22
I WAS ENTHRALLED UPON MY FIRST reading of those love letters, as I tried to get the drift of the ups and downs of their nearly ten-year-long affair. It was not so much the tone of my father’s voice or even the discomfiting details of their sex life that I found most unsettling. Nor even the unnerving intimations of Bobby’s spying and Suzanne’s—and my father’s involvement with Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. It was the vast distance I’d put between my father and myself since Winsted and Vietnam. Although I had, in a sense, followed in his footsteps, I had actually managed to let him go; I had ceased wondering about him, caring about him, looking to his life for answers or guidance, much less approval. I had given up on any sense of loyalty or allegiance to the cause for which he had died. Or so I had thought. Nor had I paid much attention to his academic passion for Homer and Bronze Age Greece. I’d become something of a hardened cynic. Reading the letters at that small desk under a single hanging bulb, with the Meltemi whistling past the library’s high open windows, I rediscovered my younger self, when my father’s fate had loomed large in my life. Through the voices in the letters, I was confronted not just with what I had become—a dispassionate and detached academic archaeologist and historian—but with all I’d given up to get there.
And by doing so, I’d abandoned the field to Max.
June 23, 1944
“How can it be that you married Bobby—that you never told me, that I knew nothing? Did he give you that engagement ring, the one you always wore—that you insisted didn’t matter? My God, I’m trampled to bits by all this. Worse, I can’t get your body out of my mind, your breasts, your cunt, your hungry lips—the taste of you. I thought I’d get it out of my system forever two nights ago; now it’s worse than ever. I’m mad for you. I can’t sleep for the desire, even with the perfidy and ugliness of what we’ve done. . . . Did you manage to dispose of the sheets?”
Even now, after Suzanne’s admissions to me, the lies and manipulations of this disciplined ideologue amaze. Kim Philby had first recruited her in London as a courier between his visits to Spain as The Times’ correspondent in 1937. Her brother and Philby had been friends at Trinity College, Cambridge. Stalin’s purges in Moscow had eliminated the experienced old-guard Soviet handlers in the late thirties, and Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt—the core of the Cambridge spy ring—had, for almost a year, been cast adrift and neglected by Moscow Center; the Lubyanka offices of the NKVD had been literally emptied by executions in the basement cells. “The new handlers who arrived in ’38 and ’39,” Suzanne complained to me months later, “were amateurs and paranoid survivors. Often we were on our own.”
In the spring of 1944, Suzanne had nursed my father at the rehabilitation center in Guilford, Surrey; for weeks, their clandestine affair went on behind drawn curtains in the wards and storage rooms. She’d dismissed her engagement ring—a boy overseas who didn’t really matter to her. Not a word about the upcoming marriage until two days before the event, when he’d received, not just one invitation to the wedding, but two. Suzanne had managed to convince him that it was pure coincidence, fate.
June 23, 1944
Don’t you see, I knew I could never give you up—never! Our night together only proves it. I realized I was fool to always think I must do the sensible thing. The sensible thing is a trap. Bobby is back to base in two days. Come to me at Cadogan Gardens. My leave from the hospital is a full week. You must come to me. I will die without you inside me again. Soon, soon, come soon. I can’t stand it. I can still taste your semen. I am all hollowed out without you. Yes, I got to the housekeeper in time to dispose of the sheets.
They had slept together on her wedding night—a betrayal as enthralling as it was terrifying—a powerful and fanatic Circe!
And so it went for the first few weeks as the world watched for news of the invasion of France and then the harrowing slog of the Normandy breakout. Bobby was flying over Germany and my father and Suzanne were stealing hours for sex together at her London home—or more precisely—in Cadogan Gardens, the park on the square of huge Dutch revival town houses. They had a thing about sex out-of-doors, dangerous sex, under the buzz bombs, where they might be discovered. It was as if they were addicted to the danger of discovery, as they had been on her wedding night—and before in the hospital in Guilford. For weeks, she’d crept into his curtained bed in the recovery ward, where he lay flat on his back, immobile and in delicate condition. Oral sex was the best they could manage . . . silent hours surrounded by the mutilated and dying. Desire for full-throttle intercourse galvanized my father in his physical therapy. Then sex outdoors would become their modus operandi, as if to banish memories of the burn ward in Guilford, and big-time at Elysium from 1946 on. Their explicit language, the sheer carnality of their exchanges shocked me. I had never used the word cunt with a woman in my life. No wonder Laura had handed me the letters and excused herself so abruptly. I grimaced at the realization that she had first read the letters at the age of seventeen, that her mind had been full of their pillow talk as she lay there in my arms under the apple trees on the Circle. I groaned at the memories of my stunted sexuality but found myself inflamed by the references in the letters to their passion’s crucible—those weeks together in the Guilford hospital. For I, too, knew something about hospitals and long periods of rehabilitation. . . and a kind pair of hands.
The letters over the remainder of 1944 were filled with remorse and guilt and a growing frenzy as they were separated for longer periods of time, as my father traveled with his OSS intelligence unit in France. “Why do you have to go?” complained Suzanne. “I don’t understand. You’ve done enough; everyone says so. You said yourself they’ve offered you a cozy office job right here in London, right here where we can be together more often. And your leg is far from fully healed; you shouldn’t be out in the field again.”
And then as if they weren’t guilty enough: “My God, I got the telegram just now; Bobby’s been shot down. Their B-17 broke up and only two parachutes sighted out of ten crew. Help me, come back. I can’t deny that some part of me wished it to happen—yes, imagined it, contemplated it. Did my longing for you bring it about? Come back. I need you here.”
They both seemed to go a little crazy over the fall and winter of 1944–1945. My father persisted in remaining in France, interrogating German prisoners, searching through captured documents as Patton pressed on to the Rhine. “The German prisoners stream past, tens of thousands of faces, shell-shocked, starved, relieved—ten thousand sons of bitches, spared, after all the horror they’ve perpetuated. The SS are the worst; they still smile when they think we’re not watching.”
Paul Oakes had gotten it right: my father was on the hunt, and, as I would realize a few days later when I finally met “our” Nestor, on the hunt for Karel Hollar.
