Short Stories: Five Decades (75 page)

Just after the war, he was appointed to the Embassy at X—. (Forgive me for these old-fashioned symbols. At this moment in our country’s history candor is foolhardy, reprisals devastating.) I did not accompany my husband to X—. It was at that time that I found it necessary to undergo an operation which turned out to be not so simple as my doctor had hoped. A second operation was considered advisable, complications developed, and it was six months before I could join my husband. In those six months of living alone in a turbulent city, my husband became involved with the two people who, it turned out, were to destroy him. The first was Munder (the name, like all others I shall use, is an invention, of course), who at that time was making a brilliant record for himself as first secretary of the embassy. John and he had been friendly at college and the friendship was renewed and strengthened in the embassy, helped in great part by their recognition in each other of similar ambitions, equal devotion to their jobs, and complementary temperaments. The ambassador at that time was an amiable and lazy man who was pleased to turn over the real work of the embassy to his subordinates, and between them, Munder and my husband were, in an appreciable degree, responsible for the carrying-out of directives from Washington and the formulation of local policy. It was at that period that the Communists were profiting most, throughout Europe, from the post-armistice confusions, and the success of the Embassy at X—in tactfully shoring up a government favorable to the interests of the United States was in no small measure due to the efforts of Munder and my husband. In fact, it was because of this that some time later Munder was recalled to Washington, where he played, for several years, a leading part in the formulation of policy. His prominence, as it so often does, finally resulted in his downfall. When the time came to offer up a sacrifice to the exasperation and disappointments of the electorate, Munder, because of his earlier distinction, was treated in such a manner that he decided to resign. While they did not understand it at the time, his friends and aides in the Service were also marked for eventual degradation, or, what is almost as bad, stagnation in humiliatingly unimportant posts.

The other person my husband became involved with was a woman. She was the wife of a diplomat from another country, a distinguished idiot who foolishly permitted himself to be sent off on distant missions for months at a time. She was that most dangerous of combinations—beautiful, talkative, and sentimental; and it was only a question of time before she blundered into a scandal. It was my husband’s misfortune that her luck ran out during his tenure as her lover. As it later turned out, it might just as well have been any one of three or four other gentlemen, all within the diplomatic community, which the lady favored exclusively for her activities.

I knew, of course, almost from the beginning, although I was four thousand miles away, of what was going on. Friends, as they always do, saw to that. I will not pretend that I was either happy with the news or surprised by it. In marriages like mine, in which the partners are separated for months on end and the woman is, like me, rather drab and no longer young, it would take a fool to expect perfect fidelity from a passionate and attractive man. I do not know of a single marriage within the circle of my friends and acquaintances which has not required, at one point or another, a painful act of forgiveness on the part of one or both of the partners, to ensure the survival of the marriage. I had no intention of allowing the central foundations of my life to be laid in ruins for the fleeting pleasure of recrimination or to satisfy the busy hypocrisy of my friends. I did not hurry my convalescence, confident that when I appeared on the scene a workable
modus vivendi
would gradually be achieved.

Unhappily, when my husband told the lady of my impending arrival and announced to her that that would mean the end of their relationship, she made one of those half-hearted attempts at suicide with which silly and frivolous women try to prove to themselves and their lovers that they are not silly and frivolous. The lady telephoned my husband just after she took the pills, and was unconscious, in negligee, in her apartment, when he arrived. He did what was necessary and stayed with her at the hospital until he was assured by the doctors that she was out of danger. Luckily, the people at the hospital were civilized and sympathetic, and my husband managed, with a minimum of bribery, to keep the entire matter out of the newspapers. There was a wave of rumor, of course, in certain circles of the city, and there was no doubt a quite accurate estimate of the situation current for a week or two; but in Europe present scandal blends easily into centuries of anecdote, and when the lady appeared two weeks later, looking as pretty as ever, on her husband’s arm at a diplomatic reception, the event seemed safely in the past.

