The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  THAT only when specifically requested to do so over the telephone will one party open a letter addressed to the other party.

  THAT the living room will be reserved for exclusive use of the two parties on alternate weekends (Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday day).

  THAT telephone messages will be taken in behalf of the absent party, and left on the letter tray, without comment.

  AND THAT no mention will be initiated by the party in residence when the other party does not occupy his (her) room any night or nights.

  What this meant, Robin smiled, for the first time in days, it seemed, and put her signature on the solemn instrument, was that the nights she was spending with Harry would not be a source of conversation the next day.

  On Herrendon’s return he asked at the embassy whether there had been any movement “on the security business.” Simon, friend and golfing companion, detected his distress. He permitted himself to wonder whether Alex had in fact anything to worry about. Was there something other than the silly consumers league petition in his past? Had his relations with Alger Hiss, with whom Alex had traveled on the U.S.S. Quincy to Yalta, been other than entirely professional?

  Simon put away his concern. But that was on Tuesday. At lunch with him on Friday, at the cafeteria, he thought to comment, “Alex, you’re the gloomiest man in Washington these days. Anything I can do?”

  Alex shook his head. “Just—family. Robin moved out three weeks ago. Quite right—a twenty-three-year-old shouldn’t be stuck in a single house with her father for the rest of her life. But it’s lonely at the house without her.”

  Simon accepted the explanation and they made their golf date.

  That night Alex called the private investigating service. He had got the number from his lawyer, Eustace Meikklejohn. The man Eustace had referred him to listened on the phone, paused, and said, “Do you want to talk to our operative tonight? If so, someone can come to your house at nine.”

  “Yes, tonight. Nine is fine.”

  “He will identify himself as ‘Cal.’ He is to quote to you,” there was another pause, “the number 1311. No further identification will be provided. But Mr. Meikklejohn has reassured you about our service.”

  “Yes. I shall await … Cal.”

  Cal arrived, they talked, and Cal departed.

  Robin liked it when Harry slept on, after her own six o’clock rising. The whole McCarthy enterprise straggled into the office in the morning. Everyone was there by ten, and not infrequently Senator McCarthy, who seemed never to need sleep, was there at seven. But everyone worked late, including Harry; though when he spent the evenings with Robin, he was not really working late.

  But, he thought late, late at night, with Robin at his side in bed, that in the best sense of it, he didn’t believe that when she was with him “work” was outlawed. He would talk happily about problems, questions, dilemmas.

  If Joe comes out for a formal invitation to the South Koreans to assert sovereignty over the North, what does it accomplish? Does it make, simply, a historical point, renewing a Geneva accord set aside, everyone seemed to agree, by the war?

  He began to talk, on the third night together, about Joe McCarthy. The human being.

  He said things he had said to nobody, doubted that he ever would. He began by telling her that she had to put aside the popular legend, canonical among the predominant opinion makers, that Joe simply did not care about factual accuracy.

  “Why does he make so many mistakes, then?”

  “There are good reasons and bad. He exaggerates. That’s bad—but it is also apple-pie American. The priesthood didn’t get all that mad at Harry Truman about what he said in 1948 when campaigning. He said that ‘powerful forces’ were working to ‘undermine’ American democracy, ‘like those that created European fascism.’ The whole business, the GOP was run by the real estate lobbies and the National Association of Manufacturers; nobody seemed to mind. But another reason is the fragmentary nature of the stuff that comes in to us. Reports, even rumors—he senses something is wrong, but the evidence doesn’t congeal. But when it pretty well does, he can’t seem to get anywhere with it. Look at Lattimore. The McCarran Committee—and that’s not Joe’s committee, that’s a whole other committee, and its chairman, McCarran, as you know, is a Democrat—did months and months of interrogation. And concluded—including six Democratic senators who signed the report—that “Owen Lattimore was a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.” That was post McCarthy. But Lattimore is still a hero out there. Besides, if McCarthy was all that wrong about loyalty/security procedures, how come the Eisenhower administration has kicked out six thousand people on security grounds? Robin?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what Mark Antony said to Cleopatra?”

