For the next few days, I floated as if on a cloud. I enjoyed Francie as I never had before; at five weeks, she was beginning to smile at me, an open-mouthed, dribbly smile. At the start of her life, she’d been thin for a baby, her legs as spindly as those of a little chicken, but the cans and cans of Gerber formula she’d been slurping had done their work. She now had dimples in her elbows, chubby rolled thighs, and cheeks that begged for kisses, which I happily gave.
In the afternoons, as she slept, I wrote, and read and reread the latest issue of Downtown, especially “Notes from an Amateur Lobsterman.” In luminous prose, Harry rhapsodized about the early mornings, the meager earnings, the rugged beauty of the painted buoys labeling lobster traps in teal, yellow, navy blue. Harry poked fun at his silver-spoon upbringing, his soft hands, which he’d sliced with a bowie knife after he made an unsuccessful tack knot. Still, he’d managed a feat of derring-do when he had to leap into the frigid water and disentangle a line from the propeller.
The average reader might have thought “Amateur Lobsterman” simply a mawkish ode to an old-fashioned way of life. But now that I had been clued in to the secret of some of Downtown’s donors, I could see, like an X-ray technician, the hidden layers of propaganda in the article. All of the men Harry interviewed for the piece were veterans; all of the young lobstermen in the pictorials vigorous, handsome, blond. The best of the New England transcendentalists were quoted throughout: Thoreau on the two colors of water, Whitman on the way stars look from a boat. The story ended with Harry feasting on lobster thermidor and prime rib at none other than the Palm. He mused about how the lobsters caught by his humble Mainer friends ended up on fine china in Chicago, in New Jersey, how they rode in refrigerated trucks all the way to Las Vegas. The article painted a picture of a beautiful, thriving American ecosystem, all working in harmony to provide us a different piece of the Dream.
It haunted me, not only because these were Harry’s last words in print, but also because I knew why they’d been written, what they were intended to do. They made America and its capitalist system seem so unblemished, so pure. It all felt phony to me now.
“You seem to have turned a corner,” my mother said one morning, when Francie and I came downstairs after a surprisingly decent night’s sleep. We’d found her drinking coffee on the porch, bare feet up on the faded floral ottoman.
“I suppose I have.” I peered down at Francie to hide my grin. “Seems my little plan to support myself might pan out after all.”
“I see.” My mother took Francie from me, and I stepped down onto the lawn to stretch my legs. “There’s more coffee on the stove. And Joe called.”
“Ugh.” Now I felt itchy all over. I imagined bugs creeping against my ankles in the grass. “What does he want?”
“I think simply to hear how his daughter’s been.” My mother tilted her head to the side. “I don’t know, Louise, maybe you should call him. Maybe the two of you can patch things up.”
“Fat chance,” I said, attempting nonchalance, even as the thought of speaking to Joe on the phone made me tremble all over. I brought my mother a fresh bottle and a burp cloth, and then I went upstairs to call him back.
My mother’s bedroom was shaded and cool, the ceiling fan still running slowly. I took several deep breaths as I sat on her nubby white coverlet. I watched the drapes rustle in the breeze from the fan, yellowed lace curtains that I hated. They made me want to be back in sleek Manhattan. I watched a shiny black bug caught between the curtain and the liner; then I finally lifted the brass handset from her phone.
“Number, please,” said the operator.
I gave her Joe’s apartment’s number. It was a Saturday; I figured he’d be at home. He answered on the first ring.
“Hello?”
Despite everything, I felt a little chemical rush of love at the sound of his voice, a fizzing sensation in my knees. “Hi, Joe.”
“Louise, what have you been doing? I’ve called and called.”
So my mother must have been shielding me from his calls. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or angry. “It’s been a bit busy. I have the baby, remember.”
“Yes.” His voice sounded pained. “Of course I remember. I miss her terribly—oh, Louise, you don’t know what you’ve done to me.”
“What I’ve done to you?” I got up, holding the receiver and stepping over the cord, so that I could close the bedroom door. “What about what you did to Harry? You know the man who killed him, or had him killed. Am I to trust you with my safety, and with Francie’s, after that?”
He huffed into the phone, so loud I had to pull the handset away from my ear to protect it from the static blast. “Oh, it’s you who can’t trust me? That’s rich. You’re the one who’s friendly with him.”
“Friendly with him?” Bob, with his odd smile, flashed into my mind, and I shuddered. “I wouldn’t say that. I’m polite to him because you are. But not anymore.”
