5
THAT WINTER, MAX TEAMED UP WITH THE electronics whiz of the class, and the two of them painstakingly fed wires through the system of pipes connecting the Osborn House basement with the headmaster’s residence. Drilling a hole in the floor of Folley’s study, they planted a microphone inside a terra-cotta statue of Saint John the Baptist, a tacky Mexican antique that Folley had bought in a Guadalajara flea market. I didn’t learn the details until years later; it was the best-kept secret in our class. In his novel, Max referred to the operation as “Ultra.” Over the following years Max recorded all faculty meetings and so had access to a rich flow of intelligence, which allowed him to run rings around Byron Folley—keeping one step ahead of the posse, while providing the novelist manqué with a rich supply of material, insider poop that would rock the establishment when it was published in Like a Forgotten Angel, not to mention disinformation to be disseminated in the Great White Way. It is no small irony that an institution that had produced more than its fair share of CIA operatives should have itself been so thoroughly penetrated, its dirty laundry and faltering confidence rumored and gossiped to doped audiences at summer parties on Martha’s Vineyard and Fishers Island and in Northeast Harbor.
Bobby Williams would later pull at this oar with his leaks to the press.
Max’s insurgency proceeded with more run-of-the-mill gambits to draw out and test the Folley regime. There was the skunk—an unfortunate case of roadkill—which had, though severely mangled, managed to drag itself into the ventilating system of the chapel before dying, producing a stink so bad that services had to be canceled for a week as the place was fumigated. There was the infamous cold morning in January when, staggering bleary-eyed into the schoolhouse study hall after chapel, we found the ranks of marble busts utterly transformed: stony lips of luscious ruby red, cheeks of rouge and scarlet, and those heavy-lidded opaque eyes alive with mascara in brilliant blues and purples—and hair varying from jet black to auburn to deepest cherry-orange and shocking pink. You could have heard a spider fart. (Only Washington, Lincoln, and Grant were spared.) It was as if the vice squad had crashed some wild party in the reign of Caligula, every cross-dresser, transvestite, and drag queen in town dressed to the nines. Amory Williams, and his tragic golden-boy brother, Samuel II, would have thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Max never missed a chance to doff his hat in tribute to those who languished in that sorriest circle of hell, the netherworld of forbidden desire and fear of society scandal. Such delicious moments provide much of the low comedy in Like a Forgotten Angel.
But in Byron Folley, Max had met an opponent who, too, knew a thing or two about strategic retreats and timely dissembling. Max, our self-proclaimed princely playwright (stay tuned for more on Hamlet), had underestimated Byron’s stage management: All were messing with the chairs on the Titanic.
As the months of his first year crept past, Folley, whom Max had taken to calling “Joy-Joy,” began diligently ferreting out the arcane marginalia of the Winsted ethos—bowing to tradition where necessary, tweaking around the edges when he thought no one was looking, and slipping in the sucker punch on the sly. He proceeded apace to redecorate the chapel with the trappings of the vital religion he preached, including garish evangelical slogans and patriotic prayers for our boys in Vietnam, while eschewing the exquisite archaisms of the King James Version for the pedestrian Revised Standard Version. Essays and Prayers vanished from the chapel program except when Paul Oakes, his powerful voice reduced to a whispered croak by cancer surgery, preached on Sunday. As the chaotic assault of war protest, drugs, sex, and rock and roll filtered into our midst, Byron Folley sought to inoculate us. He saw himself as ministering to the old dying patient, the dried-up and fossilized faith of New England, cold and sterile, like its long winters, which even the veneer of high-Episcopalian manliness dating from the 1880s, once championed by Samuel Williams to scions of Beacon Hill and Washington Square, could not save. “Give yourself to the good news, boys. Trust in Jesus your Savior—oh joy, raise your eyes to the blessed skies—hallelujah, Lord!” And like medicine men of old, he hawked his potions among us, bringing in a motley collection of characters: the crippled and sick, the recovered drug addicts and twelve-step crusaders, who claimed to have been miraculously healed by the Holy Spirit and set on the road of deliverance, now proclaiming the glory of God and Jesus Christ to all who were willing to pay the standard lecture fee. Winsted was scandalized.
My enfeebled adviser, Paul Oakes . . . it seemed like his massive heart was shriveling before my eyes as, day by day, his beloved chapel began to be transformed with spiritual renovations. He winced with disgust each time he took his accustomed seat in the ambulatory, withdrawing from the life of the school, as he withdrew from me, a living ghost investing his few remaining haunts. Before Christmas, a five-foot-tall jet blue terra-cotta figure of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus—bought from the same tourist dive in Guadalajara as the Saint John the Baptist—took up vigil by the side of the altar to mark the holiday season. . . and then stayed, and stayed—a fixture by Easter. For years to come, Joy-Joy’s “Blue-Eyed Babe” to the boys, “That thing” to the older faculty, presided at chapel services, her wide Bambi eyes a pitiful reminder of our kitschy fall. Needless to say, this affront to Max’s narrative veneer never made it into the pages of Like a Forgotten Angel, which contained one famously parsed passage noted by every critic: “Hung on the chapel door in large letters was an invisible sign for all those who cared to see: No Virgin Mary Need Apply.”
It was about this time, as my football career began to take flight, that I first learned of my father’s friendship with the legendary and slightly suspect Karel Hollar, who would vie with my father in the late thirties for the accolades of greatest archaeologist of his generation. This was delivered promptly by hand the first week of term in a blue binder, fastidiously organized by my grandmother, from Harrison & Brandt containing my more of my father’s Winsted letters.
