A Family Trust

by Ward Just

  “It is not Noah’s decision. I am editor of that book and the decision, if any is mine.”

  “Dana, I didn’t mean—”

  “Talked to Noah?” She paused and shook her head, as if coming awake from sleep. “And what did Noah say?”

  “He agreed, of course.”

  “Agreed not to publish.”

  “Certainly. Noah’s an experienced man. He understood the problem, Actually, he told Sweeney he didn’t want to know the details. Would rather not know them. Not that Sweeney would have given him any Noah’s a stand-up guy, he was grateful to be warned. Christ, nobody wants to make a mistake like that—”

  “No,” she said.

  “We’re all Americans,” he said.

  She looked at him incredulously. “I want to understand this in the simplest terms. Your Sweeney went to Noah. He asked Noah not to publish because it would harm American ... interests.”

  “American security,” McGee said.

  “And Noah agreed. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers under his chin. “He didn’t ask to see the evidence. Didn’t ask questions. Didn’t cross-check. Didn’t probe. Just listened to Sweeney and said yes. Is that right?”

  “That’s essentially correct,” McGree said. He was going to add that Sweeney had offered a generous settlement, to defray expenses. And Noah had turned him down, saying it wasn’t necessary. Noah said he was happy to cooperate, one gentleman to another but there was no reason to tell Dana, so McGree remained silent.

  She said, “Incredible.”

  “Of course Sweeney told him that I was in full agreement. Noah knew that we knew what we were talking about. We are the authorities in. this area, not him. The point is this. Sweeney has no reason to lie. No more reason than I do. What’s the percentage there? It’s genuine, a true bill. My God, why would I want to sabotage my own book? As for Noah, it was a fine, public-spirited decision—”

  “You mean, he was happy to get rid of it.”

  “No,” McGee lied.

  “And you? Are you happy?”

  “Happy and sad both. Happy to’ve done the right thing; sad to’ve lost the book. I hate losing the book because the book brought us together. That’s more important than a book or any other single thing. Dana, you know I’m a professional—”

  She wondered, a professional what? “Well, in that case—”

  “But it’s a decision that has already been made.” He touched the owl on her lapel and smiled.

  She turned away, feeling physically sick. Behind them the man in shirtsleeves began to sing the Billie Holliday song. He was off-key and someone hissed. Noise rose around them; loud voices mixed with the singing. Someone proposed a toast to Billie Holliday, dead in the service of her race; martyred Billie. A fat man stood on a table and began to speak but the words made no sense. She leaned toward McGee, her next words were lost in the din. “... love me?” He bent forward to hear. The bartender moved professionally to fill the empty mugs. Behind them the woman in the mackintosh began to cry again, little tears sliding down her cheeks. McGee said, “... adore you.” Another toast, and more applause. The fat man quoted a line from The White Negro, identifying author and page, A glass smashed and the bartender looked up, angry. McGee turned and shook his head, irritated by the noise and violence. The door flew open and a party of four arrived, the men in black tie and the women in gowns. The women were clutching sequined handbags. Someone hooted and the four beat a retreat, backing out the door, one of the men already looking for a cab that would return them uptown. Dana stared into the mug of ale and began softly to cry The man began to sing again, still off-key. Someone yelled Shut up! to renewed applause. Dana remembered Billie Holliday, her suicidal voice and its heartbreaking rhythm. The bartender raised his arms and shouted. The noise fell. McGee said, “Hey.” She was standing half turned away from him, angry at her emotions. Now she came around and focused on his face, blurred through her tears; his hair had fallen down over his forehead and he looked stricken. But when he put out his hands she danced back from the bar.

  She said, “Didn’t you feel anything?”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, believe that.”

  “Did it break your heart?”

  “Yes,” he lied. He would have given anything if it had broken his heart, but the truth was it hadn’t. He had had misgivings and the misgiving had been prove correct.

  “It’s broken my heart.”

  “Sweetheart, don’t.” Those close by were beginning to look at them.

  “Why not?” She took a long drink of ale. “Why not?”

