The Unwitting (2 page)

I poured the last of the coffee into my mug, put the pot in the sink, and stood listening to the silence. The apartment was never so quiet as just after Charlie and Abby left. Some mornings the hush was a buoyant peace I could float on; others it ached like hunger. This morning it had a gnawing feel. I never should have brought up Tucker’s remark.

I looked at my watch. The bus would be on its way through the park now.

I carried the mug into the small room behind the kitchen, the maid’s room in an earlier time for swankier tenants, now my study. The space was barely big enough for a desk, a chair, a typewriter table, shelves along two walls, and an old set of wooden library steps to reach the books at the top. A tall narrow window opened onto a miserly slice of sky.

I put the mug on the desk and stood staring at the mess of open books, uncapped pens, and scribbled notes. I usually tidied up when I stopped work for the day, but the previous afternoon I had been under the gun with the grocery shopping to do, the chicken in lemon cream to get started, the flowers to arrange. Flowers for Frank Tucker!

A sheet of paper hung limp over the typewriter roller. I leaned down and lifted it between my thumb and forefinger.

He lay on a wooden plank in a small room in the basement of the clinic, his skin ashen in the glare of the single bare bulb that swung overhead. His body …

I had stopped in midsentence because I hadn’t made up my mind how to continue. The paragraph was part of a piece I was writing on Richard Wright. The rumors that Wright had succumbed not to a heart attack, as listed on the death certificate, but to foul play were still rampant, though he had died three years earlier. Some pointed a finger at the communists, because Wright, who had been an active party member before the war, had turned on them; others at the CIA, which could never decide whether Wright was a useful tool in their fight against communism or an outspoken negro thorn in their side. His friends were sure the CIA was behind his death; his daughter suspected it; his wife did not want to hear about it.

I stood staring at the unfinished sentence. Stopping in the middle of a thought wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. It often made it easier to get going again the next morning. Who said that? Hemingway? Frank Tucker’s hero. Two posturing bellicose buffoons who just happened to be good writers. The thought of so much talent residing in a couple of overgrown bad boys made me turn away from my own stalled essay and start back down the hall, past the kitchen, to the dining room.

The hardwood floor creaked under my loafers, then went silent again as I stepped into the deep hush of the abstract patterned rug. Everything was in place: the round walnut table with the sickle-shaped pieces that slid in and out to make it bigger or smaller, the matching curved chairs, the weighted Dansk candleholders that could be angled one way or another. When we’d finished furnishing the place, Charlie had said it wasn’t an apartment, it was a Scandinavian manifesto, and we’d laughed at ourselves, but with secret pride. The memory was another pinprick to my conscience. Would I prefer the place in shambles and Charlie with a black eye, assuming Frank Tucker had been sober enough to land a punch?

I kept going through the dining room to the entrance hall and took the single step down to the living room. This really was ridiculous. I should be getting to work, not prowling the premises, taking inventory of everything I’d never leave, not for something as foolish as this, not for anything.

I crossed the room to the windows. Overhead, the wind was herding the clouds like misshapen sheep. Below, the trees in Central Park licked the air like flames. On the opposite side of the street, pedestrians the size of large insects hurried along Central Park West, moving from deep shadows into sun-drenched pools of light. I glanced at my watch again. Abby and Susannah would be boarding an uptown bus, unless they’d decided to walk.

The traffic light at the corner turned green, but the line of cars didn’t budge. A taxi driver leaned on his horn. The shriek of fury
rose twelve floors and shattered the silence. I went on standing at the window, imagining Charlie striding beneath the flaming trees, his briefcase thumping against his leg. Once, a few years earlier, I had looked out the window of a traffic-stalled taxi and caught a glimpse of him walking up Fifth Avenue. The experience had been disorienting. The man I slept beside every night and awakened next to every morning was, for a moment, a stranger, loping along the sidewalk toward a destination I didn’t know, thinking thoughts I could only guess. The realization had been frightening, and seductive.

I really did have to get to work. I turned away from the window and started across the living room, but instead of veering right to go back to the study, I went left down the hall to our bedroom. It overlooked the park too, and the morning light flooded in, glinting off the blond wood of the dressers, puddling in pools on the pale carpet, reflecting off the shiny dust jackets of the piles of books on the night tables on either side of the bed. The top book on Charlie’s table was Frank Tucker’s latest. I could not get away from the man.

I walked around the bed, picked it up, and turned it over. Tucker stared up at me. Better cut down on the booze, Frank, I warned him, before the nose begins to look like J. P. Morgan’s.

I put the book back on the pile, front side up, crossed the room to the television that sat on a wooden stand facing the bed, and switched it on. I never watched television during the day, not even the news. People were always telling me that they couldn’t do what I did because they didn’t have the discipline to stay home alone and write all day. Discipline was not one of my problems, though it seemed to be this morning.

I stood waiting while the television warmed up. On the screen, a convertible was making its way slowly down a street between crowds of cheering, waving men, women, and children. There were so many children; they must have been given the day off from school.

“Jack! Jackie!” the crowd howled. “Jack! Jackie!”

From the backseat, the President and First Lady waved back, his
mouth stretched into that dazzling grin with almost too many teeth, hers curved into a more demure smile.

“The President and Mrs. Kennedy begin their two-day tour of Texas,” the announcer said, “after these messages.”

I sat on the end of the bed and waited while a woman swooned over freshly laundered sheets and towels, children wolfed down soup that was just like homemade, and another woman stood under a pounding shower with an expression of such ecstasy on her upturned face that it always made me wonder what was going on below the camera’s frame.