My husband recounted the entire story to me on the first afternoon after my arrival. I listened and told him I would say no more about it and we have not mentioned the matter again to this day. I think I can honestly say that I have not permitted the incident to change, in the smallest particular, our relations with each other.

It is at this point in my story that I begin to perceive some of the problems that a writer faces. To make understandable what has happened it has been necessary to explain, as fully as I have, the background and personality of my husband, the kind of marriage we enjoy, and the stages and accidents of his career. But none of these things has its proper meaning unless it is viewed in relationship to the climate in which he worked and in which we lived and the pressures to which he was subjected. A more skillful writer would no doubt manage to include as much information of this nature as was necessary in a well-contrived series of dramatic scenes, so that the reader, while being held in suspense and amused by the brisk conflict of personalities, would be brought, almost without his realizing it, adequately prepared, to the climax of the story. There are two reasons why I have not attempted to do this. In the first place, I find it beyond my still undeveloped powers. And secondly, in my reading, I have found, for my own tastes, that the writers who did this particular thing most deftly were the ones I finally could not stomach.

There are crucial days in the lives of men and women, as in the lives of governments and armies; days which may begin like all other days, ordinary and routine, with no warning of the crises ahead and which end with cabinets fallen, battles lost, careers brought to a sudden and catastrophic halt.

The crucial day for my husband was clear and warm, in late spring, when the waters of the harbor of the port in which he was serving as vice-consul were blue and calm. At breakfast we decided the season was well enough advanced so that we could dine thereafter on the terrace of our apartment and I told my husband that I would search in the shops that day for a pair of hurricane lamps to shield the candles on our table in the evening. Two friends were coming in after dinner for bridge, and I asked my husband to bring home with him a bottle of whiskey. He left the apartment, as usual, neat, brushed, deliberate, unmistakably American, despite his many years abroad, among the lively pedestrian traffic of our quarter.

My husband is a methodical man, with a trained memory, and when I asked him, later on, for my own purposes, exactly what took place that morning he was able to tell me, almost word for word. The consul had gone north for several days and my husband was serving temporarily as chief of the office. When he reached the office he read the mail and despatches, none of which was of immediate importance.

Just as he had finished reading, Michael Laborde came into the office. (Remember, please, that all names used here are fictitious.) Michael had the office next to my husband’s and he wandered in and out through a connecting door, almost at will. He was no more than thirty years old and held a junior post in the commercial side of the consulate. He was personable, though weak, and my husband considered him intelligent. He was lonely in the city and we had him to dinner at least once a week. He had a quick, jumpy mind and he was always full of gossip and my husband has confessed that he enjoyed the five-minute breaks in the day’s routine which Laborde’s visits afforded. This morning, Michael came into the office, smoking a cigarette, looking disturbed.

“Holy God,” he said, “that Washington.”

“What is it now?” my husband asked.

“I got a letter last night,” Michael said. “Friend of mine works in the Latin-American section. They’re howling in anguish. People’re getting dumped by the dozen, every day.”

“A certain amount of deadwood …” my husband began. He is always very correct in questions like this, even with good friends.

“Deadwood, hell!” Michael said. “They’re cutting the living flesh. And they’re going crazy on the pansy hunt. My friend says he heard they have microphones in half the hotels and bars in Washington and they’ve caught twenty of them already, right out of their own mouths. And no nonsense about it. No looking at the record for commendations, no fooling around about length of service or anything. A five-minute interview and then out—as of close of business that day.”

“Well,” my husband said, smiling, “I don’t imagine you have to worry about that too much.” Michael had something of a reputation locally as a ladies’ man, being a bachelor, and, as I have said, quite personable.

“I’m not worried about myself—not about that, anyway,” Michael said. “But I’m not so sure about the principle. Official purity. Once people declare for purity they’re not satisfied until they nail you to the wood. And my friend wrote me to be careful what I say in my letters. My last letter had scotch tape on it. And I never use scotch tape.”

