The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  She was beautiful. Her blond hair was wavy and unruly; crinkly golden waves sprouted from the part at the middle of her head and just touched her shoulders. Her eyes, which were a spectacular hazel-blue, were spaced a little too far apart, beneath a prominent arched brow. Her jaw was strong and jutted a little, especially when she looked at you skeptically, which was often. When she smiled, which was just as often, long deep dimples emerged in brackets around her mouth. When she sat in the sun, her strong nose freckled.

  She w as in the dining hall, reading a book on Winthrop Lehman. Charlie could not resist interrupting her—w ith all the subtlet}’ he could

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 35

  summon—“I wouldn’t put much stock in that biography. I know the guy, and he’s far nicer than that writer makes him out to be.” A cheap line, a cheap tactic, and it didn’t work. She looked at him blandly and replied, “That’s interesting,” and went back to reading.

  “No, really,” Stone persisted. “He’s my godfather.”

  “Hmm,” she said, politely disbelieving, not bothering to look up this time.

  “Are you writing something on him?”

  She looked up again and smiled. “A political-science paper. I’d rather not hear anything personal about him. I’m writing a critique.”

  “What’s your angle?”

  “I think his reputation is overblown. I don’t think he’s a great man at all. I think he was a perfectly ordinary diplomat and wheeler-dealer who happened to have a lot of family money and be in the right place at the right time.” She flashed a smile; there was a space between her front teeth. With impeccable timing, she added, “So you say he’s your godfather?”

  A few days later, he managed to talk her into going out for pizza. She arrived in her Yale sweats, thereby wordlessly declaring that it was not really a date, just a study break. They bantered, argued. Each of Stone’s confident proclamations she met with an equal and opposite response, as if deliberately trying to provoke—and then she’d soften it all with a wonderful, heart-melting, endearing demi-smile.

  Stone, nervous, found his heart racing. He chipped away at the foil label on the cold wet beer bottle with his thumbnail. He was fixating on, of all things, her complexion, which was milky-white with permanently blushing cheeks, the healthy flush most people get walking outside on a frozen winter day, only she had it all the time.

  He walked her to the Gothic archway outside her dorm room, and they stood for a long moment, awkwardly. “Well,” he said, “good night.”

  Suddenly she seemed as awkward as he, one long leg turned in front of the other in an unconscious ballerina’s stance. Once again the vulnerable little girl. “Good night,” she said, not moving.

  “Thanks,” Stone said.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  36 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  His heart now hammering, Stone asked, “Can I see your room?” and immediately felt foolish.

  “My room?” Her eyes wide.

  Stone gave an exaggerated shrug, a goofy smile. He couldn’t stand to leave her.

  She took a deep breath, and Stone was startled to see her smile shyly and say in a small, hopeful, knowing voice: “Really?”

  And then Stone was in over his head. In a haze of anticipation and amorousness, he leaned forward and kissed her. It took a few seconds, but she kissed back, with a passion that surprised and delighted him.

  Every other college student listened to Jefferson Airplane or Strawberry Alarm Clock, but Charlotte put on a scratchy old Bessie Smith record, and they danced in the darkness of her cramped bedroom to the insinuating lyrics of “I Need a Little Sugar.”

  They made love several times that night. She craned her soft white neck, twisting her head from side to side, eyes closed, back arched. Her lovely florid cheeks glistened with tears and triumph and sweat, and when she began to come she looked right at him, the first time during their lovemaking that she had had the courage to open her eyes, and right then, at the most intimate moment.

  Afterward, in the first months, they made love constandy, it seemed, obsessively. They were inseparable; they lost touch with their friends. In the mornings, they would wake up late, too late for breakfast in the dining hall, and they’d lie nude on her narrow bed and drink instant coffee made in an aluminum hot-pot, scrape butter on English muffins unevenly toasted in the toaster oven she kept under her bed, and make love again.

