“Hypnotized you?”
“The TV people came up with the idea. It’s a new technique, even the cops are using it. Everything registers on the subconscious, see, but you gotta bring it up to the surface. That’s where the hypnotism works. I remembered the face under hypnotism and that’s when they drew the sketch. The artist talked to me while I was under. When I woke up, there was the face. I remembered it then, clear as a bell.”
“What else did you remember?”
“A lot of stuff, it surprised even me. They let me listen to the tape after I came to, and then later on I remembered more stuff, after I came back here. It just popped into my head.”
“Things that happened that day in Berlin just popped into your head after thirty years?”
“Right. Little details, like I was watching the Kraut agent, and I remembered why I shot at him. On the show I couldn’t answer that question. I was going to say Wolkowicz was shooting the shit out of the car, why not me? But that wasn’t it. It was what the Kraut did.”
“What did he do?”
“The son of a bitch signaled the driver of the hit car. I didn’t even realize it at the time, it was only just now, after the hypnotism, that I knew what he was doing.”
“What did he do, exactly?”
“He had this rolled-up newspaper, see?”
Mitchell got to his feet and demonstrated, gesturing.
“This is the newspaper, see? He signaled, jerked up his arm like he was calling a cab. That’s when the hit car headed straight for your father. The newspaper was the signal to kill him.”
— 3 —
When Christopher turned around and she saw his ravaged face, Stephanie said, “Good God, Paul, what is it?”
He hadn’t come into the house on his return to the Harbor. Working by the window in the kitchen, Stephanie had heard the car door slam, and then, through the open sash, she had seen Christopher climbing through the steep pasture. When he hadn’t answered her call, she had followed him up the hillside. There had been something odd, even frightening, about the way he plunged up the mountain, as if he had lost his sight and his hearing.
Stephanie found him in the Hubbard graveyard, staring down at an adder that was sunning itself on Indian Joe’s boulder headstone.
“Why did you come here?” she asked.
“To think,” Christopher said.
Stephanie teased him. “About what? The child? We could conceive it here. The time is right.”
She put a hand against his chest as she spoke to him. His body was rigid and cold. Empty-eyed, he stared at the torpid snake. She realized that he hadn’t heard what she had said to him.
“Paul, what is it?”
“I know what happened,” Christopher said.
“What happened? To you? You mean in China?”
“To me, to my father, to Molly. All of it. I understand it. Jimmy Jo Mitchell lifted his hand, like this, and I understood it.”
Stephanie let her own hand fall. Christopher began to tremble. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists, trying to control the shaking, but he could not make his body obey his will.
Stephanie seized his face with both her hands. She had to reach high to do this and her body pressed against his.
“Paul, don’t try to control it,” she said. “Don’t.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, Steph. Oh, Jesus. I loved them so.”
He began to sob, but no tears came.
“Paul, open your eyes,” Stephanie said.
He obeyed. She had never seen so much intelligence, or so much pain, in anyone’s eyes.
“Now your fists,” she said. “Open your hands.”
Stephanie rubbed her body against his. With her thumbs, she pressed his cheekbones, as if to force the tears to flow. Christopher was still trembling violently.
“How did you know?” Stephanie asked.
“I just saw the connections, the whole thing.”
“What are you feeling, Paul? Tell me.”
He shook his head.
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can. Everyone you love is dead. Are you telling me you know who killed them?”
“Yes.”
“Go on. Tell me more. Who killed them?”
“Fools. They were murdered by fools.”
Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, Christopher broke. He put his arms around Stephanie and crushed her against him. He was enormously strong after his long labors in China. His hands were still as hard as weapons. Stephanie could scarcely breathe. She thought that he might be breaking her bones. She murmured his name. Christopher had no idea that he was hurting her.
“I want to kill them,” he said. “I want them to die. I’ve been so lonely, Steph. First my mother. Then my father, then Molly. Will they let you live? Can a child of mine live in this world? I’m alone, absolutely alone. The loss! Prison was nothing to me. I went in alone and I came out alone. And now that I know, I want to kill a man I’ve always loved. That’s the final aloneness, that will make it complete. I hate them, I didn’t know I could do that, Steph.”
