top of the hill into the snowy hollow where the tenant houses were scattered. There were high, moonbright drifts of snow on the ground, but Caitlin’s father had shoveled the driveways and there was just enough powder to crunch beneath Jamey’s footsteps.

  Though it was eight-thirty at night, Caitlin’s parents were already in bed; they stayed up past nine only in the summer, when the glow hovering above the river and the shreds of light caught in the branches of the willow trees goaded them into wakefulness with memories of youth. But now it had been dark for hours and the noises of their repose came through the wooden plank door to their bedroom: Peter’s adenoidal snore and Annie’s oh-oh-oh, as if the suffering of a child had been bred with the ticking of a clock.

  Caitlin let Jamey in and let him stand there while she buttoned her coat. She was nervous; she seriously doubted she was doing the right thing. No Van Fleet had ever spent a social evening in the Flemings’ house; when someone from her family was there it was to fix, lift, or serve something. She fastened the large buttons of her coat slowly. Jamey was stomping the snow off his shoes in the kitchen, near the wood burner. The dark pine floor was unswept; the painted chairs around the table were pushed in at odd angles. The sink was full of dishes; the cookstove was splattered with grease. A kerosene-soaked wick spluttered within the blackness of its glass chimney. All Annie’s impulse toward tidiness was spent in the main house, and Caitlin wondered why she herself hadn’t bothered to make the place proper, knowing she was going to have a visitor.

  “Ready?” Jamey said. His voice sounded enormous in the silence of her house.

  Caitlin put a finger against her lips, furrowed her brow. “My parents are sleeping,” she whispered.

  Caitlin opened the door, and because there was no wind the cold air did not rush into the kitchen but just waited for them, patiently. There were so many stars in the sky it seemed as if some of them would be forced out and fall to earth.

  “Did you have a nice dinner?” she asked Jamey, as they made their way up the road. A trail of smoke rose from the chimney of her house; at night her father burned unseasoned locust, so there would be chunks of it still smoldering to start the fire up again in the freezing half-light of morning.

  “It was good,” said Jamey. “The Honorable Elias J. Stowe is visiting us, so naturally Mother wanted everything perfect. My parents want to impress Stowe, not because they like him but because he is a congressman and it kills them that the really important families around here still sort of snub them.”

  “I thought Mr. Stowe was a good friend of your family.”

  “Stowe has to like them. He’s a politician; he can’t stick his nose up in the air like some of the others.” They were at a steep part of the road and Jamey casually linked his arm through Caitlin’s. He wore no gloves and his breath made visible by the night streamed behind him like a plume. For all the small flirtations, this was the first time he had touched her with anything like gentleness in the gesture—until now it had been playful pushes, pokes for attention, flicking snow off her collar, that sort of thing.

  She was still young enough to register the significance of every time she was touched. She was two years out of high school, graduated at the top of her class, and now worked at the George Washington Inn, at the center of Leyden, New York, where the road to New York City crossed the road to Connecticut. Caitlin worked behind the main desk, and if she worked nights there was a room where she could spend the night. She made it a point to get rid of her virginity, as if it were a provincial accent she wanted to overcome. A fellow who worked as an assistant manager, named George Pelkhart, a round-faced young man with a nervous laugh and argyle socks, sometimes rapped on the door to Room 111, if he knew Caitlin was spending the night, and twice Caitlin let him in. He had a large red birthmark right above his pubic hair. He pounded himself into her quickly, with short, powerful thrusts, and when he ejaculated into his condom he kept on going so she wouldn’t know he had come, but she knew, she could feel him withering in
side of her. It made her think of lights going out in a grand house, one at a time, until all the windows are dark.

  “Let’s stop here for a minute,” Jamey said. Even when he tried to be winsome, the habits of command shaped his voice. Caitlin didn’t mind; it was who he was, a part of what made him exotic. There was always something to decode in what Jamey said, but that was what made him interesting to her. Right now, he was the only person she knew who commanded her full attention. The others she could get without trying.

  “What for?” she asked. She knew if she continued to walk he would pull her back, maybe even put his arm around her to keep her in place, and he didn’t disappoint her.