November 15, 1929
Winsted School
Dear Mother,
Another long and fascinating letter from Karel Hollar on the latest finds made by the Germans during last summer’s digging season. As ever, new discoveries spark more theories on Homer and the Greek Bronze Age. Karel sends his regards to you; he says his father often mentions you and Aunt Isabella’s Palazzo Barberini. Our weeks in Venice swim in my head like a dream. How I miss Karel’s tour of the spolia as we floated down the Grand Canal, and your inept chaperoning at a distance! Karel urges me to consider studying at Leipzig next summer, where he is headed—the greatest minds in the field of Bronze Age scholarship are there, he writes. Cambridge might disagree. Karel’s mind is such a sardine can of ideas that they can’t tumble out fast enough in conversation, much less on his scribbled pages. And yet I await his letters like messages from the gods. He has convinced me to forgo classical Greece and concentrate on Homer and the Bronze Age. He writes that he is certain that more Linear B will turn up somewhere in Greece or the Ionian Islands and that we must dedicate our lives to deciphering it. We ponder the characters in correspondence: Is it related to Etruscan or Phoenician? Karel is sure it is an early form of Greek. And so frustrating because Evans has released few illustrations of his tablets from Knossos; there just isn’t much script to work with. But I am smitten and my translation of the Odyssey only tantalizes more.
What I find fascinating is how the Greece of the Odyssey is like glimpsing the infancy of our world—already ancient in Alexander’s day. Reading the original Greek, one feels as if one is searching back in time for answers to questions about our basic nature—simple things: honor, loyalty, courage—destiny and fate. And a golden age to rival the Minoans. Homer’s text is clearly layered with a flotsam and jetsam of telling details, Bronze Age anachronisms preserving the various stages of the poem’s composition like the layers in an excavation trench. What puzzles me is how before about 700 b.c. the written window closes on what went before. Almost five hundred years of darkness from the fall of Mycenaean civilization circa 1100 b.c. to the first glimmerings of Greek civilization as we know it. Imagine, a dark ages lasting for five hundred years! What terrible thing could have happened to so thoroughly destroy such a brilliant civilization?
Of course, my adviser, Virgil Dabney, tends to play down the coherence of Homer. Being a Latinist, he would. Virgil agrees with Milman Parry that the Odyssey is just a compilation of oral epic poetry.
Am I boring you?
Well, I believe there was a real live Homer. One really needs a single author—don’t you agree?—a towering genius to anchor our humanity. Without inimitable heroic voices like Homer’s or Shakespeare’s—a single mind to encompass the moral contradictions of an uncaring universe—where would we be? That, of course, is the problem with the Bible—such a mishmash of authors, of Paul’s incoherent Platonism and hodgepodge of myths around sacrificed and risen gods. One shudders. What I love about the Odyssey is that it is a recognizable world that is as present as the rising sun, a vibrant shining light, a golden age as distant from Periclean Athens as we are from the Crusades. Karel goes on about Homeric Greece as if it was some kind of primitive Rousseauian community of equals. Ridiculous, of course—it was an aristocratic, if not feudal, world—but being a socialist, he would. And since the market crash, there seems to be more and more spouting of socialist ideas, even in the halls of Winsted!
Do you hear any more about the financial crisis? Has it hit us hard? You never tell me anything about the family finances. One hears rumors among my pals of fortunes lost. Even the town of Winsted, already down on its heels, has been hit with more mills closings. The country roads around these parts are filled with laid-off men asking for work at the farms and orchards. The collection plate on Sunday was quite full when Mr. Crocket announced that the money would go to a soup kitchen in the town. Elliot Goddard and Joe Alsop say—presumably from their fathers—that the worst is over and things are on an upswing. Let’s hope so, but I sometimes wonder if the last war, where we lost Father, might end up being our Trojan War. And another dark ages just around the corner? I hear your voice: “Don’t be such a pessimist; your father wouldn’t stand for it.” I do miss Father, as you do, of course—it takes something out of one. His name comes up among the older masters: what a great scholar he was—and yes, a great pitcher for the eleven. People tell me he was such a raging optimist, up on the latest medical science, just as you always said. A commonsense progressive like Teddy Roosevelt, according to Mr. Crocket. Well, we could certainly use some of his optimism right now. The world seems vulnerable and cruel, and, yes, dark, without him: Let’s hope not five hundred years worth.
All I have is you—perhaps you are my Nestor! Shall I call you Mother Nestor? I do love your stories about Father, your “soaring idealist.” I guess I do think a lot about the unfairness of how Father died saving lives: that no matter how hard we try to do the right thing, our fate rests with the gods. I am not a fatalist—how can I be with your voice always ringing in my ears: “You’ll just have to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps, since your father isn’t here to do it.”
Perhaps it is just the November chill in the air that gets me blue, intimations of the long, cold winter ahead at Winsted—and so thinking of summers past at Elysium, when you or nanny tied my laces, as it once was when I was younger and the afternoons echoed with Bobby’s piano practice over the lake, and the nights were full of jazz bands and bright Japanese lanterns floating across the water, and the gay life that even you—why is it you will never admit it now?—took such delight in. I remember your stories about Hermitage when waking me the next morning, of great singers and actresses, dancers and musicians—and the painters, too, or was it just one special painter?
After Amory, and now the crash, I guess those days are gone for good.
And speaking of the devil, Bobby Williams, yet another budding socialist, continues to be a royal headache, still complaining to those who will hear him out—almost no one—about how badly you and the board treated his father. I hear Amory rarely leaves his house in Cambridge, that his wife has run off to Paris with a fellow painter, and he is threatening to sell Hermitage. Bobby struggles to hold his head up and pretend it is nothing, but I know it bothers him. We all know you did what you had to do. Everybody loves Jack Crocket—well, respects him, and of course he is always going on about you with a soft twinkle in his eye!
Do you suppose if we actually believed the chapel poppycock that life might be easier?
When I pass by the chapel, or the hall, and hear Bobby practicing, I remember the good old days at Elysium, the sweet summers full of Chopin and sweet ferns and high-bush blueberries and your sweet smiles gliding in to wake me with tales of your Arabian nights.
We won’t have to sell Elysium, will we? I don’t think I could bear that.
Everyone says Bobby is headed for Carnegie Hall.
Will you be up for the big game next week against St. Mark’s? Two more wins and we are New England champions!
