Читать книгу A Geography of Secrets - Frederick Reuss - Страница 11

38°56’53.86”N

77°7’15.07”W

My mother lives in a condominium complex next to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. She bought the apartment when we returned from Germany and the house was sold as part of her divorce settlement with my father. The neighborhood was familiar, just behind the Little Falls shopping center where she’d always done her grocery shopping and also near Little Flower, the Catholic church she goes to, and the school of which I attended between the India and Germany phases of our Foreign Service life. In those days, the NGA complex was referred to as “Army Map.” I had a friend, Bobby, whose father worked there. Bobby liked to brag that his dad put satellites into orbit. I remember thinking that Bobby’s bragging was compensation for the disappointment of having a dad who merely put satellites up rather than get shot into orbit himself. My dad was in Vietnam. I may have boasted about it. If so, I’m sure Bobby understood it was to mask how much I missed him. It wasn’t all that clear to us who had the cooler father.

Over the years, as Army Map became the Defense Mapping Agency and then the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and finally the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, it has become an imposing and somewhat incongruous presence in the neighborhood, protected by high fences and an elaborate security gate at the main entrance. Soon it will disappear from public view entirely and move to Fort Belvoir, where a new and vastly enlarged headquarters is being built.

My mother’s apartment is a roomy two-bedroom with a balcony that looks out over the woods surrounding the Dalecarlia Reservoir. She’s become more and more reclusive over the years. When I arrive, she is usually either reading or knitting or in the kitchen, preparing a meal she will consume over the next several days, usually a soup or stew from the cookbook she brought back from a Trappist monastery in the ShenandoahValley where she does a yearly retreat. She no longer plays the piano. Next to the Catholic Church and her divorce, music was once the biggest thing in her life. She used to say that Oberlin drove the music out of her, but it was marrying my father and becoming a Foreign Service wife that diverted her from the musical career she had aspired to at the conservatory. The Steinway she bought after the divorce is more personal totem than musical instrument. I can’t remember the last time I heard her play it.

I let myself in, surprised to hear rock music coming from the television. She was knitting, glanced up when I came into the room, then returned her attention to the television.

“What are you watching, Mom?”

“A concert.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Since when do you watch rock concerts on TV?”

She glanced up at me again, fingers working the needles, then over the top of her reading glasses at the television screen. “Is Roy Orbison rock?”

“One of the grandfathers.”

“You wouldn’t call it country?”

“Roy Orbison? I don’t think so.”

The song continued. I was too amused to know what to think. We listened for a few minutes. The stage was a who’s who of rock ‘n’ roll luminaries. When Bruce Springsteen came into view, my mother put down her knitting and said, “I don’t like that fellow.”

“Bruce Springsteen?”

“Look at him. All preening and vain.”

“Rock and vanity sort of go together, Mom.”

She frowned and went on knitting. “Roy Orbison is the only artist up there. Look at him. He isn’t jumping around.”

She was right. Springsteen did seem a little stupidly overeager. I sat back and listened. “When did you become a Roy Orbison fan?”

“I like this concert. I’ve watched it several times.”

She didn’t elaborate and went on knitting. The concert continued. I settled back on the sofa, pleased by this little tremor in an otherwise unvarying routine. She was right about Orbison. The more the other idols pranced and preened around, the deeper Orbison seemed sunk into an autistic aloneness, which, I realized, was precisely what my mother most identified with. I wasn’t so amused anymore and stood up. “Shall I make coffee?”

“I’ll do it.” She put her knitting aside.

We went into the kitchen together. I glanced through the newspaper while she put the kettle on. It was hard to tell which of us was more reluctant to talk. Her decision not to go to the funeral had come as a relief. Dad, which is how she still refers to him, is always an uneasy topic of conversation. After nearly thirty years, all I want is for her to put the divorce behind her and move on. A framed photograph of him stands on her dresser shrine next to photos of her dead parents and Padre Pio, a Catholic priest whom she has always been fascinated with. He was canonized by John Paul II. One of my earliest memories is of my father teasing her over the claims that the priest had performed miracles and received the stigmata. When she took offense, he became angry and said, “If you want to believe that crap, fine. Don’t expect me to take any of it seriously.”

She poured the coffee, fetched a bottle of Irish whiskey from the cabinet, and splashed a generous measure into her cup. She offered the same for me and was surprised when I accepted. I’m not a big whiskey drinker but felt a sense of nourishment in that sip, something careless and down to earth. We were quiet for a while, which is the natural complement to the aromas of booze and coffee. She held her cup by the handle, propping the rim with the fingertips of her other hand. Her gray hair was pulled back into a bun, and her eyes were a little bloodshot, but she was alert and present. For a moment, she appeared to me not as a mother or a grieving widow but as a linkage. The funeral seemed a small detail in a whole chain of linkages, and I understood for the first time how, in not going, she’d attended it in a more significant way. Still, it was with a twinge of guilty feeling that I described to her the planting of the tree outside Bern.

“What kind of tree?”

