OMEGA–2

ON THAT MOONLESS NIGHT IN MARCH, RETURNING TO THE KEEP, I TOOK the road from Bath to Belfast, the road that goes by Camden. In every cove was fog and it covered one’s vision like a winding sheet, a fog to embrace the long rock shelf offshore where sailing ships used to founder. When I could no longer see anything at all, I would pull the car over; then the grinding of the buoys would sound as mournful as the lowing of cattle in a rain-drenched field. The silence of the mist would come down on me. You could hear the groan of a drowning sailor in the lapping of that silence. I think you had to be demented to take the coast road on such a night.

Past Camden, a wind sprang up, the fog departed, and soon the driving was worse. With this shift in the weather, a cold rain came. On some curves the highway had turned to ice. Going into skids, my tires sang like a choir in a country church surrounded by forest demons. Now and then would appear a shuttered town and each occasional streetlight would seem equal to a beacon at sea. Empty summer houses, immanent as a row of tombs, stood in witness.

I was full of bad conscience. The road had become a lie. It would offer traction, then turn to glass. Driving that car by the touch of my fingertips, I began to think once more that lying was an art, and fine lying had to be a fine art. The finest liar in the land must be the ice monarch who sat in dominion on the curve of the road.

My mistress was behind me in Bath, and my wife awaited me near the island of Mount Desert. The ice monarch had installed his agents in my heart. I will spare you the story I told Kittredge about small transactions that would occupy me in Portland until evening and so cause my late return to Mount Desert. No, my business had been done in Bath, and in the merry arms of one of the wives of Bath. By acceptable measure, she did not have much to offer against my mate. The woman in Bath was agreeable, whereas my dear wife was a beauty. Chloe was cheerful, and Kittredge was—I apologize for so self-serving a word—distinguished. You see, Kittredge and I, while only third cousins, look much alike—even our noses are similar. Whereas Chloe is as common as gravy and heartening to taste. Buxom and bountiful, she worked in summer as a waitress in a Yankee inn. (Let us say: a Yankee-inn–type restaurant run by a Greek.) One night a week, on the hostess’s night off, Chloe was proud to serve as pro tem hostess. I helped her funds a bit. Perhaps other men did, too. I hardly knew. I hardly cared. She was like a dish I was ready to consume once or twice a month. I do not know if it would have been three times and more a week if she lived just over the hill, but Bath was considerably more than a hundred miles from the backside (our word for the backshore) of Mount Desert, and so I saw her when I could.

A liaison with a mistress that is kept so infrequently tends, I think, to serve civilization. If it had been any marriage but my own, I would have remarked that a double life lived with such moderation ought to be excellent—it might make both halves more interesting. One could remain deeply, if not wholly, in love with one’s wife. My occupation offered wisdom on such matters, after all. Did we begin by speaking of ghosts? My father commenced a family line that I continue: Spooks. In Intelligence, we look to discover the compartmentalization of the heart. We made an in-depth psychological study once in the CIA and learned to our dismay (it was really horror!) that one-third of the men and women who could pass our security clearance were divided enough—handled properly—to be turned into agents of a foreign power. “Potential defectors are at least as plentiful as potential alcoholics,” was the cheerful rule of thumb we ended with on that one.

After so many years of work with imperfect people I had learned, therefore, to live a little with the lapses of others so long as they did not endanger too much. Yet my own defection from the marital absolute left me ill with fear. On this night of blind driving to which I have introduced you, I was half certain I would soon be in a wreck. I felt caught in invisible and monstrous negotiations. It seemed—suspend all logic—that dreadful things might happen to others if I stayed alive. Can you understand? I do not pretend: I think something of the logic of the suicide is in such thoughts. Kittredge, who has a fine mind, full of aperçus, once remarked that suicide might be better understood on the assumption there was not one reason for the act but two: People may kill themselves for the obvious reason, that they are washed up, spiritually humiliated down to zero; equally, they can see their suicide as an honorable termination of deep-seated terror. Some people, said Kittredge, become so mired in evil spirits that they believe they can destroy whole armies of malignity by their own demise. It is like burning a barn to wipe out the termites who might otherwise infest the house.

