The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  “Maybe they talk English,” Mrs. Clatley suggested. “You wanted an interpreter. I remembered one—an ideal one! If you aren’t interested—go ahead! Radio them in English.”

  The secretary of state spoke. “The Gaunts are somewhat unconventional from what I’ve seen and heard of them. His books were quite extreme. But there can be no question of loyalty in that direction. After all, my husband had a tremendous respect for Dr. Gaunt.”

  That settled the problem.

  It settled the problem because it delegated the responsibility.

  Perhaps, in their way, these women, through their contacts and the employment of their instincts, through the interaction of their very penchants and prejudices, had arrived, however indirectly and by whatever irresponsible means, at a solution which the most able and highly educated of their sex would have reached more logically. For what better step could have been taken than to put in charge of the “welcoming committee” (which was soon organized) a knowledgeable, sophisticated woman who knew something of Washington and politics, a great deal about life, and who also knew Russia and the Russian language?

  The ladies of the cabinet, at that time, were still in the grip of intense shock, the shock not only of the instantaneous loss of all males but of the appalling disasters that had ensued. If their practice of clinging to the frivolities and vanities of their previous lives was absurd, it was also pitiful: they knew nothing else. Even the fact that they were able to quarrel over a costume for themselves when the whole of America cried out for aid and direction and organization was, in a way, evidence of a certain kind of character.

  They had the strength, in the face of everything, to sustain what they did know and feel. It was not their fault that they were hopelessly unprepared in mind and personality for the burden they accepted. Their husbands had been little better equipped. And some peoples believe, notably the English, that not mere democracy but the destiny of man rises from and securely stands upon an inherent capacity of the veriest fool, if he be free, to do the right thing under extreme pressures.

  On the 22nd of May, Paula left her home in Edwinna’s charge and emplaned for New York, where the Russian flotilla was to arrive. Two girl pilots flew her, in a DC-3.

  Both the Miami airport and LaGuardia Field had long since been cleared of wrecked planes and put back in occasional use. Nevertheless, the arrangements for the flights had been elaborate. The acting President of the United States had been obliged to intervene to obtain the necessary supplies of aviation gasoline. And the journey was not without danger, owing to the lack of advance weather information, the absence of dependable emergency landing fields en route, and the uncertain mechanical condition of the ships then being flown.

  Mrs. Altbee, who was head of the welcoming committee, rejected the opportunity to fly from Washington to New York in the plane that conveyed Paula. She made the trip by automobile—a hard journey owing to the insufficiently cleared state of some stretches of road and to the now rare but still real peril of encountering women bandits at hastily erected road blocks. Her journey, however, was uneventful.

  Paula’s trip, too, was without mishap. It gave her an opportunity, as she winged north, to see for the first time the plight of the great seaboard. Cities over which they passed looked bombed-out. Three or four had been spared, by rains, as in the case of Miami, or by luck, or by the concerted action of women survivors. Small towns, also, were often burned, showing acres of standing chimneys and the empty wall-rims of buildings. Open country everywhere seemed more thickly populated than it had been. But little traffic moved. A truck was an encouraging sight and a convoy of trucks brought one of the pilots back to point it out.

  In all the long way Paula saw only six steam locomotives in motion and perhaps twice that number of Diesels. Many women were at work in the fields. But they labored without the aid of much machinery. The problem of farm equipment seemed to Paula the most pressing; machines would be even more needed out on the prairies where the grain crops were raised.

  From time to time, as she flew, Paula studied a book that showed signs of much recent leafing, a Russian dictionary. She had once been fairly proficient in the language but that had been long ago. Since word of her “appointment” had arrived, she had been brushing up.

  From time to time, too, she considered courses of action which might be pursued after contact was made with the Soviet women. It was difficult to foresee what their attitude would be. She had some ideas; she had formed certain plans that had already been carried out. But she was extremely uncertain about the feasibility of those plans.

  Who could guess how the Russian women would feel?

