The Unwitting (28 page)

“Don’t bother. You’re not staying.”

He turned back from the closet and faced me.

“You can’t sue CBS.”

“Just try and stop me.”

He stood staring at me for a moment. “You can’t sue,” he repeated quietly, “because the charges are true. The foundation was funneling CIA money to the magazine while Charlie was publisher.”

“That doesn’t mean he knew. Gideon said he quit as soon as he found out. Wally said if it’s true, he’ll quit.”

“And you believe them? Come on, Nell, in this world, naïveté is irresponsible, but willful naïveté is criminal.”

“All right, so they’re lying. I don’t care about them. Charlie is the only one I’m interested in. The program implied that he knew, and he didn’t. He never would have gone on at the magazine if he had.”

“Charlie knew. He was fully witting.”

“Goddamn it, I know Charlie was witty. What does that have to do with it?”

“I didn’t say
witty
. I said
witting
. That’s the term the Agency uses. The handful of people who know where the money comes from are witting. The rest of you who don’t know, or at least aren’t officially informed, are unwitting.”

“I don’t believe you. Charlie would never have taken money from the CIA. Not even to keep
Compass
afloat.”

“He didn’t do it to keep
Compass
afloat. He did it for his country. Things were pretty scary in those days, if you remember. Anti-Americanism was rampant all over Western Europe. Communist parties were taking over in France and Italy. Communism was on the march in India, Africa, South America, you name it.”

“Maybe with good reason.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Do I have to remind you of Leningrad? You think that woman Darya was an exception? Charlie knew how dangerous the situation was. He was a realist. That’s why it didn’t take much to persuade him that what we needed was a good left-wing anti-Soviet magazine.”

“I still don’t believe you. If he’d known, he would have told me. He would never have kept something like that from me.”

“He wasn’t allowed to tell you. That was part of the deal. The hardest part for him.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

He shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

“What would you know about the truth? You’ve been secretly funneling CIA money to do god knows what.”

“I was funneling CIA money to help a lot of people do what they wanted, whether it was to write books, paint pictures, play music, or edit magazines. And I loved every minute of it.”

“Because you were pulling the strings of a bunch of puppets?”

“I wasn’t pulling Charlie’s strings. I was giving him a chance to put out a serious magazine that took on serious issues, even if it wasn’t every serious issue you wanted, the way you wanted it. He let you and a lot of other writers have your say. He fought communism, which, as you learned in Leningrad, isn’t quite the altruistic force for equality and social justice their propaganda would have you believe. What was the harm in that?”

“How many times do I have to say it? The harm was in the lie.
Compass
was supposed to be searching for the truth, not shilling for the government.”

As he stood watching me, his cool blue eyes turned wintry. “Are you angry that he took money from the CIA or that he didn’t tell you he took money from the CIA?”

“He didn’t just lie to me; he lied to everyone.”

“You think no one knew? I’m not so sure. A lot of people must have guessed. But they were having too good a time basking in their own success, not all of it, I might add, deserved. Some second-raters did pretty well off the funding, if they happened to have something to say that the Agency wanted said. Do you actually believe that when those people got an assignment for an article or a contract for a book they asked themselves if they were really that good?”

“So I have you and the CIA to thank for getting my book about Russia published,” I said, though I hated myself for the statement. This was not supposed to be about me.

“No, we had nothing to do with that. All I’m saying is that a lot of people found it more convenient not to know.”

“Now you’re talking about my ignorance of what Charlie was doing.”

“No, again. I believe you didn’t know.”

“Because I’m so dumb?”

“Because you couldn’t believe Charlie would do something you think is so wrong.”

“You ruined him.”

“I gave him a chance to make a difference.”

“I know the kind of difference you’re talking about. Ousting Arbenz in Guatemala. Overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran. The Bay of Pigs.”

“I could counter with the Hungarian uprising, and the Berlin Wall, and the gulags, but that’s not the point. Charlie was a publisher. He never had anything to do with operations. In Agency parlance, he was an asset, not an agent.”

“I don’t care what the Newspeak term for him was. He worked
for the same people. And he lied to me about it.” Elliot was right. No matter which way I turned, that fact stood blocking my escape.

“Okay, he didn’t tell you where the money for the magazine was coming from. Was that so central to your marriage? It wasn’t as if he was cheating on you with another woman, and, believe me, he had the opportunity.”

“Thanks for the information.”

“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

He was right. I had known it. And now I was thinking that I would have preferred a moment of physical weakness to an ongoing lie that shammed fourteen years of marriage. And one more thing. A sexual slip would have evened the score.

I told him I’d heard enough. He started for the door, but when he reached it, he turned back to me again.

“Maybe you’ve heard enough, but Abby hasn’t.”

The words shook me. How do you explain to a child that her father was not the man she thought?

“I’d like her to hear about Charlie from someone who still thinks he wears a white hat,” he said. Then he was gone.

I DID NOT
go to bed that night. I sat in the living room, like the watchers who, in the days when the ability to measure life signs was more imperfect, kept all-night vigils beside bodies, on the lookout for a twitching muscle or blinking eye. In those days the fear of being buried alive was not unreasonable. But I knew the cadaver of my marriage was not going to show any signs of life. Rigor mortis was already setting in. Charlie’s smile was becoming a mocking rictus. The sweetness I’d struggled to hold on to after his death was carrion.

