Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  “You looked so peaceful.” Betty put out her cigarette. The car was full of smoke.

  Caitlin was getting a cup when she heard the sound of human movement behind her and she turned quickly, startled.

  “Oh, hello,” Joe Rose said. “You must be the boarder.”

  “Who are you?” asked Caitlin. She made certain her robe was closed. She felt suddenly and morbidly aware of her body. Her breasts felt heavy; there seemed a kind of gravitational pull in her womb. She placed the empty cup on the counter near the stove while the coffee beat like blood in a vein against the glass cap of the percolator.

  “I’m Joe Rose. Hill’s brother.”

  “Hill?”

  “Hilda.” He smiled. He was dressed in pleated slacks and a clean white undershirt. His face was freshly shaved; his thick black hair was wet. He smiled; he had a space between his front teeth. “Mrs. Zweig, to you, I guess.”

  She looked him over. His handsomeness inflicted on her an agitation that was almost like pain, as if something that had been closed within her was suddenly being pried open. He was, like her, barefoot. His feet were very white, his toes long and graceful. He was slender, even a little delicate. His arms didn’t come close to filling the sleeves of his tee shirt. Though he was merely standing there he gave the impression of quickness, and though he had barely spoken he gave the impression of wit. He stood straight, his shallow chest extended, and rubbed the knuckle of his ring finger, as if he had perhaps . banged it against the banister on his way down the stairs. She felt within her the intimations of kinship—yet it was difficult to say, really. Was that voice across the valley another person or merely your echo? Yet she sensed within Joe a turmoil that was somehow sympathetic to her own—an uncertainty of direction, an intelligence cut down by a desire not to be altogether noticed.

  He had just shaved and his skin radiated the scent of his cologne. He breathed deeply and smiled; he seemed to be smelling the coffee.

  “Can I pour you a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  “Sure can,” he said. There was a forced note of heartiness in his voice. He was pretending, as if he had seized on the notion that this was how a man spoke to a strange girl.

  He sat at the kitchen table. He had gathered the morning mail, which came early on Saturday. There were several pieces of mail and he spread them out before him like a fortune-teller arranging cards.

  “Thank God, it came,” he said, finding a square light-yellow envelope, surely containing an invitation.

  When Caitlin came to the table with two cups of coffee, Joe slid a large envelope toward her. It was bulky, secured with twine; her name was written in large block letters and there were eight penny stamps, glued on neatly in two rows.

  “Caitlin Van Fleet. Sounds fancy.”

  The envelope was from her father. She looked at it without touching it while Joe tore open the envelope addressed to him. He pursed his lips and nodded with a satisfaction she suspected was slightly ostentatious. It was an invitation and after he read it he flicked it with his fingernail.

  “It’s from Sumner Welles,” he announced and looked at Caitlin, assuming she’d be impressed. When she said nothing, Joe narrowed his eyes and asked her if she knew who Welles was.

  “Orson’s brother?” she said. It struck her as something Betty would have said and she smiled.

  “He’s Under Secretary of State and one of the few people in Washington who know which end is up.”

  Caitlin in fact vaguely remembered either Stowe or Betty talking about Welles in the office. He was one of those men who were encouraging Roosevelt to get America mixed up in the European war. She seemed to recall Betty saying something like, You can bet Sumner Welles won’t be getting his dainty little hands bloody in any war.

  Joe folded the invitation and placed it in his back pocket. His own hands were not dainty but they didn’t look as if they had done much real work, either.

  “Hill tells me you work for old Elias J. Stowe,” Joe said. He sipped his coffee and his eyes gazed at her over the rim of the cup. He had dark eyes, a mixture of gray, violet, and black. They seemed the eyes of someone who was used to watching others, eyes that at once recorded and concealed.

  “That’s right,” said Caitlin. Joe’s tone of voice had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t think highly of Stowe. “And I happen to think I’m awfully lucky to have the job. It’s not as if I had a degree in political science.”

