Andersen, Kurt (51 page)

My attention wandered, and after a while I couldn’t avoid staring at each of Chuck’s possessions scattered around their living room—the fishing gear in the corner that he’d unaccountably insisted on bringing to college, his leather jacket hanging on a hook, the Thurber paperback and Bond novels in the bookcase—each object now radiating tragic Chuckishness.

I thought of the end of
From Russia with Love,
where Bond is killed by Rosa Klebb’s
fugu
-poisoned knitting needle—and how he appeared again, miraculously alive in M’s office, at the beginning of
Doctor No.

But I knew Chuck was really dead. It wasn’t a Bond story we’d been acting out, I thought as I smoked and stared and cried, but
Rebel Without a Cause
—spoiled surly teenagers doing our own Chickie Run, drag-racing stolen cars toward a cliff, then all stupidly shocked when one of us, the unlucky one, catches the sleeve of his leather jacket on the car door as he’s about to leap out.

Except I knew that Chuck didn’t die accidentally. I had encouraged him for a year to take a harder line against the war and the government, to be more radical. I had slept with Buzzy Freeman, and not just once. I had given the Secret Service his name. I had gotten him killed.

I remembered when Chuck finally made me read Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and the funny final scene, when Walter, waiting for his annoying wife, lights a cigarette and imagines he’s facing a firing squad, “erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.”

The boys seemed talked out. “Chuck was committed,” Alex said. “He
believed.
”

“He’s a believer, all right,” Buzzy said. After guys died in Vietnam, he explained, their buddies called them believers.

Around dinnertime I walked back to North House alone and cried until I fell asleep.

31

My fourth and last burner rings for the first time. “Hey,” Stewart says, “you know about religion, right?”

“I know what a Catholic girl learned in catechism around 1960.” I wonder if he’s going to ask me about confession and absolution and reconciliation. “You’re not having some crisis of faith, are you?”

“Perpetually. But I’ve been thinking about omniscience. Really religious people all think God knows everything about everything and everybody, right? A guy from the G-I-P, Saudi intelligence, just gave me his card with this quote from the Koran on the back—it says, ‘Whatever deed ye may be doing, we are witnesses thereof. Nor is hidden from thy Lord the weight of an atom. And the least and greatest of these things are recorded in a clear record.’ That’s pretty much the Christian idea, too, yeah?”

“Pretty much.”

“Right. So
God
didn’t create
man
in
His
own image, it’s the other way around—man created God as a
goal
for himself, the ideal version of himself, and then spent the next five thousand years trying to become that. Inventing stuff—even new species in the lab, right? Like God did. And setting up systems of justice—all that used to be God’s business. And for the last couple hundred years, working hard on omniscience. Novels: omniscient narrator—you even told me you felt like God when you wrote your novel. Physics: the Big Bang,
check,
the weight of atoms,
check,
that lab where they’ve cooked up RNA out of chemicals,
check.
And surveillance—whatever NSA and NRO and all the NSAs and NROs on earth aren’t listening to and looking at with satellites and wires, a billion people have signed up to show on Facebook. We dreamed up an omniscient God, and here we are, almost there.”

“Wow. I had no idea there was a theologian in there struggling to get out.”

“So I dug up an awesome ELSURS log from 1968, the fifteenth of April.”

“I don’t—”

“Electronic surveillance, ELSURS. They had bugs in Charles Levy’s room in Anacostia when the thing went down. I think you can finish your crossword now. By the way? Levy never fired his weapon in the OK Corral that day. Another piece of excellent luck for you at the time.

“So I think
Levy,
Levy
had
to be run somehow by somebody federal, or else the black-boxing wouldn’t have gone down the way it did afterward. There’d have been no cover-up, and you’d be a convicted felon. I think Defense Intelligence. Nobody else apart the Agency and the feebs was infiltrating radicals in 1967 and 1968 at scale. And why else would the army Glomarize you now?”

Stewart says that in the next couple of days he’ll have a chance to scan the 1968 surveillance log and email it to me, but that we’ll both have to use “sanitized machines.” I tell him I’m leaving for Chicago this afternoon.

“There are Internet cafés in Chicago,” he says. “But you aren’t going all the way out there to try to get to the bottom of your little red squad episode, are you? I told you, the feebs weren’t involved in your sixty-eight business at all. There’s thoroughness and then there’s fucking insanity, Karen.”

