The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  Then suddenly the burden of the foal was partly lifted, and the mass of their bodies was successfully resisting the undertow. Though the inky black sky and dark ocean had all but merged into one ominous void for Margaret, she could sense that someone else had joined them. At first in her panic she imagined some giant fish or dolphin, some magical sea creature arriving deus ex machina, but after she regained her footing and she and the foal edged their way to a shallower patch where she could stand, she saw that it was a man with them, and he had the foal by her head and forelegs and was helping to carry her while also bringing both of them to safety, and she thought maybe it was Gwinnett but then the man raised his head to look at her and she was stunned to see that it was Charlie.

  Chapter Twenty

  Wednesday, March 10, 1954

  Maryland Rural Route 32

  His sudden trip to Nanticoke Island had been the most impulsive action Charlie had taken in a decade. Behaving erratically energized and emboldened him, allowing him to cast off the chains of predictable adult behavior amid the chaotic swirl of his life these past three months. He had gotten off the train in Baltimore and hired a taxi to take him to the end of Maryland Rural Route 32, the tip of the isthmus, although he had to try eight different cabbies before he finally found one who agreed to do it, for twice the normal rate. Charlie had the cash on hand; part of him must have known he was going to make this rash journey. He told the hack he’d give him fifty bucks if he waited an hour in that same spot.

  He arrived at the tip of the isthmus just after eight p.m. There was a narrow footbridge from there to Susquehannock Island, but to get to Nanticoke he would need a boat. The local live-bait store was not yet open for the season, but a young man doing inventory on new rods and reels, nets and lures agreed to rent him a motorboat. He took it to Nanticoke Island and disembarked at the small, shabby dock.

  From there, Charlie had walked through a thicket of trees, then to the campsite, which cast the only light he could discern on the island, from a still-crackling fire around which stood four tents. No one was there, but he heard noises from beyond some bushes, past a dune, so he headed to what he presumed would be the beach.

  From the dune he saw Margaret in the distance running into the water; he wasn’t sure why. He watched in disbelief as the three men made their way to the closest spot to her on the sand but never went into the water. Charlie began running toward his wife and saw her head disappear beneath the waves. Next thing Charlie knew, he was sprinting into the sea, gasping at its frigidity, racing toward Margaret and what he now saw was a thrashing pony. He grabbed the pony around her barrel behind her front legs and eased her and Margaret to shallower water until the two of them were together carrying the pony to the safety of the sand.

  Margaret and Charlie locked eyes and gently laid the foal on the beach away from the waves before they collapsed on hands and knees, gasping for breath and shivering in the cold. At last the other men sprang into action; Cornelius tended to the foal, covering her with a towel while he checked her pulse and breathing; Kessler draped blankets over Charlie’s and Margaret’s shoulders, while Gwinnett checked their pulses. Margaret, in an adrenaline-fueled daze, kept looking at Charlie and shaking her head, whether in disbelief that he was really here or that they had just pulled off this unlikely rescue, he couldn’t tell.

  After a few more minutes of silence, Margaret stood and approached Cornelius, still ministering to the wet foal. The pony lay on her side with her head in the grad student’s lap; he was scratching her chin groove with one hand, patting her muzzle with the other. She had a teardrop-shaped pattern on her forehead, recalling the stallion from weeks before. Her flank was expanding and contracting at a rapid clip, her eyes staring dolefully at nothing in particular until they flickered to Margaret. Against all her scientific training and instincts, Margaret felt a connection, almost an understanding, pass between them.

  “She’s going to be okay, I think,” Cornelius said.

  “Well, she’s going to live,” Margaret said. “But I don’t know that she’s going to survive without her parents. Maybe we can get her to a local farm.”

  “Why don’t we go to the camp?” Gwinnett suggested. “Warm up by the fire.”

  Charlie put a tentative arm around Margaret’s shoulders and the two headed to the warmth of the fire that Kessler was now feeding with kindling. It was agreed that Margaret and Charlie should get out of their wet clothes, so Margaret went into her tent, and Charlie accepted Gwinnett’s offer of a loan to replace his soaking-wet pants, shirt, and socks.

