The Second Sight, page 10
“I’ll consider it, sir.”
“Will you, now? That would have pleased Hubbard. Well, if you decide to go ahead, ask Paul where his great-uncle Paulus got his monocles. He’ll know the details. You’ve got to go to Germany to get the right kind.”
“You knew the German side of the family?”
The man peered through his pince-nez as if the question was wholly unexpected but very welcome. “Yes, I did. Fine people, the old type of German. They weren’t all thugs, you know; that was just a story the British started as propaganda in 1914. The Buechelers are all gone now, you know, except for Paulus’s widow. Every one of their boys was killed in the First War, three of them. Then Paulus went back in as a general in the Second War at the age of sixty and was killed in Russia.”
They reached the bottom of the hill. The others had gone inside the house. Cars were parked the whole length of the drive. A black Cadillac halfway down the line started its engine and rolled toward them, crunching gravel beneath its tires. The driver, a young man about Patchen’s age, got out and came around the car to open the door.
“David Patchen, this is Tommy Dawson,” he said. “You’re a couple of ex-Marines. Tommy was in on Saipan and Iwo Jima, came out a major. We’ll be going along—can’t stay for lunch. You’d better get inside before they eat it all.”
Patchen and Dawson shook hands. A grease-stained bag and a quart bottle of Hampden ale lay on the front seat.
“Ah,” the man said. “You got the liverwurst sandwiches, Tommy?” “Yes, sir. And the ale. Warm.”
“Good.” He turned to Patchen. “Elliott’s cook makes wonderful liverwurst sandwiches, spreads Limburger cheese on one slice of rye bread, German mustard on the other. The local ale is good, smells like skunk the way ale should, but you have to drink it warm. Well, goodbye.”
He held out his hand. His grip was powerful, not merely strong. He smiled, showing square, nicotine-stained teeth.
“You graduate in June?” he asked.
“February,” Patchen replied.
“Do you now? Well, then, we’d better get busy. Any languages besides Japanese?”
“What?”
“Do you speak any other foreign languages besides Japanese?” “I don’t speak Japanese.”
The other man gave him a look of keen interest.
“You don’t? That’s odd, somebody said you did,” he said. “Not that it matters.”
He got into the car. Patchen watched him open a briefcase, extract a desk diary, and study it. He rolled down the window.
“I’ll be in Boston a week from Wednesday,” he said. “Let’s eat lunch together.”
“All right.”
He wrote in his book with the stub of a yellow pencil. “Twelve sharp.” He gave Patchen the name of a club and its address on Beacon Street. “Just keep this to yourself for the time being, will you? Don’t mention it to Paul just yet. Compartments!”
Patchen watched the black car go down the drive.
Compartments? he thought. What are those?
Patchen presented himself at the varnished black door of the club on Beacon Street at five minutes before noon on the appointed Wednesday. There was no sign or bell or knocker, only the house number. He lifted the latch and walked in. A porter in a thread bare jacket greeted him.
“Good day, sir.”
Patchen said, “I’m meeting one of your members for lunch.” “Welcome, sir. May I ask which member?”
The man in the pince-nez had not told Patchen his name, and Patchen had asked no questions about him.
“I’ll know him when I see him,” he said.
If the porter saw anything strange in this reply, he gave no sign. “Very well, sir,” he said.
The porter, a small elderly man with a deep convalescent’s pallor, came out from behind his desk.
“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Then follow me, if you please, sir. You can take a seat in the Strangers’ Room. You’ll be able to watch out for your gentleman from there.”
He led him three steps across the foyer to a small anteroom furnished with Victorian sofas and chairs. Prints of Yankee clippers and portraits of old men in high collars and muttonchops hung on the wall. Patchen sat down on a horsehair sofa facing the door. Somewhere in the deeper precincts of the club a grandfather clock began to strike, and just as the chimes ended and the hour gong began, the man in the pince-nez came in. He looked quite different without his homburg hat, like an actor who has taken off his costume. His hat had flattened his white hair, which was parted in the middle to show a long straight line of pink scalp, and this slight dishevelment added to the transformation.
He was grinning with delight as he advanced toward Patchen with his hand outstretched, and Patchen could imagine what he must have looked like as a boy. “You found the place, I see,” he said, crushing Patchen’s hand. “Good. Do you have to go to the bathroom?”
“No, thanks. I’ve already been asked.”
“Have you? Good. Graves is very conscientious about that; for some reason the younger porters don’t like to ask. He says you wouldn’t give my name.”
“I don’t know it, sir.”
“You don’t?”
“No. What shall I call you?”
The man in the pince-nez smiled and the boy showed through again. “I’ll let you decide that,” he said. He pulled a sheet of paper and a fountain pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket and, after uncapping the pen, handed both to Patchen. “Do you mind signing that here?” he asked. “We can’t take papers upstairs.”
Patchen looked at the paper. It was a form, a secrecy agreement under which the signer promised never to divulge to anyone any part of the conversation he was about to have on this date with the other person whose signature appeared below. Patchen signed it. The man in the pince-nez, leaning over a round parlor table covered with a fringed cloth, signed it too.
“Now for some food,” he said.
