The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

“Some of his school friends ended up in government.”

  “Intelligence?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said, turning out his bedside lamp, “we’ve both got an education coming.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Before visiting the Fullers at home for the first time, Ed had wondered about what kind of woman Leona Fuller would turn out to be. She had to be smart—Fuller was so quickly bored by anyone of either sex whose mind didn’t bubble like a percolator. What Ed hadn’t expected was her directness. She said, “Martin has told me about your talent. Why don’t you tell me about your anger?”

  How could he deal with a question like that? His anger got worse whenever he went home for a visit so he stopped going home. It wasn’t like a suitcase. He couldn’t leave it in a locker or get another. It went around with him like a boil ready to burst.

  “You don’t have to answer me,” Leona Fuller said. “Perhaps some other time.”

  Ed could see that her question was meant solicitously, but he knew that if she had had a son of her own she wouldn’t ask recent acquaintances questions like that.

  Ed had to say something. “Inequities,” he said. “Inequities make me angry.”

  “Well,” she said, “be prepared for a lifetime of anger. Inequities abound because God is smarter than we are. He demands variety of His creations. And from variety, inequity.”

  Ed was accustomed to women being like his mother, shutting up even if they were smart. Leona Fuller was a new experience.

  “What I just said,” she went on, “aroused a touch of anger in you.”

  He hated that it showed. He valued control.

  “Don’t deny it,” she said. “Think about it. Our brains are for understanding ourselves first and societies second.”

  *

  When Ed was very young he heard some adult say that his father was a very impressive man. He didn’t know if they meant large or imposing mannered or rich, all of which he was. The first time he heard Martin Fuller speak, lured back for one of his perennial guest lectures, the word came back to him with a bounce: impressive. In his father’s circle there were other men as successful as he was, but Martin Fuller did what he did better than any other man on earth. That was impressive. Ed couldn’t believe his luck when Fuller took time to talk to him after class. Ed made him laugh, something he said about the bowel imperative being more imperative than the categorical imperative. Ed didn’t want to overdo it, or seem to be sucking up to Fuller, but he stopped by after his lecture the following week and sneaked in a word about the book he was finishing, Lenin’s Grandchildren.

  “Bring me ten pages,” Fuller said.

  “I could bring you all I’ve done,” Ed volunteered.

  “Ten pages,” he said.

  Ed photocopied ten pages and dropped them off when Fuller wasn’t around. He didn’t want to be there when Fuller read them. He felt like a kid physicist working on a formula and showing it to Einstein.

  Ed sweated the time away. After the next lecture he hung behind, waiting till the others got their little after-lecture ass kissing out of the way, then stood in front of Fuller, waiting.

  He just looked at Ed. He didn’t say a thing.

  “Is it that bad?” Ed asked.

  Fuller laughed with his whole chest. “I want to read the rest.”

  He could see Ed was still nervous. He said, “You have a good mind.”

  He could have said Ed had two legs for all it meant.

  Ed brought Fuller the rest of the manuscript. Several weeks went by. Was he reading it? Finally, Ed asked.

  “I’ve read it,” Fuller said. “Why don’t you come for dinner next week. We live in Westchester. It isn’t far.”

  Ed felt as if he’d suddenly been asked to sing at the Met.

  He didn’t know how he was supposed to dress and he was embarrassed to ask, but he did. “Wear clothes,” Fuller said, and that time Ed laughed.

  Ed thought there would be other students there for dinner, but that night there was only him. Was that their way of getting acquainted with a new person? Or did Fuller want to talk about Ed’s manuscript in private?

  At one point in the evening the conversation got around to the progressive income tax. Ed said, “How can you call something like an income tax progressive?” That made them both laugh. Ed desperately wanted them to like him enough to invite him back. He felt comfortable there. He’d be even more comfortable the second time.

  Fuller could turn any topic into something worth looking at again as if ideas were sculpture to be turned and seen in a different light.

