by Paul Vidich
“I haven’t answered.”
“You don’t need to answer. The fact that you had to think about it means you haven’t, or if you have, it’s milk and a bowl of cereal. I like to cook but not alone. If I lived here I’d eat out too.”
He looked at her. “Why did you come?”
“Do I need a reason?” she asked. “Isn’t it reason enough that I’m here?”
Silence lingered. When she looked up from her tea, their eyes met. “I didn’t want it to end like that at the cottage. We don’t have to be disappointed, if we don’t want to be. Do we? We don’t have to be people in a dry month waiting for rain.”
Mueller smiled at the poet she’d chosen to quote. “Tenants of the house. Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”
“Yes!” she said emphatically. Her voice was almost giddy and then she became moody and looked at him. “I have a confession. I did something once that I don’t tell many people. I worry they will think I’m eccentric, which is the polite word people use when they actually think you’re loony.
“I was a Salvation Army volunteer. I stood in Rockefeller Center in a scarlet uniform with the matching cap, bell in hand, which I dutifully rang. I needed a job to get out of the house and away from my mother. So I volunteered. I had seen these Salvation Army people banging their bells in front of Saint Patrick’s and I always wondered who they were in real life. I wondered why they did it. So I joined them. To find out.
“I stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue that Christmas and rang my bell in front of the bucket. Men walked by and dropped a quarter, or a dime, or a nickel. I would give them a button and some eye contact. If they didn’t take the button, I gave them an expression of kindness and gratitude. They would walk away. So, I had the most profound encounters with people, especially with poor people who didn’t have a job. Once, I got this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact from a young man, homeless probably, hardly a teenager standing in front of me in his torn coat. He looked at me and he reached into his pocket for a penny. My eyes said thank you and his eyes said nobody knows what it’s like to be hungry.
“And sometimes I’d get ignored all day, or they’d take pity on me and strike up a conversation, thinking I needed companionship, or another job. It made me uncomfortable sometimes because I felt I was doing something unjob-like. I had no idea how perfect an education I was getting for finding people whose stories I could tell. I saw these people on the street and a gesture became a word, their clothing a sentence, the expressions on their faces a whole life. And I wanted to share that. So I wrote about them.”
“I didn’t know you wrote,” he said.
“Because I haven’t told you. Sketches for the stage. I have a diary too.”
He pondered her. “Am I in it?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” Beth folded her arms across her chest, a protective reflex, and gazed patiently at him. She leaned to him and was curious. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Roger?”
“Remember,” he said, “don’t ask.” He relented. “We met in college.”
She continued to look at him with a puzzled expression. “What else haven’t you told me? Is it the same with your feelings for me?”
He rose and took her teacup, and then he walked into the tiny kitchen without answering.
“That’s how you like it,” she called after him. “Secret. Like your work. Well, I too can keep things to myself. Would you prefer me that way?”
He returned to her side with more tea. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
His eyes were averted, but they met hers and he lingered on her face. His voice was almost a plea. “Don’t think ill of me. Be patient.”
She touched his collar and loosened his tie. “Let’s see what happens. May I take a shower?”
What Mueller hadn’t expected was that he could feel attached to a woman again, and feel something furtive and heady, as it had been in college with his first girlfriend. The feeling startled him, and he was reluctant to give in to it. He could see the course of things, the strings that would begin to attach, the mornings of rushed pleasure before work, and the building responsibility for another person. He thought too that there was a kind of relief in only wanting her body, and having her willing to give it, keeping the rest of their lives out of it. How long would that last?
He saw her face unadorned, fresh from the shower, wet hair fallen to her bare shoulders. She wasn’t wearing glasses. Her eyes were an intense blue and sparkled in the water that clung to her face, falling down her cheeks. Her towel wrapped her chest, but there was a place between her breasts that drew his eye. She was vigorously drying her hair with a second towel and standing at the bathroom door a few feet away, without any false concern for how she looked. She stopped drying, and then her eyebrows were up, with a question.
He realized he’d been staring.
“I want this too,” she said. She undid her towel for him and waited for him to come close. She took his face in her hands and drew his lips to hers. She guided him through the open bedroom door to the narrow unmade bed that was pushed against the wall. She lowered the window blind to get privacy from the couple moving about their living room in the apartment just across the airshaft. Then she turned to Mueller. He was nearby in the center of the tiny room, bathed in moonlight that came in another window. She lifted his T-shirt over his head and dropped the cotton garment to the floor. Her fingers worked to undo his belt buckle and when she had succeeded she lowered his trousers to his knees, and he stepped out, one foot, then another.
“Take your socks off,” she said. “And your watch.”
Together they lowered themselves onto the twin mattress and looked into each other’s faces. He put his hand on her hip, and then let his hand fall to the moist skin and dense hair between her legs. She adjusted his hand and lay back on the pillow looking up into his pale face. She closed her eyes to concentrate, but then opened them wide.
