What did all that have to do with me?
I sat back in my chair.
My eyes moved across the table and between the two steel-gray heads, who had sat back as well, now that they’d agreed to throw out Asquith and Kitchener and all the rest of them.
I looked into the darkness of the corridor.
And the darkness moved.
That was the first impression, lasting only a brief moment. The darkness shifted, swelled, and then points of light began to clarify into a face, hands, and a piano started playing the instrumental introduction to a song—and I recognized it, the intro to “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—and the face emerging from the shadows of the corridor, heading this way, became clear, and now I recognized it as well, even as I had a sense of movement to my left, Buffington no doubt standing up to address us all. He said, “Gentlemen, in the interests of preserving civilization as we wait out this latest barbarous attack, I give you the great Isabel Cobb.”
My mother emerged fully into the room, dressed in black, and she stopped, framed in the doorway, as the men at our table wrenched around, turned their chairs, applauded, and cried out “Hear! Hear!”
The introduction was over and Mother shot the piano player a brief glance as he fumbled a bit with the transition to the verse. I glanced with her, and it was the stout man Buffington had replaced at the table. This was a select and secretive group; Isabel Cobb’s accompanist was drawn from one of our own number. He wasn’t terrible at this, however, and he found his way into the verse and Mother looked back to us and began to sing.
I heard her voice, but for a few moments, as far as I knew, she could have been singing a soliloquy from Hamlet, as I grappled with my surprise at her presence here. And then she was inserting that phony ache into her voice that she was so good at. Phony mostly to my ear, of course; fans loved it. But, indeed, she drew even me in with it now as she sang:
“Let no tears add to their hardships
As the soldiers pass along,
And although your heart is breaking,
Make it sing this cheery song.”
The secret service pianist did all right with the transition to the chorus and Mama floated on in, more achy than ever. “Keep the home fires burning, while your hearts are yearning,” she sang and she began to work the room, gliding along the tables, singing to each stiff upper lip individually—“Though your lads are far away, they dream of home”—and bringing a tear to each eye and a stirring to each stirrable part—“There’s a silver lining, through the dark clouds shining”—and she gave me a little less eye contact than the others and a pat on the shoulder as she slid by. “Turn the dark cloud inside out, till the boys come home.”
I watched her as she moved on to Trask.
He lifted his face to her, and a son knows certain things for reasons he can’t put his finger on easily. Or the reasons seem minute and insubstantial. But Trask’s eyes and my mother’s held on each other for one pulse beat, one intake of breath, and I knew there was something between them. This particular son knowing certain things about this particular mother made me think in my usual, weary little way: lovers.
Then he nodded, once, very faintly, with those blank eyes of his, and I felt my intuition shift. She was not sleeping with him. She was working for him. Is she ready? he’d said. Ready for Sir Albert Stockman’s weekend party.
She moved along, singing, “Overseas there came a pleading, help a nation in distress,” and Buffington extended his hand and she took it and she sang to him and I had the same first, fleeting hunch about him. She was working for Trask, but she was sleeping with Buffington. And then I felt like the punk kid I once was, standing outside a closed door in a theatrical boarding-house trying to will his mother to live her life in some other way. What way, I couldn’t imagine, just some other way.
But in fact I was thirty-one years old and she was fifty-six and we had long ago disentangled ourselves from our shared life. And rightly so. We wrote letters. An occasional telegram. But all of that was strictly private. As public as I had subsequently become and as she had always been, it was not really known—outside of a few of my journalist pals and the close-knit tribe of American theater people—that we were mother and son.
She let go of her host’s hand and I let go of the hunch and she moved off to the next table to urge everyone to keep the home fires burning while their hearts were yearning.
I thought of her lying to me in her dressing room. No. She hadn’t lied. It was no doubt true that she was not now working nor would she ever work again for a detective agency. But she didn’t say anything at all about working for the U.S. secret service. She’d convinced me about the Pinkertons by invoking her ego. Her ego would be thoroughly satisfied playing the role of spy for her country. Just the thing for a great actress who was furious with the theater for not overlooking her advancing age. As a spy she could still be a glamorous leading lady. And her performance had a special edge: her life could depend on it being convincing.
I turned around in my chair, shut out her voice, poked at a roasted potato.
My mother segued from the home fires into an upbeat “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” and then she finished with an even more achy “There’s a Long, Long Trail.”
The music stopped, the gentlemen cheered, she left, and a rhubarb crumble arrived. In the midst of all this, Buffington rose and followed her up the circular stairway and Trask turned to me as the ramekins landed before us.
“Your mother is working for us,” he said.
“I surmised,” I said.
And though I felt the irony, given my recent bout of musty hunches, I asked the obvious question. “Is she going after Sir Albert?”
“Yes,” Trask said.
And then he added, “So are you.”