  “It wasn’t the greatest book in the world, really”

  Oh, she thought, starting to cry again. Oh, that isn’t the point. She said, “It was to me. How could you not’ve told me? How could you not tell me?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said.

  “But you said, ‘not unexpected.’ You said that you’d expected them, Sweeney and the other one.”

  “I tried not to think about it,” he said. Then, smiling: “I fell in love with my editor. Please,” he said. “Don’t cry.” Others were beginning to definitely notice them now, and had pulled away from their place at the bar.

  “It deserved life,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said soothingly.

  “You should’ve told me, a hint, just a hint to let me know that something like this—”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You let me down,” she said, “and you didn’t have to.”

  He moved closer to her and put his arm around her shoulder. Half a dozen people were listening to them. “I didn’t know it in that way,” he said lamely.

  “It wasn’t serious to you,” she said.

  “Sweetheart,” he began. Then he looked at the bartender and said, “Double Scotch. And another ale.”

  “Sweeney,” she said. “Apeneck Sweeney.” Then, “What was the name of the other one?”

  He said, “Johnson.”

  “Mister Johnson,” she said. “Apeneck Sweeney and Mister Johnson, the gentlemen from national security. How nice to meet you. What can we do for you today? What books can we burn? Any facts we can suppress for you? What—why are you smiling?”

  He shook his head in amusement, rubbing his finger along the side of his nose. “Well, you’ve come closer than you know. Everyone calls Sweeney ‘Neck.’” He took a long swallow of Scotch.

  “And Johnson? What do they call Mister Johnson?”

  “Johnny,” he said.

  “Is that his real name?”

  McGee looked at her. “No,” he said.

  She was staring into the mirror at the back of the bar, looking at her reflection and his: a young woman in a raincoat, a thin man in a gray suit. Both of them good-looking; they would be admired anywhere they went. What a good-looking couple. They were no longer being overheard; the place was quiet now, and conversation muted. Then she saw a middle-aged man at the opposite end of the bar, where it curved. The face was familiar to her but she could not place it. He stood ramrod straight, a military posture, a man with a lean face and hooded eyes and tight mouth. Dana tried to picture him in a uniform of some kind. She had seen his face in a hundred newspaper photographs, but still no name came to her.

  “... go to bed,” he was saying.

  “What?” She looked at him apologetically. All the emotion had gone out of her.

  “Let’s go home,” he said gently.

  “All right.”

  He drained the glass. “What can I say? I’m afraid you’re involved with a man who has a past, and not a very satisfactory past.”

  She had stopped crying. It was over for the moment. It was over until she could think about it alone, and then it would start again. The information had come to her too quickly. She said, “I know.”

  “I’ll make you scrambled eggs at home.”

  “You will? I’d like that.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t have any eggs.”

  “There’s an all-night deli—
” She laughed suddenly and looked away. Apeneck Sweeney. What was she involved with, an advanced class in Amer. Lit.? No, it was not that. The middle-aged man was staring at her.

  He said, “Eggs and some beer.”

  “Okey-doke.”

  He said, “I love you,” meaning it.

  She said, “Me, too.”

  They prepared to leave. There were only a few people remaining in the White Horse Tavern. She felt drained and heavy, and her eyes ached. She knew her eyes were red. The bartender scooped up the money and wished them a nice night. McGee nodded curtly. When they were at the door, Dana stopped to button her raincoat. She said, “Look around casually. You’ll see a man at the end of the bar. I’ve been trying to place him but I can’t. Who is he?”

  McGee snorted. “I wondered if you’d notice him, and remember the face.”

  “Who is he?”

  “That’s Alger Hiss,” McGee said.