He cried at last.
“Jesus, I’ve been so lonely,” Christopher said. “So fucking lonely. I’m going to make them pay. I’m going to get them for what they’ve done. I am, Steph. I can’t help it.”
“Good,” Stephanie said, as his tears wet both their faces. “Good. Good. Good.”
Eight
— 1 —
“I always thought,” Alice Hubbard said, “that if I were going to take a lover, I would have chosen David Patchen; he’s so utterly intelligent, so utterly sane. Or a woman—Waddy always advised a woman.”
Alice had kept up her friendship with Patchen. After leaving the Harbor, Christopher invited himself to Sunday lunch in New York, and when he arrived, he found Patchen already there, drinking sherry in front of an open fire. Alice amused him. As she chattered, something like a smile brightened his tired face.
“If Waddy was right, maybe I should have seduced the Hubbard abstractionist,” Alice said. “Talk about revenge.”
Soon after her divorce from Elliott Hubbard she had moved to Paris, coming home to New York only after the early death, from cancer, of Emily, Elliott’s second wife, the painter.
“In the end I did nothing—well, almost nothing—because in my heart I believe in telegony. You’re not familiar with the theory of telegony? It holds that an earlier mate will impart his characteristics to the offspring of subsequent ones. The Hubbards breed so true—look at your father and Elliott, Paul, look at Horace and his half brother what’s-his-name. Elliott had his way with me for years. Who knows what little bushwackers he may have left lurking in my unsuspecting body?”
Alice was an old woman with the manners of a madcap debutante. As a girl she had discovered that speaking the truth made people laugh. She still said whatever came into her head.
She lived in the same apartment on Central Park where Paul had visited her after the divorce. Her shrewd eyes, brimming with laughter, still leaped from face to face as she talked. Her skin, as it had aged, had grown leathery, and her hair, cut short, was white, but her gaunt figure, like a model’s, was the same. She wore her jeans and silk shirt as well as Stephanie wore hers.
“I hear you’ve acquired another delicious girl,” Alice said to Christopher. “The Websters’ daughter, is it? That must mean you’re all right after your experience.”
“You know the Websters?” Christopher was surprised.
“We met them on the France, Waddy and I, years ago, a very dreary crossing in February. We were trapped in the salon. The Duke of Windsor was aboard, playing the piano, a little wrinkled man with a little wrinkled wife. It was right after your disappearance. The Websters could talk of nothing else.”
Alice gave Christopher a Perrier with a slice of lemon in the glass and sat on the sofa beside Patchen.
“Now you’re back,” she said to Christopher. “Can you talk about your adventures?
Are you writing a book? That’s what everybody does now; they tell all and make millions.”
“No book,” Christopher said.
“No? Surely David here has pumped you out, he and his spooks? Don’t they want to know every detail, no matter how trivial, no matter how seemingly insignificant?”
“No. They haven’t been interested at all.”
“Really? Is that true, David? I call that odd—very odd.”
She was sitting on Patchen’s blind side, so he had to turn his head all the way around in order to look into her face.
“Paul wasn’t working for us when he went into China, we did nothing to get him out,” he said. “What right would we have to question him?”
“I thought you had a right to do anything you liked. That’s what that man on television, the one who’s after that muzhik who jailed Waddy, says.”
“Patrick Graham.”
“Yes. I thought that program about Hubbard and Lori was awful. Really, David, you should have stopped that. The muzhik is one thing, but Paul’s parents are another. Funny about the muzhik . . .”
“Barney Wolkowicz,” Patchen said.
“Thank you, David. David,” she said to Christopher, “is my namer; he supplies the names I can’t remember. The muzhik was such an ape and still he played the spinet so beautifully, that Christmas at the Harbor in the middle of the war. That was when it all began, wasn’t it? Everyone in uniform, everyone covered in mystery. It had the smell of disaster even then, grown men jumping out of airplanes and swearing secret oaths. Were you there, David?”
