The Redhunter (2 page)

“Say.” The insistent tone was off register in the quiet of the Garrick Club. One had the impression the leather volumes winced
at Tracy’s voice. “Didn’t you used to be Harry Bontecou?”

Harry was irritated by the question. To begin with, the tired formulation, “Didn’t you used to be …” Harry remembered that
phrase used in the title of a book published in the 1960s, an autobiography of George Murphy. The author had been a genial
Hollywood song-and-dance entertainer in the memory of an entire generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was junior senator
from the state of California. Clever title—back then. In the 1960s; not funny in 1991. There was that, there was the imperious
tone of voice, and there were the—memories, many of them ugly, of the man who now addressed him. Harry remained in his chair
but extended his hand. “Hello, Tracy. How you doing?”

“I’m fine, old boy. And you? I’ll buy you a drink. What will you have?”

“Nothing, thanks. You living in England, Tracy?”

“Yes, old boy. But you—you still hunting political progressives for a living?”

Oh, please, Harry thought. Four decades had gone by. He would not take the bait. He had had more than enough, back then. Back
in the years of the Korean war, of the rise of Mao Tse-tung, of the Soviet explosion of an atom bomb, of the Berlin blockade,
the campaign of Henry Wallace for president. Above all … the years of Joe McCarthy. His mind turned determinedly to the likeliest
way of avoiding the old subject.

“Yes, indeed, Tracy,” he said submissively. And then quickly, “Trust everything is okay with you. Come to think of it, the
last time I got any word about you was from the Washington, D.C., police.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. After your surprise … visit to me … after they—escorted you home, they reported the next day that you were in law school
and evidently had excess energies to spare.” Harry did not tell him about the other call, from the security people. “—But
all goes well for you, I gather.”

“Well, I manage to make ends meet.” Tracy Allshott extended his
hand toward a waiter, who knew to bring him another drink. “You would discover this, dear Harry, if ever while in London—or,
for that matter, anywhere else in the world—you needed a lawyer, and someone was benevolent enough, notwithstanding your Redhunting
past, to give you the name of the … best in America—or in London—you would learn that I am indeed … paying my bills! Though
if you came to me as a client, perhaps I would give you a compassionate discount, as a member of the Columbia class of 1950.”

Talks rather more than he used to, Harry reflected. On the other hand, Allshott had clearly been drinking.

“That would be nice, Tracy.” He permitted his eyes to wander over to the entrance of the lounge. Tracy did not miss the meaning
intended.

“But you are waiting for somebody?”

To Harry’s dismay, Tracy reached over to an adjoining table, drew a chair alongside, and sat down. “Evidently your host has
not arrived yet. So I will take the opportunity. I am writing my memoirs, and I thought to try to dig up an address for you.
I want in my memoirs to talk about Senator McCarthy.”

“Which Senator McCarthy?” Harry asked, affecting innocence, though knowing it was fruitless. Clearly, with his background,
Tracy was not talking about the other McCarthy. Eugene McCarthy, sometime senator from Minnesota, had derailed President Johnson
in 1968 and soon after resigned political office to go back to his poetry. Harry might as well have asked, “Which Pope John
Paul?”

“Don’t waste my time, Harry. My assistant, after a few minutes in the library, confirms my impression: that after Presidents
Truman and Eisenhower, your Senator McCarthy was the dominant figure in the United States from 1950 to 1955.”

“I will not deny that.”

Allshott stared at his drink as though the salons of history were assembled there to hear his charge. His voice was oracular.
“Senator McCarthy was, by the consolidated holding of history, the most dangerous American of the half century, a savage,
unscrupulous, fascistic demagogue—”

“Tracy. Would you please go away?”

“You don’t want to talk about Joe McCarthy.” Allshott’s voice was
insistent, the words rapidly pronounced. Now he paused. “I don’t blame you.”

