9

Surprises are foolish things . . . the inconvenience is often considerable.

—JANE AUSTEN

I was a sophomore in high school when I learned beyond the shadow of a doubt that my father was a spy.

There had been other clues along the way besides the pictures that I’d found earlier of my dad with the president. One night, for instance, I was at our dining room table, writing a report on Cuba, when my father happened past. My history textbook was open to a page that featured an oversized picture of a young Castro on it, delivering one of his famous six-hour speeches to a crowd of deliriously excited young people.

My father reached over my shoulder and jabbed Fidel’s photo with his index finger. “That guy’s a world-class SOB,” he said, then stood as if waiting for my reply.

I sighed. For weeks I had put off doing this assignment, and it was due the next day. I didn’t have time for a debate about international relations. “I suppose you’ll tell me you knew him?” I asked, talking more to myself than to my father.

“No,” he said. “But we did stare each other down from opposite ends of a bridge one night.”

He exited the room.

I dropped my pencil and looked up. What on earth was he talking about? A spy exchange? An assassination attempt? And whatever it was, why was my father mixed up in it? Or had he confused the picture of Castro with someone else he knew who wore a thick beard and an olive-green cap and military uniform, and spoke to thousands of cheering university students?

I put this brief interaction into the burgeoning Psychotic Things My Father Says file I kept inside my head, and went back to work.

Another night, we were watching the evening news when an old interview with former president Lyndon Johnson appeared on-screen. As with newspapers, my father talked to the TV as if it were capable of hearing and understanding him.

“Why are you giving this idiot the time of day?” he asked the Sylvania.

“Why get so worked up? He’s dead,” I said, turning to hang my legs over the arm of the chair. “It’s not like he’ll be running for office again.”

He glared at me. “That fool nearly got me killed once, that’s why,” he said, pointing his finger in my direction. He hoisted himself out of his chair with a grunt and exited the room. Why did he always drop bombs like this, then exit the room before I could ask him what he meant? Did he think I could verbally outmaneuver him, tricking him into revealing something that would threaten national security? I was a high school kid, not Bob Woodward.

All the did he or didn’t he? craziness came to an end when I was finally told about my father’s long association with the CIA. It was an unusually warm spring that year, and the humidity hung like milky drapes, blurring the Manhattan skyline just a few miles across Long Island Sound from Greenwich. From the western tip of Tod’s Point, not far from our home, you could barely make out Great Captain’s Island. It looked like the cover illustration of a Hardy Boys mystery novel, a brown shadow floating on the water enshrouded by a stifling velvet mist.

All across town, the signs of summer’s coming were everywhere. The thick blanket of crocuses that annually announced the arrival of spring covered the lawn of Second Congregational Church, and now the eighty-degree weather confirmed that classes would soon be over, friends would be coming home from boarding school and college, and summer would begin.

It was a year of new music that never got old: Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” the Eagles’ classic “Hotel California,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Black and Blue.” New music from an artist named David Bowie and a band called the Ramones could be heard blaring out of cars. There would soon be keg parties somewhere every night, late-night pool hopping at estates in the backcountry, blustery boasts about sexual conquests (most of which were lies), and the yearly ritual of being banned from country club golf courses for driving carts into water hazards. Most of us didn’t have summer jobs, at least not full-time ones, since our parents underwrote our expenses. It’s a good thing Focus on the Family didn’t know about us: James Dobson would’ve had an aneurysm.

I was getting ready to go out when my sister, Caroline, knocked on my bedroom door. She was home visiting for a few days.

“Mom wants to talk to you. She’s in the den,” she said, her voice trailing off as she continued down the hallway.

“Are you serious? Tyler’s waiting for me outside,” I said, throwing dirty clothes around my room in search of a clean T-shirt. Of course, Tyler had already been waiting in our driveway for twenty minutes. I could hear Led Zeppelin’s song “Kashmir” coming from the stereo in his forest-green BMW 2002. We were supposed to meet up with friends at the beach, and we were already late.

I opened my bedroom window and held up five fingers. “I need five more minutes!” Tyler rolled his eyes and slumped his forehead onto the steering wheel in mock despair. I would have added that I would join him as soon as my mother finished dropping a cluster bomb on my psyche, but I was unaware that this was an imminent event.

