I had thought Albert Craven pretentious and superficial, endlessly engaged in finding something clever and outrageous to say in the presence of one or the other of his hundreds of ephemeral friends. But I was beginning to discover that he had an insight into the nature of human beings that was nothing like the shallow optimism so often exuded by the character he usually played.
We arrived at Lake Merced. Craven told the driver to come back in two hours. The flag in front of the clubhouse, hanging like all the others in California at half-mast to honor the memory of Jeremy Fullerton, flapped quietly in the gentle midday wind. A few desultory voices could be heard coming from the far side of the long low one-story wooden frame building, as the members of a foursome, adding up their totals, made their way from the eighteenth hole to the locker room. The spikes on their golf shoes tapped out a leisurely cadence on the blacktop path.
Everyone knew Albert Craven. We must have stopped half a dozen times on our way across the cafeteria-sized dining room to the table that, if he did not own it outright, had always been available for him, to exchange a word or two with another old friend. It was a weekday and the restaurant was not quite half full. If there was a man there under forty, he looked older than his age. The only women were middle-aged waitresses who moved at the unhurried pace of an accustomed routine. Except for the presence of a bar, where two gray-haired men in alpaca sweaters passed a dice cup back and forth, wagering for drinks, it might have been the dining hall of a retirement home.
The table Albert Craven had occupied for more than a quarter century was in the far corner, at the juncture of the windows that ran from the floor to the ceiling. Outside, as far as the eye could see, sunlit green fairways cut through forests of fir and cypress trees. In the distance, a single golfer, his arms brought back over his shoulders, the long thin club gripped tight in his hands, watched the flight of a ball I was too far away to see.
“What do you see when you look out there?”asked Craven after he ordered us both a drink.
“You mean other than a golf course?”
“Yes, exactly. That's what everyone sees. It's rather a stupid question, isn't it? Look around this room. They've all been coming here for years, playing golf, eating lunch, drinking—some of them—more than they should, telling stories, telling lies, telling themselves what great lives they have. There isn't one person here who could tell you that just out there,”he said, pointing toward where the golfer who had just hit his shot was trudging up the fairway, “is the place where, before Jeremy Fullerton was murdered, and before Bobby Kennedy was killed, the last United States senator was shot to death in California.”
The waitress came with our drinks. Craven thanked her by name and watched her walk away.
“Nice woman,”he said as he took a sip.
“Well,”he went on, his face all lit up, “I suppose you can't really blame anyone for not remembering. It was a few years back.”He had already begun to smile at what he was about to say. “A few years, and then some. Before the Civil War, actually: 1859. September thirteenth, to be precise. There wasn't a golf course here then.”He said this as if it were a kind of dark secret that, should it become widely known, might reduce the value of membership. “There wasn't anything here then. Just the lake, on the border between the counties of San Francisco and San Mateo. I suppose that was the reason they chose the place: the seclusion, and perhaps some grasp of the technical difficulties in determining jurisdiction if the authorities had tried to stop it. You see, it wasn't exactly a murder; it was a duel, the last public duel with guns ever fought in California. It was a duel, believe it or not, between David S. Terry, a judge of the state supreme court, and Senator David Broderick. They were both Democrats, which, despite what my Republican friends would think, doesn't explain anything. Broderick, the senator, opposed slavery, and Terry, the judge, was part of what was then called the pro-South 'Chivalry' wing of the California Democratic Party.”
Pausing long enough to take another sip, Craven's pale blue eyes widened.
“The judge seems to have been one of these people who have to keep pushing things. He could not help himself. He had to start making derogatory remarks about the anti-slavery wing; the senator, who was clearly in the right, called the judge a 'miserable wretch.' Well, that was all it took for the peculiar southern sensibilities of the judge. He challenged the senator to a duel. Later, there were allegations that the pistols were supplied by an associate of the judge and that the one given the senator had a hair trigger which caused it to fire early, but the only thing known for certain is that the judge's pistol worked perfectly. The senator was shot dead early that morning, September thirteenth, 1859, right out there, where that fellow is now trying to sink his putt.”
