15

I DID NOT HEAR AGAIN FROM KITTREDGE UNTIL THE WEATHER HAD TURNED warm and my second Christmas in Uruguay was approaching.

Dec. 12, 1957

Harry, dear Harry,

I want to hear from you, and to write to you of all that’s happened to me. So much has shifted within.

Of course, I am breaking a promise. (I refuse to call it a vow, since Hugh extorted it from me. To give one’s word when at one’s weakest is not to give the heartfelt word.) On the dubious logic of this, I decided not to tell Hugh that I am going to correspond with you again. He would not agree, and my life with him would, as a result, grow intolerable. I will not submit to his force; he would never accept my rebellion. Our marriage, which has moved equably, and in all honesty, happily, on the foundation of his prodigious care of me when I needed it most, could be thrown into the doldrums again.

I have obviously learned much. One lives with what works, but the spirit looks for what needs to be added. By this logic, I need your letters. In consequence, the royal itch to deceive Hugh has sprung up in me once more and I’m going to tell you considerably more about myself than you may expect, in fact, I’ll soon overwhelm you with a long one.

Guess Who

P.S. It’s safe to try the pouch again. New address, however. Still Polly Galen Smith, but new Route, AT-658-NF

I returned a two-line letter: “Just to say that your Christmas present arrived intact. I await words and music.”

Jan. 5, 1958

Dear Harry,

Christopher might delight you now. What a splendid little fellow your godson has become. Of course, he is also in that frightful stage other mothers have warned me about—he walks, but does not talk! I cannot tell you how fearful a situation this creates, and it could last for many hysterical months to come. The only way to protect the furnishings is to keep Christopher out on the street in his stroller, or penned upstairs. Once he gets into our parlor, he comports himself like a drunken hellion, staggering about, arms out, trying to overturn all our carefully acquired goodies. God, I love him. Each time I shriek, “No!” as he is about to knock over my hand-wrought Elfe or the beautiful Pimm, he offers a resolute manly little grin with just a hint of the glint in Hugh’s evil eye. Lord, I am awful when I come face to face with my impeccable love of property. Flesh and blood go to the block before antique value.

I find as I write that I am preparing you for a considerable confession. I don’t know that you’ve been made aware of the real landscape of my mental abdication all those many months ago. Yes, it was due to LSD, and the brooch, and Hugh, and you, all that I have already admitted to, but there were some unmanageable fantasies as well. And serious and most concrete difficulties. The real cause I have never really talked to you about. It was my work in TSS.

I now relate to you that whenever I think of the corpus of offices and corridors composing Technical Services Staff over in our wing of Cockroach Alley, I tend to think of Allen Dulles wrinkling his nose as he walks down our smelly corridors. In my dreams and daydreams he has a tail and a cloven hoof, simple as that. You do know that he was born with a clubfoot? The Dulles family had him operated on quicker than crackers, so he has only had to limp the least little bit through life except when gout strikes his Satanic appetites. Of course, given Allen’s tropisms, he did marry a young lady named Clover. ( Just change the r to an n.) Harry, forgive this string of sitting ducks, but there are times when I hate Hugh and I hate Allen for they inhabit me, which, I suspect, is what being a good boss is all about.

Well, don’t fret—I’m now over on the meditative side of these unruly emotions, and only tell you this to indicate the previous intensity of my feelings. You see, I’ve felt badly divided at times on the justifiability of the work we do at TSS. So much of it is sheer mind-control. That comes down to manipulating the souls of other people. Yet, here is my Harlot all for mind-control so long as it’s the people he approves of who are doing it. Yes, the great war for the human future—Christians versus Reds! And weren’t those Russian materialists brilliant to choose all the blood and fire of red as their emblematic color? Brilliant, I say, for it brought a necessary sense of the elemental to fill their materialistic void. Am I wandering? The one concept I’ve lived with ever since meeting Hugh is that Communists strive twenty-four hours a day to find ways to coerce the soul of humankind, and so we must labor our own twenty-four to confound them. TSS is the temple where we not only search for secret germs but hypnotic manipulations, abracadabra drugs and psychological methods to take over the enemy before they control us. Hugh, indeed, gave me a stiff lecture before we married. It was to the effect (and this is his favorite thesis on the source of vital human energy) that only when the best and worst in oneself is equally attached to the same mission, can one operate with full strength. In an exceptional moment of candor, he said to me, “I am attached to rock climbing because I have to conquer my fear of great falls—that is the good motive—but I also revel in it because I can dominate and humiliate others, and that happens to be an equally deep-rooted part of me.” Harry, I was stirred by his candor. I knew that deep under my glowing college-girl exterior were Shakespearean closets of blood, gore, and other unmentionables. I also knew that Hugh was a man who could steer a cool route through such an underworld in me.