Your loving son, John
Seated at my father’s desk in his boyhood room, staring out at the lake and the towering white pines and what is left of Hermitage, I struggle to remember exactly what I thought coming upon the name of Karel Hollar for the first time in my father’s letters. When they, too, had been young men on the verge of remarkable careers, until war intervened. I knew that Karel Hollar had been a famous Czech archaeologist, something of a renegade and iconoclast with crazy ideas, an upstart in the ranks of the rather stodgy German archaeology establishment between the wars. Like my father, he saw himself in the mold of Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy and Mycenae, and the golden treasure hordes that had first hinted at the true splendors of Homer’s Bronze Age. As young men, Karel and my father had spent many summers working together, but in the late thirties they had gone separate ways, disagreeing about the search for the fabled site of Nestor’s Palace at Pylos. It was said my father was convinced that the palace would have to be like Mycenae and Tiryns, with massive high stone walls, and so clearly visible. Karel had taken a different tack, joining forces with Carl Andersen, an American archaeologist at the University of Cincinnati, and together they settled on a nondescript site on a hill overlooking Navarino Bay with no visible walls. They chose the hill of Epano Englianos by triangulating from the positions of large Bronze Age tholos tombs in the vicinity, tombs that looked to be those of important aristocrats. It was an inspired surmise, and in the summer of 1939, on the very first day of digging, they discovered a treasure trove of Linear B tablets, the first outside of Crete, from what turned out to be the storerooms of Nestor’s Palace. This extraordinary find would revolutionize the field of Bronze Age archaeology, making headlines around the world before being quickly forgotten in the rush to war.
That much I knew: a lot of the story was in Joseph Alsop’s book about Pylos and the Bronze Age, the one he’d put into my hands the previous spring. But nothing about the hint of scandal connected with the name Karel Hollar, something of which I later heard from my Princeton colleagues—perhaps because of his eccentric early career and associations with Nazi sympathizers in German archaeology circles, and later rumored irregularities about missing finds at Pylos in the late summer of ’39 in the haste to close the site, or because he’d ended up in the Wehrmacht and died ingloriously in a Russian POW camp. By my day, Hollar’s name had a vague aura of tragedy: a brilliant, hard-driving young Turk snuffed out by war. In my father’s adolescent letters—and I had no inkling—I was reading the opening chapters of his harrowing odyssey, for the protean Karel Hollar, classicist, archaeologist, Wehrmacht captain, Soviet spy, British MI6 operative, and GDR minister of mines, was the reason for my father’s disappearance behind the Iron Curtain in 1953.
And yes, this was the true story Max never discovered—even as he read every word of those letters. Nor could he have made this one up in a thousand and one nights of prying into my family’s affairs . . . as good a story, dare I say, as any tale out of the pages of Homer.
And a story that would take a devastating turn, and with it my life, just weeks later.
That fall of 1966, the senior quarterback had been injured in preseason tryouts and I’d replaced him on a temporary basis. The game was like second nature to me, as if I’d been born to play. I won the starting role. I found myself enthralled with the strategy of the game, the exhilaration of the moment, the speed, and the indescribable joy of connecting with a receiver far downfield. I felt very much in control of things. We had an exceptional running back, a black kid from Jackson, Mississippi, with massive thighs and viselike arms—one fumble in two years—and the ability to change direction on a dime. And speed to burn, the only guy faster than I. A big-play artist who could make it happen. His name was Jerry Gadsden, a year older and a class above me. Jerry could’ve been the next Gale Sayers; Yale certainly thought so. Next to Max, he became my best friend. Jerry was the most real and honest human being I’d ever met: What you saw was what you got with Jerry, no bullshit, no pretense, although, he certainly kept his home life under wraps. Coming from the South, “from redneck land,” as Jerry called it, where the Klan still flourished, he was in awe of the fact that my great-grandfather had been a general in the Union army. “That great-grandfather of yours, the one in the library, just how many Klan sons of bitches did he kill? Not enough, clearly, since they still all over my neighborhood.” My arm and Jerry’s running and sure hands got us six wins in a row, with only two games left in the season. By our next-to-last game, against Rivers High School, the word had gotten out in alumni circles that the football team was having a great season. The downside for me: Alumni of my father’s generation were returning in droves to watch games. I’d see them lined up on the sidelines in their tweed jackets, slouch hats, athletic ties, Harvard scarves—intent on my every move. Then after the game, they’d come up to me on the field and grasp my hand and hold on as if for dear life. If I heard it once, I heard it fifty times that fall: “A dead ringer for your dad, right down to the passing motion, the head fake, the quarterback sneak.” Some had tears in their eyes about high times in the early thirties. How could the thirties bring back tears for anyone? All my father’s letters were filled with references to the long shadow of the Depression, even if his mother had gotten out of the market in 1928. The family fortune had been in New York City real estate, and her advisers knew a bubble when they saw one.
People forget the bad stuff.
The Rivers game always proved controversial, mostly because we always got our asses kicked. Rivers had been included in our schedule for decades, going back to some distant relationship between old man Crocket and a Harvard roommate, a Rivers principal in the thirties. Rivers wasn’t in our prep school league; it was a public school on the south side of Boston. It was five times the size of Winsted, and the players were big and mean, streetwise and talented, and they always ate us alive, and delighted in rubbing our snotty noses in the mud. But we thought we had a chance that year, or at least Jerry Gadsden thought we had a chance; he’d taken the measure of those Southie kids—racial slurs and all—in games from previous seasons, and knew he could run rings around the best of them. And we almost pulled it off. It was parents weekend and the board of trustees was meeting and having its annual dinner in the headmaster’s house. The sidelines were packed. We were up by three points late in the fourth quarter. Jerry had scored three touchdowns, two running, one on a forty-five-yard reception. We were driving for the end zone. There was a Rivers linebacker I really didn’t like, a compact red-haired meatball, quick as the devil, who’d been taunting Jerry—nigger this and nigger that—all game long. Every time I threatened to complain to the ref, Jerry told me to just shut the fuck up. I was stepping back to pass, totally in control of the situation, ignoring the verbal abuse and threats from across the line, when, an instant after the hike, something hit me . . . something in the midsection and then as I hit the dirt a crack to my jaw like someone had swung a baseball bat. That’s all I remembered. I woke up on the sidelines on a stretcher with a headache and blurred vision and a jaw that didn’t feel all there. I’d fumbled and the ball had been returned eighty yards for a score. We lost the game.
