The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  “What’s he doing?” Margaret whispered to Dr. Louis Gwinnett, the head of the research team, who lay on his stomach next to her, binoculars in hand and a notepad by his side.

  He leaned in closer and put his mouth next to her ear: “Don’t know,” he whispered. She raised an eyebrow at him and he smiled. The grazing ponies remained oblivious to their presence.

  “Notice how distended their stomachs are,” Gwinnett whispered. “They all look pregnant, even the two males.”

  Margaret blanched at his mention of pregnancy. She knew she didn’t show yet, but she was concerned that news of her condition would prompt some paternalistic impulse on Gwinnett’s part. Men seemed to treat pregnant women like invalids, she’d observed, and she had seven and a half months to go and a lot of work to do before this baby arrived; she was determined to make the most of her time while it was still her own.

  “Do you think that’s because of all the cordgrass they eat?” Margaret asked, focusing on the matter at hand. “Its salt content is quite high. So they would have to drink more.”

  “That’s likely it,” Gwinnett agreed. Margaret stole a look at him. With his shock of thick, prematurely white hair, deep-set, sky-blue eyes, and a jawline so sharp it could cut wood, he looked more an international captain of industry or a New England governor than a zoologist.

  Teardrop, as they’d decided to call him, casually sidled up to one of the mares and began sniffing her front legs, then proceeded down to her ribs, her rear legs, and her tail. The mare looked unbothered by this attention, until, without warning, Teardrop pushed his head forward and bit the mare’s rear end, prompting her to emit a guttural shriek. She backed quickly away and took refuge between the other two mares.

  The other stallion in the string, pitch-black and slightly larger than Teardrop, snorted, whinnied, then reared onto his hind legs, briefly almost standing. Roaring, he landed angrily, stomping onto the sand a hair’s distance from Teardrop, who backed up a few steps. The two stallions locked eyes. Teardrop had a decision to make.

  The three mares stood frozen in rapt attention. Margaret and Gwinnett lay still on the sand, similarly enthralled. If birds were chirping, Margaret couldn’t hear them.

  Teardrop gave a snort, then quickly turned tail and trotted away from the other four ponies. As quickly as the conflict had started, it came to an unremarkable end. The remaining ponies in the string continued grazing on the cordgrass.

  Margaret exhaled. Adrenaline was coursing through her veins, pounding into her stomach. The raw confrontation—sex, violence, status—terrified and thrilled her.

  “That was intense!” she finally said. “I could use a drink.”

  Gwinnett looked at his watch. “It’s six fifteen in the morning, Mags.” He smiled. “And more important, my flask is back at the campsite.”

  Half an hour later, after the ponies had galloped off, Margaret and Gwinnett walked back to their camp, where another researcher—a cheery blond graduate student named Annabelle Lane—was lighting a match from a small fire over which a pot of hot water was just starting to boil. The match blazed and she lit her cigarette. Gwinnett ducked into his tent, and Lane continued to heat water for their coffee.

  “Tell me everything!” Annabelle said, and Margaret described how Teardrop had challenged the alpha in the string and been chased away.

  “So where does he go now?”

  “After the colts run off they all tend to find one another and then they form these roving bands of bachelor stallions.”

  Annabelle rolled her eyes. “Sounds like commons on a Saturday night.” She opened a collapsible metal cup and shook in some instant coffee from a tin. She handed it to Margaret, then carefully poured hot water from the pot into the cup. “Hold on, I’ll get you a spoon,” Annabelle said.

  “And some sugar, if you have it?”

  Gwinnett emerged from his tent with a small flask. With Margaret’s assent, he poured a couple of sips of bourbon into her coffee.

  “How’d you sleep?” Annabelle asked, handing Margaret a spoon and two sugar cubes.

  “Like a baby,” Margaret said. “I woke up every hour and cried.”

  Annabelle and Gwinnett smiled indulgently.

  “You should get a vinyl airbed,” Annabelle suggested.

