FIVE

JULY 11, 1940

Morning began with a paroxysm of desire. The soul longing, the body yearning, the ego pacing back and forth like a beleaguered old auntie left in charge of two incorrigible children.

She lay in her bed and watched the morning light shimmer like reflections of water against her wall. She was covered by a single sheet, with a bare foot extended to keep her a little cooler. The mattress beneath her molded to her form, held her loosely but possessively.

Strange, still, to awaken so deeply alone, to be rapturously bereft of the familiar sounds of Twin Ponds—the wind through the hickory trees, the hysterical squabbles of domestic geese, the careful clinking of her father’s flowered coffee cup in its cracked but matching saucer. Her alienation from her own desire had had a symmetry then; the familiar surrounded sensual hunger like sentinels, with orders to shoot to kill. Yet here, in this strange room, this strange house, somewhere in the vast circular chaos of this strange, sultry city, the familiar, dreary regime of denial had been subtly but inexorably subverted.

Caitlin lived now in a converted attic room in a house owned by a family named Zweig. Thomas and Hilda Zweig were one of the many families who let rooms to government employees. They were Austrians who ran a small wine-importing company. They were elegant, rather formal people. Mr. Zweig wore a coat and tie to breakfast, Mrs. Zweig wore gloves whenever leaving the house, even in the summer. In the evenings they sat in their parlor listening to music and reading newspapers and magazines (though Mr. Zweig had a taste for private-eye novels as well) and they referred to Caitlin either as Miss Van Fleet or Dear. Caitlin had chosen to live at the Zweigs’ house her first full day in Washington. She had been given a typewritten list of houses in which single young ladies could room, and the Zweig house was closest to Betty Sinclair’s apartment, where Caitlin had spent her first night in Washington.

“Zweig,” Betty had said, “could be anything. German, Jew, not that it matters, but it’s fun to try and guess.”

Caitlin’s room was slanted, high in the center and cramped at the edges; she had to practically get on her knees to look out the small diamond-shaped windows. The walls were pale yellow; the floors were dark, and little Persian rugs were scattered here and there. Her narrow bed was in the center of the room. Next to it was a night table with a porcelain lamp in the shape of a French lady walking a dog. She had an easy chair with a floor lamp next to it, a dresser with eight drawers—mostly empty still—and a mirror that made her look fat. There was a half-bath down the hall from the Zweigs’ bedroom that had white tiles and butterscotch-painted plaster and that Caitlin had all to herself. If she wanted to bathe, however, she needed to use the Zweigs’ bathroom, and the near intimacy of being with their towels and lotions and aspirin tablets, their razors and witch hazel and tooth powder, their tweezers, their laxatives, made her feel confused, and strangely ashamed.

It was Saturday. In Leyden, Caitlin used to sleep until noon on days she didn’t have to work, and her parents, though they disapproved of late sleeping just as they did of early drinking, allowed her this luxury, feeling it was the least concession they could make for a valedictorian. They could not afford to give her travel or college but they could keep the house quiet on the weekends.

In Washington, however, she awakened with the first light and waited for the day and her life to begin. She pulled the pillow out from beneath her head and placed it over her breasts; she ran her hand over the pillowcase until she found a patch of linen that had not been heated by her body heat, and this cool spot sent a spiral of pleasure through her as if it were a stranger who had slipped into bed beside her.

She wore a pair of pale green rayon pajamas she had bought with Betty Sinclair. She had never owned anything made of rayon before; it made her feel affluent, modern. Suddenly scornful of her own reverie, she turned on her reading lamp—free electricity came with her thirty-dollar-a-month rent—and read for a while in the Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Betty had given to her. Then, not wanting to awaken the Zweigs, but unable to stay in bed any longer, she put on the dark green, rather Oriental-looking robe she had bought along with the pajamas, and went down the narrow stairway that connected her attic room to the rest of the house.

She went to the bathroom, washed her face and hands, brushed her hair, her teeth, and then crept down the carpeted second-story corridor, past the Zweigs’ closed bedroom door, past the straight-backed upholstered chair placed reverentially beneath a painting of a young Mr. Zweig wearing the tan uniform and ludicrous pointed steel helmet of the Austrian Army.

