Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  On the wall leading up the stairs were framed photographs, and purely on impulse Caitlin anointed each of them with the soft, fuzzy beam of light. There were more pictures of skiers, a photo of a sleek wolverine of a man in a tuxedo exhorting an audience, a portrait of a smiling woman with marceled hair and a diamond necklace, a jowly, small-town-looking man wearing one of those little caps worn by boy scouts and soda jerks.

  And then a familiar face. Congressman Stowe sitting at his desk in Washington, the same desk upon which Caitlin had once placed the morning mail, the day’s typing, cups of coffee. He was dressed in a suit and a dignified striped tie, and for the purposes of this portrait the desk was empty, save for a bright wedge of sunlight. Stowe was smiling; his little cheeks looked as hard as crab apples. The bottom of the picture was signed with a flourish—“Best regards from the Hon. Elias J. Stowe, U.S. Congressman, New York”—as if it had been sent to a fan, some earnest boy who would put it between pictures of Lou Gehrig and Dizzy Dean.

  She experienced a rush of rhapsodic malice, glad that Stowe was dead, forgetting for a moment there had been others on the plane when it had skidded across that Virginia pasture, scorching the earth, and that next to Stowe, screaming as he screamed, surrendering her mortal soul as his was snatched, was her friend Betty Sinclair, whom Caitlin had cherished and loved, and whose death was for Caitlin the true beginning of human knowledge, which is sorrow.

  The bathroom was just to the right of the top of the steps. It was the only door that was open in a line of ten rooms on either side of a narrow corridor. The flashlight revealed the checkerboard black-and-white tiles, the claws of a tub. And then she moved the beam across the smooth cryptic surfaces of all those closed doors; they were painted white, or pale green, or perhaps sky blue—impossible to say in that light.

  The bathroom was particularly cold. The copper towel racks were empty. Opposite the toilet was a framed painting of two little boys in short pants urinating into a pond while a family of mallards looked on. Caitlin went to the iced-over window and pressed her hand against it until some of the frost melted away and she could see outside. The snow was iron gray; the last of the sunset was being sucked into the night like a strand of spaghetti. She stood there until her handprint filled with ice again and the world outside disappeared.

  But it was only after her skirt was hiked, only after her skin adjusted to the icy toilet seat, the still, dark air, with its faint scent of oatmeal soap, only then with the pressure within her beginning to subside and a smile of true human relief spreading over her face that she processed what she had seen in the corridor. Beneath the fifth door to the right, between the bottom of the door and the floor, was a narrow ribbon of pale light—not really bright enough to be immediately noticeable, but brilliant now in memory, like a gold coin on a field of dark velvet.

  Caitlin got up to flush the toilet. She pulled down on the chain but the only sound was a hollow metallic rattle—the tank was empty, the pipes had long been drained. Her urine lay in a little golden puddle at the bottom of a commode that was as steep as a shot glass.

  Caitlin’s heart beat swiftly, shallowly. She pictured that light coming from beneath the door and she reread the memory, frantically, doubting it and finding new things in it at the same time—the light suddenly appearing, as if a lamp were being switched on, a moving darkness fluttering across that four-foot line of light, evidence of someone pacing back and forth.

  She stood there wondering and then it wasn’t necessary to wonder at all because she heard footsteps—feeble, shuffling. And then a low phlegmy moan, the despairing song of a man who believes himself to be utterly alone.

  She reached for the door, as if there were still time to flee. And the sufferer, who himself was an inflictor of suffering, had his hand on the door handle, too, and as Caitlin turned it to the left he was turning it to her right and they stymied each other mid-arc.

  Fear went off in her like a flashbulb, illuminating an internal structure of rigid nerves.

  She let go of the door, stepped back. She looked around the room for something with which to defend herself. There was a wooden cross, the size of a hammer, on the wall, and Caitlin reached for it. But it was fastened tightly to the clammy plaster. Her cold fingers ached from the effort of trying to wrench the cross free. She brought her hand to her mouth, blew on it. And as she did so the door slowly opened.