  Margaret settled herself on the ground next to Annabelle. “When I was a kid, my mom and sister and I moved right near here, on the mainland, to stay with my uncle, and the three of us would sleep in a tent throughout the whole summer and into the fall. Slept soundly every night.” Margaret recalled the comfort and security she’d felt in those moments, ensconced between her older sister and mother in two sleeping bags her mom had ripped apart and sewn together, a cocoon for the three of them.

  “Where was your father?” Gwinnett asked, taking a seat on a large rock.

  “You ever hear of the USS Shenandoah?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Gwinnett said. “I’m navy myself.” He paused, clearly aware of what her question implied. “Horrible thing.”

  “What was it?” Annabelle said.

  “Dirigible crash in Ohio,” Margaret said. “My dad was killed, along with thirteen other men.” She hadn’t spoken of her father’s accident since the first time she told Charlie about it, more than a decade before. She wasn’t sure why she had just decided to break her long silence—maybe being back on Nanticoke justified a moment to indulge that pain. She felt anew that sinking feeling in her chest, the fresh grief always there no matter how skilled she’d become at ignoring it.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Annabelle said, looking down into her coffee.

  “What Mags isn’t saying is that her father was a true hero,” Gwinnett said. “The military at the time was convinced rigid airships like the Shenandoah were the future of warfare because they could fly so high. And this was the navy’s first one, so it was akin to on-the-job training for its crew. Margaret’s father and the other men were truly on the front lines.”

  Margaret walked to the fire to pour herself another cup of coffee. “It was a real mess,” she said. “We found out later the commander had tinkered with the design. The navy had ordered everyone to fly despite the bad weather. No one wanted to. But there was this mad race to come up with a vessel that would be the world’s best. We weren’t even in a war!”

  “Kind of like the way the U.S. is treating the atomic race today,” Gwinnett said.

  Margaret stirred the instant coffee in her cup. Annabelle and Gwinnett were silent; the only sound came from a distant chorus of gulls, egrets, and red-winged blackbirds.

  “There were forty-three men in the crew,” Margaret said. “Twenty-nine survived. My father was not among them.” She lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the ground.

  “There were four zeppelins in the U.S. around that time,” Gwinnett recalled. “Three were made by the Americans. They all crashed. One was made by the Germans. It didn’t.” He took a swig from his flask. “Our great infallible capitalist system at work.”

  Margaret didn’t know how to take his remarks. She looked at Annabelle, who was nodding in agreement.

  “I’ll be right back,” Annabelle said, suddenly standing. She went to her tent, reached in, grabbed a roll of toilet paper, and headed to a nearby grove.

  “So, Margaret,” Gwinnett said, moving so close to her that their knees were nearly touching. She looked at him expectantly. “I noticed you threw up this morning. Twice.”

  Margaret grimaced. She knew what was coming.

  “When were you going to tell me you’re pregnant?” he asked.

  Damn it, Margaret thought. She’d really counted on more time to keep the news to herself. “Well, I figured I could keep participating in the fieldwork until I had to stop,” she said. “I was going to tell you, I just didn’t know exactly how. And—honestly? I was hoping to get away with not being treated differently for as long as I could.”

  “It’s fine,” Gwinnett said. “I’m sure neither Annabelle nor any of the others
picked up on it. I would have noticed sooner or later—I’m a connoisseur of the female form. Especially yours.” He held up the flask as a toast and took another swig.

  She had been ignoring men’s inappropriate comments since she was twelve, but Margaret felt differently about Gwinnett’s come-on. In some small corner of her mind, she wanted him to find her appealing. Her heart began beating more quickly; she thought of a hummingbird.

  “Well, to be perfectly candid, Charlie and I didn’t plan this,” she said, motioning vaguely toward her womb.

  Gwinnett smiled. “You know how it happens though, right?”

  Margaret laughed. “Yes, I understand the basic cause and effect.”

  He turned away and muttered something—the cadence made her think it was “I’ll bet you do”—but she tried to ignore it. She liked Gwinnett; they worked well together, and he was a respected figure in their field. She hoped this baby, and this conversation, wouldn’t change things between them.