  New York shocked her.

  They came in from the west and flew across Manhattan at about Seventieth Street.

  Areas she had remembered as a repetitive geometry of brownstone houses were now black wreckage. The skyscrapers were still standing but many of them were scorched and stained, their windows jagged, their interiors obviously gutted. Some of the cross streets were clogged with toppled buildings and impassable. But the avenues seemed to be open: thin streams of traffic moved along them. She could see that the downtown slums were destroyed too; and the distant view of Brooklyn and Queens conveyed an impression of similar ruin. Only certain of the New Jersey suburbs had looked untouched, their houses tidy and their trees pretty in the light shades of spring.

  The Triboro Bridge was unchanged. East River Drive was usable in spite of the wreckage piled alongside it. And the Park Plaza hotel was exactly as she remembered it, except that the doorman was a doorwoman, the bellboys were bell girls and the manager was a Mrs. Moore. Central Park, viewed from her eighteenth-floor room, had a border of dead trees even though blocks of park-facing buildings, like that which contained her hotel, had escaped the general holocaust.

  New York was quiet, too. No cacophony of horns and whistles and tires and abrupt brakes rose to the high room. And there were no pigeons anywhere. That was the kind of thing Paula noticed.

  When the sun set, the great metropolis did not spell out its modernistic poem of light, which had always enthralled her. Manhattan became, instead, a gloomy, ghostly place, with isolated wan lights in the buildings. Passing cars threw discrete beams and cast particular shadows now. It did not smell like New York any more, either—like wet bricks and the sea’s salt, tar and coffee and women’s perfumes; it smelled of dank ashes and stale smoke.

  On the morning after her arrival, Paula woke with the sensation of fear. For an instant she was unable to recall its exact cause or even to remember the meaning of the hotel room in which she found herself. The feeling passed as her brain recovered memory: she was in the Park Plaza and the hotel was just the same, although New York was appallingly different—at the Park Plaza, where she and Bill had often . . . Skip it, she told herself. At nine o’clock a flotilla of Russian naval vessels was expected to anchor in the bay and she and a committee were to go out to meet it.

  With factual recollection came a sickening sense of incompetence. They had sent all the way to Miami for her because she could speak the language and because the ladies in the “cabinet” had felt she, among all persons they regarded as suitable, alone could be trusted in the event about to occur.

  Six-thirty, Paula saw by her watch. A bright, sunny day, if the slit of sky visible beyond the drawn blind was an honest sample.

  A warm day in May.

  And she was going down to meet a woman-manned Soviet mission, on naval vessels, bearing one or more atomic bombs and bent on the “liberation” of America’s women, who needed aid, heaven knew, but who reviled the Soviet concept of “freedom.”

  She.

  Paula.

  She thought of the committee. She had spent the previous evening in session with it, considering plans and settling, at last, on alternatives.

  Mrs. De Wyss Altbee had the most money, the big, Victorian house in Kensington she’d inherited from her mother, the oldest family line and the most firmly entrenched social po
sition, so the wives of the congressmen, faithful to their long, climbing pursuit of Mrs. A., had continued the game by “electing” her “President” of the United States.

  Until the menacing news about the Russians was received, the administration had been an expectably preposterous joke: one filibuster and nothing else. America’s women had learned, laughed grimly, and gone on with desperate local endeavors.

  Poor Mrs. A.! The trouble was that her useful knowledge extended no further than household goods and games and clothes; her executive experience was limited to the management of clubs, balls and cocktail parties; her diplomatic training was only in regulating social status; and she hadn’t a brain in her head. A good, busty figure of a woman, Paula meditated—something of a battle-ax, well dressed and well heeled and ruthless in her fashion. Perhaps even well intentioned when her own interests weren’t involved. Paula decided she would have made Warren Gamaliel Harding look like a fifty-fifty mixture of Jefferson and Lincoln.

  She called for Room Service and was surprised when it answered. She ordered orange juice, toast and a big pot of coffee. She was told there was only grape juice. She assented to that and went on thinking.

