Some Luck (47 page)

“Henry still lives at home.”

“But if you fuss over Henry, he just walks away.”

“She’s eight years old. Eight-year-olds take a little fussing.”

Walter shrugged, patted Claire on her hair, on the head that sat on top of her round face. At night, in bed, after taking off her glasses, and putting them carefully, temples down, never lenses down, on the table beside her bed, she lay on her back and set her palms beside her cheekbones and pressed. She pressed as hard as she could, counting to a hundred, three times, and then she fell asleep, pulling her chin down. Glasses were bad enough, and a round face was pretty bad, too, but glasses
and
a round face were hopeless.

NOW THAT SCHOOL WAS
out, Henry had decided to rearrange his books. The day was hot, so he opened both windows and the door into the main part of the house. He smoothed his bedspread, and then took the books down, author by author. Right now they were arranged alphabetically, but, obviously, the better way was chronologically. The real question, which he hadn’t yet answered in his own mind, was if they were chronological, should the chronology cross national boundaries or remain within a particular nation, and was a nation the same thing as a culture? Another detail concerned translations. At this point, Henry only read French and German. Granny Mary had given him some German books—the three Wallenstein plays by Friedrich Schiller, a well-read copy of
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
and another of
Faust
, a book called
Das Erdbeben in Chili
, by Heinrich von Kleist that Henry had not been able to get through (nor had anyone else, it looked like). There was also a missal and a book of lieder. Of course, there were no German books to buy anywhere anymore, and Henry didn’t dare ask for them at the library. He had only two French books,
Madame Bovary
and
Les Trois Mousquetaires
, which his French teacher, Madame Hoch, had given him, both in Bibliothèque de la Pléiade editions. He was her favorite student. These books, the
German and the French, he set against the end of the bookcase. Once he had done that, he decided to arrange the translations chronologically by author, and chronologically within authors.

The authors he had most of were Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Wilkie Collins, but he also had a book of all of Shakespeare’s plays, which he had read from cover to cover in the winter, without, he was willing to admit, understanding much. They had read
Twelfth Night
and
Much Ado About Nothing
at school, and they were due to read
Hamlet
in eleventh grade. He liked
Hamlet
okay. He set the Shakespeare book on the shelf above
Les Trois Mousquetaires
. The plays he had liked were the one called
Measure for Measure
, and another one called
Macbeth
. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.

As he placed the books on the shelves, rather happy with his arrangement, he wondered what he should do with the books he had stolen from the library. The evidence that they were from the library was right there on the binding, and obviously he could not cut the binding, which would deface them—he had already tried, unsuccessfully, to remove the numbers by erasing them, and even dabbing them with a little alcohol, but to no effect. The stolen books were under his bed, and they were his favorites—that’s why they were stolen, and he didn’t think anyone at school missed them. If there was another high-school kid in Usherton, at least in North Usherton, who gave a damn about
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
, a translation from the French of
Père Goriot
, a translation from the Russian of
Oblomov
, and another of
Dead Souls
, and a version in the original (which Henry could not make head or tail of) of
Beowulf
, Henry could not figure out who that would be. These books he had found on his own, wandering around the stacks, and none of them had been checked out since before the war. They were dusty and stiff, and Henry felt that he had rescued them. Except for
Beowulf
, he had read them all straight through, staying up late every night (and until morning for
Tom Jones
). They possessed him, and since he had stolen them rather than checking them out, those who did not miss them also did not know where they were. There was the remote possibility that Mama would find them, but Henry kept his own room neat, made his own bed every day, and gave Mama every appearance of total candor and no reason to pry.