Say much the same for murder. An abominable act which, nonetheless, can be patriotic. Kittredge and I did not talk long about murder. It was a family embarrassment. My father and I once spent close to three years trying to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Let me return, however, to that icy road. There, if my sense of preservation kept a light touch on the wheel, my conscience was ready to crush it. I had shattered more than a marriage vow. I had broken a lovers’ vow. Kittredge and I were fabulous lovers, by which I do not intend anything so vigorous as banging away till the dogs howl. No, back to the root of the word. We were fabulous lovers. Our marriage was the conclusion to one of those stern myths that instruct us in tragedy. If I sound like the wind of an ass in whistling about myself on such a high note, it is because I feel uneasy at describing our love. Normally, I cannot refer to it. Happiness and absolute sorrow flow from a common wound.

I will give the facts. They are brutal, but better than sentimental obfuscation. Kittredge had had but two men in her life. Her first husband and myself. We began our affair while she was still married to him. Some time after she betrayed him—and he was the kind of man who would think in terms of betrayal—he took a terrible fall in a rock climb and broke his back. He had been the lead, and when he went, the youth who was belaying him from the ledge below was pulled along. The anchor jerked out of the rock. Christopher, the adolescent killed in the fall, was their only child.

Kittredge could never forgive her husband. Their son was sixteen and not especially well coordinated. He should not have been led to that particular rock face. But then, how could she forgive herself? Our affair sat over her head. She buried Christopher and watched over her husband during the fifteen weeks he was in the hospital. Soon after he came home, Kittredge chose to get into a warm bath one night and cut each of her wrists with a sharp kitchen blade, after which she lay back and prepared to bleed to death in her tub. But she was saved.

By me. She had allowed no communication since the day of the fall. News so terrible had divided the ground between us like a fissure in earth that leaves two neighboring homes a gaping mile apart. God might as well have spoken. She told me not to see her. I did not try. On the night, however, that she took the knife to her wrists, I had (on a mounting sense of unease) flown up from Washington to Boston, then to Bangor, and rented a car to go on to Mount Desert. I heard her calling to me from caverns so deep in herself she was never aware of her own voice. I arrived at a silent house and let myself in through a window. Back on the first floor was an invalid and his nurse; on the second, his wife, presumably asleep in a far-off bed. When her bathroom door was locked and she did not reply, I broke in. Ten minutes more would have been too late.

We went back to our affair. Now there was no question. Shocked by tragedy, certified by loss, and offered dignity by thoughts we could send to one another, we were profoundly in love.

The Mormons believe that you enter into marriage not only for this life but, if you are married in the Temple, will spend eternity with your mate. I am no Mormon, but even by their elevated measure, we were in love. I could not conceive that I would ever be bored in my wife’s presence either side of the grave. Time spent with Kittredge would live forever; other people impinged upon us as if they entered our room holding a clock in their hand.

We had not begun in so inspired a place. Before the disaster on the rock face, we were taken with each other enormously. Since we were third cousins kissing, the tincture of incest enriched the bliss. But it was—on the highest level—qualified stuff. We were not quite ready to die for one another, just off on an awfully wicked streak. Her husband, Hugh Montague—“Harlot”—took on more importance, after all, in my psyche than my own poor ego. He had been my mentor, my godfather, my surrogate father, and my boss. I was then thirty-nine years old and felt half that age in his presence. Cohabiting with his wife, I was like a hermit crab who had just moved into a more impressive carapace; one was waiting to be dislodged.

Naturally, like any new lover in so momentous an affair, I did not ask for her motive. It was enough that she had wanted me. But now, after twelve years with Kittredge, ten in marriage, I can give a reason. To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise. I love Kittredge for her beauty and—I will say it—her profundity. We know there is more depth to her thought than to mine. All the same, I am frequently disconcerted by some astonishing space in the fine workings of her mind. Attribute it to background. She has not had a career like other women. I do not know many Radcliffe graduates who went into the CIA.