It was just eight in the morning. The heat never really left the house any longer. If she raked her fingers through the air she could practically feel it.

Caitlin walked barefoot down the stairs toward the parlor. Though she rented only the attic, the Zweigs had made her feel welcome everywhere in their house. A breakfast of coffee and fruit was included with her rent and Mrs. Zweig, who had a cleaning woman but no cook, had from the very beginning of her tenancy asked Caitlin to prepare her own breakfasts on the weekends.

“It’s our only time to pretend we are just newlyweds, with no responsibilities in the world,” Mrs. Zweig had said, smiling.

It had struck Caitlin as an almost shocking intimacy, and she often imagined her somber, sedate landlords in bed together, wrapped in each other’s arms, fully clothed.

The kitchen was large, with blue-and-white linoleum on the floor and a bay window against which honeysuckle nuzzled. Caitlin had never been alone in a kitchen that wasn’t hers before she’d moved into the Zweigs’ and their food was an unexpected source of temptation. She had felt at first that she wanted to taste their food because she had never tasted that sort of noodle or that kind of pastry before, and then, as time passed, she craved the things she had developed a taste for and might never have an opportunity to try again. There was always a pitcher of orange juice in the refrigerator and Caitlin was in a perpetual struggle between appetite and conscience— how to slake her thirst for the sweet, pulpy juice without taking so much that her pilfering would be noticed. And there were always strange doughy cookies in the bread box, which Caitlin counted daily, having devised the rule that if there were twenty she could take two, and if there were ten she could take one, though there were times when she counted out eight and took three. Sometimes her curiosity about the Zweigs’ food lurched toward utter avidity. She once found herself peeling the binding from a leftover chunk of sirloin roast and chewing the burned fatty flavor out of the string.

Today, she filled the percolator basket with Chase & Sanborn coffee and then drew water from the tap. The Zweigs liked the way she made coffee. Then she surveyed the refrigerator. They must have had company the night before while Caitlin was at the symphony with Betty Sinclair. There were hunks of various cheeses wrapped in waxed paper and a platter of sliced salami and some sort of white meat—it turned out to be smoked goose, which Caitlin did not care for; she spit it into her hand and then threw it into the garbage can beneath the sink.

Caitlin checked the bread box. Yesterday, there had been two cinnamon buns in a small brown-paper bag. When Caitlin had reached in to see how many there were, a bit of honey and pecan had stuck to her fingertip and after she licked it off she could not resist eating an entire bun. She admonished herself with every bite but she could not control herself. She had developed a palate that could only be satisfied by other people’s food. Surely if there were only two cinnamon buns left then she was eating half of them and that would certainly be noticed. What a humiliation that would be! Yet no one mentioned anything to her and this morning the bag was still there, holding the last bun. Perhaps they’ve forgotten all about these, thought Caitlin, and, after making a half gesture to return the bag to the bread box, she shook the last bun into her hand, crumpled up the bag, and threw it away. She wanted to save the cinnamon bun for her coffee, but suddenly she just ate it while standing in the middle of the kitchen.

She had, in fact, put on a little weight. Betty had squeezed Caitlin’s upper arm, which had always been hard, almost unyielding, with the biceps of a young boy, but which had of late become soft. “Jewish cuisine,” Betty had said, furrowing her brow in a burlesque of disapproval—yet the words themselves tended to outlive the mitigating mockery.

It was summer and Congress was on vacation. Too hot in Washington to think about any laws but those of nature. Even at night the heat still clung to the city like soiled bandages. Men wandered around in seersucker suits with their collars open, women in sleeveless blouses, their armpits smooth. No one seemed to care.

With Stowe out of town and little to do in the office, Betty had been introducing Caitlin to museums and libraries, bookshops, perfumeries, parks, and a terrific record store on Connecticut where you could take a Duke Ellington record or an old Bessie Smith into the listening booth and play it for as long as you liked without so much as a glance from the tolerant, music-loving Swede who ran the place. Betty knew all the jazz and blues singers, and she’d sing along with them, making Caitlin blush because she never believed those booths were really soundproof.

