Harry, hear the worst. Shortly before my LSD episode, I had been cut down to one assistant, Rosen, and put onto collation studies with our graphology department. Instead of showing our handwriting experts how to look for Alpha and Omega, the graphologists were now giving ratings to my work.
About this time, Arnold had a long talk with me. It was a preface, I knew, to telling me that he was going to apply for a transfer over to Gittinger’s track. “Loyalty is a virtue,” he said at last, “but I want to get out of dee basement.” Suddenly, it was no longer so funny. I saw it through his eyes. To be Jewish in the Agency doesn’t call for an automatic welcome, but then to be locked up as well in his little secret. However, he did seem miserable at his own ambition. He also warned me that the time had come for Hugh to intervene.
“Kittredge, you have real enemies in TSS.”
“You’d better name a few, or I won’t listen to this.”
“I can’t point to the real estate. It could be some of Hugh’s enemies.”
“You mean I can’t even create antagonists of my own?” God, we were having coffee in the K-shed cafeteria at three in the afternoon, and Rosen was sitting across from me with tears in his eyes. I felt like screaming. “I think I’ve created a few enemies of my own,” I said.
“Maybe you did.”
“I was too cocky when I began.”
“Yes,” he said, “probably.”
“And I did show a little too much disdain for some of my colleagues.”
“Oh, you know you did.” He was virtually crooning.
“I was uncooperative with my overseers. Especially when they wanted to change my terminology.”
“Yes.”
“But all that was in the beginning. Lately, my worst crime has been to obtain a few extra perks for my best research assistant.”
This was meant to stun him precisely between the eyes. It only brought out his anger. I think he was looking to find that anger. “Kittredge, let’s go back to your office,” he said. “I’ve got some yelling to do myself.”
Whereupon, once we made the long, endlessly long, silent walk back down Cockroach Alley, he did unload a bit. “The fact, Kittredge, is that there’s a fundamental flaw in the test. Putative agents make prodigiously good liars. They’re not going to reveal themselves just because Mrs. Gardiner Montague has devised a few word games.”
“How dare you,” I said. “We’ve loaded the thing with traps.”
“Kittredge, I love you,” he said, “but whom have you trapped? I just don’t think the damn thing works. And I will not spend my life supporting an enterprise that can’t stand up.”
“Apart from all these tests, don’t you believe in Alpha and Omega?”
“I believe in them, dear one. As metaphor.”
Well, we were through, and we knew it.
“Arnold, before you leave, tell me the real worst. What are they saying? Metaphor is not the word they are employing.”
“You don’t want to hear.”
“I believe you owe me that much.”
“All right.” I realized suddenly that he was not a silly man nor a weak man, nor even a witty scamp. Under all, was the person who will yet come out of some further resolution of his impossible A and O, the future gentleman was there before me, a most steady and resolute fellow. We will hear from Arnold Rosen yet. “Kittredge,” he said, “the common notion here at TSS is that Alpha and Omega do not really exist. Alpha is merely a new way to describe consciousness, and Omega is a surrogate concept for the unconscious.”
“They still can’t get it through their heads. How often must I say that Alpha and Omega each possesses its own unconscious. And superego and ego.”
“Everyone knows that, Kittredge. But when we try to apply it, we keep being brought back to consciousness and the unconscious all over again, and Alpha is the first and Omega the second. Let me say that such people are not the worst of your detractors.”
“Tell me, as I have asked you more than once, what the worst are saying.”
“I don’t care to.”
“As a species of final contribution.”
“Very well.” He looked into the whorls of his fingertips. “Kittredge, the cognoscenti have decided that your concept of Alpha and Omega is a whole-cloth projection of what can only be your latent schizophrenia. I am sorry.”
He got up, he extended his hand, and, do you know, I took it. We shook hands limply. I think we were mourning the end of our work together. Despite all. Since then, I’ve only seen him in the cafeteria and the corridor. I miss his wit, I will testify to that.
