Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (10 page)

“I’m sorry?” I said, as the restaurant staff, whose waiters could have competed in the shot put at any track and field event on earth and indeed seemed disconsolate that attending to diners like ourselves had interrupted their practice, thoughtfully brought me back to Manhattan with a smashing of crockery.

“I was just saying,” Alger informed me, “how glad Mr. Gliaglin and I both are to hear that you haven’t changed your views.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re glad,” I said, perhaps a bit tartly. “I hope the cardinals are glad, too.”

Gliaglin had lit another of those foul tubes of his. “Indeed they are,
Gospodin
Howell,” he told me, with a luxurious exhalation of its noxious fumes. “I can say with authority the cardinals
are
glad.”

“As are the robins, Gulag Ivanovich,” Alger seconded him, his glacial reserve thawing noticeably.

In fact, Gliaglin was growing frankly if not rankly genial, so far as I could make out through the underbrush. “I think maybe you are understanding pretty quick how Explorers’ Club can hang itself with rope I buy from it,” he told me with what I could only assume, from a brief but newly friendly gleam of gray dentition amid the smoke and poodle fur, was a roguish grin. “I think maybe you are knowing before we meet that there is also politics here.”

“Well, Mr. Gliaglin, it’s not so easy as all that to pull the wool over my eyes,” I said, I trust smoothly. “You’re Democrats, aren’t you?”

The look that flickered in Gliaglin’s eye bore an uncanny resemblance to the expression that had passed across my old Latin tutor’s face when I’d avowed my passionate desire to read Gibbon in the original. A moment later, however, he had emitted a laugh that crashed like surf, and was clapping me uproariously on the back with a hand whose hairy knuckles and slatelike nails the old Boo blood, making a rare cameo appearance in my jugular, would have voted to greet with a shudder had not that cowardly impulse been vetoed by the ruddier paternal corpuscles.

“
Da!
” Gliaglin cried. “As we all must be these days, if we wish to participate in the great events now ongoing in Washingtonograd. Nothing to fear we have but fear, plus FBI and Menshevik provocateurs—your worry, eh,
Tovarich?
” He turned and spoke rapidly to Alger in what I took to be some gurgling sort of Baltimorean patois, at whose audible note of reproof Alger bristled.

“Priscilla is
not
indiscreet,” he said stiffly—instantly winning my own warm endorsement. Whatever the facts of the case, in my world no man lets his wife’s character be impugned in public, even in an indecipherable Maryland dialect in a restaurant on Carmine Street. “I assure you, Gulag Ivanovich, none of the women at that flower show would have had the faintest idea
whose
nickname ‘Koba’ is. In any case, her rose won—and was the General Secretary so displeased about
thaū Honestly?”

“We never told him.”

“You never
told
him?” Alger looked genuinely stunned; indeed, if only for Priscilla’s sake, hurt.

“Be glad we never told him. You would have shared fate of rose. Head on display for few days until smell gets bad. Then ash-heap of history along with Kulaks and Zinoviev. Other roses,” he said in a newly loud voice, addressing neither of us so far as I could see.

“Now, fellows,” I made haste to interpose, not liking to see Alger less than spruce. “Keep in mind, I’m not even in the Explorers’ Club yet! I’m sure your General Secretary wouldn’t be happy to hear that you’ve been gossiping about club business in front of me.” At this, Gliaglin looked at me with new respect, at least if I wasn’t misconstruing the other facial elements in play as he blanched.

“Do tell me!” an eager self continued. “What do I need to do to join—is there some sort of hazing involved? Can’t say I’d look forward to that much, but I’ve been upside down on the wrong end of a cricket bat before, and…”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Alger said. “Just a trifle, really. Do you recall your old friend Henry Wallace?”

To be honest, when one boasts the scads and squads of acquaintances I was handed along with my name, address, future college, and stock portfolio—at birth, is what I mean—then combing through them on the sort of short notice Alger’s eyes gave me can seem like the task of Rapunzel. But memory soon groped its way westward, found itself looking up at the gates of Colonel Wild Hiram Jones’s New Mexico Ranch for Privileged Boys, slipped into the rustic dormitory on Mnemnesia’s silent, limber feet, and stopped at an audibly buncombial bunk near my own. Thence—as the muscles of my now youthful frame began to ache from the unexpectedly spirited pony I’d been given that morning, temporarily dashing my plans to write an excited, pining letter to my beloved L. back East—a fatiguingly voluble voice was droning.

