The Paper Dragon (15 page)

He married Christine Dunseath in the First Presbyterian Church on Stamford's Bedford Street in the summer of 1952, after he received his law degree from Yale. The reception was held at her parents' home on Shippan Point, outdoors in the garden. The forsythias were still in bloom, spilling their petals onto the ground, he remembered fleetingly the image of a younger Christie threading her way through those bushes on too many nights too long ago. She had not changed that much perhaps, there was still the look of a very young and vulnerable creature about her, except for the snapping eyes that flicked as surely as a riding crop against a jodhpured thigh. At twenty-four, she was still wearing her hair in bangs, continued to wear it that way even to the time of the divorce when she was thirty-four and a mother, and when her eyes betrayed the fact that she was no longer a high school girl. Across the lawn, moving from guest to guest, her champagne glass in one delicately poised hand, while Jonah's mother sat unsmiling with a fan spread on her lap, dark eyes solemn as she watched her son's bride — did she ever think of Lucas in his jungle grave, or had there even been a grave? Christie Dunseath, radiant in white, black shoulder-length hair, swooping black brows over blue eyes, laughing. And water commissioner Dunseath, almost entirely bald now, ruddy-faced and a trifle drunk, embracing her as she came across the lawn, Mrs. Dunseath uncomfortable in a yellow diaphanous gown, no riding crop in her hand, no horse between her legs, older now, but her face still clinging to its girlish mold, the way Christie's would for years to come, except for the eyes.

Their first apartment was a three-room flat in a tenement on East 73rd Street, a street teeming with children during the summer, swarming with traffic that headed west from the East River Drive exit, noisy and smelly and wretchedly hot. Christie had never been able to stand heat, she ran from the sun the way albinos do, always seeking the comforting shade of an umbrella or a tree, her white skin turning lobster red if she were exposed for as long as five minutes. The apartment was an inferno, and the secondhand fan he bought on Canal Street did little to dispel the fetid air. He would come home from work each day to find her limp and haggard on the bed, her eyes silently accusing, and he would remember his mother's mute disapproval of Zachary, the cutting edge of her smile. He later wondered if their marriage did not really suffocate forever in those first terrible months in that grubby apartment. But at the time, he was too involved in coping with the profession he had chosen, hurling himself against an indifferent city swarming with talented young lawyers like himself, expecting Christie to cheer his efforts, applaud his small triumphs, urge him on to greater heights. She did this unfailingly until, almost a year to the day after her marriage, she became pregnant. Then, frightened by the changes in her body and the impending responsibility of motherhood, wishing for the Shippan house and the easy life she once had known, she turned to Jonah — childishly perhaps, unrealistically perhaps — wanting him to take care of her, wanting him to tell her everything would be all right, that there was nothing to worry about, that this was all a part of it, all a vital part of it. And he might have provided her with the assurance she desperately needed and sought, had not a very important change taken place in his own life at exactly the same time.

Raymond Gauthier was a bald-headed New Yorker of French descent who had lost his right eye in Italy, and who wore a black patch over the empty socket. He resembled a motion picture pirate, with powerful shoulders and chest, pepper-and-salt hair curling over the open collar of his shirt, the dangling arms of a gorilla, thick thighs and enormous hands. Jonah always visualized him with a belaying pin in his fist, following Burt Lancaster over the side of a burning Spanish vessel. His wife was a Brooklyn girl named Helen, whom he openly and frankly described as an ex-junkie who had married and later divorced a saxophone player. Jonah surmised that Raymond was kidding about this, at least about the junkie part, but he nonetheless watched Helen very carefully, and every time the poor girl scratched at an itch, he assumed she was overdue for her next fix. Helen had dark black curly hair which she wore cut very close to her head. She had slightly bucked teeth, and her eyes were green and faintly Oriental; sometimes when Jonah looked straight into them, he could believe she had once been an addict. He was tempted on several occasions to ask her about it directly, but then of course he knew it was just another of Raymond's jokes.

