November, 1980.
She keeps a black and
white photo of them by the front door and she glances at it whenever she enters
or leaves the house. It’s framed in silver and sits on a windows ledge, faced
away from the sun. The photo was taken on the steps of the Trinity Catholic Church
on N street on their wedding day. She was a nominal Episcopalian but he was a
Catholic, a staunch Catholic, and although he insisted on virtually nothing in
all the years he knew her, he refuse to marry outside the church.
She wrapped herself in
a long, soft brown winter coat with a matching cashmere scarf, black leather
gloves and locked the large red door behind her. She pulled the knob tightly,
they’d been robberies in the neighborhood. Robberies and Georgetown are almost
synonymous. She carefully and slowly made her way down the brick steps to the
even sidewalk and strolled slowly down 28th Street. Lifting her coat collar
against the wind.
They met on a blind
date right after the Second war ended. She was a ne’er-do-well unpaid intern to
a New York Senator. He was back in the states after four years in combat in
Europe and was working for what was then a new and unknown government body
called the National Intelligence Authority. They married a month later. She was
25, he was 30. They had one child, a small, dark haired gentle soul they named
Dora but called Doe, their little Doe. She was born with epilepsy and anorexia
and all of her short life was spent in and out of one hospital after another.
She rarely knew a day without pain and suffering.
She took a right on
Dumbarton, that wonderfully old and dignified street. The wind ceased and the
dull winter sun peaked through a cloud. As always, she stopped and lifted her
eyes to the tall windows of a magnificent Georgian where an ancient Beagle lay
at his post on the floor, half-asleep soaking in the days first rays of the
sun, one eye open. As he did every morning, he slowly raised himself up when he
noticed her and pressed his nose to the bottom window pane. She waved to him.
He sneezed a greeting back her and she continued on.
All of that seemed so
long ago now, but it wasn’t. Not many years had passed since then, it just
seemed as that way. But he was gone, their little Doe was gone, just memories
now and when she thought often that after she was gone all of those memoires of
them, the three of them, would disappear with her.
It was Wednesday. The
day the ladies met at a cozy new pastry shop on the far end of O Street in
Georgetown. Well, new, the place had been there for over thirty years but the
ladies had been a part of Georgetown for decades longer than that. She stopped
at the crosswalk on Wisconsin Avenue, waited for the light and crossed.
The ladies were
fiercely loyal to one another because they only had one another. It was
difficult, no, impossible really, for any of them to build relationships of any
kind in that life. The Life of a company family because balancing a life of
secrecy in an open society is more work than its worth, so they, the people in
that world, they close down, they shut down, they learn to block out others, to
watch what they, to think before they speak and when it’s over and their
husbands role in the missions were done forever they, the women of that
generation, found themselves alone and isolated without friends, with no community
that would understand them so they created their own.
Their husbands had
been a cold warriors from the first day they met them and they were their
husband’s window dressing and they were good at what they did, skilled in fact
and a learned and vital skill it is. Anyone could risk their lives and be a
field operative with the company but it took a truly remarkable person to be a
company wife. The wrong word at the wrong time in the wrong county could cost a
life. They said that with a company wife the government got two employees for
the price of one and it was true. Everything about them, their very identities
are wrapped around their husbands and the company and the mission.
There were times when,
really, she didn’t know what role she was playing. When they were at a brief
posting in Stockholm right after the war he told her they a Foreign Service
family. She leaped in to each job title and role with her typical enthusiasm
and charm, shoring up his weak cover and convincing many people that he was in
fact what he said he was — a diplomat, a military attaché, a file clerk,
whatever the job cover was. In Rome she immersed herself in the country’s
language and religious and artistic heritage while he disappeared for days and
sometimes weeks to prevent a Communist victory in Italian elections.
Inside the café, Betty
Willoughby sat next to her, she always did. They knew from a posting in Peru,
twenty or more years ago. More than that she thought. The countries all sort of
blended together after a while. So did the years. Betty’s husband was gone to,
heart attack a year after he retired. She liked Betty. There was no
pretense in her. Despite the demeanor of toughness around her, the years and
the worry of all those years showed on her face. All the company wives
eventually looked like that.
