On Green Dolphin Street (36 page)

F
rank took some teasing in the office over his evenhanded report of the televised debate. “Hey, Frank, they fired Cordell for being up Kennedy’s ass. Maybe they’ll have to take you off Nixon for the same reason.” “Call for you, Frank. It’s Pat Nixon. You free for dinner Friday?”

He did not worry; he did not bother to quote the rival reporters coming to the same conclusions. If he had called it the same way as Joe Alsop, how could he be wrong? The editor asked him to write a follow-up piece on an inside page that explained the mechanics of how the press had worked and tried to estimate the future power of the new medium. Frank raised a casual finger to his tormentors, or smiled. It was not necessary to point out that he had almost lost his job and had spent six years in journalistic exile for writing articles that opposed all that the younger Nixon had promoted, as congressman, lawyer and counsel for various committees, because everyone in the office knew it.

When he returned to the Nixon campaign, his only misgiving concerned his absence from New York. He did not want to be separated from Mary, yet the residual elation of her company was enough to sustain him
for a while. In his forty years or so of being alive, he had not actively sought happiness; he had experienced it most often as a byproduct of striving after something else. What he had felt since knowing Mary had redefined his view of the future, because he had not previously considered anything so abstract and unstable as emotion to be worth the effort of pursuing.

As he sat on the plane one late October morning, watching a brownish pattern of Midwestern prairie drift slowly by beneath them, hearing the chatter of reporters in the row behind, he admitted to himself that he could never see anything in the same way again. If Mary should die, or leave him, or in some less dramatic way deprive him of her presence, he could neither recover from the loss of her nor deal with the unfulfilled capacity for love that she had created in him.

He thought back to the morning he had recognized Charlie at the Spanish Embassy party in Washington. He remembered him quite well from Dien Bien Phu; he recalled liking Charlie’s rough indifference to the French army’s dilemma in the elephant trap it had dug for itself. Perhaps Charlie had exaggerated his infantry officer’s cynicism, but his attitude was appealing to Frank, who had been forced to cultivate a worldliness he did not feel in the Pacific. It didn’t matter what your childhood was like; nothing in Chicago prepared you for Guadalcanal, where everyone, from the hoariest marine sergeant to the freshest army reinforcement, was making it up as he went along.

He had been glad to accept Charlie’s invitation to Number 1064 that evening, even though he suspected Charlie had no clear recollection of who he was. When he first saw Mary standing in front of the table in her sitting room, his response was the exact opposite: although she was a stranger, he had the sense of already knowing her profoundly well. The way that he then behaved, forcing a reentry to her presence, was unprecedented, but that was inevitable because she had opened up in him a depth of anxiety and desire that he had never previously known, and a new fever demanded a new remedy.

As the weeks went past, he did not scrutinize his feeling too closely; he felt a little ashamed of it. It seemed to show that in his marriage to Roxanne—sincerely
enough undertaken, he believed—he had been ignorant. He seemed to have lived all his life until this point as though in some restrictive dream. The things that had driven him—a desire to escape, to have money, respect, education—appeared in retrospect to have been coarse and unambitious urges, hardly better than those of the man in the Levittown house who yearned for a larger tail fin on his car each year.

He was worried, too, that his feeling for Mary was in some way decadent, unmanly, though he felt man enough not to flinch from it. While the passion that he felt strongly intensified the experience of being alive, it also felt inexplicably dangerous, as though if he pushed through the feeling—forced his hand through the web—or orchestrated it to its natural climax, what lay beyond was annihilation.

The stewardess brought him a glass of orange juice, which he drank quickly as he looked out of the window over the torn wisps of cloud. What Charlie had told him in Minneapolis had worried him. The FBI was no longer as powerful or belligerent as at its high noon, when its uncorroborated suspicions, fed to and repeated by ambitious men on Senate committees, could deprive a man of his livelihood, his passport, his friends, his bank account or, in Billy Foy’s case, his life. Yet Frank knew how tenacious the agency still was in questioning people, how large and random were its powers. Charlie had manifestly passed the day when he could withstand such an inquisition; Frank worried for his state of mind and, more pressingly, that Mary might somehow become entangled. The thought that she might, to save her husband, be obliged to become some sort of informer was not something he could bring himself to imagine. Could he still love her? Would it be worse to lose her, or—with all it would mean for his integrity—to keep her?