  It was John Coleman, his brow wrinkled with confusion, his lips pursed, his head jutting forward. Caitlin was shining the flashlight directly into his face and he slowly, with every evidence of confusion, brought his hand up to shield his eyes. In his other hand he carried a candle in a porcelain candlestick; the wick was off center and a huge tumor of wax had congealed on one side of the slim, tapered candle.

  “Who is it?” he said. His voice was webbed and unstable. Not at all the piercing drone Caitlin remembered from her first meeting with him, at lunch in Washington with Stowe and Betty Sinclair. Caitlin was still quite new to Washington that afternoon and she still could remember Coleman’s unashamedly appraising stare, as he blatantly judged if she was someone who could be trusted, and then if she was someone who needed to be taken seriously. He had been all sharp angles and immense sensitivity that day in his dark blue suit and long dark hair, parted up the middle, as if he were an emissary from a previous, finer era.

  But now his hair was not pomaded, it was disheveled, and his eyes, which had once seemed to register impressions with the cold crunch of an adding machine, were watery and timid. The hand he used to shield his eyes from the flashlight held a handkerchief, and just as it had been when Caitlin had seen Coleman in town, the handkerchief was pink and brown from the blood he was apparently coughing up.

  “Who is it?” Coleman said. “What are you doing here?”

  Strange then to think of a man who served Adolf Hitler, who had sabotaged factories, and had, if Joe was to be believed, killed Congressman Stowe and Betty Sinclair, as a lonely soul in his thirties, a man with a frail constitution and no one to look after him, someone pathetic, who convalesced like an animal in a cold, deserted house.

  He thrust the candle toward Caitlin, hoping to see her face. If he was frightened, he seemed now to be recovering his bravery.

  She stepped back. She thought she could hit him with her flashlight and she arced it back. The light moved, swinging the room with it.

  “I am a sick man. How dare you intrude on me.”

  “Get away from me,” she said, horrified at the note of sheer pleading in her voice.

  Her fear gave Coleman confidence. He moved quickly toward her now. His breath churned in his chest like the blades of a flour sifter. He dropped the candlestick. It shattered on the cold tiles, and the candle, severed from its waxy tumor, rolled toward the sink; the room shuddered and jerked, drawings in a flip book.

  She wanted to call for help but she didn’t want to show Coleman any more of her fear than she already had. She hit him with the flashlight. The blow shook the batteries, extinguished the bulb. The candle went out and they were in darkness. She raised the flashlight to strike him again but, sensing her movements, he grabbed her wrist hard. She tried to wrest herself free, but his grip was powerful. It seemed as if he could hold two or three of her.

  He held her close to him. She felt his breath, reptile cool but ripe with the rot of his disease—he smelled like fermenting apricots, and curled within that sick sweetness was a scent of something fecal. “You have come here to my aid?” he asked her and then he repeated the question in German, this time filling his voice with mockery and then with malice. His fingers were steely, uncompromising.

  Caitlin called out Joe’s name. She shouted it, with the consonant barely pronounced and the vowel a long and frightened wail.

  “So you’re not alone,” Coleman said. He gripped her all the tighter, with a desire now not only to keep her but to hurt her. Yet his voice sounded less masterful. He was turning away from her a little, wondering what would happen next.
r />   They heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “Where are you?” It was Gordon.

  “In here!” she called.

  Coleman slapped her across the face, incredibly hard. It made her cry out, and then he shoved her back. Caitlin slipped on the tiles, fell against the tub. She hit it in stages, first her shoulders, then her neck, finally the back of her head. She tasted blood on her lip where her mouth had snapped shut.

  A moment later she could vaguely see Gordon’s massive silhouette in the doorway.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “It was Coleman,” she said, pointing to the left.

  “Where’s the flashlight?”

  Caitlin, still sitting, felt along the tiles and found it. Gordon was at her side, twenty degrees warmer than the room. He took the flashlight from her, whacked it against his large, hard palm a couple of times and the bulb lit again. He shined the light in Caitlin’s face.

