1

LET ME OFFER THE PRIMARY FACT. I AM A HUBBARD. BRADFORD AND FIdelity Hubbard arrived in Plymouth seven years after the Mayflower and branches of the clan are to be found today in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. To my knowledge, however, I am the first Hubbard to make public admission that the family name is not quite as impressive as our share of lawyers and bankers, doctors and legislators, one Civil War general, several professors, and my grandfather, Smallidge Kimble Hubbard, Headmaster of St. Matthew’s. He remains a legend to this day. At the age of ninety, he still managed on warm summer mornings to get into his single shell and row one hundred strokes out into Blue Hill Bay. Of course, one stroke missed and over he would have gone into cold Maine waters, a near-fatal proposition, but he died in bed. My father, Boardman Kimble Hubbard, known to his friends as Cal (for Carl “Cal” Hubbell the New York Giants pitcher, whom he revered), was equally exceptional, but so divided a man that my wife, Kittredge, used him as a source of private reference for her work The Dual Soul. He was a swashbuckler and yet a deacon; a bold, powerful man who showered in cold water with the same morning certainty that others used to feel while eating eggs and bacon. He went to church each Sunday; he was a prodigious philanderer. During the time shortly after World War II, when J. Edgar Hoover was doing his best to convince Harry Truman that the proposed CIA was not necessary and the FBI could take over all such jobs, my father went on a save-our-outfit mission. He seduced a few key secretaries in the State Department, thereby picking up a flood of in-office secrets which he then passed to Allen Dulles, who promptly sent such product on to the White House with a cover story to protect the secretaries. It certainly helped to convince the White House that we might need a separate Intelligence body. Allen Dulles was fond of Cal Hubbard after that, and said to me once, “Your father won’t admit it, but that month with the secretaries was the best time of his life.”

I loved my father outrageously and thereby had a frightened childhood, worried, strained, and cold within. I wished to be the salt of his salt but my stuff was damp. Much of the time I came near to hating him because he was disappointed in me and I did not hear from him often.

My mother was a different matter. I am the product of a marriage between two people so quintessentially incompatible that they might as well have come from separate planets. Indeed, my parents were soon separated and I spent my boyhood trying to keep two disjointed personalities together.

My mother was small-boned, attractive, and blond, and she lived, but for summer at Southampton, in that social nucleus of New York which is bounded by Fifth Avenue on the west, Park Avenue to the east, the Eighties to the north, and the Sixties to the south. She was a Jewish Princess but the emphasis can be put on the second word. She could not have told you the difference between the Torah and the Talmud. She brought me up to be ignorant of every Jewish subject but one: the names of prominent New York banking houses with Semitic roots. I think my mother thought of Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers as ports of call in some future storm.

It was sufficient that my mother’s great-great-grandfather was a remarkable man named Chaim Silberzweig (who had his name streamlined by immigration officials to Hyman Silverstein). He came over as an immigrant in 1840 and rose from a street peddler to the clear-cut status of a department-store owner. His sons became merchant princes and his grandsons were among the first Jews tolerated in Newport. (The name by now was Silverfield.) If each generation of my mother’s family was more spendthrift than the one before, it was never at a catastrophic rate: My mother was worth about as much in real money as the first Silverstein had left for his immediate heirs—and she possessed about a quarter of his Jewish blood. The Silverfield men married golden gentile women.

That is my mother’s family. Although I saw more of her when young than of my father, it was my paternal grandfather with his single shell that I deemed to be true kin. My mother’s side I tried to ignore. A man on death row once said: “We owe nothing to our parents—we just pass through them.” I felt that way about my mother. From an early age I did not take her seriously. She could be charming and full of interesting follies; she was certainly a lot better than average at giving merry dinner parties. She was also, unfortunately, the owner of a terrible reputation. The Social Register dropped her a few years after Jessica Silverfield Hubbard became an ex-Hubbard, but it took another ten years before her best friends stopped seeing her. The reason, I suspect, was not her succession of affairs so much as her propensity to lie. She was a psychopathic liar, and finally her memory became her only lasting friend. It always told her what she wished to remember about the present and the past. In consequence, you never could know what anyone was up to if you listened to her. I make this point because my mother equipped me, I believe, for counterespionage, a field where we do, after all, attempt to implant errors in our opponent’s knowledge.

At any rate, I can hardly pretend that I ended as any good fraction of a Jew. My only kinship with “that herring baron,” as my mother referred to great-great-grandfather Chaim Silberzweig, is that anti-Semitic slurs made me tense. I might as well have grown up in a ghetto for the size of the fury aroused in me. For I would then feel Jewish. Of course, my idea of feeling Jewish was to be reminded of the strain on people’s faces in the rush hour on the New York subway as they stood prey to harsh and screeching sounds.

I had, however, a privileged boyhood. I went to the Buckley School and was a Knickerbocker Gray until asked to withdraw, a reflection of my serious incompetence at close-order drill. While marching, I would generate headaches of such intensity that I would fail to hear commands.

Of course, the bad reputation of my mother may have been another factor, and I take confirmation for this suspicion by the manner in which my father had me reinstated. As a cold-shower warrior he was not inclined to ask for favors for his progeny. This time, however, he called on people one saves for emergencies. The Hubbards had well-placed friends in New York, and my father took me to meet a few alumni of the Grays. “It’s unfair. They’re blaming the boy for her,” was part of what I overheard, and it must have done the work. I was reinstated, and managed to soldier my way thereafter with fewer headaches, although I never knew one relaxed breath as a cadet.