Item: On the night twelve years ago when we first made love, I performed that simple act of homage with one’s lips and tongue that a good many of our college graduates are ready to offer in the course of the act. Kittredge, feeling some wholly unaccustomed set of sensations in the arch from thigh to thigh, said, “Oh. I’ve been waiting years for that!” She soon made a point of telling me I was the next thing to pagan perfection. “You’re devil’s heaven,” she said. (Give me Scotch blood every time!) She looked no older on our first night than twenty-seven, but had been married already for eighteen and a half of her forty-one years. Hugh Tremont Montague was, she told me (and who could not believe her?), the only man she had ever known. Harlot was, also, seventeen years her senior, and very high echelon. Since one of his skills had been to work with the most special double agents, he had developed a finer sense of other people’s lies than they could ever have of his. By now he trusted no one, and, of course, no one around him could ever be certain Harlot was telling the truth. Kittredge would complain to me in those bygone days that she couldn’t say if he were a paragon of fidelity, a gorgon of infidelity, or a closet pederast. I think she began her affair with me (if we are to choose the bad motive rather than the good) because she wanted to learn whether she could run an operation under his nose and get away with it.

The good motive came later. Her love deepened for me not because I saved her life but because I had been sensitive to the mortal desperation of her spirit. I am finally wise enough to know that that is enough for almost all of us. Our affair commenced again. This time, we made an absolute of love. She was the kind of woman who could not conceive of continuing in such a state without marriage. Love was a state of grace and had to be protected by sacramental walls.

She felt obliged, therefore, to tell her husband. We went to Hugh Tremont Montague and he agreed to divorce. That may have been the poorest hour of my life. I was afraid of Harlot. I had the well-founded dread one feels for a man who can arrange for the termination of people. Before the accident, when he was tall and thin and seemed put together of the best tack and gear, he always carried himself as if he had sanction. Someone on high had done the anointing.

Now, stove-in at the waist, conforming to the shape of the wheelchair, he still had sanction. That was not the worst of it, however. I may have been afraid of him, but I also revered him. He had not only been my boss, but my master in the only spiritual art that American men and boys respect—machismo. He gave life courses in grace under pressure. The hour that Kittredge and I spent together on either side of his wheelchair is a bruise on the flesh of memory. I remember that he cried before we were done.

I could not believe it. Kittredge told me later it was the only time she ever saw him weep. Hugh’s shoulders racked, his diaphragm heaved, his spavined legs remained motionless. He was a cripple stripped down to his sorrow. I never lost the image. If I compare this abominable memory to a bruise, I would add that it did not fade. It grew darker. We were sentenced to maintain a great love.

Kittredge had faith. To believe in the existence of the absurd was, for her, a pure subscription to the devil. We were here to be judged. So our marriage would be measured by the heights it could climb from the dungeon of its low beginnings. I subscribed to her faith. For us, it was the only set of beliefs possible.

How, then, could I have spent my most recent hours this gray March day slopping and sliding on the over-friendly breast and belly of Chloe? My mistress’s kisses were like taffy, soft and sticky, endlessly wet. From high school on, Chloe had doubtless been making love with her mouth to both ends of her friends. Her groove was a marrow of good grease, her eyes luminous only when libidinal. So soon as we subsided for a bit, she would talk away in the happiest voice about whatever came into her head. Her discourse was all of trailer homes (she lived in one), how ready they were to go up in flames, and of truckers with big rigs who ordered coffee while sitting on enough self-importance to run the Teamsters. She told anecdotes about old boyfriends she ran into at the town lunch counter. “‘Boy,’ I said to myself, ‘has he been shoveling it in! Fat!’ Then I had to ask myself: ‘Chloe, is your butt that far behind?’ I put the blame on Bath. There’s nothing to do here in winter except eat, and look for hungry guys like you,” at which she gave a friendly clap to my buttocks as if we were playing on a team together—the old small-town sense that you heft a person’s worth—and we were off again. There was one yearning in my flesh (for the common people) that she kept at trigger-trip. Skid and slide and sing in unison, while the forest demons yowl.