  They’d first met at the 1943 Zoological Association of America annual summer conference at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where Gwinnett, a renowned Equus expert, taught. Margaret, then about to begin her junior year at Barnard, ate lunch every day with the other women in attendance—there were six of them, at a conference with eighty-four participants. Most of the men ignored them, but Gwinnett pulled up a chair and talked to all of them about what areas of the field they were most interested in as well as his concerns about the difficulties the London Zoo was having during the war. Learning that she was hoping to write her senior thesis focused on the mysterious wild ponies of Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands, he invited her to keep in touch. Margaret suspected it was a casual remark but she was still thrilled to be noticed by a scholar she’d long admired. And, she had to admit, by someone so undeniably handsome.

  She had missed the conference in 1945, when Charlie finally returned from war and he and Margaret were engaged and married in haste. At the 1946 conference Margaret attended at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Gwinnett shook her right hand hello and simultaneously grabbed her left hand, admiring the wedding band, and making a regretful tsk sound. Over the course of the weekend, they shared an obvious chemistry, as well as a few meals together, but Gwinnett was careful not to openly flirt, and Margaret, very much a blissful newlywed in all other respects, worked hard to tamp down the attraction she felt toward him, going so far as to look in the hotel mirror one morning and say sternly and dramatically to herself, as if she were in a Cary Grant screwball comedy, “You are a married woman, Mrs. Marder!” She and Gwinnett attended panels and lectures together, and she diligently kept every conversation completely appropriate, as if Charlie were there with them. Gwinnett followed her lead; to end one particularly loaded silence after her hand accidentally grazed his, he clumsily launched into the details of an article he’d read about the recent discovery of echolocation by bats. She was relieved when the conference was over and they shared a friendly, brief farewell with vague promises to keep in touch, just like every other casual academic acquaintance.

  And then…that was it. Margaret had wondered if their friendship would blossom (carefully, chastely) with each successive encounter—twenty years her senior, he was full of experience and brilliance—but Gwinnett didn’t show up at the 1947 or 1948 conference. He was there in 1949 but he kept a respectful distance, and their relationship continued that way until just a few months ago, two days after Charlie had accepted Governor Dewey’s offer to serve out the remainder of Congressman Van Waganan’s term. Out of the blue on a December day, a letter had arrived special delivery from Gwinnett, informing Margaret that he had received a grant to study the ponies that had been their shared interest. He was putting together a small team to conduct field research throughout the year, starting in January, and there was a role and a tent for her if she so desired. Suddenly, moving to Washington, DC, a mere two or so hours away from the islands, offered her more than just the opportunity to be a congressional spouse.

  And now, here they were.

  “May I ask you a personal question, Mags?” he said. “And I’m sorry for flirting, I’ll calm it down. I’m just tired, and the whiskey isn’t helping.”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you been trying to have a baby all this time and it’s only now happening?”

  “Because I’m a bit old, you mean?”

  “You’re a perfectly healthy specimen, it’s just that I’m used to observing an earlier breeding process.” He smiled.

  “Well, we just kept putting it off,” she confessed. “Charlie and I were working on his book, and—”

  “You worked on Sons of Liberty?”

  “Yes, as an editor. And I helped organize his research. And we both just got caught up in the world of academia and scholarship—for a time I was working with the City Parks Department to catalog every wild animal in Manhattan.”

  “Including the alligators in the sewer?”

  She grinned. “No alligators, sadly. I had to debunk that myth in the summer of 1950. No, no alligators, but quite a few sewer rats and even some sad colonies of people under there.”

  “Well, I’m crushed,” Gwinnett said. “You’re very special. We’ll miss you when you have to leave.”

  Margaret was irritated. She was having a baby, not retiring, and she was certainly not ready to mourn for her career. She started to assure him of this when something in the distance caught her eye.

  “Look,” she said, pointing toward the western horizon. Gwinnett turned to see a pony. Margaret picked herself up off the ground and slowly, quietly, deliberately began heading toward the pony, slogging through the wet marsh, the weeds squishing beneath her feet. In her hurry she accidentally dropped her binoculars into the swamp, but she was too preoccupied to stop to retrieve them.