I suppose people who were happy when young may recall their childhood well. I remember little. Summary disposes of the years and I collect memories by subjects. I can always answer such absurd essay questions as “What was the most important day you spent with a parent?” I would reply: “When my father took me to Twenty-One for lunch on my fifteenth birthday.”

Twenty-One was the perfect place to take me. While my father did not know “one superior hell of a lot”—his phrase—about boys, he knew enough to be standing at the bar waiting for me.

I cannot swear in all confidence that the downstairs dining room has not been altered since 1948, but I might bet on the possibility. I think the same model toys are still suspended from the low dark ceiling, same steamships, 1915 Spad biplanes, railroad locomotives, and trolley cars. The little coupe with its rumble seat and spare tire in the white slipcover is still above the bar. Above the bottle cabinet hang the same hunting horns, cutlasses, elephant tusks, and one pair of boxing gloves small enough to fit an infant. My father told me that Jack Dempsey gave those gloves to the owner of Twenty-One, Jack Kriendler, and while I would hope the story is true, my father did not mind polishing legends of his own devising. I think he had concluded that good feeling was always in danger of being wiped out; ergo, he gilded the stories he told. He had, by the way, a degree of resemblance to Ernest Hemingway—he was at least equally vivid in presence—and he cultivated the same large dark mustache. He also had Hemingway’s build. Sporting relatively spindly legs for a man of strength, he often said, “I might have made first team All-American fullback if not for my pins.” He also had a great barrel of a chest which bore a distinct likeness to the antique bronze cash register on the bar at Twenty-One. My father’s heart beat with pride.

Of course, the pride was for himself. If I state that my father was vain and self-centered, I do not wish to demean him. While he carried the complacent look of a successful college athlete, his fundamental relation to others was a reflection of his concealed but endless negotiations with himself: The two halves of his soul were far apart. The deacon and the swashbuckler had miles to walk each night before they slept; I think his strength was that he had managed to find some inner cooperation between these disparate halves. When the headmaster’s son, impacted with Cromwellian rectitude, was able to hook up with a venture that the conquistador could also applaud, well, the energy poured forth. My father, while not uncommonly reflective, did say once: “When your best and worst motive agree on the same action, watch the juices flow.”

On this day in December 1948, my father was dressed in what I would come to call his “battle tweeds.” That once had been a suit of light brown Scotch tweed (light in hue, but as heavy and hard to the touch as a horse-blanket). He bought his suits from Jones, Chalk and Dawson on Savile Row, and they knew how to outfit a horseman. I had seen this same suit on him for ten years. By now, patched with leather at elbows and cuffs, and become more malleable, it could still stand on its legs when taken off. It fit him, however, with a comfortable surround of dignity to suggest that these two materials—his manly flesh and that iron cloth—had lived together long enough to share a few virtues. In fact, he no longer owned a business suit and so had nothing more formal to wear until you got to his black velvet dinner jacket. Needless to say, on such nightly occasions, he was a lady’s vision. “Oh, Cal,” they would say of him, “Cal’s divine. If only he didn’t drink so much.”

I think my father would have broken relations with any friend who dared to suggest Alcoholics Anonymous was waiting for him, and he could have been right. His contention was that he drank no more than Winston Churchill and held it as well. He never got drunk. That is to say, his speech never slurred and he never staggered, but he did move through moods powerful enough to alter the electromagnetic fields through which he passed. It is a way of remarking that he had charisma. He had no more than to say “Bartender” in a quiet tone, and the man, if his back were turned, and had never heard my father’s voice before, would nonetheless spring around as if starting a new page in his bar accounts. My father’s emotional temperature seemed to rise and fall as he drank; his eyes, by the shift of the hour, could blaze with heat, or install you in a morgue; his voice would vibrate into your feet. Doubtless I exaggerate, but he was my father, and I saw him so seldom.

On this day, as I came in, he and his battle tweeds were sheeted in anger. For practical purposes, I was not unlike one of those little wives who are married to huge sea captains: I could feel his thoughts. He had been busy on some serious job before lunch, and had nearly cracked its difficulty; now he was putting down his first martini with all the discontent of interrupted concentration. I could imagine how he said to some assistant, “Damn, I’ve got to see my son for lunch.”

To make matters worse, I was late. Five minutes late. When it came to promptitude, he was always on the mark, a headmaster’s son. Now, waiting for me, he had had time to finish the first drink and review in his mind an unpromising list of topics about which we might converse. The sad truth is that he invariably gave off gloom on those rare occasions when we were alone with each other. He did not know what to talk to me about, and I, on my side, filled with my mother’s adjurations, injunctions, and bitch-fury that I was going to see a man who was able to live in whole comfort apart from her, was jammed up. “Get him to talk about your education,” she’d say before I was out the door. “He’s got to pay for it, or I’ll take him to law. Tell him that.” Yes, I would be in great haste to tell him. “Watch out for his charm. It’s as real as a snake,” and, as I was going out the door, “Tell him I said hello—no, don’t you tell him that.”

I gave a nod with one quick bob of my head and got onto the barstool next to him. Naturally, I scrunched my larger testicle by too abruptly lowering my butt to the seat. Then I sat there through the small wave of discomfort this brought on and tried to study the signs above the bar.

YO, HO, HO, AND A BOTTLE OF RUM, said one old wooden placard.