  “Now, now,” said Joe, with his hand raised in a peaceful gesture. “I don’t blame you for Stowe. Look, I work at Fortune and I don’t want people blaming me for Henry Luce. Sometimes you just get mixed up in something before you have a chance to realize what it is.” He took a long drink of his coffee; he seemed immune to its heat. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  He stood there for an extra moment, trying to extract with a smile her promise to wait in the kitchen for his return. Then he turned and left the kitchen. His shoulder blades protruded like a young girl’s breasts.

  Caitlin listened to his bare feet pad up the stairs, and when his footsteps disappeared she opened the envelope from her father. In it were a bouquet of violets and a note written lightly in pencil. (Peter’s letters were always delicately composed, as if he wanted to give Caitlin the opportunity to erase what he had written and use the paper for something else.)

  Dear Caitlin,

  I hope this letter finds you well. Your mother and I are busy, as the summer has been one of many important social occasions up at the house, as well as one of unusual heat and elm blight on the farm. Just last night, the Flemings had a dinner for a real Russian count named Vonsiatsky and his wife, an American woman with sad eyes and a private fortune. They live over near the Connecticut border and the Count is teaching Cossack-style horsemanship to all the families around here. He cuts quite a dashing figure, though Mother says he looks like a big baby in his coat with all those Russian ribbons and eagles on it. The party for the Vonsiatskys went on until all hours and Mother had to walk home in the moonlight, carrying her shoes. Her feet had swollen up to twice their size! But the laugh was on me because after dinner the Count and Mr. Fleming and a few of the others went out shooting and ended up frightening the cattle, who took it upon themselves to stamp down the fence along River Road. It took me three hours to get the heifers in and three days to repair the fence!

  The Flemings ask after you all the time. They are very proud of how well you are working out. Mr. Stowe has told them many times what a good worker you are, and how you’ve learned all the office systems and the typing and filing and even a bit of diplomacy in the way you handle others.

  We miss you. Your mother wishes you would write more often. Your last letter arrived three weeks ago. We would certainly be happy to hear your news.

  Do you have a nice vase you can put these into?

  Your Father

  The violets were dark purple. Peter had wrapped them in wet newspaper and then dry newspaper and there was still some life to them, though half of the petals were crushed. Caitlin stared at them, only partially aware that her heart was pounding like a fist. The flowers, the feel of her father’s voice had brought her back to Leyden. Caitlin had imagined that once she moved to Washington she would never return to Leyden, that the town and its memories would fall away like milk teeth.

  “Are you all right?”

  She looked up from the flowers. Joe had put on a light brown shirt with a long, wide collar. He wore his trousers belted high.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I hope you didn’t dress on my account.” She gestured toward her robe and pajamas.

  “Some young suitor send you flowers?”

  “They’re from my father.”

  She stood up to find a vase. Mrs. Zweig, a bit of a horticulturalist, kept a row of simple glass vases on a shelf over the sink.

  “Say, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in going to a party at the French embassy tonight. Would you? Mr. Welles sent me
an invitation and I can bring someone if I like. In fact, to tell you the truth, it would look a lot better if I had a date for it.”

  “Well, you see—”

  “No, sorry, sorry, Hill told me you were a country girl.” Joe’s face was flushed and he waved his hands up and down at Caitlin as if he were trying to calm her. “You must think I’m very forward, which as a reporter I am, but not as a person. As a person, I’m backward.”

  “It has nothing to do with being a country girl,” said Caitlin. She walked back to the table and placed the violets in the center, on a faded white doily. “I’m just busy tonight. There must be plenty of girls in town who would love to go to a party at the French embassy.”

  “I don’t know any. I live in New York. I only came here to do an article about Mr. Welles and his views about the war.”

  “I don’t have the right kind of clothes for a party like that anyhow,” said Caitlin. “The whole purpose of having a woman on your arm would be completely undone if she didn’t look right.”

  “You’d look beautiful. I have to rent a tuxedo for tonight. I never owned a monkey suit in my life.”