My mother was sitting in the yellow-and-maroon paisley wingback chair placed perfectly beneath an oil portrait of her as a young American socialite in England wearing a cornflower-blue evening gown. My father had commissioned a well-known portraitist to paint it when we lived in London. On her lap was the previous Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, opened to the crossword page. She was a whiz at blowing through these notoriously difficult brainteasers. Her sister wasn’t so bad either. The two of them would race to complete them and call each other the moment one of them finished to declare victory and compare answers. My mother almost always won. She would do them in ink too. Just for spite.

“What’s up?” I asked, breathless from running down the stairs.

“Darling, I need to speak to you for a few minutes,” she said.

Whenever the word darling was used in our home, it was code for “Steel thyself, child—we are about to have a life-altering conversation.” The last time my mother began a discussion by calling me darling, she informed me that my father wanted me to apply to boarding school at Taft. At the time, the idea made sense. My two brothers were out of college, and my sister was a successful Ford’s model living in Paris. I declined, saying that I had too many friends at Greenwich High School and I didn’t want to repeat my sophomore year. Looking back, I realize that I didn’t go because I didn’t want to leave my mother alone with my father.

“I want you home no later than six thirty, wearing a collared shirt and on your best behavior. We have someone joining us for dinner,” she said, not looking up from the crossword puzzle.

I grabbed the molding on top of the doorframe and halfheartedly tried to do a pull-up. “Who’s coming?” I grunted.

My mother put her pen down and looked up. “Your father is being considered for a job. They want to meet the family.”

I let go of the molding and stood in the doorway. “That’s kind of bizarre. What sort of company does that?”

My mother took off her reading glasses, placed the crossword puzzle on the coffee table, and folded her hands in her lap. “The Central Intelligence Agency,” she replied.

At first I half smiled and waited for my mother to slap her knee and yell, “Gotcha!” Then I realized that my mother wasn’t the “gotcha” kind. I walked into the room and sat on the edge of the sofa across from her. “You’re kidding, right?” I said.

My mother’s face softened, but her tone of voice remained serious. “Your father is being considered for an important position,” she said.

Even at sixteen, I knew that our government was about to make a mistake of biblical proportions. Choosing my father to head up anything, much less a key post in our nation’s intelligence services, would make the Bay of Pigs invasion look like an act of diplomatic genius. Had no one told the people in HR at Langley that my father was an irremediable alcoholic? It’s not like it would have taken much research. Even our Korean dry-cleaning lady knew my father had a drinking problem. Now I was gripped by a new terror. Who did they have carrying the nuclear football—John Belushi?

“Mom, Dad is a stockbroker. Before that he worked for an oil company and before that for a motion-picture company.”

“Well, that’s true.” She paused. “But not the whole truth. Your father has worked on and off for the CIA since before you were born.”

How can I convey how this conversation affected me? Imagine for a moment that your mother sits you down and tells you that you and the rest of your family are actually aliens from a galaxy far, far away, and that a rescue spaceship is coming back to pick you up in the parking lot of Costco at midnight.

Does that help?

I ran my hands through my hair. “But what about those other jobs?”

“They were covers,” she replied.

Cover? Did my mother just use the word cover?

Inside my head I heard the sparking and crackling of wires. Numerous connections were being made in my brain all at once. Had I suspected that my father did something strange on the side? Sure. But almost everything he ever did was out of the ordinary and unexplained. Last-minute business trips that turned into weeks or even months away from home. The days my father said he was going to Manhattan but returned home with matchbooks from hotels or restaurants in Washington left next to car keys and loose change on the side table by the front door.

My father never spoke about friends from the office. We never attended company parties like other families did.

Then of course there was the Mark Harper incident. Mark’s father and my father worked at the same brokerage firm. One night after band practice, Mark drove me home and started asking odd questions.

“Ian, who does your dad work for?” he asked.

I laughed. “You know where my dad works. He works for the same company your dad does.”

“My dad says there’s something screwy about your dad. He says your dad has an office next to his but only shows up once in a while. He hardly has any clients, and he never comes to any of their sales meetings or conferences. Seriously, what does your dad do?”

“You’re crazy, Mark. All I know is, my dad works at the same place your dad does.”

Now I knew that Mark and his dad weren’t so crazy after all.

“Mom, this is nuts,” I said, standing up. “Dad can’t possibly work for the CIA. He can hardly hold down a job,” I said. My mother gave me her death-ray stare. It was unacceptable to talk like this about family, true or not. Outside, Tyler had begun honking the horn. He was probably on the verge of losing consciousness in the heat. I stood up to leave.

My mother stiffened. “You can’t tell Tyler or anybody else about this,” she said.

I threw my hands in the air. “Who would believe me?”

