by Jake Tapper
Winston peered at his son through his glasses. “I would co-sponsor it, were I you,” he said.
“That wasn’t where I thought you were going with this,” Charlie said.
“No, because I gave you the BLUF, the ‘bottom line up front,’ the stuff you’re going to worry about. Two reasons why you should co-sponsor: politics and policy. Which do you want first?”
“Politics is fine.”
“Jack Kennedy has been making enemies by voting against farm interests. It might stand in the way of his getting the veep slot in ’56. Why not make friends instead? It’s not as though anyone in your district gives a crap one way or the other.”
“All right,” Charlie said. “And policy?”
Winston drained the last of his martini. “Pesticides are not only a huge part of how we feed our own people, they’re vital to how we and our allies fight Communism. Right now, in Malaya, the Brits are using defoliation to destroy where the Communists hide.”
“We just voted on a bill to send aid to the Brits for that,” he said.
The waiter approached the table and asked Charlie’s father if he was going to have his usual; Winston nodded. Charlie requested the soup and sandwich of the day.
“What’s the downside?” Winston asked his son. “You make a friend in Chairman Carlin, you get some fund-raising from the heartland, you help farmers, you help defeat the Red Menace abroad.”
“You’re asking me, an army captain who lost a soldier to nerve gas, what can go wrong with chemicals? This is why I pushed to block permitting on the General Kinetics plant in Harlem.”
“Things can go wrong with any factory. Out in Queens today, a forklift operator will drop a box of Slinkys on his co-worker’s head. In Iowa, a farmhand will trip and drown in a feed silo. At a Texas slaughterhouse, a meat cleaver will land in the wrong place. They’re all the casualties of progress.”
“Was Private Rodriguez a casualty of progress?”
Winston waved his hand at his son’s question as if he were swatting away a gnat. A waiter deftly placed a filet mignon in front of him while a cocktail waitress replaced his martini. Winston took up his fork and steak knife and tucked into his meal.
“Charlie,” he said while chewing, “did you ever hear of Martin Couney?”
“I don’t think so,” Charlie said, looking around for his soup and sandwich.
“He died a few years ago. Considered the father of neonatology.”
“Okay.”
“You were born a few weeks premature, I think you know that.”
Charlie nodded; his parents had never been comfortable talking about his birth, and he knew few details.
“You were tiny and sickly and your mother was worried about you. The doctors assured us you’d be fine, but a nurse told me about Couney. He had set up an incubator ward out in Brooklyn. Dozens of premature babies being cared for and watched round the clock. The newest state-of-the-art incubators imported from Europe.”
“Why from Europe?”
The waiter placed Charlie’s soup and sandwich before him. He started with the chicken noodle.
“Europe was decades ahead of the U.S. on premature babies. Believe it or not, here in this country, premature babies were regarded as weaklings, deficient—like miscarriages, an act of God.”
“Darwinism.”
“Exactly. Survival of the fittest. But Couney didn’t see it that way. Not only that, he wanted to help babies of all colors and races and religions and stations in life. Poor babies, rich babies. At no charge. I was truly amazed when I went out to see him on Coney Island.”
“Coney Island?”
“Twenty-five cents a head, step right up to see the teeny-tiny babies in the incubators! A big sign outside said ‘All the World Loves a Baby.’ In the summer, crowds would line up to gawk at the baby-incubator show.”
Charlie blinked. “Seriously?”
“Yes. Right next to the bearded lady and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy. About twenty or so premature babies, fighting for their lives. Shrunken. Shriveled. Pink. Tragic.”
“I’m not sure of the point of the story,” Charlie said. “I guess it’s ‘Thanks for not leaving me at the freak show’?”
Winston chewed a bite of his steak, then washed it down with a gulp of martini. “Actually, we did. Leave you there.”
Charlie was shocked. “Excuse me?”
“You stayed there for nine days,” Winston said, slicing off another bite of filet, “after which Couney and the staff thought you were fine to go home.”
“Jesus, Dad, you left me at a freak show?”
“Charlie. I would have volunteered to stay at the freak show myself, swallowing swords or covering my body with tattoos, if I’d thought it would keep you alive. Shame doesn’t enter the picture when your baby’s life is at stake!”
“No, I just mean—”
“Good Christ, you are still in a goddamn incubator. You don’t see the world as it is, Charlie. So safely ensconced—”
“You think when I was slogging—”
“Oh, spare me your war stories,” his dad said, stunning him into silence. “I know you were a goddamn patriot, but for some reason you failed to connect the evil you saw there and what the Allies had to do to stamp it out with the same imperatives here. Let me tell you something. When I was working on that trial of that goddamn cannibal? Fish? I saw the kind of evil that exists out there. And what you might not get is that the threat from the Communists is just as evil and just as real, and those fighting them need ammunition—and you keep standing in the goddamn way!” He banged on the table, prompting nearby club members to shoot Charlie concerned looks.
Charlie looked down at his briefcase, where he’d stowed the stolen NBC Strongfellow investigation. He was doing what he had to do, even to his own father’s detriment; he was no longer standing in the way. But he knew he could hardly present this line he’d crossed as proof of his understanding.