  “Are you asking me, Have I read Shakespeare? The answer is, Yawp.”

  “He said—I mean, what comes to my mind right now—is, Antony said to her, ‘Do we have to talk about world affairs tonight?’ ”

  They kissed. And they breathed and loved each other. A half hour later she nudged him. “You can’t think you have disposed of my problems about your Senator Joe.”

  “That wouldn’t be easy to do. I haven’t disposed of them. White wine?”

  She rose from the bed. “I’ll get it. You concentrate.”

  “On what?”

  “On my rear end.”

  She walked pertly over to the little kitchen. He could hear her voice easily.

  “How do you handle the charge that McCarthy has never come up with a single member of the Communist Party?”

  Harry rose, flipped up his shorts, and walked to his desk. “Okay, I accept the challenge. But only on the understanding that we are dealing with a—synecdoche.”

  “What’s that?”

  He took the wine, sat down at his desk, and leafed through a file in his drawer. “It means one part, taken as representative of the whole. ‘One thousand oars set out for Sparta.’ Means, one thousand men, using one thousand oars, bringing on—how many?—maybe one hundred boats.”

  “So who’s your sinektee?”

  “That’s syn-ec-do-che. Now you’re being serious, right, Robin?”

  “Mmm.”

  “How about Edward G. Posniak, a State Department economist. Here is the Congressional Record, July 25, 1950, page 10928. Ready?”

  “You may fire when ready, Bontecou.”

  “ ‘An FBI agent who joined the Communist Party at the request of the Bureau—’ the Bureau, that’s the FBI—”

  “Oh, really? Go on, Harry.”

  “—the FBI agent who joined the Party ‘—in 1937 and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1948 and whose record as an informant has been one of complete reliability, stated that [Posniak] was a member of the Communist Party and personally known to him as such.’ ” Harry looked up.

  Robin would not flirt her way out of the problem. “I read you,” she said. She sipped her wine and then: “Tell me about growing up with your mom. Mine was divine.”

  “So is mine.”

  The intimacy he felt very nearly propelled him to tell her his big secret, about that day searching in his father’s trunk. But he stopped.

  Even as he did he sensed the totality of Robin for him, his absolute sense that no one else in the entire world could match her company. Yes, he was greedily, hungrily, deliriously happy with her in bed. But before, and after, he sensed a congruity of spirit that made him stop and clench his fists to keep from trembling.

  He knew that he would need a more conclusive consummation than the overnight stands. He wouldn’t discuss it with her now, though she welcomed discussion on any subject, brightly, inquisitively, playfully, sometimes. Who would ever have thought that she, Robin Herrendon, late at night in his apartment, would hear out the case against Edward G. Posniak!—but he might have been making out the case against Socrates. He’d have to think about the future. And there was the real problem of the hostility of Alex Herrendon. How odd
, his total, almost ferocious animosity, just because Harry Bontecou worked for Joe McCarthy. Bloody Brit! Harry decided he’d try to console himself with indignation. Fucking Brit. He has no businessintruding that way in internal American politics. … And after all: If McCarthy was waging the right battle, Great Britain was also a beneficiary. The hell with it. The hell with him.

  They went then to sleep, and when his little alarm rang, he rose with her, insisted she lie in bed with the morning paper he retrieved. He brought her coffee and a croissant.

  Two days later Alex answered the telephone.

  Was he free that night, same time, to see Cal?

  Cal arrived promptly in the summer drizzle, removed his raincoat, sat, and brought out a secretarial pad.

  “Last night, Subject arrived at 1123 Fifth Street, N.E., at seven-forty-five. She carried a briefcase and a small handbag. Subject did not leave apartment building until this morning at six-fifteen.”

  Cal asked whether anything further was required.

  No, Alex said, rising to take Cal’s coat from the rack. “Thank you. I will expect the bill.”

  Cal left. Alex went to the telephone. He asked for New York information.

