11

THE CANAL HOUSE PURCHASED BY HUGH MONTAGUE AFTER HIS WEDDING to Kittredge was situated on the bank of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that passes through Georgetown. This waterway, if I recall correctly, was a thriving artery in 1825, floating down its fair load of coal from Appalachia to the Potomac, the barges then towed back with a cargo of such assorted sundries as flour, gunpowder, bolts of cloth, and axes. After the Civil War, however, the canal could no longer compete with the railroads. The mills on the riverbanks had long been empty, the locks were still, and the canal bed was a trickle.

Hugh’s house, built as a stable for tow mules, was also graced with a second-floor loft where bargemen could sleep in the hay. The little building, already renovated by successive owners when the Montagues purchased it, had something like seven or eight rooms, and had become a modest but charming house for those who could abide child-sized chambers and low ceilings. One would have assumed that Hugh and Kittredge were too tall for the place, but the canal house revealed a side of them I might not otherwise have perceived. The nature of their separate professional tasks had this much in common: Their labors were often lonely, and rarely void of anxiety. So they tucked themselves into their canal house which they called—no great surprise—the Stable, and if there was a century-old effluvium of straw and mule-balls embedded in the floorboards, why, the better. Coziness was their connubial marrow. Since they were both, as I soon discovered, tough with a dollar, I think it helped that their little find had cost but $10,000. (Late in 1981, in a stroll one afternoon in Georgetown, I discovered that the house, sold by them in 1964 and several times again by subsequent owners, was now up to nothing less than an asking price of $250,000. That had to inspire some sour reflections on the changes in our American republic these thirty years.)

It also provided a half hour of melancholy. The Stable came back to my memory as it used to be in 1955.

I used to love their small living room, small dining room, and very small study for Hugh. In those former mule mangers, Kittredge showed something of her father’s inclination for collecting antiques. Given a childhood in Boston and Cambridge, she had to perceive Washington as a Southern city. Why, then, not look for rare originals by colonial cabinetmakers from Virginia and the Carolinas? Listening to her speak of her acquisitions, I became half-familiar with names I had never encountered before, and was not to meet often again: Such colonial artisans as Thomas Affleck, Aaron Chapin, John Pimm, Job Townsend, Thomas Elfe, went in and out of her conversation until I did not know who had designed what, nor from where. I could hardly be concerned whether her cherrywood dining table and handwrought chairs with doe feet (which were, indeed, touchingly carved), her poplar sugar chest, her planter’s table, her candlestand, were choice samples from North or South Carolina. It was enough that they had pedigree. Like show dogs, these pieces were not the same as other beasts. In the dining room on a panel between the mantel and the fireplace was a scene, neatly painted, of woods and houses and the canal; whiskey taken by the fire, then fortified with her pâté, could taste awfully good.

Harlot’s study was another matter. Kittredge had furnished it to his choice, and I, feeling a pang at how well she understood his desires, suffered sentiments of disloyalty to Hugh in the midst of all my honest feelings. Since there were no two people I cared for more, I had an insight into the true attraction of treachery. It felt as bright as a spring leaf. Treachery helps to keep the soul alive—a most awful thought! What if it is true?

Harlot’s study consisted of not much more than a massive dark oak desk and a leviathan of a chair. Victorian furniture, circa 1850, obviously satisfied Harlot’s idea of a companionable style. A taste for the substantial gave solemnity, Harlot would explain, to the subterranean and lewd endeavors of the period. That is a large thought for one piece of furniture, but his grand seat was of mahogany and nearly five feet tall. The top of the chair-back was framed by a gothic arch full of quatrefoil fretwork. When you consider that this chair-back had been added to a sturdy Chippendale design for the arms, seat, and legs, the result was as baroque as a cathedral rising from an English manor.

The other rooms I never saw. Let me correct myself. The kitchen was an old pantry off the dining room with its share of cast-iron pots and trivets, and I was in there often, chatting with Kittredge while she cooked for the three of us, but Harlot had an upstairs library I was never asked to enter, and they had two or three bedrooms where the loft used to be. I was not invited to stay over. Perhaps they had a finely honed householder’s fear that if I achieved entrance upstairs, I might work up some way to live with them.