When the telegraph came that Bobby had survived and was a prisoner of war, both expressed guarded relief that at least they didn’t have his blood on their conscience. Suzanne’s frustration was heightened; she complained about his dogged pursuit of captured German prisoners: “You could be fucking me instead; you could be cracking me open instead of their malevolent viper brains.” They stole two days together in a Paris hotel as Bobby, at least in their minds, safely languished in a POW camp. They begin searching for names to give to the desire that consumed them: “the beast,” “this fuck creature,” “this bear grip,” “this devil’s bargain with death” and, after a round of anal sex at the Paris hotel, “this shitty, shitty thing called love that shits all over us . . . yes, and makes this shitty war go away.”
I realized from these early letters that my father had no idea Suzanne was a Soviet courier, much less that she was probably relaying information she got out of him about OSS operations in Europe to her Soviet handlers in London. And Bobby, it seemed, had convinced him at the wedding that he’d turned against his early Communist leanings in 1939 upon hearing about the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. “Bobby, a true-blue all-American patriot—who would have thought?” A cover-up Bobby’s Soviet handler in New York had insisted upon when he returned from Cambridge in 1939, and confirmed in the Venona decrypts of Soviet cable traffic in 1947, which Elliot Goddard hung around my father’s neck as he pressed him to join the CIA in the spring of 1948: “among other things, a way to inoculate yourself against infection, Suzanne, too, I hate to tell you.”
As I read their epistolary erotica, I felt a shameful tightening in my gut, part sexual, part a realization that I was now a few years older than the man writing those letters. Did my boring life lack such a sexual drive, the frisson of such erotic daring? For sure, I better understood the cold pursuit of his duties, the hardened indifference I detected in Paul Oakes’s rendition of his reaction to the Buchenwald prison guard’s ghoulish dance at the end of a rope. Glimpsed again when Suzanne wrote in the spring of 1945 as my father’s OSS unit was combing the bombed-out German cities: “your lust for revenge, like mother’s milk. Why do you persist? Can’t you give it up? Can’t you put Greece behind you? Fuck my behind if you will—fuck me arse and cunt and mug and put this perverse thing, whatever it is, out of your mind. Lose yourself in me: take me in every damn orifice you can fathom; feed me your goddamn sweet spunk so I don’t have to bear the stench of the wards. How I hate the petty valor of this damn country.”
From somewhere in Germany, he wrote:
There’s the chance I might get back to London next week; the offensive into Germany seems stalled for the winter, but you never know. It’s so cold. My leg has stiffened up—as has my third leg as soon as I set pen to paper and think of you. Just writing gets me hard. Even your panties have lost their scent, even when I wrap them around my cup of steaming coffee to warm them. God, how I want you—how I hate myself for wanting you—your brimming, sloppy cunt with my tongue inside, how the cold and the brittle stars and the bombed-out towns seem full of the same lustful hate. How much fucking will be needed to repopulate this world? Can there ever be enough fucking?
And she:
I wait, I wait; the waiting is the worst. I fell asleep with my fingers inside myself last night, wanting it to be you, wanting to find something of you left inside me. But there was only emptiness. I can’t get off without you. I dream of your cock or your tongue inside me, one or the other, as if that is the only thing that matters in the universe. I dread the hospital—every bloody day—and all those mangled young men and their desperate faces—as if I’m their bloody miracle worker. It’s so dark and so cold; I’m sick of this crappy little island and its foolish and fading glory. Hurry, hurry . . . so I don’t have to worry about your safety anymore. Oh my John, you are a born survivor; when I am with you, I feel so alive—is that the American in you, that vital, gorgeous American innocence? Don’t lose your innocence; don’t lose the hope of something better in this life. I dream of returning to the stage, where I can dance for you and stop being your nursemaid imposter. Hurry back—warm me, fill me, love me as I love you.
Gone, shattered, obliterated was the young man I’d known from his schoolboy letters, with his romantic infatuation over Homer’s princess, Nausicca, the reluctant adolescent who needed Elliot Goddard to set him up with a date for their senior dance, when, as Elliot put it, his unself-conscious physical charm drove girls wild. Gone, too, the tweedy Princeton academic. Replaced by lines on pages dripping with frenzied sadness, that drew them back again and again to their early days together in the Guilford hospital, like the miraculous golden age of first kisses so revered by long-married couples. Suzanne’s “whatever it is” haunted their every exchange. “Your miraculous recovery—that you can still walk.” “You saved my life” was repeated in many of my father’s letters. “You save my life every day. Do you think it’s just your hands, your beautiful strong hands—maybe I’m only in love with your hands?” The moment I read those words above the song of the Meltemi, I understood so fully that I felt the blood drain from my head.
“Do you remember the milky light through the ward window?” she wrote. “Even now it fills me with longing. When I walked in there this morning, I wet myself with the memory of that light and those first weeks of unrequited—was it unacknowledged?—longing. Did you know how much I wanted you? You were such a sick whippet; I never knew anyone so sad—why were you sad? You’ve never told me, you know, what made you so sad. Your sadness is so different from the others’, and from mine.” After reading my father’s painful description of the liberation of Buchenwald (though not a word about the prison guard), she wrote, “Yes, yes, I’ve seen the reports in the papers. Don’t let it get you down. You must let me wring the neck of the sadness in you—this broken thing in you, I can feel it, darling, in your sad eyes, even in the sad bittersweet taste of your semen, which I love when it is mixed with me. I ache for your love—isn’t that enough to banish what ails you? Tell me I’m enough.”
And a day after this she wrote:
I miscarried at three this morning. A bloody little worm of a boy, I think. Please forgive me. I tried to hold on to him as best I could, but the work in the wards is so exhausting. Oh John, sorry, sorry, sorry— come back soon. I need you ever so much, my love—I need you to fill me up again and take me away from this place. I can’t stand tending any more wounded, and they keep coming and coming—Arnhem was a disaster.
