Some Luck (48 page)

He had put $113 in it—enough for someone who had a job and a non-criminal life, perhaps especially a woman, to hesitate over keeping. It also had the driver’s license supplied to him (Francis Burnett) by Arthur, a library card, and an empty addressed envelope (with a list of groceries on the back) that had Arthur and Lillian’s address on it. Arthur and Lillian were taking Timmy and Debbie to Charlottesville to visit his father. The house was his for two days.

She showed up about six. It was dark, and Frank had left the porch light on. He also made sure that the chair where he had been “reading a book” was well lit, that his martini was sitting on the side table beside the chair, that—a wonderful touch, in Frank’s opinion—chicken soup had been warmed on the range. He came to the door in bare feet, with his shirt unbuttoned at the collar and his sleeves rolled up. Just before he opened the door, he ran his hand through his hair. When he opened the door and said, “Yes?” he beamed at her. She could not help smiling back. She held out his wallet. He took it, did not open it, said, “You were sitting on the bench! I noticed you. You were worried I’d steal your bag.”

She blushed.

He said, “Come on in.”

1948

J
UDY WAS MAKING HIM
her special red velvet cake for his birthday, and they were having it for breakfast. She set a slice—bright red with white icing—beside his fried egg, and said, “Happy birthday, baby.” Then she put her hands on her hips. “It’s Hoover’s birthday, too. But I don’t hold that against you, personally.”

She sat down. Her egg was soft-boiled, sitting in an egg cup—it made him uneasy to watch her eat it. This is what she knew: That he worked in Ohio and came to Washington every month for four days (that was fine with her—she didn’t want him or anyone around all the time, anyway, she hated kids and was not the marrying kind); that he used to stay with his sister when he was in Washington, but now stayed with her. That he had served in North Africa, Italy, and the south of France. That he didn’t care about politics one way or the other and wouldn’t talk about it (a relief—all day at the office, all she heard was politics). That he grew up on a farm somewhere (she had never traveled west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or south of Asheville, North Carolina, so her idea of where was hazy at best). That when they went to the Smithsonian, he preferred the anthropological exhibits to the historical ones. That he had been to New York City and New Jersey on the way to and from Europe, and he would go back with her sometime to see where she had grown up. That he read
The Saturday Evening Post
and sometimes
Time
, but nothing more
taxing than that. That he didn’t know the name of the secretary of state or the governor of Iowa, at least right off the top of his head. She thought this was hysterically funny. He also didn’t know that a woman named Frances Hodgson Burnett had written a famous children’s book, one of her favorites, called
The Secret Garden
.

She said, “What kind of birthday cakes did you have as a child?”

“My mother is a great believer in angel food.”

“Ugh. So dry!” She leaned across the table and kissed him.

“Once in a while, a pound cake with burnt-sugar icing.”

What she didn’t know was that this was their last morning together. Frank didn’t think she would mind terribly. He was going to say that he had decided to get engaged to a girl in Dayton. Supposedly, her name was Margaret, and they had been dating off and on for a year. That part would be insulting, but only insulting. After breakfast, when she got on the streetcar to go to the Justice Department, he was going to meet Arthur and give him his last report. Arthur was going to take notes, and then that would be that.

He didn’t like the cake much, so he concentrated on his toast and the last of his egg, which was good—she knew how to get the edges crispy. They were fairly well suited to one another, neither capable of much in the way of passion. He had tried a couple of things over the two months since they’d started sleeping together—kind words, expressions of fondness (though not quite love). A couple of times, he had pinned her shoulders to the bed and not let her get up, just long enough to make her feel trapped and scare her a bit, but that didn’t arouse her, either. He’d grabbed her wrist and twisted her arm behind her one time. After that, he didn’t hear from her for two weeks, so he called to apologize and said he was drunk. In short, she was not susceptible as far as he could tell—she didn’t even like gifts much. Two things he’d brought her—some Arpège and a couple of pairs of hose—she had exchanged for Chanel N
^°
5 and a bra. She was a practical young woman. Frank liked her.

She set the dishes in the sink while Frank shaved, and then they got dressed. It was just before eight when they stepped into the street. She put her arm through his. The streetcar stop was two blocks away. At first they walked in silence; then she said, “I hate having to go to the office today. It’s supposed to be a holiday.”