  They spent almost all their time in her dorm room, always in sweatpants, which could drop to the floor with a simple tug of the waist cord. Underneath, Charlotte’s blond triangle was always moist, excited by just his glance.

  Stone studied her, majored in Charlotte Harper, intent on learning everything about her. He discovered that she was from a small town in Pennsylvania near Iron City, and both her parents worked in a plastics factory. They were second-generation Poles; “Harper” had been changed from something much longer and unpronounceable.

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  They weren’t poor, but they were always strugghng, and they didn’t understand their daughter Charlotte, who insisted on going to college, when her older sister, Martha, was perfecdy content to go right to work after high school in the Department of Motor Vehicles, where she met her husband and immediately produced three children. Charlotte had gone to the University of Pittsburgh but then decided in her sophomore year that she wanted to study history. All the professors she hoped to work with were at Yale, and so she transferred.

  He couldn’t stand the idea of being away from her. Even the similarity of their names seemed a happy coincidence, a good omen— although she demanded he never call her Charlie.

  She was one of the kindest, yet most fiercely independent people Stone had ever met. When he nervously took her to New York to have lunch with Winthrop Lehman at the Century Club—in effect, introducing to his godfather his girlfriend and the woman he planned to marry—she got into an argument with the living legend about American foreign policy—and then later told Charlie that she actually liked the old fart. Lehman, it was clear, was charmed by this lovely, feisty woman. As they left the club, Lehman took her hand and planted a dry, mandarin kiss upon her cheek, something Stone had never seen him do to anyone else.

  At graduation, her parents met Charlie’s father. There were long silences at lunch. Her parents, simple people, were intimidated by this Harvard professor. But Charlotte had a way of drawing people into exuberant conversation, making them connect. She took to Alfred Stone instantly, and after maybe half an hour they were laughing and telling jokes, and Charlie sat there watching, amazed. Sometimes Stone felt that Charlotte’s magnetism was like the pull of a planet whose gravity is a hundred times ours.

  Leaving the restaurant, Alfred Stone put his arm around his son’s shoulder and muttered, “You’d better marry this girl before someone else does.”

  The next night. Stone asked her to marry him. She looked at him with that same you-can’t-possibly-mean-me, little-girl look Stone had first seen under that Gothic archway near her room, and said, “Really?”

  38 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  They were married three months later, and for years, almost until the very end, neither one could imagine ever being without the other.

  Now, as Stone packed a small overnight bag, he found that he could not help thinking of what Saul had told him the day before. He thought about the Alfred Stone affair, and he wondered how something so long past could have anything to do with what was now happening in Moscow. He walked over to the stereo and switched on the radio, which was set to his favorite FM classical station.

  A piece by Mendelssohn—the Italian Symphony—was just ending, and then the portentous, gravelly voice of the announcer came on, giving an interminable synopsis of Mendelssohn’s life, then continuing, in annoying detail, about Mendelssohn’s E-flat Octet and how it prefigured the classical themes he would later develop, and how restrained his romanticism was, and how—

  Stone snapped the radio off. He zipped up his suitca
se and ambled over to the tall windows that looked out onto Central Park West. He watched a young woman walk by with a foolishly manicured poodle, then a couple with matching hooded college sweatshirts. He could not stop thinking about the Alfred Stone affair, and he realized suddenly that he dreaded going to Boston.

  Alfred C. Stone, professor emeritus of history at Harvard, lived in a comfortable three-story clapboard house on Hilliard Street in Cambridge. It was the house Charlie had grown up in, and he knew all the odd corners, the places where the floorboards creaked, the doorknobs that didn’t quite turn. And the smells: lemon-oil furniture polish, wood fires, the not unpleasant mustiness of a hundred-year-old house.

  The house was in a part of Cambridge where academics lived next to old money, where you never flaunted your wealth and you drove dented old Volvos and Saabs and wood-sided station wagons. The neighborhood was at once proper and Cambridge-informal, far enough from the punks and the riffraff of Harvard Square, but close enough so you could walk in and go to the right bank and shop at the

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 39

  right grocery store and maybe pick up an unstylish shirt at the Andover Shop.

