Blacklist

CHAPTER 51

In Portage, fifty miles north of Madison, the rain changed to snow. I pulled over for gas and hamburgers. Geraldine woke, used the gas station toilet without comment, although it hadn’t seen soap for a few decades, and ate one of the cardboard burgers.

“I drove up here through the snow with Calvin one December,” she said. “I told Mother I was going to St. Augustine to ride; I often did that in the winter, to get away from New Solway. Even in daylight it was a difficult passage. It was still a two-lane road then, with stop signs every so often. Of course the war was on, with gas rationing and rubber rationing; only the wealthy, like Calvin and me, could afford to be driving such distances. We didn’t pass many other vehicles.”

I wondered if she would remember the route to the lodge, but I would worry about that when we got to Eagle River: right now, keeping the car on the road was taking all my energy. That, and staying awake.

“I dredged the pond out at Larchmont on Friday” I said. “I found a ring-I forgot to tell you when I saw you on Sunday. Something that looked like a beehive of diamonds with ruby and emerald chips along the base.”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “So it was in the pond all those years. It belonged to Mother. She actually fired one of the maids

for stealing it, although I always thought Darraugh must have taken it. It was a terribly ugly thing, that ring, but Mother prized it because her father gave it to her at her coming-out party. It disappeared soon after MacKenzie died, when Mother was in her element, holding the press at bay, publicly flaunting herself in black crepe, privately gloating. Darraugh turned on her in an almost violent way.

“He turned on me, too, but I felt I had earned it and did nothing to try to deflect his rage. Everything was gray for me then, losing Calvin, losing MacKenzie, losing Darraugh, all in one short spring. My daughter, Laura, was away at Vassar. And anyway, she shared my mother’s attitude towardme, toward her father. She held herself disapprovingly aloof from all of us and our turmoil. She’s a wonderful matron now; her grandmother would be proud of her for upholding the ancien regime.”

“Does Darraugh know that your husband wasn’t his father?” I asked.

“I never told him. Mother hinted at it, but she couldn’t have known with certainty Although of course she made burrowing into my private life her major business, bribing servants, searching my room.” Geraldine’s flutey voice wavered. I turned my eyes briefly from the slippery road to look at her: she was staring straight ahead, her hands knotted in her lap.

“Darraugh and Mother fought in an interminable, intolerable way after MacKenzie’s death. She called MacKenzie ugly names, cruel names, to my son and suggested MacKenzie could never have fathered a child. Darraugh came to me. I said of course he was MacKenzie’s son. But Darraugh didn’t believe me, and he felt Mother’s words bitterly, felt them as my betrayal of himself and of MacKenzie. He ran away from home. We hired detectives such as yourself, but couldn’t find him.

“I finally fled to France, where I stayed for almost a year, until I learned that Darraugh had suddenly reappeared at Exeter. One of the masters inspired his confidence, it seemed. It was still years before he talked to me again, but when he married, his wife acted as a peacemaker. Elise was a lovely girl. She softened all o? us-well, she softened Darraugh and me. Certainly not Mother, who kept trying to make us despise her for having been a typist when Darraugh met her. When we lost Elise, to leukemia, Darraugh froze over again.”

I pulled over to the side of the road to clean off the headlights and the buildup of snow at the bottom of the windshield. When I got back into the car, Geraldine asked if I’d found anything else in the pond.

“Bits of Crown Derby. One of Kylie Ballantine’s masks.”

“That was my doing,” she said. “How strange it is to talk about all of this so calmly, when I held it fast inside me for five decades. We all bought masks to support Kylie after she lost her teaching position at the University of Chicago. And then, after Calvin brought Renee home, Renee made it clear to me that I had only been one of Calvin’s loves. Only one of the women who traveled this road to Eagle River with him all those years ago. I threw the mask in the pond in the middle of a night much like this one.”