I had met her in the off-season in the big restaurant where she worked. It was a quiet night, and I was not only alone at my table but the only diner in my section. She waited on me with a quiet friendliness, much at home with the notion that a meal that tasted right for me was better wages for her than a meal that tasted wrong. Like other good materialistic people before her, she was also maternalistic: She saw money as coming in all kinds of emotional flavors. It took happy money to buy a dependable appliance.

When I ordered the shrimp cocktail, she shook her head. “You don’t want the shrimp,” she said. “They’ve died and risen three times. Take the chowder.” I did. She guided me through the meal. She wanted my drinks to be right. She did it all with no great fuss—I was free to stay in my private thoughts, she in hers. We talked with whatever surplus was in our moods. Perhaps one waitress in ten could enjoy a lonely customer as much as Chloe. I realized after a while that on pickup acquaintance, which was never my style, I was surprisingly comfortable with her.

I stopped off again at the restaurant on another quiet night and she sat and had dessert and coffee with me. I learned of her life. She had two sons, twenty and twenty-one; they dwelt in Manchester, New Hampshire, and worked in the mills. She claimed to be thirty-eight, and her husband had broken up with her five years ago. Caught her cheating. “He was right. I was a boozer then, and you can’t trust a boozer. My heels were as round as roller skates.” She laughed with enough good humor to have been watching her own pornographic romp.

We went to her trailer. I have an ability developed, I believe, by my profession. I can concentrate on what is before me. Inter-office flaps, bureaucratic infringements, security leaks, even such assaults on the unconscious as my first infidelity to Kittredge, can be ignored. I have a personal instrument I think of as average, a good soldier, a dick as vulnerable as any other. It throbs with encouragement and droops with the oncoming of guilt. So it is testimony to the power of my concentration and to Chloe’s voluptuous exposures (call it a crime against the public pleasure for her to be seen in clothes) that, considering the uniqueness and magnitude of my marital breach, there was only a hint of sag from time to time in the fine fellow below. I was starved, in truth, for what Chloe had to offer.

Let me see if I can explain. Lovemaking with Kittredge was—I use the word once more—a sacrament. I am not at ease trying to speak of it. Whereas, I can give all away in talking about Chloe; we were like kids in the barn; Chloe even smelled of earth and straw. But there was ceremony to embracing Kittredge.

I do not mean that we were solemn or measured. If it did not come to real desire, we might not make love for a month. When it happened, however, it certainly did; after all our years together, we still flew at each other. Kittredge, indeed, was as fierce as one of those wood-animals with claws and sharp teeth and fine fur that you can never quite tame. At its worst, there were times when I felt like a tomcat in with a raccoon. My tongue (once key to devil’s heaven) was rarely now in her thoughts—rather, our act was subservient to coming together, cruelty to cruelty, love to love. I’d see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another. Afterward, was tenderness, and the sweetest domestic knowledge of how curious and wonderful we were for one another, but it was not in the least like getting it on with Chloe. With Chloe it was get ready for the rush, get ready for the sale, whoo-ee, gushers, we’d hit oil together. Recuperating, it felt low-down and slimy and rich as the earth. You could grow flowers out of your ass.

Driving that car, my heart in my teeth, and the road ice in my ice-cold fingers, I knew all over again what Chloe gave me. It was equality. We had nothing in common but our equality. If they brought us up for judgment, we could go hand in hand. Our bodies were matched in depth to one another, and we felt the affection of carrots and peas in the same meat soup. I had never known a woman so much my physical equal as Chloe.

