Echo House (33 page)

He's more like Axel every day, Willy said.

He's just a boy, she said.

He was a boy, Willy said. He's a grown-up now.

So Washington lost its savor and they returned to Nantucket, for good, as it turned out. Sylvia knew that you could as easily live in one place as another; there was no public arena at all on Nantucket. For some years she maintained a correspondence with Billie and Ed Peralta and with the Grendalls, and then the correspondence languished. She no longer followed the news closely. Ford became Carter and Carter became Reagan. On Election Day 1980, she forgot to vote. She was tending her garden, preparing for the usual vicious winter, and that night watching the election coverage she wondered what politics had to do with life as it was lived. Now and again in the Sunday paper she would see Axel's name or Alec's, Axel meeting some foreign supremo at a resort you never heard of, Alec refusing comment on the pending hearings except to say that his client would be cleared of all charges One night she saw Alec on the evening news and was surprised by how well he looked; but of course he was divorced now and sometimes divorce was a tonic.

Sylvia was experimenting with long-line verse, alone every afternoon in her upstairs study, watching Willy surf-cast on the deserted beach; he fished rain or shine, winter and summer. The struggle, she found now, was the tide climbing the low hill of sand, reaching and then falling back. She watched Willy's curvy line glittering in the sun, Willy in silhouette against the nervous ocean. Lobster boats moved offshore and she thought of dinner, lobster grilled, a green salad, chess with Willy beside the fire. She listened to cello sonatas, mostly Brahms, feeling her pencil on the paper like a bow across strings, an andante and then a diminuendo, almost a sigh. No rush; there was plenty of time. She was trying to draw music from the paper, trying to bring her crowded childhood to life, thinking all the while that any soloist needed accompaniment. Rostropovich needed Serkin. Even du Pre needed Barenboim. The cellist could supply the muscle, but the pianist set the pace, the gait of the piece. Sylvia was thrilled with her long lines, working now in a vernacular tongue. Slang she had not heard in years came back to her, and the look of her bedroom in the early morning light, her calico cat, a doll she loved, a nanny she didn't love. She was trying to arrange the characters as you would in a play. As she wrote she watched the tide; saw Willy stretch his arms and heave the line beyond the breaking surf.

Axel was in the room, and so were her father and her grandchildren, and poor Fred Greene and the Nazi officer in the Paris café so long ago, and the girl in the beret. She tried to remember the name of the brigadier's mistress and could not. She remembered the museum at Calcutta and the curator unlocking the vault to get at the drawings, and her own surprise. She conversed with her difficult mother, dead the year she left Axel. She remembered her dismay when she realized beyond doubt that one day she would occupy Echo House. She looked at Constance and saw an antique version of herself, an appalling prospect. She remembered her excitement when she realized she could leave Axel, that she was not a piece of property or a head bolted to an iron plinth. Watching Willy return, with his fishing rod on his shoulder and a fat bluefish in his fist, she decided she was the happiest she'd been. She thought. It's only 1982. I can have twenty more years of Willy and Nantucket. I will never run out of poems.

She heard the door close and the telephone ring and a moment after that Willy's knock on her door. She did not turn and presently felt his hand on her shoulder, and then his head close to hers. She knew at once that something was wrong and that it had to do with Washington.

"Ed Peralta's dead," he said. "Suicide."

Poor Billie, Sylvia said, and began to cry. She remembered Billie in the bar car of the Twentieth-Century Limited, appearing suddenly at their table, Axel looking up and smiling pleasantly as he would at any stranger. This is my place, Billie had said to the steward, but by then she and Axel were halfway down the car, his hand on the small of her back. She thought the heat of his hand would melt the cloth. She remembered the cloth against her skin and then they were embracing wildly in the vestibule, the train rocking and the night air unwelcome.

"Billie wants you to speak at the service," Willy said.