Joe huffed again. “That’s not what I hear. What have you been telling him? Wait, don’t say it over the phone.”
“Telling him? I’ve barely spoken to the guy!” Downstairs, I could hear the screen door swing open. My mother’s voice floated up the stairs as she sang softly to Francie. Hands shaking, I stood to examine some of the costume jewelry atop my mother’s dresser, necklaces and bracelets piled on a dish with a crystal finger in the middle, stacked with rings.
“Oh, really?” said Joe. “Well, whatever you did tell him got Bob fired.”
I fell silent. A stack of magazines collected dust in a basket beside my mother’s dressing table. McCall’s, Good Housekeeping.
“Wait,” I said. The floor of my stomach felt as if it had dropped, an elevator with its cable cut. Slowly, I sat down on the hardwood floor, taking the handset and receiver with me. “Hold on a minute. I thought we were talking about Bob. When you said ‘you’re the one who’s friendly with him,’ you meant Bob, right? Right?”
“I did not mean Bob,” said Joe.
The bug was still struggling, trapped in the curtain, fluttering its wings.
I covered my mouth with my hand, to keep from screaming.
Not Eli. Eli wasn’t on their side. Eli had lost his job at Time, he’d had his China story blown up, he’d refused to testify. “Did you mean…”
“Shush. Don’t say anything over the phone. I’m coming.” I heard something like the jangle of keys in the background. I heard Joe putting on his shoes. “Don’t say anything to anybody. I’m coming to Ossining.”
With that he hung up, leaving me sitting on my mother’s bedroom floor, clutching the telephone.
I met Joe at the station two hours later. I watched him get off the train and glance around eagerly in his white oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up, and tan trousers. He scanned the crowd, eyes passing over me once before he spotted me. I’d wrapped my hair in a dotted scarf and put on a big pair of my mother’s cat’s-eye sunglasses to cover my eyes, which were swollen from angry tears. I was also smoking a cigarette. It wasn’t the first.
Part of me felt like a spy; the rest of me felt silly for even thinking it. He approached me quickly, his mouth open and ready to talk. But I’d been brooding these past hours, going over and over exactly what I wanted to say, what I needed to ask, and I wasn’t about to let him take the lead.
I held up my hand: Stop! “Walk with me,” I said.
I led him down through the riverside park, around a gazebo, and out onto the pier. The early-afternoon sun was beginning to slant over the water, turning the surface orange, highlighting the crests of the little waves in the river. Tulips were beginning to bloom in red and yellow in planters at the end of the pier. When I got to the end, I leaned against the railing and crossed my legs in their peg trousers at the knee. Joe made to lean beside me, but I wouldn’t let him get any closer.
“You stay where you are,” I said. I wanted him standing alone in the middle of the pier, as if this were an interview, he in the hot seat. I didn’t remove my sunglasses.
He scratched his forearm, squinting. I noticed he had no satchel or anything else with him. He must have thrown his wallet into his pants pocket and run out the door.
“Eli Cohn is a CIA agent,” I said. It was a question, but I didn’t phrase it that way.
Joe took a long breath. He looked back up the pier. Besides a couple of children playing by the shore as their mother watched with the baby, we were alone.
“I can’t confirm that, Lou,” Joe replied. But when he saw the look on my face, he cleared his throat and whispered, “He is.”
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyebrows, then took one last, long drag from the cigarette and tossed it into the water. I’d told Eli everything. I’d almost let him keep my manuscript. My body vibrated with anger. Toward Eli, mostly, but he was not here. Joe would have to bear the brunt of it.
“So Hearst employs spies now. Are they aware that’s what he does?”
Hesitantly, Joe nodded.
“Is that why they gave him the worst office on the floor? To try to hide him?”
“You’ve been to his office, then.” Joe snickered. “Got to know the fella pretty well, did you? He made you into one of his assets and everything.”
I felt like throwing up. Here I thought I’d been using Eli to my advantage. I was a damned fool after all. “All of you,” I muttered. “All of you. Goddamn the lot of you.” Was there anyone left to trust?
“Essentially,” Joe continued, “you handed him a field report when you told him what I told you. I could be in a lot of trouble.”
“He told me you reported him for a story he wanted to write about China.”
Joe’s left hand went back to scratching his right forearm. He gazed out at the water as he spoke. “It’s cute that he told you that. It was a ruse, Louise. They were testing me. Eli himself was probably the one who came up with it. After I went to the editors about his China piece, he welcomed me into the fold. He’s the one who recruited me. When we were at The New Yorker.”