In a dining room filled with members and waiters who were all white-haired or bald, the man in the pince-nez scribbled his name and the figure 2 on a chit and handed it to a waiter.
“And let us have a half-bottle of the good white, please.”
They ate thick pea soup and cod cakes made from salted cod, followed by bread pudding. The “good white” turned out to be a 1929 Puligny-Montrachet, golden in the glass. Patchen had never tasted anything like it.
The man in the pince-nez, watching him take his first sip, said, “You like wine, do you?”
“I do now.”
“Wine has been a good friend to man, especially when it’s cod cakes for lunch.”
While they ate the penitential food and drank the voluptuous wine, the man in the pince-nez talked about baseball. Patchen listened with interest as his host described having seen Tris Speaker, Napoleon Lajoie, Christy Mathewson, and Home Run Baker play during the era of the dead ball.
“I’m a great admirer of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams and modern fellows like that,” the man in the pince-nez said, “but they changed the game when they introduced the rabbit ball. It became less of an imitation of life.”
“How so?” Patchen asked.
“Taking a human lifetime as the equivalent of a season of baseball, nobody hits sixty home runs. Most hit one or two, or none, and think they’ve done all right. The most Home Run Baker managed in one year was ten, and look what they called him.”
“Twelve,” Patchen said. “In 1913.”
The man in the pince-nez smiled with pleasure at the correction. “Absolutely correct,” he said. “You know, mankind in all its thousands of years on earth has only invented two perfect systems, the English sonnet and the game of baseball. Each is governed by absolute rules which cannot be bent without destroying the form and therefore the result, and yet everything known to the human heart and mind, everything, can happen within them. Rules and imagination—that’s the winning combination. Or don’t you agree?”
“I agree,” Patchen said.
“So did Hubbard Christopher,” the man in the pince-nez said, wiping his lips on his napkin. “Most people think my idea about baseball and sonnets is hogwash. They’re taught that everything is complicated, that rules get in the way and results don’t matter. They think the game’s the thing and never mind the consequences. Makes ‘em feel they’re pretty darn smart to get through the day uncaught. But they’re wrong. Everything that really matters in this world is simple, and that’s why it’s so doggone hard to play the game. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Let’s go into the other room.”
At a glass case by the entrance of a large sitting room, the man in the pince-nez selected two fat Havana cigars, clipped the ends himself, and handed one to Patchen.
“That’s a whale oil lamp,” he said, leaning over to light his cigar with the yellow flame.
They sat down together in facing armchairs in a far corner of the room. Other members wandered in, but did not come near. “Well, let me put the question,” the man in the pince-nez said.
“Would you like to come to work for me?”
Patchen was not startled; nothing the man in the pince-nez said or did surprised him any longer. “What would I do?” he asked.
“That’s not your worry. It’s up to me to find out what you want to do and make it possible for you to do it. What do you want to do?”
“I want to live in privacy.”
“That’s all?”
“No.”
“Then what? Tell me what’s in your heart, son.”
Patchen drew in a deep breath, and with it clouds of aromatic cigar smoke. He was unused to it and his eye watered.
“I want to work against war,” he said.
“Work for peace?”
“No, none of that bullshit. I want to be an enemy of war.”
The man in the pince-nez examined Patchen’s wounds—it was impossible to look at him without doing so, but most people pre tended not to see the damage. Then he leaned forward and squeezed his knee—not the wounded one, the whole one, knowing which was which.
“All right,” he said. “When can you start?”
“Around the end of June,” Patchen replied. “I’m getting mar ried in April, but we’ll be back by then.”
“Back from where?”
“Paris.”
“Good place for a honeymoon, Paris,” the man in the pince-nez said. “But learn a little French before you go. Talk it to Paul, he’s fluent. The French are bastards if you can’t speak their language. Correct pronunciation is their idea of a system, but it ain’t baseball. I’ll send somebody up to see you with a contract. He’ll mention that he’s a friend of the O. G.”
After supper that night, while he and Christopher were walking back to their room, Patchen asked a question. It was difficult because he did not want to remind Christopher of his father’s death by using the wrong words.
He said, “That old fellow with the white hair who talked to me at the Harbor the other day … Do you know who I mean?”
“The one in the pinch-nose glasses?” Christopher said. “That’s the O. G. He’s the Director of the Outfit.”
“The Outfit?”
“The U. S. intelligence service.”
Patchen laughed, explosively, in astonishment. Only hours before, he had agreed to become a spy without realizing that he had done so.
“Is that who he is?” he said. “Why is he called the O. G.?”
“It stands for ‘Old Gentleman.’ It’s a joke. Actually he’s prematurely white—he’s only a little older than my father.”
“How did he know your father?”
“They worked together during the war,” Christopher said. “Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.”
2
PATCHEN AND MARTHA HAD SEEN LITTLE OF EACH OTHER SINCE SHE graduated from Radcliffe. She had heard the call shortly after leaving Cambridge, and since then she had been in Guatemala, living with a tribe of Indians. They were all drunk all the time, from the age of puberty. They were peaceable drunks; they fermented alcohol from sugar cane to make a drink called guaro and consumed it for religious reasons, then lay about quietly in the drinking hut, which had been set aside for the purpose, waiting for visions. The cult had no priests or liturgy; drunkenness was all. Musicians took turns tapping out a mournful four-note tune on a marimba, day and night.