  “Operator, I want the number, somewhere in the Eighties, West Side, for Mrs. Dorothy Bontecou.”

  47

  Alex Herrendon visits Dorothy Bontecou

  Dorothy Bontecou had told him she’d rather not meet with him in her house.

  Alex understood. “Where, then?”

  “I’ll make a reservation at Astaire’s. I know the people there, and I can get a little table at the far end of the dining room. It’s Eighty-first and Columbus. Seven o’clock.”

  “Thanks, Dorothy. I’ll be there.”

  He lingered outside the door. Astaire’s was a utilitarian restaurant. Its front was a thick matted glass on which the restaurant’s name showed gold leaf in rococo script. To the right of the window on the inlaid white column a trim green felt frame featured that day’s menu. Alex looked through the glass hoping that the table reserved might be visible, however thick the glass through which he had to peer; at least he’d have an idea of Dorothy. He could not dislodge the picture of her in his memory, the striking brunette with the demure and inquisitive expression. He saw her, in memory, lying in bed, her breasts only partly shielded by the bed sheets. He wondered if he would recognize her immediately. She wouldn’t have any trouble recognizing him; he knew that from the careful study of his mirror image three weeks ago. He was the same Alex Herrendon she knew.

  He entered the restaurant. It was doing brisk Saturday night business. He was dismayed by the noise and bustle but was led not into the main room, but to the left. He passed the cashier, on to what was really a large upholstered booth. Dorothy Bontecou sat at the far corner, opposite. She wore a light blue V-neck dress and pearls. Her hair was gray, but otherwise as before, the simple, feathered curls, the forehead clear. She had been reading a paperback, which now she drew away, extending her hand. He took it and sat down across from her.

  The waiter stood by. “Aperitif?”

  Alex looked at her. “Still go with sherry on the rocks?”

  She nodded.

  “And for me, whiskey and soda. Scotch and soda.”

  They talked about the day’s headlines, which spoke of Red China’s demand on the UN that it should pull U.S. forces out of Taiwan. “You would think the GIs were an occupying power.”

  “Yes, it’s very strange,” Dorothy said. “Who is welcome where. Whose presences are demanded. Did you know that Harry, in the last months of service, was part of the army assigned to guard and repatriate the Russian soldiers and POWs? I haven’t talked to Harry, but I know he’d wish there had been a Syngman Rhee in Germany in 1945.”

  “Yes,” Alex said, repressing his own feeling on the matter. President Syngham Rhee of South Korea, ordered by the UN to send back to North Korea the POWs who did not want to return to the Communist north, solved his problem by simply instructing his guards to release the prisoners—just let them go.

  “I didn’t know that about Harry.”

  “You know that Harry works for Senator McCarthy?”

  “Yes. I do know that. He is mentioned quite often in the press. He travels a lot with the senator.”

  “I don’t like it that Harry is so close to the senator. The whole thing’s a mixed-up situation. I am one hundred percent on the senator’s side on the broad picture, and that’s why Harry went down there, on the anti-Communist enterprise. But it seems to me he’s been going wild a lot of the time. You knew Harry was the editor of the Spectator?”

  Alex nodded. “I competed to join the staff as a sophomore, in 1925, but gave up after two weeks, too much else to do. I didn’t make it.”

  “I remember you competed. You talked to Jesse about pulling out. Yes. Harry’s commitment is very strong, on the Communist problem. He fought the Henry Wallace people very hard and studied under Willmoore Sherrill. Do you know about him?”

  “Again—I’ve heard about him. The anti-Communist fons et origo at Columbia. Remember the term Jesse and I used back then, to describe Nicholas Murray Butler?”

  She laughed. “ ‘Thomas Aquinas, fons et origo of scholasticism.’ I can’t remember, did you teach me that, or did I teach you that? You were more learned than I, even as a sophomore. On the other hand, I had graduated from a Catholic college, was married to an intellectual, and had four years of Latin. I wouldn’t have had any trouble on Aquinas being pushed as the ‘fountain and origin’ of scholasticism.”

