1

AFTER HOWARD HUNT DEPARTED, I REMAINED IN URUGUAY FOR SEVERAL weeks and did not return to America until the beginning of May. Owed several weeks of vacation, I went up to Maine, expecting to pass through Mount Desert and drop in on Kittredge at Doane.

I never found the courage. If she rebuffed me, what would be left for fantasy? The romantic imagination, I was discovering, is practical about its survival.

I went further north, instead, to Baxter State Park and hiked up Mount Katahdin. It was a dubious venture in May. The black flies proved near to intolerable, and I was not free of them until I reached the winds that blow across the high, open ridge that leads to the summit.

That ridge is called the Knife Edge. To walk it is no great feat, but still, it is a mile long, and plunges a thousand feet on either side. While the route is never less than several feet wide, the ice in May has not melted altogether from the Knife Edge, and later, descending the north slope, one is left in deep shadow at three in the afternoon. I slogged through gullies filled with snow and began to feel as if I were not only alone on the mountain, but a solitary citizen of the United States. It came upon me like a revelation that the state of my ignorance on such large and general matters as politics could be deemed appalling. Was I an anomaly in the Agency? Berlin had passed me by, and in Uruguay I had become active in a country whose politics remained strange to me.

Now I was ready to go to work on Cuba. It was incumbent to do research. I went back to New York, found an inexpensive hotel off Times Square, and spent a week in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library trying to bone up on our Caribbean neighbor. I read a history or two, but retained little—I fell asleep over the texts. I was prepared to overthrow Castro but did not wish to acquire any history of his theater. I contented myself with studying back issues of Time, on no better ground, I fear, than that Kittredge had once informed me that Mr. Dulles, when he wished to float a point of view favored by the Agency, often used the magazine. Besides, Henry Luce had come to dinner at the Stable.

Castro’s first year as leader, however, remained hard to follow. There were so many quarrels in Cuba. Blocs of ministers seemed always to be resigning in protest over newly promulgated laws. Before long, another item took my eye. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts made the announcement on January 31, 1960, that he was going to seek the presidency. He looked young to me. He was not twelve years older than myself, and I certainly felt singularly young. Two weeks of leave had almost done me in. On the other hand, every saucy girl I saw on the streets of New York looked ravishing.

I ended by inviting my mother to lunch. I had not known if I would see her; my implacable absence of feeling for her sat like a gasket on my diaphragm. I could not forgive her for I hardly knew what. Still, she was ill. Before I left Montevideo, a letter came from her which mentioned in passing that she had had an operation, a quiet statement of fact, no more, after which she offered news of relatives on her side of the family I had not seen in years, then followed that up with open hints. “I have a good deal of money now, and so little idea of what to do about it—of course, a few foundations do offer flirtations.” It took no acumen to recognize that she was saying, “Damn you, pay attention or I will give the caboodle away.”

If I knew nothing about politics, I cared in those years even less about money. Out of pride itself, I felt indifferent to such a threat.

There was, however, a last page in the letter with a very large P.S. Her writing hand itself had extorted what her will was not ready to admit—“Oh, Harry, I really have been ill lately,” she burst forth. “Don’t flinch, son, but I’ve had a hysterectomy. It’s all gone. I don’t want to talk about that ever again.”

All up the warm forested spring flanks of Katahdin with the thousand nips and stings of the no-see-ums, down the out-of-season freeze of late afternoon, through the hours of drowsing at library tables, one guilty imperative kept working away beneath my lack of feeling for my mother. I realized that I was anchored to a pang of love. Now it kept dragging on me to call. I finally invited her to lunch at the Colony. She wanted Twenty-One instead, that male redoubt! Was it to take possession of my father?

Her hysterectomy, I saw on greeting her, was already—full capital loss—marked on her skin. She looked shocking to me. Not yet fifty, defeat—the pale shade of defeat—sagged into the lines of her face. I knew, even as she came toward me in the anteroom off the entrance of Twenty-One, that she had indeed lost all that she said was gone. With it had foundered the game of love at which she had been adept for thirty years, and all the empty pockets of the heart given up to such games.

Of course, I did not think too long in such directions. She was my mother. Indeed, I was struggling with contradictory feelings. While I hugged her on greeting and felt to my surprise some true sense of protection for the small, leathery, middle-aged woman she had become since I had last seen her at the Plaza three years ago, I did not trust such tenderness. All too often, the whores of Montevideo had brought out in me a perverse sense of their poignancy, and I had embraced them with equal concern. As I held her now, she gripped me back so fiercely that I soon felt confusion and was no longer near her at all.

Over lunch she brought up my father. She knew much more about his life at this moment than I did. “His marriage is in trouble,” she assured me.

“Is that a fact or a supposition?”

“He’s in Washington—yes, he’s back—and very much on top of some venture, or whatever you term those things, and he’s alone.”

“How do you know? I don’t even know.”

“New York has scores of sources. He is in Washington, I tell you, and she has chosen to remain in Japan. Mary, that big white dutiful blob. She’s not the sort to camp out in a foreign country unless she’s got herself a lover.”

“Oh, Mother, she could never take her eyes off Cal.”

“A woman like that has got one big move in her. I’ll bet she’s fallen in love with a small, respectable Japanese gentleman who’s very rich.”

“I don’t believe any of this.”

“Well, they’re separated. You’ll find out soon enough, I expect.”

“I wish he’d gotten in touch with me,” I blurted out, “now that he’s back.”

“Oh, he will. Whenever he gets around to it, that is.” She broke a breadstick and waved the little piece she kept for herself, as if she were now going to let me in on a secret. “When you see your father,” she said, “I want you to tell him that I said hello. And if you can, suggest to him, Herrick, that my eyes sparkled as I spoke.” She gave an uncharacteristic cackle, as if visualizing a pot that would soon be on the fire. “No,” she said, “maybe you’d better not say that much,” only to murmur, “Well, perhaps you may. Use your judgment, Rickey-mine”—I had not heard that little name in years—“You have gotten even better-looking,” she added, and was less good-looking herself as she said it. The operation weighed on her like a social humiliation she simply could not lift from herself. “Rickey, you are beginning to remind me of the young Gary Cooper, whom I once had the pleasure of inviting to lunch.”

I could feel only one small twinge of tenderness, but at least it was pure. After our farewells were taken, I had a drink by myself in a midtown bar, savoring the emptiness of the off hour, and pondered the nature of love, yes, weren’t most of us who were in love no more than half in love? Could Alpha and Omega ever come to agreement? Harboring kind thoughts for my mother made another part of me feel colder than ever. How could one forgive Jessica for commencing to lose her looks?

That night, all too depressed, I realized that I had given up my identity as a case officer in Montevideo, and now had nothing to replace it. One matures within an identity. One regresses without it. I picked up the phone and called Howard Hunt in Miami. He said, “If you want to cut your vacation by a few days, I sure as hell could use you. I have a few wonders, and one or two horrors, to relate.”