21 WEST ZWEI UND FÜNFZIGSTE STRASSE, said a painted street sign.

“Oh,” I said, “is that German, Dad?”

“Fifty-second Street,” he told me.

We were silent.

“How do you like St. Matthew’s?” he said.

“Okay.”

“Better than Buckley?”

“It’s tougher.”

“You’re not going to flunk out?”

“No, I get B’s.”

“Well, try to get A’s. Hubbards are expected to get A’s at St. Matt’s.”

We were silent.

I began to look at another sign hanging over the bar. It obviously enjoyed its misspelling. CLOSE SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS, it said.

“I’ve had one superior hell of a lot of work lately,” he said.

“I guess,” I said.

We were silent.

His gloom was like the throttled sentiments of a German shepherd on a leash. I think I was something of a skinny version of him, but I believe he always saw every bit of resemblance I had to my mother during the first five minutes of every one of our meetings, and I even came to understand over the years that she might have done him a real damage. There was probably never a human he wished to kill more with his bare hands than this ex-wife; of course, he had had to forgo such pleasure. Blocked imperatives brought my father that much nearer to stroke.

Now he said, “How’s your leg?”

“Oh, it’s recovered. It’s been all right for years.”

“I bet it’s still stiff.”

“No, it’s all right.”

He shook his head. “I think you had your trouble with the Grays because of that leg.”

“Dad, I was just no good at close-order drill.” Silence. “But I got better.” The silence made me feel as if I were trying to push a boat off the shore and it was too heavy for me.

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t know if I can get A’s at St. Matthew’s. They think I’m dyslexic.”

He nodded slowly as if not unprepared for such news. “How bad is it?” he asked.

“I can read all right, but I never know when I’m going to reverse numbers.”

“I had that trouble.” He nodded. “Back on Wall Street before the war, I used to live in fear that one bright morning my touch of dyslexia would make the all-time mistake in the firm. Somehow, it never did.” He winked. “You need a good secretary to take care of those things.” He clapped me on the back. “One more lemonade?”

“No.”

“I’ll have another martini,” he said to the bartender. Then he turned back to me. I still remember the bartender’s choice of a keen or sour look. (Keen when serving gentlemen; sour for the tourists.) “Look,” my father said, “dyslexia is an asset as well as a loss. A lot of good people tend to have dyslexia.”

“They do?” Over the past term a few boys at school had taken to calling me Retardo.

“No question.” He put his eyes on me. “About ten years ago in Kenya we were going for leopards. Sure enough, we found one, and it charged. I’ve hit elephants coming at me, and lions and water buffalo. You hold your ground, look for a vulnerable area in the crosshairs, then squeeze off your shot. If you can steer between the collywobbles, it’s as easy as telling it to you now. Don’t panic and you have yourself a lion. Or an elephant. It’s not even a feat. Just a measure of inner discipline. But a leopard is different. I couldn’t believe what I saw. All the while it was charging it kept leaping left to right and back again, but so fast I thought I was watching a movie with pieces missing. You just couldn’t get your crosshairs on any part of that leopard. So I took him from the hip. At twenty yards. First shot. Even our guide was impressed. He was one of those Scotsmen who sneer at all and anything American, but he called me a born hunter. Later I figured it out for myself: I was a good shot because of my dyslexia. You see, if you show me 1-2-3-4, I tend to read it as 1-4-2-3 or 1-3-4-2. I suppose I see like an animal. I don’t read like some slave—yessir, boss, I’m following you, yessir, 1-2-3-4—no, I look at what’s near me and what’s in the distance and only then do I shift to the middle ground. In and out, back and forth. That’s a hunter’s way of looking. If you have a touch of dyslexia, that could mean you’re a born hunter.”

He gave my midriff a short chop with his elbow. It proffered enough weight to suggest what a real blow would do.

“How’s your leg?” he asked again.

“Good,” I said.

“Have you tried one-legged knee raises?”

The last time we had been to lunch, eighteen months ago, he had prescribed such an exercise.

“I’ve tried it.”

“How many can you do?”

“One or two.” I was lying.

“If you’re really working at it, you would show more progress.”

“Yessir.”

I could feel his wrath commencing. It began slowly, like the first stirring of water in a kettle. This time, however, I could also sense the effort to pull back his annoyance, and that puzzled me. I could not recollect when he had treated me to such courtesy before.

“I was thinking this morning,” he said, “of your ski accident. You were good that day.”

“I’m glad I was,” I said.

We were silent again, but this time it was a pause we could inhabit. He liked to recall my accident. I believe it was the only occasion on which he ever formed a good opinion of me.

When I was seven, I had been picked up at school one Friday in January by my mother’s chauffeur and driven to Grand Central Station. On this day, my father and I were going to board the weekend special to Pittsfield, Mass., where we would ski at a place called Bousquet’s. How the great echoes of Grand Central matched the reverberation of my heart! I had never been skiing and therefore believed I would be destroyed next day flying off a ski jump.