  Dana snapped around, facing the mirror again. Alger Hiss was chatting with the bartender. She started to giggle. Face to face with the Antichrist. How many times had his name been taken in vain over the dinner table in Dement? The symbol of Roosevelt’s misrule, the triumph of the Ivy League and the Socialist rich. The East. She sighed and finished buttoning her coat and they moved out of the White Horse and into the street. McGee was silent and his face was dark. She turned back to look through the window. It was like staring at a television set with the sound off. The place seemed to vibrate but no noise was heard in the street. The bartender was fussing with the cash register and talking to a new arrival, doubtless a regular. The windows were steamed and the atmosphere inside was thick with tobacco. She leaned against McGee and he took her and held her a long moment. He tucked her head into his shoulder and they leaned against the window, cheek to cheek in the darkness. She could hear traffic on Fifth Avenue, an automobile horn and the whine of an ambulance. A man and a woman walked quickly by, giving them a wide berth. She took out a cigarette and lit it and gave it to him, and saw that he was trembling. They shared the cigarette walking down the dark street toward Fifth Avenue. She didn’t see the man in the doorway, only glimpsed his arm as he reached out of the darkness to seize her shoulder. Suddenly McGee grabbed her and thrust her roughly aside and with a growl turned toward the man in the doorway. He’d hurt her when he grabbed her and she cried out, staggering to the curb. But McGee wasn’t looking at her at all, he was shuffling into the doorway. She saw him hit the other one once in the stomach and once in the face. The man in the doorway tried to run but McGee had him trapped. He was small and had his hands up, trying to protect himself. McGee hit him a third time and a fourth, heavy, graceless blows. Then he began to slap him as hard as he could. The man in the doorway was doubled over now, both men were panting. McGee grunted each time he hit him. McGee wouldn’t stop. She could see blood on the other one’s face. He tried to get out of the doorway but McGee blocked him. She hadn’t said anything but stood on the curb in horror and astonishment. Then she rushed to McGee and put her hands on his back, pulling at his gray suit. No, she said; no. The other one was on his knees now, defenseless; he flailed at McGee once or twice but the blows didn’t land. McGee was crouched now, hitting him at will. He turned around then, facing her, his hands up. His eyes were blazing and for a moment she thought he would hit her. Then, as quickly, his hands were down and she was in his arms. No, she said again, and began to pull him away. They looked back at the man in the doorway, conscious and beginning to rise. McGee turned toward him, but she pulled his arm. No, she said. It’s enough. He stood there a moment, bewildered. Across the street half a dozen people watched silently. Come on, she said. And they began to run up the street, turning left there. They ran down the alley and onto another narrow street. They ran for five minutes until they came out on Fifth Avenue, out of breath and sweating. They paused in front of a store window and he looked at himself in the glass, buttoning his coat and straightening his tie, and brushing his hair back. “... incredibly stupid,” he muttered. She was silent, watching him in the glass. Finally he turned toward her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “I’m sorry.” Then, “I can’t imagine what was in my mind, where I thought I was—”

  She whispered, “What?’

  He appeared not to hear her. His head was bent forward, staring at the sparkling sidewalk. He shook his head again. “Impossible.”

  She pressed his arm. “What?”

  “I saw that guy—” He shrugged. “I boxed in college,” he said apologetically. “All that talk in the White Horse. Explanations, excuses. I hated doing that to you.” He shrugged helplessly. “Let’s forget it.” So they began to walk up Fifth Avenue, bound for her apartment. They walked slowly, in step, touching shoulders. She hooked her arm through his and they moved loosely through the midnight crowds of the upper Village, then out of the lights and the people until they were alone again on the broad avenue.

  “The whole business,” he said without preamble. “I’m an adult, not unfamiliar with the government. I can’t imagine what was in my mind, why I didn’t submit it through the ordinary channels. There are procedures for that, always have been.”

  “Will you tell me,” she said softly. “What you did over there.”

  He said, “I did double duty. Don’t ask.”

  “You wore a cloak and carried a dagger.”

  “Sometimes I wore a cloak.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And sometimes I didn’t.”

  “I like thinking of you in a cloak,” she said. She thought she would try to pry it out of him. He’d refused to talk about it before and this was the first flat answer she’d had. The truth was, she had no idea what he’d done. He had a double life and one part of it was concealed. He’d done double duty in the cold war. It did seem to her the slightest bit—tempting, just that. She knew no details, though she had guessed at a few, not knowing if she was right or wrong.