An hour later I was still lying in the training room in the gym, less woozy, still disoriented, but with the exception of black-and-blue bruises along my swollen jawline (the doctor said my mouth guard saved the teeth), no worse for wear. But I felt awful; I felt like I’d let the team—everybody—down. I’d never been in a situation of responsibility like that before, when so much had been riding on my performance. I thought I’d been up to it; I thought I was untouchable. Jerry had tried to cheer me up, coming into the training room, taking my hand, smiling and laughing and telling me not to worry: “You did your best, man. . . . I was with you; I know about these things. And I took care of it. And—you wait, we’ll get ’em next year.” What things? I wondered. Then the coach and the other guys all came by and put in a good word, but I still felt rotten. I was nonplussed, too, that all that good feeling of being in control of a situation could have been obliterated so fast. It was a good lesson: the fickle gods of the blind side. The doctor checked me out. The trainer wanted me to keep quiet for a few minutes more before I showered and changed. He left me and went to tidy up elsewhere. On the other side of a partition were the men’s room and the urinals. I heard two men come in and continue a conversation they’d been having. I knew they were trustees, because they were talking about the new gym and overruns in the budget.
“Unbelievable the money we sunk into this place—but a damn sight better than the old gym.”
“Alden money, you mean, including those eight-foot-thick concrete walls.”
“Wasn’t she something, though—the old lady . . . one tough broad.” “Last of the wine, last of the Puritan conscience . . . what she’d had to endure . . . her husband, then John.”
“Her face, her eyes . . . when we told her: eight-foot concrete reinforced with steel.”
A laugh. “I remember her words: ‘My Lord, are you gentlemen crazy—what do we have to be so frightened of ?’”
“How do you explain the end of the world to a woman of a certain age—doyen of New York society?”
“Well, now we’ve got a little reminder of Omaha Beach on the Circle.”
“Might save the boys from the blast, but fallout, radiation . . . I wonder.”
“Tell me about it. . . . I had Constance and Joey head down to Maine during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“Did you really?”
“I feel bad. Breach of security. Cowardly, I suppose.” “God’s sake . . . yes, you should have been shot.” “Wife and child . . . but you’re right.”
“Could you believe John’s boy out there today. I felt like I was in a dream. As if all the years—know what I mean?”
“Did you notice the head fake, the misdirection, just like John . . . as if nothing could touch him.”
“And not a wobble on the pass.”
“It made me sad, actually—whole business ripped me apart.” “You don’t really think . . .”
“That they turned him?” “Betrayed his country—John?”
“Another of Philby’s recruits—Stalin’s whoremaster.” “You and Angleton.”
“No, Angleton’s crazy as a coot; he sees traitors at every watercooler in the firm. And don’t be fooled by his lies: Angleton was taken in by Philby hook, line, and sinker.”
“Elliot—loyal Elliot—still defends John.”
“Elliot needs friends; in fact, he needs the living and the dead to defend him—two or three hundred by my count.”
“I’ll defend him—Elliot, I mean. In his telling of it, Kennedy just lost his nerve with the air cover. And Ike would have sent in the marines and saved us the whole missile fiasco—stitch in time.”
“I asked Elliot at the game about the latest mess, since he’s just back from Saigon. Didn’t seem too happy about it—politics, always politics— not happy at all.”
“He’s gonna become the world’s expert on fucked-up operations.” “Hundred thousand, two hundred thousand troops . . . now we’re up to our necks.”
“It’s going to be a bigger fuckup than Korea. And to think a brigade of marines would have deep-sixed Castro.”
“Got to hand it to Elliot, like you said, a loyal motherfucker, still carrying the flame for John.”
“You say a word against John and he’ll plant you six feet under.” “Maybe that’s why Elliot’s the ultimate survivor.”
“That’s why they gave him the Vietnam mess. Our intrepid Cold War warrior—it will finish even him.”
“I wouldn’t count him out; he’s got connections to trump the devil. Allen loves him—they talk Shakespeare and Chinese Export porcelain.” “Listen, once the press gets ahold of it. . . . that kind of loyalty only paves the highway to hell.”
“Are you going to the headmaster’s dinner tonight?”
“No, I’ve already said good-bye to my son. And I can’t stand that pusillanimous pipsqueak anyway. And Bobby Williams—Suzanne . . .
Christ’s sake—don’t get me going on those two: Philby’s creatures all. I’ve got a late flight back to D.C. I’m doing Face the Nation at nine in the morning.”
I lay there listening and not listening, as if from another dimension of time, my mind struggling to make sense of those searing sentences spilled into memory between flushing urinals and running faucets. Betrayed? Traitor? Like short-fused limpet mines, those words attached themselves to everything that kept my life afloat. As I showered and dressed, I kept dismissing the thing like a bad dream: if I could only wake up a little more, clear my head, get some fresh air. As I made my way out of the gym, I stopped at the display case containing my father’s medals and citations from the Greek government, and from William Donovan on OSS letterhead, extolling his work with the Resistance during the war. I gazed upon the black-and-white photo, yellowed and creased, which shows him standing in a columned portico in the agora with a motley band of Greek military and Resistance fighters. The photograph was annotated in my grandmother’s hand: Medals Ceremony, Athens, Agora, 1949. At the feet of the man with his arm around my father, again in my grandmother’s elegant cursive script: Nestor. The name swam in my disoriented brain: another Nestor, like a family joke, a sardonic refrain? This Nestor hardly conjured visions of Bronze Age palaces and warriors huddled around flame pits listening to tales of heroic battles. The Nestor in the photo had a rough beard and deep-fissured eyes, a flat, hard face and gnarled forehead; dark hair cascaded in oily ringlets; he wore what looked like an old suit jacket over khaki fatigues, concealing anything in the way of insignia or rank. There was something of the bandit or peasant irregular in his stocky carriage. He barely came up to my father’s shoulder. My father was smiling, but it was a forced smile above a dark business suit. His face seemed anxious, his cheekbones stood out, a smudge of black hair lay pasted on a sweaty brow, and his eyes were shadowed in the noonday sun and seemed distracted by something beyond the frame of the photo. Casually held against the side of his trousers was a cane—you had to look very closely to notice it. He had the look of a man (he was then Athens CIA station chief ) who was uneasy, if not unhappy, to be where he was.
