The Second Sight, page 46
The women met at the Age of Enlightenment, a fashionable restaurant in a little street off Wisconsin Avenue. Martha arrived first, and as she came through the door the greeter looked her up and down and hesitated; they didn’t get many customers dressed up as Salvation Army maidens in this place. Martha was used to this sort of scrutiny, and in order to put the doubtful young woman at ease, she said, “I’m joining Mrs. Graham.”
The greeter smiled with sudden charm, thinking, Old money; maybe even English. “This way, please,” she said. “Lady Charlotte should be along any minute now.”
As Martha made her way to a front table, the other customers gazed at her with open curiosity. Like the greeter, they were slender well-barbered people in their thirties and forties who retained the self-absorbed, discomposed air and the vacant faces of adolescents. Male and female dressed alike in drab pinstripe suits with pink or yellow neck cloths and costly slip-on shoes. When they lifted their drinks (mostly iced tea or mineral water, Martha noted with approval), gold Rolex watches flashed on their wrists. Their demeanor was somber and wary, like that of actors playing idealistic conspirators in a Costa Gavras movie. Many wore wire-rimmed spectacles with tiny round lenses hardly larger than the eyes they covered, like those in old photographs of Leon Trotsky and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Charlotte arrived, dressed in a Chanel suit and Gucci pumps, with a small crocodile bag slung over her shoulder by a long gold chain. (She did not share Patrick’s anxious concern for endangered species. “Crocodiles are better off dead,” she had told Martha during their chat after dinner at the Patchens’. “So are tigers; they ate two relations of mine on their honeymoon in India—just came into the tent and trotted off with them clamped in their jaws. It’s enough to make one vengeful. Of course, to my husband and his friends, one live croc is worth any number of starved natives.”) Her clothes reminded Martha, who could not tell one couturier from another, of the expensive things Cathy Christopher used to wear, but Charlotte herself was not nearly so beautiful. She had a face like a cat’s, absent-minded and bored by the daylight world, and a long-waisted feline body. She “kissed” Martha, a cool efficient touch of powdered cheek, before she sat down.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said.
“Only a few minutes,” Martha replied. “It was very nice just looking at everyone. What pretty people they have here.”
“Yes, isn’t it wonderful, they all strive to look as though Jack Kennedy banged their mothers on his way through Milwaukee,” Charlotte replied. “The menu here is nouvelle American cuisine. They’re quite snobby about it, but they don’t mind if you don’t order fish or fowl; the prices take that into account. I recommend you to try the watercress, arugula, radicchio, and walnut salad with walnut oil and raspberry vinaigrette.”
“That sounds very healthy. And a cup of tea, please.”
Charlotte gave the order to the hovering waiter, who had set an Old Fashioned glass filled with milk before her almost as soon as she sat down. “I’ll have another of these with my salad,” she said, drinking half the milk at a single swallow.
Martha watched curiously. “That milk has a brown tint,” she said.
“That’s because it’s got Scotch whisky in it,” Charlotte said. “Would you like to try one?”
“No, thank you.”
“You can have it without the whisky if you like. Or without the milk. No? I think you’ll like the salad as much as you like the clientele. I have luncheon here quite often, but I can’t get Patrick to touch this kind of food. He lives on protein.”
“I don’t think David would like it, either.”
“No, I shouldn’t think so. Toads and spiders would be more his thing.”
“What?” Martha’s brows knitted.
“Joke,” Charlotte said. “My husband thinks your husband is the Wicked Witch of the West. Men can be witches, did you know that?”
“Not David. He’s a very good person.”
“I’m sure he is,” Charlotte said. Martha’s hand lay on the table. She squeezed it affectionately. In actual fact, she had taken a liking to Martha; she was rather like the sort of girl, plain and earnest and middle class, she had chosen as friends at school. They had made excellent chums. Charlotte still wrote to them all; mostly they had ended up in African countries whose names began with “Z,” trying to make up for the overweening pride and arrogance of the British Empire by performing demeaning services for indifferent blacks. The food came. Martha ate her salad with good appetite. Charlotte left her own greens untouched while she drank her second Scotch and milk.