Well, my husband-to-be did have his thesis well in hand. He said we were blessed in our work at the Agency because the best and the worst in ourselves could work together on a noble venture. We were to thwart, dominate, and finally conquer the KGB, even as they, expressing by their lights the good and bad in themselves, were engaged, “tragic fellows” (Hugh’s words), in an ignoble venture.

So, on I went to TSS with Allen’s blessing and Hugh’s strong arm around my waist. I was prepared to dive into the dark depths, but, of course, as soon as I finished training, they wrapped me in cotton. Technical Services Staff, as you can guess, is as highly compartmentalized as any place you’re going to work in the Agency. Even now, after five years in TSS’s recessive folds, I still can’t decide such basic things as whether we go in for wet jobs, or, leaving assassination quite to the side, whether we indulge in even worse deeds, such as honest-to-god termination experiments. If one were to believe the more sinister gossip, it’s true. Of course, such rumors do come to me in the large from Arnie Rosen, and I’m not sure he’s always to be trusted. (He loves wild stories too much!)

Well, the time is come to let you in on a subconfession. About a year and a half ago, Arnold began to work for me, and soon became my number-one assistant. He’s brilliant, and he’s bad. You have to understand bad as an old Radcliffe foible. When we used to say that of a male friend, it meant he was homosexual. Arnold—and you are absolutely not to repeat this—is very much in hiding about his predilections. While he says that he’s eschewed all sex since he’s come into the Company, I don’t believe him. All the same, he swears to it. I suppose he must. Apparently, he was a bit of a queen in high school. Hard to imagine. There he must have been, funny-looking, wearing eyeglasses, school valedictorian, all summa grades, of course, but had an addiction to “debasement,” as he puts it. He says it like a black man, not one word but two, “dee basement.” He is, when you get to know him (and he drops that awful lapdog admiration which he used to put on for Hugh), a wicked and incredibly funny gossip. When I asked him how he managed to get through the wings of the flutter bird in the entrance tests, he said, “Darling, we people know how to pass a lie-detector. That’s part of our lore.”

“Well, how do you?” I asked.

“I can’t possibly tell. It would offend your proprieties.”

“I have none,” I said.

“Kittredge, you are the most innocent and locked-up person I know.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Darling, we eat a lot of beans.”

“Beans?” I didn’t get it. Not at all.

“Once you know when the test will be given, the rest is merely a small bout of discomfort. In anticipation, you eat a good plateful of beans.”

I slapped his hand. “Arnie, you’re a psychopathic liar.”

“I am not. The idea is be able to think of nothing but your bowels while you are being fluttered. Your mind couldn’t care less whether or not it is telling a lie when the prime drama is to control your sphincter. I can tell you that the test administrator got awfully annoyed with me. ‘You’re one of those,’ he said. ‘General tension in all responses. It’s hopeless.’ ‘I’m so sorry, sir,’ I told him. ‘It must be something I ate.’”

Harry, he’s a bit of a demon. If I’d never thought of Alpha and Omega before, Arnie Rosen’s existence would have suggested it. He has two totally different personalities—the one I expect that you are familiar with, and this considerably different one for me. I think Hugh had him attached to my court so I’d have at least one wise fellow around. He certainly indulges my outsized curiosity about some of the very strange people one does pass in the corridor. Rosen is full of whispers as to what might be going on. “Kittredge, feel the aura coming off that closed door! It’s Dracula’s Lair!”