  “Of course, Ed,” Fuller said, then, “Is it all right if I call you Ed?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Please call me Martin.” I couldn’t do that, Ed thought.

  Fuller was saying, “It’s the people in the middle who pay most of the tax. The rich—all you young people know that first—devote their energies to tax-avoidance schemes. The poor are trapped by sales taxes on necessities. But the Soviets,” he said, “are cleverer than the rich here. They are not about to impose a graduated income tax or eliminate their tax-free perks. Their chief tax—few people know this—is on vodka, the big contributor to the government’s coffers, the drug of choice and imposition. Since the unhappy man in the gutter and the unhappy men in the Kremlin have an approximately equal capacity for vodka before their livers give out, most of the taxes fall on the lower- and middle-income classes since the vodka served at the top probably comes out of public funds. That’s socialism?”

  He believes what he wants to believe, Ed thought. You can’t argue fact with him. Ed opted for letting loose. “Why doesn’t the CIA package a thousand bales of first-class marijuana in heavy plastic, tie them to floats, and let them loose off shore around the entire periphery of the Soviet Union during the summertime when there’s no ice. The bales’ll drift to shore. The whole country will get turned on tax free. Vodka consumption will plummet, the Soviet exchequer will shrink, the Kremlin’ll have to cut the arms budget drastically, and the KGB’ll be running around the country trying to stop pot smoking. The peasants are clever. In a wink they’ll have private plots growing their own weed. End to the cold war!”

  Oh did the Fullers laugh, both of them. Watching them appreciating something he’d said gave Ed a high. All those years he had longed to have somebody he admired appreciate him.

  “As for your manuscript,” Fuller said, “it’s a good beginning.”

  Was that a put-down? Fuller had seemed to like the first ten pages. Was the rest a disappointment? What the hell had Fuller written when he was Ed’s age?

  Mrs. Fuller was watching them both as if she could sense the web of tension between experience and enthusiasm.

  “Hope is an intellectual aphrodisiac,” Fuller said. “Your book sings with hope. As you go on in life, your work will fill with observation and insight.”

  “Instead of hope?”

  “Insight gives us hope,” Fuller said. “Hope does not give us insight.” Fuller smiled at him. “You must come again soon. And bring a friend.”

  He was being dismissed. Ed didn’t want the evening to end, but they were standing and so he had to go. He mustn’t take it personally, he told himself. People Fuller’s age conked out early.

  It took Ed four days to reread his own manuscript through Fuller’s eyes. Was it naive? Of course it was a first book. Fuller would always know more than he did. Was there no catching up? Suck his knowledge like marrow from a bone. Get whatever he has to teach, then drop him. Fuller was wrong about hope, about youth, about socialism.

  The next morning Ed woke with a giant’s feelings in his bones. It was a good beginning. Fuller had said next time to bring a friend. He was sure they meant a girl. He thought of Sonya.

  Sonya had dark hair, black eyes, and a tiny body in the right proportions. He had met her with some people at International House and when they shook hands he had wanted to drop to his knees—that was his fantasy—and stretch his l
ifeline out in front of her like a necklace and put it in her hands.

  The first time he came to pick her up for a meal and movie, she yelled for him to come in. She had seen him from the window and taken the Fox lock down and opened the deadbolt. Ed opened the door and saw nobody, then heard her yell, “Won’t be a minute!” and saw her down the hall bare-ass naked, beautiful, actually waving hello to him and then disappearing for a second and coming out slipping into T-shirt and panties and jeans and sandals, a kind of reverse striptease that was so natural he stood there like an idiot spectator. Finally he shook hands with her and felt love drowning him from the inside.

  All through the movie he was torn, thinking if he came on too strong it might end right there, so he kept his hands on the armrests during the movie and afterward at her house when they shared a joint. He didn’t know what she expected. He was afraid he’d come before she was ready, or like he once did, before he even got inside. So he just kissed her hand. He licked the palm and Sonya said, “That’s sweet,” and patted his hair and he didn’t know how to interpret that. He went home and stayed up half the night writing her a poem, full of his agony for her. What he got back in the mail three days later was a note saying, “Listen, I’m not turned on by pseudointellectual poetry, I want a man with balls.”

