An Imperfect Spy (21 page)

“I know; the catalpa tree. Well, once in New York, what made you decide to sign on with Schuyler Law?”

“They offered to pay me well.”

“With your organizational skills, any law firm would have been glad to hire you and pay you much better. Schuyler is hardly the most attractive ambience in the city.”

“For one thing, I guessed that they wouldn’t look too closely at my credentials; but the real reason was that I think clumps of mediocrity may be the sign of doom in our world, certainly in the academic world, and even more certainly in the world of law. I decided to have a go at it.

“I’ll tell you how I see it,” Harriet said, smiling at Kate. “They—mediocrities—decide to cling to a certain sense of what they are pleased to call principles. Always beware of people with principles. I don’t mean general principles like the Golden Rule, or that Hebrew who stood on one foot and said something about treating one’s neighbor as oneself. I mean people who grab on to a structure, usually one that’s been in place, untested, for years, maybe for centuries, and feel so cozy inside it that they don’t want to be moved out. That’s why women have become so threatening, don’t you see? If women move out, the whole structure has to be reorganized, and it might in turn lead to men being
shoved out of their padded lives. My male academics decided to cling to some past system, whether of lit crit or patriarchy or Freud or law doesn’t really matter, and to see any attempt to transform it as the beginning of the end. It certainly would be the end of them, the bastards, and they’re smart enough to know it.”

“So here you are in New York, fighting stupidity and evil at Schuyler Law,” Kate said.

“I hope you aren’t growing testy, Kate. It doesn’t become you. I’ve always admired your cool. Anyway, as I frankly told you, I’ve taken a leaf from John le Carré and decided to act like George Smiley. I think, I brood, I organize. You know, the way he went after Karla in the end. I’ve taken Smiley as my model. I’m not as fat, probably taller, female, and with no intelligence service behind me, but I do my best with what I have. If Schuyler is really changed, as that meeting seemed to indicate it would be, I’ll have performed my final act as part of the academic world. Smiley used many different names, and rented cars which got smashed up, and all sorts of other things I haven’t been able to attempt. I’ve just done my best.”

“And would you say that you’ve won, like Smiley?”

“I’d say we’ve all won. But Smiley knew, and I know, that no victory is final. Still, he got Karla and we got …”

“What did we get, Harriet? Do please say it.”

“Really, Kate, you’re not only having lapses of memory, you’re repeating yourself. We all know
what we’ve accomplished, we were all there at that wonderful meeting. Perhaps we both need a drink. The day is wearing on nicely, isn’t it?”

“Let it wear on a bit longer.”

“You’re the hostess, you’re the summoner,” Harriet said, composing herself like patience on a monument.

“In all that time you were talking about the catalpa tree,” Kate finally said, “and even today, talking about mediocrity, you never mentioned whether you and your husband had any children.”

Harriet, abandoning her pose, stretched her legs out. “Ah,” she said, “I wondered when you’d think of her.”

“Her who?” Kate asked rather incoherently.

“Demeter, of course.”

“Demeter.” Kate, repeating the word, recognized that Harriet would always have the ability to spin her off balance.

“I thought you were familiar with Greek myths,” Harriet said in a tone of disappointment. “Particularly that one. I thought you had it in mind all along. I really am disappointed in you, Kate.”

They sat a moment in silence.

“It’s not as though you ever mentioned Demeter,” Kate said, light dawning.

“Well, hardly.” Harriet sounded put out. “After all, I couldn’t stop the crops from growing or make some other sort of bargain with the powers that be. Women haven’t got that much leverage these days; I assumed you realized that.”

“Yes,” Kate said. “I think you had a right to assume
I would remember Demeter. It’s one of my favorite stories from the Greeks.”

“Well, I would hope so.” Harriet seemed to feel her point was made. Stretching out her legs still farther, she leaned back and closed her eyes, suggesting, it seemed to Kate, that they both contemplate Demeter.