The first couple returned, still sitting in the back of the open car, still smiling and waving to the cheering crowd.

“Yesterday,” the announcer resumed, “President Kennedy, on the first leg of his two-day tour of Texas, announced in a speech at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio that the space program would continue, despite congressional cutbacks.”

“This research must and will go on,” said a voice-over with an exaggerated Boston accent that would have been laughable if it had come from anyone else. “The conquest of space must and will go ahead.”

“From San Antonio,” the announcer continued, “the first couple went on to Houston.”

Now the President and the First Lady were coming down the steps of a plane, an absurdly boyish-looking man and a maddeningly glamorous woman in a white suit with a black belt and black hat, carrying a bouquet of red roses. Didn’t they ever stop smiling? Behind them, the words
AIR FORCE ONE
were visible on the side of the plane.

Frank Tucker had flown on Air Force One. He had a pack of cigarettes with the presidential seal and a menu with the same seal in gold at the top and the words
AIR FORCE ONE
in gold at the bottom to prove it. According to the menu, which I swear he carried around with him for weeks after, he’d had a sloppy joe on a roll, Fritos, coleslaw,
and an oatmeal cookie for lunch. The fare wasn’t much, but the thought of the misogynistic Tucker, who just happened to write like a dream, flying and eating even that meager meal on taxpayer dollars, and with that golden couple, annoyed me. Except that Tucker insisted they weren’t so golden. JFK was monumentally unfaithful, he said. All the reporters knew it, but none of them would write about it. It was a gentlemen’s agreement. Some gentlemen, I’d said when he’d told the story, but he’d only smirked.

“In Houston,” the announcer continued, “the first couple made an unscheduled stop at the League of United Latin American Citizens, where Mrs. Kennedy gave a brief speech.”

Now Jackie filled the screen, smiling her impeccable smile, and in her improbably breathy voice charmed the crowd in Spanish.

I sat watching her and thinking about Tucker’s gossip. I was pretty certain Charlie was faithful, but I wasn’t stupid enough to swear to it.

“Today,” the announcer went on, “the President and First Lady will wrap up the Texas tour with a breakfast speech in Fort Worth, a luncheon talk in Dallas, and dinner in Austin.”

I stood and switched off the television. The President couldn’t be the wolf Tucker said. He didn’t have the time.

I started back down the hall, then stopped again in the doorway to Abby’s room. Volumes of Betsy-Tacy and Anne of Green Gables, childish Winnie-the-Poohs and precocious Mark Twains marched down the bookcase shelves. There were even the touch-and-feel books that I had turned the pages of for her in infancy and the illustrated volumes that Charlie had read to her a few years later. Above them sat a line of dolls and stuffed animals that she no longer played with.

I glanced at the clock on the night table. I had watched the news for longer than I’d thought. Abby had been safe at school for a good fifteen minutes. The muscles I didn’t know I had tensed unknotted. My nerves stopped jangling.

I sat in the chair where I had spent so many hours feeding and rocking and singing to her, gazing at the books we no longer read to her and the dolls she no longer played with, and saw my daughter moving away from me, her long legs scissoring into the future, her coltish body morphing into womanhood, her silky auburn hair streaming behind her as she broke into a run. So long, Mom. See you around. I was nothing like my own mother, but I still had to be abandoned. If I weren’t, I had failed. But I hadn’t expected success to feel so bleak.

I had to get to work. I stood and started back through the apartment to my study. The framed photograph on the desk caught my attention as soon as I stepped into the room, though I rarely noticed it anymore. That’s what happens when you live with objects day in and day out.

The film was black-and-white, but the sharp contrast between the almost overexposed playground and the deep shadows of the tree-shaded benches indicated that the picture had been taken on a day much like today. Light glinted off Charlie’s dark hair, making it sleek as an otter’s. He was wearing a crew neck sweater and a pair of khakis that sat low on his hips. The image sent a sudden erotic charge through me.

Beside him in the picture, Abby came rushing toward the camera on a swing seat, hands gripping the chains, torso cantilevered back, corduroy legs stuck straight out in front of her, hair streaking behind. The thrill of flying free and the faith that those big Daddy hands would be there to catch her when she returned, caught by the click of a camera shutter, were frozen on her face for eternity.

What was I doing fighting with this man about a drunk’s inane remark? Suddenly, for no reason at all, or maybe for every reason in the world, I remembered a morning about a year earlier. I’d been in my study working, and I’d had the radio tuned low to WQXR. The news had come on, and a phrase had broken into my consciousness.
Congress for Cultural Freedom
, then the word
bomb
.

My hands had hovered over the typewriter keys. I’d reached out to turn up the volume, but I was too late. The announcer had moved on to the weather. I’d tried to remember what time Charlie had said his meeting there that day was scheduled for. I had been so busy telling Abby to hurry or we’d be late for school that I hadn’t paid attention to what he’d said. I’d tried to call him, but the line had been busy. A moment later, the phone had rung. He’d heard the news in his office and knew I would be worried. He was fine, but his meeting at the Congress for Cultural Freedom that afternoon had been canceled.

I leaned over the desk now and reached for the telephone. My hand closed around the receiver. I felt the vibration before I heard the ring and glanced at my watch again. If he had walked, he’d have only just arrived at his office.

I picked up the receiver. “I was just about to call you.”

“Pardon me?”

The voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man, but not Charlie.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. Who is this, please?”

The voice answered with his own question. “Is this Mrs. Benjamin?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Charles Benjamin?”

I still did not recognize the voice, but I knew the tone instinctively. It was muted with pity and grave with the knowledge of the many ways life could turn on a dime.

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