“Why are you going to the office?”

“I should have done some straightening up and file sorting before this, but I didn’t. What are you doing?”

“Going back to Dayton.”

She halted suddenly. “You are? You didn’t tell me that.”

He didn’t say anything. When they had walked a few more paces, he said, “Judy, I’m not coming back.”

She took her arm out of his.

It only took about five minutes. When she got onto the streetcar, she looked back at him. He smiled, and waved. He had described “Margaret.” Fortunately, Judy had never met Lillian, so she didn’t know he was describing Lillian. As he walked to where he was meeting Arthur, he thought that maybe this was the best relationship he’d ever had—mild and easy. Even so, he was glad it was over.

When he found Arthur, he did what he had to do to put him in the proper mood. He said, “So—how’re my nephew and my niece?” If he asked, they could get it over with.

“Debbie took a bit of egg for breakfast. She liked it. She smacked her lips after she ate it.” Arthur laughed. “But Timmy wouldn’t sit up to the table at all. He got Lillian to set his plate on the floor, and then he got down on his hands and knees and ate like a dog.”

“You’re joking, right?”

Arthur shook his head.

“My folks must never hear about this.”

Arthur laughed. “And he’s wearing his cowboy outfit today. Canvas chaps, six-guns, and all.”

Frank could only shake his head.

Arthur thought the best place for talking about Judy was the observation deck of the Washington Monument, and at nine, they were the first on the elevator, though because it was a holiday they weren’t the only ones. They stood by the window overlooking the Tidal Basin, which was not frozen, but frosty, and watched the cars cross the 14th Street Bridge until the crowd got back on the elevator. Arthur said, “Slow but sure, right?”

“She’s in the office today. She says she’s getting organized. But it is a holiday, and no one else will be there.”

“Okay,” said Arthur.

“She answered the phone twice last evening. Once at eight and once at eight-twenty-one. She didn’t converse either time. The second
call, I wandered into the hallway, and I heard her say, ‘Sorry. No one here by that name.’ ” Arthur wrote down the times. Frank said, “Still no discussion of politics, ever. When my aunt and her husband were commies in Chicago before the war, it never stopped. Never. They couldn’t help themselves. I’ve never heard Judy use a single phrase, not even ‘working class’ or ‘imperialist.’ Not even ‘bourgeois.’ I don’t think she knows what the Lumpenproletariat is. She went to New York for Christmas.”

“Gubitchev was there around Christmas.”

“When I asked her if she wanted to go to a production of
The Nutcracker
, she said she had to go to New York. I said I already had the tickets, could she postpone her trip? She said I could stay in her apartment.”

“Did you look around?”

“Of course. But I didn’t find a thing. Nothing in Russian, not even a translation of a Russian novel.”

“I do not get it,” said Arthur.

“She hates Hoover,” said Frank. “Remember Melvin Purvis?”

Arthur nodded.

“I mean, she’s my age, why would she care, we were kids. But I think she really hates Hoover. A month or so ago, she was furious that he had told one of the other women she had an ass like a mule and her face was twice as bad. The woman started to cry, and Hoover threw a wad of paper at her. Judy couldn’t stop talking about that one.”

“He is a jerk,” said Arthur.

“I think if there’s someone Hoover is after, then she thinks that person is by definition innocent, so whatever she’s giving Gubitchev is somehow going to save that person. I think she thinks Hoover has crossed some line, and somehow she can get him punished. He’s a tyrant. It’s a vendetta.”

Arthur stared at him, no longer taking notes. “Did he fuck her?”

“Not in a million years. But he offended her somehow.”

“Uncle Joe is the real tyrant.”

“But Hoover is the tyrant close at hand.” Frank went on, “Well, she gets worked up about it, but why she then decides to pass secrets, if she does, I don’t know.”

As the elevator door opened again, Arthur said, “Not everyone has the same idea about a better world.”

Frank replied, “Some people don’t ever think about a better world.”