  How could he risk having Sonya put him down in front of the Fullers? He kept remembering Leona Fuller’s question, Why are you angry? and what Sonya had said to him and how it had brought back everything, his father saying You read too much junk. You’ll end up wearing fishbowl glasses like your mother. You need to work out in the gym with me. You need to practice on rabbits and squirrels so you can go hunting with me for decent-sized game. You need balls.

  Ed remembered looking in the bathroom mirror. If anything, his balls seemed bigger than other boys’ because he was smaller. It’s a metaphor, you idiot, he told himself. What did his father want, that he should lie about his age and enlist for some suicidal war in South America?

  *

  The morning after Fuller’s death Ed stayed in bed longer than usual. Just because Fuller isn’t there, he thought, doesn’t mean the sanctuary is closed. He could still visit Leona. It wouldn’t be the same kind of homecoming.

  As Ed lit a joint, his mind filled with the recurrent memory of Samuel McAllister and the tennis racket.

  Ancient Sam McAllister, a widower, had come to work for Ed’s father as a gardener long before Ed was born. His accent was that of a man born in Scotland. Before Ed was officially awake, McAllister would arrive each morning in a car that he acknowledged with pride had been built in 1934. In good weather, when Ed was very young, he’d go out on the grounds to find wherever it was that Sam was working on his hands and knees, preparing a flower bed, or bending over, pruning, always. Without turning around, McAllister would boom his accented “Good morning to you, Eddie,” as if he could sense Ed’s presence even before he saw him. When it rained or in the dark months of winter, Ed would find Sam—he had to be in his seventies, Ed thought of him as being nearly a hundred years old—in the greenhouse, preparing seedlings for spring. Sam would motion to one of the high stools so that Ed could clamber up and watch him, a leather-faced god intent on turning seeds that were the size of nothing into plants that grew and grew.

  One day when Ed was ten, he witnessed a scene between his father and Sam McAllister. Sam was gathering his things—a lunch box and thermos, a sharpening stone he frequently brought from home to give a fine edge to the tools in the greenhouse—when Ed’s father, who always looked so formidable in his dark blue business suit and tie, said, “One moment, Sam. Did you see a Dunlop tennis racket around the back of the house?”

  “Oh yes, sir,” Sam had said.

  “Do you know where it is?” Ed’s father demanded.

  “In the trunk of my car. I saw it lying on top of the garbage can and assumed you were throwing it away. Some of the strings were broken.”

  “I was planning to have it restrung.”

  “I’m so sorry, sir,” Sam said, scurrying to the trunk of his car, getting the racket, and offering it back to Ed’s father with both hands. “I know you have several new rackets, and I never thought—”

  Ed’s father cut him off. “You should have asked. Taking without asking is stealing.” His father had glanced at Ed, as if this was an object lesson for him, too.

  Sam’s leathery face reddened. “Sir,” he said, “as God is my witness, I have never stolen anything in my life.”

  “What could you ever possibly want with a tennis racket?” Ed’s father said, his voice raised like a scythe.

  “To tell you the truth, sir,” Sam said, “I played tennis quite a bit until the arthritis, and I thought to cross this one with mine on the wall of my living room as a kind of decoration, a memento.”

  “You planned to sell it,” Ed’s father said.

  “Oh no, sir. Never.”

  “Theft is inexcusable. Your employment here is terminated, Sam. Please remove your work clothes from the greenhouse—and nothing else—while I make out your final check.”

  Ed saw a terrible shadow cross Sam McAllister’s face. “I’ve worked here more than thirty years!” he said. “You know how difficult it is to find a job at my age!”

  But Ed’s father’s back was already turned as he strode off.

  “Will you give me a letter of reference, at least,” Sam called after him.