Now he sat down on his bed and looked at the shelves. He liked the effect. Orderly, with books running left to right, like print. The shelves were not even or balanced, the way Mama would like them, and they had no doodads in place of books, something Mama also preferred. To the right, they had varying stretches of empty space, to be filled by more books, books that would be interleaved with the ones he already had. It was lovely, and gave him a wonderfully hopeful feeling about leaving the farm and seeing the world. Washington or San Francisco? The choice made him run his index finger back and forth over the scar under his lip. If he kept working as Dan Crest’s stock boy, which he had done now since Christmas, he could earn his ticket to one or the other, his choice, but he couldn’t for the life of him decide what his choice would be. Eloise was his favorite relative, wiry and funny and not so gapingly naïve as Lillian, but Washington was closer to France, England, and Germany. Once you got there, you might just step across. There was always that person, man or woman or fairy or monster, older or younger, or ageless, who would come up to you and ask you for a favor, or offer you a choice, and the reward would be your dearest wish. What was the name of that story Lillian had told him before he could read? “Lucky Hans.” It was a cross between “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Puss in Boots”—the boy sets out through the forest, and since he has forgotten his napkin full of food, he gets very hungry. Pretty soon, he sees a small cabin, and the door is open, so he goes inside, calling out, “Hello! Hello!” A voice from the inner room calls out, “Come help me, my child!” And the boy tiptoes into the inner room. In the bed is a giant wolf, his mouth full of fangs and dripping with slobber, and as he sees Hans, he licks his lips. But Hans says, “What can I do for you?” And the wolf says, “Feel my brow.” Hans is terrified that the wolf will bite his arm off, but he reaches out and strokes the wolf on the head. At that moment, the wolf gives a tremendous howl and leaps from the bed, and Hans thinks that he is going to be eaten, but instead the wolf changes into a prince, and the prince snaps his fingers, and the cabin becomes a castle, and Hans finds himself in a tower, looking out over the forest. It is a beautiful view, and all of it belongs to the prince, who asks Hans what he wants as his reward, and Hans asks for an old horse and a piece of gold, so he can see the world. The prince thinks this is a very small reward, but it is all Hans wants, so the prince
makes sure that every time he spends the gold it is returned to him, and every time he saddles the old horse it grows younger. At the end of Hans’s life, after he has seen (and this was Lillian’s list) “China, Russia, Nashville, Chicago, the North Pole, Germany, London, and Florida,” he comes back to the castle and lives in his room and eats tapioca pudding every day. Well, thought Henry, it could happen. You just had to decide—San Francisco, or Washington.

LILLIAN AND ARTHUR
’
S NEW HOUSE
had two stories, in Woodley Park. There were three bedrooms, and they had fashioned a nursery for little Debbie out of the big closet in their room, so, when he visited, Frank had the back of the house to himself. He was almost asleep when he awoke with a violent start to find Arthur standing above him.

“Don’t shoot me,” whispered Arthur.

“I’m not armed,” grumbled Frank.

“You wouldn’t bring a gun into a house with children.”

“I have,” said Frank, “but not this time.”

Arthur sat on the bed. The fluorescent hands on the clock read a quarter past midnight. Frank wiggled his shoulders, stilled his breathing, and sat up. Arthur offered him a cigarette and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

Frank threw off the covers. Going for a walk with Arthur was always interesting.

They went down the stairs and out the kitchen door, which opened onto a nicely fenced yard (the reason they had chosen this house) and an alley (the other reason they had chosen this house—Arthur always liked an escape route). They turned right down the alley, toward a less traveled and not very well-lit cross street. Arthur paused once to look at the house. The light above the kitchen porch was on, but every other window was dark. The outdoors was a symphony of summer odors—dust and grass, roses. Layered under this was auto exhaust and fertilizer—Arthur’s neighborhood was full of ambitious lawns.

It took Arthur about half a block to stop talking about the kids (Debbie was such a good sleeper, and Timmy was climbing the stairs and going right back down—he was careful but bold, a perfect combination)
and ask Frank if he wanted to be fixed up with someone, a nice girl about his own age, good figure, said to be lots of fun, and fairly well known to be fast. “Who does she work for?” said Frank.

“She draws her paycheck from Justice. Who she works for is for you to find out.”

“Is that right?” said Frank, in a tone of satisfaction.

