After Herc Huckley’s son asked her about The Amateur Assassins Club, she’d told him that she wanted to know what was in the box. “Is it mine? Are you giving it to me or not?” Her tone had become chilly, a voice usually reserved for moments when she had to stick up for herself around pushy salesclerks or know-it-all hairdressers.
He told her he’d made copies, but these were the originals. “All yours.”
“I’d like to look at them in private. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” Bill said. “No problem. But…” He reached out and touched the box in a way that declared he still had some ownership. “I’d really love to talk to you about it all, after you’re done. My mother doesn’t know anything about what’s in this box. She met my father years later and now my father’s gone, in a way,” he said, his voice cracking. He coughed and then went on. “This is all I have left of him.”
She’d told him that maybe the contents of the box would jar loose some memories. He jotted his cell phone number on his business card—his work was related to green technology, whatever the hell that was—and gave it to her. She ushered him to the door. And within moments he was gone. Augusta and Ingmar were alone again in the cool, dark house.
Augusta walked upstairs, leaving Ingmar—who was mistrustful of stairs—behind. He nose-whined his lonesomeness.
Using a small step stool, Augusta shoved the box onto the top shelf of her bedroom closet, behind a stack of quilts. She shut the closet door so tightly she imagined she was sealing up the past. The contents of the box would surely jar loose some memories; the question was, could she bear it?
The Amateur Assassins Club? Yes. Those words meant something to her. They shot through her like fissures across the surface of a frozen lake.
Nick Flemming abandoned her. Herc Huckley and the other members of the Assassins Club were the unwitting witnesses.
And then Flemming came back and her life, for a long while, wasn’t hers.
She sat on the edge of her bed then lay down on it with her shoes still on, and she remembered snow swirling on the other side of the window on the fifth floor of the Commerce Building where she’d once worked, the life she’d lived before her daughters existed. The secretaries gathered by the window, pulling their cardigans in close. They didn’t like Augusta. Women didn’t, in general. Men did. She was odd and yet comfortable with being odd—or, perhaps, unaware—which men sometimes mistook for mysteriousness.
It was the eve of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and someone said, “How are dignitaries going to get to all of their parties?”
“Who cares?” Augusta said. “How are all of us going to get home?” She’d left her combative parents in the house on Asbury Avenue as soon as possible—in fact, while still just eighteen and having only completed a short secretarial program. She was living in a small apartment in Arlington that she shared with an older woman who’d never married and who seemed to need no one. Augusta admired her.
The snow had been drifting down since midday, but now it was really starting to accumulate. As it was, she only had a pair of galoshes that fit tightly over her high heels. They would be of little use. The snow was already ankle-deep where it hadn’t been shoveled from the sidewalks, and the galoshes were bound to become pockets for snow.
“Do you think they’re going to have sense enough to let us go?” Augusta asked, rhetorically. At eighteen, she was already a committed career woman. Her co-workers thought she’d prematurely adopted the jaded tone of some of the older higher-level secretaries, for effect, but Augusta had been a jaded toddler. She found an early Christmas present in her father’s closet—a tricycle. She pulled it out, took it to the third floor, and pedaled it around.
When her father found her, he said, “That was supposed to be a gift from Santa.”
“It was in your closet.”
“It’s a special Christmas gift. You should wait until Christmas morning for it.”
“Why?” She sat on the red leather seat and stared at him blankly. “That makes no sense.” She meant it seemed arbitrary, but she hadn’t yet learned the word.
At quarter to four, Mr. Shapiro walked out of his office, coughed loudly, and then clapped his hands over the clatter of their typewriters. “I have an announcement!” he shouted. “Can I have your attention?” He was exasperated even though they all quieted immediately; he was often preemptively exasperated. “All government employees are getting out an hour early! You can pack up and head home at four P.M.”
Augusta finished her final report, tidied her desk, and was leaning over to put on her mother’s galoshes when Lloyd Bartel, a young patent attorney, walked up. “You need a ride?” He spread his hands on her desk, leaned in, and smiled.
“I’m okay,” she told him. “I’ve got a ride.” She didn’t have a ride. She was going to take the bus.
“Full tank of gas, working heater. You sure?”