I’d told Stewart the last time we spoke that I’d received a second Freedom of Information reply from the FBI. They were mistaken before, the letter said, due to my “surname misspelling.” I am mentioned once in a half-century-old file, a report by the special agent in charge of the Chicago field office based on a phone call he received from a Lieutenant Murray of the Subversive Activities Unit of the Intelligence Division of the Chicago Police Department in the late summer of 1963. It described an incident “at a night club on No. Michigan Avenue involving one person (female), Karen Hollaender, who claimed to be a Soviet national and daughter of senior Communist official, and two others, Alec McCallister (male) and Emilio Largo (male).”

“Don’t worry,” I tell Stewart, “I’m not insane. I’m going out to visit somebody I used to know. An old lady.”

On the flight from L.A. to Chicago, Faye Dunaway is sitting across the aisle from me, alone. She looks good for a woman of seventy-three, in the terrifying cosmetic-surgical mutant sense of “good.” The last time I saw her in a new movie was fifteen years ago, the remake of
The Thomas Crown Affair,
in which Pierce Brosnan, the James Bond of the time, played the title role. We’re sitting in business class, but she’s brought her own food in Tupperware containers.

Even with my detour to drive past our old house on Schiller Avenue, I make it from O’Hare to the town of Glenview in under an hour. I stop at the guard booth and tell the young woman no, I am
not
here as a prospective resident, and the reason I don’t know my plate number (do they train these people to be patronizing?) is because it’s a rental car. Before arriving, I wasn’t sure whether the facility is geared toward independent living, supportive housing, supportive living, residential care, assisted living, or senior living, but a large gilded wooden sign tells me it’s the Continuum Care Dwelling Complex, which I guess means all of the above. (I can’t keep track of the distinctions. Last year my son-in-law was raving about the “super, super” old people’s home where his eighty-six-year-old mother lives, and Greta told me later that Jungo took my nomenclature confusion as a bad sign, a function of either denial or early dementia.) This place is like a tasteful resort where, at a certain moment around 1978, all the vacationers mysteriously decided to stay forever and grow old together.

For July in Illinois, the heat’s not bad. We meet outside in a little garden. She’s holding a manilla envelope.

“
Hello
—it’s Karen Hollander. It’s so great to see you after all these years.”

As we hug, I worry I’ll pinch off the plastic tube trailing from her nose to the oxygen cart near her feet.

“I can’t believe it,” she says. “It’s like time traveling, isn’t it? You look exactly the same, Karen.”

Mrs. Levy does not. “You’re kind.”

“And even more glamorous than you do on TV. I see you all the time! They say I’m bragging when I say ‘I
know
her, I
know
her,’ that I was practically your mother-in-law once upon a time.”

So far, so good. She seems mentally with it.

“Except your hair,” she says. “Weren’t you a brunette? Didn’t you have long brown hair parted in the middle?”

Totally mentally with it. “Uh-huh. And ridiculous pink lipstick, and way too much mascara and black eyeliner.”

“Your skin is so
beautiful.
You’re so lucky.”

When we go to sit down on a bench to talk, I offer to drag her oxygen for her, but she says, “You don’t need to, he follows me wherever I go.” Sure enough, the tank is mounted on a little robot that also carries her pills and hairbrush and magazines and automatically trails after her and stops when she stops.

She says she stayed in their old house in Wilmette for nine years after Professor Levy died, but last spring, when she turned ninety and Chuck’s radiologist brother semiretired to San Diego, she decided to move out here. I tell her it’s been three years since my mother passed away, a phrase I never use. I tell her I sometimes see Alex Macallister in Los Angeles, and that Bernard Freeman, whom she met exactly twice in 1968 but whose career she has followed ever since, had recently passed away. I tell her President Obama’s “pro-Arab sentiments” were not the reason I declined to be nominated by him to the Supreme Court two years ago.

She abruptly hands me her big unsealed envelope. “Here’s the book and Charles’s letter, just like I found it. I didn’t read the letter. Didn’t even open it.”