  “I think this is the most beautiful spot on the farm,” he said. (All the Flemings called Twin Ponds a farm, though really it was a country estate, a summer and holiday and weekend place.) “You can’t see our house, or your house, or any of the other buildings. No wires or poles, no lights, road, nothing. Just trees and fields and the river. Nothing to spoil it.”

  “I like seeing signs of human life,” Caitlin said.

  “Empty,” Jamey said, letting go of her and mounting a bluish snowdrift. “Just like it was, pure and clean. Life is so debased, Caitlin. The human race.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe God made us in His image, not at all. Darwin was right, we all come from the ape. But now it’s even worse. We live in the age of the ape in a suit, the ape with spectacles on his nose and a briefcase full of utility bonds.” He slid down the drift and put his arm through hers again. “Did you know they’re going to pave River Road?”

  “The apes? The apes in steamrollers?”

  Jamey frowned. “The most beautiful road around here. There’s dirt on that road that George Washington’s troops marched over.”

  “Well, you’re not here that much, Jamey,” Caitlin said. They were walking again; the main house loomed suddenly at the top of the hill, an apparition with its tall bright windows and its smoking chimneys. “You don’t know what it’s like in April and May when that road’s mud. It’s murder. Anyhow, I think it’s about time things got modern around here.”

  “There are no heroes anymore,” said Jamey. He looked pained, as if he were also admitting that he himself was no hero. “There’s no one to pull the sword out of the stone. And if you think the future’s going to be so great you should go down to the city and look around. Money grubbers, filth. The little weak men who suck you dry. If you want to see the future.”

  “Then take me down there, why don’t you?” Caitlin said, disguising how much she longed for just that by shoving him playfully.

  He slipped momentarily on the icy road. The main house was close now; a silhouette passed by an uncurtained window. “You would hate New York, Catey, you really would.”

  “We could go to a Broadway show, and the top of the Empire State Building, and a French restaurant.”

  “I guess if Mr. Hitler succeeds they’ll be serving Wiener schnitzel in most of the French restaurants,” Jamey said, laughing.

  “I’ve only been there once my whole life,” Caitlin said. “A hundred miles away and I’ve only been once.”

  “I’d rather take you to India,” said Jamey. “There are ancient things there, mysteries. There’s magic in India, not everybody going for the dollar. Even the goddamned English bastards haven’t been able to ruin that. Do you ever notice how the snobs around here like to brown up to the British? God, that makes me sick.”

  Case closed, plan canceled, over. Caitlin could as soon see herself attending Vassar as imagine herself in front of the Taj Mahal. She knew Jamey introduced this far-flung fantasy as a way of avoiding her reasonable request. But he would rather have it complicated, with visions of passports, visas, inoculations, lengthy crossings. He had taken a simple wish and turned it into a pipe dream.

  They mounted the broad stone steps to the main house. There were pine needles embedded in the snow: only that afternoon Caitlin’s father had dragged the Flemings’ Christmas fir out of the entrance hall. Several sets of snowshoes rested against the outside wall, looking like the petrified footprints of a giant. The porch lights hung from spears borne by unclad maiden warriors carved from stone and standing guard on either side of the huge black mahogany door.

  Jamey took her coat and draped it carelessly over a Teutonically carved chest in the front hall, and then he let his own overcoat simply slip to the floor. Caitlin had heard all her life about the messiness of the Flemings.

  It was gloomy in the hall. The flame-shaped bulbs in the wall sconces seemed distant, cold. The door was closed to the library to preserve the heat thrown off by the fireplace, and there was a voice, muffled, yet still somehow loud, full of booming, truculent energy, coming from behind the door.

  “Uncle Roscoe won’t go home,” said Jamey, touching Caitlin’s elbow, guiding her across the hall, toward the library.

  She looked up at the carved teak ceiling. She wanted to stop, to preserve the moment. The first Van Fleet to be in the main house without a hammer in hand, or a basketful of apples.

  “He was on his way to Europe three weeks ago and he’s still here,” Jamey whispered, moving his mouth close to Caitlin, letting her feel the warmth of his breath. “Mother is mortified in front of Stowe.”

  Jamey opened the door to the library. It was painted dark green, with Persian carpets on the floor, fussy uncomfortable furniture, portraits of relatives about whom nobody had a good word to say, and shelves full of books that were for the most part unread—books in Latin, German, books about phrenology, hygiene, Egypt. They were books suitable for a stage play about a certain kind of family.

