Escape the Night (4 page)

“With still more words?” John Carey flashed a contemptuous smile. “Without so much as calling you to testify, Mr. Englehardt and his Committee have displayed far greater weapons. Now we can only hope to bore them, Charles, until they bore the country. That means no political controversy or cheap heroics.”

“You're directing me to respond to peepers by hoping they approve of what they see? My God, that's pitiful …”

“You've made yourself a liability, Charles.” John Carey measured his words. “It therefore falls on you to maintain a graceful silence, or to leave.”

Phillip Carey felt shocked sympathy for Charles, and then a rush of anticipation made his skin tingle. Charles
gone
…

Charles faced his father with a faint, sardonic smile. “I can leave right now,” he answered softly. “All you have to do, is ask.”

His answer lay between them like a dare. Phillip turned to his father …

John Joseph Englehardt held his breath with Phillip Carey.

“All you have to do,” Charles repeated, “is ask.”

In the long silence that followed, the tape clicked off.

Abruptly, Englehardt remembered that he was not sitting next to Phillip but alone in a shabby room in Georgetown, a single light bulb hanging over him.

Wind and rain spattered the window.

In anxious haste, he pushed the rewind button and turned up the volume, thinking that John Carey's answer had been swallowed by the storm …

The Careys had become much more than just a file; over months their lives and voices had seduced him. Slowly, inevitably, he had been drawn to their central drama, Greek in its explosive symmetry: the father was a tyrant, the sons locked in bitter contest for his place.

He was helpless to resist.

Since childhood, Englehardt had known that he was cursed with a diamond-hard brilliance he could neither turn to grace or charm, nor use to catch the pleasure of his father. But his father's eyes had fallen elsewhere: like a snake, the younger son had drawn back. Alone as any Jesuit, he had seen that he must live through indirection, manipulating others in ways they did not see …

Now, in subtle choreography, he was turning HUAC to a secret purpose: the tape, silently rewinding, had been stolen from its files. Rapt, he watched it spin …

He had joined the Committee upon leaving Yale, armed with a useless doctorate and no prospects in his father's business. From the beginning he had seen the congressmen he worked for as list-waving buffoons, stringing “secrets” they already knew into jerry-built conspiracies. The secrets he was using them to learn were deeper: the hidden workings of faceless institutions and of the minds of men. Knowing the fever fueling HUAC to be transient, he gained a deeper lesson from their hearings. As witness after witness crumbled beneath their petty crimes of thought, he learned that men, and thus the governments which were simply groups of men, shared a mystic fervor to exploit the secrets that belonged to others, and to protect their own.

For two lonely, friendless years he had ferreted out the “sins” of writers for politicians to expose, hoping that their approval of this craven service would replace the affection he could never earn, and thus commend him to still others, more secret and more powerful. Inwardly, he writhed at this submissiveness, this prostitution of his brain to buy the favor of idiots. And then his fateful meeting with the Careys had driven him beyond servility, to feed his soul.

This terrible need for power with which to touch the Careys was one secret the committee must never know.

Having failed to block publication of the slave novel, he returned to Washington despising Charles Carey as the mirror of his inconsequence, the last legacy of his father. Yet the emotions that the Careys stirred were much more disturbing and profound: Englehardt felt their kinship pierce his years of solitude. He
knew
them, knew the father's fierce passion to conserve their place, saw Charles as the object of his thwarted love, felt the pain in Phillip's heart.

This once, he would use the Committee's power to gain an end which would fulfill him.

In memos and meetings he reported the Careys' defiance; finally, HUAC ordered him to probe their support of left-wing writers. Within two weeks, without any one person's knowing the scope of his invasion, Englehardt arranged through several agencies to bug the Careys' homes and offices, to open their mail and watch their every movement.

Secret parcels of reports and tapes began arriving in his office.

At night, unseen by those for whom he worked, he began retreating to his apartment to re-live the Careys' loves and hates and listen to their quicksilver rivalries, until he knew that what he had seen in them was real, and he no longer felt alone.