“I enjoyed our talk at your house tremendously,” Charlotte said. “Especially the part about the tiddly Indians. Can’t I do something to help?” Martha was chewing her salad and could not answer at once. “I mean to say,” Charlotte continued, “why not simply rescue a few of the little chaps, educate them in America, then send them back to save the rest? They could set up some sort of Mayan Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Rescue the children?” Martha said. “How would you do that?”
“Just abduct them, that’s my idea. It’s done all the time for immoral purposes. Evil white men are always buying little girls in Thailand and little boys in the Philippines and posting them off to Europe and America and Japan like tins of biscuits. Why not do it for a moral purpose?”
“How could it be moral if it began by doing a wrong?”
Charlotte picked up a sprig of watercress in her fingers and nibbled it. “Quite right,” she said. “It couldn’t possibly be. I must tell Patrick what you’ve said and see if he thinks it applies to his terrorists. He’s been trying to ring up David on that subject, but his calls are not returned.”
“I don’t think the children would be able to help the others even if they did go somewhere else to grow up,” Martha said. “They’d be very homesick, and when they got back to the village they’d be so glad to be home that they’d go straight into the drinking hut.”
Charlotte let a moment go by before answering. “I see what you mean—the jungle claiming its own,” she said at last.
“It’s funny,” Martha said, “but somebody else had almost the same idea as you years and years ago.”
“Really? Who?”
“You wouldn’t have known her.”
“Ah, a spy. What a dilemma it must be, having all these secret friends.”
Martha, smiling angelically, ate the last of her salad.
“Look here, Martha,” Charlotte said. “I’m in something of a dilemma myself. I want to ask you a question I can’t really ask anyone else. But I wonder if I should. I do like you so much.”
It was clear to Martha that Charlotte meant what she said. “Thank you,” she replied. “I enjoy our time together, too.” The look of goodness on her face intensified slightly. “Why shouldn’t you ask, Charlotte?” she said.
“It’s rather difficult because it involves our husbands, and they don’t like each other at all.”
“Maybe that’s because Patrick used to be a toad before you turned him into a Patrick.”
Charlotte shouted with laughter. A dozen glossy interchangeable heads turned curiously in her direction, toy eyeglasses glittering. No one else in the restaurant had laughed in all the time Martha had been there; judging by the snatches of conversation she had overheard, they had all spent the entire hour and a half talking to one another about fractured relationships, personal or professional, and trying to discover the reasons for these puzzling little divorces. However, they seemed prepared to laugh now, if only they could find out what Lady Charlotte considered funny and repeat it; you could see the curiosity in their studious faces.
“What is the question, Charlotte?” Martha asked.
“Will your husband meet Patrick and talk to him?”
“I really don’t think so. He never talks to journalists.”
“Then why did you have us for dinner?”
“Oh, that was just one of David’s evenings. He likes to have people taste his wine.”
“Oh, dear. Well, perhaps you could persuade him to forgive and forget about the Margaux and return Patrick’s calls. The poor man is quite shaken up about this Eye of Gaza business. He’s not used to being sued by Mormons and threatened by bloodthirsty terrorists over the telephone.”
“Is he being threatened?”
“He thinks so. Perhaps even with death; it’s not entirely clear what the Eye of Gaza has in mind for him but I assure you he fears the worst. It’s so unfair when he’s been such a champion to the wretched. He thinks your husband is behind it all.”
Martha was taken aback. “How could he be?”
“That’s his job, my dear, laying traps. He’s famous for it.”
“You don’t know my husband,” Martha said.
Charlotte looked into her serene face with dismay. She was beginning to think that this woman was no fool. What a mistake it was to let oneself think that someone else was stupid. Patrick did it all the time; that was why he was so often at a disadvantage. Usually it did not matter; he just went on to the next broadcast, leaving the field littered with the sadder but wiser. This time, it seemed, it did matter. Charlotte was now quite sure of that.