Raymond had been practicing law in New York since 1951, and felt it was time he took a partner, an idea Jonah clutched at immediately; Raymond had a going practice, Jonah was still chasing ambulances. Neither of them knew that the treason case would come their way so soon, or that it would catapult their newly formed partnership into that rarefied upper atmosphere of the legal profession, where clients were abundant and fees were outrageous, and fame was suddenly upon them like a sunburst. They knew only that they liked each other, and respected each other, and could possibly put their separate talents to fruitful use in a partnership. The treason case was still six months away. The plot itself was at that very moment, in fact, taking definite shape and form in a Jersey City basement, the plans being drawn, the bombs manufactured; the execution and subsequent capture were still in the offing. But the formation of the partnership meant that he and Christie could move instantly from their shabby East 73rd Street town-house (Mr. and Mrs. Jonah Willow of New York and Shippan Point) into a better apartment on Central Park West, large and airy, and not terribly expensive because the neighborhood was supposedly succumbing to the Puerto Rican influx.

The new apartment did little to lift Christie's spirits. She had begun to show in her second month, and she now tried to conceal the pregnancy as though she were the victim of a back-alley rape. She incessently blamed Jonah for what she called his "animal impetuosity," and one night delivered a five-minute kitchen diatribe on "the primitive and unreliable birth control methods available to American women." She then developed a theory relating her pregnancy to Jonah's work, claiming he was always too busy to do anything but make love, and further claiming they had used sex that summer as a substitute for other forms of entertainment (
"What!"
Jonah said) which would not have been necessary if he'd taken her to dinner or the theater every now and then (
"What!"
he said again). Besides, she said, this new partnership of his was all craparoo, and he knew it, the same as everything else in this stupid world, "craparoo" being one of Mrs. Dunseath's more choice expressions, passed on to her daughter the way some families pass on the Limoges or the Sheffield plate, an expression Jonah hated, and one which Christie used with increasing frequency to describe almost anything.

Stalin's succession by Malenkov that year was craparoo, as was Salk's development of a trial polio vaccine. Hillary's and Tenzing's conquest of Everest was likewise craparoo, and even the first test explosion of a hydrogen bomb by the Soviet Union was so classified by Christie. The exchange of ideas in those last few months of 1953 became virtually impossible. Coupled with Christie's craparoo concept was an almost biblical attitude that found voice in her second most favored expression, undoubtedly inherited from the water commissioner himself:
This too shall pass.
Why bother wondering whether Dag Hammarskjold would make a good secretary general of the UN? His term would only last five years anyway. Why concern oneself with Senator McCarthy's belief that a Communist Party cell was in operation at the Lynn, Massachusetts, plant of General Electric? Wouldn't this eventually blow over? The theory applied to everything, all human endeavor fell before it and was trampled: the latest world event, the newest novel, the most recent motion picture, the goddamn Pillsbury bakeoff. All was either trivial at worst or transient at best, and who really gave a damn?

I 
really give a damn, Jonah thought, and began wondering whether or not anything at
all
mattered to Christie. Well, she's pregnant, he thought, she's going through a difficult time, she's only twenty-five years old, been married a year and a little more, this is difficult for her. She's really a very sensitive and vulnerable person, it's easy to see how things in this neurotic world of ours can confuse her and force her to build defenses against involvement, she's only exhibiting the symptoms of our times, she's a sweet confused kid, and I've got to help her. But where do you start when someone doesn't even realize that "craparoo" is as phony as whatever it purports to define? Crap is crap, and shit is shit, and craparoo is neither, no matter what Mrs. Albert Dunseath astride her Arabian stallion may believe or have caused her daughter to believe. So where do you begin, and what do you say?

He said nothing, he did not begin. Instead, the marriage began to die in that second year while Amy grew inside her belly and Jonah fell into Christie's own trap: it was all trivial and inconsequential, the normal difficult adjustment newlyweds have to make, it would pass, it would pass. It did not pass, and eight years later he would wonder whether he could have said or done anything to change the situation, whether there was still time then before the treason trial began, before everything else became terribly more urgent and important than the woman who was his wife.