“It’s just a hunch,” said Arthur, “and you’re the man to follow it out. What happened was, last month, George Kennan was driving down U Street, and he had to stop for the streetcar at Fourteenth. A guy who got off the streetcar was someone he knew, a fellow from the Soviet embassy to the United Nations, named Valentin Gubitchev. These days, he works for the UN, as a translator, I think. Kennan recognized him and wondered what he was doing in D.C. He followed the streetcar down Fourteenth. A woman got off at Pennsylvania that Kennan thought he recognized, and when he got home, he realized that he did recognize her as someone he’d seen at the Justice Department. He even remembered her boss. So he sent her boss a message referring to a newly discovered source of uranium in Tunisia, a place where there is no uranium, and pretty soon, our own agents were picking up attempts on the part of the Soviets to find out who was mining uranium in Tunisia. She had handed it over. There was no other way for them to get that information.”

Frank laughed. They had come to a park, and Arthur turned right along the sidewalk that skirted the darkness of the grass and trees.

“All you have to do is date her for a while. There is no reason for this girl to be a spy. She has no history of communist sympathies. Is she sleeping with this Russian guy? Is she giving him stuff because she’s sleeping with him, or is he sleeping with her because she’s giving him stuff? Or what? I’m telling you, it’s like, if this girl can be a spy, then anyone can be a spy. We got plenty of suspicious characters who did this or that in the thirties and through the war, and believed something or other. But this gal, she has no reason at all.”

“Arthur, am I being hired?”

“No, Frank. You are exercising your favorite hobby. You like pretty girls. Pretty girls like you. And I am curious. The thing is, guys that I work with are always running out and doing crap. Hillen-koetter will be a sitting duck for these guys. They want to start a war
in Greece, they want to start a war in Italy. They believe everything they hear, as long as it gives them a reason to start a war. I’m not saying old Joe Stalin isn’t a bastard. I’m not saying there aren’t spies everywhere and commies in every broom closet—maybe there are. But if I knew something, I could do something.”

“But you don’t know what.”

“But I don’t know what.”

Monday morning, Frank sent a telegram to his boss in Dayton, saying that he was down with the flu and would be home in a week. The girl’s name was Judy—Frank wouldn’t let Arthur tell him the last name—and the only other thing he knew about her was what she looked like (Arthur gave him a copy of her Justice Department ID photo). Frank followed her for two days, at such a distance that he started having the feeling that he was going to shoot her. He found out where her apartment was (Georgetown), where she shopped for groceries (not far from Lillian’s), where she shopped for shoes, where she bought cigarettes and magazines. He followed her to a movie (
Life with Father
), and saw that no one met her there. She met someone for a drink, but afterward they went their separate ways. She turned out her bedroom light at half past ten on Monday, ten after eleven on Tuesday. She left her apartment building at 7:47 a.m. on Tuesday, and eight on the dot on Wednesday. Most important, she ate lunch at the same spot on Monday and Tuesday—on a bench to the west of the Navy Memorial. Frank was there when she arrived on Thursday, sitting with his egg-salad sandwich and his devil’s-food cupcake and his Pepsi (she liked Pepsi). She paused for a moment, then, evidently deciding that he was harmless, sat down at the other end of the bench.

He gave her a sidelong glance. Up close, she was more buxom than he’d thought. Her face was one of those that looked plain sometimes and pretty sometimes. His assessment was that he was better-looking than she was, so he turned and gave her a big smile. She moved her handbag closer to her hip. He said, “Thanks.”

She didn’t say anything. He relaxed against the back of the bench, and pretended to doze off. She then relaxed, too, and began to eat her sandwich. She also had an apple—a pippin, Frank thought, from the rough skin. Four or five people passed—how many Frank couldn’t really tell, once his eyes were closed. He counted down—three, two, one—and then sat up, looked at his watch, muttered, “Oh, damn!”
He leapt from the bench and ran toward 7th Street. His wallet fell from his pocket, and landed on the grass in front of the bench. As he disappeared around the corner of the Navy Memorial, he heard her shout, “Hey! Hey, you!” He peeked back at her just long enough to see that she was standing there with her arm out, holding his wallet in the air. Then, thinking he was gone, she opened it. Frank turned away. Part of the pleasure in this was seeing what she would do now.