  The group stood around the fire warming themselves, and finally Charlie spoke. “With Margaret’s permission, I’d like to take her home. She can come back after a little rest, I think. Yes?” He turned to Margaret and she nodded.

  “You sure about that, Mags?” Gwinnett asked. She nodded again.

  Charlie shook Gwinnett’s hand with a firm grip and looked him in the eye. The message was clear, he felt: I’ve got it from here, fella.

  “Okay, we can leave your camp set up,” Gwinnett said. “We’ll be here until the first week of May. Come back as soon as you can.”

  “We can move your tent and gear to Susquehannock in two weeks,” Kessler added, “or bring it to you in DC in a month.”

  The Marders walked through the brush and to the dock. Charlie guided Margaret into the motorboat he had rented, and they headed to the mainland, where the cabbie was waiting. They were spent, so they asked him to take them to the local motel, Polly’s Lodging. The two barely spoke as they were driven through the dark, though Charlie’s hand eventually found its way to Margaret’s.

  Margaret recognized Polly from her last visit to the island in January, when she’d borrowed the motel phone, but the woman gave no sign of remembering her. She informed Charlie that they had plenty of rooms and offered them what she referred to without a trace of sarcasm as the honeymoon suite at no extra charge if they indeed would be staying only one night. He looked at Margaret, who squeezed his hand. With his briefcase and her leather satchel between them, they walked to room 20 and Charlie locked the door behind them. The clock by their bedside said 1:05.

  “Well,” said Margaret, sitting on the bed and exhaling loudly, “that was something.”

  Charlie pulled up a chair and tried to think of what to say.

  “I’ve really missed you,” he finally blurted out.

  “I’m right here.”

  “Are you?”

  She sniffed, still cold from the ocean, and reached for a tissue. “Yes,” she said.

  “We haven’t talked in forever.”

  Margaret pulled an elastic band from around her wrist and put her blond hair up in a ponytail. “Truth Train?”

  Charlie smiled. His parents’ wedding present to them had been a round-trip train ride on “the most famous train in the world,” the 20th Century Limited, from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station, a trip they took in the summer of 1947. It was not the easiest time in their marriage, as Charlie was struggling with war memories and what seemed to him a shallow and silly civilian world. After a couple of cocktails one evening, Margaret came up with the idea that while they were on the train, they could speak only the 100 percent truth to each other. The result was shockingly effective—the truths one revealed and explored were usually about one’s own bad behavior—and for the next year or so they would use the term Truth Train to temporarily reinstate those rules. It had been at least five years since either had invoked it.

  “Truth Train,” Charlie agreed.

  “We haven’t talked in forever because I’ve made it clear I didn’t like what you had to say.”

  Charlie grimaced; she was so much better at Truth Train than he was.

  “I know,” he acknowledged.

  She sat waiting for him to offer a contribution.

  Finally he told her: “I’ve been doing the best I can. This hasn’t been easy. You and the baby. Everything is so new, and Washingt
on is such a messed-up place.” He heard weakness in his voice and cursed himself for it; he wanted to be honest, but he didn’t want her to think he couldn’t handle the pressures of their new life.

  Margaret’s face was stony, unreadable. She leaned back on the bed. “I’m assuming there’s much more going on here than those insipid comic-book hearings. And part of me doesn’t want to know more. But that’s selfish.” Her face softened. “I think I’ve been afraid to find out more.”

  “You don’t want to hear that I’m not the man you thought you’d married.” Charlie took her hands in his. “I didn’t think you did.” He looked down at the floor and shook his head. It was hard to meet her gaze knowing everything he had to tell her.

  Margaret squeezed his hands sympathetically. “You sound just a bit self-pitying there, honey.”

  He winced, then smiled. “I forgot how turbulent the Truth Train can be.”

  “I want to help. But I have to know what’s going on.”