“I think it was an elm. A friend arranged it with a local farmer, who let us plant it on the edge of his field on the Dentenberg. It was one of Dad’s favorite places to walk. There’s a little restaurant up there where he liked to stop for a beer.”

“Sounds nice.” The disdain was muted, but only slightly; another reminder of things she felt cut off from. I’d said too much. We sipped our toddies and watched the birds at the feeder outside the window. Funny, the things we feel cut off from, how they so often turn out to be just the things we at one time deliberately rejected. My mother always complained about the superficialities of being a Foreign Service spouse. She detested the clubs, the cocktail parties, the bubbly charity of the wives, the pompous husbands. My father disliked all those things, too, but he protected himself with an ironic and often malicious sense of humor. He was a recognizable type: the wry, smart guy, likable but a little intimidating and best kept at a distance. The Foreign Service is full of them, always a rung or two down from ambassador, bearing all the institutional scars and grudges. My mother says she is happy to have left all that behind, is happy with her quiet life. I’m not sure I believe her.

We went into the living room. She picked up her knitting, and I listened as she began reminiscing. “I remember once we were in Aachen, walking through the cathedral there, and all of a sudden your father tells me there’s something he needs to do and to meet him at the restaurant directly across from where we’d parked the car.” She shook her head. “Right out of the blue. He’s off. Just like that. I hadn’t even noticed there was a restaurant.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I tried my best to enjoy the cathedral, then went to wait for him in the restaurant. I waited there for two hours!” She put her knitting down. “Can you believe it? Two hours! Then he comes in and plops himself down and says ‘I’m famished,’ as if there was nothing more normal in the world.”

“What did you say?”

“I got right up and left. Are you kidding? The last thing on earth I wanted to do was sit there for another minute with him and pretend everything was just fine.”

“Where was he all that time?”

“He said he had to call the office and afterward he’d done a little exploring and simply lost track of the time. Going home, he took one of his famous shortcuts that took us an hour and a half out of the way. We ended up stopping for dinner, anyway.”

I always feel oppressed by her reminiscences. It pains me to see her so completely stuck in the past. She doesn’t have to become a happy person, just live a little more fully in the present.

I stood up. “I’m going to have another toddy. Want one?”

“No, thank you.” She smiled to let me know that she was happy to indulge this sudden immoderation on my part, in spite of all the lectures I’d given her about drinking. I went to the kitchen and poured the remaining coffee into my cup, taking note of what there was of whiskey left in the bottle. It was not to keep tabs but just to know. One of the phantoms of alcoholic behavior is always to take notice as well as to be alert to all notice-taking.

“Did you ever meet a friend of Dad’s named Blake?” I asked, coming back into the living room.

“Blake?” She thought for a moment, knitting needles slowing. “Blake who?”

“I don’t know.” I sat down on the sofa, sipping the vaporous concoction. I tried to recall if any first names had been used, but couldn’t remember. “He turned up at the memorial service and came back to the apartment afterward. Uninvited, it turned out—and pretty obnoxious. Nicole couldn’t stand him. Claimed he was an old friend, met Dad in Laos.”

She put her knitting aside, shook her head, and frowned. “That can’t be. Dad was never in Laos.”

“I’m just telling you what he said.”

Her hands were folded in her lap. She stared down at them, the crease on her brow deepening. She can make herself look so angry when she becomes uncertain. It was hard to watch the Irish temper churning up. “No,” she said firmly. “It’s just not possible. He was never in Laos. I’d remember.”

“Well, maybe I got it wrong,” I said, wishing I hadn’t brought it up. “I was just curious to know if you’d heard of the guy. It’s not important.”

The glare in her eyes was familiar and troubling.

“Look, Mom. Forget it. It’s not important.”

“I’ll prove it, damn it,” she said, and marched off to the bedroom. It came on too suddenly to protest. I knew she had saved all his Vietnam letters. She’s offered to let me read them several times. I always decline. I settled back onto the sofa, resigned to going through the whole routine again. All these years of persisting in a worn-out relationship—not out of hope but out of hopelessness. It was too pathetic to think about, much less be shown the moldering evidence pulled from a dresser drawer.

She returned with an oversized manila envelope.

“I don’t want to look at them,” I said.

“Well, they’re here if you change your mind.” She put the envelope on the coffee table as if it were an extra helping of dessert I’d turned down. It was a provocation. The more indifferent I seem and the more she pretends not to be bothered in return, the more we prove to one another how deeply we both care. It’s an uncalm, interior caring that needs to be guarded and restrained.

I was a little drunk when I left a short time later. It was late afternoon. She’d asked me to return some books to the library for her. It was a routine request. She typically has half-a-dozen overdue books lying around at any given time. Although she lives in Bethesda, she often takes books from the library in Georgetown, where her friend Marge Noonan works. Marge is also a divorced Foreign Service wife. She and my mother had been cordial in the Foreign Service wife way back in Madras. They became friends years later, in the context of their divorces. My earliest memory of Marge is of her dressed as a heavily bejeweled Indian bride, chain-smoking Salem 100s at a costume party at our house on Adyar Club Gate Road.