Naturally, I was taken over no such towering jump. I was put instead on a pair of rented wooden slats, and after a set of near-fiascoes on the long rope-tow up, attempted to follow my father down. My father had a serviceable stem turn which was all you needed to claim a few yodeling privileges in the Northeast back in 1940. (People who could do a parallel christie were as rare then as tightrope artists.) I, of course, as a beginner, had no stem turn, only the impromptu move of falling to either side when my snow plow got going too fast. Some spills were easy, some were knockouts. I began to seek the fall before I needed to. Soon, my father was shouting at me. In those days, whether riding, swimming, sailing, or on this day, skiing, he lost his temper just so quickly as first returns made it evident that I was without natural ability. Natural ability was closer to God. It meant you were wellborn. Bantu blacks in Africa, I came to learn in CIA, believed that a chieftain should enrich himself and have beautiful wives. That was the best way to know God was well disposed toward you. My father shared this view. Natural ability was bestowed on the deserving. Lack of natural ability spoke of something smelly at the roots. The clumsy, the stupid, and the slack were fodder for the devil. It is not always a fashionable view today, but I have pondered it all my life. I can wake up in the middle of the night thinking, What if my father was right?

Soon he grew tired of waiting for me to get up.

“Just do your best to follow,” he said, and was off, stopping long enough to call back, “Turn when I turn.”

I lost him at once. We were going along a lateral trail that went up and down through the woods. Going uphill, I did not know how to herringbone. I kept getting farther behind. When I came to the top of one rise and saw that the next descent was a full-fledged plunge followed by an abrupt rise, and my father was nowhere in sight, I decided to go straight down in the hope such a schuss would carry me a good way up. Then he would not have to wait too long while I climbed. Down I went, my skis in a wobbly parallel, and almost at once was moving twice as fast as I had ever traveled before. When I lost my nerve and tried to switch to a snowplow, my skis crossed, dug into the soft snow, and I wrenched over in a somersault. There was no release to the bindings in those days. Your feet stayed in the skis. I broke my right tibia.

One did not know that at first. One only knew more pain than ever felt before. Somewhere in the distance my father was bellowing, “Where are you?” It was late in the afternoon and his voice echoed through the hills. No other skiers were coming by. It started to snow and I felt as if I were in the last reel of a movie about Alaska; soon the snow would cover all trace of me. My father’s roars were, in this silence, comforting.

He came climbing back, angry as only a man with a powerful, sun-wrinkled neck can be angry. “Will you rise to your feet, you quitter,” he cried out. “Stand up and ski.”

I was more afraid of him than the five oceans of pain. I tried to get up. Something, however, was wrong. At a certain point, my will was taken away from me completely. My leg felt amputated.

“I can’t, sir,” I said, and fell back.

Then he recognized there might be more than character at issue here. He took off his ski jacket, wrapped me in it, and went down the mountain to the Red Cross hut.

Later, in the winter twilight, after the ski patrol had put on a temporary splint and worked me down to the base in a sled, I was put in the back of a small truck, given a modest dose of morphine, and carried over some frozen roads to the hospital in Pittsfield. It was one hell of a ride. By now, well into the spirit of the morphine, the pain still rasped like a rough-toothed saw into my broken bone each time we hit an evil bump (which was every fifty yards). The drug enabled me, however, to play a kind of game. Since the shock from every bump shivered through my teeth, the game became the art of not making a sound. I lay there on the floor of the truck with a wadded ski jacket under my head and another beneath my leg, and must have looked like an epileptic: My father kept wiping froth from my mouth.

I made, however, no sound. After a time, the magnitude of my personal venture began to speak to him for he took my hand and concentrated upon it. I could feel him trying to draw the pain from my body into his, and this concern ennobled me. I felt they could tear my leg off and I might still make no outcry.

He spoke: “Your father, Cal Hubbard, is a fathead.” That may be the only occasion in his life when he used the word in reference to himself. In our family, fathead was about the worst expression you could use for another person.

“No, sir,” I said. I was afraid to speak for fear that the groans would begin, yet I also knew the next speech was one of the most important I would ever make. For a few moments I twisted through falls of nausea—I must have been near to fainting—but the road became level for a little while, and I succeeded in finding my voice. “No, sir,” I said, “my father, Cal Hubbard, is not a fathead.”

It was the only time I ever saw tears in his eyes.

“Well, you silly goat,” he said, “you’re not the worst kid, are you?”

If we had crashed at that moment I could have died in a happy state. But I came back to New York in a cast two days later—my mother sent chauffeur and limousine up for me—and a second hell began. The part of me that was ready to go through a meat grinder for my father could hardly have been the poor seven-year-old boy who sat home in New York in his Fifth Avenue apartment with a compound fracture surrounded by a plaster cast that itched like the gates of sin. The second fellow seethed with complaints.

I could not move. I had to be carried. I went into panic at the thought of using crutches. I was certain I would fall and break the leg again. The cast began to stink. In the second week the doctor had to cut the plaster off, clean my infection, and encase me again. I mention all this because it also cut off my father’s love affair with me nearly as soon as it had begun. When he came over to visit—after an understanding with my mother that she would not be there—he would be obliged to read the notes she left—“You broke his leg, now teach him to move.”

Allowing for his small patience, he finally succeeded in getting me up on crutches, and the leg eventually mended, just a bit crooked, but it took too long. We were back in the land of paternal disillusion. Besides, he had more to think about than me. He was happily remarried to a tall, Junoesque woman absolutely his own size, and she had given him twin boys. They were three years old when I was seven, and you could bounce them on the floor. Their nicknames—I make no joke—were Rough and Tough. Rough Hubbard and Tough Hubbard. Actually, they were Roque Baird Hubbard and Toby Bolland Hubbard, my father’s second wife being Mary Bolland Baird, but rough and tough they promised to be, and my father adored them.

Occasionally I would visit the new wife. (They had been married four years but I still thought of her as the new wife.) It was just a trip of a few blocks up the winter splendor of Fifth Avenue, that is to say, an education in the elegance of gray. The apartment houses were lilac-gray, and Central Park showed field-gray meadows in winter and mole-gray trees.