  “Well, it’s not as simple for a woman.” She imagined Betty saying those words and how she would make them funny, how she would clasp her hands in front of her breast and bat her eyelashes in a burlesque of the simpering female. Betty knew how to hit those notes, how to claim the prerogatives of femininity and mock them at the same time. She had a way of putting imaginary quotation marks around words like girl, lady, nice, giving them an emphasis that made them absurd and harmless and somehow touching, too.

  “What we could have done,” said Joe, “was rent a tuxedo for you, too. That would have given the Washington diplomatic community something to wash their caviar down with, don’t you think?” He smiled, captivated by the picture he had put in his own mind.

  They talked for a time. Joe spoke of Sumner Welles. He said Mr. Welles was not only brilliant but a man of unusual elegance and grace. “He thinks the way Fred Astaire dances,” Joe said. Joe had a radio announcer’s baritone. He smiled often. But, despite this, he seemed ill at ease. He went on about Welles, about the article he planned to write about Welles, about the objections his editor had about running an article about Welles.

  Finally, he stopped talking about Welles and looked at her gravely. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “I don’t like men who do that—and they always do it to women, too. You know, just talk about themselves and call it conversation.”

  “You weren’t, you were talking about Mr. Welles.”

  “It’s kind of you to say so.”

  They were silent for a moment. Caitlin heard the Zweigs stirring upstairs. Footsteps. The sudden animation of the pipes as tap water was summoned.

  She glanced up at the ceiling and then noticed that Joe’s eyes looked upward, too, simultaneously.

  It was not a major emotional event in her life, sitting with him in that kitchen. It was comfortable, vaguely promising of something further, no more than that. His hands seemed to want to gesture when he spoke but he kept them folded. He looked directly into her eyes. He wanted to know her and she wanted to know him, too.

  When she finished her coffee Caitlin stood. Out of restlessness, she stretched her arms out, not remembering she was wearing only pajamas and a robe. The robe opened and Joe looked away.

  “Hill didn’t tell me how beautiful you are,” he said, looking at the floor.

  “I’ve got to be going,” said Caitlin.

  The sun went behind a cloud just then, and a layer of darkness fell through the kitchen, as if reality were a photograph that was suddenly starting to fade.

  “If you see your boss,” said Joe, rising from his seat and making a playful, formal bow, “tell him Sieg heil for me.”

  JULY 11, 1967

  Twenty-seven years later, Caitlin sat at her desk. Behind her was a huge semicircle of window, spotted with rain, and before her was Marlene Draper, a small, dark woman of twenty-five. Marlene’s inky hair had been chopped severely; it looked as if she had done it herself. They were in the offices of the World Refugee Alliance, fourteen stories above the corner of Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.

  It was a large office, harshly lit and disorderly. The walls were lined with file cabinets, some of them metal, some cardboard. The art works on the wall were organizational. Every year the WRA produced a poster, which was sent to anyone who donated more than twenty-five dollars. The most cheerful of these posters was a hundred small snapshots in rows of ten showing the faces of people who had been brought to America thanks largely to the work of the Alliance. Most of the other posters were dark paintings of battlefields, barbed wire, border patrols.

  The one anomalous poster was a photograph of a golden saxophone lying in the snow. Above that was: “WELL, YOU NEEDN’T.” A PLAY IN TWELVE BARS. THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY ENSEMBLE GROUP. The play had been written by Caitlin’s son, whose name, in the spirit of collectivity, did not appear on the poster. There was nothing else in the office to suggest Caitlin’s personal life, or that she even had one. Her old steel desk, with a keyhole on every drawer, had been bought from the Marxist splinter group that had rented the office space before the World Refugee Alliance took over the lease, and it held only a phone, an old Royal typewriter, a couple of manila folders, and an ashtray filled with paper clips.

  “I’m taking so much of your time,” Marlene Draper was saying.

  “We’re here to help you in whatever ways we can,” said Caitlin.