“Hankie!”
I cried exultantly. “Three-Hankie Wallace. Of course I do.”

“Are you aware that Roosevelt has named him Secretary of Agriculture?”

“Didn’t altogether know the post existed, to be utterly candid with you. But I must write him my congratulations.”

“Exactly,” Alger said. “And when you do, Thurston, I’d like you to recommend me for a job.”

“In the Department of Algerculture, Agri—Er, Agriculture, Alger? Whatever for? Isn’t it a lot of … well,
crops
, and so on? Grim reapers, ordure, sleepily grappling with unknown udders at dawn and whatnot? I wouldn’t have thought it was your sort of thing at all.”

“I feel a vocation.”

“Well! I can see you don’t call it the Explorers’ Club for nothing,” I said.

“Neither does
Tovarich
Wallace,” Gliaglin explained—that is, his tone was explanatory. “But a recommendation from you places the whole matter above suspicion.”

“Well, that’s flattering, Gliaglin. Many thanks,” I beamed. “I do like the sound of that. That’s me all over, I must say! ‘Above suspicion’—and Forty-second Street, too!”

Despite my offer, heartily repeated amid our curbside adieux before Rolls and I became one once more, of assistance with his tennis game, I never saw Gliaglin again. Shortly after I had written my letter to Wallace, Alger informed me that our mutual friend had been called home to Baltimore after a bout of scarlet fever, and that our chapter of the Explorers’ Club was being summarily disbanded. But I learned that only from a postcard, for Alger himself was already in Washington, making a brilliant career as one of the vibrant young minds whose suave zeal was to propel a confused nation—the self most patriotically included-—through first the New Deal and then the war as dashingly as the wind making sense of the clatter of masts and rival rudders off Newport at the start of the America’s Cup.

The higher his star climbed, the more I felt warmed by it, if you’ll indulge what I don’t doubt must be some fairly dubious physics. You see, I had often marked life’s milestones by fretting, on one occasion aloud to L., that my own stint on the planet wasn’t amounting to much, except in
cash and securities. (Obeying her newly ringed hand’s suggestion that boredom might reasonably flee a rampart only pity’s sepoys could defend, my love’s vague eyes drifted like paired starlings toward the passing night outside the clacking window, as pater Walter’s private railway car hurled us toward a Palm Beach honeymoon.) But knowing that I was the man who’d gotten Alger Hiss his first job in Washington did brighten the otherwise muddled tableau with some sense of having contributed a small rocket to the universal fireworks display. Despite having long since exchanged a thrilled crouch on a parquet floor for somnolent recumbence in an armchair, in a progress whose one constant had been the voices of a succession of housekeepers politely requesting me to briefly agitate both feet in the air, I followed my protege’s ascent quite as avidly as I had the exploits of my favorite heroes of the Sunday funnies as a child, at that fist-to-nose age when one is still under a lovely impression, perhaps more easily retained in my case than most, that only one copy of the newspaper has been printed.

At the same time, may I say, I can put two and two together as expeditiously as any man. Once I have, two and two may well simply stare up like the urchins Ignorance and Want emerging from the Ghost of Christmas Present’s cloak in Dickens, but there they are side by side just the same. In particular, a newsreel glimpse of a tobacco-less and thus twice tortured Gliaglin in the prisoners’ dock at one of the Moscow show trials did make me sit bolt upright next to a snoozing L. in our private theater, not least with surprise that Stalin, notoriously mistrustful xenophobe that he was, had ever risked including a Baltimorean in his entourage to begin with. A later newsreel’s glimpses of a Soviet flag fluttering madly alongside an equally energetic swastika at the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact also jolted recollection’s ever idling engine into a belated recognition of the hammer-and-sickle symbol Alger had been tracing in chalk on the trash bin when I alighted outside Le Perroquet de Moscou that day in long-gone ‘33.