I stormed out the front door and slammed it behind me. As I walked to Tyler’s car, my mind felt disconnected, wafting up into the highest branches of the tall oak that shaded our front yard. From that perspective, I looked down and saw myself get into the car and thought, Does anyone else live this way? Part of me wanted to tell Tyler that something had come up and I couldn’t go to the beach. Then I could drive down to Mianus Park, sit by the river, and try to solve the riddle of my family the way my mother did the New York Times crossword, only I couldn’t do it in ink since the facts kept changing. I took a deep breath and decided to pretend nothing had happened. That’s how we Cron kids survived.

Tyler turned down the stereo. “What the heck were you doing?” he asked.

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” I said, closing the car door. Then I realized it probably wasn’t wise to use that joke anymore.

When I got home from the beach, there was a tan Mercedes 450SL convertible with the top down parked in our driveway.

My heart sank. “My parents are going to kill me,” I said.

“Why?”

“I thought my mom said seven. She must have said six thirty.” I jumped out of Tyler’s car. “Let’s hang out tonight. Come over around eight thirty. Rustin Grant’s parents went to Nantucket. There’s a party at his house,” I said.

“He’s a jerk,” Tyler said.

“He’s a jerk with a half keg.”

Tyler smiled and nodded. “Good point,” he said. “See you at eight thirty.”

I tiptoed up to my room and changed, then ran downstairs and found my parents with . . . well, let’s call him Mr. Smith. They were on our patio, drinking iced tea.

“Hello. I’m Ian,” I said, walking out our back door, extending my hand, and looking Mr. Smith directly in the eyes.

Mr. Smith stood up. “Your parents have been bragging about you. It’s good to have a face to go with your name,” he said, gripping my hand, so tightly that I nearly yelped.

My parents were dead serious about social protocol. My brothers and I had at one time been required to wear jackets and ties to dinner on Sunday nights. Whenever my mother entered the dining room, we were expected to stand and remain standing until she had taken her seat. Before guests arrived, my father drilled us on the proper way to meet people: “Always look people in the eye when you meet them. Make sure your grip is strong—not viselike, but confident. You’ll never offend anyone by calling him sir. Your wingtips should be polished till you can see your reflection in them. Men can tell a lot about other men by the way they take care of their shoes.”

My father believed shoes told you everything you needed to know about a man. If a man’s shoes were scuffed and unkempt, so was his character. If they were waxed and shined, he was morally peerless. He had an electric buffer in his bedroom. It had a long, silver, vertical pole with an on-off switch at the top, and at the bottom two round brushes, one red and one black, on either side. The brushes spun so fast they would burn your hand if you touched them. You used the red brush first, after you applied the Kiwi polish to your shoes, then finished off the shine with the black one. My father didn’t know the names of my friends or teachers, nor over the course of eleven years had he attended more than one or two events at my schools, but the man knew footwear.

Mr. Smith wasn’t wearing a dark suit with a bulge in his jacket where he kept his gun. He didn’t wear dark Ray-Bans, nor did he have a pen in his pocket that looked like it might fire poison darts. He looked like he had stopped by our house on his way home from playing a round of golf at a local country club, which turned out to be the case. I had expected Sean Connery in a hand-tailored Gieves & Hawkes suit, but instead I got a pudgy Arnold Palmer in madras shorts and grass-stained loafers, with a white leather golf glove sticking out of his back pocket. I was disappointed. It was like finding out your parents had hired a clown to be the entertainment at your sixteenth birthday party when you had been expecting the Rolling Stones.

Eventually, I learned that lots of people who work for the CIA were like my dad. Many of the really important guys didn’t have desks at Langley; some didn’t even collect paychecks from the government. Many of them were to be found in the upper echelons of corporate America while serving the Agency at the same time. This was one of those guys. I recognized his name from around town and from the newspapers. He was a major player in corporate America and later became an ambassador to a country significantly more important to our national interests than Togo.

“What kinds of things do you like to do, champ?” he asked. “You play sports?”

I hated being called champ. It’s what adults call you when they don’t think it’s worth the trouble to remember your name.

“No, sir, I spend my time watching TV and stealing car radios to feed my heroin habit.”

I didn’t say this. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

“I’m not much into sports, sir. I enjoy music. I play trumpet in the school orchestra. I have my own band as well,” I said.

“A rock band?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Mr. Smith smiled. It wasn’t the “Wow, it’s so cool that you’re a creative person, and I’m curious to know more about you” smile. It was a chilly “I-would-like-you-so-much-more-if-your-name-was-Bucky-and-you-played-golf” smile. Mr. Smith was a disappointment when I met him. Now he was a disappointment and an idiot.

