Escape the Night (9 page)

There was still no sound.

He went back to his bed and stood beside it. On his pillow was a stuffed green elephant with shoe-button eyes that his father had brought home from F.A.O. Schwarz and named “Dewey,” for reasons that Peter did not understand. “Elephants are a tad slow-thinking,” his father had smiled, “but quite large and very brave, of course. So if you find yourself afraid of anything and I can't be there, just hang on to Dewey until I get back.”

Peter picked up Dewey by his trunk and went into the hallway to find his father.

It was even darker. He edged past his mother's silent bedroom, clutching Dewey more tightly, to his father's.

It was empty.

His heart beat faster. He tiptoed back down the long, dark hall, pausing at his room. Then he went to the head of the circular stairway. He stood there—the belt to his robe trailing behind him, Dewey tucked under his arm—and looked down.

Nothing.

He rubbed his eyes again. “Daddy …”

Still nothing.

He hesitated, a tightness in his throat. Then he reached for the railing, smooth and polished under his hand, and began tottering down the stairway, stopping on each step to listen for sounds.

A crack of light came from beneath the library door.

He stopped once more, recalling how he had surprised his mother there and broken the glass, and she had shrieked at him for sneaking. Then he remembered that his mother wasn't home.

He couldn't lose his father. Not yet.

His father might be in the library.

Gingerly, he took the remaining stairs.

He paused again at the double doors to the library, heart pounding even faster. Then he reached for the round, smooth knob. He turned it slowly. Half frightened, half wanting to surprise his father, he thrust Dewey through the crack in the door, peeking from behind.

He stopped, transfixed by naked arms and legs and bodies, a slim, dark woman he had never seen. His father moaned.

Unable to move or speak, Peter watched them. Time stood still …

Suddenly Peter saw Charles staring at his stuffed elephant, saw his lips part but make no sound. Dewey slid to his chin; in one terrible moment Peter Carey looked into his father's stricken eyes as Charles came in his lover's mouth.

Peter saw his naked father shivering in a rictus of agony and release, saw the woman's black hair and ivory shoulders bobbing over his father's lap and then backed from the library, Dewey clutched in his hand, crying without knowing why.

A short time later, when it was still dark, Charles came to his room. Softly, he asked, “You'd been watching, then.”

Shamed, Peter could only nod.

Charles knelt by the bed. “Are you angry?”

“No.” Peter clung to his father.

“Because it's okay if you are.”

Face buried, Peter shook his head: he knew that this was not his father's fault, but his. He had his mother to remind him.

Watching Charles's movements from a cover of indifference, John Peter Carey made a silent promise to his grandson: never would his son's affair put Peter in the care of Allie Fairvoort.

There must be no divorce.

He never told this to his son: Charles would not accept that his father had at last set detectives to watching only from his fear of those who followed him, in order to learn what they might know.

What he learned, to his astonishment and fear, was that Ruth Levy had become his son's sole lover.

The secret reports of Charles's movements confirmed that he was still closely watched: the odd clickings of the telephone, the strange delays in the Careys' mail, argued that these further spies might still be those of HUAC, and not of Alicia Carey. Yet this seemed too irrational.

He directed that these men be traced to whoever sent them.

A month later, the head of his detectives—a silent man, slate-gray as pavement—reported to his office.

Two men who followed Charles had met another at a Chinese restaurant on Mulberry Street. Frozen in dim photographs, they spoke to him.

The detective's finger pointed to his bow tie. “Know this one?”

Staring downward, John Carey nodded.

He did not tell him how, or from where.

The Committee was a dying force. That this man still persisted in watching Charles scared him with its senselessness: it was not justified by politics, or by anything else he knew of …

He looked back at the photograph, at the face of the watcher.

His long pursuit of Charles smelled too personal.

Dismissing his operative, John Carey began pondering how perverse a form such deviance might take. But he could think of nothing Charles should fear …

Except Ruth Levy, for the harm she might cause Peter.

He began reaching for his telephone, to fire her on the spot.

His arm stopped in midgrasp, at the thought of Charles's face. Firing her would estrange his son beyond all hope of his retrieval, without ending their affair: nor would it stop this strange and sallow man from working through Alicia Carey, should that be his true purpose.

His hand fell to his side.

It was better to destroy this man who threatened them.

Coolly, over days of thought, he studied each member of the Committee: at length he settled on a ranking congressman, lazy and in trouble in his district, and called him from a phone that was not tapped.

He had followed the man's fortunes, he explained, and wished to help. But first, civilly and in private, he hoped to discuss their treatment of the Careys …

He was certain that this shallow politician would not know what his Committee's staff was doing, and that he would instruct its Chief Counsel to find out.

Within the week, the congressman invited him to Washington.

En route, John Carey felt a fear he had not felt in years: Peter's life was more important than all the lesser ambitions that had driven him, when other men had blocked his way. He must not fail.

He found the congressman sequestered in the peculiar green mustiness common to public offices, leavened only by the smiling vanity pictures of well-known faces that seem so easily replaced by those of someone else. The congressman's smile was oily, his handshake weak; John Carey felt his own density, as if he could cause the other man to fade away. He almost smiled to himself: he had had this feeling before, with the Van Dreelens.

He did not smile at the man.

“I'm honored you could come here,” the congressman was saying, “as busy as you are …”

“It was necessary we met. Cigar?”

The man shook his head; John Carey lit his own. Through the stream of cigar smoke, the man ventured, “You stated some interest in my re-election …”

Silent, John Carey let the man stare into the chasm of his enforced retirement. Finally, the man said feebly, “How might I help?”

“Simply by confirming that we share principles that I might comfortably support. On the respect due publishing, for example.”

The man's gaze flickered. “There were some excesses …”

“Which have touched my family too long.”