“No.”
“When did you join up with the Hubbards?”
“I came with Paul.”
“To Hubbard Christopher’s funeral. Yes. You were shocked by the Hubbard merriment, I remember. The muzhik played that day, too—Bach. Such a delicate touch—tinkle, tinkle. You’d have thought he’d smash the keyboard; he had hands like hams.”
The doorbell rang. Alice rose to answer it, then heard a key in the lock and sat back down.
“Waddy,” she said, comfortably. “He’ll be delighted to see you, Paul, he’s been dying to. I didn’t tell him you’d be here, or David, either; he’s skittish about Outfit people, as well he might be. Waddy lives up in the Berkshires now, you know, eating natural foods and dwelling in a solar house; Waddy’s tremendously in tune with the environment.”
She broke off and smiled at the door through which her brother must come. As he entered, Waddy was puffing a bit. He wore a small orange rucksack and carried a bushel basket full of McIntosh apples. When he saw Patchen, he stopped short and half a dozen apples tumbled out of the basket and rolled over the carpet. Waddy got down on his hands and knees and recovered them, searching under the coffee table.
He polished the apples on his jacket. It was a faded denim jacket, the kind that farmers once wore, but embroidered all over with flowers. He gave one apple to Alice and one to Patchen.
“Straight from my own trees in Ashfield,” he said. “No sprays, no preservatives.” He smiled his boyish smile. Like his sister, Waddy had brought his manners with him from an earlier stage of life. “Unpoisoned apples,” he said.
Still on his knees, he turned around to offer Christopher an apple and, because Christopher was seated with his back to the door, saw his face for the first time.
“My God,” he said. “Paul.”
“Paul wanted to surprise you,” Alice said.
Waddy’s arms dropped helplessly to his sides and he gave his whinnying laugh.
The luncheon menu was the same as it had been twenty years before: cold asparagus in vinaigrette, an omelet, cheese, and a German wine.
This time Waddy did not drink too much Riesling. He had given up alcohol. Also ordinary food; in his rucksack, he had brought his own lunch—millet, bean curd, raw vegetables. He swallowed several vitamin and mineral capsules from a row of bottles that he set out in front of his plate, washing them down with spring water that he had transported from the Berkshires in an antique green jug.
Waddy’s discomfort with Patchen and Christopher did not last long. Soon he was chattering away about himself and his life. Waddy taught a course in political science at an experimental college in Massachusetts, he reviewed books about the witch-hunting era for a magazine for intellectuals, he tilled the soil of his upland farm. Mostly, he traveled from campus to campus, lecturing on his life as a victim of anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s.
“Waddy is a culture hero,” Alice said. “He gets two thousand dollars a talk, plus disciples.”
Waddy patted Alice’s hand and gave a self-mocking smile. “Do you remember the last time we had lunch with Alice?” he asked Christopher. “The sky was falling down. But it didn’t fall after all. Everything really is for the best, Paul, in this best of all possible worlds—or don’t you think so?”
“Maybe not quite everything.”
“No, not absolutely everything, but we’re a couple of jailbirds, you and I, and we know things these innocent folks can’t possibly know, don’t we? Prison does focus the mind wonderfully, didn’t you find?”
“Yes.”
Waddy shot Patchen a keen look. “You should try it, David,” he said. “The way things are going, maybe you will. I know that you know not what you do, you and Horace and all the rest. But my audiences can’t believe that; they’re idealists. They come up to me on campus, these young people, after my lectures, and say, ‘How can you be so forgiving, how can you be so calm?’ They think all you people ought to be hung, like the Nazis at Nuremberg. First we have to win the war, I tell them. Then we’ll try the war criminals.”
“Are you winning the war?” asked Patchen.