What evenings we had! While I never went over without telephoning first, and there were more than a few nights when they were out, or had company they did not choose to have me meet, I still encountered an odd collection of people at their small dinners. (Indeed, I was too young to know how curious and mutually unsuited some of their dinner guests were.) The columnist Joseph Alsop, for one, proved to be overpoweringly patriotic, even for me, and I must say he breathed heavily whenever military or Company matters were discussed. The thought of young American men in such pursuits was obviously moving to him. Alsop also proved prodigious in his snobbery. I was paid no attention until he discovered that Boardman Hubbard was my father, and then Alsop asked me to dinner, an invitation which I, suddenly acting much like Cal, took pleasure to refuse.

Actually, I was lonely on those evenings when I did not have a welcome at the Stable. Graduated from the Farm, I had been bunking with four other Junior Officer Trainees in a furnished apartment in Washington. One or another roommate was invariably preempting the living room in an attempt to seduce his date, usually a secretary from the I-JK-L, and I, looking to think a few things through, took long walks at night.

No wonder, then, if invitations to the Stable meant much to me. I felt not unlike an unemployed curator who, once or twice a week, is permitted to visit the museum’s private collection. There was no doubt Harlot knew extraordinary people. Since many of them had to do with OSS, I never judged by appearances. One hard-looking man with a limp and an off-accent who talked about horses all night turned out to have been one of the guerrilla leaders of the Chetniks—the Mikhailovitch group that lost to Tito. I was impressed with his Balkan manners. When he toasted Kittredge—which he did frequently—he not only raised his glass but curved his knee, as if the good leg were a bow and he was flexing it. Another guest was a formidable old lady with a grand manner, porcelain blue eyes, and white hair, a half-Bavarian, half-Italian countess who had run an underground safe house in Rome for Jews during the Occupation.

Twice Kittredge had a girl there for me, each the younger sister of Radcliffe classmates, and both young ladies proved no better than I at petting on a couch somewhat later that night in my crowded apartment. We got awfully drunk to do it, and roommates would come through the door or go out, and my romances were without wings. I was becoming seriously concerned about the intensity of my sexual dreams compared to the lukewarm manifestations of it I was able to offer the dating world.

One evening the Montagues had a guest who most certainly brought out the best in Harlot. Given the size of the dining table, they never sat down to more than six, and this night we were four, but it looked like five. Their guest was a red-faced British general six feet seven inches tall, of magnificent bearing, with four rows of ribbons six inches wide on his chest, and he sat at his quarter of the table and drank all night and nodded wisely to all Harlot said. It seemed he had been in the SOE, and served on sister missions with the OSS, parachuting into France with Harlot. After which they became, as he put it, “good fellow sots” in London. Since the General contributed no more than his immaculate and immense presence, his lineage—which went back eleven hundred years—his title, Lord Robert, and his remarkably impressive uniform which he wore, he murmured, “in Kittredge’s honor,” conversation was left to Harlot. He did not flag. I had never known anyone to speak as well on so many matters; if Harlot had a conversational vice, it was his preference for monologue. Sir Robert suited him. “What,” the General asked, after listening to other matters for a half hour, “is the history of this place? Looks quaint. What do you call it? Georgetown? Has to’ve been named after one of the kings, hope not the Third.” That was Lord Robert’s longest speech of the night. Harlot reimbursed his guest with a disquisition on Georgetown after the war—the Civil War. “Nothing but camps and government corrals and a few bone factories. An awful lot of the horsemeat put into tins for the Union troops was processed just a few streets down. You can still smell dead animals in the fog.”

“Hugh, you can’t,” said Kittredge.

“Darling, I can sniff them out,” said Hugh, the reflections on his eyeglasses dancing from the candlelight.

“It must have been an awful place for a little while,” admitted Kittredge. “Full of diphtheria and brothels.”

I had the distinct impression that Lord Robert perked up. Dead horses one hundred years gone might not waken much appetite, but old brothels did!