  Alfred Stone was seated behind his desk in his study, wearing his customary tweed suit, when Charlie arrived. He had been retired for four years, but he always wore a suit, as if he might suddenly be called upon at any moment to teach an emergency class on the New Deal and the Roots of Postwar Liberalism or some such thing.

  He had been a handsome man, before his arrest and imprisonment had turned his life upside down, before he had begun to drink too much. His auburn hair was mostly gray now, and his cheeks were webbed with the fine broken capillaries of a heavy drinker. His hornrimmed glasses, habitually smudged, had carved deep red ridges on either side of the bridge of his nose.

  Beside the desk, in a loose heap on the floor, was Alfred Stone’s labrador retriever, Peary. Charlie had found him in the pound and given him to his father as a birthday present two years before. Peary sleepily raised his head, acknowledging Charlie’s presence with a slow wag of his tail.

  “I think he has a real soul,” Alfred Stone said. “I’m convinced of it. Look in his eyes, Charlie.”

  Charlie looked. Peary returned the look quizzically, gave another wag, exhaled noisily, and sank slowly to the rug.

  “He’s a good influence on you,” Charlie told his father. “Why ‘Peary,’ by the way? I never asked.”

  “This dog just loves being outside. So I named him after the polar explorer Robert Peary.”

  “Peary’s a great name.”

  “You know you’re putting on a little weight?”

  “Just a little.” Charlie instinctually pinched his waist. “Too much sitting in front of the computer, and not enough climbing.”

  “Maybe that’s it. Also, you quit smoking. Drink?” Alfred Stone got up from his desk and walked over to a small bar he’d arranged on top of a glass-fronted bookcase. He lifted a two-liter bottle of cheap Scotch, the liquor of a serious drinker, and turned to Charlie questioningly.

  40 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “Not in the afternoon, Dad.”

  “Don’t get moralistic on me.”

  “I’m not,” Stone said, although he knew he was doing precisely that. “Alcohol fogs my brain in the afternoon.” He added archly: “I need a clear head to fathom matters of national security.”

  “Well, I don’t,” the elder Stone muttered, pouring his drink. “Lord knows, nobody’s asked me to do that in almost forty years. Anything interesting these days?”

  Stone knew that his father rarely asked about Parnassus, respecting the super-secrecy, and when he did he expected his son not to answer. Charlie replied with a rumor that was all over Moscow and therefore not at all secret. “I think one of the Politburo members has got a bad heart.”

  Alfred Stone returned to his desk chair and leaned back slowly. “They’ve all got bad hearts.”

  Charlie grunted as he sank into a leather club chair. He liked the light in his father’s study at this time of day. The sun came in at a slant, casting a warm hue over the highly polished hardwood floor, the ancient Oriental rugs, the brown tufted leather couch, its surface scarred by hairline cracks, where Alfred Stone took his naps.

  And the floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases, painted white. The shelves of history books that revealed Alfred Stone’s interests: Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Churchill’s history of English-speaking peoples, Acheson’s Present at the Creation, Truman’s memoirs. The Secret Diary of Harold L. lakes, Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.

  The walls were cluttered with framed pictures: a black-framed photograph of the young Alfred Stone, beaming with excitement, with Harry Truman (and autographed “with fond regards”); a photo of Alfred and Margaret Stone with Winthrop Lehman, taken at some formal dinner; a silver-framed picture of Margaret Stone, her hair done up in large Mamie Eisenhower curls, smiling knowingly.

  “What?” Alfred Stone asked.

  Charlie realized that he had muttered something aloud. The sunlight had shifted now, and it was shining directly in his eyes.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 41

  “Nothing,” Charlie said hastily, turning his head. “Listen, when was the last time you saw Winthrop?”