She nodded. “Thanks.” It was just a car ride but, still, she was suspicious of men, in general, and was dating a young dental student named Max Stern in part because it took her off the market. She hadn’t yet broken it to him that she didn’t believe in marriage. Her parents assumed he was going to propose, and she’d been practicing a speech for that moment. Sometimes the speech was meant to let Max down easy, but often it was a treatise on the pointlessness of marriage: People who get married seem either encased in blocks of ice, so stiff they can’t even blink, or rabid with anger, setting out to kill each other over the course of a lifetime. Those were her parents’ only two modes and what she assumed all couples reverted to in private.
He rapped on the desk with his knuckles. “Keep warm!” he said. “Bundle up!”
She bustled out with the other workers, packed into the elevator amid the cheery nervous chatter—“About time!” “It’s a blizzard out there!” “Call in the reindeer!”—and then through the lobby, the wind-gusted revolving doors, and onto the street.
The snow was coming down so quickly that Augusta stopped for a moment and stared up into it, like a child might. She clutched the collar of her mannish camel-hair coat—identical to so many of the women’s coats that season—and let the snow light on her face, daintily. She smiled. She couldn’t help it. She was out of the stuffy office and in the world. And although she’d been an adultlike child, she could also be a childlike adult. It was as if age didn’t apply to her chronologically, but instead it was mood-based, experiential, like matching an age to an experience rather than experiencing things through the lens of age.
The snow felt like a reminder that nature still existed, that the world wasn’t simply made of boardrooms and buildings and streets and bridges. It could still be overtaken. The city and all of its important bustle could be blotted out—just like that. All white, covered in a blanket, as if what they did here was unimportant, antlike, as if they’d never existed at all.
She was shoved by the crowd. Some had thought to bring umbrellas; popped open, they surrounded her with their silver spokes. She only had a long thin scarf, which she wound over her head and around her neck. She wedged her way into the herds, slipping now and then. The traffic had already slowed, barely inching along. The city was home to many southerners who had no experience driving in snow. She knew it was bad and only going to get worse.
Her nylons were wet and freezing cold. As she approached the crowd huddled at her bus stop on the corner of Fifteenth and Constitution, she realized that there was no way she’d be able to board the next bus or the next.
A man in a tuxedo and a woman in a fur coat stepped out of a limousine and into a small restaurant. The woman was crying. “What a waste. A horrible waste. Are you listening?”
Augusta turned then and headed east toward Twelfth Street. She’d have to reverse the route to its origins at the depot if she wanted a warm and dry seat for the next few hours. She passed a garbage truck, outfitted with a plow.
At the depot, she found a bus from her line just about to head out. It was idling. She tapped on the door. The driver opened it.
“Can I board here?” she asked.
“You’re in for a long night.” He was bundled and flushed, his eyes puffed and bleary, like he’d been making rounds for a long time already.
“I figured that much.” She opened her change purse and paid. All of the seats were empty. She took one in the middle of the bus, slid all the way to the window. She thought of Kennedy. She’d voted for him, proudly, and it seemed that all this snow was nature’s confetti. She loved Kennedy in such a deeply personal way that she wasn’t sure it was healthy. When she heard his voice, she sometimes welled with such hope that her eyes teared up. She breathed on the glass and then made a print of her hand.
At the next stop, men and women shuffled down the aisle, doubling up. Augusta kept her eyes out the window so that no one would try to catch her attention and ask to sit next to her. She knew she’d have to share eventually; this was a habit more than anything else. An only child, she usually preferred solitude.
As the bus lurched from the curb, she sensed someone’s presence on the sidewalk. Maybe it was a flutter of motion that she saw out of her peripheral vision, maybe it was something more inexplicable—sometimes we sense things beyond our senses. She turned and saw a young man running along, his overcoat flapping open. He had dark hair that, if not cut so close, would have been curly, and shining eyes. He raised his hand and called out. He looked at Augusta and opened his arms wide, slowing his pace, as if to say, I’m at your mercy.
Augusta was about to call to the driver but someone beat her to it. “One more!” a voice shouted.
The driver nosed forward but there was nowhere to go. He opened the bi-fold doors and the young man jumped up the steps. He made a quiet joke that made the driver laugh loudly.
