41

ALLEN DULLES CAME BACK FROM PUERTO RICO EARLY THURSDAY MORNING with a terrible case of gout. To my father, who had gone out to meet him at Andrews Air Force Base, he said, “This is the worst day of my life.”

On that same morning three exile leaders were flying back from Washington to their families in Miami, and I was on board to expedite any problems they might encounter. While it had been deemed discourteous to send our Cubans back alone, none of my superiors wanted the job, so I volunteered one moment before it would have been assigned to me.

It proved a quiet voyage. As heavy as pallbearers, we sat in our Air Force seats, and, on arrival, so soon as I had arranged for transportation, we shook hands gravely to say farewell. It was obvious they had seen enough of the Agency.

Since I was done with this task before noon and could take another Air Force plane back to Washington in the evening, I decided to drive downtown, park the car, and walk about in the April warmth. Crossing NE 2nd Street, I felt an impulse to enter Gesu Catholic Church, a noble armory all of 180 feet wide and not much less than 300 feet in length, a Miami edifice to be certain, offering pink and green walls and golden-yellow chapels. I had gone there several times over the last ten months to service a dead drop in one of the missal books in the fifth pew of the thirty-second row off the southern aisle.

So, yes, I knew Gesu Catholic Church on NE 2nd Street. I had also dropped in there on my own after bouts of love with Modene, and I do not know why, but the church was balm, I found, for sexual depletions of the spirit. I even used to wonder, if in no serious way (since I understood that I was not the least bit inclined), whether one more High Episcopalian might not be tempted just a little to become a Catholic. As an expression of that random impulse, I had even on one occasion asked Modene to meet me in the back of Gesu at the votive candles, a choice that I suspect irritated her. She had not been inside a Catholic church for over a year, and then it had been for another stewardess’s wedding.

Today Gesu was not empty. The last Mass had taken place well over an hour ago, and the next was not due till five in the afternoon, yet the pews were not empty, and everywhere were women praying. I did not want to look at their faces, for many of them were weeping as well. My ears, keened to the private silence I could always hear within the larger solemnity of a church, became aware at last, in the slow befuddled manner of a drunk who has wandered right up to the edge of the sea, that today there was no silence. Lamentations never ceased. Into them poured, as from many smaller vessels, murmurings of sorrow from the throats of separate men and women, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters of the lost Brigade, and the dimensions of the loss came over me then with such power that for this one rare time in my life, I had a vision of the suffering of Christ and thought, yes, such suffering was real, and this is how the mourners must have felt as they waited in the shadow of the cross and heard His agony, and feared that some tenderness of spirit was vanishing from the world forever.

That much I felt, and knew the vision was a self-deception. Under my pain was rage. I did not feel tender or loving, but full of the most terrible anger at I knew not what—was it the President, his advisers, the Agency itself? I had the rage of a man who has just lost his arm to the gears of a machine and does not know whether to blame the engine or the finger in some upstairs office which flicked the switch to turn it all on. So I sat alone in church, a stranger to my own lamentations, and knew that the end of the Bay of Pigs would never end for me since I had no real grief to build a tomb for my lost hopes. I was condemned instead to the black, obsessive rings of one oppressive question: Whose fault was it?

At that moment I saw Modene on the other side of the church. She was sitting by herself at the end of a pew with a black lace handkerchief on her head, and she had knelt in prayer.

I saw it as a sign. A sense of happiness as quick as the light on a blade of grass when the wind turns it to the sun came to me, and I stood up and walked to the back of the church and over to her aisle and up to her pew and sat down beside her. When she turned around, I knew that I would see the same light come into her green eyes that I had seen in the long thin palm of the grass blade, and she would whisper, “Oh, Harry.”

When the woman turned, however, to look at me, it was not Modene. I was staring at a young Cuban woman who styled her hair in the same manner—that was all.

I had not permitted myself to steal near to any feeling of what I had lost, but now it was there. I had lost Modene. “Discúlpame,” I blurted out and stood up and left the church, only to stop at the first pay phone and call the Fontainebleau. The desk clerk did not react to her name, but merely rang her room. When she answered, I discovered that my voice was near to mutinous. The words almost did not come out.

“God, I love you,” I said.