In some strange yet entirely welcome way, Betty was circling Caitlin. If it had not been coming from a woman, it would have been nothing short of Caitlin’s ideal of courtship. It had begun casually, with friendly gestures tempered by natural reticence and respect. Then it had become part of the rhythm of work—a shared lunch, a cup of coffee after work, a burst of heartfelt confiding that did not insist on leading to a complete destruction of all barriers. Contact was uncertain, sporadic, but free of anxiety. They didn’t have to make up a reason to see each other and they didn’t have to invent excuses not to: work took care of all that.

Once Congress was in recess Betty began more regularly to suggest to Caitlin that they spend time together. It seemed as if Stowe’s absence animated Betty. She smoked more, laughed more, took Caitlin away from her typing and filing tasks for earlier and lengthier lunches. They ate in cafeterias for the most part, but slightly off the beaten track because Betty didn’t like meeting people she knew. Caitlin did enjoy meeting this congressional aide, that senator’s secretary. People who had important jobs thrilled her and it filled her with pleasure and amazement to be treated as if she were on a par with them. But Betty treated every chance meeting as an arduous task, a combination of public relations and sheer endurance, and when the interloper was gone Betty would rub her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, as if she had just been reading pages and pages of fine print.

Yesterday, after lunch, Betty had taken Caitlin out to shop. Caitlin had bought a Leading Lady pocketbook, wine-colored, with a more or less alligator grain, for just a dollar. Then Betty talked her into some fancy soaps. “It’s the cheapest way to make a working girl feel like a debutante. Take the Woodbury. Recommended by Mr. Cholly Knickerbocker.” She had tossed a bar of the soap to Caitlin while the saleswoman looked on in prim disapproval—but that was part of the fun. Betty had a way of creating a private world that others couldn’t understand. Then she had Caitlin buy some Kayser hosiery and then, finally, she somehow talked Caitlin into a Playtex makeup cape. The cape was an outsize bib; it was meant to protect your clothes while you did your face. It cost a dollar and it seemed a ridiculous waste of money to Caitlin. “But oh it’s so sheer, so chic, so terribly feminine,” Betty had said, her voice alive with laughter. She brought you close to her, made you want to discover the joke, too. “And look, a swing pocket to hold your powder puff. Now come on. I may not always be there to hold your powder puff, you know.”

That evening, Betty drove them in her new Ford out to Maryland to see the Roadside Players perform some old play about boyfriends, a lost wallet, switched blazers. Caitlin had always felt there was something inherently solemn and meaningful in anything that deserved to be called drama and she surprised herself with her own laughter. Afterward, Betty said, “I love old plays. Not just the classics but really dumb ones you can make fun of and enjoy.”

They drove home. The night was so hot it seemed the stars might melt and turn the sky silver. It was a long drive and the sway of the car had lulled Caitlin to sleep. When she finally woke up they were parked in front of the Zweigs’ on Peabody Street and Betty was leaning back in her seat, smoking a cigarette and looking at her.

“How long have I been sleeping?” Caitlin had asked.

“Awhile.”

“You should have—” She sat up, rubbed her face. She felt unaccountably nervous.

“You looked so peaceful.” Betty put out her cigarette. The car was full of smoke.

Caitlin was getting a cup when she heard the sound of human movement behind her and she turned quickly, startled.

“Oh, hello,” Joe Rose said. “You must be the boarder.”

“Who are you?” asked Caitlin. She made certain her robe was closed. She felt suddenly and morbidly aware of her body. Her breasts felt heavy; there seemed a kind of gravitational pull in her womb. She placed the empty cup on the counter near the stove while the coffee beat like blood in a vein against the glass cap of the percolator.

“I’m Joe Rose. Hill’s brother.”

“Hill?”

“Hilda.” He smiled. He was dressed in pleated slacks and a clean white undershirt. His face was freshly shaved; his thick black hair was wet. He smiled; he had a space between his front teeth. “Mrs. Zweig, to you, I guess.”