Whereas, Kittredge was the former consort of a knight, now a crippled knight. I felt like a squire in a medieval romance. While my knight was off on a crusade, I entertained his lady. If we had found a way to pick the lock of her chastity belt, I still had to mount the steps. We might see lightning and stars, yet the bedroom remained her chamber. Our ecstasy was as austere as the glow of phosphorescent lights in Maine waters. I did not see Creation; rather, I had glimpses of the heavens. With Chloe, I felt like one more Teamster with a heavy rig.

On a night of driving so unsettled as this—sleet on the cusp of freezing—there was no way to meditate for long. Rather, thoughts jumped up before me. So, I saw that Chloe had the shape of a wife, and Kittredge was still my lady. In most affairs, a kiss can remind you of many a mouth you have known. It lubricates a marriage to have a wife who reminds you of other women as well. Many a connubial union is but the sublimation of orgies never embarked upon. With Kittredge, I had hardly been enjoying the promiscuity of making love to one woman who might serve as surrogate for many.

Once, about a month after we were married, she said to me, “There’s nothing worse than the breaking of vows. I always feel as if the universe is held together by the few solemn promises that are kept. Hugh was awful. You could never trust a word of his. I shouldn’t tell you, darling, but when you and I first began, it was such an achievement for me. I suppose it was the bravest thing I’d ever done.”

“Don’t ever be that brave with me,” I said, and it was no threat. At the uneasy center of my voice, I was begging her.

“I won’t. I won’t ever.” She would have had the clear eyes of an angel but for a touch of mist in the blue. A philosopher, she was always trying to perceive objects at a great distance. “No,” she said, “let’s make a pledge. Absolute honesty between us. If either of us has anything to do with someone else, we must tell.”

“I pledge,” I said.

“My God,” she said, “with Hugh I never knew. Is that one of the reasons he clung to that awful name, Harlot?” She stopped. Harlot, whatever he was doing at this moment, was in the wheelchair now. “Poor old Gobby,” she said. Any compassion she still held for him was in this nickname.

“Why is the name Gobby?” With Kittredge, there was a time for everything and I had never asked her before.

“God’s old beast. That’s his name.”

“One name, anyway.”

“Oh, darling, I love giving people names. At least, people I care about. That’s the only way we’re allowed to be promiscuous. Give each other hordes of names.”

Over the years, one by one, I had learned a few of them. Hugh had a fine mustache, trim pepper-and-salt. It belonged on a British cavalry colonel. Kittredge used to call him Trimsky. “Just as bright as Leon Trotsky,” she’d say, “but ten times as neat.” Later I found out she was, this once, not original. It was Allen Dulles who first christened him thus. That was when Hugh was working for the OSS in London during the war. Apparently Dulles repeated it to Kittredge at her wedding. Kittredge had been mad about Allen Dulles ever since meeting him at a Georgetown garden party her parents took her to during the Easter vacation of her sophomore year in Radcliffe. Ah, the poor Harvard men who tried to spark Kittredge after Allen Dulles kissed her on the cheek for good-bye.

Following the nuptials, she took to calling Hugh Tremont Montague by Trimsky. He gave her monikers in return. One was Ketchum, for Ketchum, Idaho (since Kittredge’s full pedigree was Hadley Kittredge Gardiner, first name taken from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, whom Kittredge’s father, Rodman Knowles Gardiner, met in Paris in the twenties and thought was “the nicest woman ever encountered”).

It had taken its own good time for me to learn a few metamorphoses of my beloved’s names. Ketchum, avoiding Ketchup, was transmogrified into Red—which was perfect, and stuck for a period, since Kittredge’s hair was raven-black (and her skin as white as your best white marble). I also knew a lover’s pain when Kittredge confessed that Hugh Montague, on notable nights, would call her Hotsky. Did people in Intelligence shift names about the way others move furniture around a room?

In any event, Gobby was the postmarital a.k.a.

“I hated,” said Kittredge, “the idea that I couldn’t trust Gobby’s personal honesty. You do pledge, darling? We will have honesty between us?”

“We will.”