Now, Harry, I couldn’t keep this last blow to myself. I told it all to Hugh and he set up a meeting with Dulles and Helms. Hugh probably thought I should pull my own potatoes out of the fire, but I wouldn’t go. I could hardly be present to plead my own case if I were being accused of schizophrenia. Well, Dulles told Hugh that he did not for a moment believe my thesis was a projection of my own schizophrenia. What a shocking notion. No, for them, Kittredge’s theory remained, as always, profound. “I would even,” said Dulles, “call it sacrosanct.”
Helms then spoke: Kittredge, in his opinion, was to be seen as a most innovative inventor. Such creative originality often suffered in unfair fashion. “The trouble,” he said, “is that we have a psychological reality to deal with. The rank and file in TSS do tend to see Alpha and Omega as some kind of sound-and-light show.”
“Paranoid sound-and-light show?” asked Hugh.
“Look,” said Helms, “we can bat these words back and forth until the courts are too dark to play upon. The crucial difficulty is that it’s one thing to support an underground circus like TSS, but it is absolutely verboten to let word get around that it is a freak show. Kittredge has had five years and an absence of conclusive results. We’ve got to find another boulot for her.”
Boulot. Old argot for job, kiddo. Harry, I’ve never seen Hugh quite as upset as when he related this conversation to me. Do you know, it was on the day your brooch arrived. That may explain a few things. I plunged right off into the LSD. Anything to come up with a new grasp on the testing process. I took terrible travels on that little trip. My vision led me down a long purple road to phosphorescent pools of moonlight where pigs were wading, and worse. I was a young man disporting in a brothel.
These days, I put in four sessions a week on graphology, a fascinating business after all. And I still pursue a few thoughts on the development of Alpha and Omega. Oh, I’ll be back, I promise I’ll be back.
Now you can see, however, why I want to hear about your life again. And in detail. I sense all over again that I do not know enough about the details of my own life. I certainly never knew how many fellow workers, often strangers, were determining my fate. Your letters give me some understanding there.
Harry, write again. I am truly fascinated with how you spend your days. It seems so long since I’ve held one of your full letters in my hand. What has happened to AV/OCADO and his tormented soul? And what of your Russian garden parties and dear Hyman Bosqueverde and his wife who whispers nice things about Gordy Morewood? Yes, give me all the rest, your Gatsby with his yellow hair and the dark-brown mustache that Howard Hunt made him remove? You see, I do remember, and want to know more.
You can even write to me about your upwardly mobile COS. I realize now why I disliked Mr. Hunt. He was that worldly principle I was secretly unequipped to deal with. But no longer will I indulge such prejudices. If one would have new ideas, one must find a way to renew oneself. So tell me all about him too. My curiosity deepens, my strictures become flexible. My love for you will always grow apace, dear long absent man.
Kittredge
16
THE LETTER WAS WRITTEN IN HER SMALL GOTHIC SCRIPT. BY THE TIME I was done, longing had thrown another noose around my wish to escape from love.
Jan. 11, 1958
Dearest Kittredge,
I will not try to tell you how near your letter brought you to me. How deep, how damnable, and how unfair it mu
st all have felt. I see now why my letters, with their small details, have been agreeable to you. Let me try to divert you, then. Here at this Station on a busy day, when two or three things are coming to a boil (or coming apart), one feels in the midst of a Rube Goldberg machine. Right now, on Saturday afternoon, it is quiet—a rare occasion!—a quiet Saturday afternoon in the midst of our January summer. Everyone I know is at one or another of our clay beaches and coffee-colored sea. It’s hot, and I sit in my shorts, still in the same cheap hotel room, believe it or not—I’m one of their three oldest residents by now. Kittredge, I pride myself at how little I need of material things. On the other hand, I virtually percolate with pleasure in enumerating Station activities. I feel as if that is my store, and I’m taking proud inventory.
Here is a good portion of the news. The Bosqueverdes have two awful Washington people from the Soviet Russia Division virtually bivouacked in their quarters. On Tuesday nights, in another part of town, AV/ALANCHE is fighting pitched battles against the left student youth group, MRO. AV/ALANCHE are the sign painters, do you recollect? And there’s still Peones and Libertad, and Chevi Fuertes to bring you up on, plus the Russians, which is to say, our one Russian couple. I am now on good visiting terms with Masarov and his wife. Yes, the greatest single change is that I am, under the most stringent precautions you can imagine, permitted, even encouraged, to cultivate a relationship with Masarov. It has turned the pockets of my inner life inside out.