Perhaps this is a retrospective reading, for my grandmother was an excellent editor and this was precisely the image she wanted to remain. . . OSS, not CIA.
And who, I wondered again, the whisper of flushing urinals behind those eight-foot blast walls like a ringing in my ears, was Philby . . . and Angleton?
Just hours before, I had passed the display case with my usual nonchalance: just one more memento of my father’s esteemed life. Suddenly these things—“relics of obscure glory,” so described by Max—took on added weight: They mattered a great deal to me. These tangible proofs of a hero’s life became my gold standard. Surely, such artifacts—much less the name emblazoned on the new gym—put the lie to those obscene speculations in the urinals, which threatened the meticulous ingenuity of my grandmother’s grip on the family legacy. In the following years, as I bailed frantically, her handiwork of incised lettering kept me afloat. But the damage had been done, as is often the case with loose talk.
Outside, it was dark and chilly—a first hint of frost. I breathed deeply, shaking my head. I was shocked that the daylight was gone, the hard pinpricks of silver stars already over the Circle. I was an hour off schedule, out of sync with my habitual postgame routine—and winter looming. I walked slowly toward the dining hall, wanting things to comfortably settle back to how they’d been before the fourth quarter. I wanted company and I didn’t want company. Jerry, I knew, was off working on his history paper for Monday. And Max—where the hell was Max? Who ever knew where Max was? He never came to football games. Never a pat on the back—You did great, Hawkman. (He once told an interviewer that all the school football scenes in his first novel were constructed on a single Sunday afternoon in 1975 as he watched NFL games on TV.) Most of the guys were off at local restaurants with their parents, discussing grades and teacher conferences held that morning. My mother could never be bothered and I never gave her reason, at least not on the grades front.
As I was walking around the Circle, alive to the aroma of woodsmoke, my head began to clear. I found relief in the dark’s anonymity and the comforting thought of a retreat to the library, where I, too, had begun a deep dive into the Odyssey (checking Lattimore to see if I might do better).
Then I was aware of a presence behind me—an unsettling thing, because in the ambient light I’d seen nobody. I kept walking, holding on to my aloneness, as if by ignoring the footsteps they were bound to fade. My name was authoritatively called. I turned to a man in a suit and overcoat. He halted half a moment to light a cigarette, snap the lighter shut and exhale, inhale again and fix me with an unnervingly knowing smile.
A messenger from the gods holding my fate close to his.
“Hello, Peter.” He moved to quickly take my hand, shaking it vigorously, lingering to keep me close as he examined my face. “Survived, I see?”
Elliot Goddard, his blond hair slicked back in a perfect crease, expertly reached to my jaw, as had the doctor who examined me in the training room, to appraise the damage.
“I’m okay, sir . . . and thanks for the Vince Lombardi book.” It had been less than six months since I’d seen Elliot Goddard in the Founder’s Day reception line. He’d served under my grandmother on the Winsted board since 1962. (The New York Times had even noted the fact, calling it a “closing of the ranks” after the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Elliot had often visited at Elysium in summer when I was a kid, invited by my grandmother. And he’d been best friends with my father at Winsted and later in the OSS and CIA. My father’s letters are filled with anecdotes about Elliot, which my grandmother seemed to have relished. She’d dated his widowed father briefly after her husband had been killed in the First World War; they’d danced at the Vanderbilts’ in Newport, sailed together on Buzzards Bay, and on some counterfactual level she must have wondered how drowning her grief in a second marriage might have provided her with the husband and companion of a lifetime she’d never had. Her one comment about his old seafaring Rhode Island family stuck with me: They made their fortune as slavers.
“The kid who threw the punch—he slipped a lace key into his jersey and palmed it before he hit you. The little shit should have been thrown out of the game; and the coach who put him up to it should be suspended, if not fired.”
“The coach?”
“I knew they’d try something like this—they did it in my day, too. I was over on the Rivers sideline. I saw the coach order the hit. I’ve put it to Coach Alexander and Mr. Folley; they will file a protest with the league on Monday. Such unsportsmanlike behavior is unacceptable in this league. Rivers has always been a breeder of bullies—not that we didn’t give them a pasting three years in a row when John and I played.” He shrugged. “But we took the game seriously.” With that backhand dismissal, he took another drag on his cigarette, his rugged good looks
illuminated by the burning ash. “Here, walk with me to the headmaster’s house; I’m already late for dinner.” He put an arm around my shoulder. “Nice game, Peter. I always liked quarterbacks who knew how to use their running backs and not just their receivers.” He snorted in acknowledgment of his little joke. “Paul Oakes says you’ve progressed much faster than he expected—poor guy, a shadow of himself with one lung missing. I’ve tried to convince him to try an experimental program at Walter Reed, but no go.” With this, he examined his cigarette and then tossed it. “I swore to my wife I’d quit—only my second today.”
Elliot Goddard squeezed my arm. “And the Gadsden boy—you should’ve seen him rip into the son of a bitch who hit you. The next offensive play, Jerry blocked the left tackle fifteen yards in reverse, halfway to his own bench, before dropping him. It took three guys to haul him off the field, nasty little bugger.”
That was the first I’d heard of it, and I suddenly wanted to throw my arms around Jerry.
“Isn’t Jerry incredible? It’s . . . well, it’s like handing the ball to a gale-force wind.”
“Gale-force wind, huh, I like that. Took some doing to get Jerry. Went down to Jackson, Mississippi, myself. Can’t get much deeper in the Old South than that. Dirt-poor, two brothers—one in jail, one in the army—five sisters, dad abandoned the family, mother drinking. I got a tutor working with him for two years until we got his grades up, until he was ready for Winsted. Had to pry him away from his besotted mother: her eldest, her pride and joy. Now he’s got a chance to make something of himself. I’ve got the Yale coach down next week to check him out, so be sure to give him the ball.”