Joe almost sounded proud. And he would have been; he’d begun his life the son of poor Italian immigrants, neither of whom had gone to school past the third grade. He’d found himself at Harvard, then being recruited by the CIA. No wonder the guy wouldn’t admit there was anything untoward about what he was doing.
“But Eli lost his job at Time,” I said. I felt embarrassed, almost, at not having been able to put the pieces of the puzzle together myself. “He wouldn’t corroborate what Whittaker Chambers said about Alger Hiss. He accused Chambers of still being a Soviet spy…. Is that true?”
Joe shrugged. “I don’t know any more than you do. It’s possible Chambers still was a Soviet spy, and that, even though the FBI made a deal with him to bring down Hiss, the CIA wasn’t happy about it. My general impression is that sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. Or it could be that, by publicly shaming Eli, getting him fired from Time and planted at Hearst, they were offering him even deeper cover and influence. Who knows?” He glanced back up the pier. “God, I can’t believe we’re discussing this.”
“Worried they’ll have you killed?”
“No,” Joe said firmly. “They don’t do that. It would never come to that. But they could send me to jail.”
We stared at each other a moment. I was glad I could see his eyes and he couldn’t see mine. His looked weary.
“They’d send you to jail? For talking? For printing the wrong words?”
“Possibly. Pipe down.” Joe came a step closer. “What they’re doing isn’t wrong, Louise. It’s a small part in the war against Communism. You know it’s not wrong. Your brother died for this. If we can change a few minds, if we can keep young people on our side, through art…isn’t that better than fighting another war?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t, anymore. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Paul had died entirely in vain, which was heartbreaking. “If we’re talking about ‘Un-American Activities’…is this not it? Censoring, controlling artists. Using them. Do you know who else does that?”
“Of course I do. That’s why we have to beat them at their own game.”
“What are we even fighting for if we’re giving up our freedom of speech—isn’t that the very first amendment? Who have we become?”
Joe smiled a little. He had a quick reply. “We’re promoting art that’s pro–freedom of speech. That’s all.”
“Listen to you, talking in circles. Maybe I just don’t understand how an essay about baiting lobster traps will really do anything for world peace.” Part of me was trying to be insulting, to dismiss his magazine’s work. But as I said it, as I smelled the fishy aroma coming off the river, the hot wood scent of the dock, something clicked inside my mind. Harry’s essay had ended with a reference to eating lobster at the Palm, the restaurant where I’d met Eli. I’d just thought it was a coincidence.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“What?” Joe took another step.
I took off my sunglasses. I had to get a better look at his face as I said this, to gauge his reaction. “Eli wrote that story. The one about the lobster, Harry’s last work. Eli wrote it.”
“Pssht,” said Joe, tossing his head, but he didn’t deny it. I watched his cheeks turn pink.
“He did, didn’t he?” I said, coming toward him. “And he wrote the big one, too, the one about the Game. Eli’s a writer, but he told me his work isn’t published anywhere. He was lying. It is published—only not under his name.”
I’d come very close to Joe, my finger pointed at his chest. I could see a tiny bit of toothpaste in the corner of his mouth. He started to say something, then stopped. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
“Aha!” I shouted, punching my fist in the air. I’d figured it out. The thrill of discovery faded quickly, however. I lowered my fist, then my shoulders. “I told him about my novel.” Loose lips sink ships. My face landed in my open palm. How could I have been so stupid?
Joe shook his head, looking out over the river. “I’d give up any hope of the book being published, in that case. As I’ve been telling you all along.”
I turned away from him and put the sunglasses back on. “At least he didn’t shred it.”
“No,” Joe said. “He’ll have done you one worse than that.”
I went to the railing and stared out at the river’s brown water. Joe came up beside me and crossed his arms over the edge. He rested his chin on his forearms, his body bent forward. We stared out at the water, side by side. I felt as if we were a pair of salt and pepper shakers that had been separated. We were, after all, someone’s mother and father, and he was the only person who knew just what I’d gone through in bringing that little girl into the world.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
I didn’t say anything in reply. We stood there awhile, watching white sailboats pass by, as the cruise boat to Bear Mountain cut through the waves.
“Louise. Louise, look at me.” I did, reluctantly. His eyes were rimmed with red. “After all we’ve been through, you’ve got to promise me this. You won’t get any notion in your head of spreading this around. In fact, you’ve got to promise not to say anything to anybody. I’ll go to prison.”