Mr. Smith cleared his throat and got down to business. “Champ, how would you feel about making a move to another country? After all, you’re just about to start your junior year.”

My heart dropped through my shoes. “Move to another country?” I asked.

Mr. Smith looked at my parents. He crossed his legs and shifted around in his chair like he was sitting on a hot plate.

“The position we’re discussing is headquartered in Eastern Europe,” my father said.

Eastern Europe? I thought about the grainy, black-and-white news footage from the 1950s of people being shot by Soviet border guards while trying to get through barbed-wire barricades, or being electrocuted while trying to climb electric fences to escape Soviet-occupied countries in Eastern Europe. Why would anyone volunteer to go someplace other people were dying to get out of?

I took a deep breath. “I think it would be a great adventure, sir,” I said.

Mr. Smith winked at me and pumped his fist in my direction. “Atta boy,” he said.

My father smiled.

Mr. Smith stood. My father and I joined him. He placed his hands on his lower back and stretched like we’d put him through a workout. “Not as young as I used to be,” he said. “My back can’t take eighteen holes anymore.”

I wanted to suggest that losing thirty pounds might help, but I resisted.

“Jack, you’ve got a wonderful family,” he said.

“Thanks for coming by,” my father said.

“Anne, thanks for the iced tea. It was just what I needed,” he said, taking my mother’s hand.

“We’ll be in touch, Jack,” I heard Mr. Smith say to my father as they walked into the house.

I collapsed into a teak chair with a gray-and-white striped cushion. “Eastern Europe? Are you kidding me?” I said to my mother, then buried my face in my hands.

Two guys with mustaches and aviator glasses, wearing suits and driving a tired-looking black BMW, followed me to and from school for a week. I would pull out of our street, look in my rearview mirror, and see them behind me. They must have thought that driving a BMW would fool me into believing they were locals. But after a few days of the same two men tailing you to and from school, you concluded that they either worked for the government or were perverts. And these guys were way too cool looking to be pedophiles.

On day one, I felt flattered that I was being followed. On days two and three, it started to creep me out. Neither guy smiled or talked. On days four and five, I started to get angry that the federal government was spending money on having two men tail a sixteen-year-old who played trumpet in the marching band. By day seven, I decided that these nice men needed to be given an exhaustive tour of the town. Greenwich is not small. It is 67.2 square miles of winding New England roads and lanes. Even longtime residents come across streets they’ve never heard of before. For two hours I zigzagged from one end of town to the other. It didn’t take long for them to figure out I was onto them, especially when I waved to them in the rearview mirror. The guy in the passenger seat said something to the driver, who just shook his head. They eventually pulled into a gas station, and I continued on.

When I got home, I told my father about being followed.

“They want to make sure you’re not doing things that could be an embarrassment later on. I’ll take care of it,” he said.

I never saw them again.

Several weeks later, my mother told me that my father hadn’t been selected for the post in Eastern Europe. He was diabetic, was a heavy smoker, had suffered two minor strokes, had undergone liver surgery, and did I mention he was an alcoholic? The results of his physical exam suggested that the stress associated with the job would have been too much for him.

Given that medical history, the stress of getting a haircut might have been too much for him.

A few days after my father was passed over for the job at the CIA, I came home late from a party, turned off the lamp on the sideboard in the living room, and turned to tiptoe upstairs to my bedroom. My eyes just caught the tiny, blazing orange dot, like a firefly’s final, yet beautifully courageous effort to shine, through the big bay window that looked over our backyard. I looked closer and made out the dim silhouette of someone standing in the middle of the yard. It was my dad, the tip of his cigarette ablaze as he took a long drag, his face lifted toward the sky. It was well after midnight. I leaned against the frame of the opening to our dining room and watched him from the shadows. A pang of sadness pierced me. I was relieved not to be moving to Eastern Europe, but I was sad for my father. This had been a chance to start over, to recover years of lost self-respect. Maybe he hoped to become someone we could all be proud of. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would have gone to Europe to see him get a second shot.

Usually, I would’ve gone straight to my bedroom, but an instinct, primal and basic to a son’s heart, drew me to be with my father. I quietly opened the screen door and walked down the rose-lined path that led to the open yard.

“Hi,” I said, coming alongside him.

My father turned to me, silvery in the moonlight. He had been crying. The crooked paths of his tears down his cheeks ended at his lower jaw, where they must have pooled for a moment before falling to the earth.