  “The truth is.” His voice and manner were serious now; he was the familiar McGee. “It seemed to me quite mild, what I wrote. When I apologized to them and told them that, they agreed with me. It was quite mild and unexceptional, unless you knew the full picture. Then it wasn’t mild at all, it was dynamite. I didn’t know the full picture. Still don’t. They understand that, there are no hard feelings.” He paused, thinking. In darkness now, surrounded by small gray buildings with signs in Hebrew and Slavic, he took her hand and squeezed it, reminded suddenly of evenings in Belgrade. There was a particular café overlooking the Sava, with a Turkish ruin nearby. He and Caull sometimes met there for a beer in the evenings. He usually had an escort and so did Caull, and of course both of them were normally followed by someone, Yugoslav or Soviet or German. He and Caull always took a table near the sidewalk and in ten minutes half a dozen men were in the café, all of them reading newspapers or having their shoes shined or otherwise appearing conspicuously inconspicuous. He and Caull didn’t talk much, except to notice a girl from time to time. At that time, the end of his tour, he was fearfully depressed and drinking too much and there didn’t seem to be anything of value to say, to Caull or to anyone else.

  She said, “It must have been. All of it. Very difficult.”

  He smiled. “Sorry, nothing very spooky. I was a rather high-level courier, nothing much more than that. A mailman.” He lowered his voice and shortened his stride to match hers. “I’ll tell you something.” His voice was so low she could barely hear it. “I spent three years on and off in the bloc. I’d never met people like that before. I mean the people I was working with. We’re isolated in America, we don’t understand what’s happening elsewhere. The rest of the world is a mystery to us, and I suppose it’s just as well; we don’t solve mysteries very well. We are not, as a people, deft.” He said, “That’s why I wrote what I did, to lift the curtain a little and let light in. Do you know how Trot-sky described Europe? ‘A system of cages in a provincial zoo.’ Our ass
ets in Europe ...” He paused to smile. “Sorry, that’s jargon. I mean the people I dealt with. I didn’t know there existed men and women with that order of—courage. Intelligence and sensitivity and raw passion. A passion for freedom, the things others have without thinking about them; freedom to love. They were patriots and spent their lives underground, as patriots have to do ...” He shook his head, walking faster now; it was difficult for Dana to keep up. “All of it by inches. They didn’t want utopia, knowing in a fatalistic way that there wasn’t any; they just wanted to loosen the chains. They saw themselves living in a cage within a cage and they were right. So they fought like hell, struggled, risked everything—wives, families, husbands, children—themselves. Many of them died. Died. They wanted it so much they’d die for it. And we helped them die. Dana, you have to see them, their faces. Touch them. You need to talk to them personally, or watch them die yoursetf.” He knew then that he had gone too far and fell silent. Then, “I would do nothing to jeopardize those people. They live in permanent jeopardy anyway. That’s why Sweeney just had to nudge me a little. He and the ... other one had only to say, ‘Don’t do it.’ They knew that was all they had to do. God damn us.”

  She nodded. “I understand.”

  “Please,” he said, tears in his eyes.

  He was close to her; she could feel his hot whiskey breath. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

  He put his arm around her shoulder. “Dana.” Then, after a moment: “It isn’t the Europe you read about in the brochures.”

  “Darling McGee.” They halted in a doorway and kissed in the shadows for a long moment. She pressed against him, her hands on his chest, kissing his neck, his cheeks, his eyes. His eyes were wet and his face grim.

  “Home,” she whispered.

  “Gets to me sometimes.”

  She said, “I’m glad you told me.”

  “I hate it.” He stood with his hands plunged into his coat pockets, desolate now. “It’s so damned sad.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “We let them down. That’s what we did. We put them up there on tiptoe.” His voice was metallic, his body rigid. “We put them up there on tiptoe and then we didn’t kiss them. We kicked them in the balls instead.”