Inside, I see my mother’s pink hardcover copy of
From Russia with Love,
the first Bond novel I read. Like my childhood house, which seemed so big when I was growing up, the book seems so small. The bikinied woman in the drawing on the cover used to be skinny, but now her hips are substantial, way too big for a model’s. The last time I looked at the back-cover photo of Ian Fleming, touching the barrel of a pistol to his chin and lips with his finger on the trigger, he was an old man, but now he’s only forty-nine. The summer after sixth grade, I lent the book to Alex, who lent it to Chuck that fall. Was he planning to return it to me?

Tucked inside is a sealed envelope stamped with an uncanceled five-cent Henry David Thoreau and two half-cent Benjamin Franklins. It seems impossible that I lived in a time when the post office issued half-cent stamps.

“I did take out the little program from Michael’s bar mitzvah to send to him. It was stuck in there with the letter.”

Michael Levy is Chuck’s younger brother. Chuck must have finished the letter when he and Buzzy drove to Wilmette to bring the radio-controlled airplane back to Cambridge. On the envelope is my name, but no address. Mrs. Levy found it when she was cleaning out her house and packing up her things. She sent me a postcard at UCLA asking if I wanted the letter, and I wrote back, saying—lying—that I happened to be coming out to Chicago anyway and would pick it up from her personally.

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll read it later.”

“You know, I know why Charles really died. That it wasn’t a drug thing. That he didn’t shoot anyone. Bennett told me all about it later.” Bennett was Professor Levy. “I was so relieved. So
proud.
But also so frustrated all those years that I could never tell anybody.” She glances down at her robot pal. It has a built-in camera, a cyclops eye.
“National security,”
she whispers. She takes my hand. “I always assumed you knew the truth, too. So now it’s our secret.”

I nod.
Proud?
What in God’s name is her version of the truth?

“Afterward, Bennett always said he felt a little like he was Abraham and Charles was Isaac, but that no angel arrived in time to prevent Isaac’s death.”

“Why did Professor Levy feel responsible? For what happened to Chuck?”

“Why? Because Bennett was the one who helped him get recruited!”

“Aha. I didn’t realize.”

“Uh-huh. From the time he was little, Charles always had an interest in the military.”

“I remember.” He wanted to be an air force pilot the summer after eighth grade, when he was a boy. And he died when he was an only slightly older boy.

“Through Bennett’s contacts in the Defense Department, when they were first inventing the Internet, well, they needed some bright young people, the Defense Department did, to keep an eye on subversives during all the terrible Vietnam
mishegoss.
”

“But he—he, Chuck, wasn’t in the army.”

“No, no.” Again she glances down at her robot. “An auxiliary special-agent kind of thing, on the QT. And you remember, it was right after the Six-Day War, and the campus radicals were in
love
with the PLO, and, well, he always wanted to be some kind of hero, Charles did.”

“Yes, he did. He really did.”

She says that if we were doing our “James Bond, whatever they were, scavenger hunts” today—

“You knew about our Bond missions?”

“Why would Charles keep them secret? Of course we knew! Anyhow, these days you’d want to do them over in Skokie. Karen, you would not
believe
! Skokie might as well be Peking or Bangkok or Tokyo! And these days you kids wouldn’t even need to go into the city to have your … whatever, the jazz.” She glances at her robot. “I mean,
Evanston,
Karen, from McCormick Boulevard almost all the way to Northwestern—Bronzetown! Totally black now.”

We talk awhile longer. She would go on for hours if I let her. “Well, it’s been wonderful to see you, Mrs. Levy.” I lift the envelope. “And thank you
so
much for this.”

“Before you go, Karen? And don’t take this the wrong way, please, but I’ve always wondered. If you and Charles had married, would you have raised my grandchildren as Jews?”

I smile and shrug and kiss her, and before midnight, I’m back home here in Los Angeles, at my desk on Wonderland Park, where I am, as the sales manager of the Glenview old people’s home informed me on my way out this afternoon, aging in place.

Other than that,
Chuck wrote near the end of his long letter to me dated February 18, 1968,
and I know that’s a huge and unforgivable one, I’ve only been anything other than completely truthful two times in all the years we’ve known each other. I did go to see
Thunderball
(with Wendy), and the summer before last, after you told us about your professor at Northwestern, I asked my dad to check him out, because I was jealous. But that’s it. I love you, Karen. I will never love anyone more.