“Let’s see a
show of hands.” Betty rasped “Did you ever turn on the washing machine because
he couldn’t figure out how to do, but he needed it on to muffle his phone
conversation?”
They all smiled and
raised their hands.
“Mine preferred the
blender” Mary Rose said.
“Running bath water”
said another.
Angie Robins held her
open palm up and said “Do you know where we went for our honeymoon? To
Scandinavia. He said we would tour at the castles. And we did. At every stop his
operatives picked up radio devices hidden in the car’s trunk. My honeymoon was
a mission”
When it was her turn,
she leaned forward into the table and recalled the time when he served as the
station chief in Saigon during the America’s war years there and how she
received her baptism under fire during one of the country’s seemingly endless
unsuccessful coups. “Bullets whined through the windows. I barricaded Doe and I
in the kitchen with the help. I had a loaded pistol in my house coat pocket.
Me. A pistol. Can you imagine?”
They all nodded.
They’d all been there in one way or another, in some third world banana
republic or another.
She widen her eyes in
wonder and added “I was holding a loaded revolver. We kept it under the
mattress in case anything ever happened. Can you imagine? Me? With a big loaded
gun?”
What she didn’t say
was that he wasn’t home because he was directing a counter coup from his office
at the embassy. Nor would be home for two nights after the coup was defeated,
its leaders executed.
“He sent us home after
that. At the airport he told me "You should have probably married a guy
from Columbus, Ohio, instead of me. You’d be living in Columbus now. He'd be
devoted to you. You would go to the dances and play golf on weekends.” And then
he shook his head and said “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of this”
What she didn’t tell
them was that he looked like a lost boy when he spoke those words so she held
his chin in her hand and he looked around in embarrassment and she leaned in
close to him and said "But then we wouldn't have had Saigon, or Rome, or
Venice or Washington. Or our Doe and I would not be married to a good and
decent man and I would not be part of his noble mission”
She didn’t have to
share that part of it with them. They knew. They’d all spoken words like at
point or another.
Nor did she tell them
that he stayed on for two more years after that and that she and Doe were alone
again as they almost always were alone because he was almost always away,
someplace and she never knew where away was or how long he would be there. So
she faced increasing difficulties of caring for Doe who declined more and more
with every passing day. And then one day Doe died as they expected she would
and he was away so she was alone for that too.
He had mentioned to
her once, on a beach up in Maine one summer, that his heroes…he used the word
pantheon instead of heroes, as only he would….were Richard the Lionhearted,
Joan of Arc, and St. George the Dragon Slayer. It pleased her then and now that
one of them was a woman although she didn’t understand that. All of them were
warriors. That she understood. He was a warrior, a cold warrior. And all of
them, like him, were zealots and she attributed that to his Irishness and
Catholic upbringing, another thing she never really understood.
His Catholic faith
also the reason why he viewed the company as a kind of priesthood. It made
sense those who knew him. He was a Midwestern Catholic. In fact he was almost
the definition of the Midwestern Catholic. He said little regarding his work
and nothing, ever, of his considerable accomplishments. He came from a long
line of WASP educators on his father’s side and garden variety second
generation Irish Catholic on his mother side which is what brought him to Notre
Dame.
She was Midwestern
too, but he often scoffed at that and said that she may have been Ohio she not
of Ohio. Her father ran one of the largest pharmaceutical in the world from an
office in Cleveland and her Manhattan born parents, sent east as a teen to be
educated for ten years, four at Middlebury, four at Wesleyan and two at Vassar
where she took a masters in humanities.
He adored John F.
Kennedy. She recalled how they had stood in the audience at the young
Presidents inauguration with clenched teeth and applauded wildly at Kennedy’s
words "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support
any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of
liberty." He repeated the words often. It was his mantra she thought. But
for all his worldliness he was remarkably naïve about politics.