Of course the community was appalled and the newspapers understandably suspicious that the suicide came on the eve of hearings into the most recent Agency scandal. Ed's name still rang a bell. Everyone knew that he had been out of the intelligence business for years, but—did any of those people actually leave? Weren't they often called back into service, contract jobs in countries where they had special knowledge or friendships with figures in ruling circles? The answer was yes, but Ed was not one of these; no one wanted Ed Peralta back on the government payroll. He was worn out, ill, and bored beyond endurance. Axel said that his life was not worth the effort it took to live it, so he ended it; and Alec recalled that those were the exact words his father had used to describe his own condition at the end of the war.

A memorial service was arranged at the Friends Meeting House on Florida Avenue on a blustery spring day, the date and time never publicly announced but passed quietly from friend to friend, owing to the general commotion and the identity of many of the mourners, Ed's former colleagues, old now and deskbound or retired or semiretired but still more or less clandestine and determined to remain so. All the same, the more aggressive members of the Washington press corps were expected, because memorial services were political events and the intelligence community a subculture as mysterious as any in the capital. Wilson Slyde and a friend from one of the newsmagazines were among the first photographed. Axel and Alec entered together through a side door and were not noticed. Harold Grendall and Lloyd Fisher were both present and André Przyborksi unaccountably absent, out of the country it was said, Vienna or Rome. Someone suggested that the service be held in the chapel at Langley, but Billie tartly refused; and if the American press or the KGB or the Mossad or the Deuxième Bureau or MI-5 wanted to send their gumshoes to snap pictures, good luck to them. Everyone knew the identities of the old farts, and it was only vanity that kept their fedoras low over their near-sighted eyes.

Yet at the service Billie spoke touchingly of the love her husband had for intelligence work, its subtleties and crude hazards, its many demands and slender rewards in a world where secrecy defined success and publicity defined failure, as opposed to the political world, where things were the other way around. She concluded with an account of her husband's harrowing last days, when not even the prospect of a fine season from the Orioles was enough to give him hope. Of course this was the life he chose, and for the balance would have wanted no other. It was not for his family to disagree or make their own reckoning, or settle their own scores. She looked in the direction of her children, the son in tears and the daughter staring angrily out the window. They looked to be in their late forties, suburban people out of their element here. Billie waited for some sign that they would rise to say something about their father. When no sign came, she sighed and said she was glad her Ed did not live to see the present disarray and mismanagement of the agency he had loved and served for so long. The malfeasance. The misrule. The misprision. Billie was on her feet only briefly, blamed no one by name, and when she was finished, sat down.

Axel and Alec both spoke. Axel in his boardroom voice; someone later said that he sounded as if he were making a report to the stockholders, a bad year all around, profits flat because of the unsettled economic conditions and depressed consumer confidence, despite the notable achievements of the past. The truth was, Axel had neither patience nor sympathy with suicide. He spoke warmly of Billie. reminding the gathering that they had known each other for fifty years; she was a gallant woman and he admired gallantry. Alec spoke at some length, a droning summation of a life in public service. Truly in some sense Ed Peralta was a casualty of war.

Then from a bench in the rear of the room Sylvia rose and recited a poem, speaking in a lovely clear voice, conversational in tone. It took a moment for those present to realize they were listening to verse. The poem sought to capture Ed as he was as a young man, and Washington as it had been before and after the war, at the dawn of the modern world, and what the dawn forecast of the day to come. Sylvia made a number of obscure references, puns and wordplay that caused Lloyd and Harold to wince, look at each other, and listen hard. The witty parts made people smile, even Billie, though her children remained apart. Alec listened to his mother and thought that she would have made a great actress, her voice at perfect pitch and her manner commanding. But of course she had been giving readings for many years and knew how to lead an audience. Toward the end, her voice faltered, breaking, her hands trembling. She was reciting from memory and seemed to lose her way, but she gathered herself with difficulty and finished the poem, her voice barely a whisper in the vast gloom of the Meeting House. Gusts of wind rattled the windows.