The man nodded vigorously. “I knew nothing of that, I assure you. I mean that it be stopped …”

“And?”

“Pardon me?”

John Carey blew more smoke. Softly, he said, “There is a man named Englehardt.”

The congressman hesitated, surprised. “Yes, well, I'm certain that he'll understand that he went too far with you …”

“He understood that all along.”

“We'll restrain his zeal.” Smiling, the congressman spread his arms in feigned bewilderment. “What more assurance can I give you? After all, he works for
me
.”

“Not forever.”

The man looked away, then, almost shyly, back into John Carey's eyes. In muted tones, he asked, “You wish him fired?”

“No.” John Carey spoke with equal quietness. “I wish him destroyed.”

The man blinked. “Destroyed?”

“Specifically, I wish to be certain that no one in this city will trust him with a mop and pail.” He paused. “It merely requires the same assurance that I'll need to help your reelection—that you can back our common principles with action. That belief, I might add, is the sole prerequisite to a considerable commitment to your campaign.”

The man fidgeted. “By ‘considerable'…”

“Your Committee needs to solve its problem with the public perception of its excesses. By firing this man, you can signal that misguided zealotry will not mar the cause of anti-communism. Assuming, that is, that the public learns of his defects …”

The man looked almost frightened. “Isn't firing sufficient? Mr. Englehardt may be overzealous, but his diligence on our behalf has been exceptional.”

“Which makes him a time bomb should he ever learn that I had caused his ruin; the Careys would acquire a lifetime enemy. It's basic that such an enemy have no power.”

“That's not so easily arranged.”

“Even were his presence here a threat to
your
survival?” John Carey leaned forward to grind his cigar in the congressman's ashtray, gently adding, “As perhaps it is.”

The man stared at him. Tentatively, he said, “I suppose I might mention the reason for his firing to those who'd pass it on—the
Times
, for example. Not for attribution, of course, and not mentioning specific cases.”

“Of course.” John Carey nodded. “You might even place some calls to those who might have similarly employed him, to ensure he did no harm to them.”

“He's a strange man.” The congressman shifted in his chair, looking away. “I've never felt quite comfortable …”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” John Carey said.

Twelve days later, he stopped reading that morning's New York
Times
…

For a moment he imagined the young man Peter, strong and unafraid, and for once it did not matter that then he would be dead.

Quietly, he wrote a check.

John Joseph Englehardt could not bear to leave his own apartment.

Gaze averted, the congressman had fired him, blathering of excesses without specific names. Feeling the man's indifference like a slap in the face, Englehardt was riven by the superstition of his childhood: unloved and unlovable, he would be forever punished for the distaste he caused in others, which he could neither change nor comprehend.

Only in the corridor did he learn who else had been his enemy.

Scarcely seeing his surroundings, he collided with the Committee's Chief Counsel. Righting himself, the man read Englehardt's expression. They stared at each other; foolishly, Englehardt blurted, “He fired me.”

The Chief Counsel looked right through him; Englehardt could almost see himself receding in the other's eyes. In a low, cool voice, as if disgusted by a stupid error, the man asked, “What did Charles Carey ever do to
you?
” and walked away.

For days thereafter, like a man wasted by paralysis, Englehardt could barely move or speak.

He had been short weeks from bringing Charles Carey down, leaking his affair through gossip columns in a way that Allie could not miss, then sending her the pictures. The last photograph, of Ruth Levy entering Alicia Carey's home at night, would have offended her beyond recall …

Now he could not even touch the Carey file; as cruelly as he would with Phillip, Charles Carey had stripped Englehardt of his power.

At last, summoning a résumé like a phoenix rising from the ashes of his firing, he once more began to gather strength. He would find a spot in government, revive his career; then, in a way of his own choosing, he would see to Charles Carey.

The morning he was to begin his phone calls he opened the New York
Times
and read his name.

He went to the bathroom and vomited.

When he returned, the headline stared up from the floor: once more, in the shame of his humiliation, he felt the coolness of his father's eyes. He could not escape himself, and did not know the reason.

What he did know, without even picking up the telephone, was that no one now would reach out to save him.

Six months later, filled with hate for Charles Carey, he found refuge in the mausoleum of a research library, acquiring books.

CHAPTER 5

As time passed, Alicia Carey retreated from the precipice of madness, becoming a graceful shell.

The incidents that had scarred both son and husband now seemed scarcely real. She felt as if she had been caught alone by some dark, enormous nightfall, awakening to a gulf measured in their stares and silence, which she lacked the gift of closing. Before the traumas of death and failing marriage, no sadness had been allowed to touch her, no pain to shadow her delight; in all of her imaginings, she had never been asked to imagine someone else. Her parents, fashioning a flawless world, had rendered it incomprehensible.

Sensing her void without perceiving it, she felt alternating currents of hurt or anger, and had no words for either. Neither she nor Charles spoke of the past. Instead, she devoted herself to the minutiae of married life—what wines to serve with veal, the location of their box at the symphony—as if seeking absolution. From these rituals, the Careys erected a routine, safe, decorous and unreal. Unvaryingly polite, he told her of politics or the writers he saw; in turn, she would talk of
Don Giovanni
, or read the books he published. She never told him of the unknown man who called to detail, in an excruciating monotone, Charles's affair with the Levy woman and the things they did in bed. There was no way she could speak of it: she no longer had sexual thoughts about him. She could not face what she had heard.

Nor, still, could she quite believe she had a son. She sensed his fear, struggled to reach for him through her disbelief, yet could not. She
knew
that she should feel something; sometimes, watching him as he slept, she did. One chilly night, covering Peter with a wool blanket, she dared to imagine what she might say if he awoke from the innocence of his sleep, and found her changed.