Читать книгу An Affair of State - Harry Hart Frank - Страница 9

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He took her to Hall’s, down near the waterfront, and they ate lobster flown from Maine that morning. She knew how to eat lobster. She knew how to start at the tip of the tail, and draw all the meat from the shell in one skillful operation. She cracked the claws expertly, and neglected nothing, not even the succulent globules of flesh hidden under the base of the legs. “You must have eaten here before,” he suggested.

“I ate here often until a few years ago. My husband used to bring me.”

She would have been married, of course, but it didn’t seem the proper time to ask about her husband. She would tell him of her husband when she was ready. “Did you know this was General Grant’s favorite restaurant?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t know.”

“It was. He had a private dining room on the second floor, and when he’d finished a couple of dozen chincoteagues and a three-pound lobster he’d pace up and down on the balcony over the garden, smoking a cigar and shaking down his dinner.”

“Tell me,” she said, watching the thin spiral of smoke from the clamshell ash tray, “what do you think of generals?”

“I think generals are fine for winning wars. Or used to be.”

“Used to be?”

“Uh-huh. I think generals are archaic, like knights in armor.”

“If you talk like that in the Department,” she said, “you won’t be very popular. Generals are Chiefs of Mission in all the critical areas, and more areas are getting critical all the time.”

They talked of the successes and failures of ERP, the uranium mines in Bohemia, British trade, Italian Communists, Chinese graft, and the Japanese Zaibatsu. They leaped across the globe to The Straits, and she asked him what he thought of the new Turkish military loan. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “There’ll be big parties in the Casino Taxim, and toasts to that noble ally and splendid democracy, Turkey. Then the pashas will take the hundred million bucks and build more villas on the islands in the Marmara. The Turkish Army doesn’t need equipment. It needs education. It would take one generation for the Turkish Army to learn to read, and another to learn how to use radar and jets and rockets.”

“Jeff,” she asked, “do you always say what you think, like that?” She asked this very quietly, and very seriously.

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I do.”

“People don’t like to hear that sort of talk. It isn’t, you know, very diplomatic. Particularly in the Department it isn’t diplomatic. There are men in the Department whose reputations suffer when any part of our policy is questioned—even such a small part as the Turkish loan. You could very well get your official throat cut, for a statement like that.”

“Anyway, it’s the truth.”

“They’ll ship you to Noumea, or Guayaquil, or Addis Ababa,” she predicted, naming some of the traditional Siberias of the Foreign Service. “I don’t want that to happen to you.” She seemed genuinely troubled. “I want you to go to some place where you are needed.”

“Like where?”

“Like Budapest. Or Prague. Or Rome.”

He realized for the first time that she had been dropping carefully chosen pebbles into the stream of his thought, and charting the spreading ripples of his reaction. He thought it wise to parry question with question. “Susan,” he asked, “exactly what do you do in the Secretary’s office?”

“I’m just the stenographer who takes the nine o’clock conference. I’m rated as a confidential secretary, and I’m an FSS, Class Eight, and make fifty-four hundred, but all I actually do is take the nine o’clock conference.”

“That’s pretty important, isn’t it? Isn’t that the Planning Conference? Don’t you hear a lot?”

“I hear a lot, and I never talk about it. But sometimes I think.”

He wondered how a girl with such irregular features could appear so beautiful. She had none of the vacant, antiseptic loveliness that the back pages of magazines made Americans in the middle of the century accept as beauty. But the eyes of the men at other tables were drawn away from their own women, and towards her. “How is it,” he inquired, “that you were free tonight? I’m very happy that you are, but it doesn’t seem logical.”

“In the first place, don’t you realize that there are a hundred thousand more women than men in Washington?”

“And in the second place?”

“In the second place, I don’t sleep around, and I’m not getting married.”

“You’re human, aren’t you?”

She didn’t reply at once. She tapped her cigarette into the clamshell, and then cocked her head to one side in a way she had, as if this was a difficult and almost an unfair question. “There are two answers to that,” she said finally. “The first is that I wish I could show you how human I am. The second is that I can’t.”

“That’s no answer. That’s a riddle.”