  Her friend Mrs. Guegresson had traveled a good deal and possessed some sense, as evidently did Mrs. Dwight. The three other ladies on the committee were presidents of women’s universities. After listening to them for several hours, Paula had realized that a knowledge of truth and a “higher education” were two matters as different as feathers on a hat and a Bock of vultures. She had forgotten, in the years with Bill, that he was not a typical professor-forgotten what yeasty, impractical mythology passed for common sense among the flat-hatted Phi Beta Kappas.

  A knock came on Paula’s door; she thought that Room Service, under female aegis, was a great improvement on its male-conducted counterpart. But it was Mrs.

  Altbee. She wore a negligee of pale-rose silk; but she was personally white to the lips.

  “They’re here!”

  “Here? Who?” Paula sat up in bed.

  “The Russians! They said they’d anchor at nine in the harbor! Actually, at daybreak, they steamed straight into the Hudson River and anchored in a line right off Manhattan and trained their guns!” She gasped the last phrase and leaned against the wall.

  Paula had an impulse to laugh. “We never catch onto them, do we?”

  “Catch onto them! Do you realize—?”

  “Did they shoot?”

  “They haven’t—yet—or we wouldn’t be here!”

  “That’s typical Russian bravura. Getting the jump. Pushing us. The smart thing to do now is to—”

  “That’s what I’m here for! You’ll have to send somebody out to implore them to hold their fire at least until we can talk!”

  Paula yawned. “The thing to do is to let them sit there till noon, when we had an appointment—”

  “Suppose they fire? Set off an atomic bomb—!”

  “And blow themselves up? We went over that last night.”

  “They’re capable of anything. Anything! And so barbarically quick-tempered!”

  “Funny. In all they’ve done, I’ve noticed plenty of barbarism. We have our share too. But not one scintilla of quick temper. They are as patient as oysters making pearls—

  ”

  Mrs. Altbee relaxed somewhat and took a chair. Paula’s tray arrived. She drank the grape juice, made a face, and tried the toast.

  The pro-tem President said, “Don’t you feel it’s dreadfully risky to let them sit out there for five hours without doing a thing?”

  “Sure.” Paula chewed. “But the males are gone. It looks as if the human race had come to a slow stop. Half the cities in our country are half ash heaps. So what the hell is a little more risk, nowadays?”

  “I would hate to feel I’d failed to do my duty.”

  Paula found the opening irresistible. She asked, “Why?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean—” Paula poured coffee. It steamed and the room smelled of it and the smell was heartening. “Why are you afraid to fail to do your duty? The whole country is a mess. You were elected President, after a fashion. And your duty was to accomplish something for the tragic condition of the people, not to preside over a finish fight on pleats.”

  Tears came into Mrs. Altbee’s eyes and she shook her head sadly.

  Paula again felt sorry for her. “I know, and I apologize. Nobody’s normal. The superficial things were once the most important things we had to deal with. Women. What a predicament we’ve all been in! Maybe, just by sticking to trifles, you showed character and courage. Who knows?”

  “We haven’t any character,” Mrs. Altbee said unevenly, “and not very much courage.”

  “Nonsense!” Paula’s inner sentiments half agreed. “Let the Russian women sit! At noon—”

  At noon, aboard the Bessie, the committee put out on the river. For all her plebeian name, the Bessie was a prepossessing vessel, a private yacht, one hundred and twelve feet long, equipped with every luxury that could be stowed away on and built into a seagoing ship of her size. She belonged to a Mrs. Trafalgar, a personal and dear friend of Mrs. Altbee. The yacht had cost upward of a million.

  Mrs. Trafalgar, unlike her eminent Washington colleague, was a woman of some practical enterprise. She knew how to handle and navigate the Bessie, how to start her engines, and how to dock her smartly. When asked to prepare to meet the Russians she had trained a crew of college girls sufficiently for the purpose. The Bessie’s crew wore blue skirts and white blouses; they had been chosen as much for good looks as for know-how from amongst the semi-seafaring debutantes of such maritime regions as Larchmont and Southampton.