  The drinks came in. They delayed ordering dinner.

  “So Harry is communicating Sherrill’s Laws to Senator McCarthy. Well, it’s hard to know who is instructing McCarthy, except his rampant ego—”

  “Alex. Let’s not argue McCarthy.” They spoke instead of Jesse and his poetry. Alex took courage, draining his glass: Listen: He recited a sonnet.

  “That’s his most famous, I’d say. It’s in a couple of anthologies. By the way, when Jesse spoke those lines he ran the last couplet together: ‘Inlaid then with glassed eyes/The movement stilled, the sunlit skies.’ No pause.”

  “I’ll remember.” He caught the eye of the waiter. He ordered another round of drinks and the menu.

  “Alex. Why are you here? It can’t be for the pleasure of seeing me after twenty-five years. We made a pretty firm decision back then. I’ve observed it, zero communications with you—about me, about Jesse, about … Harry. And you did the same thing. Though Jesse did hear that you married. I’m glad. Children?”

  Alex’s throat clutched. “We had a daughter. Judith—my wife—died two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Alex. Jesse died in 1943.”

  “I knew that. I was at the funeral.”

  “You were at the funeral?”

  “Yes. At St. Ignatius. I was in the rear. I saw you, of course. I also saw Harry.”

  “Divine, wasn’t he—isn’t he?”

  “A very handsome young man.” He looked down at the menu. “I knew his age, of course. He must have gone off to war just about that time?”

  “One year later, 1944.”

  They paused. The waiter was hovering over them. They gave him the order for their meal. Dorothy Bontecou ordered the grilled salmon; Alex ordered sweetbreads. Both asked for garlic soup.

  “So, Alex, why now?”

  “Because our son, Harry, is sleeping with my daughter, Robin.”

  Dorothy Bontecou turned pale.

  Reaching for her purse, she knocked over her cocktail glass. Alex brought out his napkin and caught the liquid before it reached her lap. The waiter appeared. Dorothy mumbled an apology.

  “No matter, ma’am, no matter, we have lots of tablecloths.” He removed the other glasses, the knives, spoons, and forks, the candle, then the tablecloth. Humming a tune, he wiped the table clean, reached in the drawer opposite the cashier for a fresh cloth and napkin, placed the cloth over the table, gave the napkin to Alex, returned the knives, spoon
s, and forks, the candle, and, finally, Alex’s glass. “I will come back with a fresh sherry.”

  “Thank you, I don’t want another drink.”

  “Okay, ma’am. I’ll be along with the soup.”

  She looked down at the napkin, fiddling with it with both hands.

  “I won’t say, Are you sure? You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t sure. Has Robin spoken of any—plans?”

  “No. But what you’re thinking about can’t be ruled out. My opposition, when I learned who she was going out with, was so—explosive—there’s the awful possibility they’d—”

  “Elope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God, Alex.” Dorothy looked down and spoke with difficulty. “So she has to be told.”

  “So she has to know about Harry, yes, Dorothy. … Does he know—you never told him—his father was … somebody else?”

  “No.”

  “He—that would be obvious—never found out about Jesse’s problem?”

  “How could he? I never told him.”

  “Dorothy, I never showed you this.” He reached into the pocket of his coat.

  Dorothy put on her glasses. “What is it?”

  “A letter from Jesse. Written the day Harry was born. It’s not long.”

  She took the envelope and pulled out a single sheet. She recognized instantly the script. It read,

  Dear Alex:

  I knew it had happened. I didn’t raise my voice. Dorothy wanted a child so desperately, and I couldn’t give her one. You have made her very happy. Made us very happy. I am grateful. We will not be in touch again.

  Ever, Jesse

  Alex spoke to her. “I have to do something about Robin. You have to do something about Harry.”

  Dorothy got up from her seat. “I really can’t have anything to eat. I have to go home. It’s not your fault, Alex. I don’t blame you … for anything.”

  “I’ll walk you home.”

  “No, Alex. I’ll go. I’ll … take care of Harry. Good night.”