He rose from his chair. “We’ll leave it that there were those of us back in the fifties during the anti-Communist hysteria
who were far-sighted and courageous enough to resist McCarthy and McCarthyism.”

“Congratulations,” Harry said, lowering his eyes to the newspaper.

“All right. I’ll let you alone. But you’re going to have a place in my memoirs, Harry. Harry Bontecou, the young McCarthyite.
You’ve never written about those years. But I’m not surprised. What the hell would you say?”

Harry bit his lip. He said nothing, keeping his eyes on the paper. Tracy Allshott hesitated only a moment, and then turned
and walked back to the bar.

Harry’s eyes stayed on the newspaper, but they did not focus. It had been a long time since the subject of Joe McCarthy had
been raised. But the memories would never entirely dissipate. When McCarthy died, Pol Pot was a young Marxist student in Paris;
Khrushchev had succeeded Stalin as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the most exalted office in
the Soviet empire; Dwight David Eisenhower was one year into his second term as president. And Harry—

But again he was interrupted. This time by his host.

“We’ve never met.” Lord Herrendon extended his hand.

The letter from Lord Herrendon had reached Harry Bontecou at the University of Connecticut a day or two after Harry’s visit
with Ed Furniss, UConn’s provost. Furniss, age thirty-two, had snow white hair. When two years earlier the trustees nominated
him as provost, he found the color of his hair useful in suggesting a seniority he hadn’t biologically earned. It wasn’t easy
for a thirty-two-year-old to deal with scholars twenty, thirty, even forty years older. But Furniss had to do it, approving
this project, disapproving the other, allocating funds here at the expense of requests there.

Harry Bontecou, sixty-four, had been thirty years with the department of history, teaching the politics and diplomacy of the
nineteenth century. During his year in office Ed Furniss had never interfered with the history department, in which Bontecou
was senior professor.

The summons had social dress—an invitation to Furniss’s house for a drink before dinner. But it had, even so, an instrumental
feel. The subject Harry knew had to come up at some point might now be coming up: the matter of Harry’s retirement. The senior
Storrs community, when the subject of retirement came up (not infrequently), called their talisman the “Old Age Act.” It was
the law-regulation that made it unlawful for any institution that received federal funds to discriminate against an employee
on account of age. Professor Harry
Bontecou was mutely grateful for this protection, while aware that civilized behavior would require him, at some point, to
hang up his hat and make way for younger scholars. But then too, in recent weeks he had found himself restless.

It had been just two months—the day after Valentine’s Day. There had been no theater for a public dispute over whose fault
the accident was, no lawsuits, no arraignments. But for an oppressive week or two, one thousand faculty and ten thousand students
took it for granted that Professor Bontecou privately thought the responsibility for the accident lay with Mrs. Furniss—the
late Mrs. Furniss—and that Professor Furniss privately thought the responsibility for the accident lay with Mrs. Bontecou—the
late Mrs. Bontecou.

The official verdict: The accident was, in every respect, accidental. Approaching the bridge from the south, in a heavy snowstorm,
Mrs. Furniss had swerved left to avoid the fourteen-year-old boy crossing the bridge, walking from right to left (he testified
to seeing the oncoming car for only an instant). A police reconstruction had her slamming on her brakes, skidding diagonally
left into Mrs. Bontecou’s car, which had been approaching the bridge from the west road, going downhill. The impact edged
both the Ford station wagon driven by Mrs. Furniss and the Bontecous’ Volvo over the embankment, the two cars and their drivers
dropping twenty feet into the icy water. The boy’s telephone call from the half-hidden house on the point brought police and
ambulance in fifteen minutes. Both drivers were drowned.

They had agreed, in a crisp telephone call the next morning, not to attend each other’s funerals, and they both declined to
give interviews to the
New London Press.
A month later the university chaplain invited them to a small dinner party to which just the right other people—two close
friends of each of the widowers—had been invited. The dinner party worked. There had now been a meeting between the two widowers,
who had professional reasons to be in touch.