I’d only seen my father cry three times. I was no more than seven or eight the first time. It was a Saturday, and my father had just come home from visiting his brother Kenny at a psychiatric hospital in New York. I had never met Uncle Kenny, nor was he spoken about much in our home. He was like Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird—a mysterious and vaguely ominous figure only my father was allowed to see.

During an invasion in Belgium, Kenny had accidentally parachuted into a tree. His canopy and lines became so entangled in the branches that he wasn’t able to free himself. As he hung on the tree, a passing German soldier stabbed him with his bayonet and left him for dead. Kenny survived the injury to his body, but the wound to his mind wouldn’t close. A few months after returning home, he began wearing his combat boots and sleeping with a knife under his pillow. Soon he started telling people he was Jesus. The family felt they had no alternative but to have him institutionalized.

When he came home from seeing Kenny that Saturday, my father went straight to his bedroom, closed the door, and wept loudly enough that I could hear him from the bottom of the stairs. I asked my mother what had happened. She said that while the two of them were talking, Kenny hiked up his pants and my father saw serial numbers written in black Magic Marker on his brother’s white socks. I was a little boy, so I didn’t understand why this would upset him, but my mother said it had made him very sad.

The second time I saw my dad cry, I was ten. My father took me to see the movie Patton. As I recall, there’s a scene where the camera pulls back and reveals a battlefield strewn with the twisted corpses of dead soldiers. When he realized how graphic and awful the scene was, he cupped his hand and placed it over my eyes. I looked through the gaps between his fingers like blinds on a window and saw him wiping away tears with the back of his hand. As he did, he said, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” until the scene was over. I was an Irish Catholic kid. I knew the difference between taking the Lord’s name in vain and praying. This was praying.

Under the moonlight in our yard was the third time I saw tears on my father’s face.

I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my corduroys. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “I know that job meant a lot to you.”

My father was looking into the sky. “I loved flying on nights like this,” he said, referring to his days as a pilot in the war.

I tried to peer toward the same point in the sky he was looking at. “What was it like up there?” I asked.

He whistled. “The glint of moonlight on the nose of the plane, the glow on the instrument panel, the purr of a Rolls-Royce engine. It was something. Alone in a tiny cockpit, three hundred miles per hour,” he said, like he was talking to himself. “Twenty-five thousand feet above the earth and twenty-five thousand feet closer to God.” His voice trailed off.

There is a photo of my father in a fleece-lined leather flight jacket, wearing a radio headset over his crush cap. He was all business in that picture. It was probably the one they took to send home to your family when you were confirmed killed or reported missing in action.

“Sounds beautiful,” I said.

“I was only a year or two older than you,” he said, shaking his head. “Lost a lot of friends. Still, there’s nothing like flying under a full moon.”

“You sound like you miss it,” I said.

“You start missing things at my age,” he said.

Every so often the door that separated my father and me would crack open and I would scramble to find the words to ease it open a little more, or at least keep it ajar a little longer. This time it was him who nudged it open further.

He exhaled. “Do you know why I didn’t get that job?”

“No, sir,” I lied.

“I wrote checks against my life I couldn’t cover,” he said, looking down at his foot, crushing his cigarette into the grass.

I crossed my arms and thought for a minute. Finally I said, “I don’t know what that means, Dad.”

He smirked. “Don’t write checks against your life that you can’t cover. That’s what it means.”

He put another cigarette between his lips and lit it. I hadn’t realized how smooth the skin on his face was, until the crackling flash of the match illuminated it. He looked like the young man in the leather jacket with the fleece lining, not yet ravaged by the life to which he had resigned himself. He would look older in the morning.

The crack in the door closed. I knew well the awkwardness that followed these moments. It was better to leave.

“Good night, Dad,” I said.

“Good night,” he said.

I trekked across the dewy lawn to the house.

That night I tossed and turned until one of my restless limbs swatted the clock radio off my bedside table, crashing it into the side of my dresser. I wormed over to the edge of my mattress to grab its power cord and drag it back. The oversized numbers illuminated by a faint orange glow read 4:00 a.m. My heart sank; I wanted this fitful night to be over. I slid the clock back onto the table and sat up to gather the sheets that had been kicked into a swirling mass at the end of the bed. I reached even farther to retrieve my quilt that hung over my footboard like a plaid waterfall.

Before resting my head back onto my pillow, I glanced through the window next to my bed that looked out over our backyard.

My father was still there.