No wonder Jerry never wanted to talk about his family.
“He’s smart,” I said. “Jerry is in the library all the time. Latin kind of throws him, but I’ve been able to help him with that, and history.”
Elliot gave my shoulder another squeeze.
“That’s the ticket. We need black kids like Jerry. The world’s got to know that we mean what’s written in the Declaration of Independence. That we stand for something more than just making money and kicking Commie ass.” Elliot paused for a reaction, reviewing the silhouetted apple trees on the Circle as if they were on parade. “So, what do you and Jerry think of the new headmaster?”
Even then, even with a pro like Elliot guiding the conversation, I think I probably realized this was the essential point—that and making sure Jerry looked good the following Saturday. I was pleased to be consulted by a man who was already a legend in his own time. Not that I really knew as much then, but I had an inkling from the stray remarks in the urinals. Gathering accurate intelligence from sources on the ground—tradecraft—was Elliot’s specialty when he wasn’t upending tiny countries like Guatemala.
“I think there are some style issues, but maybe . . . we’ll just get used to him—or he us.”
Elliot laughed and I winced and my jaw throbbed.
“‘Sith nor th’exterior nor the inward man/Resembles that it was.’” Elliot barked another laugh at this quote from his favorite author, and as we neared the lighted windows of the headmaster’s house, I turned and saw every muscle in his powerful face flex as it went through a repertoire of expressions from amusement to knowingness. His blond hair, in the diffuse lamplight from the doorway, reminded me of the color of tarnished bronze in a Mycenaean breastplate at the Met, the way it sparked with highlights along the edges of his clean part. “I hate to let you in on a dirty secret—what are you now, fifteen, right?” I nodded. “But style, more often than not, ends up being the crucial factor. The perception of an event is often more telling than the event itself.” This bit of professional wisdom, with a grin attached, came out as an inside joke. Only a few years before, his pals had bowed to White House pressure and set in motion a coup to overthrow the South Vietnamese president, Diem, because it was felt his aristocratic hauteur and persecution of Buddhists, among other foibles, had lost him the necessary popular support in the face of the growing Communist insurgency. Perception had triumphed over the reality: Diem was all they had. No bench strength whatsoever.
“Perhaps . . . he’s trying a little too hard,” he said.
“The seniors, the prefects can’t stand him. They mock him to his face.”
“Well, seniors, like the faculty—if all you’ve ever known was old man Crocket . . .” He shrugged. “Tough act to follow. Even in our day, the old man—and let me tell you, he was old—Harvard does that to you—when he was young—was like George Washington on Mount Rushmore: boring, humorless, immovable on most subjects, but at least you knew who stood by you at the Battle of Trenton. Your dad was the only boy I ever knew to stand up to old man Crocket and get away with it.”
This tidbit only got my head spinning again: Jack Crocket’s silence all the more ominous.
“John and I used to laugh about it, but at the time it was pretty damn scary.”
Elliot, as if sensing my rising consternation, dialed it down a notch. “I mean, John was such a classics man; he wore it on his sleeve, so to speak. Pop off in sacred studies class about Homer’s take on divinity and such like—over my pay grade, of course. Chip off General Alden’s block, if you know what I mean: seeing what he’d seen at Antietam . . . well, the received claptrap no longer held water. We had to find our own way . . . .”
That went right over my head. I could sense Elliot stiffen a little, his powerful bandy legs gaining a half step as we continued, as if to change the subject: the secret society he’d concocted with my father their senior year.
All that mattered, from what I’d overheard: Elliot was a loyal ally. I never forgot it.
“My father was a great scholar,” I said, as if needing to anchor our bond of loyalty in a safe harbor. “His papers on Homer, his excavation reports in Crete and the Peloponnese are still quoted in scholarly texts today.”
This seemed to bring Elliot to an abrupt stop, just short of the arc of flickering lamplight from the white-columned portico of the headmaster’s house. He must have detected the needy note in my voice. He nodded benignly, respectfully, as he adjusted his blue-and-white Yale letter tie.
“Ah,” he said, as if discovering a more convenient truth to impart. “Maybe that’s a good way of . . . well, of looking at things. And of course you’re right. Your dad was a serious scholar—sometimes one forgets how the war changed things.” His eyes turned to the darkness at our backs and his face went into eclipse. “Such a serious guy, the way he used to scold me in the huddle: ‘No more brooding in your tent, Elliot.’ I had quite the temper back then; you see, I couldn’t bear to lose. And fear of losing—he liked to tell me—is what causes mistakes.” A self-deprecating smile bloomed on his lips, and his shoulders under the camel-hair overcoat went slack. “That’s why he was so popular. He was a congenital optimist, always looking for the best in people.” He raised his eyes to the expanse of the Circle, a hint of light in the rose window of the chapel, and sighed with something touching a faint nostalgia.
“That was quite a trick in the Depression, and if the Depression didn’t knock the optimism out of you—killed my favorite uncle, the war sure did. People stopped believing in the fundamentals; they lost perspective . . . and worse: Bad ideas get a purchase in this world. That’s what makes it so hard—optimism, I mean. But when you’re stuck dealing with the criminal mind, you’re a lot safer believing the worst. Believe me, better to be wrong and pleasantly surprised. Otherwise, you get eaten alive.”
This passed for sage advice from someone who’d overthrown governments and infamously failed to overthrow the one that really mattered. A man haunted by screams for help from the Cubanistas he’d trained, who were abandoned and killed and captured on the swampy beaches of the Bay of Pigs. These sad details were, of course, unknown to me then. What had riveted my attention was his description of my father’s optimism, when his letters were filled with a pessimism touching on an inner darkness that I knew only too well. I wanted to shake my head, tempted to ask about his friend and teammate who brooded to his mother about a looming dark age, who pined for the return of a golden age, for the Elysium summers of his youth, the thing glimpsed in his glowing descriptions of the island of the Phaeacians in his translation of the Odyssey.