ON HIS FIFTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY
, Walter went to the doctor without telling Rosanna. He had cleaned the barn and trimmed the Osage orange, and, truthfully, now that they had no animals, the farm work wasn’t much this time of year. You had to get out the equipment and make sure it was in good repair, but if you had put it away in good repair and oiled it and lubed it, which Walter always did, there was not likely to be much of a change through the months of cold. This year they had 500 acres to plant—140 of their own, 180 at the Fredericks’, 100 for his father, and 80 for Rosanna’s father. Joe was planting clover on his place and on part of the Fredericks’ place. About a third of Otto’s fields and a third of Wilmer’s fields were going to lie fallow, which was a good thing, because Walter didn’t like the idea of planting almost eight hundred acres. Even though planting both corn and soybeans stretched out the season somewhat, it was a backbreaking chore, and Walter didn’t care as much for backbreaking chores as he once had—yes, sheep were a pain in the neck, and chickens were irritating, and when you were milking cows, you were always about two seconds away from some sort of accident, if only getting smacked in the face by a frozen tail. His old love of horses had subsided once he saw how “tractable” tractors were. But the place had been lively, hadn’t it? He’d been running around, tearing his hair, never knowing how young he was or how good he had it. One thing he liked about Joe these days, though he didn’t say a word about it, was that Joe knew what he was missing. He was a strong kid (young man now, really—he was twenty-six) with an appropriate air of faint melancholy. Rosanna was always saying to him, “What’s wrong with you? Cheer up! Times are good!” and then shaking her head when he wasn’t around and saying, “He needs to get over Minnie Frederick, is what he needs. She left him behind long ago, at least in her opinion. He’s such a sad sack.”

“He works hard” was what Walter said.

“Who doesn’t?” returned Rosanna. “I need grandchildren in the neighborhood.”

Dr. Craddock looked pretty old himself, and maybe, Walter
thought, it was the smoking. When he sat Walter down in his office after examining him, he lit up a Camel, and his fingers trembled when he flicked his ash into the ashtray. His voice was gravelly. “Walter, I’m saying you’re about thirty pounds overweight at this point, though. You’ve gone up from one seventy-eight to one eighty-five in the last year.”

Walter said, “I never weighed a hundred fifty after I got into the army. In boot camp, I weighed one fifty-five.”

“Well, it’s telling on you. Your blood pressure is one eighty over one fifteen, which is pretty dangerous. You’re complaining of headaches and not being able to sleep. You say Rosanna gets up in the night and crosses the hall because you’re snoring. I don’t know that your aches and pains are plain old rheumatism, because there isn’t such a thing as plain old rheumatism. You might have some osteoarthritis, or you might have a touch of gout, and if you have that, then you’ve got to cut back on rich foods and drink, anyway.” Dr. Craddock’s trembling hand reached toward the ashtray again, and the very long ash dropped on the desk. Craddock was as thin as a rail. He said, “You come back next week, and I’m going to do some more tests on you.”

The two of them stood up, and Craddock closed the file as he walked him to the door of the office. He said, “You shouldn’t have come on your birthday. It’s always more depressing that way. Myself, I don’t know whether, when you get to our age, the bad news is you might die or the bad news is that you might live.” He stubbed out the cigarette. Walter didn’t laugh just then, but he did when he was getting into his truck. He laughed right out loud.

ONE OF THE GREAT REVELATIONS
of Joe’s life, he thought while he was feeding the rabbits and the two new calves (this year’s named Paulette and Patricia), and watching Nat run after Pepper, was soybeans. Before the war, there were farmers who grew soybeans instead of oats—once they were up, you turned the cows out into the field, and they were pretty good pasture. During the thirties, Walter hadn’t planted soybeans because he had always expected enough rain to grow the crops he preferred, especially oats. Even that worst year—what was it, ’36?—there had been so much snow and ice that Walter
had finally rejected planting soybeans. What was he going to get for them? How was he going to harvest and store them? What could you use them for? If you were going to grow beans, then grow beans, was how Walter saw it—pole beans. Soybeans were like oats or clover or alfalfa, but not as useful. Joe, though, loved soybeans. When you planted them, because they were beans, they nitrogenated the soil, and did so much more efficiently than clover. Corn planted in a former soybean field nearly leapt out of the ground. Nor did they care much about rain, either way. The corn could be pale and short, and the beans would be green and thick. Cattle liked them, too. Joe didn’t have a herd of milk cows or beef cows anymore, but farmers who did bought all the beans you could grow. Betty and Boop loved them ground up into meal, and beef raised on ground beans, it was said, had a good flavor—not too high for the city slickers.