An Imperfect Spy

by Amanda Cross

  “I’m interested in the question you asked Ted,” he said. “About Jane Eyre. Why is the last word in the book the name of Jesus? Jane hated the hypocrisy of religion, and when she needed divine guidance, it was a woman god, the moon, who spoke to her. So why end with Jesus?”

  “Do you have an explanation?” Kate asked.

  “Well, I think it was a cop-out. She was scared she was writing too revolutionary a book, so she dragged Jesus in at the end. I don’t exactly blame her, considering it was 1847, but I’m sorry she did it.”

  “You could well be right,” Kate said. “I haven’t an answer that I’m satisfied with for more than a week at a time. But that last paragraph does begin with a reference to St. John, whom Jane refused to join in a celibate marriage. She gave up religion for a relationship that allowed her her sexuality. But perhaps, having now got the sexuality, she was ready to reconsider religion?”

  The young man laughed. “I still think it was a cop-out,” he said.

  “Okay,” Kate said. “I still think you may be right.”

  On her way upstairs to Blair’s office and her belongings—he had stayed behind to consult with a student—Kate was waylaid by Harriet. “How did it go at the prison?” she asked.

  “Better than I might have hoped,” Kate said. “She was grateful for the cigarettes. She might even decide to open her case with Reed’s help. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m interested in everything, like Walt Whitman,” Harriet said. “Actually, I stopped you to say that I think we ought to have a meeting.”

  “We are having a meeting. Do you prefer to sit down, or retreat to the women’s room as usual?”

  “No, you clown, a meeting of all of us—you, me, Reed, Blair, and Reed’s assistant at the clinic. Just to make sure we’re all together on this, that we all know what’s going on.”

  Kate looked surprised, or perhaps dubious.

  “What I really want is some more of that malt scotch,” Harriet said, “and this seemed like a good way to get it. Humor me. Ask us all for a drink today.”

  “All right,” Kate said, “I’ll try. I’ll call Reed first and ask about him and Bobby, then I’ll ask Blair, and then, if all goes well, I’ll swoop you up and take you home and force single-malt scotch down your throat.”

  “You are an admirable woman, I’ve always said so,” Harriet announced. “I await your swoop.”

  Reed was, as it happened, agreeable to meet them at home for a drink, and he promised to bring Bobby. Blair was always ready for a social occasion—so Kate had discovered—and swooping up Harriet having already been arranged for, they all arrived at the apartment at about the same time. Kate went for the single-malt scotch, which everyone except Bobby, who didn’t drink, had agreed on—Kate actually, to her delight and surprise, managed to dig up a bottle of ginger ale for Bobby—and they all settled down to exchange stories.

  “I take it Kate has told you about our fisticuffs and verbal onslaughts,” Blair said to Reed. “Any idea that Schuyler Law might be a dull place has been banished, largely thanks to Kate, I do believe.”

  “It can’t be due to me,” Kate said. “I’ve lived a life amazingly devoid of physical exertion, if you don’t count walking. People don’t actually hit people in English departments, not at least in my presence. They take out their aggressions in squash games with their friends, and they simply ignore their enemies, or mouth sweet insincere nothings if they have to talk to them.”

  “And which group are you in?” Harriet asked, with a certain edge to the query.

  “Oh, me for the meaningless sweet nothings,” Kate said, unperturbed. “You’d be surprised all the same at how long it took me to figure out that promises meant nothing. But I was always allowed to do my own thing, so to speak. I mean, nobody intruded into the classroom or told me what I had to teach, or how I ought to teach it.”