  Ed’s father stopped only long enough to say, “As a thief. Are you sure you want it?”

  *

  Sam McAllister had driven nearly halfway home in a trance when he thought he heard sobbing in the back seat. He saw Ed’s tear-streaked face in the rearview mirror, and pulled quickly over to the side of the road.

  “What are you doing here?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “Thank you, Eddie. I don’t want to leave. But your father has the say. Until socialism comes. Maybe things will change then.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, sitting in the ancient auto at the side of the road, Ed heard for the first time about capitalism and socialism and the views that Sam had kept to himself all these years.

  Finally, Sam said, “I’d better drive you home. Your father will say I kidnapped you.”

  “Can I come and visit you?” Ed asked.

  “Only if your mother gives permission ahead of time.”

  “Will you come and get me?”

  “You’ll have to find a way of getting to my place. I will drop you off at the gate today. I will never enter those grounds again.”

  “Even if I make my father say he’s sorry?”

  Sam McAllister laughed, and it was the memory of that sound that brought him to mind, now as many times before, even long after Sam McAllister, as Ed’s mother had said, died of loneliness.

  *

  For a while Ed spent time in the greenhouse trying to continue at least some of Sam McAllister’s propagation work, but the new gardener, a Filipino who smiled a great deal but never laughed aloud the way Sam had laughed, told him, “Go play.”

  Play for Ed now became the realization of a secret ambition, to try to read all the worthwhile books in the world, starting with those that Sam had mentioned. Some were difficult, but he read books about those books, which he bought with money his mother slipped to him for other things. Once he made the mistake of leaving one of the books face down and open on the hallway table where his father glanced through the mail when he came home at night.

  “Jenny,” he shouted to his wife, “have you seen this garbage Edward is reading?”

  Jenny Sturbridge had come in from the living room and said, “He’s trying to find his way. All kids read a lot that doesn’t stick. He gets good grades, that’s what counts.”

  “If he keeps reading junk like this,” his father said, “he’ll turn into a goddamn commie.”

  When she answered him she sometimes ducked her head a little deferentially. But this time her eyes and body were unswerving.
“I think he’s trying to become a decent human being,” she said, then turned to where Ed was standing until Malcolm Sturbridge turned his head and saw his son.

  *

  Ed didn’t know if it was his father’s embarrassment at having been overheard or the fact that his pacemaker had to be replaced and he was in bed for a few days contemplating the possibility of his own death again that resulted in their having a frank talk.

  Malcolm Sturbridge looked lonely propped up on pillows in the big bed, no longer imposing, pale, probably frightened. Ed had come in because his mother had said he ought to at least say hello to his father, but when he saw what his father looked like he sat down on the edge of the bed. Ed expected to be ordered off, told to pull up a chair, but instead his father just nodded as if to declare a truce before saying something he had been saving up.

  “I’m glad you stopped in, Edward,” he said.

  Ed wanted to say to him Will you ever call me Eddie or Ed before you die?

  Malcolm Sturbridge said, “It’s been a very long time since we had a peaceable talk.” He paused for a moment to gather strength, or was it courage? “You’re a very bright young man. I think you inherited your mother’s sharp mind without her passivity about using it. Can you focus on a question I’ve been thinking about?”

  Ed said nothing, waiting.

  “What do you think, Edward, is the chief difference between yourself and me? I’m not talking about physical things. I mean character.”

  “That sounds kind of heavy, Dad,” Ed said.

  “The doctor put no limitations on my thoughts, just on my physical activity. What difference do you see?”

  Once Ed had feared that if he gave his father an answer he didn’t want he’d reach out and slap him. That time had passed.

  “In the world of business,” Ed said, “the end is profit, the impulse greed. If you spend your life in it, I suppose you become part of it.”

  Sturbridge sighed. “I suppose that is intended to characterize me. What about you?”

  “I’m concerned about the people, trying to puzzle out answers we don’t yet know. My feelings,” Ed said, “are with the perpetually powerless.”