Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  “I was in France,” said Joe. “Now that was something. So much of my time was spent flying a desk, but I was in France, I guess I’ll never forget it. I was there when the Free French took the city back from the Germans. The Nazis fought like complete cowards and then De Gaulle came marching down the Champs-Elysées and the city went mad.”

  “Oh, God, I wish I could have seen it,” said Caitlin. “I saw the pictures and the newsreels, but to be there, really be there … ” She sipped her drink and added, “I’ve never been anywhere,” and then quickly put the tumbler down again, as if it were making her foolish.

  “Do you know who I met in Paris?” Joe asked. He scooped the ice out of his second drink and dumped it into the empty glass that had held his first.

  Caitlin watched him. He needed a shave, a hot bath, a long rest.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Welles,” said Joe, in a murmur. He turned toward her, offering up his dark sorrowful eyes.

  “They ruined Sumner Welles,” Joe said. “That incident on the President’s train was a setup. But he’s landed on his feet. He’s an aristocrat. God, if something like that happened to me, I guess I’d put a bullet in my head.”

  “How did you happen to run into him?”

  “Luck. Blind luck. I was sitting in a café with another soldier and Sumner saw me, came right up, put his hand on my shoulder, and that was it.”

  “It must have been amazing, I mean since it was Paris and all.”

  “His hair was combed straight back, he was wearing a seersucker suit, carrying a cane. He was tan. He told me he liked my book and that I should go home and write another one. I’ll probably never see him again.”

  “Who knows? If the last few years have taught us anything it’s that anything can happen.”

  Joe shrugged, looked away for a moment.

  “I think about you all the time, Joe,” she said, retrieving him.

  “It makes sense, you working to get people across borders. I mean, you’ve crossed these frontiers inside of yourself, those borders we all have set up to keep us in one place. Telling someone, You can go here but you can’t go there, is a kind of fascism, isn’t it? But it’s not only how most of us treat the people around us, we treat ourselves like that, too. You crossed the border, Caitlin. You erased the boundary lines. So it’s no wonder you want to help others cross the borders, too.”

  He took her hand, turned it over as if to study the lines on her palm. And it was then that Caitlin’s heart, so long in hibernation, flew from the cave of her body toward Joe.

  In love, it seemed, the heart was not filled but stolen. She felt love for Joe not as a swelling in the chest but a sudden, eerie emptiness, as in one of those dreams where we think we are falling, falling out of bed, out of time, out of the universe, and where once the great solidity of sleep filled us there is now a vibrant hollow, a vivid void.

  They left the Amsterdam Bar and Grill, walked out into the dusty sunlight and the heat and noise. They walked to Greenwich Village, where they went to Caitlin’s favorite market and spent Caitlin’s remaining ration tickets on oranges, French bread, olives, a small chicken, a little sack of coffee, and a can of condensed milk. Caitlin adored sweet milk, considered it a luxury item.

  They walked south on Sixth Avenue and then west on Waverly, Car horns blared—some out of anger at the traffic, some out of end-of-the-war high spirits, and a few as a simple response to hearing others make noise. Some boys in their teens were pushing an Oriental man in his twenties against the green tin of a newspaper kiosk. The Oriental man was saying, “I am Chinaman, please. Not Japan. Chinaman.” When Joe and Caitlin stopped, the boys suddenly left the man and Caitlin used the moment to link her arm through Joe’s.

  Even on Barrow Street, Joe seemed unmoved, seeing the houses and trees he had once known so well. There was something labored in his gait, and once he stopped in the middle of the block and took a deep breath.

  When they reached her building, Caitlin pointed to it and said, “Feel like home?” He looked up at it, nodded vaguely at the stolid brown building, plain as home-baked bread. The windows that faced the street were open today. Mrs. Nicholas as usual leaned out from her perch on the top floor, the cement sill digging into her fleshy forearms as she stared down at the street, frowning. The window to the Clarks’ apartment was open, and their leggy geranium, with its pale red flowers and its leaves fringed with decay, had been put out to sun. Mrs. Ernst’s eternal cat paced around the potted flowers, twitching its tail.