Before commencing, however, I must tell you, Kittredge, how much I adore you. I am absolutely confounded that anyone in our line of work can doubt for one moment the existence of Alpha and Omega. Well, a good writing teacher I know at Yale said never to use qualifiers like absolutely unless one was hopelessly in love. Absolutely not.
To my good friend Boris Gennadyevitch Masarov and his gypsy wife, Zenia, then. (She told me once that she was one-nineteenth gypsy.)
“One-nineteenth?” I asked her.
“You are brutal as Russian with fascination for facts, figures, numbers,” she responded.
“One-nineteenth?” I inquired again.
“Are good-looking young man. Why ask silly question?”
Having set down this exchange, I see that I have failed to present her quality. She is not shallow. She carries herself as if nothing has transpired in Russia of any moment since Dostoyevsky was saved from the firing squad by the czar’s reprieve. I suppose I am saying that she elicits a chord in one’s historical appreciation. I now know how an aristocratic woman of the provinces might appear to us in the middle of the nineteenth century. The best of Russian literature comes alive for me when I am around Zenia. So many of Turgenev’s dissatisfied women come to mind, and Chekhov’s incomparable glimpses of the Russian provinces.
Zenia is all of them for me, and more. Yet, she is also a woman who has lived under the horrors of Stalin. Kittredge, you can feel the depredations of Soviet history through the sense one receives of her much-battered soul. While she looks over forty, the Russians show their age in ways we do not. Do you know, I believe they take a certain grim satisfaction in wearing their souls on the wrinkled surface of their face. We Americans would, of course, go squeak before we’d ever let anyone have the satisfaction of thinking he was looking into our spiritual depths, but that may be exactly what the Russians have to offer. “I have passed through cataclysmic days, and permitted state horrors to be visited on friends, but I have never lied to my soul.” That is what her face says to me. (She has the most extraordinary deep dark eyes—operative definition of “Otchi Chorniya.”) Yet she has to have been around frightful events. She is KGB, after all. Or at least her husband is. Then she tells me that she is thirty-three. Yes, history has cut its lines into Russian faces.
Well, here I am, rushing new people on to you without the courtesy of a little development, but then this friendship with the Masarovs is the most interesting relation I have at present with anyone in Uruguay, even if it has been put together like an arranged marriage with brokers on both sides.
It began because here in Montevideo we are sometimes a working part of the State Department. “Our cover folds us into the crust” has become one of Hunt’s sayings. Of course, he doesn’t exactly hate the idea of pretending to be First Secretary to the American Ambassador. As you may recall, that worthy, Jefferson Patterson, Eisenhower’s appointee, is a genteel man with a hopeless stammer in English and it gets worse when he attempts Spanish. So, Patterson continues to avoid functions. His deputy, the Counselor, is all right, but his wife, a lush, has been known to take off her shoes at Embassy dances and embark on impromptu high kicks—“Grands jetés,” she announces. Needless to say, they took her off the circuit. Which leaves the field open to the Hunts, and, on occasion, the Porringers, and myself.
Combine this with the State Department’s estimate that Khrushchev’s constant appeals lately for armament reductions, while clearly not to be trusted, must be met, nonetheless, with compensatory American moves. We-cannot-lose-another-contest-for-world-opinion is the present State Department stance. Word has even come to us from Western Hemisphere Division: Carefully monitored fraternizing with the Soviets is a viable option. Theoretically, we’re always prepared to get friendly with any Soviet who throws us a side glance, but as a practical matter, whenever small conversations commence around the canapé tables, we comport ourselves as if we are offering Christmas politesse to lepers. You don’t put a career on the line by fraternizing for too little.