She looked him over. His handsomeness inflicted on her an agitation that was almost like pain, as if something that had been closed within her was suddenly being pried open. He was, like her, barefoot. His feet were very white, his toes long and graceful. He was slender, even a little delicate. His arms didn’t come close to filling the sleeves of his tee shirt. Though he was merely standing there he gave the impression of quickness, and though he had barely spoken he gave the impression of wit. He stood straight, his shallow chest extended, and rubbed the knuckle of his ring finger, as if he had perhaps . banged it against the banister on his way down the stairs. She felt within her the intimations of kinship—yet it was difficult to say, really. Was that voice across the valley another person or merely your echo? Yet she sensed within Joe a turmoil that was somehow sympathetic to her own—an uncertainty of direction, an intelligence cut down by a desire not to be altogether noticed.

He had just shaved and his skin radiated the scent of his cologne. He breathed deeply and smiled; he seemed to be smelling the coffee.

“Can I pour you a cup of coffee?” she asked.

“Sure can,” he said. There was a forced note of heartiness in his voice. He was pretending, as if he had seized on the notion that this was how a man spoke to a strange girl.

He sat at the kitchen table. He had gathered the morning mail, which came early on Saturday. There were several pieces of mail and he spread them out before him like a fortune-teller arranging cards.

“Thank God, it came,” he said, finding a square light-yellow envelope, surely containing an invitation.

When Caitlin came to the table with two cups of coffee, Joe slid a large envelope toward her. It was bulky, secured with twine; her name was written in large block letters and there were eight penny stamps, glued on neatly in two rows.

“Caitlin Van Fleet. Sounds fancy.”

The envelope was from her father. She looked at it without touching it while Joe tore open the envelope addressed to him. He pursed his lips and nodded with a satisfaction she suspected was slightly ostentatious. It was an invitation and after he read it he flicked it with his fingernail.

“It’s from Sumner Welles,” he announced and looked at Caitlin, assuming she’d be impressed. When she said nothing, Joe narrowed his eyes and asked her if she knew who Welles was.

“Orson’s brother?” she said. It struck her as something Betty would have said and she smiled.

“He’s Under Secretary of State and one of the few people in Washington who know which end is up.”

Caitlin in fact vaguely remembered either Stowe or Betty talking about Welles in the office. He was one of those men who were encouraging Roosevelt to get America mixed up in the European war. She seemed to recall Betty saying something like, You can bet Sumner Welles won’t be getting his dainty little hands bloody in any war.

Joe folded the invitation and placed it in his back pocket. His own hands were not dainty but they didn’t look as if they had done much real work, either.

“Hill tells me you work for old Elias J. Stowe,” Joe said. He sipped his coffee and his eyes gazed at her over the rim of the cup. He had dark eyes, a mixture of gray, violet, and black. They seemed the eyes of someone who was used to watching others, eyes that at once recorded and concealed.

“That’s right,” said Caitlin. Joe’s tone of voice had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t think highly of Stowe. “And I happen to think I’m awfully lucky to have the job. It’s not as if I had a degree in political science.”

“Now, now,” said Joe, with his hand raised in a peaceful gesture. “I don’t blame you for Stowe. Look, I work at Fortune and I don’t want people blaming me for Henry Luce. Sometimes you just get mixed up in something before you have a chance to realize what it is.” He took a long drink of his coffee; he seemed immune to its heat. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”

“Of course.”

He stood there for an extra moment, trying to extract with a smile her promise to wait in the kitchen for his return. Then he turned and left the kitchen. His shoulder blades protruded like a young girl’s breasts.

Caitlin listened to his bare feet pad up the stairs, and when his footsteps disappeared she opened the envelope from her father. In it were a bouquet of violets and a note written lightly in pencil. (Peter’s letters were always delicately composed, as if he wanted to give Caitlin the opportunity to erase what he had written and use the paper for something else.)