And yet Elliot saw nothing of this.
“You could feel it in the quickening rhythm of his stroke as we neared the finish . . . we were inspired to keep up.”
Had my father disguised it all so well? Did it have something to do with his equivocation about Elliot’s unpleasant behavior: his merciless bullying of Bobby Williams, his tantrums and selfishness on the field? Like Jerry Gadsden, Elliot had protected my father, laying out more than a few opponents who had made illegal hits on his quarterback. It was Elliot who got kicked out of games, got a reputation as a brawler, and so was scolded by old man Crocket for unsportsmanlike behavior. While my father, smelling like roses, got all the glory—and three championship seasons.
I suppose I was crazy and naïve to trust Elliot, because the moment he sniffed out the compromising affair between my father and Suzanne (a Philby go-between), he’d used it to get him to give up Princeton and return to Athens in 1948 as CIA station chief.
But on that cool October evening, with American boys beginning to die by the hundreds in Vietnam, I was drawn to Elliot’s loyalty to my family, to the fragile code of honor that Max so trashed and yet failed to decipher. For Elliot Goddard’s fate and that of my father—at least in the eyes of history—still hung in the balance, and they hung in tandem. With Cuba a still-festering fiasco, Vietnam was to be a make-or-break attempt to hold the line for his generation: The whole policy of containment was at risk. Elliot’s crowd knew their reputations for good or ill were up for grabs, dependent on another insecure Texan’s last throw of the dice as half a million troops went in.
And Elliot’s Phoenix Program was just beginning its deadly harvest. Of course, in the gaslit lamps of the white Doric-columned portico, this unfortunate history to come was but a phantom on the wind. The Circle was our refuge, our brass bottom self-respect, the cocoon of our identity, from which we drew strength . . . and safety. We talked urgently about headmaster Folley. Here, too, Elliot tried to be loyal and circumspect about a man he detested: They—the board—would all look stupid ditching the little turd after only a year. Maybe he could be brought along: somehow learn to talk the talk, walk the walk. Damage control was on Elliot’s mind.
“You know what bothered me at your age?” Elliot asked, moving us to a convivial parting, eager now to go on into the brilliantly lit interior of the headmaster’s cozy residence, where his fans and detractors were waiting for updates of far greater import than Byron Folley’s failure of leadership. He paused for effect. “How Shakespeare could exist without there being a Shakespeare to write those extraordinary plays. It really bothered me: no manuscripts, no autograph copies of the plays, no history for the playwright, as if this huge lie was being perpetuated generation after generation.”
I stood there wide-eyed, wondering if I was hearing right: How had we stumbled onto this subject?
He began to gather steam on his pet theory but then waved it off as he realized he really did have better things to do.
A little over a year later, a book arrived all the way from the American embassy in Saigon by an Englishman named Looney (which can’t have helped his cause), “Shakespeare” Identified, written in 1920, which makes the case that Shakespeare was in reality Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford. From my father’s letters, I knew that Elliot had been passionately carrying the flame for the seventeenth earl of Oxford since Winsted days, since his favorite uncle gave him Looney’s book during his fourth-form year. As far back as Yale Law School, he’d neglected his studies to read the plays again and again, detecting the exquisitely subtle legalisms strewn throughout. Only someone trained in the law could even begin to grasp such subtleties, he always told me. He became obsessed by the detailed references to Venice and Italy, the insider knowledge of court politics. During his Wall Street lawyer days before the war, he took any firm business in London, haunting the Bodleian in search of clues for the greatest fraud in literary history. In London during the war, head of an OSS Jedburgh team waiting to be dropped into occupied France after the D-day landings, he sometimes found himself in a near panic with the thought that a bomb-damaged block, a burned library, might have forever destroyed the evidence for de Vere’s authorship. As he told me years later, “Even after I got back from Brittany, every time I heard a buzz bomb overhead, I wondered if that might be the one to do it.” By 1975 and the Church hearings into the CIA, with his career in shambles, Elliot retreated to his Buzzards Bay home to lick his wounds and write his unfinished magnum opus, proving that the Bard was in fact Edward de Vere.
But on that night, Elliot was a lifesaver and a steadfast tie to my father, a Cold Warrior still trying to keep our country safe and the CIA’s reputation alive after the near death of the Bay of Pigs. He was still a magnetic presence then, his strong nose, which always struck me like the nose of the Indian on the buffalo-head nickel, lifted with an aggressive flexing of the nostrils toward the firelit parlor. The trustees were all gathered in the foyer before dinner, the headmaster’s mousy wife passing around Texas hors d’oeuvres (pulled pork on potato rolls, Elliot complained), and there was Suzanne Williams standing tall and resplendent behind her husband’s wheelchair—the sullen, skulking, disfigured Bobby. She drew every male eye in the room, including that of Elliot Goddard, who watched her covertly through the glass door from the gaslit shadows of the portico. He’d had a thing for her—who hadn’t; he’d met his English wife at Suzanne’s wedding. She’d been maid of honor at the ceremony in the back garden of Colonel Fairburn’s country house in Sussex, just weeks before Elliot parachuted into Brittany. Elliot had talked Shakespeare to his bride-to-be and gallantly promised her, half in jest, that if he survived the war, he’d marry her. And he did, with three daughters—Goneril, Regan, Cordelia—to prove it.
I’ve often asked myself why I didn’t just ask Elliot about the overheard conversation in the urinals. I was in awe of this man and I hoped I’d heard wrong. Besides, Elliot would have had to lie to me, because Kim Philby had defected to the Soviets only three years before and the fallout was still rippling through the intelligence services of the free world. Elliot and my father had first met Philby at Bobby and Suzanne’s Sussex wedding in June 1944. Philby, the most icily smooth and debonair of the Cambridge Five traitors; Philby, who deceived and besmirched everyone he touched; the man who murdered my father.
I can just see Max’s horrified face. “Don’t give your ending away, Hawkman. Keep the reader in suspense.”
But this is not fiction. I’m just trying to set down the facts.