“What happened to the judge?”I asked, staring out the window toward the red flag flying in the far distance above the green.
“ To his credit—or his discredit, depending on how you look at these things—he was true to what he believed. When the war broke out, he joined the Confederate army and rose to the rank of brigadier general. What he actually did in the war, I don't know. But he survived it and eventually came back to California and retired to Stockton.”
After a long pause, Craven added, “There was a peculiar twist to the whole thing. Terry must have had a more-than-usual taste for violence, or perhaps a more-than-normal hatred of the government. In 1889, exactly thirty years after he shot to death a United States senator, he tried to shoot a United States Supreme Court justice. Stephen Field, a fairly famous justice in his time, was attacked at the train station in Lathrop. The attack failed. Terry was shot and killed by Stephen Field's bodyguard.”
The waitress came back to the table and patted Craven on the shoulder.
“Do you need menus?”she asked, smiling down at him with the affection of an old friend.
“Margaret,”he said, patting her hand, “I want you to meet Joseph Antonelli. He's going to be with us for a while.”
We exchanged a greeting and with a wink she gave me some advice. “Don't let him talk you into the bean soup.”
“But I always have the bean soup,”he protested, nudging his shoulder against her hip. “Well, all right,”he went on with a quick glance at me. “I'll have the bean soup, but you can bring him a hamburger. Mr. Antonelli prefers that to just about anything.”
A wistful look in his eye, Craven watched as the waitress ambled serenely toward the kitchen.
“Twenty years ago, when she first came to work here, men would have left their wives for the chance to spend the night with her.”His eyes came back around to me. “A few of them did.”
I leaned back and studied him for a moment. “You've been talking to Marissa, haven't you?”
Craven's eyebrows shot up. “Yes, Marissa. She's one of my favorite people, you know. And now I'm afraid you're about to steal her away.”
Reaching quickly across the table, he took my wrist. His hand was soft, pliable, without a callus or a rough edge anywhere. “No, I'm teasing. We're very old friends, Marissa and I, and if I have a certain almost parental affection for her it's because—well, it's because she's so much more interesting than most of the other women I know.”
Frowning, he thought about what he had just said.
“That's not exactly right. The rest of the women I know— and I know quite a lot of them—”he assured me, “are all very nice and all and, despite what I just said, all really quite interesting. But Marissa—and this is really quite astonishing when you consider how outlandish Marissa can be at times—is about the only one of them who isn't, underneath it all, quite fraudulent.”
It was closer to what he wanted to say. Enlivened by his success, he bounced once on the edge of the chair.
“I really think she's the only woman I know—the only one over thirty-five, at any rate—who hasn't had major plastic surgery. Do you know,”he went on, a droll smile on his round lips, “most of my so-called friends have a private hospital they go to? I think it even has an emergency room entrance where they go every Sunday night or Monday morning to repair the weekend damage. It's true!”His small eyes danced with irreverent delight. “Why do you think these people are always endowing hospitals? They're blackmailed into it!”he chortled.
“I like Marissa,”he said, suddenly quite serious. “Maybe she's the only one I really do like. Is that true? I wonder. Yes, well, perhaps it is.”
His eyes wandered around the room, as if searching for someone who could tell him for sure. He looked back at me.
“I think it must be because of the money.”
“The money?”I asked blankly.
His eyes made another circuit of the dining room.
“Money is everywhere now,”he said vaguely. The solemn expression that had begun to cloud his visage vanished, replaced with the same ebullience with which, just a moment earlier, he had regaled me with stories about private hospitals and overnight cosmetic surgeries.