Englehardt had learned that men who spied on other men, out of the loneliness of such a job, came to like or dislike their chosen quarry. But, in his soul, he knew that this secret passion for the Careys grew from something stronger.

The brothers' rivalry was also his.

He sensed, with the same bone-deep affinity that had first drawn his eyes toward Phillip Carey, that there was nothing their contest did not touch: Phillip, who hoped that Charles's defiance of HUAC would prove to show poor judgment, feared that the pregnancy of Charles's wife might return him to John Carey's favor.

Englehardt began to measure the time for his allotted task by the growth of life inside Alicia Carey …

Now, his thoughts were broken by a single click, like the short electric impulse that changes the chemistry of a madman's brain.

The tape had finished rewinding.

For a final moment, Englehardt teased himself by watching the contest of raindrops skittering down the windowpane, and then he pushed the button. Once more Phillip Carey told his father: “They're watching us …”

By design, he had made the Careys feel his pervasive presence: their authors were called to testify, there were new delays in the Careys' mail and fresh problems with their tax returns; Charles was conspicuously followed. Englehardt did not care if this was of no use to HUAC: he acted only for himself, with a passion that enraged him, to persuade John Carey that Charles's defiance was the act of an unworthy son.

“
Englehardt
,” Charles shot back to his brother. “You'd trade a gifted writer for the smile of a cockroach?”

Englehardt clenched his fists in helpless fury.

His father had died without a word for him, his legacy a preference for the elder son, a smiling, careless athlete, the father of his grandson. Reaching for intimacy without this risk of pain, a one-way mirror into others' hearts, Englehardt had looked too deeply into his own.

He had seen himself in Phillip Carey.

“All you have to do,” Charles said once more, “is ask.”

Englehardt bent closer.

The tape reached its silent end.

Englehardt's shoulders sagged: John Carey did not have the words to ask his oldest son to leave.

With Phillip Carey, his second self, he must await the birth of Allie Fairvoort's child.

From its earliest moment, Alicia Carey disowned the child she bore.

She stopped going out. Water weight bloated her thighs and stomach, she vomited, her nipples were sore. She learned nothing about the life inside her, and took no pleasure in it. She felt awkward. Her eyes lost quickness, transfixed by some black hole between reality and imagination. She had never imagined children.

The baby was an abstraction, subverting the chemistry between her mind and body. Straining to envision herself as a mother, she was betrayed by the ugliness she saw in the mirror, and the sickness she felt. Her imagery vanished. She could not imagine her child's face or the smell of its hair. Her husband seemed a stranger; she saw with stark clarity that his body did not move her.

As months passed, she was brutalized by this destruction of her fantasies. Her manic activity ceased; she organized no parties, betrayed by the incomprehension all around her. She grew to despise the good wishes of other women, oppressed by their smug equation of motherhood with fulfillment. An only child, she had wished to be the center of her marriage. Now she felt like a stray, trapped by Charles Carey's seed in a role she did not care for. His efforts to reach her through the psychiatrist Levy insulted her: Charles did not understand that it was he who had killed her dreams. Avoiding him, she retreated, in time, toward her parents.

They had never failed her before.

Grant and Elizabeth Fairvoort had worshiped her from infancy, dressed her in the clothes she wished, taken her to Corfu and Mallorca. The world as she learned it responded to her touch. Told early of her own enchantment, she had come to believe the lives of others less bright without her presence. As she ripened into adolescence, she would make love to herself with her fingertips—brushing her cheeks or tracing the line of her hips—as if reflecting the admiration in Grant Fairvoort's glance. Later, acting, she thrilled with pain she had never felt, to be rewarded by her parents' pleasure. Even things beyond her sight or knowledge found their purpose in her happiness. She knew that her father—a ruddy, confident man with a white, perfect smile and snow-white hair—was an investment banker; she never asked what that involved. Simply and without reflection, she knew that it was done for her.