5
The next night Isabel Cobb ended her run in London as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. She’d swept out of her basement cabaret on the night of the most recent Zeppelin attack on London and it wasn’t until Friday morning that I saw her again, when she stepped into a first-class compartment at Victoria Station for the train to Broadstairs in Kent and she sat down across from the American journalist and German apologist Joseph W. Hunter.
Trask had booked the compartment so that she and I would be alone. But she entered playing a stranger, nodding at me and then ignoring me as she settled in, arranging her handbag next to her just so, its corners squared to the edge of the upholstered bench seat. I watched this with a vaguely squirmy sense of recognition. I always did that very thing with the pages of a story as they came out of my typewriter.
She finished with her bag and then smoothed her overskirt, though it hardly needed smoothing. It was a stage gesture. She looked quite summery in a blueberry bolero jacket and straw boater with a matching ribbon and pleated bow.
She turned her face to me now, even as I was thinking how she looked pretty good, and she tightened her forehead as if I were a young man on the mash.
I refused to play along. “We have the compartment to ourselves, Mother,” I said, in a tone of We both know this, so what are all the theatrics for?
She flared her hands in front of her. “Can’t we have a little fun, my darling? Improvisation? How long has it been since we rode a train together? We used to have so much fun.”
I shrugged and looked out of the window beside me. A conductor strode past blowing his all-aboard whistle.
“You were always a clever boy,” she said. “A talented boy.”
We rode enough trains together between theater towns to circle the earth and circle it again. For as long as I could think back, we would play roles together to pass the time. Over the years, I was everyone from a beggar boy running away from an orphanage to a dry goods commercial traveler who was Isabel Cobb’s biggest fan and overwhelmed to meet her. She once had hopes I’d follow her into the theater.
The train was moving now, and I turned back to Mother. She was watching out the window. Her face was blank. I knew the l
ook. I’d seen it often, in stage wings just before she would make her first entrance. This blankness was all she would show of the actor’s inevitable terror of reinventing herself before a thousand strangers watching from the dark.
This time her audience would be smaller and she would walk among them and things were at stake far beyond entertaining a theater crowd.
I knew to let her be. The outward blankness would last until her entrance cue, and then she would come suddenly alive as if she’d flipped an electric light switch. I glanced at her only briefly and stealthily, but her preparatory state went on and on, through our run across the Thames and through Clapham and Herne Hill, with their old estates turning into middle-class commuter houses, and through our plunge into the dark of the long tunnel beneath the Crystal Palace. Here, the electric lights in the compartment flickered us into total darkness. We clattered through the blackness for a long moment, and when the lights flared back on again, I looked frankly at her and she had closed her eyes.
I believed her fear.
I wanted to reach out and take her hand.
But I knew better.
What would she take as her entrance cue on this day?
The lights blinked off once more and then almost instantly back on and her eyes were open, as if they had been all along and what I’d seen was wrong.
But she was still preparing.
Only when we were above ground and finished with London and into the county of Kent and we were rushing through vast hops gardens, the plants beginning to bloom into gold, ready for the seasonal pickers to come down from the slums of London, only then did she turn her face back to me.
“The curtain goes up,” she said.
I nodded.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“This role of yours.”
“And you, my son? I was quite surprised to learn about your own specialized acting career.”
“You already knew about me the other night.”
“Of course.” She leaned forward and patted me on the knee. “Aren’t we having fun?”
There was nothing to say to that. Of course she was.
I decided to watch the hops for a while.
Trask had briefed me before we parted at Buffington’s. I’d been invited to stay the weekend at Stockman House, his family estate high on the chalk cliffs between Broadstairs and Ramsgate. I was following Isabel Cobb, doing a feature story on her for the de facto syndicate of German-leaning American newspapers that were making my reputation. The news hook was the next stop on her tour of Hamlet. Berlin. A detail she deliberately withheld from our discussion of her tour in her dressing room. I was to stay alert to—even, at my discretion, seek out—evidence that Sir Albert was indeed actively aiding the German cause. My mother was doing the same.
“This will be an interesting test of your new identity,” Trask had said.
I wasn’t worried. There had been almost no images of me in the press over these half dozen years of my war correspondent notoriety. I’d insisted on that. My printed words were my public face. There was, however, another issue. I’d said to Trask, “She and I have kept it quiet for more than a decade, but the Germans surely know she’s my mother.”
He’d simply nodded. We were drinking brandy in the two Morris chairs after everyone else had cleared out of Buffington’s basement bunker.
“This is very risky for her,” I said.
Trask did a lift of the left shoulder and a tilt of the head in the same direction, both equally minute. A characteristic shrug I’d seen more than once. It usually was meant to stop a line of inquiry. But this time he also said, “She understands the risk. She’s made it very clear how disaffected she is with you. I understand she can be very convincing.”
I let that sink in. I tried to believe it. I said, “But why recruit her? Why take on that extra burden?”
