Even when he started to take her out, on nights when he was not working late, he did not change his ways. He talked always interestingly about his job, his future hopes, asked about her life and friends and plans, even discussed current events and the darkening cloud the cold war was casting over Europe. But he rarely spoke of his family, his boyhood; he seemed to exist only in the present. He never made a pass at her, and he never even sought a good night kiss when he took her home to the family brownstone. He did not even seem to suspect that she might have liked it.
And of course she loved him more and more.
And then, one night, dining at a restaurant, he asked her to marry him. Just like that. As if he were suggesting that they go to the theater rather than to the cinema. And she accepted him. Just like that. He signaled to the waiter and asked him to bring them a bottle of champagne. When it came, and their glasses were filled, she found the courage to ask, “Do you know something, Fred? I have this crazy idea that you’re acting a part.”
He took this calmly enough. “In a play? What sort of a play? I hope at least that I’m the hero.”
“Oh, you’re the hero all right. But it’s not so much a performance as a rehearsal. There seems to be a director sitting out there in the orchestra. In a front row seat. But it’s dark, and I can’t see him. Oh, I know it sounds silly, but you’re going to have to get used to my being silly at times.”
He frowned, and she observed that it was a new kind of frown, or at least one that she had not noted before. “And what does the director do?”
“Well, he’s ready to supply you with a line. That is, if you forget one.”
“What line have I forgot?”
“Well, you haven’t even told me that you love me.”
He became grave at this. “I love you, Anita.”
And she believed him. She had to believe him. But she also had to add something. “I love you too, Fred. Very much. Very, very much. But maybe I’m just a tiny bit afraid of you.”
He shook his head as if she had raised a more important issue than she knew. “If you’re afraid of me, my dear, you had better not marry me.”
“Oh, I’m not that afraid of you!” she cried in sudden excitement. “Don’t think you can get out of this that easily!”
***
The first year of marriage was, on the whole, eminently satisfactory to both husband and wife. Fred continued to be the same pleasant and even-tempered companion that he had been as a beau, with the all-important added attraction of being an ardent lover at night. One of Anita’s pals assured her that this was often true of young lawyers who had been monastically devoted to their work too long. Anyway, it came as something of a surprise to her and helped smother the little misgivings that she had felt about what she was almost hesitant to call his occasional detachment. She even joked to herself about being an Elsa in Lohengrin, too wise and too happy to ask her lover’s name and see him sail away in a swan-propelled boat.
***
A few years into their union, Anita’s father had been appointed an assistant secretary of state by President Eisenhower, and he had asked his son-in-law to head up the important branch of their firm in the capital. Bates might have been motivated in part by the desire to have his daughter near him, but Fred saw it as a promotion that would bring him closer to the post of heir to the senior partner that he coveted. So all was well, or so it seemed. He and Anita had a charming little house in Georgetown, and she was expecting their third child.
One day, passing through a corridor of the State Department, where he had been calling on his father-in-law, Fred encountered his old friend Nathan Levy. The latter informed him that he was now a special assistant to the secretary of commerce, and suggested that they have lunch. Fred, interested in catching up with this once stimulating acquaintance, took him to the Cosmos Club, which he had recently joined, and quizzed him about the apparent switch in political views that his current job implied. But Nathan seemed more anxious to quiz his host.
“You’ve really made it, Fred, haven’t you? But then there was never much question that you would.”
“How do you mean?”
“You always set yourself in a beeline for the top spot—that was clear enough. And what’s wrong with that? So long as you get there, and you have, my friend. In your job, in your marriage, in your future. I’m not criticizing you. I think I may even envy you.”
“What about yourself?” Fred queried with more than a touch of resentment. “Haven’t you done pretty well, too? You don’t look to me like someone who’s sharing the crust of the poor.”
“No, I live well enough. But that’s dough I inherited.”
“And your job in Commerce. Isn’t that something?”
“It might have been.” Nathan’s tone changed from his old ironic note; he suddenly seemed human. It was evident that he wanted a more candid discussion. “But you know, Fred, we’re living in a reign of terror. At least those of us in government are.”
“You mean this McCarthy business. That’s odious, of course, but isn’t it bound to go away? It’s so obviously a red herring, and the guy’s such a phony. Won’t it be a case of not being able to fool all of the people all of the time?”
“Maybe. But will there be anything left when it’s over?”
“Surely you’re exaggerating, Nate.”
“Am I? Who’s going to stop McCarthy? Will Ike? Will Dulles? Will your esteemed father-in-law? Have any of them lifted a finger to defend loyal government employees maliciously accused of treason? And whom they know, or should know, to be innocent?”
“Ike may be playing for time. Give the junior senator from Wisconsin enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”
“Dream on, pal. And in the meantime our sainted president won’t even defend General Marshall, to whom he owes his entire career, from McCarthy’s spit.”
“I admit that bothered me,” Fred conceded.
“I tell you, my friend, we tore up the Constitution when we put thousands of Japanese Americans in concentration camps without trial, even though they were innocent American citizens. We left the field wide open for little Joe to ravage as he chose!”