Dear Caitlin,

I hope this letter finds you well. Your mother and I are busy, as the summer has been one of many important social occasions up at the house, as well as one of unusual heat and elm blight on the farm. Just last night, the Flemings had a dinner for a real Russian count named Vonsiatsky and his wife, an American woman with sad eyes and a private fortune. They live over near the Connecticut border and the Count is teaching Cossack-style horsemanship to all the families around here. He cuts quite a dashing figure, though Mother says he looks like a big baby in his coat with all those Russian ribbons and eagles on it. The party for the Vonsiatskys went on until all hours and Mother had to walk home in the moonlight, carrying her shoes. Her feet had swollen up to twice their size! But the laugh was on me because after dinner the Count and Mr. Fleming and a few of the others went out shooting and ended up frightening the cattle, who took it upon themselves to stamp down the fence along River Road. It took me three hours to get the heifers in and three days to repair the fence!

The Flemings ask after you all the time. They are very proud of how well you are working out. Mr. Stowe has told them many times what a good worker you are, and how you’ve learned all the office systems and the typing and filing and even a bit of diplomacy in the way you handle others.

We miss you. Your mother wishes you would write more often. Your last letter arrived three weeks ago. We would certainly be happy to hear your news.

Do you have a nice vase you can put these into?

Your Father

The violets were dark purple. Peter had wrapped them in wet newspaper and then dry newspaper and there was still some life to them, though half of the petals were crushed. Caitlin stared at them, only partially aware that her heart was pounding like a fist. The flowers, the feel of her father’s voice had brought her back to Leyden. Caitlin had imagined that once she moved to Washington she would never return to Leyden, that the town and its memories would fall away like milk teeth.

“Are you all right?”

She looked up from the flowers. Joe had put on a light brown shirt with a long, wide collar. He wore his trousers belted high.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I hope you didn’t dress on my account.” She gestured toward her robe and pajamas.

“Some young suitor send you flowers?”

“They’re from my father.”

She stood up to find a vase. Mrs. Zweig, a bit of a horticulturalist, kept a row of simple glass vases on a shelf over the sink.

“Say, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in going to a party at the French embassy tonight. Would you? Mr. Welles sent me an invitation and I can bring someone if I like. In fact, to tell you the truth, it would look a lot better if I had a date for it.”

“Well, you see—”

“No, sorry, sorry, Hill told me you were a country girl.” Joe’s face was flushed and he waved his hands up and down at Caitlin as if he were trying to calm her. “You must think I’m very forward, which as a reporter I am, but not as a person. As a person, I’m backward.”

“It has nothing to do with being a country girl,” said Caitlin. She walked back to the table and placed the violets in the center, on a faded white doily. “I’m just busy tonight. There must be plenty of girls in town who would love to go to a party at the French embassy.”

“I don’t know any. I live in New York. I only came here to do an article about Mr. Welles and his views about the war.”

“I don’t have the right kind of clothes for a party like that anyhow,” said Caitlin. “The whole purpose of having a woman on your arm would be completely undone if she didn’t look right.”

“You’d look beautiful. I have to rent a tuxedo for tonight. I never owned a monkey suit in my life.”

“Well, it’s not as simple for a woman.” She imagined Betty saying those words and how she would make them funny, how she would clasp her hands in front of her breast and bat her eyelashes in a burlesque of the simpering female. Betty knew how to hit those notes, how to claim the prerogatives of femininity and mock them at the same time. She had a way of putting imaginary quotation marks around words like girl, lady, nice, giving them an emphasis that made them absurd and harmless and somehow touching, too.

“What we could have done,” said Joe, “was rent a tuxedo for you, too. That would have given the Washington diplomatic community something to wash their caviar down with, don’t you think?” He smiled, captivated by the picture he had put in his own mind.

They talked for a time. Joe spoke of Sumner Welles. He said Mr. Welles was not only brilliant but a man of unusual elegance and grace. “He thinks the way Fred Astaire dances,” Joe said. Joe had a radio announcer’s baritone. He smiled often. But, despite this, he seemed ill at ease. He went on about Welles, about the article he planned to write about Welles, about the objections his editor had about running an article about Welles.