“She was already undercover.”
“I know about that.”
“So I gather.” He smiled, slow and sly. Her Pinkerton work.
“You’re not saying she came to you,” I said.
He shrugged again. This time it did stop the inquiry. But he added, “It could actually make her more interesting to them.”
At that, I should have had a thought about something I’d seen in her dressing room, but I got distracted by her being “interesting” to the Germans.
Trask even followed up on my distraction, though he figured he was simply giving me a more direct answer to my question of why her. He said, “She happened to be the best possible person for our Sir Albert. He is her ardent fan.”
The hops seemed to have vanished. The field passing was full of cows.
I turned back to Mother.
“There is something to say to that.” This came out of my mouth before I realized I was alluding to a thought of a few moments ago that I’d not given voice to: what was there to say to her “Aren’t we having fun.”
“Have I missed something?” she said.
“We can’t take this as fun,” I said. “Of course you knew about me and Trask when I saw you in your dressing room. You knew long before that.”
“So?”
“So what the hell were you doing making a show of my being your son? The stage manager knew me on sight. My photo was stuck in your mirror. You did your underappreciated-and-deeply-concerned-but-proudly-loving-mama act with the suffragettes.”
“I am underappreciated and deeply concerned,” she said.
“Trask surely told you these people are dangerous.”
“I am proudly loving too,” she said.
“Your fate . . .”
“Always that,” she said.
“Your fate with the Huns,” I said, firmly, “depends on their belief that we are estranged, you and I.”
“I know that,” she said.
“Then how could you publicly play the opposite?”
“It wasn’t public. This man would never in an eon talk with suffragettes or stage managers. And when he came backstage I hid your photo.”
I flipped my hands in the air in exasperation.
“So Mr. Hunter,” she said, suddenly lighting up in her stage-star way, immediately turning me into this guy. As if that was all it would take to put my concerns to rest. “You and I share some strong sympathies that are, I’m afraid, quickly becoming unpopular in our country.”
She engaged my gaze and she was looking at me with veiled but lively eyes and she was smiling a very small, crooked smile. This pose was filed under Faintly Superior Solicitousness. She was inviting me to get into character with her now. Like old times on a train on the way to a performance.
“Wrongheadedly so,” I said. “This is not the first time our country has had trouble choosing its friends.”
For a very brief moment her smile flashed wide: Isabel smiling at her son Kit playing along with her. Then she plunged back into her playlet. “You are so right, Mr. Hunter. So right indeed. But this weekend you will have a chance to write about the greatest actress of the American stage celebrating her triumph as Hamlet in London and then traveling on to play the tragically fated prince in Berlin. I will, by my art, build a bridge between these two warring nations. I take no sides. I love the English but I also embrace our German brethren.”
“And do you embrace our host this weekend?” I asked.
There was a stopping in her and then a fluttering out of her part, just a little, in her hands. I tried not to show any pleasure at getting her to briefly lose her performance composure. My sense of our old game of this indeed made me feel a sort of pleasure. But for me to have flustered her with that cheap innuendo meant there was some bit of truth in it. And there was no pleasure in that at all.
She recovered quickly. “Mr. Hunter, I never took you for a yellow journalist.”
I played at backing off. “I mean, of course, in the same way you would embrace the good people of Das Deutsche Reich.”
“Well, do forgive me,
Mr. Hunter, for misunderstanding you. I am sadly accustomed to young men taking an inappropriate interest in my private life, which is none of their business.”
I turned my face to the windows. The cows had given way to apple orchards, the small, green earlies already beginning to appear.
“We need to talk in our actual selves,” I said.
“And what are those, exactly?” she said.
I looked at her.
Our eyes connected but didn’t hold. She turned her face to the long, even rows of apple trees whisking by. “All right,” she said.
“Your man Albert . . .”
“He is not my man,” she said.
“Your target Albert.”
“Yes?”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“I’ve said things about America privately to him that make your little pseudonymous odes to the Fatherland sound wishy-washy.”
“Wouldn’t that make him suspicious?”
“I’m exaggerating.” She said this instantly, shrugging.
“Let’s talk straight,” I said.
“What I said felt that extreme,” she said. “It’s easier for you to write this drivel than it is for me to say it face to face. But I’ve made myself look as potentially good for the German cause as your J. W. Hunter. And I worked up to it. I know how to play that role with a man. Oh, sir, I’ve got this little secret that some people would think unsavory but I feel I can trust you.”
“Sounds effective.” I said this with an edge I didn’t want. She didn’t either. It was her own fault for putting it in those terms.
We looked at each other and silently called a truce.
She said, “I think he believes me. And he was receptive. You could feel him expanding, glowing. But this was just loose, still rather indirect talk. His receptiveness is nothing like proof.”
“There’s one thing I worry about,” I said.
“What’s that, dear?”
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Page 4