“Ever since you got back from France, you’ve been in a goddamn academic ivory tower thinking lofty thoughts,” Winston said, “writing about our Founding Fathers—who certainly knew what protecting this nation actually meant. But you’ve missed the point of all of it!”
Yes, by all means, lecture me about elitism in the private dining room of the Harvard Club, Charlie thought. He took a bite of his chicken salad sandwich. “Boy,” he said, chewing, “that Fish trial sounds disturbing. Seriously psychologically disturbing.”
Winston Marder ran his tongue against his molars, seemingly more focused on stray bits of steak stuck between his teeth than his son’s concern over the damage done years ago to his psyche.
Charlie went straight from the Harvard Club to Pennsylvania Station, hoping to catch the first train back to Washington. He had refrained from drinking with his father, but he went to the club car of the Afternoon Congressional train and ordered a bourbon even before the locomotive lurched and jerked and commenced its southward trip. He checked his watch: 2:50 p.m. The lights in the car flickered as they proceeded under the Hudson River through the North Tunnel, chugging under Weehawken and Union City, emerging from the underworld via the portal in North Bergen.
They zoomed through the slums of Secaucus and Jersey City, crossing over the dingy Passaic River for a brief stop at Pennsylvania Station in Newark, then quickly moved off through Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway—the low-income apartments and one-story homes ran together, blurring the entire state into one giant, nebulous town you would never want to live in. The club-car bartender refreshed Charlie’s drink as he stood at the bar, staring out the window. He thought about the This Is Your Life investigation, the irony of his father sneering at him for not following orders with sufficient obedience when the only reason he was even in New York City was to steal NBC’s This Is Your Life investigation from his dad, a testament to his being all too willing to do what he had to do. He thought of the irony of the fact that though he had been obsessed with correct usage of the term irony as a young man, he had never tru
ly experienced it until today. He thought of the irony of the fact that his father had been the one to drum into his head the proper use of the term after he had wrongly used it as a synonym for “coincidence,” and here he was betraying the man who had taught him what it meant. Or was that not in itself ironic? Charlie’s head began to ache.
He felt weighed down again. There were the issues that seemed minor in the grand scheme of things intellectually but still felt like bites of his integrity—stealing the NBC Strongfellow dossier, his failed Goodstone fight, guilt about MacLachlan’s death, the pending preposterous comic-book hearings, handing off the Boschwitz folder. A lifetime’s worth of selling out in just two months.
And then, of course, the young woman, his fears about what he must have done to have caused her death, though there was part of him that still couldn’t believe it. He assumed this was a defense mechanism and that sooner or later he would accept that he was behind the loss of a life, but he wasn’t there yet.
And underneath it all there was Margaret, or the absence thereof. Where was Margaret? God, how he needed her now.
Chapter Nineteen
Wednesday, March 10, 1954
Nanticoke Island, Maryland
From Charlie’s enlistment in 1942 until the end of the war, Margaret had tracked his journey on a map she tacked up next to her bed. Starting in Fort Meade, Maryland, pins were placed on the North Carolina–South Carolina border where Charlie next was shipped for practice maneuvers, then to Fort Benning in Georgia. In October 1942, Charlie and the 175th Infantry Regiment crammed into the ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth and set sail for England, where they were ultimately given temporary quarters at a former British military base, Tidworth Barracks.
She wrote to him every day; he wrote back as often as he could, although that became increasingly difficult as K Company got closer to the front lines. In his letters, Charlie described Tidworth Barracks as ascetic—just a dozen brick buildings with no central heat, each named for a battle the British had fought in India. The barracks had coal-burning fireplaces at each end, but Charlie’s bunk stood in the middle, so very little heat reached him throughout that cold, wet English winter.
Charlie deployed his usual comic detachment when he wrote to her, but Margaret thought the barracks and the daily training routines sounded miserable. The UK was being bombed constantly, so every night blackout conditions were in effect. Any rare moments of R and R were spent struggling with directions to a restaurant or pub without benefit of street or route signs, which the British had removed in case of enemy invasion. Charlie and his fellow troops conducted practice amphibious assaults on local lakes, rivers, and moors until K Company and the larger infantry regiment were transported to Devon to wait to board the tank landing ships in which they would be shuttled to the beaches of Normandy.
“Of everything we’ve experienced here in England,” Charlie wrote while waiting to ship out for France, in a rare moment of candor,
it wasn’t the bone-chilling cold of the desperate English winter that made me most miserable, though there was one night where I gladly would have traded a limb for a bucket of coal. And it wasn’t the constant threat of air assault marked by sirens, panic, confusion, and impotence. It was the moors—the dark, dank, foul, freezing, fetid swamps filled with bacteria and leeches and swarming with mosquitoes, a hundred pounds of gear strapped on our backs, pushing us down into the muck, while the slough tricked us with false floors, causing us to stumble and drink in the grime—the experience was akin to dunking my body into a pool of death, that’s the only way I can think of to describe it. I cannot say anything more about what we are doing next, but I am sure it will be worse. I don’t know if our times in the marshlands prepared us tactically or just barely introduced us to a taste of the horror that awaits on the mainland.
