In the center of the golf course, across from the screened porch of the house, was a water hazard—with alligators. You could see them most of the time, at least their noses, sometimes their heads. Twice they had lumbered out onto the fairway. The golfers buzzed around them in their carts, hardly slowing down. Maybe that added to Arthur’s sense that Florida was a menacing place. There were four bedrooms—Dean and Linda were to arrive for the weekend and stay until midweek. Carlie hadn’t come—she was working for a boutique furniture manufacturer in North Carolina; she’d been on the job for three months. Kevin had gone to Stowe, snowboarding with some friends.
There wasn’t much to do besides walk the beach, grocery-shop, or sit on the porch and look outward. Hugh did play golf one afternoon; Arthur watched him go by with three strangers. None of them broke a window.
Debbie took him to the beach, and once for a walk around the neighborhood. She grilled fresh fish with lemon and herbs. Hugh talked about tropical wood—teak, mahogany, Brazilian cherry, bocote, and about how, in the fall, he had invested some money in a tree farm in Costa Rica where they grew all sorts of rare (and fragrant, said Hugh) woods. He now “owned” the trees, and he would own them for as long as he wanted to. He could visit them, which always seemed appealing in Hamilton. As his first project, he was planning a coffee table, from some honey-brown striped hardwood that Arthur had never heard of. He showed his drawings each evening, the details refined from day to day. As Hugh got older and more skilled, their house overflowed with his pieces, which he sometimes gave away but refused to sell, because he didn’t know how to price them. He had been to a crafts show, and the prices had been all over the place—no help. He was a tight-lipped fellow, equipped with hundreds of hand planes and chisels. Neither of the children seemed to have inherited his talents.
On the fourth morning, Arthur had gently refused to go for a beach walk. Debbie didn’t force him. She made sure that he had a cool glass of water on the table beside his chair, then went with Hugh across the bridge to Fort Myers to look in galleries. The funny thing about the island, Debbie thought, was that the headquarters of the grocery store was outside of Minneapolis—the west side of Florida was the southern Midwest, whereas the east side was the southern Northeast.
The car drove away, and the house fell silent. As Arthur sat on the deck, staring out over the golf course, due south, across the lower bulge of the island, two hundred miles to Havana, he could not remember every failed operation he had tried to tweak or fix or reinterpret, but he did remember sending Frank to Iran to make sure that that crook, what was his name, did not steal the funds, either for himself or his buddies. How the funds were then put to use, Arthur had no control over, but Frank was game and cheap: all Arthur had to do was put him on the plane as a sign unto the embezzlers that they were being watched. What had the fellow taken—ten grand? That would be fifty or sixty grand these days. At the time, Arthur had thought you might not be able to control stupidity, but maybe you could control dishonesty. He had since learned otherwise. Arthur had stopped using Frank after Iran, not because he wasn’t very good, but because he was good at stealth, not secrecy. Once the secrets began to proliferate, Arthur didn’t dare outsource anymore—he had to be sure of loyalties. Loyalties grew first out of patriotism, then out of fear; Stalin knew that, Nixon knew that. Frank did not know that. Arthur also remembered looking into Frank’s army records as soon as he met him. There had been lots of commendations, some rather excited remarks: “Squad escaped intact!” “Langdon seems to always bring them back. Recommend?” But even so he’d only risen to corporal; about that there was one remark, from ’43, “Keep this soldier in the field.” Had that been an insult or a compliment? But there was also a red flag—after the travesty at Sidi Bou Zid, and everyone knew it was a travesty, from top to bottom, Frank’s disappearance called into question his loyalties. That he had managed to save himself and also to take out a tiny German outpost made no difference—he was gone for days. Where was he? Once you leave, even when you return, you are only partially forgiven. Better to be mowed down, since you can always be replaced. Arthur remembered reading it all more than once when he recommended Frank for the translation job in Dayton. And he remembered pausing before he wrote the word “trustworthy.” Even though he had not doubted that Frank was trustworthy—by then he’d known him for months—he could not commit himself without wondering if he would somehow get in trouble for recommending someone who was too smart to be fooled every single time.
