The Unwitting (31 page)

She thought about that for a moment. “Someone who fought, maybe even risked his life, to make a difference in the world.”

“Margaret Sanger.”

“Who’s she?”

I looked up from the green beans I was trimming. “And to think I pay good money to send you to a high-minded all-girls school. The mother of birth control. She went to jail for the cause countless times.”

“Mom!”

The sexual revolution was under way, but the days when Abby’s daughter would learn to put condoms on bananas in that same school were still in the future.

She didn’t spring the suggestion on me until the potato had baked, the meat loaf was warmed through, and we were sitting across from each other.

“Do you think it would be too weird or conceited or whatever if I wrote about Daddy?”

I was careful to keep my voice even. “What would you write about him?”

“I’m not sure. But before you got home I was on the phone with Lauren about the assignment, and her dad walked in and said I should write about my dad.”

I did not understand Bill Dreyfus’s obsession with Charlie.

“Forget it,” Abby said.

“No, I think it’s an interesting idea.”

“Sure you do. You should see your face.”

“I can’t help that, kiddo, it’s the one I was born with. What would you write about Daddy?”

“I don’t know. That’s what you’d have to tell me.”

“Okay, interviewing 101. You have to figure out what to ask to find out what I have to tell.”

“Why does Lauren’s dad think he’s a hero?”

“Wrong question, or rather right question but wrong interviewee. Why do
I
think he was a hero is the one you ask me.”

“Do you? I know you used to.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Maybe
hero
is the wrong word. It doesn’t sound human, and he was. But he was extraordinary too. He had an intriguing mind, at least to me. He cared about social justice. He was”—I hesitated for a moment, but only a moment—“deeply moral. He made me laugh. And he was loving. God, was he loving.” The last two sentences surprised me. I hadn’t meant to say them. I hadn’t even known I was thinking them.

“But don’t you have to do something to be a hero?”

“He published an awfully good magazine.”

“That doesn’t sound heroic.”

“Try it when you’re older and you’ll see. But seriously, years ago, when you were a baby, he was called down to Washington to be investigated, and he stood up to some pretty dark forces.”

She leaned back in her chair and shook her head. “I guess you’re right. I guess it isn’t such a good idea.”

“Let’s just say you might be better off writing about someone you don’t know. When the assignment is a personal memoir, you can
write about Daddy, but when it’s a modern hero, maybe you’d better stick to more conventional choices.”

“Like who?”

“Like whom.”

“Like whom?”

“It’s your assignment, kiddo, but I promise to give it some thought.”

After she helped me clear the table and I stacked the dishwasher, I wandered down the hall to her room. The desk lamp turned the cascade of hair that fell forward over her cheeks to a polished mahogany.

“Rosa Parks,” I said.

“What?” she asked without looking up.

“Rosa Parks. That’s your modern hero.”

She looked up. “Who’s she?”

Now I really was beginning to worry about the school.

“The woman who refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”

“She made a difference in the world, and what she did was pretty risky.”

“Thanks.”

She went back to her book. I went on standing in the doorway.

“Would you like to talk to someone who was involved in organizing the whole thing?”

She looked up again. “What do you mean organizing? I thought she just refused to give up her seat.”

“She did, but she wasn’t the first, which doesn’t make what she did any less heroic. For years negroes had been beaten and even killed for defying white bus drivers’ orders to move to the back of the bus. A little while before Rosa Parks made her stand, a fifteen-year-old girl was arrested for the same thing. But when civil rights leaders, who were looking for a test case, found out that the fifteen-year-old
girl was pregnant, not to mention hotheaded, they decided they needed someone beyond reproach. That was where Mrs. Parks came in.”

“I thought she just got fed up.”

“I’m sure she did, but there was more to it than that. There always is. That’s why I think you ought to write about her and the incident. It’s a lesson in civil disobedience as well as heroism.”

“And you know someone who was involved?”

I couldn’t tell if she was excited by the possibility of touching history or by the prospect of having to do less research.

“I used to. I can probably track him down.”

I KNEW WHAT
I was up to, and I wasn’t proud of it. I had seen divorced women, broken on the wheel of disillusion, make the same mistake. Before the decree was even final, they began looking up old lovers and boyfriends, working their way back to college romances and high school crushes, searching in phantom memories for an innocence they had lost, a gullibility no grown woman in her right mind should want. I had prided myself on not being like them. Now I was.

Abby went down to Woody’s office to interview him. A few evenings later, I met him uptown for dinner. When I’d called to ask him if he’d speak to her, I’d been pretty sure he would suggest it.

Appearing in public with Woody was a crash course in America’s snail-like but steady evolution toward racial equality. The first time we’d gone for coffee, we’d had to find an out-of-the-way diner on the border between the campus and Harlem, and even then we’d gotten dirty looks. In Russia, we had made the rest of the troupe uneasy. But now, as I approached the table and Woody stood and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek, the other diners ignored us ostentatiously. In certain circles, and the Upper West Side was one of them, interracial was in fashion.

The first thing I noticed when we sat was the pale glow of gold
on the third finger of his left hand. That’s what I mean about the phantom memories of disillusioned women. In my mind, Woody would always be unmarried and just a little in love with me, even if he wasn’t willing to upend his life for it.

“You’re married,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“The least you could do is sound a little heartbroken.”

“I am, but I’m hiding it well. Tell me about your wife.”