  “Go on, he’s getting away,” she said.

  Caitlin slowly made her way out of the bathroom, into the corridor, and, holding on to the banister, down the staircase. She could hear Gordon charging from room to room, throwing doors open, heedless of any danger. “Come on out, you son of a bitch!” he shouted into one empty room, and “I see you, shit face!” he shouted into another.

  When she made it to the bottom of the stairs, Joe was waiting in the darkness, more or less hidden in a dark corner beneath the steps.

  “Joe?” she said, only able to see his faint outline, a certain residual spark in the whites of his eyes.

  “Shhh,” he whispered. “Come here.”

  She walked toward him, hitting with her hip the table where they had found the German Awakener and Observer.

  “Was it him? Was it Coleman?” Joe asked her.

  “Yes,” she whispered. Upstairs, the noise of Gordon’s slamming the doors grew more distant, fainter.

  “I’m sorry, Caitlin,” Joe whispered, and the words, and the way he said them, held some rare perfume of intimacy that even in the frightful frigid darkness of that house struck her as an exaltation. “I wanted to help, but if he saw me …”

  “I know, I know. It’s OK, really it is.”

  “It’s just that if he saw me then I’d lose all my effectiveness.”

  “I wouldn’t want that, Joe.”

  “I wanted to go up there. I mean especially when I thought you might be in danger.”

  “I was only scared.”

  He was silent for a few moments. Caitlin stood close to him, yet in some strange way his body did not acknowledge her presence. It was not as though he avoided her, stepped away; it was just a failure to register. And then at last he said, “Thank you.”

  Gordon came pounding down the stairs, the beam of the flashlight sweeping in front of him.

  “I can’t find him. Anywhere. There’s probably rooms in this place … tunnels, I don’t know.”

  “We’d better get out of here,” said Joe.

  “Then he’s still in this house,” Caitlin said.

  “We’ll lock the place up and set it on fire,” said Gordon. He shined the light on their faces, saw the shock. “I’m from Chicago,” he said, by way of explanation.

  Yet Caitlin and Joe had no arguments against burning Coleman alive. He had killed many and would kill more.

  “Are you serious?” Caitlin asked. “You’d really do that?”

  “What do you mean, would I do that?” said Gordon.

  “We’ll all do it,” said Joe. “He deserves to die. He must die. If we don’t do it then we’ll be murdering the next people the Germans send him out to kill.”

  Caitlin felt a tumult of anticipation in her stomach. She knew it was a trivial comparison but it reminded her of how she felt only once before in her life: in Washington when Betty Sinclair clicked cocktail glasses with her and then kissed her full on the mouth.

  In the corner where Joe had retreated there was a door, locked with a dead bolt. Gordon asked Joe to move and he opened the door and there was a steep wooden staircase going down to what was surely the cellar.

  “Keep an eye out for him,” Gordon instructed, the brusqueness of his voice announcing the fact that he felt himself in control now. He disappeared down the stairs. A cold humid air rose from the cellar.

  “They’ll find our footprints in the snow,” Caitlin said to Joe.

  “They won’t be able to make anything out of it. Anyhow, they’ll find three sets. So they’d be looking for three people who work together and Gordon and I will be out of here. They’ll never figure it out.”

  “Have you ever done this before, Joe? Or anything like it?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. But it’s our morals and theirs, don’t you understand? A gun has no morality. In the hands of a fascist it’s evil, in the hands of a freedom fighter it’s good.”

  “Well, I always thought it was hard for anyone to know for sure what they were.”

  “I sure as hell know I’m not a fascist,” said Joe.

  The face of Gordon’s flashlight appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “I found what we need,” he called up in a passionate whisper. He came quickly up the stairs, holding an oblong gasoline can. When he was next to Caitlin and Joe he shook the can back and forth. A frothy slosh of fuel echoed inside of it.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They made their way to the door, leaving the nearly unanimous darkness of the house. The moon had risen and cast its pale light on the snowy field. Gordon shook the gasoline onto the porch, along the outer windowsills. Joe found the key above the door frame and locked the door and then replaced the key.

