1
ON THAT MORNING FOLLOWING THE BAY OF PIGS, WHEN ALLEN DULLES returned from Puerto Rico with a case of gout, my father was to describe him as looking as if he had died.
I do not know whether Cal’s remark shaped my view, but in the months and years that followed, I always thought of Mr. Dulles as a man who, by some inner measure, was dead, even if it would take seven more years before he passed away, and that event was going to provide a notably unhappy Christmas week for those who were still close to him. I remember that on the evening he took ill I was in Saigon. It was Christmas Eve of 1968 and I was writing a letter to Kittredge who would send me details of his demise in the return mail, and I would hear more of it in the late spring of 1969 at lunch with her in a crab-and-beer hutch of a roadhouse on the Virginia Tidewater. Our affair had by then begun, that affair which was yet to uproot our lives and send tragedy plummeting upon us.
That, however, lay ahead. In the spring of 1969, Christopher was still alive and Harlot most certainly had the full use of his legs. He might be a cuckold, but, not at all witting of that, he remained a priapic prodigy, more ramrod than the lover who had, to a degree, replaced him—that younger lover whose ability to woo Kittredge originated in the felicities of his mouth and lips, offering “delights so rare one knows the rapture of a feather’s fall,” a phrase Kittredge uttered once in passing, and I never dared to ask if it came from a poem I ought to have recognized; but then, I hardly cared—the words were accurate. We adored each other. No two friends could ever have been more dear. Our lovemaking was as close as the little turns of our talk, curving in and out of our mood like the fine and artful ridges of a well-formed ear.
That afternoon in a roadhouse shack, cracking our crab claws with lobster pincers on an unpainted trestle table, she told me again of Allen Dulles’ final and much-delayed death, and “the way it came was as bizarre as his birth.” I had all but forgotten that he was born with a clubfoot, his toes curled into the same black warp as Lord Byron, but she reminded me that his father, the Reverend Allen Macy Dulles, Presbyterian, who had been so liberally advanced in the early 1890s as to preside at the remarriage in full church ceremony of a divorcée, could not, nonetheless, endure the sight of his son’s deformity. Did it speak of caverns of damnation? He had the infant operated upon before baptism would expose him to the gaze of the Foster and Dulles relatives. “Once Hugh told me about Allen’s foot, I have never been able to see him otherwise,” Kittredge remarked. “No other man stood so securely with one foot in the full glory of the sun while the other was stuck in the mucky dark.”
Dulles began to die his last and corporeal death on the evening of the large party he and his wife, Clover, gave on Christmas Eve of 1968, and if the best of Langley’s seventh floor was present, the Montagues, the Helmses, the Angletons, the Tracy Barneses, the Lawrence Houstons, the Jim Hunts, as well as old friends from the State Department and a few chosen foreign dignitaries, it was a tribute, finally, to Dulles’ old reputation that a full seven years after his retirement his guests could find the generosity to come out on the last night of what had been a week, after all, of pre-Christmas drinking, but they were paying him the honor of confirming that Allen Dulles might be off the board, yet his chair had never been filled; they would commemorate him one more time even if he was old, bent, and kept his gouty foot in a carpet slipper. Yes, remarked Kittredge, they had all popped over to salute him, but he did not make an appearance. Only his wife, Clover, was present to receive the guests and lead them over to the drink and the reliably good food—fluttery, once beautiful Clover, slender and as unfit for combat as a violet—“ditsy Clover, never quite there,” Kittredge would say and then remark that Clover was as vague as the desire for vengeance when there is no real desire, only the marks of old matrimonial rancor. Allen had made love to half the women he knew in Washington, and Clover had even done her best to make friends with some of her husband’s more serious mistresses; yet through such bouts and rounds, Clover had exacted only the smallest, most systematic revenge, although it must have jabbed like a spear in Allen’s gouty foot: Clover spent money with the full license of a financial illiterate. The Dulleses were invariably in debt or nibbling on their principal. Each affair produced one more ballroom gown; one too many affairs, and the living room would be redone. They had been married for close to fifty years and she loved him, but she detested him. “Very long marriages develop divinely opposed strata of Alpha and Omega,” Kittredge could not resist adding.
Now, at the party, guests began to notice that Allen had still not come down. Kittredge was perhaps the first to detect his absence. There had not been a meeting, after all, in the eighteen years since Allen first encountered her that he had not flirted like the Devil discovering his own true angel; Kittredge, in turn, loved the hearty promise of all that had never been embarked upon; they loved each other in the wholly enclosed way that will allow love, on occasion, to be perfect. They could count, instantly and dependably, on an improvement in their mood when they encountered each other.
So, Kittredge was the one to notice. Allen was most certainly not to be seen at his own party, and she told Hugh, and insisted, since Clover remained vague about his absence, that Hugh take a reconnaissance of the upper floor of the house. There was Allen in his bed, unconscious, the color of a wax effigy, and in a deep sweat.
Hugh came down to convince Clover that her husband was frightfully ill. “No,” said Clover, “it’s just flu and spells. He gets these things.”
“On the contrary,” said Hugh. “He has to go to a hospital at once.”
Hugh called an ambulance while Kittredge whispered a few words to hasten the drink-up and departure of the guests, and the ambulance came, but Clover almost did not go along, and then rushed out in such a hurry that she forgot to take her coat. Allen proved to be very ill, and Clover was obliged to leave him at the hospital, coming home by herself at midnight. Chilled by the return trip in a poorly heated cab, she ran hot water for a bath, but was feeling so cold that she got into bed while waiting for a full tub, and fell asleep, thereby waking on Christmas morning to discover that the overflow had taken down the sculpted moldings of all the ceilings on the downstairs floor, and her furniture was buried in a blizzard of wet plaster. It would not be known for certain until the next day that the Hartford Insurance Company did not, under the circumstances, consider itself liable for the damage.
“I don’t care,” said Clover, “what it costs to fix it. I just don’t want my husband to find out.”
He did not, said Kittredge. He had died in the hospital.
That may have been his end, but since I had thought of him as near to dead for many years, I pondered his slow extinction. Had his soul died years before his heart and liver and lungs? I hoped not. He had enjoyed so much. Espionage had been his life, and infidelity as well; he had loved them both. Why not? The spy, like the illicit lover, must be capable of existing in two places at once. Even as an actor’s role cannot offer its reality until it is played, so does a lie enter existence by being lived.
If this is a poor epitaph for Allen, let me say that I mourned him devoutly and most enjoyably through all of my illicit lunch with Kittredge in the spring of 1969. But let me stop at this point for I am already eight years ahead of myself.