Now, ten years later, standing on her tiptoes on a sandbar in the Atlantic Ocean, saltwater waves splashing into her nose and down her throat, Margaret had some understanding of what Charlie had described.
The previous night, Margaret had made a glorious discovery. Quadrani and Hinman, their counterparts on Susquehannock Island, had found the three ponies that had swum to their island and concluded they were a stallion, mare, and foal—a family. On walkie-talkies, they shared what they’d learned. Gwinnett assigned each of the members of his team night shifts in which they were to surreptitiously watch the sleeping strings to see if any made their way to the beach and then the ocean. They did that for three nights straight, with no results. But then Margaret found a string in a field and patiently waited behind a shrub thicket of marsh elder. Within an hour, just after midnight, she watched a mare lead her family down a narrow path toward the beach. Margaret, crouched over and scurrying quietly behind them, watched as they galloped into the shallows of the surf and onto an apparent sandbar, after which the stallion, mare, and two foals swam out across the bay, the stallion now taking the lead. She raced back to wake up her colleagues and share with them the confirmation of what was something of a revelation in their field—that the ponies, quite unusually, apparently traveled in families, not larger strings, and that the mare, at least in this case, was the driving force to get the family to the water.
Tonight, however, as they watched a new string make the journey, it seemed the foal might prove too weak. A strong wind raised a more pugilistic surf than normal, with trains of swell waves hitting shore. As the stallion and mare boldly galloped into the surf, the foal stumbled, her legs wobbly and spindly.
“She looks off,” said Kessler, kneeling in a patch of beach heather behind a dune, where the group had been sitting since dusk.
“Maybe she was premature? Or just a runt,” Cornelius speculated.
The foal made her way to the sandbar, which was within a few dozen feet of shore, the waves slapping into her flank as she followed her parents.
“Is she going to be able to handle the swimming part of this?” Gwinnett asked. “I think I saw her two days ago struggling to keep up just on land.”
Aiming Kessler’s powerful flashlight at the sandbar, Margaret watched the foal stumble and fall behind while her parents set out into the water. Margaret had long been interested in the bond between mares and foals and whether it had an impact on the larger string, but right now, her intense focus was less academic in nature; she realized that at some point the foal would need to begin swimming, and she didn’t know if the young pony was up to the task. The foal looked weak but determined, faltering and nearly collapsing before taking a few halting steps, falling farther behind her parents. Margaret held her breath, wondering whether the stallion or, more likely, the mare would opt for nurturing heroism or if more Darwinian impulses would decide the foal’s fate.
“Jesus,” Margaret said as a wave smacked the foal’s shoulder and half submerged her head in the water.
“Maybe best not to watch, Margaret,” Gwinnett said, placing his hand on her arm. She twitched instinctively and his hand fell back to his side.
The foal, now ten or so yards behind her galloping parents, continued on her path to Susquehannock Island, but her struggle seemed to increase with each step. She slowed as she waded into deeper water, and she began to disappear. The farther and deeper she went, the harder it was for the team to track her progress.
Margaret snatched the flashlight from Kessler and ran down the beach, trying to get a better view of the foal.
“Margaret, what are you doing?” Gwinnett shouted from behind her.
The slight extra weight in her midsection slowed Margaret a tad as she began sprinting down the beach, trying to catch up with the foal, running parallel to the angular path of the sandbar and into the surf, lifting her knees to avoid being slowed by the breakers.
“Margaret!” shouted Gwinnett. “Margaret?”
But Margaret barely heard him; she was focused on the young pony, who was trying to keep her head above the waves, fighting not to be dragged down. Margaret waded in and then threw the flashlight onto the sand and div
ed into the water. She had the foal in her line of sight, maybe twenty feet away, still vaguely illuminated by the moon. The water was shockingly cold.
Gwinnett, Kessler, and Cornelius began running down the beach, following Margaret’s general direction in the water but remaining on land.
Margaret was maybe ten feet away from the foal, whose ears were all that were visible as the rip current dragged her from the shore. As a wave approached, Margaret inhaled deeply, then dived into the sea, extending her arms as far forward as possible until finally her fingertips, then her full palms, touched the pony, covered in soft, silky hair. She slid her arms around the sides of the foal’s body, clasped her fingers under her barrel, and tried to stand. As she straightened her legs, the depth of the water surprised her. She was able to stand, but barely, on the balls of her feet, with her head and mouth just reaching the air above. She found herself trapped in a tug-of-war with the undertow as she and the foal battled against the current.
It was then that she thought, for just a split second, of Charlie and his stories from training for D-Day.
She could hear the men yelling from the shore, but she didn’t know what they were saying and she didn’t care. The foal couldn’t have weighed that much, and given natural buoyancy, Margaret thought she should have been able to quickly float the pony to the shallows, but it proved more difficult than she’d anticipated. The foal’s thrashing complicated her attempts to hang on to her as the ocean dragged her out to sea. Soon Margaret could no longer touch the bottom of the ocean. She was athletic enough to keep holding the foal’s head above the water, the scissor kick of her legs preventing them from drifting farther, but the result was essentially stasis.