“Yes, of course. It’s always been an inch-by-inch proposition. Look at my life. That’s what I tell the kids: look at my life and take heart. History was with me, history is with them. The witch-hunters threw me in jail, they took away my living, they drove me into the wilderness. And here I am, still fighting.”
“Isn’t it admirable?” Alice said. “Even when they turned out to be mass murderers, even when they strangled art, through thick and thin, Waddy stuck by his Russians. No wonder he’s a culture hero.”
“Alice scoffs,” Waddy said, “but I never for a single moment ceased to be a revolutionary.”
“Really?” Alice said. “I thought you were innocent of the charges. That’s what you said when they were hauling you off to prison.”
Waddy’s eyes, twinkling with the wry amusement of a sage who understands all, looked across the table at Christopher.
“Of course I was innocent of the charges against me,” he said. “Paul knows how that is. The more obvious it is that you can’t possibly have committed a crime, the less possible it is for your accusers to believe you. But I’ve found peace, years afterward; I see that there was a purpose, and what the purpose was. You will, too, Paul—that’s why I hoped to see you, to tell you that. You may not see it now. But you will.”
“See?” Alice said. “What will Paul see?”
“The exact nature of the purpose in this insane thing that’s happened to him. He knows there is a purpose. He must; I did. You can’t get through it otherwise. What bothered me was not knowing just what the purpose was—the details. In time, it all comes clear, you see the light. You just wake up and see it, whammo.”
Patchen cleared his throat. Waddy continued to smile round the table. He was now totally bald and this hairlessness, the scrubbed glossy scalp above the wide blue eyes, intensified his look of childish eagerness.
Patchen coughed. Alice poured more wine and tapped his glass, instructing him to drink and cure this trouble in his throat.
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Patchen said to Waddy. “You mean you were literally innocent of the crimes you went to jail for?”
“Of course I was,” Waddy said. “How can you, of all people, ask such a question, David? I mean, you’re Director of the Outfit, aren’t you?”
“I still don’t follow.�
�
“No?” Waddy said. “It was all such a joke. What was the charge against me? That I’d committed espionage as a member of Mordecai Bashian’s spy ring. What was the evidence? Bashian said from the start he didn’t even know me. Nobody in the Addressees Spy Ring knew me. Naturally they’d say that, correct? Communists lie.”
Waddy turned to Christopher again. “Did the Chinese ever believe you when you told the truth?”
“In the end, they said they did.”
“Did you believe them when they said they believed you?”
“No.”
“Voilà. Mordecai Bashian used to dog my footsteps in prison. ‘Why?’ he would ask. ‘What diabolical purpose do the capitalists have?’ He thought I was an FBI spy, that my conviction was all a trick, that I was in jail to weasel into his confidence. He actually spread that story. For a while, I lost all my friends in and out of prison. Only Elliott never believed it. Elliott was one of you. If he didn’t believe it, how could you believe it? How could anyone believe it?”
“Believe that you were a Communist spy?” Patchen said. “Why would that have been so hard to believe? There was your background, there were witnesses.”
Waddy held up a forefinger. “One witness,” he said. “The slave of love. Jocelyn Frick. She testified that I had had sex with her. She wept on the stand, describing an unnatural act she performed upon me. I’ve never had sex with a woman in my life.”
Alice burst into laughter. “It reminds me of the France,” she said. “Paul, you must ask your Stephanie about the France and Waddy.”
A puzzled look came over Waddy’s face.
“The velvet suit, the German woman, the brig,” Alice reminded him.
Waddy laughed at himself. “The velvet suit,” he said. “I’d forgotten.”
Alice gave Waddy a broad smile; they knew a joke the others didn’t know. Christopher began to ask a question. Alice shushed him.
“No,” she said, “we can’t tell, it would be wrong. You must ask the Webster girl. Go on, Waddy.”
“I just couldn’t understand it at first,” Waddy said. “When I found out that Wolkowicz was involved, I thought it was a personal vendetta. He’s hated me ever since Burma.”
The Last Supper Page 37