I pretended to mull his words, though he had to have known I wouldn’t do anything to risk his being sent to prison. He was Francie’s father, and always would be. And, despite myself, there was still a strong instinct urging me to give him a hug.
“What happened to Harry?” I asked, after a while.
Joe stood upright and sniffed, wiping his nose. “I told you,” he said. “It must have been an accident.”
For the first time, I wondered if Joe wasn’t lying—if they’d kept him in the dark, or if the plan all along hadn’t been to kill Harry, but to embarrass him, or scare him, or coerce him to confess to something, and all had gone horribly wrong. I wondered, too, if Joe didn’t want to learn the truth. If it would be too much for him, would challenge his pure notions of patriotism.
Still, I began walking backward, away from him, toward land and my mother’s house. Toward Francie. “At least there’s one thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Eli, Clifton—they’ll never get the better of Hemingway. He’s got his latest novel buried, somewhere on the grounds of the Finca Vigia. Really explosive stuff, apparently. All about Cuba, and Moncada, all with a guerrilla’s-eye view. Don’t know what he plans to do with it. Maybe he’ll have Mary publish it after he’s gone.”
Joe raised one eyebrow, slowly. He had the look of a man who wanted to know more but didn’t want to let on. “How do you know this?”
“He told me,” I replied, “over oysters. Said something about burying it under the…the cows? Somewhere near the livestock.”
Joe’s features jumped, eyebrows raised and lips parted in such boyish curiosity that I felt bad for a moment. For just a moment. “Goodbye,” I said, my voice catching. With a little salute, I turned away from him. My gait felt strange with him watching me, as if I were performing an imitation of a real person’s walk. But I didn’t turn around. I kept on going.
The first thing I did when I got home to find my mother and Francie asleep in a chair on the porch was walk back up to her bedroom and free the insect stuck inside the curtain. I don’t know why I did it, but I had to do something, and, sure enough, after I tiptoed upstairs and past my father snoring in his own room, I found that it was still there. It had stopped fluttering, but it was alive. I carried it out onto the little widow’s walk inside my cupped hands, but when I opened them, it wouldn’t fly off right away. It had been captive for so long, it seemed, it didn’t know how to free itself. Finally, I nudged it onto the railing, and it took to the sky. I watched it disappear into the trees.
What would Francie and I do now? What would become of us? Would I have to marry the grocer? I had Joe’s ring, still hidden in the lining of my pocketbook, but how much money could I net from a small diamond? How long would it last me?
I stayed out there for a long time as the sky turned purple. When, at last, I ducked through my mother’s window, back into the bedroom, I felt light-headed, but a little bit better. Then I noticed the bedposts.
My mother’s old-fashioned bed had four knobby maple posts, the tops of which came unscrewed in the event that one wanted to add a canopy. Paul and I used to unscrew them when we were playing house as kids, put them in a basket, and call them bread rolls. I noticed now that one of them sat a bit crooked on the post, as if it had been recently unscrewed.
Silently, stealthily, I went over to check the bedpost. I unscrewed the top.
Nothing inside. Only a thick metal screw. Feeling ridiculous, I checked the other three. Then I went into my childhood bedroom and peered into the corners. I unplugged the hallway telephone, looking for extra wires.
Ultimately, I decided what I needed was a stiff drink.
As I walked down the hall, past my mother’s bedroom, I noticed something tucked between her mattress and box spring. I knelt down and pulled it out.
It was a book, a pocket-sized paperback with gaudy gold lettering. The cover felt flimsy and cheap, the pages—and there were many—already yellowed. The title, The Flight of the Fair, appeared over the figures of what looked like a Revolutionary War soldier holding hands with a woman in a ruffled cap and a low-cut ball gown.
I stifled a laugh—my first of the day—imagining my mother reading this alone at night, then hiding it from my father under the mattress. I turned the book over to read the description on the back. About what I’d expected: chaste Virginia, orphaned by the war, finds comfort and safety in the arms of Samuel, a Son of Liberty. I scrolled down to the name of the publisher, which was one I’d never heard of: W. P. Fullerton Books, based in Paramus, New Jersey.
Find the silliest publisher you can, the one with the bright-pink paperbacks.
I hugged Virginia and Samuel to my chest. It felt too much to hope, but maybe. Maybe Eli’s reach didn’t extend all the way to little W. P. Fullerton Books in Paramus.