I think it was three or four in the morning when my eyes and my back finally gave out, as if I’d humped a million miles from Cadogan Gardens to the battlefields of France to the rubble of Germany to a peaceful interlude that was postwar America, and then back to Greece as CIA station chief during the Greek Civil War, and then the early fraught years of the Cold War. As Laura had warned me, the letters from their last years spoke of evasion and conspiracy and deceit—on both sides, like caged animals circling each other for advantage.
The Meltemi was rattling the high windows of the library, a low fluty kind of insistent whisper, swirling dust balls in the bare corners, as if to remind me of all I’d abandoned. My mind reeled backward and forward in time: a young man defending his father and his school and his country . . . no more. If sex and desire could have saved him, Suzanne would have been the one to do it. Intimated in her embrace on the piazza of Hermitage on that moon-glutted night, and in the arms of her daughter under the apple trees, if only it had been in me.
I was overwhelmed by a sudden anger at what felt like a history of deceit, and Laura’s words about how they “didn’t or couldn’t get him out” of that Prague prison. That took me back to Hâu Ngh˜ıa Province, where I had been stationed with Lt. Theo Colson and Sgt. Willie Gadsden, Jerry’s brother, and the sometimes inept but always determined South Vietnamese colonel Minh, and our plucky district militias that feared to fight without American advisers and air support—and who surprised themselves when they did. And the NVA regulars who were indoctrinated to sacrificial slaughter, and the medevacs that refused to land under fire, and the B-52 strikes that could have stopped the NVA’s 271 Division on the doorstep of Cambodia had there been better intelligence from our prisoners. And Nixon and Watergate—and all the shithead politicians who had gotten us into the mess and then let us down.
The letters replaced any lingering schoolboy romantic notions with bruised and bloodied flesh, and a carnal craving still virulent across decades. And with it an image of a seventeen-year-old girl staring into a display case of medals and a photograph of my father posed with Greek fighters, and one in particular, labeled in my grandmother’s hand, “Nestor.”
My Athena was leading me back to the truth . . . to the beginning of our story, a story that began way before we were born, before my father and grandfather were born.
When I woke late the following morning from an uneasy sleep, I felt as if the world I thought I knew had undergone a seismic shift. The morning light was more brilliant than usual, flooding the high windows of the men’s dormitory; the Meltemi’s low droning was more persistent, the lines of cots with their folded blankets and toilet kits more spare of appearance. It was as if everyone had awakened on tiptoes as they made their noisy morning ablutions, fearing to wake the late sleeper. . . newly estranged from his own life. I thought I smelled coffee from the mess and then I realized I was chilly: The Meltemi was blowing from the north. I sat up abruptly and my back went into a spasm, much worse than its usual morning briar patch of pain and stiffness. It took me a good hour’s worth of exercises to get mobile, and I yearned for a hot bath instead of the lukewarm shower available in the crude amenities of the museum washroom. I popped an added dose of Demerol with my coffee and downed some buttered rolls with apricot jam.
According to the black-scarfed crone of a custodian, Laura had left the museum hours before; the ancient woman motioned to her ears, making little circles and funny faces, as if the American woman might be a little crazy. I had no idea what she meant, but the phrase from Max’s novel sprang to mind: “a world unto herself.”
I found Laura standing off to the side of the main excavation trench. By late September, only a skeleton crew remained to tidy things up after most of the teams and their students had returned to their universities for the fall. She wore a faded blue T-shirt, inscribed Free the ABT 100, khaki shorts, Nike running shoes, tortoiseshell dark glasses. A yellow Walkman cassette player was attached to her belt and yellow earphones covered her ears. Her hair was pulled back tight with an elastic band. Her long neck and striking jawline set off her pale features; she looked a lot better after a night’s rest. She didn’t hear me, intent on the team of archaeologists working in the trench below, intent on her therapy, with one hand resting on a marble slab as she bent and stretched to her soundless music. The steel brace of the evening before had been replaced with a simpler elastic wrap. I watched her for a time, registering her beauty anew amidst the ruins and a deep cerulean sky. How was it I knew her so little and yet felt I knew so much and yet probably knew next to nothing at all? Such was the spell of Max’s fictional straitjacket. Her striking image at a fifty-foot remove reminded me of a recently uncovered inscription on Delos that I’d come to see. It commemorated a visit to the temple of Apollo by a party of Ionians some 2,600 years ago: They arrived in their trailing robes to praise Apollo with their boxing and dancing and song. Anyone who met them, then, when they were gathered together, would say that they were immortal and would never grow old.
Just another voice from the past inhabiting the living, enough to bring tears to the most veteran of diggers.
I noticed how every now and then she winced, as if the stretching exercises were causing her discomfort. She had always been a hard worker, as Max had found out, to his chagrin: always on tour, always too exhausted from rehearsals and performances for sex, and famously (he’d devoted an entire chapter to this trauma) abandoning his “lazy, ever-prevaricating ass” in Venice, after her abortion, to return to New York and rehearsals and a life without him.
Watching her, examining her face closely, a sensation of fear curdled with hatred rose into my throat, pressing there like a constricting hand. I gasped for breath. Something from the last of the letters, when I could barely keep my eyes open . . . the name: Kim. Kim Philby.
I came up behind her and gently lifted the earphones from her ears—tempted, like Iago, to whisper that name—and placed them over mine, as if to steal her power of motion, as if to escape into her celebrity life by way of that thin umbilical cord and fathom her—like mother, like daughter—perfidious soul. She didn’t startle or miss a beat. La Bayadère, she told me, something she’d once rehearsed with Natalia Makarova. The repeating motif and slow phrasing were perfect for the light therapy she was doing for her bum knee.
She took the headphones from my ears and stowed them around her neck. “So, what did you think of the letters? I’ve been dying to know what your reaction would be: whose side you’d take.”
“Is it about taking sides?”
“You tell me. If I were you, I’d be defending your mother. Max always said you were such a loyal sort.”
“Well, from such an expert on loyalty—”
“I was sorry . . . to hear the news about her.” “Long time ago now.”
“The way I figure it, the reason your father tried to make a break with Suzanne in the summer of ’48 was because Elliot tipped him off about the fact that Bobby and my mother were Soviet agents.” That much had certainly been broached in the letters.