I accept that. I believe it. But, then I wonder if I am hypersensitive to the occult. (One full summer and a half ago, you may recall that I encountered the ghost of Augustus Farr up at the Keep, and to my over-fevered recollection, he limped just like Allen on a bad day. Ho, ho, ho.)

Well, I want to bring you back a few years more than that. To the time when I was wrapped in cotton. Allen Dulles had taken to my Radcliffe senior thesis on Alpha and Omega so completely that he funded me right from the start. On the completion of my Farm training—do you remember that that was the spring we met?—I was set up with a bona fide group of five graduate students in psychology at Cornell who did not even know they were being paid by the Agency. Another bit of nifty cover. I used to fly up to my seminar in Ithaca every two weeks to see how research was progressing.

By every visible measure, I was doing nothing dirty. I was merely developing my chosen work. I may have been a little in love with Allen during those first couple of years. If not for Hugh, I could actually have contemplated going to bed with the man. Allen was dear. I certainly loved him enough to want to develop something of exceptional use for him. So I dashed off in the wrong direction. Instead of pursuing Alpha and Omega a little further into the labyrinth of myself, and serving as my own laboratory which—all proportions kept—is what grand old Master Plumber Freud did, that is, spent many years analyzing himself before giving us ego and id, I absconded from my floods and raging furnaces, and went searching too quickly for overt tests the Agency could use to spot a potential agent.

I worked for the last five years, therefore, trying to elaborate a test profile that could be used to detect potential treachery. The final form, as of eight months ago, shows up as twenty test sheets with twenty-five items to check off on each page, and at certain levels we were as good at predicting mental disorders as a Szondi test or a Rorschach.

Extracting a reliable Alpha-Omega profile, however, is backbreaking. We learned to our horror that Long Tom (our in-house term for the five hundred pairings) has to be taken a minimum of five times in order to pick up the style of transition from Alpha to Omega. While certain kinds of bureaucrats keep the two personae wholly separate for years, actors and psychopaths can go back and forth twenty times a day. For such people, the test has to be repeated, therefore, at different hours of the day. Dawn and midnight, so to speak. Drunk and sober. We did end with a pretty foolproof set of vectors to spot a putative agent, or even better, a putative double agent, but administering Long Tom was more difficult than raising orchids.

Harry, for the last five years, I have carried this burden of woe, doubt, misery, and burgeoning frustration. And every year, across the corridor, so to speak—actually, he works out of town—another psychologist named Gittinger, who came to us from his work at the State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, has been running rings around my tests merely by adapting the good old Wechsler Intelligence test to what he calls the Wechsler-Bellevue G. It works. Gittinger, who’s a stocky Santa Claus type with a pepper-and-salt goatee, can use his battery of tests (which require only one session) to spot defectors and putatives better, I fear, than I can.

Rosen, by the time we came to trust each other, began to warn me of the turn in affairs: The Wechsler-Gittinger was prospering at TSS, and I was not.

“What are they really saying?” I asked him at last.

“Well, there is some talk that your work may be only a lot of talk.”

That hurt. Then I had to deal with the news that Gittinger had been allocated some scrumptious funding through one of our more elegant foundation covers. He can now play with the Human Ecology Fund. Whereas my seminar at Cornell has not been renewed.

This has been my introduction to the down slope. Harry, life has always treated me as a darling, and for much too long. If my mother merely adored me whenever she came around to noticing my existence, my father more than made up for it. Ever been fêted by a rip-roaring Shakespearean? We never did get into formal incest, Dad and I, but I knew what it was to feel a powerful man’s love at the age of three. It never faltered. Just grew more and more possessive. How Daddy hated Hugh. I think that’s the first storm of passion I ever encountered out of books. Up to then, our princess trod only on carpet. Radcliffe was a coronation. I was either adored all over again, or envied, or both, and didn’t even notice. My brain was so fertile that I could have gone off to a desert island and been deliriously happy with myself. The only pains I knew were the ferocious congestions attendant on new ideas. Lord, they were forever streaming into my thoughts. And as Hugh’s wife, figure-toi! I was twenty-three years old, yet grizzled veterans of the intelligence wars were lining up to charm me. Darling, was ever a brilliant fool more spoiled?