  “Winthrop? Oh, it’s been years. I know he’s having some party in a couple of days, a publication party for his memoirs or something. I was invited. Weren’t you?”

  Stone remembered the invitation, which he’d filed away, planning not to go because he expected to be up in the Adirondacks. “Yes, I was, come to think of it. Are you going?”

  “Probably some very high-toned affair. No, I don’t especially want to, but I wish you would.”

  “Maybe I will. I …” He shifted again, then moved the armchair, putting a ripple in the carpet as he did so. “There’s something I want to ask Winthrop about, actually.”

  His father was still leaning back absently in his chair. “Aha.”

  “I ran across something that I think has to do with, you know, with what happened to you. The McCarthy stuff and all that.”

  “Oh?” His father involuntarily hunched his shoulders. A nervous tic began in his eyes, the old tic, which afflicted him whenever he was tense.

  “I know you don’t like digging all this up. I realize that. But did you ever hear the phrase ‘Lenin Testament’?”

  Alfred Stone stared at his son a beat too long, his face frozen, except for the old tic in his left eye, which was now wildly out of control. His reply, when it came out, was hushed: “What?”

  “You’ve heard of it, then.”

  The elder Stone removed his glasses and massaged his eyes. After a while, he spoke again, this time much more nonchalantly. “You’re the Russia expert. Didn’t Lenin leave some sort of testament behind, criticizing Stalin and so on?”

  “Not that. Some other ‘testament.’ It came up at the McCarthy hearings, didn’t it? Didn’t McCarthy mention something about it?”

  Alfred Stone spread his hands, palms up, a dismissive gesture that said, I don’t remember. He replaced his glasses, got up, and went over to the bar. “I got a card from your wife,” he said, pouring some Scotch, straight, into a crystal tumbler.

  “Dad …”

  42 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “She said she’s coming back to the States on leave, sometime around now.”

  He was transparently avoiding the subject, but Charlie knew that his father had always liked Charlotte, that they had always been close, and he replied: “I don’t think she likes Moscow too much. Dad.”

  “I trust she’s having a better time of it than I did there.” He spoke gendy now: “You want her back, don’t you? But you’re too much of a man to admit it, is that right?”

  “I can’t be very specific about why I want to know, but it’s important. Please.”

  “Charlie, I’m not interested,” Alfred Stone said, hi
s voice betraying his alarm.

  “There was some state secret involved, wasn’t there?”

  Alfred Stone shook his head, his eyes wide and glistening. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said angrily.

  “Would you mind if I asked Winthrop?”

  “Don’t, Charlie,” Alfred said too sharply. Peary, startled, looked up and barked once, warningly.

  “Why not?”

  “Please, just do me a favor. I don’t want you reminding him of that whole nightmare.”

  “I very much doubt he’d mind. He and I’ve talked plent' of times about his role in history, his meeting with Lenin, that kind of thing. I doubt he’d—”

  “Charlie, I don’t know how much he stuck his neck out for me in those days. More than anyone knows, I suspect. I don’t know what he had to lie about to save my skin. Please, don’t ask him.” He leaned over and began massaging the loose skin at Peary’s nape. Peary uttered a low, throaty growl of contentment. “There’s a lot I’ve never told you about—this whole thing. About Winthrop, and my situation.” He looked up. Charlie had never seen him so shaken. “I realize you want to … I suppose ‘vindicate’ is the apt word … vindicate me, but I really don’t want you opening that can of worms again. I mean, it— means a lot to me. Genuinely.”

  “What do you mean by ‘can of worms’? You’ve seen a reference to this testament, haven’t you?”

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  After a long pause, Alfred Stone replied, “Yes. Yes, I have.” He didn’t look up as he continued to speak. “Winthrop asked me to go through his personal files at the White House one day for some reason, I forget what. We all had central files and personal files, and these were the personal ones, the ones you can take with you when your White House service is over.”