  “Look at that old cat up there,” said Joe.

  “That old cat can go to hell,” replied Caitlin. “It’s been nothing but trouble. Well, come on up.” They walked up the five cement steps to the front door—heavily varnished mahogany and leaded glass that held the sunlight like little points of flame.

  And by the time she let him into the apartment, Caitlin’s heart was beating so fiercely she could barely keep her balance. She wanted him, wanted to embrace everything about him that she knew and discover everything she did not know. She wanted to kiss him, make love. Desire was going through her like a wave of sickness. She dropped the sack of groceries onto the plain kitchen table and they thudded so loudly that Joe looked at her, wondering if she had perhaps lost her temper.

  “Do you want to eat now?” she asked.

  “Isn’t it a little early?”

  Someone was listening to patriotic music on the radio. The sound was oppressive though its origin was indistinct. It was marching-band melodies, with tubas and whistles and crashing cymbals, all played at a furious clip.

  “The happiness is incredibly contagious,” said Joe, sitting at the table, resting his head in his hands.

  “Why do I feel as if the war was lost as much as won?” she asked, sitting across from him.

  “I wonder where John Coleman is today,” said Joe. “Probably marching in a parade or making patriotic toasts in a bar somewhere.”

  They were silent and it was not a difficult silence at all. It was fine just to sit together and breathe.

  “Do you mind if I say something about you and Betty?” Joe said, after a few moments.

  “I don’t have anyone else in the world to remember her with.”

  “It’s just that—well, if you look at things in a certain way, if you hadn’t known her and then if she hadn’t been on the plane with Stowe, then you and I probably wouldn’t have had much to do with each other.”

  “I think about her,” said Caitlin. She lowered her eyes. She had placed her hands on the edge of the table and the sun came into the kitchen and touched the tips of her fingers.

  She brought Joe into the front room. Sitting in a kitchen seemed to Caitlin something for people who lived on farms. They brought the oranges and a large blue enamel bowl for the peels and they sat close on the red velvet sofa. They were not courting. They were two people eating oranges while the rest of the world listened to martial music on the radio.

  “It’s as if we don’t belong here,” Joe said, after a time, and there was in his voice a simplicity that made her take his hand.

  “Where do we belong?”

  He answered her with a kiss. It was simple, unforced, he was not trying to capture her or stake any claim. His hand touched the side of her face as he kissed her and it was not a kiss to end a movie or even a night on the town. It was not sexual, it did not burn, it did not move through her. Yet it overwhelmed her. It was solemn and as serious as a vow.

  “Caitlin,” he said, his voice low, suddenly not afraid. Low and calm, the way it was when she first knew him.

  They held each other in the heat of that apartment. Beyond the walls were the radio announcers and the awful music and the truckdrivers honking their horns and the foghorns in the harbor and kids throwing firecrackers and cherry bombs in the echoing air shafts.

  Joe kissed the top of Caitlin’s head and she placed his hand between her thighs.

  And then they brought each other to her bed and collapsed
together and stayed poised for a moment, entwined, until Caitlin put a little pressure on his hips and Joe rolled languidly onto his back and let Caitlin crawl on top of him.

  She made love to him and it was as if she were making love to the entirety of her life. He held her firmly, moved when she did, and cried out softly when he came, yet even then did not let her go, did not want her to stop. And later she lay beside him, touching the sweat on his chest, and knowing in some deep and frightening animal way that she was pregnant.

  TEN

  NOVEMBER 20, 1967

  “I don’t give a hoot about being lost since everything is so beautiful,” said Caitlin, turning up the collar of her bright red wool coat. “Lost in Holland,” she said, with satisfaction.

  The temperature in Amsterdam was a few degrees warmer than it was back in New York, but the air was dead and damp. They were walking along a canal; the water gave up its dark, ancient aroma, an odor at once domestic and alarming, like dishwater from a century ago. The houses along the canal were dark brown with white trim. Here and there a door was painted royal blue or scarlet. Notices for rock concerts and protest rallies were posted on the ancient trees, and their edges shuddered in the clammy breeze.