It took Arthur all afternoon to think these thoughts—his mind worked so slowly now. And other fragments cropped up among them, fragments that seemed connected, although the connections were only foggily apparent to Arthur: What about Bill Casey? When was it that he had been slated to testify about Iran and North and the Contras? At the last moment, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the operation left him unable to talk. But, thought Arthur, why so secretive about such a small thing? Secrets, thought Arthur, were the real problem. Due south two hundred miles from this porch was Havana—not as far as Manhattan was from D.C. Here we have lived with Castro now for thirty-nine years. That was the bargain Khrushchev had offered—live with him or die—and, indeed, living with him hadn’t been that hard. Living with secrets was what was hard.
And it wasn’t just because secrets led to lies and lies led to chaos; it was because secrets led to the assumption, on the part of those not in on the secrets, that there were many more secrets than there really were. Arthur had already retired when Casey was diagnosed and operated on, rendered unable to talk, but he had been instantly suspicious of the strange convenience of it all. Logical connections abounded between dangerous secrets and convenient secrets. Does the president have a mistress back in Texas? Who cares? But it has to stay a secret. Have we infiltrated the high command of our most lethal enemy? Maybe—that’s a secret, too. Has our operation gone wrong and resulted in tragic losses? It’s a secret. All secrets had a way of connecting to one another and evening out—the mistress becomes connected to the infiltration, which becomes connected to the failed mission, and a secret has turned into a theory, which then turns into a cause, blowback, fallout. All of this leads to more secrets, since admitting a single thing requires admission of other things, and the plan, or the agency, or the government unravels.
Once upon a time, Arthur had loved secrets. He loved breaking codes in the early days, seeing a narrative unfold, peering through a pinhole and viewing the scene in sharp relief. During that war, everyone knew the consequences, and, anyway, the secrets were rather few, while the crimes were very many. But after the war, the crimes were secret, and the secrets, quite often, were crimes. The thing was, Arthur realized at some point, being secret made them seem like crimes. And keeping secrets made one feel like a criminal. These days, he didn’t remember too many specifics, but he did remember that feeling, of telling himself that the necessary had to outweigh the good, that orders had been given, that someone, surely, was in control of the larger picture (though often that person was Frank Wisner, who Arthur thought was crazy, but maybe it was Arthur who was crazy—that had been his thinking).
Sitting in the hot Florida air, Arthur felt his temperature rise just contemplating these memories, anger and fear and shame. Eventually, the secret became the most important thing, didn’t it, more important than the crime, after all, more important than the damage and the failures and the tragedies. The secret sucked every one of those things up into itself—danger, danger, danger. Arthur leaned back suddenly, threw his hand out, and toppled his glass of water, which rolled across the deck. Then he fell out of his chair.
When he came to, lying in a patch of burning sunlight, he thought, I don’t want these to be the last things in my mind when I die. Am I dying? He was panting. He did not know. He did not know anything, and for the moment, that was a blessing.
—
AFTER JOE’S FUNERAL—on her way back to Chicago without Henry, who was staying for another three days, then flyin
g to D.C.—Claire drove around assessing the decline of Denby. Frank’s death had been such a shock that, although events seemed to move very slowly at the time, afterward it seemed as though he had been whisked over from Ames and shoveled into the ground. Claire hadn’t noticed Denby then, only the faces of her relatives, blanched in the summer sun and eager to get the whole thing over with. But maybe because Lois had done such a good job preparing them, keeping everyone posted, calling them if they couldn’t come for a visit (Claire had come for Christmas and Valentine’s Day, pretending that she was just celebrating, though Joe wasn’t fooled, of course), Joe’s death seemed to rise like a tide and then recede, a matter-of-fact part of life to be understood and incorporated.