Since finding myself on crutches, I no longer ventured from my apartment house. In one of the later weeks of convalescence, however, I had a good day, and my limb did not ache in its cast. By afternoon, I was restless and ready for adventure. I not only went down to the lobby and talked to the doorman but, on impulse, set out to circumnavigate the block. It was then the idea came to me to visit my stepmother. She was not only large but hearty, and succeeded at times in making me think she liked me; she would certainly tell my father that I had visited, and he would be pleased I was mastering the crutches. So I decided to attempt those five blocks uptown from 73rd to 78th Street and immediately went through a small palsy the first time I put my crutches out from the curb down six inches to the gutter. This small step accomplished, however, I began to swing along, and by the time I reached their apartment house, I was most talkative with the elevator man and pleased with how much pluck I was showing for a seven-year-old.

At their door a new maid answered. She was Scandinavian and hardly spoke English, but I gathered that the nurse was out with the twins and “the Madame” was in her room. After some confusion the new girl let me in and I sat on a couch, bored by the wan afternoon sun as it reflected on the pale silk colors of the living room.

It never occurred to me that my father was home. Later, much later, I would gather that this was about the time he had given up his broker’s slot in Merrill Lynch to volunteer for the Royal Canadian Air Force. To celebrate, he was taking the afternoon off. I, however, thought Mary Bolland Baird Hubbard was alone and reading, and might be as bored as I was. So I hopped across the living room and down the hall to their bedroom, making little sound on the pile carpet, and then, without taking the time to listen—all I knew was that I did not wish to return home without having spoken to someone, but would certainly lose my nerve if I waited at the door—I turned the knob, and, to keep my balance, took two big hops forward on my crutches. The sight that received me was my father’s naked back, then hers. They were both pretty big. They were rolling around on the floor, their bodies plastered end to end, their mouths on each other’s—if I say things, it’s for want of remembering the word I had then. Somehow I had an idea what they were doing. Importuning sounds came out of them, full of gusto, that unforgettable cry which lands somewhere between whooping and whimpering.

I was paralyzed for the time it took to take it all in; then I tried to escape. They were so deep in their burrow they did not even see me, not for the first instant, the second, nor even the third as I backed my way to the door. Right then, they looked up. I was nailed to the door frame. They stared at me, and I stared at them, and I realized they did not know for how long I had been studying them. For heavens, how long? “Get out of here, you dodo,” my father roared, and the worst of it was that I fled so quickly on the crutches that they thumped like ghost-bumpers on the carpet while I vaulted down the hall. I think it was this sound, the thump-thump of a cripple, that must have stayed in her ears. Mary was a nice woman, but she was much too proper to be photographed by anyone’s memory in such a position, let alone a slightly creepy stepson. None of us ever spoke of it again; none of us forgot it. I remember that in the time it took to reach my mother’s apartment, I generated a two-ton headache, and it was the first of a chronic run of migraines. This pressure had been paying irregular visits from that day. Right now, here at lunch, I could feel it on the edge of my temples, ready to strike.

Now, I cannot say that these headaches were responsible for the ongoing fantasy of my childhood, but it is true that I began to spend many an afternoon after school alone in my room making drawings of an underground city. It was, as I look back on it, a squalid place. Beneath the ground in a set of excavations, I penciled in clubhouses, tunnels, game rooms, all connected by secret passages. There was an automat, a gym, and a pool. I giggled at how the pool would be full of urine, and installed torture rooms whose guards had Oriental faces. (I could draw slant eyes.) It was a warren of monstrous and cloacal turns, but it brought peace to my young mind.

“How are your headaches?” asked my father at the bar at Twenty-One.

“No worse,” I said.

“But they don’t get better?”

“They don’t, I guess.”

“I’d like to reach in and pull out what’s bothering you,” he said. It was not a sentimental remark so much as a surgeon’s impulse.

I shifted the subject to Rough and Tough. They were now Knickerbocker Grays, and doing well, he told me. I was tall for my age, almost as tall as my father, but they gave every promise of outstripping me. As he spoke, I knew there was some other matter on his mind.

It was his inclination to pass me tidbits about his work. This presented curious debits to his duty. In his occupation, you were supposed to encapsulate your working life apart from your family. On the other hand, he had formed his reflexes for security, such as they were, working for the OSS in Europe during World War II. Nobody he knew then had been all that cautious. Today’s secret was next week’s headline, and it was not uncommon to give a hint of what one was up to when trying to charm a lady. Next day, after all, an airplane was going to parachute you into a strange place. If the lady were made aware of this, well, she might feel less absolutely loyal to her husband (also away at war).

Besides, he wanted to fill me in. If he was not an attentive parent, he was at least a romantic father. Moreover, he was a team man. He was in the Company and his sons ought to be prepared as well: While Rough and Tough were a foregone conclusion, he could hardly swear on me.

“I’m all riled up today,” said my father. “One of our agents in Syria got shot on a stupid business.”

“Was he a friend of yours?” I asked.

“Neither here nor there,” he replied.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m just so goddamn mad. This fellow was asked to obtain us a piece of paper that wasn’t really needed.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll tell you, darn it all. You keep this to yourself.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“One of those playboys at State decided to be ambitious. He’s doing his Ph.D. thesis on Syria over at Georgetown. So he wanted to present a couple of hard-to-get details that nobody else has. He put through a request to us. Officially. From State. Could we furnish the poop? Well, we’re green. You could grow vegetables with what they scrape off our ignorance. We try to oblige. So we put a first-rate Syrian agent on it, and there you are—lost a crack operator because he was asked to reach for the jam at the wrong time.”