And James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, who knew Kim Philby’s diabolical machinations only too well, became convinced my father had tried to defect to Moscow, where he’d been quietly disposed of; and that Elliot, if not complicit or simply careless, was fatally compromised.
“How’s your American history?” Elliot asked as we shook hands. His eyes, now glittering with interior light, turned again to the happy gathering and, as I followed his longing gaze, I too, recognized Suzanne wearing a sequined evening dress that showed off the tensile bone work of her shoulders and upward curve of her breasts.
“We don’t really take American history until sixth-form year.”
In the fantail window above the door, a huge luna moth had settled, a transfixing aquamarine-and-turquoise flame for wings. I was struck by its beauty and wondered if I might reach up and grab it, if I’d make a fool of myself by doing so.
“Yes, yes.” He pondered this impatiently. “That’s what I remember, too.” Elliot rejiggered his crotch. A glow came into his eager face, as it must have on the playing field decades before when a play to his liking had been called, and his chieftain’s nose lifted to the warming smell of the crackling fireplace. “Tell me about the Monroe Doctrine.”
“The Monroe Doctrine?”
“What it is, what it means, what it implies.”
Pathetically, I had no idea, and my gaze kept straying to the luna moth—emblem of summer’s fading—just out of reach.
“Tell me the names of Henry the Eighth’s wives.” I rattled them off.
“Well”—and he placed his hand on my shoulder in a parting gesture—“maybe I need to have a little conversation with the headmaster.” More than twenty years later in cold, rainy Prague, with the Berlin Wall pulled down just days before, and Elliot on his last legs, he’d bemoan again about the big if of his career—the counterfactuals we historians so love to contemplate—if that little shit Jack Kennedy had only had the balls to invoke the goddamn Monroe Doctrine and defend our backyard from Soviet aggression—hadn’t Teddy R. stolen Cuba fair and square in the first place?—if that womanizer had sent in the marines to run Fidel out of fucking Cuba from the get-go—and fuck plausible deniability—then all the other catastrophes from the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even Vietnam could have been avoided. If his boys hadn’t been left to die on that godforsaken beach without the promised air cover, it all might have been different. . . .
And so it might.
But he couldn’t tell a fifteen-year-old kid that kind of thing. And Vietnam hadn’t even become Vietnam—or not quite. And Philby was spilling the beans in Moscow and planning his autobiography, and Suzanne was waiting.
And that’s when I remembered where I’d heard the name before; Joe Alsop had mentioned it: . . . spring of ’53 with the Kim Philby scandal the buzz of Washington . . .
Not much to go on, but enough.
December 2, 1929
Winsted School
Dear Mother,
Here is the gist of my essay on Homer and the tangled morality tale of the Odyssey for sacred studies class—your thoughts, please?
I expect your protégé Mr. Crocket is going to put me through the ringer.
Odysseus is a great warrior and force for moral rectitude, but also a famous schemer and liar. He often turns out to be a pirate and despoiler and proud of it. Not quite on the up-and-up. He loves his wife and son, longs to return to his island kingdom and be reunited with them—all the while lying in the arms of another woman, Calypso. But a hero gets to have it both ways. Then when he finally returns home, he exacts the most terrible revenge on his wife’s suitors, piteously slaughtering well over a hundred. How does that sit with the Ten Commandments, or, dare I say, King David’s thousands slain?
Well, the mortals in the Odyssey are forever prostrating themselves and making sacrifices to the jealous gods, who decide their fate on the basis of whimsy and injured pride. Destiny, they call it when things turn out badly. Or Zeus blames Poseidon for Odysseus’s trials. Or condemns humans for blaming their troubles on the gods, instead of looking to their own reckless ways—as he puts it, compounding their pains beyond their proper share. Telemachus, in turn, blames Zeus for dealing to each and every laborer on this earth whatever doom he pleases.
So, Zeus is wicked and vindictive, punishing entire cities for the merest slight. His treatment of the Phaeacians at the end of the epic, setting a mountain around their city, merely for transporting Odysseus home, is a travesty of justice. And yet—this will be my thesis: There is a certain moral grandeur as the poet has his characters seek to make sense of a cruel world and find a way to take control of their fate. They may beseech their gods, but in the end these mortals are left to their own devices. They succeed or fail according to their choices, good or bad.
Dare I ask Mr. Crocket if his God is responsible for our Hoovervilles and breadlines? If it is the wise all-knowing God of Essays and Prayers, who directed a five-hundred-pound shell onto father’s operating theater, then I wash my hands of Him.
I think my central point is that in Homer’s universe men attempt to placate the gods (fate) as best they can, while in the Old Testament, a jealous God (with absolute power and no competitors) does exactly what He pleases and mankind can do nothing but grin and bear it.
So which book do you chose, Mother Nestor, or, as you like to say, which better accommodates our free will?
Write me as soon as you can with your comments. My essay is due next week and the wrath of the temple looms.
Karel Hollar and I are in furious correspondence over the location of the land of the Phaeacians. He says it must be Corfu, but I feel by internal evidence that it may well be Minoan Crete—and poor Nausicaa forever immured by wicked Zeus!
The situation with Bobby is still no better: The more he complains, the more he is picked upon by all and sundry. Elliot’s cruelty to Bobby is awful, but Bobby’s “radical airs,” as Elliot describes them, just make him wild. I try to keep an eye on Bobby at your insistence, but he rejects everything; he is really his own worst enemy: extolling Stalin as the savior of the Western world! His mother’s debauchery in Paris is the source of endless crude gossip. If only he’d stick to his music; I still love to hear him practice the piano or organ in the chapel and dream of better days.
Elliot got thrown out of the football match on Saturday for using obscenities. He has not learned to control his temper even after his last visit to Mr. Crocket’s study. Nevertheless, I’m glad to have him on my side of the line of scrimmage, my valiant Diomides. By the way, when Elliot comes to visit in the city over Christmas vacation, don’t bring up Shakespeare. You will never hear the end of it.
It was a terrible thing about Elliot’s uncle.
Love, John
PS: Please send me my large volume of Evans’s Linear B tablets.