The grain elevator was still there, and the building that had been Crest’s, now a funeral home. The only “market” in town was a Kum & Go. The little motel had become a restaurant for a while, maybe in the seventies? The drugstore was gone, too—no soda fountain in years. At this time of day, the Denby Café looked dark and abandoned; they served breakfast until lunchtime, and locked up at two. Lois’s little antiques store was still in business; Claire peered in the window beside the “Closed for the weekend—please come back!” sign. Several couches, a table and chairs, two side tables, some dishes stacked on one of the side tables—all chintzy. The heavy, dark, ornate, beautifully made pieces that Lois had extracted from the dying farms of the seventies and eighties had been sold away. She had said at the wake that maybe she would close the business and move somewhere—or write a cookbook (twice she had overseen the Christmas cookbooks Pastor Campbell had issued for fund-raising purposes; Claire had both of those, and sometimes she gave recipes from them to her party caterers). Claire wondered if Pastor Campbell knew that Billy Sunday was born just south of Ames, if he knew who Billy Sunday was. Her mom had always spoken fondly of Billy Sunday, but he’d died before Claire came along.
Minnie had stared at Lois when she talked about moving to Milwaukee but not living with Annie. Minnie did live with Jesse and Jen—she had a pension, and she was useful. She had said to Claire that seventy-nine wasn’t that old if you kept active. Lois would be sixty-eight, Claire thought. She herself was fifty-nine, and her business was booming. She could ask Lois to come to Chicago. She looked across the town square at the vast Worship Center and dropped that idea. But it all brought to mind another thing that Minnie had said—when your parents died young, you had no idea what your own old age would look like.
The square was still green, and there were a few families making use of it, two of them Hispanic. The parents probably worked at the meatpacking plant out on Route 330, near where the hog confinement facilities were. Judging by the town, the people who worked there didn’t have enough money to buy anything. However, the daffodil bed in the center of the square was yellow and thriving—someone was caring for the bulbs. The Worship Center was at the opposite corner of the square from Lois’s shop—what Claire remembered as the Methodist church where her Langdon relatives had gone, now unrecognizably enormous and showy—buildings had been torn down on either side so that Pastor Campbell could add day care, parking, and offices. The Worship Center was the biggest business now. Denby itself could not possibly be supporting the Harvest Home Light of Day Church in such style, but Claire had not asked Lois where the congregants were coming from. And the Harvest Home Light of Day Church had no graveyard—no room for the dead, she thought meanly. St. Albans was gone, but the graveyard where everyone was buried remained neatly fenced, maintained by the county. Claire wondered where the Hispanic families went to services. She and Carl didn’t go to church.
Carl hadn’t come with her, at her request. She didn’t quite know why, since he’d been willing to come, but maybe this was the reason, some time alone on a spring day, getting used to the fact that funerals started proliferating when you got older, if you were lucky. She kept walking, looping down Rain Street (why had they named it that?), where the houses were sturdy and all the front porches had rockers. It was one of life’s treats, wasn’t it, paying a visit to your past, swinging like a ball on a string away from the person you loved, always knowing that the string must pull you back, and you would be oh so glad to get there.
—
IT TURNED OUT that Charlie and Riley were good matchmakers, because Richie fell for Nadie Cantwell (born Nadya Chertsev in Leningrad, in 1967, moved to London at the age of two, when her parents defected, then to Boston at the age of seven). What Nadie wanted in a man was someone busy, thoughtful, good-looking, and willing to joke around. Whether anything would come of it, Richie didn’t know. Nothing could come of it until the election was over, because Nadie was just a little suspect to the Republicans; her liberation from the Soviet Union was balanced by her very outspoken skepticism of all Republican positions on Ayn Rand, abortion, religion, extramarital sex, homosexuality, and communism (which Nadie and her parents felt had its good points and its bad points, just like capitalism). Although he had been seeing Nadie for almost a year, Richie had not told Loretta about her, or introduced them. That had to wait until after the election, too.
It was known to his constituents that his wife had left him for a billionaire from New Rochelle. He was still seen, sometimes, playing with his adorable son in Prospect Park, taking that very active but charming boy to the little zoo or to concerts at the Bandshell. They were darling together. Vito Lopez agreed that they were darling together. Vito Lopez had met the billionaire more than once, here and there. The billionaire had recoiled from Vito, or so Vito said (though maybe what he meant was that the billionaire was not terribly enthusiastic about bear hugs from Vito). Anyway, Richie had Vito’s support. And Richie had $376,983 in his election coffers, compared with the seventy-six thousand or so that his self-employed electronics-store owner Republican opponent, who was fed up with Washington and hoped to throw out all the bums, had. Several of his New York colleagues in the House were running unopposed; Richie wasn’t so lucky, and Michael occasionally told him that he was the one who was financing Rex Carr (could that really have been the name bestowed by his rival’s parents?) just to keep Richie on his toes.
