What was Renia telling me? That the children felt bad that their mother took on her cancer recurrence alone so they could have a good vacation? That would be a reason that Bob couldn’t face talking about her. Maybe he thought that in spite of her hopeless attitude, if only he had known about the recurrence, he could have somehow saved her. And the anger Renia cryptically referred to?
Then it suddenly occurred to me. How could I have been so dense? Bob was so careful not to hurt people’s feelings. He was a sensitive man, and he must have known that anything he shared would make me feel inadequate. If he said she grew gorgeous sunflowers, it would reflect on my own ignorance of gardening. If he told me she was a great cook, I would feel like a bad wife. Given that most of my balls went out of the court, how could he say if she was a crack tennis player who won championships with him?
And there was something else I had to understand: he was protecting me further. I didn’t need to know anything more about Martha. I now knew the secret I had been dreading. He still loved her, and always would. But that was all right—I could accept it, because I knew he loved me too.
I gave Renia a hug. When Bob sauntered into the kitchen, I looked at him apologetically. “Thank you for tolerating me,” I said.
He was bewildered—not for the first time. “I thought you were mad at me.”
“I’m sorry I invaded your privacy—and hers.”
He took my hand reassuringly.
* * *
I have never understood how some people live their lives in utter stillness and restraint. They seem to float in the nests of mythic halcyons, who tame the gales into calmness. I need a halcyon. I whirl around in a maelstrom of exhausting epiphanies, odd moods; certain sounds and sights, no matter how trivial, disturb me—an overly bright sun, a car going too slow, pants with grease spots—I screen out very little.
How I wish I could put that agitation and energy into making my old Remington move. My warhorse, its ivory keys sticking up on metal necks, the letter u missing, had been my best friend through hard news, investigative pieces, profiles. But now that I’m trying to write fiction, it is my enemy.
My Pulitzer for national reporting had given me both a lifetime calling card and a lifetime curse. I wasn’t alone. Many Pulitzer recipients went on to failure (the talented Anthony Lukas ended up killing himself) and never could write anything afterward that seemed good enough.
Deadlines, editors eager for your copy, that makes it easy. But on your own, writing is a capricious obsession. Sometimes, it will be pure pleasure, even euphoria, and others, utter misery. Writer’s block is a condition whose symptoms are restlessness, a bad conscience, and an incremental increase in self-loathing. It is like entering a black hole of impossibility from which you might never emerge. There is a void that only writing can fill, but if the fragile writer manages to write and doesn’t like what he has written—which is probable—then in comes the void again.
Aside from a few articles, I had hardly produced a word of value since I began to date Bob two years earlier. And I knew that the longer I didn’t write, the longer I wouldn’t.
* * *
“Bob, I’m a vegetable.”
“Hmm?” said Bob, lost in his U.S. News & World Report.
“I’m a vegetable.”
“You mean you’re vegetating.”
“No, worse.” I flopped down next to him on our denim-covered sofa in Park Avenue. “I mean I’m a vegetable.”
Finally, he put his magazine down. “Well, what are you going to do about it? What about trying to become a lively, enterprising reporter again?”
“And also a lively, enterprising wife? I take care of a public figure, get involved with his cases, look after a teenager, a big apartment. I go to events at night, conferences on the weekend, speeches, dinners…”
“Don’t blame me for your writer’s block. I’ve been very supportive of your career. Who pushed you to go to Northern Ireland to get the Peace Women story?”
He was right, he had nurtured my talent. In a sense, I was his proxy. Bob was as much a frustrated journalist as I was a frustrated detective. In fact, he had been editor in chief of the Amherst Student in the late 1930s and had distinguished himself throughout his three years on the staff by writing unsigned editorials against the school’s president, Stanley King, for his conservative leanings; to be particularly mischievous, he formed the Amherst Political Union, inviting King’s nemesis, the liberal First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, to be the first speaker.