“It's just another way that Marissa is different from most of my other female friends. Women in this city—well, let's just say they have in common a wonderful instinct for the vanity of men. Older, rich men, you understand. It's really quite shrewd, the way they put that instinct of theirs to work. They don't just attract older men, they marry them, and because the men they marry are always so much older, their husbands are always dying and leaving them vast sums of money. I can't tell you how much I admire the sheer intelligence involved in all this. Think of it. They have their social position because, of course, they still have their husband's name; and they have everything else they want because now, of course, they also have their dead husband's money. The best part is that there are always other older men to marry. Of course, when they do that,”he added confidentially, “they keep their former married names as well as their new one. I mean, why give up the obvious advantages of a well-known name—especially, let's face it, a name known for money? After a while”—he snorted, leaning back against the chair as he placed both his hands in his lap— “you begin to wonder if some of them haven't somewhere along the line made a mistake and somehow managed to marry themselves!”
Craven's eyes fluttered like the flag outside. For a moment, he stroked his small, barely visible chin.
“Marissa isn't like that at all. She earned her money.”A smile started at the corners of his mouth. “You didn't know she had money, did you? No, of course not. It's not something she would ever talk about. Good. Well, she does. And she certainly didn't get it from that husband of hers. After her divorce she went out on her own—no help from anyone, just her own talent. She started a clothing line, very small at first; then she opened a store, then a few more, and now of course a whole chain.”
“A whole chain,”I repeated dumbly. “She said something about a store. The Way of All Flesh.”
Craven laughed and then told me the name, the very famous name, of the stores Marissa owned. I am not certain whether it made her more or less interesting, more or less attractive; all I knew for sure was that it made her seem different than the woman in whose company I had grown surprisingly at ease. I felt in a strange way betrayed, as if it were something she should have told me; and I wondered if the reason she had not was because she sensed that I might not like her quite so much if I knew how much she had.
The waitress brought Craven his bowl of bean soup and set a plate with a hamburger and a small mound of coleslaw in front of me. She tucked a cloth napkin into Craven's collar and spread it out over his shirt and tie. It was apparently something she always did. He kept on talking while she did it and did nothing by way of acknowledgment when she finished. He lifted the spoon, blew on the hot soup, took a first, tentative taste, and then, wincing slightly, set it down to cool a little longer.
“They haven't changed the menu since I first became a member. They haven't changed the soup, either. I think they made a huge batch ten or twenty years ago and they just keep adding a few more things, stirring it up, a little more every day.”He lifted the spoon again, repeated the same ritual, but this time began to eat.
“I ran into your friend Andrei Bogdonovitch outside the courthouse today,”I told Craven. “It wasn't an accident. He followed me. He said he had to see me about something. Do you have any idea what it might be about?”
Craven seemed surprised. “He followed you?”
“From the courthouse. If he wanted to talk to me, why wouldn't he just have called?”
The response was a reminder that I did not have a telephone, much less a number of my own. I was about to suggest that Bog-donovitch might have left a message the same way the district attorney had.
“You forget. He was a spy. I can't imagine he talks very much on the telephone.”
“Not even to invite someone to lunch?”I replied, not at all convinced.
“Not if he didn't want anyone else to know,”he suggested with a serious look.
Craven stirred his soup, then let go of the spoon. “I've known Andrei for years, since sometime in the late sixties. He was with the Soviet Consulate, but he was very adept at moving in all the right social circles. Tr y to imagine what he was like then: younger, but with that same Old World charm and that same rich, cultured voice. People who met him forgot he was a communist and remembered only that he was Russian. He talked about Tolstoy and Pushkin and every great writer Russia ever had; he never mentioned Marx or Lenin. And he never talked politics. Never. He was KGB. There's no doubt of it. But I was always convinced that he was still a decent and a generous man. He was on the other side, that's all. And I don't think it was necessarily the side he would have chosen for himself.”
“He did choose sides, though, didn't he? He defected.”
Holding his hands just below his chin, Craven tapped his fingers together and looked out the window, down the long stretch of fairway to the flag that fluttered above the green, the place where the judge had shot the senator.
“There was really only one side left,”he observed dispassionately. “Did he defect? Who knows? He says he just decided to stay. One thing I can tell you about him for sure: He never lies, and he never tells the whole truth. There's something else,”he said, still gazing out the window. “He never gives answers; he just asks questions that seem like answers.”Craven's head turned until his eyes met mine. “That business about the Kennedy assassination, for example.”