“What’ll happen to the fellow in the State Department?”

“Nothing much. Maybe we’ll slow down a promotion for that idiot by talking to a guy or two at State, but it’s horrifying, isn’t it? Our man loses his life because somebody needs a footnote for his Ph.D. thesis.”

“I thought you looked upset.”

“No,” he said quickly, “it’s not that.” Then he hoisted his martini, stepped off the stool, raised his hand as if calling a cab, and the captain was there to bring us to our table which was, I already knew, in his favored location against the rear wall. There my father placed me with my back to the room. At the table to my left were two men with white hair and red faces who looked like they might have gout, and on the right was a blond woman with a small black hat supporting a long black feather. She was wearing pearls on a black dress and had long white gloves. Sitting across from her was a man in a pencil-thick pinstripe. I mention these details to show a facet of my father: He was able, in the course of sitting down, to nod to the two gentlemen with gout as if, socially speaking, there was no reason why not to speak to one another, and freeze the man in the pencil-stripe suit for the width of his stripes while indicating to the blond lady in black that she was blue ribbon for blond ladies in black. My father had a gleam in his eye at such times that made me think of the Casbah. I always supposed a Levantine would come up to you in the Casbah and give a flash of what he had in his hand. There!—a diamond peeked out. That made me recollect Cal Hubbard rolling with Mary Baird on the carpeted floor, which in turn caused me to look down quickly at my plate.

“Herrick, I haven’t seen a superior hell of a lot of you lately, have I?” he asked, unfolding his napkin, and sizing up the room. I wasn’t too happy being placed with my back to everyone, but then he gave a wink as if to suggest that he had his reasons. It was incumbent on his occupation, as he once explained, that he be able to eye a joint. I think he may have picked up the phrase from Dashiell Hammett, with whom he used to drink before word went around that Hammett was a Communist. Then, since he considered Hammett smarter than himself, he gave up the acquaintance. A loss. According to my father, he and Dashiell Hammett could each put down three double Scotches in an hour.

“Well, there’s a reason I haven’t seen a lot of you, Rick.” He was the only one to call me Rick, rather than Harry, for Herrick. “I have been traveling an unconscionable amount.” This was said for the blond woman as much as for me. “They don’t know yet whether I’ll be one of the linchpins in Europe or the Far East.”

Now the man in the pencil-stripe suit began his counteroffensive. He must have put a curve on what he said, for the woman gave a low intimate laugh. In response, my father leaned toward me across the table and whispered, “They’ve given OPC the covert operations.”

“What’s covert?” I whispered back.

“The real stuff. None of that counterespionage where you drink out of my teacup and I drink out of yours. This is war. Without declaring it.” He raised his voice sufficiently for the woman to hear the last two phrases, then dropped back to a murmur as if the best way to divide her attention was to insinuate himself in and out of her hearing.

“Our charter calls for economic warfare,” he said in a highly shaped whisper, “plus underground resistance groups.” Loudly: “You saw what we did in the Italian elections.”

“Yessir.”

He enjoyed the yessir. I had broadcast it for the blond lady.

“If not for our little operation, the Communists would have taken over Italy,” he now stated. “They give the credit to the Marshall Plan but that’s wrong. We won in Italy in spite of the money that was thrown around.”

“We did?”

“Count on it. You have to take into account the Italian ego. They’re an odd people. Half sharp, half meatball.”

By the way in which the man in the pencil-stripe reacted, I suspected he was Italian. If my father sensed that, he gave no sign. “You see, the Romans themselves are civilized. Minds quick as stilettos. But the Italian peasant remains as backward as a Filipino. In consequence, you mustn’t try to motivate their self-interest too crudely. Self-esteem means more to them than filling their bellies. They’re always poor, so they can live with hunger, but they don’t want to lose their honor. Those Italians really wanted to stand up to us. They would have derived more pleasure spitting in our face than sucking up to us with their phony gratitude. Nothing personal. The Italians are like that. If Communism ever takes over in Italy, those Red wops will drive the Soviets just as crazy as they’re driving us.”

I was feeling the wrath of the Italian man next to me. “Dad, if that’s what you think,” I blurted out, scurrying to save the peace, “why not let the Italians choose their path? They’re an ancient and civilized people.”

My father had to ponder this. Allen Dulles may have said that the happiest week of Cal Hubbard’s life was spent seducing secretaries, but I expect no period could have been equal to the year he spent with the partisans. If Italy had gone Communist in 1948, my father would probably have gone right over to form an anti-Communist underground. In recesses of his brain so secret he could not even reach them in his dreams, I believe he would have enjoyed a Communist takeover of America. What an American underground he could have helped to set up then! The thought of dynamite Americans waging an underground war up and down our countryside against an oppressive enemy would have been a tonic to keep him young forever.

So my father may have been on the edge of saying “You bet,” but he didn’t. Instead, he answered dutifully, “Of course, we can’t afford to let the Russians in. Who knows? Those guineas might get along with the Russians.”

We had an interruption here. The man next to us suddenly called out for his check, and my father immediately stopped our conversation in order to look appreciatively at the blond lady.

“Weren’t we introduced at Forest Hills this fall?” he said to her.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” she answered in a muffled voice.