It was 1939, and Amherst, reflecting the rest of the country, was divided over the question of American involvement in the European war. The majority of the students, a broad spectrum from liberal to conservative, were vigorously against having anything to do with a conflict so far away.
“When she arrived, she said, ‘Bob, I’m scared.’ The First Lady, the wife of the president, about to address a bunch of green undergraduates, was scared! She was so human and honest,” he said.
“I thought she was beautiful. I never understood the stupid remarks about her being homely.”
Mrs. Roosevelt’s talk was a success and, according to Bob’s thank-you letter to her, “won over many who have feared the so-called dictatorial tendencies of the government.”
Bob also said he thought her talk would make Amherst’s president, a conservative businessman, more thoughtful about the interests of students: “President King … has been trying to use the war as an excuse for imposing restrictions on them. He does not seem to realize that, as you said, students must have the privileges of citizens when they are in college if they are to make good citizens later on.”
Mrs. Roosevelt replied that Bob had been “a perfect host, even to the sherry and oranges, and I enjoyed every minute.”
Emboldened, Bob put an anonymous note into the Amherst Student in Latin: “Beware the King lest the people rise up and the kingdom fall!” He ended by urging people who wanted more information to dial “80”—President King’s personal extension.
* * *
Now Bob wants me to do the writing for both of us, wants to see my name on the front page of the Times. But since I quit the newspaper, the name I had made for myself is fading, the fan mail is down to a trickle. My husband was attracted to me in large part because I was a star in journalism; I wonder how he feels now that the blockbusters with my byline are no longer on the front page of The New York Times.
“Sweetheart, I think you fell in love with The New York Times, not me.”
He looks up, frowning. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m trying to get you to write again because I think it’s important for your morale. It’s not about me.”
It is June 1978, and the heat is already brutal; we are both sweaty. I pick up my Dante. I’m reading The Inferno, and I feel as if this month has been a contrapasso, a “divine revenge” for the widespread complaints about the constant snowstorms and rain and drizzle of last winter. The only bright spot is the election of Carter. He has halted work on the neutron bomb and given official pardons, a step beyond simple amnesty, to Vietnam War draft dodgers. Roger, wherever he is, must feel vindicated. As for Bob, he feels betrayed by Carter’s weak support for Israel.
“Be my wife,” Bob says suddenly. “Just be my wife.”
“What? You think I shouldn’t be a writer anymore?” Sitting in the gloom of quick-falling night, I feel hurt and bewildered.
“I didn’t say that. I just don’t want you to beat yourself up.”
And in truth, Bob had been trying to help me write again. I can picture it so clearly, that day almost two years ago:
* * *
I am staying the night at Riverdale. He comes in from work looking glum.
“I’ve lost my cap!”
“Oh no, not your DA’s cap!” I say with exaggerated sadness. “Not the old, faded one you’ve had for how many years? With the top all crushed down. Is that the one?”
“Nobody likes a W.A., as my father always told me.”
He reaches in h
is pocket. “No, I’m sure they’re going to be big.” If he starts a sentence with “No,” it can mean he is continuing a conversation he has had only in his own head; it can also be about a conversation he’s carried on with others some time before. Jenny teasingly calls it Daddy’s “return to original subject.”
“What are you talking about? Who’s going to be big?” I ask.
He hands me a little Daily News clip about two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, who’ve gotten together to help bring peace to Northern Ireland. One had a husband killed in the fighting. “It’s the perfect story for you,” he says.
I can hardly speak.
“I’ve already booked you a ticket. You can leave for London on British Airways day after tomorrow.”
My competitive juices begin to run. “But I’d have to leave you alone.” We’ve never been apart for more than a day or two.
“That’s all right,” he says. “Let’s have a glass of wine.”
Even if it wasn’t all right, he wouldn’t tell me.
“I’d be gone for a week or two. How will you get along?”
“I don’t know. I’ll just have to manage somehow,” he says plaintively.