Men became a different class of being, mysterious yet powerful, to whom she owed nothing but the acceptance of their gifts. She sought in marriage the perfection of her father's love: now, sensing Charles's needs, she could feel only contempt and fear, just as she had come to fear the child that she carried. It did not matter that Charles had some new trouble with his father, or that he kept picking up the telephone to try to catch the sound of strangers. She made plans to see her parents.

As she packed to leave, six months pregnant, the Fairvoorts crashed while flying a Piper Cub to their summer home on Lake Champlain, leaving her wealthy, and without defenses.

Nothing bad had ever happened to her until she'd married Charles.

Deflecting his sympathy, she sleepwalked through the funeral—a rote Episcopalian service that deadened her emotions—as if through a role that bored her. The caskets were empty; her father would reappear, say how fine and elegant she looked. Then, returning home, she saw her pregnant body in the mirror, and knew that he was dead.

With terrible finality she passed beyond her husband's reach.

In the last month of her pregnancy, moodily drinking Scotch in the living room, Charles heard her scream.

He raced up the dark winding stairway to their bedroom.

The bed was slashed to ribbons. Alicia's shredded clothes were strewn across it, cut with the scissors that now protruded from a portrait of Charles Carey.

He found her in the bathroom, panting as she slashed the mirror with lipstick until her naked, bloated image seemed bloody chunks of skin. He saw lipstick reflected as blood on his mouth, watched her eyes in the mirror widen with animal surprise. Then she screamed, and her fist swung forward, shattering his reflection in the glass. He grasped her wrist, felt warm blood spurting from the back of her hand. She twisted away, and then collapsed over the basin, hair falling into the broken glass, round belly heaving with her sobs.

Levy gave her Thorazine; six days later, she gave Charles Carey a son.

CHAPTER 3

Watching Charles sit restlessly in his office, William Levy felt the weight of Carey's infant son.

At Harvard, when they were freshmen, he had not imagined Charles would ever need him. Where Charles was athletic and a WASP, Levy was Jewish and awkward, envying Carey's prep-school toughness and the girls he had, the way he drew followers by not looking back. But Charles seemed to notice neither awkwardness nor envy, casually including Levy among his friends, scrounging him dates and beers and asking his opinion of their dorm-mates or the books he read, or even Judaism, with a dispassion that suggested this was just another subject on which Levy's thoughts were interesting. In turn, Levy noted that Charles, too, said little about his family, never showed surprise or hurt or anger, as if he were born a Harvard athlete, unscarred by any past and utterly self-possessed. As months passed, Levy sensed that this unruffled
persona
—even Carey's flat, sardonic speech—was a cover for a vulnerability that Carey could not admit. With a shock of recognition, Levy saw his own loneliness in Charles Carey.

One night, in a waterfront Boston bar filled with smoke and sailors and the stale smell of beer drying on the floor, the two sophomores got very drunk. At a point Levy could no longer remember or define, they passed beyond mere palship amidst the noise and haze, and became friends.

“Why do you hang out with me?” Levy had asked. “I've been thinking maybe you were hard up for Jews.”

Charles shrugged. “If you didn't study so fucking much, you'd probably notice you're one of the few people around here worth talking with.”

“It's premed—the worst grind there is.” Levy drained the Scotch, smoky on his tongue and throat. “Frog-cutter to the world, that's me. I want to be a halfback.”

“It's an overrated thrill. Besides, you wouldn't do all that if you didn't want to.” Carey peered at him with exaggerated concentration. “Would you?”

“I don't know.” Levy stared at his empty glass. “My father thinks I've got ‘surgeon' stamped on my genetic code.
My Son the Doctor
, a Martin Levy Production. God help my sister—he's got
her
cast as Lillian Hellman.”

“Can she write?”

“Not a lick,” Levy said mournfully. “But she can read.”

Carey grinned. “Then we'll make her an editor. How old is she, anyhow?”

“Thirteen?”

“Well, when she grows up send her around to Van Dreelen and Carey. ‘Literacy and Loyalty,' that's my father's watchword.” In a different voice—low and intense—Charles finished, “You don't have to do what he wants, Bill.”