Once a week, since he was running a fairly lackadaisical campaign, Richie, Nadie, Charlie, and Riley had dinner somewhere, tonight at Bistro Italiano—Richie paying, of course, and Nadie, Charlie, and Riley telling him what to do and how to do it. The primi piatti had just been delivered. Nadie removed her hand from his under the table, reached her fork for a piece of grilled artichoke, and said, “Believe me, it would have never gotten as far as it did if she hadn’t been egging her on.”
“That is so true,” said Riley. Riley was having the grilled pepper bruschetta.
“She” was Linda Tripp. “Her” was Monica Lewinsky. Richie did not love talking about the scandal every single moment of every day, but the tapes had, indeed, been so fascinating that even Riley had stopped talking about global warming for a while to talk about them. What was clearest to the women was that Linda did not like Monica much, that she would listen to her, play with her, sympathize with her, prod her. It was Linda, said Riley and Lucille, who worked up the Christmas phone-sex tape that everyone found so shocking (well, no, thought Richie, not shocking). “She was using her,” said Nadie. “Just like junior high. Remember that? Some ninth-grader would come up to you and tell you how great your hair looked, and where did you get those loafers, and, by the way, didn’t you carpool with So-and-So? And so you would be drawn into this plot to humiliate So-and-So—had she really given Billy Johnson a blow job behind the science building? Ugh. Been there, done that.” Nadie shook her head hard, as if shaking spiderwebs out of her hair. Richie thought she was the most worldly female he’d ever met. She was fourteen years younger than he was, and for the first time he understood why men did this, fell for these much younger women—it was just another expression of that social ineptitude they were cursed with. In ninth grade, best go for an eleventh-grader; in college, a girl your own age knew what to do; but once you got her bun
dled away into a marriage, then both of you lost your touch. Witness Ivy putting her eggs in the billionaire basket.
Nadie was much more suspicious of the sources of the scandal than even Riley. Whereas Richie and Charlie assumed that Clinton was a horny guy whose brain was sometimes overwhelmed by his dick, and who was now paying the price for his obliviousness, Nadie had listened to her parents. She said, “You look at what they are doing to him. It is right out of the KGB—he can have no privacy. What if Hillary did know all about it, about everything over the years, and said, ‘That’s the way he is, I can live with it’? They would say: Not her business, our business. We are the police. You live like we do and do what we say, or we will ruin you.”
“What is the KGB?” said Charlie. Richie wondered if he meant this metaphorically, or if he really didn’t know what the KGB was.
Nadie said, “Kristol. Podhoretz. Wolfowitz. Once a commie, always a commie.”
“My dad’s aunt was a commie,” said Richie. “Aunt Eloise. Everyone loved her.”
“All of my relatives were commies,” said Nadie. “The thing they want most is to be sure that you are thinking the right thoughts. Even if they change their minds, or when they change their minds about what the right thoughts are, they still have to make sure that you think them. There may have been hippies in America who thought sex and communism went together, but in the U.S.S.R., this was not so.” She smiled merrily, and Richie laughed, but she went on: “They feel it is their right to know everything about you, to hide microphones and make tapes and invade your privacy, because not doing everything according to the party line contaminates and infects society.” She sniffed.
“That’s like people who are against solar initiatives,” said Riley. “They see funding for solar and go bananas. They have arguments, but the bananas comes first.” She sighed. Once the scandal blew up, Richie had pretty much stopped talking about solar and wind. Here was how it went: Gore liked solar and wind; Gore was contaminated by Clinton; Clinton was contaminated by Lewinsky; therefore, no talk about solar and wind. It appeared to Richie as though the KGB was winning.