Wondering where my duty lay and whether I ought to get it to its feet, I asked myself if I should contact someone in authority. But a dread dating back to Groton days of simply advertising my status as the last to
catch on, just as I had always been the first to stand a round of cocoa after intramurals, made the prospect too daunting for this old boy’s hand to find either telephone receiver or quill.

In any case, Pearl Harbor soon made allies of the Soviet Union and ourselves and, in the
March of Time,
great pals out of Uncle Joe and my father’s old chum Franklin (had he broken a leg? He was really much too old for skiing, particularly with the nation in crisis). With some relief, my memory revised the curious affair in which I’d played a none too nimble part into a privileged glimpse of my friend’s political prescience—the very quality, so I assumed, that made him valuable in Washington.

Within three years, our country’s great crusade was in sight of its dark, crook-mapped Jerusalem. I gathered victory was in the air on one of my periodic guided tours of the Stock Exchange, where that piratical parvenu Joseph P. Kennedy, glasses and choppers flashing in their perennial duel for his nose’s rather modest favors, buttonholed me to crow about the return of his malarially frail second son from the rigors of the South Pacific. The bespoke, so to speak, issue of
Reader’s Digest
detailing the lad’s exploits that old Joe had thrust on me was still nestled between pin-striped arm and mildly bruised rib cage when I returned to the office via my private elevator. As I settled into an armchair for whose leather the bulls of half an Argentinian herd had been beheaded on the pampas, my secretary promptly buzzed me: “Mr. Acheson is on the line from Washington, sir.”

The then Under Secretary of State and I had been at school together. “Dean!” I cried as
Reader’s Digest
plopped softly carpetward, unread and unretrieved. “How goes the battle?”

“Well, I’m on my way out to Topeka and Santa Fe for some speeches, so I both would and will say ‘Reasonably well’—not to put you on the same footing with hoi polloi,” he answered in his usual tone, which was that of Mowgli’s friend Bagheera in a good humor. “But something here can’t wait till I get back. See here, Thurston: you’ve known Alger Hiss a long time, haven’t you?”

“Indeed I have. Can’t say I’ve seen much of him since Roosevelt came in, though—you fellows keep him too busy for more than the occasional Christmas card.”

“He’s still finding time to send those? We’ll have to do something about that. In fact, we are, and that’s the reason I’m calling. We’re considering having him chair the organizing meeting of the United Nations next spring in San Francisco.”

“Sounds impressive. What is it?”

“It’s a mid-sized, rather lovely city on the West Coast of the United States,” my caller retorted briskly. Dean, may I say, had been one of the least cruel of my Groton classmates, but the bent was pandemic. With a chipper apology for his lack of willpower, he gave me a quick rub-down—no, it’s “rundown,” isn’t it?—on the nature and purpose of the world body at whose founding Alger was indeed to play concierge if not midwife come 1945.

“It’s damned important, like every other job aside from the Vice Presidency these days,” Dean said, “and once Alger’s name came up, some of the lower orders here at State raised allegations that I must say I think are pure horse hockey. But I thought I’d better check in with you, since you were his first sponsor over at the Agriculture Department.”

“And a proud one,” I said.

“Well, just to reassure me, then. Look, as one haberdasher’s favorite customer to another, or possibly the same haberdasher’s favorite customer to another—hang it, Anglomane to Anglomane, old Grotonian to old Grotonian: is the fellow reliable?”

“Absolutely! He’s a dedicated Communist. You know how disciplined they are.”

Chuckling, Dean thanked me and rang off. Only some years later did it pop to my mind that he might well have thought I was joking.

Dean, of course, later famously said, “I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Fond as I was of Alger, I had to admit that I wouldn’t have risked it either. Not that the self was required to do so microphonically before the committee of which surly, sweaty young Congressman Cancer was such an indefatigable member, busying himself in pursuit of Alger as urgently as if he feared that he too would turn into a pumpkin like the one in which had been hidden those ridiculous microfilms. Depriving me of the chance to hire a lawyer with whom I might later have played backgammon as we reminisced about the odd ordeal that had made us
pals, they didn’t call me as a witness, and indeed I can’t fathom how my testimony would have done Alger any good.