“To get him to join the CIA and go back to Greece as CIA station chief. But how did Elliot know? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Oh, he was cagey as hell. I think it had something to do with army intelligence and decryption of Soviet cable traffic—I’m not supposed to talk about it. [Even in 1989, the Venona decrypts had yet to be released to the public.] Elliot admitted they used the new information to get him to leave Princeton—back into harness with the fledgling CIA.”
“You’ve known—about your parents, I mean—for twenty years.” “Well”—she raised her eyebrows at me—“suspected, until I got my hands on everything. Why do you think I stayed away? You don’t think that fucks with your mind—much less what it might mean for my career? As if Max wasn’t bad enough.”
I thrilled at her sentiments.
“I suppose Elliot told you that in 1963 he talked Bobby into turning in his Cambridge recruiter, Anthony Blunt?”
Her body tensed and I felt her eyes burning behind her sunglasses. “No, you’re fucking with me—right?”
“A quid pro quo, for a place on the Winsted board.” “Anthony Blunt . . . keeper of the king’s pictures?”
“Queen’s pictures, by the time Margaret Thatcher finally accused him publicly in 1979.”
“Shit, Bobby used to reminisce about that asshole, Anthony: his days back at Cambridge, when he was nearly famous. He and dear Anthony hung out at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Palazzo Barberini in Venice—I think he even visited Palazzo Fenway one summer to see Isabella Williams’s old masters.”
Her tone, her syntax of distancing herself from her father seemed positively creepy.
“Don’t forget Wigmore Hall.” “Right, Wigmore Hall.”
“So, they were Anthony Blunt’s lovers? Both Bobby and Guy—” “Don’t fuck with me. Elliot didn’t mention any of that.”
“The crown jewels—I don’t think so. Only what he needed to give you—that’s how it works in the intelligence game.”
“And now you’re such an expert?” “I’ve played a hand or two.”
I was enjoying myself talking tradecraft, lapping up her dismay, how I was getting back at her and her damn family, redirecting a precious bit of life-changing news her way for once.
“Elliot”—she raised her dark glasses, her blue eyes blazing as she grabbed my wrist and squeezed—“didn’t tell you this, did he?”
I smiled. A woman who thought she had her man dead to rights. “A source, almost as good.”
Tears welled in her dilating eyes as the implications washed over her, and her thousand-yard stare spoke of the embittered disaster of Bobby and Suzanne’s split, illuminated by the full glare of their traitorous lives, to their countries, their lovers, and each other. I’m sure it must have occurred to her, as it did to me, that Suzanne had arranged the Federal Express delivery of .45-caliber ammo for Bobby’s Colt pistol on the day after Kim Philby died in Moscow. The gun he kept, as he always insisted to Suzanne, in case the KGB came after him, which indeed they might have had word of his betrayal of Anthony Blunt reached Moscow Center. And having the perfect executioner—his estranged wife—for the job.
I gave her time; I climbed down the ladder into the excavation area and busied myself with my French colleagues. Half an hour later, tears wiped, composed, she joined me. I looked up from a sorting tray of pottery shards. She gave me a knowing look, an imperious straightening of her back, so that her head rose to my height, as she watched me.
I said as matter-of-factly as I could, “I hope you’re wearing sunblock.” “Tons. Can’t you smell it?”
“So,” I asked, “what were you thinking—that night of the dance, under the apple trees?”
“Confused. Scared to death. At seventeen . . . well, to think people did those things.”
“Ah, the letters—you were . . . shocked?” “And I wanted you in the worst way.” “Oh right, Max’s childhood crush—”
“No—don’t go there.” She waved her hands as if to banish the thought. “From the letters, I realized how much of your father was in her . . . in me . . . in Elysium. He’d been there the whole time, don’t you see: mother and me at the lake, on the beach. She taught me to swim before I could walk. We always swam in the nude, always . . . like they did in the letters. And when I was a little girl, we hiked for hours—all over God’s creation—until I thought I’d drop. And we’d stop and have picnics or pick blueberries, or nap or collect flowers; I knew my wildflowers and the trees before I knew my ABC’s. Only when I read the letters did I realize that we walked the paths they walked, hung out in the places they went to fuck each other—sorry, but those letters are so fucking graphic.”
“And I was such a flop.”
“Wrong time, wrong place. We should have been in Elysium; it was so alive when I was a little girl, and it was all about him, don’t you see. They were happy there, until Elliot tipped him off about the spying. I was happy there, incredibly so, at least until fucking ballet took over my life.”
“Rumor has it you’re a star.”
“I hated it. I hate it.” She shook her head with such vehemence that I found myself perplexed, as if she was trying to convince me of something, some golden age of love before Elliot spoiled it all. A kind of faith in which she needed to make me a believer as well, while treading softly, very softly.
“The stuff about our boathouse, well . . . the splinters in her ass from the dock—quite unforgettable.”
“Do you mind?”
“Jesus, no wonder my mother hated the place.”
Elysium, my onetime sanctuary . . . where for years they had indulged in ravenous guilty and deceit-fueled sex—if they’d been wildfires, they’d have obliterated our woods.
“Peter.” I started at my name, lost in a stand of three white columns in the near distance, simmering on the blue. “We need to tell the truth about your father; we need to get him back before it’s too late.”
“I’m afraid Max got to him first.”
“You’re the historian. We’ve got a lot of what we need. And I’ve spoken to this old guy in Pylos, the one named Nestor in the photograph—that’s only his nickname, by the way; he was head of the Greek Resistance in the Peloponnese. He knew your father, like a brother, he said. They worked together during the Greek Civil War, as well. I heard his voice come alive on the phone when I mentioned your father’s name, your name. He’s throwing a party for us. We’ve been invited to spend the weekend with him. A big party, he said, a reunion of the Resistance fighters. That should give us a good start.”
Her use of we sounded like yet another stratagem. “How did you find him?”
“Elliot knew all about him; he’d interviewed him back in 1954 or ’55, when he wrote the CIA report on your father’s disappearance.”
“Elliot wrote the report, too?”
She took my arm.
“Tell me about your father, Peter. What he did here—what you do: Get me up to speed. I liked it last night when you talked about all the trading ships and the names of those ancient places.”