“All the same, it was a thriving work town,” said Hugh, “full of flour mills and corn mills, and hammers hitting the adze in the coopers’ shops, a good sound.”

“Good,” agreed Sir Robert.

“Saws and planing machines,” Hugh went on, “anvils dinging away. Such stuff. On a still night, I can hear echoes. Raucous bars. Canalmen fighting. A few of those taverns have made it all the way down to our time, and boys like Herrick, who work in the government, go to drink there now.”

“What did you say your name was?” asked Lord Robert.

“Herrick Hubbard, sir.”

“His father is Cal Hubbard,” said Harlot.

“Yes, a man of very strong opinions, your father,” said Lord Robert, as if mental life on his own promontory six feet seven inches high offered few people who would voice their opinions up to him.

“Hugh has got it wrong,” Kittredge said. “Georgetown used to be, for the most part, a darling place. The houses had porticoes and gabled dormers. Slathers of gingerbread in the eaves.”

“Kittredge, you miss the essence,” said her husband.

“Do I?”

Two spots of anger showed in her cheeks, an unhappy color. It was the first time I had seen her looking harsh. It gave me a sense of the reason they did not invite me to sleep over: They would need the space to raise their voices.

Hugh, however, was not about to go to war with the General and myself as linesman and judge. “She’s right,” he said, “so am I. We happen to be talking about opposite ends of the town.”

“Never knew a place that didn’t have its up street and its down,” Lord Robert said.

“Yes. Funny story. I was reading about Georgetown last night in a local history.” Hugh began to laugh. His mirth was powerful enough to suggest that a good deal of anger had just been packed away. “Quotes a newspaper account from 1871. A resident of this town, Thaddeus Atwater, walking down Q Street one March morning, slips on the ice. His cane flies out of his hand and hits a hog strolling by”—a look at Kittredge, who put her tongue out at him and took it back so quickly that the General, if he had seen it, might have thought his eyes were up to tricks—“whereupon the injured pig roars like a bull and bolts into the nearest open cellar door. That happens to be a carpenter shop with shavings on the floor. It’s filthy dark down there, and they’ve set a candle on a stand which, of course, the beast knocks over into the shavings and so starts one hell of a fire. Enter Red Hat .  .  .”

“Red Hat?” inquired Lord Robert.

“The local firehorse. A giant steed. Red Hat is pulling the Henry Addison fire wagon in unison with his mate, Dora Girl. The firemen drop hose into an adjacent brook, begin to pump, and manage to quench the fire, although they are all the while slopping so much water over Q Street that it soon becomes a frozen pond. By evening, the townspeople are out to try their ice skates. I enjoy that period,” said Harlot.

“Yes,” I said, “I guess events had more influence on other events, then.”

“Yes,” he said, “you’re not a dull boy, are you? You see the metamorphoses.”

“Just so, metamorphoses,” Lord Robert remarked. He seemed to be coming out of the trance Hugh’s story had left him in. “Do you know, there’s talk of sending Philby to Beirut. Going to give him a journalist’s job.”

“Oh, no,” said Harlot. “It’ll play like hell over here. Do your best to stop it. It’s hard enough to keep the FBI off MI6, without your people giving Philby a plum.”

“Be bad for you personally, won’t it?”

“No,” replied Harlot, “all is forgiven.”

“Hope so. I used to think it was your Waterloo.”

“Not at all,” said Kittredge. “They need Hugh much too much.”

“Good to hear that.”

“The mark of a great man is that his mistakes are also great,” Kittredge declared.

“Well, damn Philby, I say,” said Lord Robert. “Let’s drink to his damnation.”

“To Philby,” answered Harlot, holding high his glass. “Damn him for eternity.”

I had no idea what they were talking about. Yet its importance permeated the room. The shadow of things unsaid was on our evening. Once again I was content with my profession and the mysteries it would yet disclose. Philby. I was even stirred by the way they said his name; they could as well have been speaking of an old fort where drear losses had been taken.