“Please tell me your name,” said my father, “and I’m certain I’ll recollect where it was.”

“Think of nowhere,” said the man in the striped suit.

“Are you trying to give directions?” asked my father.

“I heard of people,” said the man, “who lose their nose by poking it around the corner.”

“Al!” said the blond lady.

Having stood up abruptly, Al was now putting money on the table to cover his tab. He dropped each new bill like a dealer snapping cards, signally upset that one of the players had called for another deck. “I’ve heard of people,” repeated Al, and now he looked sideways at my father, “who stepped off the curb and broke a leg.”

Into my father’s eyes came that diamond of the Casbah. He, too, stood up. They each took a long look at the other. “Buster,” said my father in a happy, husky voice, “don’t get tough!”

It was his happiness that did the job. Al thought of replying, then thought better. His jaw did not work. He folded his napkin as if folding his tent, looked for the opportunity to throw a sneak punch, did not find what he was looking for, and gave his arm to the blond lady. They left. My father grinned. If he couldn’t have her, he had at least broken a couple of eggs.

Now my father began to talk a good deal. Any victory over a stranger was kin to triumph over rival hordes. Al was out there with the Russians. “There are six million soldiers in the Red Army,” said my father, “and only a million of us. That’s counting NATO. The Russians could take all of Europe in two months. It’s been true for the last three years.”

“Then why haven’t they?” I asked. “Dad, I read that twenty million Russians were killed in the war. Why would they want to start one now?”

He finished his drink. “Damned if I know.” As the waiter sprang for the refill, my father leaned forward: “I’ll tell you why. Communism is an itch. What does that mean, to have an itch? Your body is out of whack. Little things take on large proportions. That’s Communism. A century ago, everybody had their place. If you were a poor man, God judged you as such, a poor man. He had compassion. A rich man had to pass more severe standards. As a result, there was peace between the classes. But materialism came down on us. Materialism propagated the idea that the world is nothing but a machine. If that’s true, then it’s every man’s right to improve his piece of the machine. That’s the logic of atheism. So, now everybody’s ears are being pounded to bits, and nothing tastes right anymore. Everybody is too tense, and God is an abstraction. You can’t enjoy your own land so you begin to covet the next guy’s country.”

He took a long, thoughtful swallow from his drink. My father could always bring a cliché to life. Many have been described as taking long thoughtful swallows of their drinks, but my father drank like an Irishman. He took it for granted that real and true spirits were entering with the fire of the liquor. He inhaled the animation around him and could breathe back his own excitement. Emotion must never be wasted. “Rick, keep clear on one matter. There’s a huge war brewing. These Communists are insatiable. We treated them as friends during the war and they’ll never get over that. When you’re older, you may have the bad luck to get into an affair with an ugly woman who happens to enjoy what you offer but has never been on daily terms with a man. She’s too ugly. Fellow, you’re going to have trouble on your hands. Before long, she’s insatiable. You’ve given the taste of the forbidden to her. That’s the Russians. They got ahold of Eastern Europe; now they want it all.”

He did not halt long at this place. “No,” he said, “it’s not a good analogy. It’s really worse than that. We’re in an ultimate struggle with the Russians, and that means we have to use everything. Not only the kitchen sink, but the vermin that come with the sink.”

My father was interrupted at this moment by the two white-haired gentlemen seated on his right. They were getting up to leave and one said, “I couldn’t help hearing what you were explaining to your son, and I wish to say, couldn’t agree more. Those Russians want to crack our shell and get all the good meat. Don’t let them.”

“No, sir,” said my father, “not one knuckle will they get,” and he stood up on that remark. The rich compact that comes from a common marrow guarded us all. Honor, adventure, and sufficient income was in the air of Twenty-One. Even I could prosper there.

When we sat down again, my father said, “Keep this most strictly to yourself. I’m going to trust you with a weighty secret. Hitler used to say, ‘Bolshevism is poison.’ That idea is not to be rejected out of hand just because Adolf said it. Hitler was so awful that he ruined the attack on Bolshevism for all of us. But the fundamental idea is right. Bolshevism is poison. We’ve even come to the point”—and here he dropped his voice to the lowest whisper of the lunch—“where we’ve got to employ a few of those old Nazis to fight the Reds.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “There’s hardly a choice. The OSO is not all that competent. We were supposed to put agents in place all over the Iron Curtain countries and couldn’t even seed it with birdfeed. Every time we built a network, we discovered the Russians were running it. The great Russian bear can move his armies anywhere behind the Iron Curtain, and we don’t have an effective alert system. If, two years ago, the Soviets had wanted to march across Europe, they could have. We would have gotten out of bed in the morning to hear their tanks in the streets. No reliable intelligence. That’s fearful. How would you like to live blindfolded?”

“No good, I guess.”

“It came down to this: We had to use a Nazi general. I call him General Microfilm. I can’t reveal his name. He was top intelligence man for the Germans on the Russian front. He would weed out the most promising of the Russians captured by the Germans and manage to infiltrate them back behind Russian lines. For a while, they honeycombed the Red Army, even worked a few of their boys into the Kremlin. Just before the war ended, this general, prior to destroying his files, buried fifty steel boxes somewhere in Bavaria. They were the microfilm copies of his files. A voluminous product. We needed it. Now he’s dealing with us. He has built up new networks all through East Germany, and there isn’t much those East German Communists don’t tell his West German agents about what the Reds are planning to do next in Eastern Europe. This general may be an ex-Nazi, but, like it or not, he’s invaluable. That’s what my business is about. You work with the next-to-worst in order to defeat the worst. Could you do that?”