  “I can’t believe our hotel gives us peanut butter and chocolate for breakfast,” her son said. His matted curls shook slowly in the wind. Unshaven, his chin looked as if he had pressed it down into a mound of black pepper.

  “I thought it was delicious,” said Caitlin. “And I love the hotel. Don’t you?”

  “I’m still so tired.”

  Even on the KLM flight over, the boy kept on talking about needing to crash—an odd choice of idiom, it seemed to Caitlin, who could rarely even see an airplane without thinking of that DC-3 whose wreckage still burned in her memory.

  Some students came out of a small basement café. They were carrying books, smoking cigarettes, all of them talking at once. Before the door closed, Caitlin caught a glimpse of the coffeeshop. A stack of cups and saucers, a rack of sweet rolls, the chrome of an espresso machine, a blue-and-white poster with Russian lettering. A pang of loneliness went through her, as resonant as the hum of a tuning fork. She felt that odd nostalgia we sometimes feel for all that we never knew. The life of a student … She glanced at her son. His eyes were cast down; he was waiting for the students to cross the street. He’s ashamed to be seen walking around with his mother, thought Caitlin.

  “OK,” she said. “Let’s see if we can figure this out.” She opened the street guide to Amsterdam. Her hands were tired, fingers clumsy. The wind tried to tear the map away. “Oh-oh. I think we’ve been walking in the wrong direction. The Prinsengracht seems to run like this.” She traced a curl of canal on the map. “See?”

  Caitlin was in Amsterdam to attend a three-day conference called “The Rise of the Extreme Right in Europe and the Americas.” She was a representative of the World Refugee Alliance, and Gordon, at the last moment, gave her son the money to take the trip, too. (Gordon had just been given the account to take all the class pictures at the Walden School and he was feeling flush.) The conference would convene at the Anne Frank House in two days; they had deliberately come early to see a bit of Amsterdam. After a lifetime of dreaming of travel, this was Caitlin’s first trip abroad.

  She had risen at dawn, and while the boy had snored lightly in the bed beside hers, his hands thrown over his head, his chest bare, hairless, the blanket kicked off during the night and the sheet clinging to his lean shape like a shroud, she had dressed quietly and left the hotel. In her purse she had an aerogram from Joe, the last word from him, received months ago. He was living in Amsterdam, at least he had been at the time of the letter, where he was working on his tenth book. None of them sold very many copies; he was far from being a rich man, he was not even comfortable, but whatever money he made combined well with his sense of determination and he kept at it, book after book. The one he worked on now was about the United States’s role in helping certain key Nazi intelligence officers escape from Europe. His letter had mentioned that he would be going to East Germany soon, where a certain Professor Heinemann would give him access to his files. And so in the chill of the first light, Caitlin had taken a taxi through the Vondel Park to 38 Von Eghenstraat, asked the driver of the old Mercedes to wait, and then mounted the steps of the tall, narrow rooming house with its scarlet shutters and matching door. Drizzle wafted past the street lamps, the ducks in the park were beginning to squawk. She had no intention of awakening this house at such an hour; she was not certain if she even wanted to see Joe. Yet even if she were to see him, it would not be like this, not as a surprise. She would leave him a note and let him decide. Her heels clattered against the stone steps as she approached the door. A mailbox was affixed to a column next to the door and the names of the tenants were written on masking tape. Syversten. Holder. Westervelt. This last name seemed to be more vivid than the others, and Caitlin lifted the tape up to see what was beneath it. Rose. He had already moved on.

  Now, the sky was beginning to brighten. The sun edged past a mountain of yellowish clouds and the bright ribbon of gold around the cloud was light’s pure nectar.

  “It’s like a Rembrandt up there,” the boy said.

  “Maybe we’ll have luck with the weather after all,” said Caitlin, taking his arm. She felt an abrupt jolt of sadness, as if she were in a car hitting a hole in the street.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “You … I don’t know. The look on your face.” The observation might have been born of sympathy but it was communicated testily; he experienced the bond between them and rejected it in the same breath.