Well, the directive has come in. And we have certainly heated up the GOGOL outpost (which is how we refer to the Bosqueverdes) now that the Russian garden parties are going again. The Sourballs thought enough of this opportunity to send down two of their operators. Nearly all of Soviet Russia Div’s people are anti–Soviet Russians, or Poles, or Finns, intensely fluent in Russian. They do make an odd breed. Paranoid and insular to an extraordinary degree, they give off about as much warmth as a barnacle. Yet they sport what could be Irish names if not for the odd spelling. Monikers like Heulihaen (pronounced Hoolihan) and Flarrety (pronounced Flaherty). Heulihaen and Flarrety have been installed on separate eight-hour stints at GOGOL outpost for the last month, and have been photographing the very hell out of the lawn parties in the Soviet Embassy garden.
Hunt calls them our Finnish Micks. Left to themselves, the Finnish Micks would pass over to us about as much information as you could get from a Mickey Finn, but Hunt knows how to play the web back at Cockroach Alley. Result: The Finnish Micks grudgingly provide us with bits of poop and scam.
The largest discovery (accomplished by way of filming the Russians and their guests in the garden, then studying these home movies around the clock) is that a bit of infidelity is going on behind Soviet Embassy walls. There seems a likely connection between the new Soviet KGB chief, the Resident, named Varkhov, Georgi Varkhov, who looks exactly as he should, built like a tank, shaved head like a bullet, and—are you wholly prepared?—our own soulful Zenia.
Now, I was apprised of this item after I became friendly, all proportions kept, with the Masarovs. I still think Zenia is soulful, although her taste for Varkhov, if true, puts me off. The Finnish Micks, however, seem pretty certain of their ground. The working logic for such conclusions, as I piece it out, comes to this: In social life, we are always surrounded by hints of infidelity at every party. We see smiles, whispers, glances—all that movie-business sign language. Yet our perceptions are transitory. Hints of behavior are everywhere, but we usually cannot confirm what we have seen. On film, however, if we expend the patience to reexamine each move of our actors, the indeterminate can crystallize into the concrete. By such methods are we provided with a 75-percent certainty that Zenia Masarov and Georgi Varkhov are having a liaison, and Boris Gennadyevitch Masarov is aware of the situation.
I hate to terminate at just this place but an urgent phone call involving my work has just come in. Since I have to go by the Embassy, I will post this letter and do my best to carry it up to date tomorrow. Hopef
ully, I can send a full account then. Forgive such a brusque ending.
Love,
Herrick
17
THE URGENT PHONE CALL DID NOT INVOLVE MY WORK BUT WAS FROM Sally. She had to be with me. She had just been to the doctor; she was pregnant.
Lately, I had been attempting to see her less often, but the results had been inconclusive. Now she was pregnant. My poor Sally was honest, or honest enough when pushed to the truth (since I did push her), to admit she had also had intercourse with Sherman in this period. She did not know whose child it was. Although she would swear it was mine.
I felt close to nausea. Soon, I recognized that she felt worse. She would not have an abortion, she told me. She would proceed to have the child—“And,” she said, “let’s hope he doesn’t look too much like you.” If it was a boy, she was certain it would be mine. Her logic seemed unassailable to her. “I want him to look a little like you,” she said.
We sat on the edge of my bed, grasping each other in the way of beggars who hope to draw warmth out of the gnawing hole within themselves. For the first time, we neither took off our clothes nor made love with them on. Even as I pressed her to have an abortion, I knew she would refuse, and found a demon within my inmost worm. The thought that I would be having a child closeted in the home of Sherman Porringer did appeal to a very small part of me. I understood suddenly that evil did not have to be all-consuming, it need touch no more than one rare nerve. I did my best to tell myself that it might be Sherman’s child after all. Then I decided that it did not matter. Sherman, devoted habitué of every good (and low) brothel in Montevideo, deserved whatever he got. It also occurred to me that he could have syphilis (in which case, so could I), although, loyal hog to modern medicine, Porringer was always consuming each new antibiotic that came into the Embassy pharmacy. He was a walking myocinizine of a penisulfamilimide.
Sally departed to the tune of mutual agreements to discuss these matters further. I even thought of the child to come. That finally gave me one fine pang. Some part of me might soon be trapped beneath Porringer’s roof. I consoled myself with the thought that Sally would be a passionate and loving mother, albeit a loud one with a register of shrieks for the spills and slops of childhood.