He did that lot,
repeating the words of other. She remember the one time he did that and it sent
chills up her spine. By then he had risen high in the company, in part because
he deserved it and the company rewards its own and in part because he had
simply outlasted everyone else. But he was an unwise choice for anything above
an intelligence officer because he both lacked the political sense and failed
to understand the importance of social skills necessary to navigate the very
dangerous marble halls of Washington and because of that it eventually crashed
in around him with the fall of Viet Nam. Then his nation, the nation that had
called him a hero warrior, now called him a war criminal for the company did.
He was called him to
testify on the Hill a dozen times. She saw it as more of a grilling, and they
called him in a dozen times in one year, always making sure the media got the
transcript early. She saw it as punishment, a humiliation lesson than anything
else. It ripped her apart to watch what they did to him.
“They have no right”
she said “No right”
“The ends justified
the means” he said to her “And if we had won, if Saigon had not fallen, none of
this would have been an issue. But it is an issue because Americans don’t like
losing, we don’t accept failure and somebody has to pay. I’m the somebody this
time. It’s nothing personal.”
“They have no right”
she said.
He was watching
television, an old black and white film. He pointed to the screen and said
“Ever see this? The Third Man, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. Great
film”
She absentmindedly
looked at the screen for a moment and then back to him and said “We should hire
a lawyer. We should….”
‘Shh-shhh” he cut her
off and pointed at the screen. Orson Welles character was sitting high atop a
Ferris wheel with Joseph Cotton’s character. When Welles character spoke her
husband spoke the lines aloud along with him and didn’t miss a single word
"Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me—would you really feel any
pity if one of these dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 for
every dot that stopped, would you really tell me to keep my money—or would you
calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?"
Day by day the attacks
from the Congress and the media grew worse and he was increasingly unable to
defend himself against it. He started to drink more. Finally, almost
mercifully, the President himself fired him. There were no ceremonies, no
gold watch, no speeches and no words of appreciation. A clerk from the Chief of
Staff’s office called and told him the President wanted his resignation.
A month later he left
her for another woman, the former wife of an ambassador. They’d all know each
other, off and on, over the years. It was sudden thing, there had been no
secret dalliances. He was always loyal to her. And he didn’t leave her because
the other woman offered something more or better, he left her because he was
very good at making war all that came with it. But now there were no more wars,
no more missions. It was time to change. To become someone else. She was part
of a life that had been and was gone.
He took his new wife
and moved out of Washington and retired to the life of a country squire in St.
Michaels, sailing town in Southern Maryland. She never saw him again after that
although he called one night, late one night. She asked what was wrong and said
“Nothing, nothing is wrong. I just wanted to talk to you”
The words surprised
her. The call surprised her. At his best he was clipped both in his speech and
in his emotions, everything really. He was more British than English. It was
almost impossible to engage him in a phone conversation but that night he
talked for hours about everything and anything. He told her he was losing his
memory and she said that it was age and he said “No, no it more than that” and
then he asked if he had done enough for her.
“When?” she asked
“Always” he answered.
“Yes” she said because
true or not she sensed it was something he needed to hear.
“Did I do enough for
Doe?” he asked. “I was gone so much”
He had never discussed
it before. They never really talked about her death. It happened, there was a
funeral, and that was it. She was forgotten after that, by him anyway.
“We did what we could”
she answered and that was true.
He died a week later.
He suffered a sudden heart attack and died in his boat, on the water. She held
a memorial service for him at the National Cathedral. It was part of the
mission. It’s the way things were done. The new wife didn’t attend although she
had sent her an invitation to speak. The White House sent an emissary.
He didn’t leave much
when he died. His cash assets amount to just under $2,400 and his most valued
possession, a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence
that they had bought together during a Sunday afternoon walk on the Strand in
London. He read it so many times in so many different places that he could
recite that to from memory.
Noon approached and
the ladies ordered a bottle of wine and a tea sandwich platter of Ham, Brie and
apple spread, Cucumber and Dutch Butter with Watercress and grilled shrimp with
Ham Puree.