Nor could he resolve what Charlie had told him, as the dawn was breaking, about how much he depended on his wife. Of course Charlie loved Mary; of course she was his light, his child—whatever the word was he had used: you would not be married to Mary and not feel that, Frank thought. The fact that Charlie valued her so much made Frank like him more, but there was nothing he could do to resolve their impasse. He was locked into it, like the other two, and the trivial questions of adultery—to
tell or not to tell; to know or not to know—were of no interest to him. Perhaps, when Charlie spoke to him that night of his feelings for Mary, he had been warning him that he already suspected something; perhaps it was an appeal to Frank’s finer feelings.

Frank swallowed and looked down at the cracked shiny leather of the empty seat next to his. He had “finer feelings,” all right, a “nobler nature,” all sorts of impulses toward fairness; but the intensity of his passion for Mary had banished them to some mental Alaska, far beyond reach.

Charlie was scanning the newspapers, about to leave for work from Number 1064, when there was a ring at the front door. A large man in a raincoat with a bovine face was leaning against the doorjamb; on his chin, a piece of cotton wool was stuck to a shaving cut. He opened a wallet to reveal an FBI card.

“You Mr. van der Linden? We’d like to talk to you.” He nodded his head toward a second, smaller man with a felt hat.

Charlie sighed. “You sure you’re meant to be here? Do you think there’s been a crossed wire? I don’t see O’Brien anymore. That’s all over.”

“I don’t know any O’Brien. Is it through here?”

Charlie stood back from the door and followed them into the living room. He picked up his coffee cup and drank what remained in it.

“Your wife here?” The taller man had reddish hair, a Celtic look, Charlie thought, though well enough Americanized by now.

“No,” he said.

Neither agent sat down; the smaller one took off his hat and looked about the room, picking up photographs and papers. The one with the shaving cut leaned against a radiator.

“Where is she?”

“She’s in New York.”

“What’s she doing there?”

“She’s writing a book.”

“What’s it about?”

“I don’t know. She hasn’t told me.”

“Shouldn’t she be here with you?”

“She is. She only goes for a couple of days at a time.”

The agent picked up the newspaper. “You come across a guy named Frank Renzo? A reporter.”

“Yes.”

“Know him well?”

“No.”

“Where did you first meet?”

“In … I forget. At a party probably. Embassy reception, that kind of thing.”

“You sure? He’s not a D.C. man. He’s based in New York.”

“Maybe in New York then. I meet a lot of people in my work.”

“Maybe you met him someplace else. Maybe you met him in Vietnam.”

“I don’t recall.”

“You seem a little nervous. You want a drink?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Sure about that? I got some Wild Turkey in the trunk of the automobile if you’re out of it.”

“I’m sure.”

“What were you doing in Vietnam?”

“My job.”

“And what was Renzo doing?”

“I’ve no idea. I don’t recall meeting him.”

The smaller man pulled a book off the shelf.
“The Man with the Golden Arm,”
he said. “You like this writer? Nelson Algren.”

“Not particularly.”

“He’s a Communist.”

“Is that so?”

“This guy Renzo,” said the man with the cut. “Your wife know him well?”

“She’s met him three or four times.”

There was a silence. The two agents walked round the room, their paths crossing by the doorway. Neither went near the window. Eventually the larger one said, “She see him in New York? On these visits of hers?”

“It’s possible. I doubt it. She works. She writes this book.”

“You’re not worried about her all on her own there? She an attractive woman?”

“I am a little worried.” Charlie paused and looked at the man’s blank eyes for a moment while he fought among his conflicting thoughts to assemble a response. “She’s had a difficult time,” he said. “With the family. That’s all.”

“Think she could tell us a little more about this guy?”

“I doubt it. Why are you interested in him?”

“He’s being posted to Washington after the election.”

“Do you check out all the reporters who come here?”