  She looked at the girl. Her youth and beauty were there— fine, clear skin, delicate but prominent bones in the face— but sorrow had dulled her spirit as a stony field can dull a scythe.

  Marlene had come to America from Austria in her mother’s womb. Her mother, Lena, a gifted pianist, who, because of a touch of arthritis, earned her living as a piano teacher. She had fallen in love with and married a Gentile named Otto Schilling. Schilling owned a small steel mill in Austria. He had been, when Lena met him, a widower, with a young child, a boy to whom Lena was hired to teach music. Otto and Lena married and had a few happy years. But when anti-Semitism became the overwhelming reality of life in Vienna, Otto, feeling he was going to be persecuted for marrying a Jewess, sold his factory and disappeared, leaving not only his pregnant wife but Otto, Jr., the issue of his first marriage. When Lena escaped Vienna, she took Otto, Jr., with her. They slept in farmhouses, in spare rooms, in the holds of freighters; the boy died while in quarantine on Ellis Island. Two months later, Marlene was born.

  Now Lena was working as a secretary for two psychoanalysts, elderly brothers who shared a suite of offices on Central Park West, and Marlene was studying biochemistry at Brandeis University.

  “My mother doesn’t know I’m doing this,” Marlene said to Caitlin. There was a fan on the floor behind Marlene, and every few moments the warm breeze it stirred agitated her long earrings.

  “I’m surprised you’d want so badly to see your father,” Caitlin said. “He didn’t behave very honorably.”

  “I know, I know. He abandoned my mother. And his son. But he didn’t abandon me. He didn’t even know me.”

  “Marlene,” Caitlin said.

  “He never even saw his own daughter,” she said. Her face reddened from the throat up, but the blush stopped at her cheekbones and her eyes remained logical. “And now he is in trouble with the authorities.”

  “He was convicted of many offenses, Marlene. And nothing that anyone can construe as having anything to do with human rights. A public nuisance.” Caitlin said this with some gentleness in her voice, but it was not easy. She could not understand why this girl wanted to worry about a father she had never known, a father who had betrayed her and her people.

  She could not help but think of her own fatherless child: what agonies of self did he endure? What was the little begging bowl he held, asking her, asking friends, asking the world for alms in the form of identity?
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br />   “I have reason to believe he is not a well man,” Marlene said.

  “Physically?”

  “In every way.”

  Caitlin was silent. The rain scratched against the window. Traffic sent up its desperate noise, mechanical sinners beseeching heaven.

  “You’re very forgiving, Marlene,” she finally said, folding her hands, raising her eyebrows.

  “Because of you I can be. We lived, we escaped, we have made a good life here. I know he was a coward, but he was not the only one. There were many who did worse things than hide. And he’s been punished. He lost everything, his business, his friends, his pride. When he works he works as a common laborer. He’s been in the hospital with tuberculosis, anxiety, and depression. He is blind in one eye. And now he writes me and says he would like to come here and I wrote him back and said I would help.”

  “Let me make something clear, Marlene. It wasn’t because of me that your mother could come here. It was many people.”

  “My mother thinks it was because of you.”

  There was a knock on Caitlin’s door and Mrs. Rosenthal came in without waiting for an answer. She was stooped, with a permanently startled expression on her face. She carried a cup of tea. Mrs. Rosenthal’s right leg was six inches shorter than her left; though her left shoe had a lift in it, her gait was nevertheless uneven and she covered her teacup with her hand.

  “You have a visitor, Miss Van Fleet,” she said. She had known Caitlin for twenty years and still rarely used her first name.

  “I’ll get out of your way,” said Marlene, standing quickly.

  “Who is it?” asked Caitlin.

  “Mr. Jaffrey.”

  Ah, Gordon. She could not think of him without a stab of sadness that was peculiarly comforting.

  “Ask him to wait a minute, Mrs. Rosenthal.”

  Marlene was looking around the room. Her eyes stopped on the poster advertising Well, You Needn’t.