“Why have you stopped?”
He gazed at her.
“Tell me. There is a reason. Are you sorry I’m here?”
He lowered his head so it hovered close over hers, kissed one eye, then the other, and when he pulled back he drew his finger across the seam of her lips. “I’m nervous,” he said.
She looked in his dark eyes, astonished. She laughed. “Nervous? About what?”
“Where this is going.”
They looked into each other’s faces, eyes searching the other’s eyes for a clue to what lay ahead. The silence lingered and with it came the eagerness of their breathing. He lowered his mouth to her breast, its nipple wrinkled like a walnut, tasting the fresh perspiration. No woman had spent the night in his apartment, and he remembered the many evenings he’d gone to bed alone thinking about this moment, wondering if it would ever come. He was uncertain how he felt about her being the first to share his solitude.
He moved his mouth to her lips and he kissed her now with deep kisses that she returned. He suggested that she turn over, but she said, no, she wanted to face him. He entered her slowly and together they acted as one flesh surrendered to urgent sensation. Afterward, they lay side by side, separate and not touching, looking at the moonlight rippling across the ceiling, listening to their beating hearts.
Mueller was up early the next morning and had already showered and dressed when Beth emerged from the bedroom wearing his pajama top. It fell to her thighs. Her hair was a wild nest of curls. She stumbled past him in a groggy daze without saying one word and entered the bathroom, closing the door. He heard water running, a cough, and then the sound of the toilet flushing.
It was a grim apartment, he thought, suddenly self-conscious of the spare furnishings. He looked out the makeshift curtain to the apartment across the air shaft, window cracked open, where a couple from the Deep South lived with four young children. Somewhere outside he heard the mother’s shrill voic
e rail at a child, and suddenly, he understood how he’d used their loud arguments as a way to rationalize living alone. They were the cautionary example of a romantic beginning that became unhappy family life. If life were only that simple, he thought.
Mueller unfolded the morning newspaper and flipped to the classified advertisements, his fingers traveling down the column of babysitters seeking work looking for “Dorothy A”—Vasilenko’s signal to check for his chalk mark.
“You need a babysitter?”
Mueller found Beth standing over his shoulder, absentmindedly drying her hair.
“I’m good with children,” she said. “I can babysit your son. I have time.”
“This isn’t for him.” He saw her confusion. “He’s in Austria with his mother.”
They ate breakfast together. She ate slowly, a spoonful of cereal at a time, elbow propped on the table without false concern over how it would look or what he might think. She stopping eating and cocked her head. “Will you come with me to the hearing this morning?”
The first string, he thought.
“It would mean a lot to me. There will be press and a crowd wanting to be entertained by the spectacle of the senator vilifying a man for his beliefs.” She looked at him. “This country has lost its soul.”
Beth carelessly stirred the puffed rice, playing with her cereal. She looked up. “Whatever it is that you do, I don’t care. It’s your business. I don’t meddle in other people’s lives. I wouldn’t want you to meddle in mine. We go about our lives, and if we’re lucky we find someone with whom we can share the loneliness. You don’t have to be miserable in a relationship, you know.”
She reached across the table and placed her palm on his hand. Her expression was caring, almost sad. “Giving famishes the craving.”
Her eyes met his. “Eliot,” she said.
• • •
Room 357 in the Senate office building was thick with spectators and national press. There was a carnival din of voices waiting for the hearing to start, and a few eager faces looked to the front of the room where a solitary white-haired man sat at a witness table before the high curved dais. Sober senators huddled with aides, or waited for the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to bring the room to order. The chairman wore a gray flannel suit, starched shirt with a garroting tie, and his thinning gray hair combed to the side. His cheeks were heavy with a drinker’s flush. He cocked his head to receive a brisk whispered instruction from a young aide.
Mueller was making his way through the aisle crowded with late arrivals seeking a seat, when he heard his name called. He saw Beth in the middle of the row, arms raised, waving to get his attention. He begged his way past seated men, who drew in their knees, and he made his way down the row apologizing to the bigger men who were forced to stand to let him pass.
“I didn’t think you were coming.” Beth removed the coat she’d used to save a seat. “What held you up?”
“Traffic.” A sort of truth.
“You know my brother,” Beth said.
Mueller nodded at Roger Altman, who nodded back. They assessed each other—acknowledged one another like secret conspirators, eyes signaling a private recognition no one else observed. It was a knowing glance they exchanged under the cover of a casual greeting. “Good to see you old boy,” Altman said. “Here in these circumstances.”
Altman leaned across his sister, who sat between the two men, and whispered to Mueller. “It feels like Julius Caesar.” He nodded at the senators on the dais. “The best in us attracts the worst in them. That is who we have become.”
The chairman brought a gavel down hard, then a second time, and a third time, getting attention of the restless crowd. The chairman trained his withering gaze high over the bright lights, reproving spectators furthest removed from his authority. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice boomed.