Kate stared at the ceiling. She could remember reading the story herself in a book on mythology by Edith Hamilton when she was quite young—ten, perhaps, around that. Demeter had an only daughter, Persephone, who had been carried off by the lord of the underworld, carried off significantly, Kate now realized, because she had wandered away from her women companions, as women did yesterday and do still today, enticed yesterday by the beauty of the flower narcissus, today by stories of romance and other accounts of false idylls between men and women. The lord of the underworld, Kate remembered, had risen up through a chasm in the earth and borne Persephone away, weeping, down to his dark dungeon of a kingdom.

But Demeter had power; she controlled the fecundity of the earth, all that grew on it; and to get her daughter back she threatened famine. Nothing grew; nothing could be harvested. Zeus sent emissaries to her; they pleaded with her, trying to turn her from her anger. But Demeter would not let the earth bear fruit until she had again seen her daughter. In the end, Kate remembered, they had made a bargain, which is why there are four or five months of the year when nothing grows. This is the time when
Persephone must return to the underworld. But the rest of the year she is with her mother, and the earth once again bears fruit.

“Women no longer have so much power, so much to bargain with,” Harriet said after a time, into the silence. “You might say, all I had was you.”

“I see,” Kate said. “But I will still repeat my question; did you have any children?”

“Yes. We had one child, with whom I’m rather out of touch. We’re more than out of touch. We haven’t seen each other in years.”

“I see,” Kate said. It seemed to her that, not inappropriately, she was saying I
see
in every other sentence. “So your main aim wasn’t to be a le Carré spy.”

“I never said it was. I said I took a hint from le Carré, that’s all. To be a le Carré spy, you have to belong to an intelligence service. You have to talk yourself into a dirty frame of mind. You have to think anything you do, any lies you tell, are justified. I am not a le Carré spy, much as I admire George Smiley.”

“You seem to feel any lies you tell are justified.”

“I resent that, Kate; I deeply resent that. I have told no lies.”

“To allow people to draw the wrong conclusion and remain silent, that is to lie.”

“It’s to spy.”

“Well, you have to admit I have a point. It’s to use your friends rather than to trust them. True, I might have thought of Demeter. But don’t you think
Reed would have done exactly the same thing if you had told him the truth?”

“Well, admittedly, I do sometimes suspect that I have a passion for spying. I think we all do, in a way. Spying isn’t lying, and that’s where spies go wrong. Spying isn’t worrying more about your allies than your enemies, which I never did.”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “If you consider us your allies, you certainly withheld information from us, as you did from your daughter.”

“I most certainly did not,” Harriet replied hotly. “I can’t help it if you didn’t catch on; if you’ve forgotten your Greek myths. I just put a few plots in motion that might help my daughter or might not. I never withheld anything from my daughter in my life. We might have got on better if I had.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I never liked that man she married, and I liked him even less when he began beating her. She hid it for a long while, but she couldn’t hide it forever, even during my infrequent visits. And then when the kids got caught up in it, she really cut me out. I wanted her to leave, you see, and she couldn’t quite make up her mind to that. And then, when she shot him, she wouldn’t let me see her. She just went limp, she just gave in; I think she really believed they had a right to take the children away from her. I offered to take them, but she wasn’t letting me do anything.”

“Why not?”

“Who the hell knows why not? Because I opened my big mouth too often, because of something going
far back into her childhood, because she just died to herself for a while? I had to get her to agree to a defense.”

“You may not be Demeter, but you certainly planned the whole thing with great cleverness.”

“Believe it or not, the amazing part isn’t that I planned the whole thing; I couldn’t plan it. I just played the cards as they came along. The amazing thing is that it all worked out. Anyway, don’t forget, Kate, that we helped to make that dump into a better law school, we goosed them
and
the students; we accomplished a hell of a lot, if you stop to think of it. You’re feeling used, that’s your problem; but you weren’t used. All I did was get to know you by picking you up at the Theban, after I got the Schuyler job.”

“Why did you pick me up? Why did you decide that I could be of use to you?”

“
Of use
is a damn offensive term. I didn’t have Demeter’s powers. I had damn few powers. In fact, the only power left for women today after they’ve made a fundamental mistake, is the power to disappear in the old self and reimagine oneself into something, someone, else. That’s what I wanted for me and for my daughter. She
was
in the underworld, you know.