  Gwinnett followed her. Margaret was twenty feet away when the pony turned and, it seemed to Margaret, looked directly into her eyes. It was Teardrop.

  “Hi there, beauty,” Margaret said, approaching prudently.

  The pony snorted and looked down, splashing his forelegs in the marshy shallows. Margaret took another cautious step forward, one hand outstretched, barely able to breathe. Very few people ever got this close to one of these ponies—for all she knew, she was the first human he’d ever encountered. She was desperate to touch him, to pat the soft side of his stocky neck. Again he looked at her and she felt a shudder of connection.

  Gwinnett stood behind her, silent, as she slowly moved toward Teardrop, murmuring in low tones she hoped would reassure him, never taking her gaze from his. Her heart was pounding; her mouth was dry. She reached the beast and slowly put her hand on his forehead, then softly patted him down to his muzzle. He leaned into her and closed his eyes. And then, abruptly, Teardrop tossed his head and pawed the water before turning and galloping into the distance.

  Margaret stood watching him, trying to understand what had just happened. Gwinnett’s voice broke the spell.

  “Wow,” said Gwinnett, coming up to stand next to her. “That was incredible.”

  Margaret nodded mutely.

  “We should go back to camp and write up our notes. Annabelle will be jealous when she hears how close you got.”

  Margaret felt a sharp pang of loneliness. The person she most wanted to tell was Charlie, who was a hundred miles away. She missed him deeply. She looked one last time at the spot where Teardrop had just stood, then turned and followed Gwinnett back to see if she could find her binoculars in the swamp.

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday, January 23, 1954

  Georgetown, Washington, DC

  Margaret had been home from Nanticoke Island for only an hour when, still unshowered and exhausted, she answered the town-house doorbell and was greeted by a pretty, college-age woman holding Charlie’s dry-cleaned tuxedo.

  “Hello, Mrs. Marder! I’m Sheryl Ann Bernstein, the congressman’s intern. Miss Leopold asked me to deliver this—I hope I’m not intruding.” She ha
nded over the garment and smiled so brightly Margaret almost wanted to shield her eyes. “Thank you!” she said. “I hope you and the congressman have a good weekend.”

  The intern was halfway down the town-house steps when she turned around. “Oh! Mrs. Marder!” she cried. “Please tell the congressman I made some progress on my homework assignment!” She smiled yet again and then bounced away, a vision of perky youth that made Margaret feel ancient.

  Charlie was tucked away in his first-floor study, surrounded by tall stacks of thick reference books.

  “Some Debbie Reynolds look-alike just dropped this off,” she said, hanging the tuxedo on the doorknob.

  “Oh, crud,” Charlie said. “I forgot to tell you, I have to go to a dinner this evening. The Alfalfa Club.”

  “Alfalfa like from the Little Rascals?”

  “No, Alfalfa like the plant,” he said distractedly. “The roots of which will apparently do anything to find a drink. That’s the conceit of the name, at any rate. Har-har.”

  “Yes, I get it, Charlie,” Margaret said drily. “You’re spending too much time educating infatuated interns, perhaps. Assigning them homework.”

  Preoccupied by the book in his hand, Charlie raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Nothing. Anyway, I’m filthy and I need to shower.” She headed upstairs, and Charlie decided to let her comment dissolve in the ether, returning his attention to the Funk and Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia. He’d been looking for more information about Chairman Carlin when he’d stumbled on the entry for the University of Chicago; recalling the odd note he’d found in his desk, he read more in hopes of learning what the school might have had to do with cereal grains or broadleaf crops. Messrs. Funk and Wagnalls offered no help. No matter. Charlie turned instead to entries on Kefauver and others whom he thought he might encounter that evening.

  The Alfalfa Club was among the most elite social organizations in Washington, DC, its membership consisting of two hundred business leaders, politicians, sometimes even presidents. Charlie’s invitation was obviously an afterthought, but that didn’t diminish his anticipation. Yesterday he had been having lunch in the private Senate Dining Room with Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, when Kefauver stopped by their table.