“That was wartime fever. Crazy things happen in war. We all know that. Anyway, you have nothing to fear from the Un-American Activities Committee personally, I assume. So why get quite so upset?”
“Oh, but I have! I have! I have every good reason to believe that I am on Senator Joe’s list of government suspects.”
“In the Commerce Department? Why in God’s name does he care what goes on there? What could he charge you with?”
“With giving classified information to an agent of the Soviet Union. Isn’t that the usual charge?”
“But you didn’t!”
“Of course I didn’t. Does that make any difference? You’ll say they can’t prove anything. But anything is just what they can prove to a hysterical jury. I tell you, a man accused is a man doomed!”
For the rest of their meal they discussed the fabrications of the McCarthy committee, and Fred found himself both intensely interested and strangely wrought up. He told Nathan that he would like to renew their aborted Yale friendship and invited him, still a bachelor, to the house for dinner. Nathan came readily enough, and made an immediate friend of the enthusiastic Anita.
“How absurd,” she told her husband afterward, “to suppose that he could be suspected of being in the pay of the Russians. Isn’t he the son of a rich man?”
“And he’s also one himself. Yes, he was something of a radical at Yale, but that’s a far cry from being a communist, let alone a traitor.”
“What could he have in Commerce that the Reds would really want?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Trade agreements, I guess. Or the confidential talks preceding them. Or department plans to root out communists in government. And I suppose that an idealistic American communist might not have to be paid to betray his country. He might even be wealthy and guilt ridden. But I’ll stake my last d
ollar on Nate’s loyalty.”
“Oh, darling, so will I! And I can’t tell you how much I love hearing you say it!”
He looked at her in mild surprise. “Why do you love that so much?”
“Oh, just because I do!”
In the weeks that followed, Fred saw Nathan at several lunches and had him over for dinner a couple of times as well. It came, therefore, as less of a surprise when Nathan called to say that he was about to be indicted. Fred went at once to his apartment—Nathan had already resigned from Commerce—where he found McCarthy’s victim astonishingly calm, almost indifferent. Fred assumed that receiving the blow might have been an actual relief from the agony of anticipating it. But when he informed Nathan that he wished to act as his counsel, the latter was suddenly touched and rose to grasp his friend’s shoulder.
“Look, old man, that’s going too far. Not that I don’t appreciate it, I do, deeply. But when I tell you that the lawyer in the attorney general’s office who will be in charge of my prosecution is none other than Hallam Daly, on leave of absence from your own firm, you will see the impossibility of it.”
“I also can take a leave of absence!”
“And anyway, I have my father’s firm to represent me.”
“I could be co-counsel, couldn’t I?”
Nathan appeared suddenly struck by the idea. He pondered it for a moment. “It would be rather a jab in the prosecution’s eye,” he admitted. “But what might it do to your career, my friend?”
“I don’t care! Some things have got to be beyond that.”
“Well, we’ll sleep on it.”
Fred’s visit to his father-in-law at State, where he went immediately after his visit to Nathan, was stormy. Bates was appalled by his son-in-law’s proposition.
“But I know he’s innocent,” Fred protested.
“How can you know a thing like that?”
“Think how long I’ve known him. And haven’t I heard you yourself say that most of McCarthy’s victims are blameless?”
“I never said they all are. I know nothing about Levy. Neither does Mr. Dulles. The matter has nothing to do with State, and I certainly don’t expect to get into it. You will do very well to follow my example.”
“I’m afraid I can’t go along with you there, sir.”
“You can’t? What’s got into you, Fred? I’ve never seen you worked up like this before. All about some Jewish radical you haven’t seen since college. How do you know what he may have been up to since then?”
“I have my conviction that he’s not guilty.”
“Very well, let him prove it. And as for your representing him, you must see it’s out of the question. You know who’s in charge of the prosecution. How can you appear against your own partner?”
“I can take a leave of absence, as he has. Neither of us will then be active members of the firm.”
“You’ll still be partners. The canons of ethics won’t allow it.”
“Then I’ll resign from the firm altogether.”
“You can’t do this, Fred!” Bates exclaimed with sharp dismay. “You can’t do it to your wife and children. You can’t do it to me. You can’t do it to yourself!”
Even in the painful distress of the scene unrolling before him, Fred found an odd little part of his senses that seemed to be telling him that he was becoming someone he had never been before—a curious distortion of Frederick Coates, conceivably even a not very appealing character. But one who was going to stick. In the back of his mind, he could hear that old hymn they used to sing at Chelton: “Once to ev-er-y man and na-ation, comes the mooment to de-cide.” Was he going crazy?
“I think I know, sir, what I have to do” was what he heard himself say.
“Fred, listen to me. If you won’t think of yourself and your family, think at least of your political party. It’s the party that has taken me into government and will take you in time, if you’ll just keep your head. We have an election coming up, and there’s every reason to hope for a Republican sweep. It’s no time to show a rift in the ranks. Ike will take care of McCarthy in time—don’t you worry. But right now we have to do a little ducking before this storm of spy catchers. Granted, a few people will get hurt who perhaps shouldn’t get hurt, but that sometimes has to be accepted. First things first.”
“I guess that depends on what you regard as first things.”