One night there was a small gentleman at dinner named Dr. Schneider who, I was informed, had achieved some recognition in Europe as a concert pianist. He remained determinedly vague about whether he was Austrian or German, but was quick to express the most extreme monarchist opinions: Hitler, he insisted, might have been able to win the war if he had only been wise enough to restore the Hohenzollerns. “After all,” Dr. Schneider said, “the monarchy could have underwritten the crusade against Bolshevism.”

Dr. Schneider wore dark glasses and had large, pointed ears. He sheltered himself behind a thick, gray mustache. His hair was white, and he looked to be more than sixty. Given his opinions, he must have gone through some fancy footwork when the war ended, since he now spoke of giving recitals in the Soviet zones of Germany and Austria. I wondered if he had been a spy for Harlot. All the same, I found him unsavory and wondered why the Montagues treated him with respect. On second examination, I could detect that Dr. Schneider was wearing an expensive white wig, well placed on his head, but I had my mother’s eye for masquerade and so was intrigued with his desire to present himself as an older man. I hardly knew how I felt about sitting at table with what might be a crypto-Nazi.

After dinner, Harlot sat down to a game of chess with Dr. Schneider, and I decided that Hugh liked to enjoy people by their pieces and parts. “Watch the play,” Harlot confided to me. “Schneider is phenomenal in the endgame. He falters occasionally with openings, but unless I’m two pawns up after the middle game, I’m far from home.”

The pianist would rub his hands and croon or moan after every one of Harlot’s moves. “Oh, you are a devil, Mr. Montague, you are a clever fellow, the trickiest, aren’t you, oh, oh, oh, you have me in a pickle, you do, sir, a fiend with your knights you are, yum, yum, yum, yessir,” after which, nodding his head, albeit still groaning, “Punkt,” he would say, and move a pawn. As Harlot predicted, Dr. Schneider did well in the endgame and brought off a draw. It was the only time I ever saw him at the Stable.

After he left—and I did notice that he and Harlot shook hands at the door like old comrades—Harlot asked me to stay. While Kittredge was doing the dishes (with which I usually helped her, although, on this night, by Harlot’s insistence, signally not) he took me into his study, pinned me down on a small wooden chair to face his presence in the Cathedral Chippendale, and proceeded to give the first reasonably full deployment of his mind that I had received since the night he told me to give up rock climbing.

I was ready to talk to him about an unhappy situation at my new work (about which he had never made one inquiry) but, then, I did not dare. What if he had no interest?

At this moment he said, “Your father is coming back. We’ll go out to dinner, the three of us.”

“That sounds terrific.” I kept myself from asking where my father had been. No word had come from him in months, so I did not see how I could inquire.

“Do you find CIA a large place?” Hugh Montague inquired.

“Enormous.”

“We weren’t always so big. In fact, the baby almost didn’t get born. J. Edgar Hoover did everything he could to stop us. Didn’t want his FBI put in competition. Hoover may be the most fear-ridden man in Christendom. We refer to him, by the way, as Buddha, J. Edgar Buddha. If the fellow you’re talking to doesn’t follow, then he is not one of us.”

I nodded. I didn’t know whether us now referred to all of CIA or but a small part.

“What with Foster Dulles owning Eisenhower’s mind, Allen has us in good shape. We’re certainly expanding.”

“Yessir.”

“To do what?” he asked. “What is our purview?”

“To supply the President with intelligence, I suppose.”

“Do you have a vision of what that intelligence ought to be?”

“Well, first to catch up with the KGB.”

“We can do that. We may have to do a little better than that. It is not just the Russians, you see. We can probably work their mainspring loose, disembarrass them—even if it takes a half-century—of their Marxism, but the war will go on. Right here. Right here, it’s taking place. Across all the face of America. The secret stakes keep going up. The active question is whether this Christ-inspired civilization will continue. All other questions fade before that.”

“Including the bomb?”

“It’s not the bomb that’s going to destroy us. If it ever gets down to the nuclear people, then we’re merely incinerating the corpse of all that’s been destroyed already. The bomb can’t be used unless civilization dies first. Of course, that can happen. Our continuing existence depends on not falling prey to false perceptions of reality. The rise of Marxism is but a corollary to the fundamental historical malady of this century: false perception.”