  “That’s why I came here. I can get through this, but not…not without you.”

  He was surprised to see her eyes glistening with tears. She patted the bed next to her. He obligingly crawled onto it and sank against the pillows. Margaret propped herself up on an elbow and turned to him, all trace of emotion replaced by her usual inquisitive and methodical manner. “All right, darling. I want to hear everything.”

  So he told her.

  Hands clasped behind his head, Charlie found it easier to look at the motel ceiling than at Margaret as he unburdened himself. He began at the beginning: Why he had the congressional seat. Congressman Van Waganan’s death might not have been as neat and tidy as it seemed. At least, not according to Congressman Christian MacLachlan, who was now also dead, shot by Puerto Rican terrorists.

  “What was Mac suggesting happened to Van Waganan?” she asked.

  “Nothing specific. Just vague allusions to how nothing was what it seemed, how Van Waganan had kept up the fight against companies cutting corners.”

  “I thought Van Waganan committed suicide.”

  “Me too, but Street says he was found in a hotel with a prostitute. They were both dead.”

  Margaret’s face settled into an expression of confused disbelief as Charlie told her about the odd note he found in the desk that was once Van Waganan’s: U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops.

  “You remember my perky intern, Sheryl Ann Bernstein, she came to the house that time?” Margaret nodded with a slight roll of her eyes. “Her brother’s at Northwestern so she asked him to go see what that meant, but he hit a dead end. A woman at the University of Chicago said the study was subject to wartime secrecy laws.”

  “War’s been over for a decade,” Margaret observed.

  “Yes, so I’ve read,” Charlie said. “Strongfellow’s on House Armed Services so he explored it at the Pentagon but also didn’t get anywhere.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “This is all just so bizarre.”

  “It gets stranger. Because now Mac is dead,” Charlie said, “and on his deathbed, the last thing he said to me was ‘under Jennifer.’”

  She scrunched up her face in confusion, and Charlie nodded. “We had no idea who Jennifer was, but then Sheryl Ann came up with a smart theory.” He started telling her about Maryland delegate Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, but Margaret held up her hand to stop him.

  “I need to write all this down,” she said. She opened the drawer of the nightstand and withdrew a pad of paper and a sharpened pencil. Mac, she wrote at the top of the pad, followed by other reminders of related threads. This was how they had worked together while he was writing Sons of Liberty; he would research and share his discoveries, and then she would take notes and categorize every item until they could come up with coherent narratives.

  “Congressman Street and this girl, Sheryl Ann—how much do they know about your predicament?” Margaret asked.

  “Sheryl Ann knows a little, about the broadleaf-crops note and about Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, obviously,” Charlie said. “Isaiah knows everything.”

  “Okay, what else?” she asked. “What ever happened with your main mission? To stop funding for Goodstone?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I thought I’d achieved it. Carlin told me it was out of the bill, we voted, everyone was patting me on the back—”

  “Did you read the bill?” she interrupted.

  “I did,” he said. “There were no references to Goodstone. That section had been deleted. But then…well, Conrad Hilton was throwing a party—a celebration of the migrant bill passing. So we were all at the penthouse of the Mayflower and Carlin was there. The night got away from me a bit. Strongfellow and Bob Kennedy were there. Roy Cohn too. We got into it about Ike and patriotism, and I got hit with the Cohn crazy spray. But more to the point, eventually I ended up drinking absinthe with Carlin, Strongfellow, and some others. LaMontagne.”

  “Oh…” Margaret tapped the pencil against her cheek thoughtfully. “This must have been the morning you came home reeking like a distillery rag.”

  “Correct.”

  “Boy, I hated you that morning.”

  Charlie remained silent, knowing she had every right to resent him. And he hadn’t even gotten to the worst of it yet: the car accident. He told her about Carlin cackling when he said, “I screwed you on Goodstone,” and, to be fair, because he was nothing if not diligently so, about Carlin’s argument that businesses such as Goodstone and General Kinetics needed to thrive as much for national security as for national economic advancement.