Mueller was seated obscurely in the middle of the room, but he was nevertheless conscious of being visible. Unwelcome enough in any circumstance, this exposure was not at all what he had in mind when he’d agreed to attend the hearing. He hadn’t thought of it in advance, but his presence there, among the room of people glancing about to see who else had come, made him uncomfortable. He too scanned the room for a face he’d want to avoid. In fact, no one looked at Mueller except when they pretended to look at him in order to take in a person sitting in the row ahead, or behind him.
There were the formalities of the hearing—the opening statement, the swearing-in, and the sergeant at arms’s instructions to the crowd to keep order and abstain from talking. Mueller didn’t see anyone from the Agency, and he hadn’t expected to, but he couldn’t say the same for the FBI. He recognized two agents at the chief counsel’s table—calm, crew-cut, confident—seated with Committee staffers.
And then the hearing began. Arnold Altman gave his name, age, his addresses in Maryland and on Park Avenue, and he recited for the record his work in banking and then briefly as secretary of the International Monetary Fund.
“We are here,” the senator said in a stentorian voice amplified by the hearing room’s tall ceiling and wide windows, “to ask some questions, Mr. Altman. The Committee heard testimony of two former officials of the Economic Cooperation Agency that the exchange rate fluctuations of the Austrian currency in 1948 worked against the country’s financial stability and in favor of the Soviet occupation forces. Funds were moved from Soviet satellite Czechoslovakia to Swiss banks through IMF accounts and were used to drive down the schilling. These are the facts we have from the testimony of two former employees.”
The senator looked out at the room and then at his colleagues. His voice was firm and accusatory and it went on with the great rolling cadences of a man more accustomed to inciting a mob in a stadium. “This is the Austrian incident. That’s how we refer to the currency manipulation that devalued the schilling, ruined the economy, and led to the food riots. Men and women and children died. For the purposes of this hearing today, I will summarize the situation in May of that year. The only mention of you, Mr. Altman, was in a cable sent to Austria and Washington indicating that the Czech delegation to the IMF was objecting to the devaluation of the schilling. The objection was transmitted by the office of the secretary of the Fund through the State Department to Austria, and I believe the wording of the cable from the secretary advised that the Czech delegation objected to the devaluation and questioned how IMF’s classified currency support was compromised.”
Arnold Altman leaned forward to the microphone and spoke in a respectful tone. “Was there a question?”
The senator looked over the top of his glasses. “Whether you have any recollection of the protest that the Czech government made in the action your office took.”
“I do not. If I could see the documents I might recall.”
“So your testimony is that you don’t recall?”
“Yes.”
“And do you know how the information got to the Soviets?”
“I don’t know that it did.”
“But member governments took monetary matters through the secretary.”
“No, that isn’t correct, because you say monetary matters. As secretary of the IMF it was my duty to report discussions of the Fund to governments.”
“Sir, that wasn’t my question. My question was, did you communicate this to Czechs?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I don’t recall.”
“At this time you have no recollection that the schilling support was leaked?”
“That is right.”
“Did you work for the Czech delegation to the Monetary Fund?”
“Yes, technically, assuming you mean the executive director. He was a Czech national on the board at one period of time when I was secretary of the board.”
“So,” the senator said, leaning back, “you worked for him, as you say, technically.”
“Yes, technically.”
“And you listened to him?”
“Yes, he was on the board.”
“And he listened to you?”
“We talked. I suppose it would be natural to assume that if one man is talking the other would listen.” The crowd stirred, and a few in the audience laughed.
“In the fall of ’forty-eight,” the senator said, “the Czech representative, or executive director, or whatever you call him, was a Communist.”
“I don’t know.”
“He represented the Czech government, did he not? The fall of Czechoslovakia was in 1948, was it not?” The senator took a note handed to him by his young counsel.
Mueller whispered to Beth, “Where is this going?”
Brother and sister had moved closer together in the bond of family threatened by the senator’s intimidating power. She clutched her sibling’s arm. Mueller saw the difference between power and authority, the former on display, the latter a weakly cloaked performance. Beth’s face was drawn, color had drained from her cheeks, and there was a sad, helpless expression on her face. He mouth was open almost as if she’d stopped breathing, but she shook her head in a vague way. “I don’t know.”
Mueller looked across at Roger Altman, who had covered his sister’s hands with his own. His jaw was set, eyes fixed and flinty, and Mueller thought Altman gazed at his father with something that was not quite compassion. It was so startling and unexpected, Mueller stared. Only the senator’s voice took Mueller’s attention back to the proceedings.
“You’re an American citizen?” the senator asked.
“Yes,” Arnold Altman replied.
“Born here?”
“No.”
“Where were you born?”
“Sudetenland.”
“That’s Czechoslovakia, correct?”
“Now it is. It was Austro-Hungary when I was born.”
“And when was that?”
“The date?”
“Yes, the date.”
“July twenty-fifth.”