  Jamey had already announced that he was bringing Caitlin up for drinks after dinner, and it was his parents’ method of discipline to “refuse to dignify with a response” what they did not approve of. He knew full well that they did not think it wise to socialize with staff. Not enough time, money, or prestige separated the Flemings from their own somewhat clamorous beginnings. More-established families along the river—Delanos, Roosevelts, Astors, Vanderbilts— might be able with impunity to bed the help. For them it would be a dalliance, but for a Fleming it might be construed as a regression.

  Neither Fulton nor Mary Fleming turned to greet Jamey when he came into the library with Caitlin. Caitlin felt with a lurch in her stomach that she had made a mistake, but she did not altogether regret it. Where is your defiance? she asked herself. Where is your pride? She meant it as an incantation and, as it happened, something like defiance and pride did rise up within her, a wisp of it, as if from a very small fire.

  Congressman Stowe looked at her as Jamey led her to a small sofa beneath a set of Goethe. Stowe was small, compact, with carved yet smooth features, like a puppet. He sat with his feet propped on an ottoman, his legs covered by a blanket. He had a piece of medicine-soaked cotton in his right ear. He made a brief, bright smile at Caitlin, as if he might know her; his friendliness poked itself out at her like a cuckoo as the clock struck the hour, and then it was gone again and he slumped back in his chair.

  Mary Fleming sat in a pale green armchair, her slender legs curled beneath her. She held a brandy snifter in front of her face and looked at the room through it. Her hair was cut short, just as it was when she and her husband courted. She still had clothes from that happy time and she took care to wear them from time to time. It was part of what made her brave and unreasonable; she would not take no for an answer, even if it was given by her own body. Fulton Fleming stood behind her, staring into his highball glass, frowning, as if to accuse the ice of drinking the four fingers of blended whiskey he had poured a few minutes ago. He wore a tweed suit thick as oatmeal and he needed a shave. Caitlin fought back the impulse to stare at Mr. Fleming. Seeing him at home, with no orders to give, no walking stick with which to point at the part of the stone wall that needed shoring or the roof that needed flashing or the elm that needed pruning, was like seeing an actor outside of his role, and Caitlin felt fascinated and disappointed, too.
Without authority he had no glamour.

  Mary’s brother Roscoe stood in front of the enormous fieldstone hearth. He dominated the conversation; it was his way of singing for his supper. He was a sturdy, florid man, with a fondness for full, flowing suits, floppy bow ties, and theatrical asides, which he would deliver in his basso profundo.

  “I don’t know why you want to get mixed up with going to Europe,” Stowe said to Roscoe. His voice was thin, querulous, somewhat piercing. “It’s a madhouse now. War, you know.”

  “There’s a fellow over there I want to see,” Roscoe said. “Chap named Biro, Lazlo Biro. He’s one of those whizbang Hungarians who can do anything. Marvelous character. Worked as a hypnotist—half Gypsy for all anyone knows.”

  “My brother is an adventurer,” Mary announced to Stowe, trying, it seemed, to encourage Stowe’s tolerance. “A mad, daring adventurer.”

  “I see,” said Stowe. Then, to Roscoe: “What business do you have with this Hungarian, then?”

  “He’s invented a new sort of pen. Rather than a nib it writes with a sort of rolling ball. It doesn’t leak or smear and you never have to fill it with ink. I’m absolutely dead keen to get my hands on it, take out a patent, bring it over here, and I’ll be rich.” He laughed happily at the idea, as if he might be hearing it for the first time.

  “Oh, Roscoe,” said Mary. “You and your wild schemes.” She stole a glance across the room at Stowe.

  “Oh, but it’s not a wild scheme, my dear. It’s the pen of the future and I think I’d better hurry.”

  “Yes,” said Fulton Fleming. “Hurrying would be good.”

  If Roscoe heard that, he ignored it. “Sooner or later,” he said, “according to my sources, Hungary will be joining the Reich and then old Biro might be in for some rough sailing.”

  There was a draft circulating near the floor. Caitlin felt it against her legs like the breath of a dog. She looked up and saw Mary Fleming glancing at her and then turning away.