“He has a history.”

“What kind of history?”

The agent shook his head.

“I suppose he’s a ‘Communist’ too, is he?” said Charlie. “I thought we’d left that game behind us.”

Neither agent spoke. Charlie watched as the larger man gently teased the piece of cotton wool away from his cut, then seemed to think better of it and stuck it back. He looked an oaf, Charlie thought, a comic figure really, but there was something about his bulk that was menacing; something unsettling also in the way that, while neither gave a name, both conveyed the impression they knew more about his own life than he did himself.

Charlie said, “Does Frank know he’s being moved to Washington?”

The larger man shrugged. “Promotion, isn’t it? Closer to the heart of things. He ever speak to you about being investigated?”

“No.”

“Ever mention Emmett Till, the Negro boy who—”

“I remember the case. But I haven’t talked to him about it. I’ve told you, I hardly know him.”

The smaller man looked round from the bookcase. “So when didya last see him?”

“A few weeks ago. In Minneapolis.”

“What didya talk about?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Don’t recall much, do you? Is that because of the liquor or because you don’t want to recall?”

Charlie said nothing. He could feel sweat bubbling out onto his upper lip; he wanted a drink, now that they both kept mentioning it: he badly wanted a drink. Years ago he had led his company in a beachhead breakout, into a tempest of machine-gun bullets, and had not hesitated; but these lumpen, unaccountable men filled him with a dread he could not manage.

“Listen,” said the smaller one, “we’re not trying to frighten you. We’re just asking if you’d be willing to help us. And I’m sure you would be.”

“Did Renzo talk about his wife?” His partner resumed the questioning.

“I didn’t know he was married.”

“Divorced. She runs some kind of store in Ann Arbor—books, magazines. D’you know the city? Kind of a hangout for intellectuals.”

“There’s a university campus, if that’s what you mean.”

“This Renzo guy, is he an intellectual?”

“No. You wouldn’t call him that. Clever enough, perhaps, but that’s a different thing. He’s a newspaperman.”

“But he went to college, right?”

“Search me.”

“What about you, Mr. van der Linden?” It was the short man, who had apparently finished his inspection of the bookcase, lighting a cigarette as he did so. “You go to college?”

“Yes. It’s considered usual in my work.”

“What year you go there?”

“Before the war.”

“You know any of those English guys who ended up defecting to the Soviet Union?”

“No. They were before my time.”

“And they were posted here, weren’t they? Diplomats here in D.C.?”

“I believe so.”

“Were you at the same college?”

“Same university.”

“Still plenty of Communists in your day?”

“I suppose there were a few. But just undergraduates. Boys, really.”

The dark man dropped his cigarette on the maple parquet floor, stubbed it out with his shoe and moved toward the door.

“Your wife tell you any more about this guy, you let us know. You know how to reach us.”

Charlie nodded.

The larger man turned back to Charlie from the doorway. “You want a lift to your office?”

“A lift? Christ, are you out of your mind?”

Charlie watched as the two men left and walked away to wherever they had deemed it safe enough to leave their car, before going on to trouble someone else’s day. He stood in the doorway, staring after them as their feet went over the sidewalk down which Frank had first laid his trail of blood back to the van der Lindens’ house.

When Mary returned late in the afternoon, Dolores passed on the various telephone messages that awaited her: Kelly Eberstadt and the dentist; Katy Renshaw, asking them to dinner; her father; and Kelly Eberstadt again.

“You ring Mr. van der Linden?” said Dolores reproachfully.

“I did. But I’m going to call again. I’m going upstairs.”

Mary carried her case up to the bedroom, hung up the dresses in the closet and threw the dirty laundry into the basket in the bathroom. She kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the bed, where, with her feet tucked beneath her, she took a picture of the children from the bedside table and stared at it. The last time she had seen them was when she had taken them out from school the day after her mother’s funeral.

She had borrowed her father’s Rover to drive up from London, a black car with shiny leather seats and an inner ring of chrome within the steering wheel that operated the horn. It was so heavy to steer that she felt the muscles of her arms straining beneath her sleeves as she slowed down for the corners.