  “I know what it’s like,” Reed surprisingly said. “That’s why I left the DA’s office. I started there soon after law school, when Hogan was still district attorney. He knew how to run the office. His assistant district attorneys were trained, they were supervised, their court appearances were watched and discussed afterward, it was a tight ship. Hogan quit as DA in 1973—he died in 1974—and I stayed on for a while. I tried to act as we all did under his leadership, but the place had gone sloppy, it became a stepping-stone for ambitious young politicos. It took a while to fall apart, but the young attorneys just counted on the police evidence, they didn’t really prepare their cases, they didn’t even always follow changes in the law. It got to be depressing. We had evolved from automatically hiring white males to hiring minority men and women both white and black, but there wasn’t any discipline anymore, no real caring for the job. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that things were getting a lot worse, not better, and then I left. I went on to the academic world, which I have to admit is a much less demanding job, even if you do it properly. Or, I should say, it was less demanding, until this particular adventure came along. Oddly enough, the law professors at Schuyler Law remind me of the new crew in the district attorney’s office: nothing matters but what we can say on our résumés, the contacts we make, and covering our asses.”

  Kate stared at him. “I never knew you felt that way,” she said. What the words meant, as he well knew, was: you never told me that was how you felt, and now you’re telling me in a group.

  Reed answered the unasked question. “The odd thing is, I never really thought of my experience there in quite that way. I thought I was getting too old for the job, which I was, and getting cranky, which I was, and after Kate and I had been married awhile, I just left. But I didn’t face what it was really about until just now. Hence the uncharacteristic speech.” He looked at Kate as though to say: “Sorry.” She nodded consolingly.

  “It’s like long marriages,” Harriet added, “where the woman suddenly walks out, to everyone’s astonishment, including her own. She’s never allowed herself to recognize what was going on, or that she’d outgrown the whole arrangement, or that she was now a quite different person. And when she does realize it and walks away, she looks back on the long years of marriage and interprets them quite differently. As you did with the DA,” she added to Reed.

  “If we’re going to discuss marriage, I was lured here under false pretenses,” Blair said, “and so, I can see by the way she sips her ginger ale, was Bobby. The scotch is excellent, but I’m a bit nervous about the agenda.”

  “No, you’re not, you just want to talk about beating up students in your class. Fine behavior, I must say.” Harriet looked hopefully at the bottle, and Reed, smiling, filled her glass.

  “There’s no doubt, my dears, the faculty are worried about a new ripple of discontent in the student body, all of it attributed to Kate and Reed, but really to Blair, who got them there. If,” she added, looking at Blair, “I had a nickel for every time they regretted hiring you with tenure, I’d have a ride on the subway, maybe both ways.”

  “What is it exactly that we’re supposed to have done?” Blair asked.

  “Well,” Harriet said, “teaching, or as they think of it, indoctrinating the students with feminist cases and feminist lit crit, just for starters. Then there’s all this locked-door business. Naturally, they take no responsibility for the student who locked the door and grappled with Blair, and I think they have more than a suspicion that whatever Reed is doing out at the prison for women is not going to be conducive to their peace of mind. Of course, this is all interpolation and translation. Most of what I hear is grunts and groans, with an occasional expletive, but the infrequent word serves to clarify the message.”

  “All that is normal faculty justification,” Blair said. “As to Reed’s clinic, they think it’s a waste of time to teach law students what they can learn on their own when they get out.”

  “And,” Harriet said, “they are worried about that poor battered woman incarcerated on Staten Island who was married to one of their group and who they fervently
hope—I’m surmising this—will not talk to Reed or anyone in his clinic.”

  “As it happens,” Reed said, “Betty Osborne has asked to see Kate again. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to mention it to you before,” he said to Kate. “Things seem to be moving rather fast all of a sudden.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Kate said, trying to keep any edge from her voice.

  “One other thing they’ve taken to objecting to,” Blair said into the silence, “is the number of aging students who are flocking to the law school.”

  “Women who have returned to law school after an unhappy life as a housewife,” Harriet said. “I’ve noticed them, and I must say I cheer them on when I can.”