She shot me a penetrating look, again raising her dark glasses, her blue eyes taking in my leery face. The student from hell: the one’s who’s read all the texts before the semester has even begun—who keeps you honest.
“I’m a teacher.”
I pointed out the grid system of wires placed over the area of excavation that allowed us to map unearthed objects in terms of time and place. From a sorting tray, I selected a large shard, a pottery fragment of Late Helladic II from a strata of Mycenaean settlement on Delos between 1400 and 1200 b.c., at the height of the Mycenaean empire and influence—something my father would have relished.
“Like I said last night,” and I took her hand in mine and placed the dirty fragment in her upturned palm. “Spit on it.”
“Spit?”
“Or I can spit, if you prefer.”
She raised her palm and delicately spit on the shard. I took her hand again and rubbed the wetted area with a finger until the dried mud liquefied and revealed the amber glazing and red floral motif, typical of the period. I bent to a knee and drew in the dirt the shape of a kylix, a stemmed cup with looped handles on either side, and showed her the part of the cup from which the shard in her hand had come. “The patterning is more formalized, stylized compared to earlier Minoan models, which had a greater degree of naturalness and more expressive design.” I looked into her eyes. “You’re the first to gaze upon this artifact in over three thousand years.” With that, I folded her fingers tightly around the fragment, as if it were a creature that might escape. “Think of it as energy: the skill and purpose of the maker of this kylix, his delight at painting the design, the way his lines echo the shape of the cup while abstracting the floral motif . . . the careful transport of this artifact across the seas to find a willing buyer, who, in turn, would find delight in the elegant shape and abstraction of natural forms, perhaps engendering a sense of wonder—you see”—and I squeezed her fist tighter still—“energy translated from the hand of the maker to the covetous eye of the beholder: a feeling of status and belonging that beauty incarnate bestows upon the possessor—that his world might somehow, against all the odds, survive the violence that waits on every horizon. We see only the ruins of worlds, and yet, for the people who lived here, there were interludes of peace and prosperity that lasted, sometimes for hundreds of years. And these”—and I unfolded her fingers so that the rays of sunlight sparked on the red glazing—“are testaments to their lost stories.”
She reached a hand to my lips, not to hush me, I sensed, but to better feel the tone of voice.
“And words, too?”
“Oh yes, but alas, so very rare.”
“So you’re happy—with what you do, I mean?”
“The truth. It ends up being pretty arbitrary, trying to bring order to this chaos—but it’s what you find along the way that makes it worthwhile.” And I quoted her the inscription that had been discovered that summer at the temple of Apollo.
“So many lives,” she said, looking around at the strata layers, each carefully labeled with little green plastic tabs.
“Grave robbers . . . kids digging for buried treasure.”
She turned to the shard of the kylix again, an amber glow against the white of her palm.
“Actually, wasn’t he—your father—fascinated with the influence of Minoan civilization on early Bronze Age Greece? The possibility of a golden age—right? Mentioned by Hesoid and implied in Homer, something like the way Odysseus thought of the island of the Phaecians, a better place and time.”
I took the shard from her palm and carefully placed it back in the sorting tray.
“Sandbagged . . . you’ve read my father’s journal articles.”
She indicated her strapped knee. “I’ve had time on my hands. I’ve read everything I could lay my hands on, including your books and articles.”
A guilty smile eased up the corners of her mouth as she caught my expression: as relentless as her mother.
For an hour, I led her among the ruins of the major sanctuaries, as I had done with my Princeton students for nearly two decades, and finally on to the lion’s terrace built by the Naxians at the entrance to their sanctuary near the sacred lake.
“Here you are, your lions,” I said.
She got out her photo of my father and began inspecting each of the five remaining lions of the original sixteen until she found the one he had posed beside. She fingered the lion’s worn marble flanks shorn by centuries of exposure, its mouth agape in a toothless roar.
“August 1939 you said this photo was taken.” She seemed to be assessing the figure for damage. “What’s that, fifty years, almost to the day, imagine.”
“Fifty years”—I snapped my fingers, imitating the way she’d done it the night before—“like nothing.” I motioned to the ruins of the town and the blue of sea and sky.
She playfully petted the mane of Naxian marble and spoke to it in perfect imitation of Bert Lahr.
“Courage, you just gotta have courage.”
That was their little pick-me-up—Max and Laura’s—replayed to each other in moments of crisis and disappointment. And a comic leitmotif in Gardens of Saturn.
“Funny, this guy reminds me of something. I can’t quite—”
“Venice. The Venetians stole one of the marble lions—their mascot, after all—and put it front of the Arsenal.”
I watched carefully as something in her expression fell.
“C’mon, I’ll take your picture,” she said, pulling from her pocket an expensive compact Nikon. “Stand right here where your father was.”
“No, I’m not in this picture, but you are.”
I took the camera from her hand and she gleefully assumed a consciously touristy pose. Then as I was about to snap the shutter, she threw back her head, rubbing her chest so that her nipples showed beneath the T-shirt.
“A little cheesecake for the fans—as if I have any left.” I handed back the camera.
“There are plans to put this pride of cats in the museum, before they’re totally ruined by weather, and replace them with copies.”
“No, really, how sad.” We resumed the tour. “Hey, how come you’re walking so off balance?” She stopped, appraising me with a critical tilt of her head.
“Bad back. Comes from all the years digging ditches.”
“You’re out of alignment. You need to see my chiro, best in the business. He’s saved my life more times than I care to remember.”
I shrugged and we continued.
“So,” she said, as if suddenly annoyed at my professorial airs. “Do you ever wonder about those guys you got kicked out of school?” I stopped short. “Kicked out?”
“Max couldn’t have cared less, but the others—I don’t know.” “They got themselves kicked out.”
“We heard you gave the headmaster a list.”
“He had a list with Max’s name at the top. I did confirm a few facts.” “But it came from you, don’t you see. It fucked people up with their colleges, their student deferments—Vietnam. They still talk about it, about you. . . . We all do.”
“Well, I never said anything—not a peep about you.”