Now, at TSS, after five years, I was on the down slope, and Gittinger was growing greater by the week and month. Yet it proved impossible to dislike the man. He’s a wise, subtle, jolly Oklahoman who, as Arnie says, uses his twang like a guitar string. Gittinger has the power to dispense happy laughter. Sometimes he shows off for us. Give him a Wechsler-Bellevue G test-profile of a man or woman he has never met and he will return an interpretation that is about as complete as a personage out of Proust. Truly formidable. Gittinger is the only one in the profession who can get such a splendid readout off a mere Wechsler-Bellevue G, but then he works twenty-four hours a day, and has the ability to correlate everything that comes his way, agents, taps, sneakies, verbal interviews, photos (for body language), and handwriting analysis. He charms all of us, because he is, or pretends to be, a modest man. Always downgrades his own work. “Another fellow could do as well with Tarot cards.” So he charms all the competitors he’s outstripping. (Although it did hurt when Rosen told me that everyone now referred to Gittinger as “our resident genius.”) Harry, there was a time when they spoke that way of me. So I knew the pains of a toppled monarch. Yet G. always flatters me. “Your Alpha and Omega will take us yet into the true caves. I just make charts of the surface.”

That’s all very well, but I’ve lost out wholly. Gittinger is already working in the field with case officers and agents (wherever a Chief of Station will allow this) and I have become one of his adjuncts. The Gardiner Annex to Gittinger, you could call it.

Harry, hear the worst. Shortly before my LSD episode, I had been cut down to one assistant, Rosen, and put onto collation studies with our graphology department. Instead of showing our handwriting experts how to look for Alpha and Omega, the graphologists were now giving ratings to my work.

About this time, Arnold had a long talk with me. It was a preface, I knew, to telling me that he was going to apply for a transfer over to Gittinger’s track. “Loyalty is a virtue,” he said at last, “but I want to get out of dee basement.” Suddenly, it was no longer so funny. I saw it through his eyes. To be Jewish in the Agency doesn’t call for an automatic welcome, but then to be locked up as well in his little secret. However, he did seem miserable at his own ambition. He also warned me that the time had come for Hugh to intervene.

“Kittredge, you have real enemies in TSS.”

“You’d better name a few, or I won’t listen to this.”

“I can’t point to the real estate. It could be some of Hugh’s enemies.”

“You mean I can’t even create antagonists of my own?” God, we were having coffee in the K-shed cafeteria at three in the afternoon, and Rosen was sitting across from me with tears in his eyes. I felt like screaming. “I think I’ve created a few enemies of my own,” I said.

“Maybe you did.”

“I was too cocky when I began.”

“Yes,” he said, “probably.”

“And I did show a little too much disdain for some of my colleagues.”

“Oh, you know you did.” He was virtually crooning.

“I was uncooperative with my overseers. Especially when they wanted to change my terminology.”

“Yes.”

“But all that was in the beginning. Lately, my worst crime has been to obtain a few extra perks for my best research assistant.”

This was meant to stun him precisely between the eyes. It only brought out his anger. I think he was looking to find that anger. “Kittredge, let’s go back to your office,” he said. “I’ve got some yelling to do myself.”

Whereupon, once we made the long, endlessly long, silent walk back down Cockroach Alley, he did unload a bit. “The fact, Kittredge, is that there’s a fundamental flaw in the test. Putative agents make prodigiously good liars. They’re not going to reveal themselves just because Mrs. Gardiner Montague has devised a few word games.”

“How dare you,” I said. “We’ve loaded the thing with traps.”

“Kittredge, I love you,” he said, “but whom have you trapped? I just don’t think the damn thing works. And I will not spend my life supporting an enterprise that can’t stand up.”

“Apart from all these tests, don’t you believe in Alpha and Omega?”

“I believe in them, dear one. As metaphor.”

Well, we were through, and we knew it.

“Arnold, before you leave, tell me the real worst. What are they saying? Metaphor is not the word they are employing.”

“You don’t want to hear.”

“I believe you owe me that much.”