Finally, he stopped talking about Welles and looked at her gravely. “Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

“I don’t like men who do that—and they always do it to women, too. You know, just talk about themselves and call it conversation.”

“You weren’t, you were talking about Mr. Welles.”

“It’s kind of you to say so.”

They were silent for a moment. Caitlin heard the Zweigs stirring upstairs. Footsteps. The sudden animation of the pipes as tap water was summoned.

She glanced up at the ceiling and then noticed that Joe’s eyes looked upward, too, simultaneously.

It was not a major emotional event in her life, sitting with him in that kitchen. It was comfortable, vaguely promising of something further, no more than that. His hands seemed to want to gesture when he spoke but he kept them folded. He looked directly into her eyes. He wanted to know her and she wanted to know him, too.

When she finished her coffee Caitlin stood. Out of restlessness, she stretched her arms out, not remembering she was wearing only pajamas and a robe. The robe opened and Joe looked away.

“Hill didn’t tell me how beautiful you are,” he said, looking at the floor.

“I’ve got to be going,” said Caitlin.

The sun went behind a cloud just then, and a layer of darkness fell through the kitchen, as if reality were a photograph that was suddenly starting to fade.

“If you see your boss,” said Joe, rising from his seat and making a playful, formal bow, “tell him Sieg heil for me.”

JULY 11, 1967

Twenty-seven years later, Caitlin sat at her desk. Behind her was a huge semicircle of window, spotted with rain, and before her was Marlene Draper, a small, dark woman of twenty-five. Marlene’s inky hair had been chopped severely; it looked as if she had done it herself. They were in the offices of the World Refugee Alliance, fourteen stories above the corner of Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.

It was a large office, harshly lit and disorderly. The walls were lined with file cabinets, some of them metal, some cardboard. The art works on the wall were organizational. Every year the WRA produced a poster, which was sent to anyone who donated more than twenty-five dollars. The most cheerful of these posters was a hundred small snapshots in rows of ten showing the faces of people who had been brought to America thanks largely to the work of the Alliance. Most of the other posters were dark paintings of battlefields, barbed wire, border patrols.

The one anomalous poster was a photograph of a golden saxophone lying in the snow. Above that was: “WELL, YOU NEEDN’T.” A PLAY IN TWELVE BARS. THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY ENSEMBLE GROUP. The play had been written by Caitlin’s son, whose name, in the spirit of collectivity, did not appear on the poster. There was nothing else in the office to suggest Caitlin’s personal life, or that she even had one. Her old steel desk, with a keyhole on every drawer, had been bought from the Marxist splinter group that had rented the office space before the World Refugee Alliance took over the lease, and it held only a phone, an old Royal typewriter, a couple of manila folders, and an ashtray filled with paper clips.

“I’m taking so much of your time,” Marlene Draper was saying.

“We’re here to help you in whatever ways we can,” said Caitlin.

She looked at the girl. Her youth and beauty were there— fine, clear skin, delicate but prominent bones in the face— but sorrow had dulled her spirit as a stony field can dull a scythe.

Marlene had come to America from Austria in her mother’s womb. Her mother, Lena, a gifted pianist, who, because of a touch of arthritis, earned her living as a piano teacher. She had fallen in love with and married a Gentile named Otto Schilling. Schilling owned a small steel mill in Austria. He had been, when Lena met him, a widower, with a young child, a boy to whom Lena was hired to teach music. Otto and Lena married and had a few happy years. But when anti-Semitism became the overwhelming reality of life in Vienna, Otto, feeling he was going to be persecuted for marrying a Jewess, sold his factory and disappeared, leaving not only his pregnant wife but Otto, Jr., the issue of his first marriage. When Lena escaped Vienna, she took Otto, Jr., with her. They slept in farmhouses, in spare rooms, in the holds of freighters; the boy died while in quarantine on Ellis Island. Two months later, Marlene was born.

Now Lena was working as a secretary for two psychoanalysts, elderly brothers who shared a suite of offices on Central Park West, and Marlene was studying biochemistry at Brandeis University.