She said, “Tell David that Patrick is through with this story. No matter what happens, he’s going to let it die.”
Martha nodded, but said nothing.
“If he can let it die, that is,” Charlotte added. “He’s not so sure that they’ll let him. The phone calls really are quite theatrical.”
Martha smiled luminously. It resembled, Charlotte thought, the transforming smile of one of those flat-faced peasant madonnas in an Italian painting made before the discovery of perspective. Behind Martha, the restaurant crowd babbled and preened. She had lost interest in it, you could see it in her eyes. The racy post-modern world that meant so much to Patrick and Charlotte, and even to David Patchen, had no more reality for Martha than some jumbled medieval village teetering on a cliff beyond Mary’s halo in a gaudy pieta by some thirteenth-century monk.
Charlotte called for the bill and paid it by scribbling her name and a not very generous tip across the bottom with a square Cartier pen provided by the waiter. “This has been very enjoyable,” she said to Martha. “Can I drop you anywhere?”
“Thanks, but David made me promise not to ride in your car.”
“Did he?” Charlotte said, her eyebrows rising in alarm. This time it was Martha who touched Charlotte’s hand in womanly sympathy.
6
AFTER THE NETWORK LAWYERS REVIEWED THE VIDEO TAPE, THERE was no question whatever that Harvey Walpole had two normal hands. In the course of the interrogation he had gesticulated freely, showing first the left, then the right. “Four fingers and a thumb and lots of hair on each one,” Graham’s producer reported. “Garth Robertson wears a hook.” His voice was jaunty. He was one of the new breed who had picked up all the right opinions in college but had no commitment to ideals. He did not seem to be altogether unhappy about the lawsuit; Patrick Graham would remember that.
By the end of the day, Graham had looked at an edited tape that showed nothing but freeze frames in which Walpole’s hands were visible. The producer was right: there was no mistaking them for artificial ones. As he sat slumped in the ergonomic chair in front of the huge back-projection screen in his study, he fought against depression. How had this happened? Whose fault was it? His people, beginning with the producer, were supposed to protect him from things like this. “I’m very disappointed,” he said in his booming voice, rehearsing the tongue-lashing the producer was going to get. Just then Dorcas brought him the tall glass of yoghurt, ice cubes made from Evian water, honey, and wheat bran, all beaten together in an electric blender, that he ordinarily drank at six o’clock. She jumped a little at the sound of his voice, but he did not seem to realize that he had spoken. He waved the drink away.
“Get me David Patchen on the telephone,” he said. “Call his office, his car, and his home, in that order. Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and don’t come back in here until you have him on the line.”
To his surprise, she succeeded on the first try.
“David!” Graham said. “You’re a hard man to catch up to. I wanted to tell you that I found a couple of bottles of ‘61 Château Margaux downcellar and I’m sending them over to you.”
“That’s nice of you, Patrick,” Patchen replied, “but I couldn’t accept such a handsome gift without breaking the law.”
“They’re not poisoned, I assure you.”
Patchen laughed appreciatively at this meager joke. Why was he being so agreeable? There was clicking on the line; his voice sounded distorted and far away. Graham said, “Where are you? In the car, or what? You sound like you’re talking from a vault.”
“I’m at my desk,” Patchen replied. “A lot of people complain about this phone. Was the wine all you called about?”
“No. I was wondering why you wouldn’t let your wife ride in my car.”
“It’s a Mercedes, isn’t it?”
“Yes. What does that have to do with it?”
“People like Martha shouldn’t ride in cars that run on human hair. Not that I think there’s anything strange about your owning one if you can afford it.”
Graham did not understand the full import of this outrageous remark—was Patchen suggesting he was some kind of Nazi because of his anti-Zionism?—until he, Graham, was halfway through his next sentence. When the realization that he had been insulted struck him, he was saying, in a casual tone, that he had received an interesting phone call that morning from the Eye of Gaza. His voice faltered. Patchen interrupted.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m glad you called, Patrick. Our conversation about the exploitation of women by radical political movements got me thinking about the similarities between the Hitler Youth and the American counterculture of the sixties.”