This was not, of course, the last talk Fred had with his father-in-law on the subject. Bates even brought two of his older law partners down from New York to argue with their stubborn junior. But Fred was unyielding. The biggest surprise in the whole affair for him was Anita’s explosive support of his stand. He had rather assumed that she would change her tune when it came to opposing her adored father, but on the contrary, the parental confrontation seemed to add to her fire.
“Be the man I married,” she urged him at one point, when the force of the partnership began to look as if it might be too much for him, “and not the man I almost didn’t.”
When he finally sent in his formal resignation to the firm his mother wrote him a long bitter letter berating him for tearing down everything she had spent her life building up. And Mr. Simpson wrote to say that he felt he had wasted his money and sympathy supporting a man who was now willing to jettison the accomplishment of a lifetime to come to the aid of a Jewish communist.
***
As it turned out, however, it was not Senator McCarthy who had instigated the prosecution of Nathan Levy. McCarthy’s committee had sniffed around the Department of Commerce, but it was the FBI that had set the attorney general on Nathan’s trail. At the trial Fred’s services were indeed used by Nathan’s father’s lawyers, and he was allowed to cross-examine one or two hostile witnesses, but the major part of the proceedings was in the hands of his co-counsel, and he spent many hours sitting silently beside his friend and offering him such tacit support as he was able. But the testimony of a double agent that revealed Nathan had indeed passed classified information to a Soviet agent relating to commercial treaties between the United States and Israel resulted in Nathan’s conviction.
Fred, reeling at the catastrophe, sought an interview with his client alone. He stuttered something about the probability of a reversal on appeal.
“Not in this day of hysteria,” Nathan replied in a surprisingly mild tone. In fact, he seemed to accept his doom as something nobody should waste time trying to avert. “I’ve had it, and I face it. It was always in the cards that this might happen. I knew the risks, and I took them of my own volition.”
“What the devil are you trying to tell me?”
“Didn’t you ever suspect it, Fred? I thought you probably had, but that you believed fighting McCarthy was right on any grounds.”
“Oh, my god, Nate, how could you have done a thing like that? How could you? Betray your country!”
“Because the Soviet Union is the only nation in the world that genuinely desires peace. I hoped that the info I gave them might prove some help to their putting pressure on both Israel and Palestine to work things out. I failed, and I’m through. But others will take my place. No, Fred, don’t try to argue with me. You could never be brought to see the light on these things. You are too committed to the old rotten order of the world. It’s not your fault. It’s the way you were raised.”
“Nate, is it possible that with all the evidence of the atrocity of Stalin’s murders, you still—”
“Spare your sermons, Fred,” Nathan interrupted firmly. “They’re wasted on me. I’m not saying that I approve of everything that goes on in Moscow, but I adhere to the longer, the larger view.”
Fred walked home from the courthouse, block after traversed block, his eyes on the pavement before him, grimly facing the bleak fact that his life was in tatters. He had lost his firm and his reputation. Any political future for him with the Republican Party was gone for good. He had alienated his mother, his father-in-law, his early sponsor, and for what? To defend a confessed traitor.
&n
bsp; Anita listened to his sad tale and then disappeared without a word. He heard her steps descending to the cellar. When she returned she was holding a bottle of champagne.
“We’ll have to put ice in our glasses,” she told him. “Do you want to get some from the pantry?”
“What in God’s name are we going to celebrate, I’d like to know?”
“Our grand new life!”
“Darling, have you taken leave of your senses? Have you heard what I’ve been telling you?”
“Of course I heard you. But don’t you see? You’ve spent your life doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Now, at last, you’ve done the wrong thing for the right reason. You are you now, my dear one. And you’re never going to be anyone else as long as I can help it!”
He stared at her in astonishment and at last smiled. He went to get the ice.
5
The Omelette and the Egg
KATE RAND had imbued her philosophy of life—that of a dedicated domestic wife and mother—from her own mother. Emma Laidlaw, a highly intelligent, smartly efficient, brisk but kindly lady, tall, straight, and strong, both in character and figure, had been left in 1900 a widow of limited means with six children at the age of forty. The Laidlaws were a huge, gregarious Manhattan tribe, some rich, some almost poor. Emma was nearer to the latter. Her assets had been a small portfolio of securities, an ordinary side street brownstone and three housemaids, a cook, a chambermaid, and a nurse, little enough in the opulent east side of the city of that day, where Irish servants were paid a pittance. But it was generally agreed among Emma’s more affluent friends and relations that her skill in management amounted to genius. She was an expert cook and housecleaner when the servants had their rare days off; she was as good as a trained nurse when the children were sick; she drove a car before other women did and was clever at picking up stock market tips from the magnates she sat by at dinner parties. She knew just how to get her well-mannered children invited by richer friends or cousins with children the same age to go on trips or stay at country resorts, and even made those friends think she was doing them a favor. She became such an asset to hostesses, as much by her keen suggestions about how to make a party go as by her ability to charm and regulate bores, that she was able to carve out a permanent niche for herself in the top echelons of Knickerbocker society, assuring her offspring of the help of the powerful in making their way in life.
The Friend of Women and Other Stories Page 12