I rest my elbow on his shoulder, kiss his lips. It occurs to me that by temporarily plucking me out of his life, he has ironically taken charge of it. It feels sexy.
“I never can tell what you’re really thinking. Maybe you’ll resent it if I go.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t care?”
“No, I do care. I’ll miss you very much.”
I can already hear those lilting Northern Irish tongues, feel the tart breezes, the gladdening music, the story I’ll write. I run upstairs to pack; with all the gun fighting there now, maybe I should get a Kevlar vest. I only realize when I get to the top that I never poured him his glass of wine.
* * *
I arrive in London and take a train, then a ferry, to Belfast as I had done when I first made this trip years ago. I want to hear the waves slap against the hull as we enter the harbor, smell the peat smoke, hear the clang and crack of shipbuilding from the ancient Harland & Wolff shipyards. Going to Ireland is always like going home.
I hadn’t been to the North since the early 1970s. During my three years in London, UPI always sent me here when trouble broke out. Though I was in my early twenties, they knew I could beat the pants off the jaded male press who had seen it all. They would hit the pubs, waiting for the mild British press releases that they would rewrite and file as their own stories. But I was raw and shamelessly ambitious. Typical of the young, I had no fear and would happily hotfoot it out into the riot-filled, tear-gassed streets, happening onto stories the British press would never let out. The saddest one was going up to Strabane in Derry and finding the neighbors and parents weeping over the body of young Eamon McDevitt, an innocent deaf boy who was shot by an overzealous soldier. They said he had a gun. Some were still milling around, and I looked at a particularly menacing soldier with disgust. He pointed his gun at me. I gave him the finger.
Now, giddy with the sharp cool air and the hills so green they almost hurt your eyes, I walk into Belfast. It is almost unrecognizable—burned-out houses, the sound of gunfire, empty streets. Britain has sent troops in, and they have become each side’s enemy. Every time a soldier is shot by an IRA gun, troops stage night raids, knocking down Catholic doors and dragging off suspects to internment camps.
“The women have become like a second army,” I tell Bob on the phone. He’s fascinated. “They bang garbage can lids to warn their men the troops are coming and then make a chain around them. Boy, I would get the biggest rush pulling out my Glock and protecting you from some rampaging mafioso.”
“You don’t have a Glock,” Bob says, chuckling a bit uneasily.
En route to the province, I meet a freelance photographer lugging a conglomeration of equipment that is almost bigger than she. A pair of biceps bulge like tennis balls from her slight arms. She invites me to share a double room in her hotel, which turns out to be a simple affair—algae-colored walls, splintered wood floors, but only a ten-minute jog from the tumultuous city center.
I walk down an alley that links the Protestant Shankill and the Catholic Falls Roads, and I find a mixed cluster of women who look hopeless, afraid; they have collapsed their bones on kitchen chairs outside their small brick row houses. When they see me, they go silent.
I persuade them to talk to me. Speaking softly, they tell me that the paramilitaries on both sides control them like medieval trade guilds. They extort money and deal out punishments; they have become the law in their respective neighborhoods.
But now, today, the women of the province get up and speak out. Here are Catholics and Protestants, who not long ago spat at each other across the barricades, embracing under banners calling for an end to the province’s sectarian war. Betty Williams, a tall, raw-boned Protestant, who lost a cousin, and Mairead Corrigan, whose sister lost three children, tell me the young children of the province have been forever infected: “Our kids don’t know how to play. Give them a book, and they draw tanks and guns on it.”
The IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force hate the women, but still they have succeeded in frustrating the gunmen and winning the hearts of people. Today, I am covering a march that has brought thousands out onto the perilous streets. No one has seen anything like it. Perhaps they really can bring peace where others have failed.
When I come back to the hotel, windblown and excited, my photographer friend is sitting cross-legged on her bed, running her hands through her hair, which rises like a tea cozy on top of a teapot.