“My mother doesn’t know I’m doing this,” Marlene said to Caitlin. There was a fan on the floor behind Marlene, and every few moments the warm breeze it stirred agitated her long earrings.

“I’m surprised you’d want so badly to see your father,” Caitlin said. “He didn’t behave very honorably.”

“I know, I know. He abandoned my mother. And his son. But he didn’t abandon me. He didn’t even know me.”

“Marlene,” Caitlin said.

“He never even saw his own daughter,” she said. Her face reddened from the throat up, but the blush stopped at her cheekbones and her eyes remained logical. “And now he is in trouble with the authorities.”

“He was convicted of many offenses, Marlene. And nothing that anyone can construe as having anything to do with human rights. A public nuisance.” Caitlin said this with some gentleness in her voice, but it was not easy. She could not understand why this girl wanted to worry about a father she had never known, a father who had betrayed her and her people.

She could not help but think of her own fatherless child: what agonies of self did he endure? What was the little begging bowl he held, asking her, asking friends, asking the world for alms in the form of identity?

“I have reason to believe he is not a well man,” Marlene said.

“Physically?”

“In every way.”

Caitlin was silent. The rain scratched against the window. Traffic sent up its desperate noise, mechanical sinners beseeching heaven.

“You’re very forgiving, Marlene,” she finally said, folding her hands, raising her eyebrows.

“Because of you I can be. We lived, we escaped, we have made a good life here. I know he was a coward, but he was not the only one. There were many who did worse things than hide. And he’s been punished. He lost everything, his business, his friends, his pride. When he works he works as a common laborer. He’s been in the hospital with tuberculosis, anxiety, and depression. He is blind in one eye. And now he writes me and says he would like to come here and I wrote him back and said I would help.”

“Let me make something clear, Marlene. It wasn’t because of me that your mother could come here. It was many people.”

“My mother thinks it was because of you.”

There was a knock on Caitlin’s door and Mrs. Rosenthal came in without waiting for an answer. She was stooped, with a permanently startled expression on her face. She carried a cup of tea. Mrs. Rosenthal’s right leg was six inches shorter than her left; though her left shoe had a lift in it, her gait was nevertheless uneven and she covered her teacup with her hand.

“You have a visitor, Miss Van Fleet,” she said. She had known Caitlin for twenty years and still rarely used her first name.

“I’ll get out of your way,” said Marlene, standing quickly.

“Who is it?” asked Caitlin.

“Mr. Jaffrey.”

Ah, Gordon. She could not think of him without a stab of sadness that was peculiarly comforting.

“Ask him to wait a minute, Mrs. Rosenthal.”

Marlene was looking around the room. Her eyes stopped on the poster advertising Well, You Needn’t.

“It’s a play,” said Caitlin. “My son wrote it.” She got up and stood next to Marlene, put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. It was the best she could do.

“I didn’t know you had a son, or even that you were married,” said Marlene.

“Yes, a son, just the one child,” said Caitlin.

“Your son? He’s in college?”

“Yes,” said Caitlin. It was something she was proud of: he was the first person in her family to go to a university.

“Then he’s my age. How come you never introduced us?”

“I don’t know,” said Caitlin. “I think you would find him … I don’t know. I think you are much more serious than he is.”

“I’d like to find someone to help me become less serious,” said Marlene. She quickly, almost furtively embraced Caitlin; she was small and had to rise up on her toes to place the kiss on Caitlin’s cheek.

Caitlin sat at her desk for a few minutes after Marlene left and then went to the waiting room to collect Gordon. He was standing next to the aquarium, with its few indolent goldfish floating about the murky green water. He moved his fingers on the glass and one of the goldfish followed as he did.

“Hello, Gordon.”

He turned around. He had grown a beard. His face was heavy, deeply lined, but he had a rapt expression now.

“He likes me,” said Gordon. “That fish really likes me.”

He walked toward Caitlin, who had her hands extended toward him. He clasped her and kissed her on both cheeks. He was courtly, though there were still nights, infrequent though they were, when he would show up at her apartment very late and very drunk and talk of nothing but his loneliness.

“You look beautiful, Caitlin Van Fleet,” he said.