The treason case broke in July of 1954, two months after Amy was born. His daughter weighed nine pounds two ounces, huge for a girl, causing Christie to go into shock shortly after the delivery, throwing up all over the floor of her room while the night nurse ran to fetch a mop instead of a doctor. He cornered the nurse in the hospital corridor, a big red-faced mean bitch with gray hair and a nose like a cleaver, and he told her she had better get the doctor immediately before he strangled her. Her red face went very white, two glacial spots showing one on each cheek and then spreading to the rest of her features as she struggled with indignation and anger, and then swallowed both and went trotting off down the corridor, white skirts flying, crepe soles padding, you're goddamn
right
, Jonah thought. His daughter had the Dunseath look, passed directly from Lady Fitz to Christie, each lineal reproduction slightly less perfect, as though the mold were losing its firmness: Mrs. Dunseath had been breathtakingly lovely; Christie was merely beautiful; and Amy, his daughter, was only pretty. But oh what a true loveliness about her, something Mrs. Dunseath could not have acquired in a thousand years of breeding, the black hair and the light eyes, yes, the finely turned profile and the generous mouth, yes, all these though less classically stated, but her manner as well. Ahh, her gentle, shy, and inquiring manner, the delicate grace of her,
this
was the Willow legacy.
This
was his mother gently walking toward the seawall, her head tilted in anticipation, his Amy, his darling girl.

In July of 1954, a young man named Kaneji Yoro, accompanied by another young man named Peter Koenig, set a series of homemade bombs against the walls of Gracie Mansion, detonated them, and began running downtown in the direction of Wall Street, hoping to lose themselves in the lunch hour crowds. They were picked up before they had traveled three blocks, and were immediately charged with attempted murder, the mayor and the governor having been in executive conference within when the bombs went off. The charges were later expanded in the indictment to include arson (because the building caught fire), anarchy (because they found in a Jersey City basement several documents in the defendants' handwriting which outlined an escalating scheme of methodical destruction that would eventually lead to chaos and insurrection), conspiracy (because the two men had been out of state when they conspired to commit their act against the peace of New York), and, finally, treason. Treason, of course, was the most serious of all the charges and was a crime punishable by death. Since Article 212 of the New York State Penal Law defined treason as consisting of "a combination of two or more persons by force to usurp the government of the state, or to overturn the same, shown by a forcible attempt made within the state, to accomplish that purpose," Jonah could not see how the district attorney hoped to prove there had been an attempt at overthrowing the government, notwithstanding the timely presence in Grade Mansion of the state's highest executive. The documents in the Jersey City basement indeed supported a charge of anarchy, bolstered as they were by copies of books by Engels and Marx, issues of the
Daily Worker
, and even one or two party directives. Attempted murder was also well within the bounds of realistic possibility, and a conviction on that charge alone would have netted the perpetrators twenty-five years each in prison, a long enough span for any young bomber. The enormity of the crime, however, this attempt on the lives of two important officials (by Communist anarchists, no less) undoubtedly called for more severe punishment than the law allowed, so the district attorney had gratuitously tacked to his indictment the charges of arson, conspiracy, and treason. The arson charge amused Jonah. The conspiracy and treason charges incensed him. He could not believe that Yoro's and Koenig's respective Japanese and German ancestry had anything whatever to do with the indictment ("Of course not," Christie said. "The war's already forgotten. It's all craparoo") but he nonetheless detected in the public reaction an attitude of outraged piety and righteousness. Hadn't we been reconstructing and regenerating those dirty Nazi bastards and sneaky Jap finks ever since the war ended, a war
we
had won, mind you? So now two snotnosed red Communist Fascist punks try to blow up Gracie Mansion with our beloved mayor and governor inside, dirty red subversive Jap rat bastard Nazis — notwithstanding the fact that Yoro was born and raised in San Francisco or that Koenig's father was a respected employee of the
Reader's Digest
in Chappaqua, where he had been born and where he had sired his anarchist son.

Jonah wanted to take the case because he felt the treason charge was unjustified and unjustifiable. Raymond wanted to take the case because he was shrewd enough in his ancestral French way to realize that whoever defended these two young Communists would become famous overnight. Their initial separate motives were later ironically reversed: it was Raymond who wrote a paper explaining the principles involved in the case, which he read at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association; it was Jonah who conducted the court trial, Jonah whose name and picture appeared in all the newspapers, Jonah who came out of the proceedings a well-known legal figure and a champion of the rights of the individual in a free-society.