“She’s negro.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Sure it is. Or at least part of what you meant. I met her on a protest march. It’s where all my best affairs begin.”

I changed the subject and thanked him for seeing Abby. He said she was a nice kid and I ought to be proud. I liked him for that.

I asked him about his work; he inquired about my writing. If he’d seen the CBS News Special, he didn’t mention it. We went on that way through his osso buco and my veal piccata. The conversation never flagged, but there wasn’t a lot of heart to it. Finally, we stood on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, bathed in a circle of light from an overhead lamp, and my sadness. He said something about staying in touch, and I agreed, but we both knew we would not stay in touch, unless professional exigencies brought us together again. He started to hail a cab for me. I told him I wanted to walk. It was only a few blocks to my apartment.

“You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

No! I’m not all right, and I won’t be
.

I told him I’d be fine, leaned over, and gave him a cautious kiss on the cheek. Then I turned and started up Broadway, my spine straight, my shoulders back, my chin raised. No casual observer, not even Woody, who I had a feeling was watching me go, would guess that every human encounter I had these days was nothing more than a brutal collision that made me feel more alone.

Twenty-Three

I
HAD RAGED AGAINST
JFK and the nation for turning Charlie’s death into a footnote. Now two more assassinations threatened to drag Charlie out of the shadows, where these days I wanted to keep him. On April 4, 1968, a sniper in a rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, shot Martin Luther King, Jr., dead. Two months later, on June 6, a Palestinian immigrant gunned down Robert Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A month after that, on a July morning when the air conditioner in the window of my study coughed and sputtered its hoary breath, I got a call from someone who identified himself as Sean Keller. He said he was a reporter. He sounded about twelve. He also said the two recent assassinations had gotten him thinking. I didn’t tell him they had gotten most of the country thinking. I had just finished a piece on our violent society.

He said he wanted to talk to me about my husband’s murder.

I told him I did not talk to the press about my late husband and got off the phone, but the conversation rattled in my head all morning, as noisy and distracting as the air conditioner. I tried to work, but it was no good. I finally gave up and sat staring at the picture of Charlie pushing Abby on the swing. I told myself I kept it out for Abby, but I kept it for me too.

The realization hit me suddenly. It was the recognition of the tainted CIA money I’d been living on all over again. I could not imagine how I hadn’t seen it before. I’d had enough hints. Bill Dreyfus’s words about Charlie deserving a medal, like the men who had given their lives in the shooting war. Frank Tucker’s comment outside the restaurant about vindicating Charlie’s death. And the clincher. How had I missed that? The obscene life insurance policy. The foundation hadn’t taken out a policy on Charlie’s life to keep him from leaving
Compass
. It had taken it out because Elliot and the CIA knew they were putting Charlie in harm’s way.

Or maybe the CIA wasn’t worried about the Soviets. Maybe the CIA was the culprit. As I turned off my typewriter and stood, I noticed a letter on my desk. It was a request from a woman who was writing a biography of Richard Wright. She wanted to talk to me and to see the notes from my interview with him. She said she understood there was also a handful of letters. He and I had stayed in touch after the interview, because I had hoped to do another piece on him. I opened the filing cabinet, took out the folder labeled
Richard Wright
, and began riffling through the papers.

“The white West cannot forgive my blackness. It blinds them to who I am. It colors the way they read my books. Even while I battle communism abroad, they stick a knife in my back at home,” he wrote in one letter.

“There is a plot against me. I have proof,” he said in another.

“To the Americans, I am more dangerous than a communist, because my color speaks to the colors of Africa and Asia as neither they nor the Soviets can.”

There were also notes from interviews with some of his friends. One woman just back from seeing him in Paris had told me he’d looked dreadful. She did not trust his doctor, she had added, a Russian émigré who lived mysteriously well in a large apartment on
Avenue George V. “Has Wright on massive doses of bismuth,” I’d scrawled.

I didn’t bother to put the file away. I was in too much of a hurry.

COMPASS
WAS LOCATED
in the seedy Broadway building owned by the Drinkwater family, but the foundation itself was in a more respectable skyscraper on Madison Avenue. I could count the number of times I had been there on three fingers, once years ago with Charlie, twice after-hours when I’d picked up Elliot to go to dinner. And I had always been careful not to call him at his office. We had been so circumspect that his secretary had no idea who I was.

She asked if I had an appointment.

“He’ll see me.”

I sounded like something out of a grade B movie, but I was right. He even came out of the inner office to get me. His voice was cordial. His face gave away nothing.

“I want to know about Charlie’s death,” I said as soon as he closed his office door behind me.

His face remained impassive. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m fine the way I am. I want to know about Charlie’s death.”

“I thought Charlie’s death was the one thing you didn’t want to know about.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry. That was unfair. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know everything, who did it—them or you—and why.”

“So the kid reporter called you. The one who wants to write a piece on what he calls assassinations and foul play.”

“It’s a good enough term.”

“It doesn’t wash. Charlie was a publisher. I told you, an asset, not an agent. He had nothing to do with operations. The Soviets had no reason to take an interest in him.”

“Then what about you and your friends?”

“You think our people would do that to Charlie?”

“If ‘our people,’ as you call them, killed Richard Wright, another asset, not an agent, and lots of people think they did, why wouldn’t they do the same to Charlie? I have letters from Wright saying he was sure the Americans were out to get him.”