“Loyalty, was it, to the old school? Protecting the families, the founders?”
“I figured you’d have enough on your hands with Max.”
“Touché.” She waved me off and took the lead on the winding path through the tumbled sanctuaries, striding purposefully on with her bum knee as if to leave me in the dust.
I found myself pissed off: they still talk about you. I had a self-image, for better or worse, in terms of the circles in which I’d grown up, of someone who’d pretty much fallen off the face of the earth: a faded bogie on the radar screen. I’d never been back to a Winsted reunion. Occasionally, I had wondered about my classmates at reunions, deep in drink and sentimental blather about their radical school days—especially those now on Wall Street. Did they remember me, and how? Certainly not in terms of my hero father and his generation and their good war. Only one other poor son of a bitch in my generation at Winsted had actually ended up in Vietnam. To some, I belonged to a very exclusive club of fools and fascists.
“Yikes . . .”
I heard her startled cry and I rushed ahead, to find her standing at the entrance of a temple enclosure where a large green lizard, maybe three feet from nose to tail tip, eyed her from a mosaic floor.
“They’re absolutely harmless,” I assured her. “But they do grow incredibly large on the island. They have no natural predators here.”
With that assurance, she strode boldly forward, and the lizard cocked its emerald-gray head, blinked a lifeless eye, and scampered across the mosaics to disappear with a furtive swish of its tail into a fissure of the surrounding wall. She began circling the mosaics, staring down at two gold-and-turquoise dolphins rising above a line of blue-crested waves.
“I don’t suppose . . . did you find my mother at all sympathetic in the letters?”
She raised her face to me, her eyes neatly hidden behind her dark glasses.
A passage in one of my father’s last letters leapt to mind:
“What is this black spell we have cast over each other? The thought of death only saddens me, in that it would be the end of you, too. Do you suppose it is the prospect of nothingness that makes me so hungry for your kisses, that all I can think about is crawling into your body and having you wrapped around me again like a second skin?”
“I only wish she had managed to save him, keep him from going,” I replied.
She paused, her shoulders going slack.
“Somebody once told me that you were always such a good sport,” she said. I rolled my eyes and she looked away. “When your father disappeared, Elliot and a whole team of CIA interrogators questioned Suzanne and Bobby for days. They, of course, denied everything.”
I went to a low stone wall and sat to relieve the pressure on my back, covering my face in my hands.
“That’s why we can’t just leave it,” she called after me.
Wiping cold sweat from my eyes, I glanced up with sudden anger: something about how she was painstakingly distancing herself from an inconvenient past.
“Were you really in love with Max?” I blurted out. She snapped a bemused look at me.
“In love . . . I was crazy about him. You think my mother was a seductress, Max was in a league all his own.”
“Well . . . now I feel better.”
“Peter, he told me—Max assured me you were gay.”
I shouted, “Of course he did. It’s in his fucking novel, and we know it’s all true.”
“So, you’re really—”
“Like father like son—in the novel, remember?” She eyed me, intrigued.
“Listen,” she said, “if it makes you feel any better, my publicist, his publicist, they used to get together for lunch at Lutèce and plot our bad-boy scenarios . . . feed the piranhas of the press.”
“So, where did the fiction stop? Tell me, what’s left of the real you?”
She sighed. Her lips quivered as she paused, testing her knee by moving forward and back, as if to summon her resolve to go on.
“Don’t hate me, and don’t hate Max. I had to watch him, and others, fall apart for years, and worse. Don’t make me go there, okay? Consider yourself lucky.”
I watched Laura’s face lift to the blithe blue of the bay and her jaw tighten.
Listening to her pleading voice, I thought back to that wonderful fall afternoon and her words after the football game, as if she’d made a discovery: “But you like to . . . move.” And, for a moment in the cooling breeze, I felt again the sense of speed and physical mastery that had been that last football game, lighter than air. Perhaps she caught something of this in my distant stare, for she seemed to blink back tears behind her Foster Grants as she circled the mosaics, inspecting the patterns of waves and leaping dolphins.
“Besides, I really liked your books; they’re fascinating—really.” She paused, as if surprised by a genuine rush of emotion. “It’s just, well, fifth-century Athens wasn’t exactly a bed of roses for women. No legal rights, no intellectual life, barely allowed out of the home, dying like flies in childbirth while their men went off to slaughter one another or bugger one another—sex slaves, breeders; I gather the big boys only fucked their women from behind, and up the ass, like one of the guys—huh.”
She flung this at me like a prosecutor’s battering of the star witness. Not that I was about to give her the satisfaction of a defense—not of the life of women in fifth-century Athens. In my books, I had assiduously touched all the bases of feminist criticism and then some. I had made my case about how much better off women were in Athens than anywhere else in the ancient world at the time; they were mothers, and daughters, and lovers—the social glue. Athena was the patron goddess of the city. Full and rounded female characters were found in the works of Aeschylus and Euripides; their true voice came through to us, as it did in Homer. And, yes, they did have legal rights and could own property. And, yes, maybe dying in childbirth was an unpleasant prospect, but certainly not as bad as getting chewed up on the left flank of a hoplite phalanx, stomped to death, with your entrails spilling in the dirt.
“But who am I to talk?” she sighed. “I’d have turned out to be a Medea or Clytemnestra, not to be trusted with having children.”
I eyed her uneasily, finding myself a little fed up with her fragile emotions. “Perhaps a Sappho, or Cassandra, forever warning us of our sad fate.”
“Fate is such a guy thing.” She took off her glasses as if to make a show of her sincerity, and as she did, in the bright sunlight, I saw the track marks on the inside of her left forearm, ancient scars whose memories still lingered. “Know what the great thing about you is? You know nothing about me—you see,” and she slapped the elastic wrap on her knee. “I’m all washed up, a clean slate. My orthopedic surgeon said it’s six months before I’m even supposed to take a light class again— if it heals. He advised retirement, like he did two years ago, like he did the year before that. I was strong, you know, a workhorse. I had the best turnout and extensions and I was quick, smooth and quick, Balanchine quick and so on the music. Every goddamn choreographer wanted to see if he could break me—push his latest gig, with my body to experiment on. Oh Laura,” she went on with an affected lisp, “you’re the only one who can do my new ballet—one extra performance, we know you can do it. I lapped it up. I was a fool for punishment and to prove to my mother that Max hadn’t fucked up my career. And then, one day, they start replacing you with seventeen-year-old bun heads who can stick their toe in their ear but haven’t even located their clitoris.” She grimaced and rubbed her knee. “So you try harder and take more risks and do more than your fair share, and you’re still the greatest—until you break.”