  And Caitlin was suddenly tempted to tell him more of the truth of her life than ever before. What goaded her? Was it the otherworldly edge of electricity around that mammoth cloud? The sudden mutability of time that traveling great distances suggests? Or this sullen, watery city, containing somewhere in its vast mesh the microbes of her ancestry?

  “There’s just a sadness in life,” Caitlin finally said. “When you get to my age, you’ll understand.” She closed her eyes, wishing she hadn’t said it. Hearing these middle-aged platitudes come from her own mouth shocked her more than catching her reflection in the mirror unawares.

  But her son let it pass, apparently too bored to be offended.

  “What are you going to do if we ever find this place?” he asked her.

  “Anne Frank House? Go in, say hello.”

  “Say hello? Like, hello everybody?”

  “Don’t be a wise guy. Let them know we’ve arrived. They probably have a registration period and all kinds of information. And I think I’d like to see the house, too. Her room. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’ve read the book, seen the play, and the movie. I think I’ve had enough of it.”

  “Well then, what were you planning to do?”

  “I don’t know. Wander around and see what happens. Is that OK?”

  Caitlin shrugged, patted the boy’s hand. An iron railing bordered the canal; they were just then passing a cluster of houseboats, a floating shantytown. A dark-haired woman wearing trousers and a loose-fitting tank top was throwing water from a blue plastic bucket over the side of a houseboat. There was something about the angularity of her body and the whiteness of her skin and something else, something less definable about the rhythms of her gestures, that evoked Betty for a moment—just a moment, but it plunged in and out of Caitlin’s heart like a blade of light.

  “I thought we would spend some time together here,” she said. She heard her voice as reasonable, kindly.

  “We will, of course we will.” He smiled. He made it so clear that charm was really a form of evasion. “But my roommate gave me all these tips, places to go, and I’d like to check some of them out.”

  “Then where will we meet?”

  “And there’s a Roy Lichtenstein show at the big museum here, whatever it’s called,” he went on, ignoring her question, the p
roposed rendezvous.

  He’s giving me the shake, thought Caitlin. “The one who makes the cartoon paintings?” she asked.

  “I’d rather drown than call Brad for help,’ ” her son said in a falsetto, holding up his hand and assuming the look of someone going down for the third time. “Do you know that one?”

  Caitlin shrugged. He felt culturally superior to her, but she no more begrudged than believed it.

  “If you want, I’ll stay with you,” her son said.

  “No, you have fun,” she said, in an exaggerated tragic voice, making fun of mothers who heap guilt upon their children and, in that fissure between the emotion and its burlesque, staking her own emotional claim: she wouldn’t have minded if he did feel a bit of guilt.

  “We can meet in this place called the Vondel Bar,” he said. His voice sounded uneasy, a clumsy con man. “It’s on the Leidseplein.”

  “Oh, the Leidseplein. That makes it easy,” Caitlin said.

  “Well, if I can find it you can, too.” He rocked back on his heels, looking plaintive.

  “Ah,” said Caitlin. “The Prinsengracht. At last.”

  “Are you sure it’s OK? Me not coming along?”

  “It’s fine, sweetie. Really, I never expected.”

  Caitlin turned away. Sweetie? She had never called him that, or anyone else. It was Betty’s word, her voice, coming through for a moment, the rattle of a train over weedy tracks abandoned for years.

  They kissed goodbye. His kiss was boyish, wet, dear. And then he was off. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. She watched him as he walked; he had his father’s determined gait, that odd, truculent bounce, the walk of an angry man made a touch ridiculous by broken pavement. He did not once look back.

  Caitlin found the Anne Frank House, an ordinary house in this city of ancient domesticity. Near the house, an old man in a blue knee-length jacket and wool cap was painting tar on the trunk of an old bare tree. Caitlin saw her father’s dour Dutch expression on the man’s face but she suspected she was forcing it, too much has happened, too much lost; she was trying to find her reflection in a mirror over which time had cast an impenetrable shadow.