In their village, located in a clearing in the jungle near the overgrown ruins of Maya temples which looked like small green mountains, Martha had lived as the Indians lived in all respects except for the drinking. She slept on the ground in a leaky hut, weeded corn, and cut cane with the women; she ate the tribal food, which consisted of unleavened corn bread, boiled beans with chili peppers, squash, a pear-shaped vegetable called güisquil, and potatoes. Martha spent much of her time treating the wounds the Indians inflicted on their own bodies: in their stupor they often fell down or ran into things, or cut or scalded themselves. One woman bled to death in front of Martha’s eyes after she fell on her machete and severed a deep artery in her thigh. Martha, unable to locate the source of the bleeding, had been unable to save her life.
“The other women ran and got guaro for her, and she drank as she died,” Martha told Patchen. “They said it would be a bad thing for her to go into the next world sober.”
Martha was not a missionary in the usual sense of the term, and she made no attempt to convert the adult Indians, or even to turn them away from drink. She was a believer in the Inward Light, a form of Quakerism which emphasizes the Christ within each person while ignoring the Scriptures and the historical Jesus. As such, she confined herself to doing what she described as “the unasked,” bandaging the Indians’ wounds and sharing their work. Most died young, usually of liver disease and kidney failure, and their children, brain-damaged in the womb by alcohol, were born dull.
The children did not begin to drink until puberty, which came as early as ten in some of the girls, and Martha had concentrated on the younger children, teaching the girls how to sew and the boys how to repair an automobile; she had gone to night classes at a vocational school in Boston to learn these skills herself. With Patchen’s help she had purchased a surplus Army Jeep which grease-smeared little boys took apart and put together again many times under her supervision. They enjoyed this work, and once they learned how to fit the parts together, were amazingly quick at it.
“It was always a wonderful moment when they stepped on the starter and the engine started after they’d put the Jeep back together,” Martha said, “but they didn’t really like noise made by a machine. After a minute or two they’d turn it off so they could hear the marimba.”
Although the children were as clumsy as the adults—the girls pricked themselves with their needles, the boys suffered gashes and smashed fingers from wrenches and screwdrivers—Martha had hoped that embroidery and auto mechanics would prove to be means of escape from the village for some of her pupils. But as soon as pubic hair appeared on their bodies, the children were initiated into the cult by means of a ritual called tragando el gato, “swallowing the cat,” so called because they were required to drink a whole cup of guaro without pausing for breath, and gulping that much raw alcohol for the first time was like letting a clawed animal with a long, twitching tail scramble down your throat. After initiation the children disappeared into the drinking hut. They did not seem to recognize Martha thereafter, but went about in the stupor that would last for the rest of their lives.
Martha investigated the origins of the cult and concluded from hazy stories the Indians told her that a Spanish deserter from the army of the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, who subdued Guatemala in the sixteenth century, had taught them to ferment and drink alcohol. In the drinking hut, the largest building in the village, they kept a life-size effigy of the Spaniard, wearing his breastplate and helmet, seated on a throne. They called him Maximón.
A large unglazed pottery vessel, about a pint in capacity, hung from the effigy’s neck, and the Indians filled this with guaro every morning; by nightfall the guaro was gone. The Indians said that Maximón drank it, but Martha thought that it vanished through evaporation. At evening they placed a lighted cigar between the effigy’s lips, and it smoked this rapidly, down to the end, the tip glowing in the darkness and the acrid tobacco smoke drifting out of the hut.
“I think the Spanish deserter is their real god,” Martha said, “but they’re very secretive about him, except to say that he gave them a thousand children.”
“How did he do that?” Patchen asked.
“By impregnating the women. I think he got them drunk, then did what he wanted to do.”
“Then they’re all related to God, who was a drunk.”
Martha gave a little grunt, as if Patchen had implanted this blasphemous idea by injection instead of merely speaking it aloud; he was alway surprising her by seeing things that she could not see.
“Of course that’s what they think,” she said.
She began to weep.
“What’s wrong?” Patchen asked.
“Thee just made me realize that there’s no hope for my Indians in this world,” she replied. She addressed Patchen with the Quaker “thee” when they were alone; it was a sign of love and belonging, and he liked it. Nevertheless, he called Martha “you”; he was a birthright Quaker himself, but a non-believer.
“Your Indians? How are they yours?”
“I am not speaking possessively. Thee will understand some day.”
Martha did not believe in unbelief, only in the idea that people were sometimes mistaken about what they believed, or in Patchen’s case, mistaken about what he thought he did not believe.
It was night, three days after Martha and Patchen had been married in Ohio. They stood together on the fantail of the liner America, watching the phosphorescent wake of the ship as it passed through the dingy waves of the North Atlantic. Martha had never been to sea before. She had never even seen the sea—she had traveled to her Indian village in her Jeep, driving alone through Mexico, navigating by compass and sleeping in the open—and she found its ceaseless motion soothing and mysterious.