My car went into a severe skid, much longer now in memory than it takes to tell. The wall of forest on one side stuttered up to me, and my front end yawed when I spun the wheel, whereupon car and I rushed viciously across the lane toward the other wall of pines at the far shoulder, now suddenly the near shoulder. I thought for a moment I had died and become a devil, for my head seemed put on backwards: I was looking down the road at the turn I had just come out of. Then, as slowly as if I were in a whirlpool at sea, the road began to revolve. Interminably. I could have been a spot of dust on a turntable. Presto!—car and I were moving forward again. I had skidded ninety degrees to the right, then had spun the other way through a full three-sixty counterclockwise, no, put on ninety more degrees to find myself going straight at last, a full one-and-a-quarter, four-fifty-degree turn. I was beyond fear. I felt as if I had fallen out of a ten-story window, landed in a fireman’s net, and was now strolling around in a glow and a daze. “Millions of creatures,” I said aloud to the empty car—actually said it aloud!—“walk the earth unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep,” after which, trundling along at thirty miles an hour, too weak and exhilarated to stop, I added in salute to the lines just recited, “Milton, Paradise Lost,” and thought of how Chloe and I had gotten up from bed in her trailer on the outskirts of Bath a couple of hours ago and had gone for a farewell drink to a cocktail lounge with holes in the stuffing of the red leatherette booths. Just after the potions were brought, I knocked one over in a conversational sweep of my arm, and the glass shattered into intolerable little bits as if nothing much was holding together any longer. Whereupon Chloe and I both fell into an uncharacteristic brown spell, and were gloomy when we said good-bye. Infidelity was on the horror of the air.

Now I pondered those millions of creatures who walked the earth unseen. Did they whisper in Kittredge’s ear as she slept, even as once they had called out to me on that long-ago day eleven years back when she grew ready to cut her wrists? Who ran the espionage systems that lived in the ocean of the spirits? A spy needed thoughts as narrow as lasers to rouse no stir. How did an agent making copies of secret papers week after week, year after year, keep from himself the awful fear that this spirit sea of misdeeds might seep into the sleep of the man who could catch him?

I passed a phone booth in a rest area and stopped the car. I was in a panic to speak to Kittredge. Abruptly it seemed that if I did not reach her at once, every last barrier between my mind and hers would be down.

What can be closer to the ages of old-ice than one corroded, pockmarked phone booth on a freezing highway in Maine? I had to raise the operator, and she had trouble repeating the number of my credit card. I was stamping my feet to keep warm before the machinery of the Bell Company was able to stir itself out of chilly sleep. The phone rang four, five, six times, and then I leaped with love at the sound of Kittredge’s voice and, on the instant, recalled how my heart had once lifted equally with joy one dark night alone in a canoe in Vermont, when, behold! a galaxy of light lit up every ripple on the black waters of the pond as a full harvest moon rose exactly in the notch between two steep round hills. Druid certainties left their flush then on my heart. I knew a curious peace. So did Kittredge’s voice now give ease to the stricken tunnels of my breath. I felt as if I had never heard her voice before. Let no one say I did not love my wife if after eleven years of marriage I could still discover her wonders. Most speaking tones come into my ear through filters and baffles. I hear people monitoring their larynx to purvey warmth and cold, probity, confidence, censure, approbation—we are phony voices if only by a little. After all, one’s speech is the first instrument of one’s will.

Kittredge’s voice came out of herself as a flower opens out of its bud, except I never knew which bloom would be first. Her voice was as amazing in anger as in love—she was never on guard for the turn of her own feelings. Only those who walk about with the notion (it can be modest) that they are an indispensable part of the universe can speak with such lack of concern for how they sound to others.

“Harry, I’m glad you called. Are you all right? I’ve been full of forebodings all day.”

“I’m fine. But the roads are terrible. I’m not even to Bucksport.”

“Are you really all right? Your voice sounds as if you just shaved off your Adam’s apple.”