“Wait. I’ll unriddle it. I married when I was nineteen. My husband was much older. Not that he wasn’t a good husband. He was. In every sense. He was also—I was going to say like a father but that’s not what I mean. He was like a tutor—a wise friend. He was in the Public Health Service and when war came the Marines took him and shipped him out to the Pacific to clean up those islands. I’d see him every six months or so. He’d come back to get a planeload of little fish to eat mosquito larvae—things like that. He was always fighting for supplies and medicines not only for the Marines but for the people in New Georgia, and the Marshallese, and the Gilbertese. He was that kind of man.”

“And you lost him?”

“I lost him. I celebrated V-J day in a big way, because I knew he’d soon be back. I woke up with a hangover and a telegram beginning, ‘The Secretary of the Navy regrets.’ All I have to show for him is a Legion of Merit, posthumous.”

“I’ll admit that’s tough. Okay. But other women lost their husbands and got over it.”

“I know. I didn’t. Other women don’t have to take the State Department’s nine o’clock conference.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t? Put it this way. Lots of women won’t have babies, nowadays, because they’re afraid. They’re afraid they’ll lose them in another war. They’re afraid babies will be killed in their cribs this year, or next year, or the year after. Right here, in Washington. In New York, and Pittsburgh, and Detroit and every other target city. Well, I don’t want to have any more men, like other women don’t want to have any more babies. I couldn’t bear to lose another man.”

Jeff Baker wondered whether it would be presumptuous for him to ask about Keller, and he decided it wouldn’t be because she would understand it was necessary for him to know all he could know of her. “What about Fred Keller?” he said.

“I go out with him, very occasionally.”

“That all?”

“That’s all. He’s a dear.”

“You mean he doesn’t make passes at you. That’s what a woman means when she says a man’s a dear.”

“As a matter of fact, he doesn’t. When he takes you out you feel that he’s wearing you like a carnation in his buttonhole. He’d never do anything so crude as make a pass. Fred’s a perfectionist. I don’t know exactly how he’d go about having an affair with a girl, but I have a hunch the preliminaries would be sending orchids, and introducing you to his mother.”

“He didn’t look so damn safe to me,” Jeff said. Keller was spare and tanned, still a bachelor at forty, and rich enough to have twelve acres in Berwyn, a shooting box on the Eastern Shore, and an ocean-front villa near Palm Beach. He had once been runner-up for the national squash title, and in 1947 had been picked as one of America’s ten best-dressed men.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s not safe,” said Susan Pickett, and Jeff knew she was not speaking of her relations with him, but of something else.

“Go on,” he said.

“Nothing, except sometimes he gives me the shivers. He’s so casual about war. When he talks about atomic bombs his mouth waters as if they were lemons.”

“That’s not unusual in these times. And after all, he’s not so important. He’s not Undersecretary of State, or Chief of a bureau or a division or even a section. He just has some sort of a control job on the European desk.”

“He is important,” she insisted. “He gets into everything. And he’s going to Budapest.”

Jeff recalled she had mentioned Budapest before. “Didn’t you recommend Budapest for me?”

“I suppose so. It’s been on my mind.”

“What’s cooking in Budapest?”

“Nothing that isn’t cooking in Prague and Salonika and Trieste and Vienna and Berlin and Seoul and everywhere else where we’re face to face with the Russians. Only in Budapest it’s closer to burning.” She was silent while the waiter laid the check on the table. “Jeff,” she added when the waiter was gone, “sometimes I forget I’m not supposed to think. I’m just the girl who takes the nine o’clock conference, and I need my job, and if I do too much thinking and talking I’ll lose it.”

“What’re you afraid of—thought control police?”

“Sure. We all are.”

“Okay,” he agreed, “we won’t talk shop any more. Anyway I like Budapest. It lives.”

“You’ve been there?”

“When I was a kid. In the summer after my sophomore year in college. The Department sent my father to help in an audit of the Balkan Missions, and we made a trip up the Danube. What a city!”

“If you’re interested in what’s going to happen to this world,” she said quietly, “you should try to go there again.”

He knew it was not necessary to talk any more of it. She was a puzzling girl, a skein of fear grown over her emotions, masking her desires, but he did not doubt her judgment. If she thought Budapest would be an interesting and instructive post, then he’d believe her.

It was something to remember, but not to count on.

Outside, in a taxi, he suggested the Footlight Club, but she said that while it was a nice idea, and she loved to dance, it was too late for her to go anywhere else. She had to be in the office, typing the agenda for the nine o’clock conference, at eight every morning. Therefore she didn’t stay out late except Saturday nights.