  “Actually,” Blair said, “the script goes this way: she’s put him through graduate school, provided him with invaluable professional help, and raised the children; now he’s decided she isn’t suited to his new, more glamorous and successful life. So he marries someone twenty or thirty years younger than he is, and the abandoned wife is totally miserable for a year or two, and then one day she discovers that it was the best thing that ever happened to her, especially if she has managed to get some income out of the divorce and if the children are on the way to independence.”

  “You seem well-informed on the subject,” Harriet said.

  “I am,” Blair said. “It happened to my mother. I followed her into the law, as it happens. I was one of the children more or less on the way to independence. She didn’t seem to think much of the way the law and the courts regarded women, and I rather ended up agreeing with her.”

  Kate looked at him with renewed interest. She knew that neither she nor Reed had spoken as much as was their wont. She felt, and was fairly certain that Reed felt also, that they had to talk with one another as soon as they could. She found herself wishing the others would go, but recognized the unreasonableness of this; she had agreed to this meeting and would have to see it through.

  But, Kate was moved to notice, Harriet had picked up Kate’s wishes, and began to gather her wits and her belongings in an obvious way. “Great,” she said, draining her glass and rising determinedly to her feet. “Let’s all get to it. Blair and Kate will continue their wonderful seminar, without physical activity if possible, if not, with. You two,” she said to Reed and Bobby, “figure out your Betty Osborne strategy before too long, hear? I’m glad to have met you, Bobby. Why don’t the three of us wander off together to a comfortable bar and tell each other our lives and miracles?” And gathering up the others with a glance, like an English upper-class hostess ready at the end of a formal dinner to depart with the women, she marched them to the door. The good-byes were brief.

  Kate and Reed sank back side by side on the couch after Reed had poured them each another drink.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, taking her hand. “About the confessions regarding the DA’s office and the rest of it. I hope you understand that its suddenly coming out that way was as much of a surprise to me as to you. I hope believing that reduces the jolt a little.”

  “It was a jolt,” Kate said. “But I do begin to see that, like most women, I’ve blamed myself for something that has as much to do with you as with me, and probably much more. We women, however modern, liberated, and deep into analysis of the patriarchy and all its workings, still seem to assume our own guilt and our own responsibility for healing in every damn situation that comes along.”

  “I don’t blame you for being angry,” Reed said. “You’re right; I do see that.”

  “See what?” Kate said, her tone indicating doubt that he did see.

  “See that in some crazy way, my willingness to take on the clinic at this damn law school was a way of forcing the whole mess out in the open. Does that make any sense? Perhaps we should take a vacation together, if this mess is ever resolved, and just talk.”

  “I don’t believe in vacations,” Kate said. “I don’t even like them. And if two people are living together and, in theory at least, are devoted to each other, if they can’t talk about what’s eating them during the course of everyday life, they probably never will. The point is, I suppose, that vacations offer time for conversation, but as far as I’m concerned, what they mainly offer is excuses to avoid conversation, or a way to feel a little less bored with your usual companion, changing the setting to stimulate interest, which it doesn’t.”

  “The hell with vacations, then,” Reed said.

  It was, after all, Reed who, the next day, drove Kate to the Staten Island prison to confer (for absolutely the last time, he promised) with Betty Osborne. They decided to take the ferry; it certainly wasn’t quicker, but it seemed to fit their mood better than the Verrazano Bridge; standing at a rail, looking at water, always reminded Kate of the old movies they had taken to renting and watching into the night. Lovers stood at the rails of ships, in the days when that was how people traveled, and waxed romantic. It wasn’t reality; nothing could have been further from reality, but at least one could watch those movies without inevitably retiring to nightmares. Kate also found black-and-white films restful, to say nothing of the fact that, unlike life and current movies, one scene plainly ended before another began.

  So once on the ferry they left the car and climbed the stairs to the highest deck. New York and the Statue of Liberty were spread around them. Kate admitted to herself that it reminded her more of the immigrants’ journey to Ellis Island than an erotic interlude on an Atlantic steamer, but she felt happy nonetheless. (Later, when she mentioned the ferry ride to Harriet, Harriet recalled Smiley’s words on the matter: it was a habit of the spying trade, Smiley had decided; spies talk better when there’s a view.) But Kate and Reed were not talking of the spying trade.