What a man of the cloth he would have made! The value of his words was so incontestable to himself that he did not question the size of his audience. I could have been one parishioner or five hundred and one: The sermon would not have altered. Each word offered its reverberation to his mind, if not to mine.

“It’s sad,” he said. “For millennia, every attempt at civilization foundered because nations lacked the most essential information. Now we lurch forward, overburdened by hordes of misinformation. Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us. Harry, are you beginning to have some concept of how much our people here have to amount to?”

I managed to mutter, “I’m not sure I see where you’re heading.”

“You just don’t welcome it.” He swallowed his brandy. “Our real duty is to become the mind of America.”

I nodded. I had no idea whether I was ready to agree with him, but I nodded.

“There’s absolutely no reason,” he said, “why the Company can’t get there. Already, we tap into everything. If good crops are an instrument of foreign policy, then we are obliged to know next year’s weather. That same demand comes at us everywhere we look: finance, media, labor relations, economic production, the thematic consequences of TV. Where is the end to all we can be legitimately interested in? Dwelling in an age of general systems, we are obliged to draw experts from all fields: bankers, psychiatrists, poison specialists, art experts, public relations people, trade unionists, hooligans, journalists—do you have a good idea how many journalists are on contract to us?—do observe a little hush-hush on that one. Nobody knows how many pipelines we have into good places—how many Pentagon pooh-bahs, commodores, congressmen, professors in assorted think tanks, soil erosion specialists, student leaders, diplomats, corporate lawyers, name it! They all give us input. We’re rich in our resources. You see, we had the great good luck to start all at once.” He nodded. “For a bureaucratic organization, that is usually a disaster, but it happened to work for us. Not only were we seeded with some of our best OSS people, but we attracted good ambitious men from all over the place, State, the FBI, Treasury, Defense, Commerce—we raided them all. They all wanted to come to us. That created a curious situation. Organizationally speaking, we were set up in a pyramid. But our personnel, as measured by their skilled experience, gave us the shape of a barrel. Enormous amounts of talent in the middle ranks. And they had no way to rise. After all, the people at the top were also young. Relatively young, like myself. So a good many of the men who rushed to join our ranks five years ago had to sign out again. Now, they’re all over the place.”

“All over Washington?”

“All over America. Once you’ve been in the Company, you don’t really want to quit it altogether. It’s tedious to work in those financial worlds and business worlds. I tell you, we have liaison into every game that’s going on in this country. Potentially, we can give direction to the land.” He smiled. “Feeling tired?”

“No, sir.”

“Didn’t wear you out with the size of the mural?”

“I’ll be up all night.”

“Good for you.” He smiled. “Let’s have one more drink before you go. I want you to understand something. I don’t get confidential very often, but from time to time, I will. You see, Harry, everyone in this Pickle Factory has a weakness. One fellow drinks too much. Another screws around heedlessly. A third is a closet queer—either he brazened it through the polygraph, or turned queer later. A fourth smokes marijuana on the sly. My vice, old Harry Hubbard, old before your years, is that I tend to talk too much. So I’m obliged to choose people I can trust. One does get the feeling, speaking to you, that it all goes down into the deepest vault you’ve got. So, yes, I’ll tell you a thing from time to time, and Heaven help you if you don’t keep it to yourself.”

He took a full draw on his Churchill and let the smoke surround him. “What did you make of our Dr. Schneider?” he asked.

I had the sense to be brief. “I would,” I said, “read him as an ex-Nazi in a wig. I think he must be ten years younger than his false white hair, and he may know less about concert recitals than dead drops.”

“It’s tempting,” said Harlot, “to tell you more. But I’m afraid I can’t let you in.”

“Despite what you just said?” I was as suddenly hungry for secrets about Dr. Schneider as a hound called back from his food.

“Well,” said Harlot, “there’s no remedy. Perhaps you’ll discover him for yourself one of these days.” He took a puff again. He was enjoying my frustration. “Harry,” said Harlot, “keep the faith.”