I laughed as madly as an embarrassed Japanese businessman. It was her claim that I would have been as dark, tall, and handsome as Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck if not for my prominent Adam’s apple. “I’m all right,” I said. “I think I needed to talk to you.”

“Oh, I need to talk to you. Can you guess what arrived today? A telegram from our friend. It’s demoralizing. After being nice for so long, he’s now in an absolutely deranged mood.”

She was speaking of Harlot. “Well,” I said, “it can’t be as bad as that. What did he say?”

“I’ll tell you later.” She paused. “Harry, promise me something.”

“Yes.” I knew by her tone. “Yes,” I said, “what’s your foreboding?”

“Drive most carefully. There’s a very high tide tonight. Please call me when you get to the dock. The water’s roaring already.”

No, her voice concealed nothing. Tones were flying in many directions as if she were working a dinghy buffeted by chop.

“I have the oddest thoughts,” she said. “Did you just have a bad skid?”

“Never a worse,” I answered. The windows of my telephone booth might be iced up, but perspiration was collecting on my back. How near to me could she get without encountering the real hurly-burly?

“I’m all right,” I went on. “I expect the worst weather is over. It feels that way.” I took a chance. “Any other odd thoughts flying around?”

“I’m obsessed with a woman,” she said.

I nodded intently. I felt like a boxer who is not certain which hand of his unfamiliar opponent he should respect more. “Obsessed with a woman?” I repeated.

“A dead woman,” Kittredge said.

You may believe I took relief.

“Is she family?” I asked.

“No.”

When Kittredge’s mother died, I woke on more than one night to see Kittredge sitting at the side of the bed, her back to me, talking with animation to the bare wall on which, with no embarrassment, she could perceive her mother. (How much this had to do with my warped dream—let us call it such—about Augustus Farr is, of course, anyone’s good question.) On these earlier occasions, however, it was clear: Kittredge was in some sort of coma. She would be wide awake, but oblivious to me. When I would tell her in the morning of such episodes, she would neither smile nor frown. My account of her actions did not disturb Kittredge. It seemed fitting to the nocturnal fold that there would be occasions when those of the dead who had been near to you could still speak. Of course her son Christopher had never come back, but then he had been smashed. His death was different. He had fallen into the bottomless abyss of his father’s vanity. So his demise had been rendered numb for all. In this fashion, Kittredge reasoned.

Kittredge had Highland blood both sides, and you have to know how Celtic a few Highlanders can be. Not all of the Scotch content themselves with devising controls for the law, the banks, and Presbyterian practice; some take a cottage on the interface between this world and the next. They do not blow those bagpipes for too little.

“Do you want to tell me,” I now asked, “about this woman?”

“Harry, she’s been dead for ten years. I don’t know why she is trying to reach me now.”

“Well, who is it?”

She did not reply directly. “Harry,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about Howard Hunt lately.”

“Howard? E. Howard Hunt?”

“Yes. Do you know where he is?”

“Not really. Someplace quiet, I guess, picking up the pieces.”

“Poor man,” she said. “Do you know I actually met him first at that party long ago when my parents introduced me to Allen Dulles. Allen said, ‘Here, Kitty, meet Howard Hunt. He’s an absolutely nifty novelist.’ I don’t think the Great White Case Officer had top powers in literary criticism.”

“Oh, Mr. Dulles always went in for superlatives.”

“Didn’t he?” I had made her laugh. “Harry, he said to me once, ‘Cal Hubbard would be the Teddy Roosevelt of our outfit if it weren’t for Kermit Roosevelt.’ Lord, your father. It fits!” She laughed again, yet her voice, honest as a brook full of the quick lights offered by moving clouds and pebble bed, was in shadow now.

“Tell me about the woman.”

“It’s Dorothy Hunt, darling,” said Kittredge. “She’s come right out of the woodwork.”

“I didn’t realize you knew her well.”

“I don’t. I didn’t. Hugh and I had the Hunts once for dinner.”

“Of course. I recall.”