It was rush hour. A steady stream of traffic was flowing out of the front gate of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The agency’s motto is Know the Earth. Show the Way, which has always struck me as a peculiar variation of the Delphic injunction, Know thyself. I am also reminded of the lines from Rilke: Nirgends, Geliebte, wird Welt sein, als innen—Nowhere, beloved, will world be but within. To know the Earth is no simple proposition—but to be shown the way by a government agency? The inverse of the motto might be Know Thyself. Find the Way.

I drove down MacArthur Boulevard to Reservoir Road, feeling oddly mellow in the rush-hour twilight. It was more than just alcohol-induced well-being and had tinges of melancholy to give it ballast. There is a hidden traffic camera on MacArthur that has photographed me speeding several times. I always roll down the window and wave when I pass it. I also take note passing the mailbox at R and Thirty-seventh Street where Aldrich Ames made his drops. The original box is now on display downtown at the International Spy Museum—which speaks volumes about the legacy of the Cold War and the profitable cult of the secret agent. This part of upper Georgetown is a labyrinth of locations where secrets and watching have spilled over into history. There’s Wild Bill Donovan’s house on Thirtieth Street; Alger Hiss’s various addresses on Volta Place, on P Street; Au Pied de Cochon, the restaurant Vitaly Yevchenko disappeared from when he redefected to the USSR. The restaurant is gone, but a plaque (also in the Spy Museum) once marked the table where he sat. There’s the home of Amy “Betty” Pack, the OSS “swallow” who got her hands on the Vichy French naval codes by first getting them on Charles Brousse, the Vichy French attaché. Farther up Wisconsin Avenue is the apartment where the South African agent Jennifer Miles fucked her way through various echelons of the White House, DOD, and State Department. All are regular tour stops now, as much part of the quilt of Washington attractions as the monuments on the Mall, and perhaps all the more compelling for being so mundane.

The Georgetown library is a grandly sited neo-Georgian structure on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and R Street. I was paying my mother’s fine at the front desk when Marge Noonan came out of the History and Reference Room with an armload of books. “Come up and say hello,” she called to me and pressed the elevator button with her elbow.

“I’ve been meaning to call your mother all week,” she said as I entered her office a few minutes later. The room would be claustrophobic if it weren’t for the enormous window directly behind her desk. The view is one of the best in the city.

“I was just returning some books for her,” I said.

“How is she?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Come in and close the door.” I hesitated, unsure about the whiskey on my breath. “I’m sorry about your father,” she said.

“Yes, well.” I shifted my gaze to the window behind her.

“He was too young.”

I nodded.

Marge pushed herself back in her chair. “I spent some time with your mother while you were at the funeral.” She put her reading glasses on and glanced for a moment at her computer screen. Then she took them off again and let them dangle from the chain around her neck. “I worry about her.”

“Well, you shouldn’t.” It came out sounding testy, but I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the busybody nature of the remark but the suggestion that my mother wasn’t able to look after herself and I ought to be doing more to help her.

Marge took the tone of my remark as proof of her suspicion. “I think I have a right to worry,” she said. “Your mother and I are old friends.”

My resolve collapsed. I felt trapped. “What I mean is that she’s—well, she is the way she is.”

Marge’s look softened. “It’s been a rough time for both of you, I know.” I was about to take this as my cue to leave when she perked up suddenly. “Oh, before I forget. You remember that elderly gentleman? When you were in here a while back? He came in recently and asked me to give you this.” She rummaged through the drawer of her desk, then produced a card and handed it to me. It was an old index card, yellowed at the edges. “I have a map which may interest you.” On the back were a name, address, and telephone number.

“Did he say anything else?” I asked.

Marge shook her head. “He just asked me to give you that.”

I slipped the card into my pocket and only half listened as Marge mentioned the upcoming retreat at the Trappist monastery in Virginia. Evidently, my mother had invited Marge to join her. “I just hope she knows she’s free to change her mind if she wants to,” Marge was saying.

“Change her mind?”

“About me coming along.”

I fingered the card in my pocket and glanced at my watch.

“Will you tell her?”

“That you changed your mind?”

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” She rolled her eyes and waved me off. “Forget it. I’ll tell her myself.”

“When was he in here?” I asked, taking the card from my pocket.

“At least a month ago. I don’t remember exactly.”

It was dark outside. I crossed the library parking lot behind the building and stood in the little park that adjoins it. I never leave the library without stopping here to take in the view. I sat down on a bench, pulled my collar up against the wind. In the foreground, the rooftops of Georgetown slope down Wisconsin Avenue, quaint and tasteful and haughty in the Washington small-town way. Across the river, Arlington Cemetery, the Pentagon, and the skylines of Rosslyn and Crystal City spread out in their closed crucible of power. Vaulting into the sky just behind the Pentagon is the Air Force Memorial, a bouquet of chromium arcs meant to suggest the trajectories of soaring jets that looks more like an explosion tearing up the horizon.