Axel breathed heavily as he watched her, closely attending to each word. So far as Alec knew, this was the first time his father and mother had been in the same room since their divorce. It was possible that this was the first time they had seen each other in all that time. Axel's jaw muscles began to work when she mentioned the hydraulics of Washington and the brass cigarette lighter with its familiar initials, and the fist her hand made at something said, then unsaid, then enhanced, repeated, revised, and explained once again. You know how things go here in our capital city. You know who we are, the seer seen, the church fallen, bare ruined men Axel snorted when he heard that. But he nodded in appreciation when she ended, bowing her head slowly and disappearing into her seat at the rear of the room. Alec turned to search out Billie Peralta, and when he turned back, Axel was already out of his chair and limping to the side door.

When Alec stepped outside his father was gone. Many of the older men had hurried away, though there were no photographers; the service had gone on for so long that they had wearied of the assignment, and there were other ceremonies that day. Alec remained on the sidewalk for a few moments, talking to Billie and her children. The son offered a limp hand and the daughter stared through him, eyes flashing in contempt. He did not know whether she was angry at something he had said, or only at who he was. Alec turned to find his mother at his elbow. When he congratulated her she looked at him strangely, shrugged, and walked sadly away, arm in arm with Willy. Then Wilson Slyde asked if he wanted to go across the street to the restaurant; he was lunching with Virginia Spears, the newsmagazine reporter much in the news. She was one of those who had become as famous as her subjects. Alec declined; he had appointments at his office. Billie and her children climbed into Ed's old Mercedes. Soon the sidewalk was empty except for Alec, Wilson, and Virginia Spears.

"We'll walk with you a ways," Wilson said. "We've decided to go to Melody's for the steak tartare."

The rain was blowing hard now. Bits of rain stung their faces.

"I liked your eulogy," Virginia said to Alec. He nodded, distracted, still back at the Meeting House, his mother reciting her poem and Billie sitting with her head bowed. Billie had shown no emotion when he spoke, but of course she held him responsible for Ed's forced resignation, illness, and death. There was plenty of responsibility to go around, but he hated it when Ed's daughter had looked so coldly at him, as if he had put the Beretta in her father's hand and commanded him to pull the trigger. It was all so long ago, the details forgotten by everyone except Ed and Ed's family. No one was proud of his role in the affair, but you had to put that behind you.

"The White House didn't send anybody," Wilson said.

"There was that one boy," Virginia said. "The deputy assistant something-or-other."

"No one official," Wilson said. "No one conspicuous. No one to show the flag."

Alec picked up the pace, eager to get back to his office. He had a conference call at four and a meeting with Billie and her children at five. He was executor of Ed's will and had to refresh his memory on its provisions. An awkward occasion all around, though the will was straightforward enough.

Wilson cleared his throat and said, "Virginia wants to have a word with you, Alec."

Alec looked at her, a slender woman, thirtyish, a blue silk scarf at her throat, alert brown eyes behind aviator glasses. She had the demeanor of an academic, her voice soft and well-bred, ironic around the edges. He did not know her well but he liked doing legal work for journalists, knowing about their wills and broken marriages. You built up a relationship, first of trust, then of friendship. You climbed the tree together. They told you things in the privacy of your office. And you told them things about cases you were working on and what you heard here and there. If your own name came up in connection with a political matter, they let you know about it; and if they had to write something they wrote it gently, with a wink. Alec made it a point to halve his usual fee, because journalists were such valuable friends. Wasn't it Wilson himself who had said that in Washington they were the
pi
in any discussion of circumference?

"I've proposed a story about you," Virginia said.

"I don't spend much time with the press," Alec said carefully. So it wasn't a will or a divorce after all.

She smiled. Yes, of course.

"A long story," she said.

"Listen to Virginia, Alec," Wilson said.

"I think it will be a cover story," she said.

Alec said nothing to that.

"Not the ordinary story at all; something different, something unique for the magazine. Of course the material has to be there. The material has to be good. In fact, the material has to be superb. You can't imagine the competition; they find some cannibal in the heartland and they go apeshit. They can't get enough of body parts up in New York, and if it's not body parts it's some nasty little war south of the border. So the material has to be
really good.
It has to get their attention right away. And it has to be exclusive.
It has to bring the news,
Alec. In other words, I need access to your nearest and dearest."