“Wasn’t it the greatest?” I ask. “Bet you got some great pictures.”
She glowers at me. “I dropped my film in a gutter of water.”
“Oh no!” I sit down across from her. “Oh, dear … I’m so sorry … you could get other pictures; I mean, the two of them together would be nice, with men, maybe. No one’s talking about the movement’s men…”
“I know my profession,” she snaps.
I retreat. “Of course.”
We are so tired that night that we order dinner from room service. I dig into a plate piled with bangers and mash—the English version of bratwurst and whipped potatoes. She picks at an arrangement of raw vegetables. “What’s your favorite food?” I ask in a lame attempt to make conversation. She looks at my sausages with barely disguised distaste. “I always like a nice big salad.”
I feel like we ourselves are on the verge of a sectarian war. She is a bad sleeper—I bet it’s because she’s hungry all the time—so she goes to bed at 8:30 p.m. I wait until 10:00, hoping she has fallen asleep, and bring the phone into the closet to make my nightly calls to Bob. But just when I begin to whisper endearments, she starts loudly clearing her throat.
The night of the march, I stay up until 2:00 a.m., writing on the stairwell so the light won’t disturb her. Then I go downstairs to the hotel phone to call Bob. The line is faint. “Tell me what you think of my lede,” I shout. “I talk about these women, huddled under their brollies, looking like a great long centipede coming down the road. Then it reads like this”:
On the stone walls lining the street, they are watched by boys with chopped-off bell-bottoms, boys with deep swampy eyes and hollow cheeks … they take stones from their pockets and hurl them at the women. As they raise their umbrellas to shield themselves, they smile at the boys—unsteady, tightly pressed smiles. As the stones hit their arms, legs, heads, the line does not break. The march goes on.
“Very nice,” the nearby pub owner weighs in with a Northern Irish accent.
“That’s great,” Bob says. “Terrific.”
I smile at the guy, who’s now filling a glass of Guinness from the spout. “Oh, good, I wasn’t sure…”
“You know I envy you,” Bob said. “I was there during the war, and I knew why they called it the Emerald Isle … green even in late November. But the wind was so raw it’s understandable why
the Irish like their shot of whiskey.”
“I didn’t know you’d been here!”
“I was navigator of the lead destroyer taking a convoy of fast tankers into Belfast harbor, and we went up the river Foyle to Derry.
“There was a USO reception for us in Derry,” he continued, “and the girls were more interested in eating the sandwiches than talking to us. Except for this RAF sergeant. I took a walk with her.”
“Oh?”
“We stopped under a bridge and I kissed her.”
“What?” I was startled and tantalized. He had never admitted having a romantic attachment before he was married. “Did you do anything else to her on this first date?”
“Oh, I think so but not much. We weren’t there that long.”
“Did you see her again?”
“No, we shipped out the next day. I don’t even remember her name. So when are you coming home?”
“You kissed her, hmm. I suppose it was too cold to make love under the bridge.”
“When are you coming home?”
“Well, uh, I wanted to interview this Protestant today, but I lost the whole afternoon. You see, after the march I wanted to get some reaction, so I went up to Strabane and got caught in sniper fire. But everything was fine. I dove under a car, and the only bullet that hit me went through my boot. It kind of took off the tip of my toe. Lucky I was wearing my Doc Martens.”
Silence. Then a burst of tinny anger comes over the line. “Why did you do a stupid thing like that? What do you mean, the tip of your toe?” My husband is angry rather than solicitous? I’m about to get mad myself when I remember Bob telling me how furious his father was when one of his kids got hurt.
“It was no big deal. I went to the infirmary, got it sterilized and bandaged.”
Suddenly I know someone’s behind me.
It’s the photographer. “Look,” she shouts. People at the bar are looking at her. “Can’t you wrap this up? I can’t sleep not knowing when you’re going to come in and wake me up.”
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