As he headed down the aisle, he looked directly at Augusta. His gaze was so intense that she immediately looked down at her lap, fiddling with the metal snap of her purse. The bus lurched again and she heard the swish of his jacket and then felt his weight as he took the seat beside her. “Hope it’s okay,” he said.
She slid toward the window immediately, glanced up, and smiled. “Oh, yes. Of course.”
“My name is Nick,” he said, and he held out his hand. “Nick Flemming.”
“Right,” she said, shaking his hand. She realized now how hard her heart was beating. She tugged at her scarf. “I’m Augusta Rockwell.” She wanted to keep this formal.
“Rockwell?”
“No relation,” she said, “to the artist. Norman, that is.”
“The Saturday Evening Post, right? Baseball games and fishing holes and Santa. I don’t know if I ever really bought it.”
“Bought the newspaper?” Augusta said, but she knew that wasn’t what he meant. He was talking about authenticity.
“The whole ideal. If there’s a place in America that’s perfect like that, quaint and tidy and all tucked into bed at night, I wouldn’t want to live there.”
“Why not?” Her own childhood was a strange lopsided triangle. Her mother and father fought, but all the while her mother took care of her father, who drank too much and took pills for his nerves. With what energy she had in reserve, her mother took care of Augusta. As soon as Augusta was old enough to take on some element of her own rearing, she relieved her mother of the duty. It was as if she fired her mother, task by task, as Augusta grew up, and her mother wanted to be fired.
Nick ran a hand through his hair, wet with snow. He leaned back and smiled—a bright, slightly lopsided smile. “Because it’s not the truth, is it? I like the truth even if it’s ugly. Don’t you, Augusta Rockwell?”
She looked out the window, now densely fogged with the heat of the crowded bodies. She felt almost breathless. Yes. She didn’t know it until this moment, but yes—she preferred the truth even if it was ugly. Marriage, for example, felt like an enormous lie—joy, happiness, twin souls. She would work this into her treatise against the institution, but she didn’t know this stranger well enough to explain what was going through her mind so she said, “What plans are you missing out on because of the snow? You were going somewhere, right?”
“All these big shots in town? Where do you think I was headed?”
“I don’t know,” she said. He was gazing at her—not staring, gazing. “Maybe you’re the type to crash galas and parties. Am I right?”
“So you’re saying I’m not the type to get an invitation?”
She shrugged. “Are you?”
He shook his head and then whispered, “I was on my way to an assassination, but I’ve been delayed.”
“I didn’t know assassins took the bus.”
“What can I say? I’m not highly paid.”
“Why are you making up stories? I thought you preferred the truth.”
“Do you think I’m lying?” he’d said, sheepishly.
“I think you’re horsing around.”
“I couldn’t lie,” he told her. “Not to you.”
The night went on, attenuated by snow. Hours passed on the bus. Dark gathered all around them as the bus inched forward. He told her that he was a law student at George Washington, that he was the youngest of five boys, that he liked jazz and had voted for Kennedy, of course. She confessed things too, but nothing about Max Stern, the dental student.
At one point, Nick took liquor orders for people on the bus. He hopped off to bang on the window of a shuttered liquor store. The owner was inside, socked in by the snow. Nick talked him into selling a few bottles. The man appeared at the plate-glass storefront. He was sleepy, bleary-eyed. Some of the passengers waved, including Augusta. He waved back, stuffing bottles in brown bags.
The bus got rowdy after that. They sang Christmas carols, though the season was over, and a few pop tunes—“Mack the Knife” and, fittingly, “I Want to Walk You Home.”
“We should get out of here and hit one of the galas,” Nick said. “They’ll have food and booze and bands, but not many people showing up to dance.”
A little tipsy, she said, “Yes, let’s!”
They got off the bus, doubled back the direction they’d come, and hustled up E Street. Eventually they started passing restaurants and large hotels.
“Just up ahead,” Nick said, “another block.” Finally, he stopped and said, “This was where I was headed. This one, right here. Should we crash it?”
“I’m not dressed for it,” Augusta said.
“I don’t think they’re being picky.”