“Maybe.”

“You might be too liberal, Herrick. Liberals refuse to look at the whole animal. Just give us the tasty parts, they say. I think God has need of a few soldiers.”

“Well, I believe I could be a good one.”

“I hope so. When you broke your leg, you were a great soldier.”

“Do you think so?” This moment alone made the lunch superlative for me. So I wanted him to say it again.

“Not in question. A great soldier.” He paused. He played with his drink. His free hand made a rocking motion on the table from thumb to little finger. “Rick,” he announced, “you’re going to have to pull up your gut again.”

It was like coming in for a landing. My focus moved closer to my father’s with every instant.

“Is it medical?” I asked. Then answered myself. “It’s the tests I took.”

“Let me give you the positive stuff first.” He nodded. “It’s operable. There’s an 80-percent likelihood it’s benign. So when they take it out, they’ve got it all.”

“A benign tumor?”

“As I say, they are 80-percent certain. That’s conservative. I believe it’s 95-percent certain.”

“Why do you think that?”

“You may have bad headaches but the powers that be aren’t ready to lift you from the board. It makes no sense.”

“Maybe the whole thing makes no sense,” I said.

“Don’t you ever believe that. I’d rather you took a dump right here in public, right in the middle of my favorite restaurant, than that you descend into that kind of sophomoric nihilism. No, look at it this way. Assume the Devil made a mistake and put all his eggs in one basket concerning you”—again my father was whispering as if any loud statement of Satan’s name could summon him to your side—“and we’re going to remove him all at once. Excise him. Rick, your headaches will be gone.”

“That’s good,” I said. I was ready to cry. Not because of the operation. I had not realized an operation was this near, but it had been part, certainly, of my inner horizon. I had been taking tests for three months. No, I was ready to cry because now I knew why my father had taken me to lunch and favored me with professional secrets.

“I convinced your mother,” he said. “She’s a very difficult woman under any and all circumstances, but I got her to recognize that one of the best neurosurgeons in the country is available for this. I can tell you in confidence he also works for us. We’ve talked him into putting his toe in the water for some studies we’re doing on brainwashing techniques. We need to keep up with the Russians.”

“I guess he’ll learn a little more about brainwashing with me.”

My father gave a half-smudged smile for the joke. “He’ll give you every chance to become the man you want to be.”

“Yes,” I said. I had an awful feeling I could not explain. There was no doubt in my mind that the tumor was the worst part of me. Everything rotten must be concentrated there. I had always supposed, however, that sooner or later it would go away by itself.

“What if we don’t have surgery? I can keep living with my headaches,” I said.

“There’s a chance it is malignant.”

“You mean when they open my head, they could discover cancer?”

“There’s one chance in five.”

“You said 95 percent. Isn’t that one chance in twenty?”

“All right. One in twenty.”

“Dad, that’s twenty to one in our favor. Nineteen to one, actually.”

“I’m looking at other kinds of odds. If you’re debilitated with headaches during all the formative years to come, you’ll end up half a man.” I could hear the rest. “Shape up” were the words he was inclined to speak.

“What do the doctors think?” I asked at last.

I had given up the game by asking this question. “They say you must have the operation.”

Years later, a surgeon would tell me that the operation would have been elective, not mandatory. My father had lied. His logic was simple. He would not manipulate me or any other family member who was arguing a point out of his own feelings; if third parties, however, were consulted, then the debate had become a recourse to authority. Since I asked what the doctors said, my father was ready to substitute himself as final authority.

Now he got out his wallet to pay the check. Unlike Al, my father did not snap his money down. He laid it like a poultice on the plate.

“When this is over,” he told me, “I’m going to introduce you to a dear friend of mine whom I’ve asked to be your godfather. It’s not customary to have a brand-new godfather at the age of fifteen, but the one we gave you at birth was a friend of your mother’s and he’s dropped out of sight. The guy I’m bringing in is wholly superior. You’ll like him. He’s named Hugh Montague, and he’s one of us. Hugh Tremont Montague. He did wonderful stuff for OSS while on liaison with the Brits. During the war he worked with J. C. Masterman—I can tell you that name. An Oxford don. One of their spymasters. Hugh will fill you in on all of that. The English are such aces in this kind of work. In 1940, they captured a few of the first German agents sent over to England and succeeded in turning them. As a result, most of the German spies who followed were picked up on arrival. For the rest of the war, the Abwehr was fed the niftiest disinformation by their own agents in England. And, oh, how the Brits got to love their German agents. Just as loyal to them as to their favorite foxhounds, yes, they were.” Here my father began laughing heartily. “You have to,” he added, “get Hugh to tell you about the code names the English gave their little Germans. Perfect names for peachy dogs. CELERY,” said my father, “SNOW, GARBO, CARROT, COBWEB, MULLET, LIPSTICK, NEPTUNE, PEPPERMINT, SCRUFFY, ROVER, PUPPET, BASKET, BISCUIT, BRUTUS. Is that, or is that not, the English?”

For years, I would fall asleep surrounded by men and women holding brass nameplates in capitals: BRUTUS, COBWEB, TREASURE, RAINBOW. As I grew ready in the last of this lunch at Twenty-One to lose a part, forever, of the soft meats of my brain, so were old spies with the code names of hunting dogs filing one by one into the cavity waiting for them.