  “It’s so odd that he told you about it,” Margaret said. “Why not just do it and go on about his life?”

  “Clearly he doesn’t like me,” said Charlie, who had given the matter some serious thought. “He didn’t appreciate my original protest of the funding. And, look, he’s a hardscrabble, pull-himself-up-by-his-own-bootstraps kind of guy from Snake Skull, Oklahoma, and to him I must seem like an entitled establishment New Yorker who breezed into Congress without any right to be there.”

  Margaret kept writing. Underneath Carlin she added a note about the chairman’s request that Charlie co-sponsor the farm bill with him.

  “This is all about controlling you,” Margaret observed. And it was difficult to argue with that, though Charlie told her that when he’d asked Carlin to block the General Kinetics plant from Harlem, Carlin had said he would.

  “Carlin screwed you on Goodstone because it would hurt General Kinetics,” Margaret noted. “Do you assume he’s going to follow through with the Harlem plant?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, now that he thinks I’m playing ball?”

  It was after two o’clock in the morning but neither wanted to stop talking, and the work was almost beside the point. On a page Margaret labeled Miscellaneous, a list of names and events grew long: Carlin, Strongfellow, Cohn, Kennedy, Kefauver, poker night, comic-book hearing. She designated the next page Odd, and that list included Margaret Chase Smith’s suggestion that Charlie use the special members-only collection at the Library of Congress to do more research on Ben Franklin and the Hellfire Club (“Why do you think she made such a point of recommending that?”). And although Charlie wasn’t sure if or how it related to his ongoing troubles, she insisted on adding his father’s drunken luncheon lecture and the unsettling revelation about the Coney Island incubators.

  She came to the end of the page and looked at him expectantly. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  That she knew him so well was both perilous and the whole point. Charlie nodded grimly and took a deep breath.

  “So LaMontagne gave me a file full of dirt against a guy at Zenith, Ira Boschwitz. A competitor. About him being a Commie. I went back and forth on it, but ultimately I did what LaMontagne told me to and gave it to Bob Kennedy for the McCarthy Committee. I saw in the paper three days later that he’d been called before the committee and that he’d been fired.”

  She sat silently for a minute, her head tilted to one sid
e. Were all these compromised decisions just part of adulthood? She knew of no such corruption of her martyred father, but was that only because she didn’t really know about his life? Or because he had been killed so young? Now that she thought about it, was his participation in that mission without blemish? The captain of the USS Shenandoah had seen that thunderstorms would be on the flight path and urged command to wait them out. He’d been overruled, and fourteen men, including her dad, had been killed. Surely they had all known of the bad weather, yet they went along with their orders. Was that so dissimilar from the difficult orders Charlie faced?

  “I could see that decision not being so simple,” she finally allowed. “I mean, what if he ends up being a Communist and it comes out that you sat on the file? It would be easy for me to judge. But who knows if it’s wrong or right? It’s not as if there aren’t Communists infiltrating the world of defense contractors.”

  Charlie nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s how I rationalized it, but it wasn’t a proud moment. And I don’t trust LaMontagne.”

  Margaret was less understanding when he told her about McCarthy asking him to steal the file on NBC’s investigation into Strongfellow from his father’s study.

  “Why on earth would you do that?” she asked.

  And that was when he had to tell her the worst of it: the car accident. He didn’t know who knew what, and he was terrified to disobey anyone lest that person ruin his life.

  As calmly and clearly as he knew how, Charlie recounted the events of that awful night—those he remembered, at any rate. He watched his wife’s face closely as she tried to understand what he was telling her: waking up in the mud, LaMontagne’s arrival, the discovery of the dead woman, LaMontagne carrying her corpse to the car, Charlie refusing to take part in it but also refusing to stop it, the two of them driving off, how he’d collapsed later that morning from the guilt of it all, his terror that he might have killed an innocent woman.

  When he was finally done, the tiny room was silent. Outside a chorus of crickets chirped.