30

The Keep

August 20, 1963

Dearest Harry,

I am frightfully concerned about Hugh. Have you ever considered whether he is mad? Or whether I am? Poor Christopher. Sometimes when I rebel against the injunction I have put upon us not to meet nor even to talk on the telephone, I wish you could see Christopher. His eyes are so blue, a brilliant blue, as if blue is the best color for fire. Otherwise, my Christopher is a quiet and gentle child of six, vastly in awe of his prodigiously austere father (who still approaches him as if he were a small and polluted creature in a large wet diaper), but my son is also wary, I fear, of his mother. I think he is waiting for me to scream. Perhaps he will not trust me until I do.

Dear Harry, let me commence again. Hugh has entered some tunnel of absolute logic that simply refuses to look at the world as it might be. I know he has communicated his theory of The Great Disinformation Sino-Soviet Swindle to you and Cal, for he wrote to me that he had you both over for dinner the night after I left. He has been delivering himself of this prodigious tirade all summer, and (worse luck!) has called the tune through June and July as to what the Russians and Chinese would do next. All the same, it is obscene, in my opinion, to postulate that one hundred men are manipulating a world of several billion humans. “You are ignoring the variety of possibility that God chose us to have,” I said to him, but he cannot be reached by argument. Hugh has been waiting all his life for the shade of Dzerzhinsky to pay him a visit. He obviously feels he is the only mortal in CIA who can appreciate KGB on a transcendental scale.

I keep trying to tell him that Russia and China cannot pretend to have a profound schism. Humans are, if nothing else, too perverse to be able to carry out such an orchestrated scheme of such immense and immediate disadvantage to themselves. But I will not deaden your head with the teleological and dialectical models that Hugh elaborates. For the present, it is enough to say that he has been looking to convert any number of critically situated people in the Agency to the new religion and must believe I am one of them, for we have had terrible fights over what he does with his thesis. For example, Hugh was so ill-advised as to use the half hour of private conversation he manages to obtain about once a month with Jack Kennedy in a futile attempt to brief him on the real nature of Sino-Soviet policy. Jack is the last person to hope to convince of such a concept. He has such a shrewd, sardonic sense of human foible and the little traps that spring out of the simplest things. I was watching both men from across the room—the upstairs family parlor, as it happened to be—and I must tell you that Jack was sitting a full foot further away from him at the end than at the beginning.

Did Hugh wake up next morning with a rueful sense of how much he had lost? No! He was in a rage at Jack Kennedy. “That man,” he kept saying, “is superficial. It is a horror to recognize how superficial he is.”

Two days later, Hugh decided that we must break relations with Jack and Bobby.

“Do that, and I may leave you.”

“You, too, are superficial.”

It was the worst. We never speak to each other in that manner. It took forty-eight hours, but Hugh apologized, and I admitted that I could not leave him. Of course, the issue was still before us, nothing resolved. Oh, we explored the gap. It was one of the few times in our marriage when we were able to talk about facets of ourselves that were not at all agreeable to reveal. Hugh confessed to feeling like a fraud when with the Kennedys. “I am always pretending to be more amused than I am. For a time, I thought it was my duty. I might grow close enough to have influence. But these Kennedys never know what I am talking about. They come from an intellectual tradition that is comprehensive, humanistic, and six inches deep. At bottom, there is nothing we can agree upon. If they are servants of any power higher than themselves, it is not the God who is near to me.”

“They are good men,” I told him. “Flawed, and not profound enough for you. But do you recognize how rare it is to have keen and reasonable men with a touch of vision? Not automatic, Hugh.”

“I consider it a vice of the soul,” he said, “to fail to suffer over one’s lack of profundity. Unless one’s brain is dumb from birth, superficiality is a choice made by the self-indulgent. It is painful in the extreme to live with questions rather than with answers, but that is the only honorable intellectual course. I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver’s nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.”

I did not say, “As you have.” I couldn’t. It was true. Hugh has not only to wonder whether his mother is a murderess, but is he responsible for those hundreds—or is it thousands?—of Polish Communists whom Stalin consigned to the pit after Hugh and Allen Dulles played their mean game on Noel Field, yes, Hugh sleeps over the chasm. But I fear that he is mad. He said to me, “I know my theses are true because I verified them last week.”

“However did you accomplish that?” I asked.

“By my trip to the Shawangunks. I wasn’t at all easy about that. I haven’t done any real rock, after all, in quite some time. There was one night before I left when I did not sleep. I had a vision of my end. I almost said good-bye to you. To make it worse, on the morning I arrived at the Gunks, I fell in with a crew of young climbers who were not only good but kept calling me ‘Pop.’ No jibe goes unremarked when you are among good climbers. It is the surest place for measure I have ever encountered. So I had to surpass them. I did. I embarked on a free climb up a 5.8, no ropes.

“I knew that if I kept my head, odds in my favor were better than even—still, you are never more alone than on a free climb. ‘If I can do it,’ I said to myself, ‘then the Soviet-Chinese deception is confirmed. I will take that as a sign.’”

Harry, I wanted to weep. Are all good men as full of folly? For if they are, we may be doomed to fall into every trap that is set for the brave, bold, and bloody blind. Yet, I don’t know. A great deal of me responds to just this inner vision in Hugh.

Well, I did not tell him any of that. I informed him that I had become a swollen, greedy, worldly creature who loved nothing so much as to be invited to dinner at the White House or to an afternoon at Hickory Hill. If he persisted in his threats, I would not be able to accept such invitations for fear that he would insult Bobby or Jack. Before I would risk that, I would not see them. I would also not forgive him. Never. Next morning, I decided to take Christopher up to the Keep.

And here I have been. I am much too angry at Hugh. I could not tell him the real truth about what he is asking me to relinquish. He would not understand that it was life-giving to learn that I was neither a mad genius, nor an overeducated and underexperienced girl, but an attractive woman who had her bit of wit to offer the President and knew he was happy in his heart to talk to her. I believe I had influence on him. I say to myself, “This is hubris,” but do you know, Harry, nothing is more painful to relinquish than hubris itself? I am beginning to comprehend that there is more to the Greeks than their acceptance of the dark verdicts of heaven—there is also our human rage, larger, perhaps, if only for an instant, than the determining hands of the gods.

I love you,

Kittredge

POST SCRIPTUM: If I speak of love, can you feel the full force of its opposite? I could as easily have written: I hate you.

K.