He was wearing a summer suit. The right side of his jacket was wrinkled from carrying his camera case around.

He followed Caitlin back into her office and closed the door, took the seat where Marlene had been, slouched back, thrust out his long legs.

“Guess who I saw today,” he said.

“Can you give me some sort of hint?” She often felt prim around Gordon, as if it were up to her to maintain social barriers, tact, felicity of phrase.

“OK, a hint.” Gordon pretended to think it over. “All right. Here’s a clue. He’s your son.”

“That sort of narrows it down. How is he?”

“Amazing.”

Caitlin nodded, gestured, as if to say, Go on.

“Hair down to here,” said Gordon, touching his shoulder.

“That really is impressive,” said Caitlin.

“Oh, come on, give the kid a break, why don’t you? He’s lively, he’s creative. He’s young.”

“I worry about him. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“You see him, don’t you?”

“I see him all the time. But I still can’t figure out what he’s doing. He’s a playwright, he’s moving to California, he wants to work with the Indians, he wants to open up a restaurant on Cape Cod. He has no beliefs. His compass is all screwy.”

“We were luckier,” said Gordon. “We had the war.”

“There’s a war right now. Plenty of wars.”

“Vietnam,” said Gordon, with a dismissive wave. “We had a real war, with no one on the sidelines. We would have been just as screwy as the kids today. But.”

Suddenly, Caitlin leaned forward on her elbows and covered her face with her hands.

Gordon was silent for a moment and then asked, “Caitlin? Are you really that worried?”

She shook her head No, but did not uncover her face.

“It’s July II,” she said. “This is the day I met Joe for the first time.”

“The world traveler,” said Gordon, with so much contempt it bordered on the comic.

“I wasn’t very nice to him,” Caitlin said, finally removing her hands from her face. Her face, older now, but still lean, still with its fierce feminine bearing, was wet with tears. “He asked me on a date and I said No.”

“The first time he met you?” asked Gordon. “Not the Joe I knew.”

“The French embassy, no less.”

“Fancy that.”

“Do you think about him?

“Yes.”

“I mean often.”

“It’s the great thing we have in common, dear. Do you think he’s still in Europe? Do you think he’ll ever come home?” Gordon smiled; his politics made him embarrassed to call America home, but really it was how he felt.

“He has no home. He’s an exile, a permanent exile,” said Caitlin.

“It’s strange, isn’t it. You’ve helped thousands of people come to this country, running for their lives.”

Caitlin reached across the desk and took Gordon’s hand. Their fingers braided and squeezed tightly.

“What do you say we go to someplace very very air-conditioned and have a stiff drink?” said Caitlin.

“I know just the place.”

In the elevator going down, they were alone. They could hear the chains clanking in the old elevator; the ride was slow, full of shudders.

“I’m glad you stopped by,” said Caitlin.

Gordon was preparing to unfurl his umbrella. His camera case hung down to his knees and he stood as crookedly as Mrs. Rosenthal.

“Do you think I’d leave you alone on July eleventh?” he said, smiling. He had new teeth; it gave him an eerily youthful smile.

“You knew?”

He shook his head. “Every year you do this, Caitlin. And every year you say: ‘You knew?’ ”

The elevator bumped to a stop and the door slowly slid open. They walked through the small, scuffed lobby, toward the door to the street. Caitlin stopped for a moment to watch the passersby in the rain, some of them with their collars up, some holding soaking newspapers over their heads, some of them seemingly led by umbrellas that had filled with wind. So many, many people.

And no trees anywhere. The little snip of river filled with garbage, bodies. Concrete buildings like factories producing lives.

“Gordon,” she said, “would you do me a favor and just hold me, hold me before we go out?”

He didn’t say a word. He dropped his open umbrella on the tile floor and took Caitlin in his arms. Pressed her chastely close to him, breathed the scent of her slightly grayed hair, felt the articulation of her.

And she held on to Gordon, as if he were a childhood friend. He had gotten so large she wasn’t sure she could get her arms all the way around him. Oh Gordon, she thought, go away, get married, make a life for yourself.