“I remembered that Betty had admired you in graduate school,” Harriet went on. “I knew that Reed was going to run that clinic. Okay, I persuaded Blair that it would be neat to have Reed’s accomplished wife to teach the course with him. I had to hope that Betty might ask for you, that you might
reach her as no one else seemed able to do. Damn it to hell, Kate, can’t you see that if Reed had agreed to take her case ten times over, he couldn’t have done anything if she didn’t want him to, and there was no way I could see apart from you to make her want to wake up and decide to face life again. So if that makes me a spy and a criminal and the equal of Karla, who, you will remember, gave up everything for his daughter, I guess I’d better say good-bye, it’s been nice knowing you, I’ll send you my regards when I see Reed in court.”

“Sit down,” Kate said. “You wanted a drink, you said the day is wearing on, and it’s worn on even further. I’ll get us both a drink, and if you try to budge so much as an inch, I’ll tackle you.”

“I’ll only have that drink,” Harriet said, “if you promise not to forget Demeter, who had wide dominion. I only had you, and then only on the slimmest of chances. With some hints from George Smiley, of course. Don’t you see, Kate, after I got the job at Schuyler—and it was obvious I had to start there, at the place that had condemned her—when, after I got there, I heard that Reed was doing a clinic at prisons, it became obvious that I had to get to you; you were the thread that could lead me through the labyrinth to Betty. To my daughter.”

“That’s another myth,” Kate said.

“Yes, I know. I hope you don’t mind being compared to a thread.”

“I’m honored,” Kate said. “It’s humbling of course, being just a thread. Usually, I’m more than that, or convince myself I am. But really, all we detectives
do, amateur or professional, even private eyes, even the police, is change the direction of events. None of us really solves anything anymore, do we? We do just try to alter history, however slightly. Now, let me get that drink.”

When Kate had returned with the much-admired scotch, when they had both taken a sip, and Harriet had yet again praised the libation, Kate leaned back in her chair and took up the threads of their earlier, more mundane conversation.

“Are you going back to the Boston part of the world?” she asked.

“Only for a visit. I’m staying here. I’m hoping Betty will let me stand by her during the times ahead. Hell, I’m counting on it. Anyway, I’m staying. Do you still want to know me, or is this a farewell drink?”

Kate ignored this. “Are you going to keep up this cash economy business? Are you going to go on being someone without a real identity or your own name?”

“Well, I can’t, can I, not if Betty lets me help her. Then I’ll be her mother, so I’ll have to have a name, and pay taxes, and be altogether proper and accounted for. And don’t say that I cheated the government, because on Schuyler’s generous salary, I always stayed at the poverty line and didn’t owe the government a damn thing.”

“And after Betty is released …”

“I’m glad you say
after
, not
if
.”

“And after Betty is released, will you go back to Boston then?”

“Probably. She may come with me or she may not. That’s up to her. I’ll be available when she needs me; she’ll know that, and I hope will think on it. But I have to say that Massachusetts is more my home than New York, privileged as I have been to know all you New Yorkers. I’ll get some sort of legitimate job, if I don’t go to jail for impersonation and all that rot, and decide on what comes next.”

“Well,” Kate said, “the next time you take a name, what about Smiley?”

“What about Fansler? Would you mind if there were two female Fanslers; you haven’t any female relatives of that name, have you?”

“Only three sisters-in-law, and endless nephews and nieces, also complete with in-laws. I don’t think it’s advisable.”

“You’re probably right. The reason I rather like the name Fansler, Kate, is that we are in many ways the same person. Oh, not superficially, heaven forfend. I don’t claim your slimness or your money or your excellently subdued taste in clothes. But essentially, we are the same—in spirit, you might say. I am what you may be in time, if you play your cards right.”

“I won’t have a daughter.”

“Not biologically, no. I can’t say I think a lot of the usual mother-daughter connection. We may work it out someday; we haven’t so far, not in most cases. But you’ll have an honorary daughter or two,
I hope not in prison, but somewhere, needing you just to exist and encourage.”

“You’re a bloody romantic, Harriet. But I guess I already knew that. Only I called you a spy instead.”