There was no need to crash. Two anxious men in top hats ushered them in off the street into a large nearly empty dance hall. There were pyramids of fresh shrimp, a full open bar, servers carrying trays of small hot hors d’oeuvres. The band was fantastic; the drafty dance hall echoed. Every time the door opened, the entranceway fluttered with snow as if a ticker-tape parade were passing by on the street. They danced to everything, warming up enough to take off their coats. As a girl, after the rheumatic fever, she’d been stricken with Sydenham’s chorea, also called Saint Vitus’ dance, her face and hands and feet taken over by occasional spasms. Her handwriting became broken and blocky, her face sometimes went rigid while her body squirmed restlessly. The romantic fever wouldn’t let her go, and she became shy, always scared her body would betray her somehow. But with Nick all of that old self-consciousness disappeared. She could remember, even now, the heat of Nick’s skin when he pulled her in for a slow song, the feel of his hand cupping the small of her back, the breadth of his collarbones. Sometimes falling in love is immediate, headlong, and permanent. She knew that he wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met before or would likely ever meet again. She didn’t believe in marriage, so could she believe in love? None of that mattered. The night wasn’t of this earth. All of the landmarks were blotted out by snow. This wasn’t Washington, DC. This wasn’t even America.
And she knew that even though she was falling in love, she could never keep him. He was too urgent about living. She could never hope to contain him. She knew it from the beginning.
Sitting at a round skirted table, he said, “Jesus, it’s him.”
Augusta followed his gaze to a man in a red blazer. In his midsixties, the man had a waxed mustache, a bulbed stomach, and short arms. He walked, chest-puffed, to the men’s room.
“Excuse me a minute,” Nick said, standing up so quickly that his chair nearly kicked backward.
Augusta grabbed his sleeve. They were both a good bit drunk by this point. She laughed and then regained her composure and said very seriously, “You’re not going to assassinate him, are you?”
“It’s just a game,” he said. “I’ve got to get within five feet of my mark.”
“A game?”
“A club.” He leaned down, putting his cheek to hers, and whispered, “I’ve told you too much already.” Then he pulled away, winked, and followed his mark into the bathroom.
Later, Augusta would come to understand the club. It was simple—overachieving law students challenged one another to mock assassinations. This was before Americans became so deeply and personally scarred by the word assassination—before the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby. They had no idea what was looming, how, one day, the club would feel Old World, cast over in darkness.
A few minutes later, the old man walked out, as chest-puffed as ever, his short arms swinging at his sides, and Nick appeared next.
He jogged over to her and grabbed her hand. “Let’s dance.”
The band eventually played the last song. They walked back out into the snow. After four blocks, they found the very same bus. The passengers were quiet now. Many dozed against the windowpanes.
After they boarded, they approached the Ellipse and saw, through the front windshield, a motorcade rocketing through the park, headlights cutting the darkness, spinning red lights churning the air.
Augusta imagined trying to explain this night to her daughters—and the months that followed, so passionate she felt devoured. Esme wouldn’t understand. She’d never accept that her mother was once—even briefly—a different kind of person. Liv might accept it. She lived a nonconventional life. And Ru? Ru would nod as if she already knew the truth. Ru was prescient this way.
This was the night that changed Augusta’s life, and for a short time the world was a completely different place. It was impossible to explain, too close to something sexual, but it was more than sexual. It was a kind of desire that, once stirred, never left her.
It was a costly desire, and her love for Nick Flemming would eventually exact great sacrifice.
Was it time to tell her daughters the truth? Would they even believe her? There was a time—after the dissolution of The Personal Honesty Movement—when the girls had questioned whether she was lying about their father. Esme accused her of having sex with strangers—she’d never forget it.
The box probably contained some proof. If Herc Huckley’s son knew about The Amateur Assassins Club, what else did he know?
She sat up and planted her shoes squarely on the floor.
Ingmar had given up on his nose-whining and was likely dozing. The house was completely quiet.
She stared at the closet.
This was what had come to her. This was what had bobbed to the surface of the storm—for her. This was what she could no longer ignore.
She walked to the closet door and put her hand on the knob.
She would open the box, spread its contents on her bedspread, and allow what was to come.