Ed Furniss was a natural diplomat. He had no problem using his house for official purposes. As a widower, he recognized that
he needed to give extraordinary attention to domestic arrangements. What on earth had his wife done, he made himself wonder
out loud, pencil and pad in hand, to make one guest professor comfortable? On that list today were fresh limes, essential
to a proper gin and tonic. That was the drink Harry Bontecou had requested at the chaplain’s dinner.

“You know, of course, about Campari?” Furniss’s voice sounded to Harry, seated in an armchair in the handsome book-lined living
room with ornithological prints nicely spaced along three walls, as if he were speaking from deep inside the refrigerator.

“What do you mean, Ed? Do I know that Campari exists? Or are you asking me for recondite knowledge about Campari? My field
is history.” He attempted to make his voice sound solemnly reproachful—better to break the ice that way than to answer routinely.

“Don’t slight Campari when you’re making a proper gin and tonic. I use one teaspoonful per jigger of gin. Since I will be
giving you two jiggers of gin, which I would not have been permitted to do by Edith—she insisted on three jiggers—I will be
giving you two teaspoonfuls of Campari.”

“That follows. How much tonic?”

“Ah. People are careless on the subject. The ratio must be exact. One and one-half ounces of tonic water for one ounce of
gin. Otherwise the tonic taste simply takes over. I don’t really like the taste of tonic, come to think of it.”

“You know what, Ed,” Harry moved into the orderly New England kitchen, where Furniss was mixing the drinks, “I don’t know
you very well, but I’d bet you have a cup there that holds five ounces, which is what the average cup holds. So to make it
sound highly calibrated, you come up with the one-point-five measures of tonic for one gin, but what it all boils down to
is a cup of tonic water and a regular two-jigger splash of gin.”

“Plus the Campari bit.”

“Plus the Campari bit.”

Ed Furniss laughed and, seated back in the living room, raised his glass and started talking about the upcoming baseball season.

Harry let him go on a bit. But after the refill was served he took his pen from his pocket and tinkled his glass, as though
summoning a dinner party to a toast. “Ed, you want to talk to me about when I plan to pull out of UConn?”

Furniss raised his own glass and sipped from it, a philosophical smile taking shape. “Well, yes.”

“The Old Age Act no longer shelters me, Ed?”

“Yes, it does. But—well, who knows the situation better than you do? There’s a lot of pressure, and not unreasonable pressure.
All
those young cubs gasping for the pure air of tenure. But,” he said with resignation, “we can’t move any without a corresponding
vacancy, not with Hartford’s budget, and that budget ain’t going anywhere.”

Harry had several years before resolved not to pay out his federal anchor line beyond the point he thought seemly. He had
no financial obligations he couldn’t handle. His third book,
Victorian Disharmony,
was on its way to the University of Chicago Press. He had fitfully planned to visit Europe (his wife hated to fly, so he
had been there only twice). But everything was now different, and he knew that he really yearned to be away. He’d make it
easy for Furniss.

“Tell you what, Ed. I’m not due for a sabbatical until 1992. Give it to me instead at the end of this semester. I’ll go off
for the summer and fall, come back after that and teach one more year, then quit. Okay?”

“Done,” said the provost.

Harry was oddly grateful for this nudge by Official Connecticut. Before he had finished his second drink, Harry was talking
to Ed about other matters, academic, national, collegiate, though never personal.

Lord Alex Herrendon was tall, spare, well-groomed, his abundant hair silver. A trace of a smile on his face. “I was told you
were waiting for me here,” he said. “I’m sorry if I kept you.”

Harry stood. Herrendon motioned Harry back down with the deferential touch of a hand on his shoulder. “Please sit.” He slid
his limber frame onto the chair Tracy Allshott had left behind. “And I will join you in a sherry. I gave the order to the
steward coming in. You selected the favorite of my father, I discovered.”