“Your friend is too nervous,” my husband said.

“He says Il Blanko has ninety paid spies in Europe,” said Michael. Il Blanko was Michael’s epithet for the senator who was freezing the Foreign Service into a permanent attitude of terror. “My friend says the damndest people are reporting back all the time. He says they sit next to you in restaurants and write down the jokes when you’re not looking.”

“Eat at home,” my husband said. “Like me.”

“And he says he’s heard of a new wrinkle,” Michael went on. “Some crank you never heard of decides he doesn’t like you and he sends an anonymous letter to the FBI saying he saw you flying the flag upside down on the Fourth of July or that you’re living with two eleven-year-old Arab boys and then he sends a copy to some hot-eyed congressman and a couple of days later the congressman gets up waving the letter and saying, ‘I have here a copy of information that is at this moment resting in the files of the FBI,’ and the next thing you know you’re in the soup.”

“Do you believe that?” my husband asked.

“How the hell do I know what to believe? I’m waiting for the rumor that they’ve discovered a sane man on F Street,” Michael said. “Then I’m going to apply for home leave to see for myself.” He doused his cigarette and went back into his own office.

My husband sat at his desk, feeling, as he told me later, annoyed with Michael for having brought up matters which, to tell the truth, had been lying close to the surface of John’s consciousness for some time. John had been passed over for promotion twice and his present appointment, even when the most optimistic face had been put upon it, could only be regarded as a sign that, at the very least, he was out of favor in certain influential quarters in the Service. For more than a year he had had moments of uneasiness about his own mail and had, without specifically admitting it to himself, taken to keeping the tone and contents of his letters, even to intimate friends, mildly noncommittal. As he sat there, he remembered, disquietingly, that several personal letters among those he had received in the last few months had had scotch tape on the flaps of the envelopes. And in the course of his duties in the visa and passport sections he had received information through intelligence channels on various applicants, of a surprisingly intimate nature, information which must have been gathered, he realized, in the most unorthodox manner. And in recent months he had been visited, with annoying frequency, by investigators, persistent and humorless young men, who had questioned him closely for derogatory information about colleagues of his, going back in time as far as 1933. Since all this, as the investigators always pointed out, was merely routine, my husband was conscious of the fact that the very same young men must certainly be making the same inquiries about himself.

My husband is a realist and was not one of those who considered these activities merely wanton persecution of the department. An actor in it himself, he realized better than most the obscure and fearful nature of the struggle which was taking place in the world and the necessity for measures of defense; treachery existed, and he regarded as ingenuous those of his friends and acquaintances who pretended it did not. It was only in the current vagueness of definition and limits of the term that he was uneasy. Trained to assess guilt and innocence by definite standards, and, as a result of his extended service in Europe, having grown into a habit of tolerance of political diversity, he could not help but feel that perhaps he would be considered old-fashioned and not sufficiently severe by his superiors. The custom he had fallen into of discussing with me all invitations, with a view to avoiding being associated, even in the most casual way, with anyone who might conceivably discredit him, was, while necessary, increasingly irksome. The pleasure of society, to be truly enjoyed, must have a certain automatic and spontaneous quality, and in the last year or so all that had vanished. To judge, professionally, the virtue of colleagues and applicants, is one thing—it is quite another to be forced, on the most innocent occasions, to speculate on the politics, the discretion, the potential future disgrace, of dinner companions and tourists to whom one is introduced, by chance, in a bar.

John’s speculation was interrupted by the arrival of Trent. Trent was an executive of an American oil company which had an office in the city. He was a large, soft-spoken man, from Illinois, a little older than my husband. John occasionally played golf with him and considered him a friend. My husband rose and shook Trent’s hand and offered him a chair. They talked for several moments about inconsequential matters before Trent settled down to the business that had brought him to the consulate.