“And I do remember her. An intelligent woman. We had lunch a few times. So much more depth than poor Howard.”

“What does she say?”

“Harry, she says, ‘Don’t let them rest.’ That’s all she says. As if we both knew. Whoever them may be.”

I didn’t reply. Kittredge’s dismay, delicate but pervasive, leaped over the wire. I almost asked: “Did Hugh ever talk to you about the High Holies?” but I did not speak the thought. I trusted no phone entirely, certainly not my own. While we had said nothing to get any big wind up, still one did one’s best to keep all conversation under some kind of damage control. So, now I merely said, “That’s curious about Dorothy,” and added no more.

Kittredge heard my shift of tone. She, too, was aware of the telephone. There was always, however, her perverse sense of the wicked. If there were monitors on this call, she would offer them a heaping plate of confusion. Kittredge now stated: “I didn’t like the message from Gallstone.”

“What did it say?” Gallstone—you may have guessed—was one more name for Harlot.

“Well, it was delivered. That awful handyman, Gilley Butler, was standing at my door this evening. He must have taken our dinghy and rowed across, then presented me the envelope with a raffish grin. He was awfully drunk, and acting as if the heavens would undulate should he ever smuggle me into a cave. I could see by his attitude that somebody paid him much too much to deliver it. The most awful emanation came off him. Superior and sort of sleazy all at once.”

“What,” I repeated, “did your message say?”

“Five hundred seventy-one days on Venus. Plus one on leap year. Eight months to do it all.”

“He can’t possibly be right,” I replied, as if I had comprehended every word.

“Never.”

We finished by telling each other that we missed each other, speaking as if it would be years rather than a couple of hours before we met again. Then we hung up. So soon as I was back in the car, I took a worn paperback of T. S. Eliot’s poems out of the glove compartment. The eight months mentioned in the telegram referred to the fifth poem in the volume. We had agreed to add the number of the month—March was the third month—to the number of the poem. Venus was a garnish to distract attention, but 571 plus one, by our private convention of subtracting five hundred, gave me the seventy-first and seventy-second lines of the fifth poem, which was—dare I confess it?—“The Waste Land.” To any qualified person who had the same edition of Eliot’s selected poems, it would be no great work to break our code, but only Harlot, Kittredge, and myself knew which book was in our employ.

Here was Harlot’s message—lines 71 and 72:

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

He had done it again. I did not know what Harlot meant, but I did not like it. I had supposed we were enjoying a truce.

In the year just after my marriage to Kittredge, when ex-husband Hugh Montague lived through the nights of the long knives, he had sent off hideous telegrams from his wheelchair. On our wedding day came the first: “Lucky are you for the dice roll eleven. You must buss each other 528 times plus two and save the sheets—A Friendly Heap” translated into:

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

That succeeded in coloring our wedding night. Now, after all these years, he was sending personal messages again. Perhaps I deserved no less. My nostrils still reeked criminally of Chloe.

Of course, cruelty can be a cure for tension when visited on a guilty man. (So says our penal system.) Harlot’s message, sinister as the fog—“that corpse you planted last year in your garden”—enabled me to climb onto the same plateau as the difficulties of the weather. I was at last ready for each little breakaway of the tires. I could think while my reflexes did the driving, and given the fruits of our call, I had a bit to go over. I was trying to decide whether Kittredge had a clue to the High Holies. I had certainly not told her, and now it was reasonably clear that Harlot hadn’t either. Her voice had been too unknowing about Dorothy Hunt. Kittredge certainly appeared to be wholly unaware that Harlot and I had joined forces.

Having all this much to go over in my mind, I obviously needed the ruminative powers offered by an easier journey. So, I appreciated the change in weather as I passed through Belfast where Route 1 joined Route 3. For now, the air was a crucial degree warmer, the sleet had eased to rain, and the roads, if wet, were free of ice. I was able to settle into my thoughts. In the special file on the High Holies, Dorothy Hunt occupied a manila binder.