  Caitlin noticed the cross-country skis. They were no longer propped against the house but were strewn over the porch.

  “We better take the can along with us,” said Gordon.

  “We’ll wait right here until he comes running out,” said Joe.

  “But you just locked the door,” said Caitlin. “He couldn’t get out if he tried.”

  He glanced at her. There seemed to be scorn in his eyes. But he retrieved the key and unlocked the door. “There,” he said. “Feel better?”

  Gordon took a box of matches out of his coat pocket. He held them up. “Who would like to do the honors?”

  “I will,” said Joe, grabbing the matches. Caitlin was certain he was making himself hard because he hadn’t run up the stairs when she had cried for help.

  He struck the match so violently it snapped in two. “Step back,” he said to Caitlin and Gordon, as if everything were going according to plan.

  They stood on the edge of the porch and Joe struck another match and threw it at the spot Gordon had soaked with gasoline. It burst into flames with the startled, hollow sound of a man who’s had the wind knocked out of him. A chaotic bloom of bright orange. They jumped off the porch and watched. The flames raced across the porch, as if to get a closer look at the ones who had given them life, and then they seemed to turn and head back toward the house.

  Caitlin stepped further back to see the windows on the second floor, to see if Coleman’s face would appear, or the shadow of his racing form as he frantically tried to rescue himself. She saw nothing.

  She stumbled over a ridge in the snow and looked down. There were ski tracks.

  “Joe!” she called out. “Gordon. He’s already gone. He took a pair of skis and just—” She moved her hand in a smooth arc to describe an escape.

  They didn’t answer. She was pointing now to the ski tracks and they came to see for themselves.

  “There must be another way out,” she said. “All these old houses are full of secret passages.” Her voice sounded high, excited; she forced herself to calm down.

  The flames that had so rapidly crawled up the side of the house were now suddenly losing intensity, growing smaller. It seemed that not even that would work out.

  Joe shook his head. He squeezed his hands together and seemed to want to appear distraught, but there was something in his eyes
that Caitlin recognized: a shimmer of sheer relief. It was not really in him to kill a man, or even a monster.

  Gordon took pictures of the burning house that was no longer a burning house.

  Caitlin turned away, first toward the moonlight and then toward a distant rise in the snowy field. And there she saw a figure, perhaps three hundred yards away, a man on skis. He seemed to be looking at them, but when she stepped forward to get a better view of him, he quickly turned, stuck his poles into the snow, and with a heave propelled himself forward, up over the rise, down again, and out of sight.

  FEBRUARY 3, 1952

  Caitlin was sitting in the living room-dining room-bedroom of her apartment on Barrow Street, New York City. It was snowing outside; the city was quiet, even beautiful. Now and then the sun would appear, and the ground, the automobile windshields, and the windows of all the apartment houses would vibrate with light.

  She was being interviewed by two FBI agents, one of them with a pocked, vaguely Mexican-looking face, but who spoke with no accent, and the other a tall redhead with a small Band-Aid on his massive chin—a chin as blunt as a knee.

  She was not in grave trouble herself; it was all about other people. She had been working in an organization that had helped refugees come to this country, and now some of the refugees and anyone who had helped them were under suspicion. Some of them were Communists, some of them were not anti-Communist enough for this particular era.

  Caitlin was, in her own estimation, handling the two agents beautifully. She was wearing a woolen skirt, a sweater, nylon hosiery, black pumps. She gave every appearance of someone who was in a hurry to get to work, though the truth was that the baby sitter had been stranded in the Bronx by the snowstorm and Caitlin was going to take this day off anyhow, to be with her little boy. She was acting vague, formal, slow; she was boring them to death, making them restless. She could remember no one, nothing. She pretended to be the sort of person to whom specifics are an anathema.

  Then the red-headed agent pulled one in from left field. All of the questions had to that point been about the Combined Emergency European Relief Committee, but then he asked, quite casually on the surface, but with a glance at his partner, “How about Gordon Jaffrey. Ever see much of him?”