“What similarities?” Graham cried, sitting bolt upright in his chair. What was going on here? He, not Patchen, occupied the moral high ground. “Wait just a goddamn minute.”
But Patchen merely raised his voice slightly and talked over Graham’s interruption. “The counterculture was clearly totalitarian in its impulses and methods,” he continued.
“TOTALITARIAN?”
“Shocking thought, isn’t it? The sixties always puzzled me, that army of foul-mouthed runaways, all dressed up like the proletariat, squirting urine on the cops and waving marijuana lollipops at the TV cameras. Why did you bourgeois kids who had everything decide to hate everything you might ordinarily be expected to love—freedom, country, family, school? It couldn’t just be puerile self-hatred; that was far too simple an explanation for a movement of this magnitude. I kept wondering where this mass temper tantrum came from. And then I stumbled onto the most amazing book about the Wandervögel, the pre-Nazi German youth movement. This was the precursor to the Hitler Youth, of course, but it began before the First World War as a reaction to post-Bismarckian industrialization. A schoolteacher named Karl Fischer got it started as a sort of back-to-nature thing in 1896. Wandervögel means ‘birds of passage.’ Very apt. Here, let me read from the book.”
“What book?”
“This one is called Young Germany, by Anne Merriman Peck, published in this country in 1931. It’s a sort of primer on the subject, a bit gushy, but very revealing.”
“I don’t have time to listen to this crap, Patchen.”
“That’s all right. I’ll compress as I go along. Here we go: ‘The German people became very materialistic. Cities grew big, noisy and driving, and factory work made life unhappy. The school system was so rigid and severe that there was no room for young ideas to grow. But boys and girls, idealistic and romantic, as German youth have always been, rebelled against this kind of a world. They spent their free time in the country, making friends with the peasants and learning from them the old folk songs and dances which had been almost forgotten. They had a great longing to get away from this harsh civilization. They adopted a costume which represented the repudiation of confining city life, velveteen suits and peasant dresses [because they] wanted to be different from their world even in their clothes. They revolted also against the strict conventional rules for the relations between boys and girls. They tramped and swam together, slept side by side in all sorts of shelters or in the open fields. They held high-hearted discussions around their camp fires about the meaning of life, what they would do with it, and how they would make it beautiful.’ …Sound familiar?”
“No,” Graham said. “It doesn’t. David, I have to talk to you about something important. It affects both of us.”
“Let me finish,” Patchen said. “It will only take another minute. This is damn interesting—how the German youth movement became the Hitler Youth. This is from Nazi Youth in the Weimar Republic, by Peter D. Stachura: ‘The NSDAP,’ …that’s the Nazi Party, Patrick … ‘portraying the movement as one of youth and for youth, judiciously sensed the latent tensions between the generations in German society, played the young and new against the old and decayed with consummate skill, and denigrated ‘the system’ as the vile creation of a declining, older generation. The alternative was the destruction of the republic by the dynamism of national socialism and its replacement by the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. The goal of the Hitler Youth was to rouse youth and direct their resentments against the state.’ “
“So?” Graham said.
“So change a couple of proper names—Peoples Republic for Third Reich, for example—and think about it. Of course you had no Adolf Hitler to look up to, and your enemies had Richard Nixon. The question is, who benefitted? You were upset the other night when I mentioned covert action, but maybe being covert action assets is the fate of idealistic, romantic folks like yourself, Patrick. You seem to have been weaned on it.”
Graham gritted his teeth. “I don’t know what your purposes are in hammering away at me with these stupid lies and false comparisons,” he said. “But it’s not going to work. I know exactly who I am and what the Sixties Movement was all about, and I don’t have any trouble looking at myself in the mirror when I shave every morning. Now, damn it, you listen to me.”