A ship’s horn sounded off the bay. The day cruiser from Mykonos was making the turn into the harbor, where it would disgorge hundreds of tourists to inundate the ancient city. I suggested we escape the multitudes and make our way to the far side of the island, which was largely deserted of life, ancient or modern.
There we walked on the empty beaches, barely speaking, as if needful of the silence and the gentle lapping of the waves. She removed her shoes and walked on ahead of me in the shallow surf, as if wanting a certain distance to properly feel the stones against her battle-worn feet. She carried a bouquet of wildflowers she’d picked along the way—ruby red poppies and purple crocuses that still grow in abundance in the fall, like altar flowers among the ruins. And every now and then she’d retreat from the water’s edge, kneel and plant a stalk amid the sand and shingle, little flags, as if to mark her journey, bread crumbs to find her way home. As a kid, I’d found similar floral flagpoles crowning miniature battlements in the sand of our swimming beach at Elysium.
I enjoyed seeing her like that, walking slowly, head bowed, her proud, bitchy voice stilled for a time, all the accumulated losses coming to bear upon her still-girlish figure. In truth, I felt a little stranded in her wake. She had come expecting a reckoning of sorts, to confront me with the letters and my past—our past. But standing there in the shallow surf, at a remove, she could have been any beautiful woman; she could have been seventeen again; she could have been the young princess Nausicaa come down to the beach to find the shipwrecked Odysseus.
How strange our idealizations of women and the multitudinous guises in which we cloak them: goddesses, fertility figures, images of chastity and justice, Madonna, muse, and model, icons of motherhood and sirens of libidinous release.
She, in turn, would have laughed off such abstractions: “Oh my God—enough of your scholarly obsessions, Dr. Alden—shall I call you Doc Alden—professor? Your head is not only clouded with the justly obscure but most of the time it’s entirely beside the point.” The physical world was the only reality that mattered to her, living, as she did, with the effects of gravity and aging muscles, and witness to the grip of an insidious disease on her colleagues, which all the expanse of blue skies and sea could not wash away. At that very hour, another old friend, a danseur noble, a man who had partnered her a hundred times at Lincoln Center—lifting her like a windblown leaf across that enormous stage, lay in his small apartment on West End Avenue, dying, scarred with lesions and ghastly melanoma, wheezing out his last breaths. She had said a final good-bye the morning of her flight to Athens.
How often did she chastise me: “What the fuck do you know, Alden?” She’d had enough of heated ideological cant when Max’s radical friends dropped by at all hours, when she was so desperate for sleep. “Hasn’t the century had enough of your bullshit that you can’t at least save it for lunch and not three in the morning?” She had exhausted her body to dance on the world’s gilded stages, cheered by balletomanes and a president whose son had first met her in ballet class. She hated herself for wanting the adulation and hated herself for hating it—what the fame game had cost her and Max.
But there was something else on her mind that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Years before, I had pretty much gotten over my obsession about Kim Philby; hers, recently, had taken on a life of its own.
Laura had stopped again ahead of me, Nikes dangling by the laces in her hand. Above us, drifting like moored kites, seagulls bobbed and dived in the brine-scented air. Then she bent and picked up a stone and began washing it in the water, a look of almost childlike wonder in her eyes as she slipped her dark glasses to her forehead to better inspect the prize. Her hair was loose and blowing, her eyes flashing with reflected light. And I thought, Yes, she’s her mother’s daughter: proud and brazen and devoted . . . and dangerous.
We were not exactly spring chickens: How much damage could we yet do?
“Of course . . . if you’ve got everything you need here.” She said this as I drew a few steps closer, within earshot, but the remark was less directed to me than an explanation for herself. Mindful of what she’d only recently faced up to, I felt a wave of inchoate guilt for a world of shirked responsibilities.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t have a life. There were my books, my classes and students; my lectures got top ratings from the Princeton kids; my course on the Acropolis building programs had five stars in the informal course guide put out by The Daily Princetonian. Maybe my office hours were a little spotty, maybe I was a little hard to get in touch with, since I spent half the year in Athens and on digs, but that was what great scholarship required: sacrifice and focus. And yet the kids scurried to get into my classes. For many classics majors, I was even something of a celebrity; for budding archaeologists, a star performer in the field. Those professors who had known my father were dead or retired.
I winced inwardly, turning my eyes to the speeding flight of the white gulls.
She pursed her lips and began again to examine her stone. Her blue T-shirt billowed for moments like a spinnaker, a full-bellied fertility goddess, a momentary image of pregnancy, until luffing a second later to return the outline of her small-breasted figure. Then she came to me, her hands dripping, and handed me the stone she’d washed.
“For you,” she said, and was about to move away again when she paused, a question shadowing her face. “Would you call them love letters? Do you think it was love? Or was it just incredible sex? Incredible because it was illegitimate: a nurse and her patient, a wife and her lover, a spy and her target. Fueled by guilt and a bad conscience. Is great sex love, or just love’s way of giving birth to the future? Or can there be love without great sex?”
“Maybe sex was how they could lose themselves.”
“God, I hope so.”
She gave me an uneasy look and moved on down the beach.
I stood examining the gift. The smooth white quartz was shot through with tiny black striations, like an arcane script from some unspeakably remote age. I smiled and looked to where she stood on the beach, stopping again as if something out there on the blue sea had caught her eye. And again, her wonderfully innocent yet how canny questions put me in mind of Nausicaa, and of my father’s prewar articles speculating on the connection between Minoan civilization and Homer’s Bronze Age Greece.
That age of innocence, given up fifty years before on the eve of war. . . when he and Karel Hollar engaged in a conspiracy that would have, if discovered, ended his professional career.