  “Let me give it one more try,” Reed said, “explaining to myself and you what happened to me. It’s not the usual midlife crisis, I’m sure of that. It isn’t a man saying to himself, ‘Is this all there is?’ It isn’t the depression of some scientists I know who wake up to the fact that if they haven’t had a Nobel Prize by this age, they never will. You have to understand, Kate, that I wasn’t aware I was unhappy; I think I just began to fade away, to become less distinct, without really noticing it, even though fading away was making me miserable.”

  “You never seemed to me in the least danger of fading away,” Kate said.

  “No. The outer man remained the same. Here’s what I think it was. I don’t understand it all yet, but I think I have a clue. I was becoming comfortable in the status quo, one of the boys, one of the establishment, no threat of danger. Well, danger is too strong a word. I had become one of the regular guys, part of a self-satisfied, largely mediocre clump cemented together by the ease and superficial congeniality of our life. It wasn’t that way at the DA’s; we kept lurching from one case to another, we had to be on our toes, indolence alternated with amazing effort. There was no time, for the most devoted of us anyway, to just go on doing what we were doing. And, of course, we weren’t paid handsomely; we hadn’t made it.”

  “I know,” Kate said. “I’ve felt all that.”

  “Not in the same way, don’t you see?” Reed said, putting his arm around her. “You always had the challenge of being a woman, of being a feminist, of trying to change the system, trying to open it up. You aren’t the kind of woman who felt easy just being one of the boys.”

  “I doubt any woman feels easy with that,” Kate said. “Not really.”

  They were quiet for a minute, and then, taking her completely by surprise, Reed kissed her. Not lightly, but as though they were on an Atlantic steamer, in love but threatened with separation. I’d forgotten about kisses, Kate thought, astonished and amused at her response. I’d forgotten what they were like before movies forever hooked the erotic to the explicitly sexual. By god, I’d forgotten.

  The ferry horn blasted; they were docking.

  “Shall we let them push the damn car into the sea?” Reed asked. But they had already started down the stairs, laughing together.

  Betty
Osborne seemed glad enough to see Kate, but she sat silently, reminding Kate of how her mother used long ago to say, “Cat got your tongue?” when the recalcitrant child Kate refused to discuss the matter at hand. Betty was not recalcitrant, only at a loss for words, and Kate did not know how to help. She had already made the general inquiries that were supposed to begin the conversation, but seemed, instead, to have shut it down.

  Since they had limited time, Kate decided that after all, she had better prime the pump. “If you don’t know where to begin,” she said, “why not start with what you remember of the law school where your husband taught? Did you know his colleagues well?”

  “Some of them,” Betty answered. “But I’ve been thinking about Tess. Do you suppose I’m crazy at a time like this to be thinking about a character in a novel a hundred years old? I could have got the book to read, as you suggested, but I only wanted to remember it.”

  “If I thought you were crazy to think of Tess, I would have to think my whole life was crazy and worthless into the bargain,” Kate said, “and I don’t. What was it you felt about Tess?” Betty had talked of Hardy at her previous visit, Kate remembered.

  “What I thought is all mixed up with what critics said. We read so many critics in graduate school, and some of them seemed to say exactly what I had thought. I remember you told us we had to footnote the book anyway, even if we’d thought of what the book said before we read it.”

  Kate smiled her interest. Betty had begun talking and might continue. After a pause, she went on, almost as though Kate were not there.

  “Remember that Hardy had subtitled the novel ‘A Pure Woman,’ and later regretted it? Of course you remember. I think the trouble is that Tess and I, we were pure women, really, and not prepared for the world we had to face. Tess’s honesty cost her everything, and in the end she, too, murdered the bastard. They hung her; they don’t hang people anymore, so the way I figure it is, maybe that means that I have another chance.”