“All right.” I realized suddenly that he was not a silly man nor a weak man, nor even a witty scamp. Under all, was the person who will yet come out of some further resolution of his impossible A and O, the future gentleman was there before me, a most steady and resolute fellow. We will hear from Arnold Rosen yet. “Kittredge,” he said, “the common notion here at TSS is that Alpha and Omega do not really exist. Alpha is merely a new way to describe consciousness, and Omega is a surrogate concept for the unconscious.”

“They still can’t get it through their heads. How often must I say that Alpha and Omega each possesses its own unconscious. And superego and ego.”

“Everyone knows that, Kittredge. But when we try to apply it, we keep being brought back to consciousness and the unconscious all over again, and Alpha is the first and Omega the second. Let me say that such people are not the worst of your detractors.”

“Tell me, as I have asked you more than once, what the worst are saying.”

“I don’t care to.”

“As a species of final contribution.”

“Very well.” He looked into the whorls of his fingertips. “Kittredge, the cognoscenti have decided that your concept of Alpha and Omega is a whole-cloth projection of what can only be your latent schizophrenia. I am sorry.”

He got up, he extended his hand, and, do you know, I took it. We shook hands limply. I think we were mourning the end of our work together. Despite all. Since then, I’ve only seen him in the cafeteria and the corridor. I miss his wit, I will testify to that.

Now, Harry, I couldn’t keep this last blow to myself. I told it all to Hugh and he set up a meeting with Dulles and Helms. Hugh probably thought I should pull my own potatoes out of the fire, but I wouldn’t go. I could hardly be present to plead my own case if I were being accused of schizophrenia. Well, Dulles told Hugh that he did not for a moment believe my thesis was a projection of my own schizophrenia. What a shocking notion. No, for them, Kittredge’s theory remained, as always, profound. “I would even,” said Dulles, “call it sacrosanct.”

Helms then spoke: Kittredge, in his opinion, was to be seen as a most innovative inventor. Such creative originality often suffered in unfair fashion. “The trouble,” he said, “is that we have a psychological reality to deal with. The rank and file in TSS do tend to see Alpha and Omega as some kind of sound-and-light show.”

“Paranoid sound-and-light show?” asked Hugh.

“Look,” said Helms, “we can bat these words back and forth until the courts are too dark to play upon. The crucial difficulty is that it’s one thing to support an underground circus like TSS, but it is absolutely verboten to let word get around that it is a freak show. Kittredge has had five years and an absence of conclusive results. We’ve got to find another boulot for her.”

Boulot. Old argot for job, kiddo. Harry, I’ve never seen Hugh quite as upset as when he related this conversation to me. Do you know, it was on the day your brooch arrived. That may explain a few things. I plunged right off into the LSD. Anything to come up with a new grasp on the testing process. I took terrible travels on that little trip. My vision led me down a long purple road to phosphorescent pools of moonlight where pigs were wading, and worse. I was a young man disporting in a brothel.

These days, I put in four sessions a week on graphology, a fascinating business after all. And I still pursue a few thoughts on the development of Alpha and Omega. Oh, I’ll be back, I promise I’ll be back.

Now you can see, however, why I want to hear about your life again. And in detail. I sense all over again that I do not know enough about the details of my own life. I certainly never knew how many fellow workers, often strangers, were determining my fate. Your letters give me some understanding there.

Harry, write again. I am truly fascinated with how you spend your days. It seems so long since I’ve held one of your full letters in my hand. What has happened to AV/OCADO and his tormented soul? And what of your Russian garden parties and dear Hyman Bosqueverde and his wife who whispers nice things about Gordy Morewood? Yes, give me all the rest, your Gatsby with his yellow hair and the dark-brown mustache that Howard Hunt made him remove? You see, I do remember, and want to know more.

You can even write to me about your upwardly mobile COS. I realize now why I disliked Mr. Hunt. He was that worldly principle I was secretly unequipped to deal with. But no longer will I indulge such prejudices. If one would have new ideas, one must find a way to renew oneself. So tell me all about him too. My curiosity deepens, my strictures become flexible. My love for you will always grow apace, dear long absent man.

Kittredge