My father had been obsessed with Homer’s scene—an image that had haunted him from his school days as he worked on his translation of the Odyssey—when the castaway Odysseus, washed up on the shore of the Phaeacians, finds himself entranced with the noble beauty of the princess, she of the white arms, Nausicaa. What had intrigued my father was how this young woman could have so transfixed the world-weary, battle-hardened Odysseus that he’d been taken out of himself, forgone his usual strategy of canny aloofness with a plea from the heart, hoping this fair maiden might assist him in returning to his home and wife. And, too, how the impetuous Nausicaa had gently faced down this stranger, a terrifying brine-covered apparition out of the sea, as he must have seemed, and responded with a brave offer of hospitality, clearly ready to take Odysseus as a husband if he’d have her.
Little could my father have imagined how closely his life would follow art.
He speculated in his article that the literary style and somewhat archaic language, much less the vision of the land of the Phaeacians, untroubled by war and tumult, a culture of civility and generosity toward strangers, might have harked back to memories or stories of the golden age of Minoan Crete, or perhaps the early years of the still undiscovered Pylos of Nestor, when the Greeks, before they were Greeks, had emigrated from the northern steppes: a Bronze Age warrior culture discovering the marvels of an island civilization in brilliant bloom. Was this the Atlantis of Plato, the true golden age that Homer projected upon the Phaeacians from the dark ages of post- Greece? So my father had speculated as late as 1939 in his last journal article before the war, on his last visit to Delos, when he and Karel Hollar had split their bets, my father financing a dig on Delos to explore for Mycenaean artifacts, perhaps a cache of Linear B tablets deposited in a sanctuary to Apollo, while Karel teamed up with the American Carl Andersen to find the palace of Nestor.
And I, too, was put in mind of the passage in Homer where Odysseus recalls a trip to Delos, describing a lovely palm tree growing near the altar of Apollo, to which he had compared Nausicaa, a sight that had stopped the grizzled Odysseus in his tracks: that something so beautiful could just appear from the hard earth.
With Laura standing down the beach from me, and my father’s anguished letters still fresh in my mind, much less thoughts of him languishing in a Prague prison for over a year, I was overcome with emotion at all that had been lost. That if there was any truth to be found, maybe it might yet allow us to move on, that time’s arrow was not just a one-way street to the grave, but a path to forgiveness, or at least forgetting.
Time: in the guise of a lithe not so young woman on the beach with windblown hair, reminding me not a little of Telemachus’s lament: “Who, on his own, has ever really known who gave him life?”
And so, like Odysseus remembering his youthful infatuation, perhaps with a younger Penelope, or more likely like a young Telemachus agonizing about the fate of his father, I found myself transfixed by this image of a woman standing in the surf, remembering something of how I’d felt on that warm fall afternoon when I had run with the swiftest, when I had held a winsome girl in my arms under the apple trees and the future had rolled out before us like a silver carpet of moonlight.
When an iota of the desire in those letters might have saved us.
I continued to watch her as she pondered another stone in her fingers, only to realize that her downward gaze was directed to her reflection in the clear water, or perhaps had slipped deeper still, to her shadowed self on the sandy bottom, one image of a crystalline iridescence, the other darkly indistinct, like separate apparitions of a single soul locked in a struggle for her true identity. She dropped her stone, watching as the obliterating ripples did their work, and then, in what seemed an instinct for self-preservation, she reached into the sea, as if into the very heart of her troubled self, and scooped up a handful of sand and pebbles, letting the wet mass ooze between her searching fingers.
The sensation seemed to produce a petulant thrust of her jaw. “Skinny-dip, anyone?”
I had to laugh, because she’d gotten it out in perfect imitation of Max on that late afternoon at Elysium—when we’d still been just innocent enough to scorn our innocence.
She began by pulling off her T-shirt. It wasn’t as if she was daring me, or making a display of immodesty; rather, she was reaching across time to something of what we once were and might again be. A kind of paralysis came through my limbs, my abdomen a sharp point of constricted muscle. I felt the panorama of blue sea and sky come to focus in her body, the way her weight rested on her good leg as she pulled the shirt over her head, how the raised hip bone began an upward rhythm through her torso, up and across the indent of her belly to the gentle swaying of her pointed breasts, ribs just visible below, further animated in the sudden inclination of her head and brilliant jet of hair whipped by the breeze as she bent to ease down her shorts. The white of her back glowed in the afternoon sun, every muscle and tendon and dentil molding along her backbone standing out, springing the long arch of her neck. Then she remembered the knee brace, bending again to force the elastic down, a band of redness between calf and thigh, like the mark of a slave’s shackle. Her things stowed in a pile, she went dashing into the blue without a backward glance, a sensual line of white flesh, blond hair loose and flowing as she disappeared with a thin splash beneath the Aegean.
I undressed slowly, never taking my eyes off the area of disturbance where she had disappeared. Her head and shoulders rose far out. She had gone an amazing distance underwater. She swam with effortless, crisp strokes and I followed into the water. The sea was cool, thrilling as it reached my crotch. I squinted into the sunlight. She was moving outward, faster than before, ripples in her wake catching points of gold. She switched to the butterfly stroke, shoulders and back rising and plunging, dolphin-like. Such a pleasure to behold that my breath caught in my chest. I made a halfhearted attempt to swim closer, but she was too powerful. Had she drawn me purposely into her element to demonstrate her competitive prowess? That she could always swim circles around me? After treading water a while longer, I swam back into shore and lay down in the sand to dry off. I watched her swimming far out, a little worried, but not much, envying her freedom.
I must have fallen asleep, for I was shocked awake by a handful of cold water poured into my crotch. She was standing there stark naked, laughing at my reaction, then wagging an admonishing finger at me and warning that a sunburned cock would spoil me as a lover. Max redux—how many of his little quirks and mannerisms she had picked up. I was annoyed as she laughed again, my eyes slipping in and out of the shadow of her body where she stood over me. When she turned for her clothes down the beach, I couldn’t help noticing the tampon string between her legs.
Of lingering youth and last chances.