As the night wore on, the memories came back turned inside out. I wasn’t too late with the article on the coup in Guatemala; Charlie didn’t want the CIA cover blown. He wasn’t courageous when he
published the piece on McCarthy; he hadn’t run it until McCarthy was finished. How had I misread Charlie so completely?

The tender memories hurt even more. I was standing at the sink in the kitchen, filling the ice bucket, and he was behind me, his arms around me, his mouth on the nape of my neck, binding us together against the world.

We were lying in bed, spooned, breast to back, stomach to buttock, thigh to thigh, holding our breath for the other shoe to drop in Washington, holding on to each other for survival.

He was grinning at me from the big carved bed, beneath a painted ceiling shimmering with reflected light from the canal, while his mouth, still swollen from our lovemaking, lied reassurances.

He had even put it in writing.

I was on my feet, racing down the hall, pulling open the small top drawer of my dresser, rifling through the pearls he had bought me for our tenth anniversary, the only piece of jewelry in the small velvet compartments that wasn’t fake. Surely there was some irony in that; the pearls weren’t fake, but Charlie was. I pulled out the envelope. The outdated airmail stamp and the Leningrad address weren’t even faded, but the letter inside was beginning to come apart at the folds. I had taken it out to read too many times in the past three and a half years. I knew it by heart, but now I sat on the side of the bed and read between the lines.

You are my love. And my conscience. And my touchstone. You keep me honest, or as honest as I can be
.

He had written a confession in camouflage.

I tore the letter in half, then fourths, and kept going until it was nothing but bits. They lay on the quilt like confetti. I curled on my side in a fetal position on top of the fragments, my knees drawn up, my arms wound around myself. I had lain the same way after my first miscarriage, hugging the pain to me, and Charlie had come into the room, found me, and curled himself around me. I don’t know
how long we stayed that way, bound together in our shared loss, his tears running down my cheek.

Now, as the windows faded from black to gray and the world lurched toward a new day, I huddled in the same position, trying to hang on to the memory of that closeness. But it was already seeping away. By the time the buzz saw of Abby’s alarm shattered the morning silence, it was gone. My marriage had become a figment of my imagination.

Twenty-One

I
WENT INTO THE
bathroom to wash my face, brush my teeth, and comb my hair. I did not want Abby to see me this way. The first thing I noticed when I came out was Charlie. He was grinning at me from the silver frame on my dresser. I crossed the room, picked up the photo, and dropped it in the wastebasket. The sound of glass shattering jerked me back from the edge. I bent to take the picture out of the wastebasket. When I straightened I saw Abby standing in the doorway. Her hair was tangled, and her pajamas were twisted, but her face was wide-awake.

“What are you doing?”

“I knocked over Daddy’s picture.”

As I stood it on the dresser, a sliver of broken glass sliced my thumb. Now my bloody fingerprint stained Charlie’s cheek.

Abby went back to her bedroom, and I went into the bathroom for a Band-Aid, then down the hall to the kitchen. Outside the window, gray clouds foamed like toxic sludge. The room lay in shadows. I switched on the overhead light. The flare of white enamel and stainless steel made me wince. There was nowhere to hide.

I began taking things out of the refrigerator. I poured juice, dumped cereal into a bowl, sliced a banana over it. All over the city people were going through similar morning rituals. Some would be discussing a special news report. Some might be parents of Abby’s friends. Charles Benjamin. Wasn’t he the father of that girl in Susie’s,
Annie’s, Marjorie’s class? I heard Charlie’s name murmured, disdained, spat. I saw Abby’s classmates sitting at their Cheerios and Rice Krispies and cornflakes, suddenly alert to the pitch of adult voices, attuned to the undertones and innuendo of a conversation they hadn’t been paying attention to a moment earlier. And I remembered the cruelty of teenage girls.

Abby shuffled into the kitchen and slid into her chair without looking at me. She knew I had not dropped the picture accidentally. I turned my back to her and began making coffee. After a while, I heard the click of her spoon against the bowl. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe she believed I hadn’t meant to drop the photograph. But she’d guess the truth when I told her the rest.

I stood watching the coffee perk. When it was ready, I filled a mug, carried it to the table, and sat across from her. Suddenly I was sitting across from Charlie again, swapping sections of the paper, passing butter and jam, not minding his humming. We’d been in perfect complicity, I’d thought. I felt my face collapsing like a house of cards, like my life now that Charlie had knocked the struts out from under it.

She looked up from her cereal with Charlie’s eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I was just thinking how nice you look this morning.”

She screwed up her face. “In my uniform. Get real, Mom.”

She returned to her cereal. I sat searching for words. There was a program last night. It had something about Daddy. No, don’t whitewash it. He lied to me. He lied to all of us. She’d ask what he had lied about. I heard myself trying to explain to a thirteen-year-old the nuances of taking money secretly from a clandestine organization, of undermining the underpinnings of democracy; trying to educate a child about the crosscurrents of trust and betrayal between the written word and its readers, between a man and a woman. I was a writer, but I had no words to tell her the truth without taking her father away a second time.

I pushed my chair back from the table. The wooden legs scraped against the linoleum. My scuffs whispered over the floor as I crossed to the counter, refilled my mug, and carried it back to the table.

Perhaps no one had seen the program. Perhaps everyone had been glued to a
Perry Mason
rerun. Even if people had seen it, they wouldn’t think it was important enough to discuss over breakfast the next morning. As Elliot had pointed out, not everyone viewed Charlie’s actions as an ethical lapse. Most people were probably like Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, who pretended he did not want to be called a master spy.
You have to use techniques that are appropriate for that situation
. The end justified any means.