  The white yacht, elaborate goldwork glittering in the hot sun, moved slowly up the Hudson River past the submarines, the destroyer and the heavy cruiser, to the aircraft carrier. On all these vessels female crews stood at silent attention while the Bessie passed.

  A landing stage had been let down the carrier’s side and Paula translated the name of that ship as the panicky committee prepared to be transferred by launch.

  “It’s called the October Revolution.”

  “What an absurd name!” said Mrs. Guegresson, checking her hair and lipstick.

  “Not really. It’s like the Independence—in Americanese.”

  Mrs. Dwight was gazing at the lined-up crews through binoculars. “They’re kind of little—you know it? Short. And they keep looking toward New York.”

  “They’re probably thinking of firing,” said Dr. Joan Clemment, one of the university presidents. Her face was clay-white.

  “They’re probably comparing the skyline,” Paula answered, “not only with Moscow, but with all the garbage they’ve been taught. It may be quite a shock to them.

  Well-the launch is ready!”

  Stony-faced women in uniform helped them onto the landing stage. Women with rifles at attention lined the way as the committee climbed up the forbidding steel side of the carrier. On deck, they were confronted by what seemed regiments of uniformed women-sailors. In the center of a human square, facing the landing stage, stood seven or eight women who wore gold braid.

  Above their heads four huge guns pointed in bleak significance at Manhattan.

  Paula estimated them to be eight-inchers. Behind the dressed-up naval officers, or political officials, or whatever they were, was a band. It now struck up, to Paula’s surprise, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Paula came to a halt. She was in the lead, so the pale and shaking women behind her followed the example.

  Paula was wearing a green hat that matched a green tailored suit. Mrs. Dwight and Mrs. Guegresson also wore suits. Mrs. Altbee and the college presidents wore silk prints.

  We must look like hell, Paula thought.

  After the “Star-Spangled Banner,” another song began. Paula felt motion behind her and murmured, “Attention! It’s ‘The Internationale’!” None of the ladies had ever before stood at attention for that piece. None even
knew what it was. But they stood now.

  When “The Intemationale” was finished, the officers moved forward. At their head was a powerfully built, rather handsome woman with short, muddy-blonde hair, slaty eyes set far apart, high cheekbones, and a big, very firm mouth. She had not changed expression during the music. She approached the committee and suddenly, stiffly, held out her hand. She spoke in throaty, noncommittal Russian:

  “Welcome. I am Ilnya Basrov, special commissar for foreign affairs and commander of the American Liberation Expedition.” Another woman stepped forward and opened her mouth, evidently to interpret.

  Paula glanced once at the interpreter and back quickly at Ilnya Basrov. She said, in swift Russian, “I am Paula Gaunt, American citizen. You are welcome to our country.

  I would like to introduce the President of the United States and the members of the official welcoming committee.”

  Ilnya Basrov was startled; it showed for an instant. Then she smiled in the way an acute woman will smile when her mind has solved a small puzzle. “Ah! You are one of us, then? You speak the language quite well! I knew we had many, among the Americans—”

  “I am not one of you,” Paula answered firmly. “I think communism is foolish.

  Madame Basrov, I have offered to introduce our President!”

  The Russian leader flushed slightly and handshaking began.

  “You offended that woman! Be careful!” Mrs. Dwight whispered to Paula.

  What Paula was noticing, at close range, was the stupefaction in the eyes of the crew, eyes that failed to stay “front” and strayed continually to the Manhattan skyline.

  The handshaking ended and the formal smiles that went with it also vanished.

  Ilnya Basrov and her associates stepped back a little. A camerawoman commenced to take motion pictures. The Russian leader looked at the committee and then gazed off into the distances. She was, plainly, about to make a speech.

  “We come in peace,” she began “We—”