“Oh, Harry.”

“Can I come over?”

“All right,” she said, “maybe you had better come over.”

Her room, when I arrived, proved small enough to suggest she was certainly paying for it herself, and we made love on the carpet on the other side of the door, and from there made our way to bed, and I may have been as happy making love as I had ever been, for when we were done and holding one another, I heard myself say, “Will you marry me?”

It was an amazing remark. I had had no intention of making it, and thought it was desperately wrong so soon as I said it, for she would hate the life of an Agency wife, and, good Lord, she could not even cook, and I had no money unless I broke into the safe of my tightly closed principal and accruing interest—yes, all practical considerations came rushing into my thoughts like travelers arriving too late to catch the train—and were swept away in the big steam and blast of the departure—yes, I wanted to marry her, we would find a way to live together, we were extraordinarily different and wildly connected, we were the very species of cohabitation out of which geniuses are born, and I said again, “Modene, marry me. We’ll be happy. I promise you.”

To my surprise, she did not throw her arms around me and burst into celebratory tears, but broke out weeping instead with sorrow that came out of so deep a place in herself that she could have been the vehicle for all the grief collected in Gesu Catholic Church on NE 2nd Street.

“Oh, darling,” she said, “I can’t,” and left me waiting for her next words long enough to recognize the true horror that sits like a phantom at the root of every lover’s wings. It was coming in on me that the higher I had flown, the more I had been traveling alone, so high on my long-hoarded love that the profound sweet calm in which she received me could have been—now, and much too late, I knew—the whole numb body of grief itself.

“Oh, Harry,” she said, “I tried. I wanted to get near to you again, but I can’t. I just feel so sorry for Jack.”

MOSCOW, MARCH 1984

LIFTING THE WINDOWSHADE, I looked out on the courtyard. The sky, leaden in hue, seemed closer to twilight than dawn. My watch, corrected to Moscow time, said six o’clock. I had read through the night and it was morning. Or had I read through the night and the day? No chambermaid had knocked on the door. Did I not hear her?

Had I slept? I felt no hunger. I must have read and slept, read and slept, sitting in my chair, the converted flashlight in my hand, the filmstrip pushed forward frame by frame upon a white wall. Had I read every page? I did not know that I had to. It is possible I had drowsed, read again, and passed through many a frame without seeing a word. Whether I had read or merely advanced each strip of film, the events had entered my mind. I was not dissimilar to a blind man who is led by a guide down a path he knows well enough to take by himself.

As I looked into the courtyard, the sky was darkening. I had been living in the early years of my professional life for close to twenty hours. Yes, for twenty hours, not eight, I had been at it and nothing untoward had stirred. Was it possible that I had found the sanctuary of a magic circle? The anxiety of my last weeks in New York, that urgent and unendurable anxiety, was quiescent. Perhaps I would read and sleep through this night. In the morning I could return to the coffee shop of the Metropole and have some breakfast. They were bound to serve some sugared and soured species of fruit drink, and there would be black bread, and one sausage looking like a finger that had spent a month in water. There would be coffee that tasted like coffee grounds. Accursed country of whole incapacities! Yes, I would eat my breakfast tomorrow morning and come back here to read about Mongoose, and our further attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Just so far had I advanced in my memoir before that catastrophic night in Maine that overtook my writing and my life, and left me to spend a year in New York writing about no more than that night. Memories wheeled about me like matter from an eruption in space. Such memories would return to me again so soon as I had no more to read.

I was grateful then for each envelope of microfilm still unprojected. For another day at least, I would not have to leave my room. Even as I had found a burrow in the Bronx, I could hole up here. Indeed, the feeble daylight that made its way down the airshaft reminded me of the gloom of the other airshaft in the apartment building on the Grand Concourse.

Yes, I was alone, and I was in Moscow, and I was all right so long as I kept to the narrative. It would move, frame by frame, on the old white plaster wall of this old hulk of a hotel. Leading Bolsheviks had once gathered here in the early years of the Russian Revolution. Now I had three slices of bread saved from dinner nearly twenty-four hours ago, and a full night before me in which to sleep and to read in my small room with its high ceiling deep inside the wings and corridors of the Hotel Metropole.