She was quiet for a bit; I thought she’d gone back to sleep, but it was the past she’d journeyed to. “I don’t believe Calvin ever took Renee to the cottage. The family’s agreement with the government had expired, as I said, and Calvin wouldn’t come here if it wasn’t his private home anymore. Besides, he was busy establishing himself in political and social circles with his new wife: after the hearings, he became a public darling. I couldn’t help noticing him, you know. Even when I returned from France and found my wits again, I couldn’t help noticing his comings and goings. It was a small balm to the spirit to know that even if Kylie Ballantine and a dozen others had lain with him on the bearskin rug before the cottage fire, Renee herself never did so.”

“So Catherine doesn’t know about this cottage?” I cried out. “Have we come all this way for nothing?”

“I would much prefer it if you didn’t shout at me, young woman. Calvin didn’t have much interest in children. He didn’t care that Darraugh might be his son, and he paid little heed to his and Renee’s boy. But when Catherine was left to Renee’s care and to his, he became as proud as if he had just invented children and she was the first example ever created. He was growing old, but Renee was still young. Renee had always worked for his firm; he let her take over more responsibility. She was in her element, hiring and firing, buying and selling. Calvin devoted himself to the girl. He used to take Catherine to Wisconsin to fish and ride, until he stopped driving some four years back.”

“He told you these things?”

She gave a brittle laugh. “Good heavens, no. I kept in touch with him through servants’ gossip: it’s how the wealthy have always kept track of each other. One’s servants know everything that one does, and their friends are the servants in the other great houses. Until Renee built a thick wall of silence around his illness, I would know whatever Calvin did; Lisa could tell me. If she wanted to punish me, it was with tales of great events Renee and Calvin had taken part in, with him glowing proudly over Renee. If Lisa wanted to comfort me, she told me of their quarrels.”

I thought of my mother’s words on the worries of grand ladies. I was glad of the poverty I’d grown up in, glad of having to earn every dime I’d ever spent. You pay a high price for money, too high a price.

We fell silent while I concentrated on the road, stopping every thirty or forty miles to clean the headlights. By the time we reached Wassau, it was midnight, but the snowplows were out and the road became easier to negotiate. I pulled over at a truck stop for a cup of bitter coffee and a detail map of the north woods. Back in the car, I handed the map to Geraldine and asked her to see whether she could piece together the route to the lodge. She couldn’t read the map, she said: the print was too small, even with her glasses.

She dozed off again. I had started the journey exhausted; the cones of snow swirling into the headlights hypnotized me into drowsiness. I turned on the radio, but only picked up all-night revivals of religion. I pushed the tape player in case Marc had been listening to something.

An old man’s scratchy voice came through the speakers. “Oh, no, young man, no tape recorders. You may take some notes, but no one puts my words on tape.”

A younger, deeper voice responded, “Very well, sir.”

Several loud clicks followed, and then the young man spoke again, his voice muffled. “I’m writing a book about Kyhe Ballantine. I found a letter from her to Armand Pelletier in which she mentions a meeting with you.”

The Saturn fishtailed madly. I fought for control, spinning the steering wheel in the direction of the skid. By some miracle, we ended up in the middle of the road, facing south, but we weren’t in the ditch.

“That’s Olin,” Geraldine sat up in surprise, ignoring the car’s gyrations. “And Marc Whitby,” I agreed.

I pulled over as close to the edge of the road as I could without going into the ditch and rewound the tape to the beginning. Marc apparently had put his tape recorder in his pocket or a briefcase, but hadn’t turned it off, he’d recorded the whole conversation.

Olin laughed thinly. “The Negro dancer-what was her name? Ballantine, yes, that’s right. She was very exercised. But I told her she had made a gross error in judgment if she thought weeping and shouting would change my mind: emotional women have always disgusted me. And an emotional Negress is a terrible parody of feeling.”

“Is that why you sent the letter to the university demanding that they fire her?” Marc asked. “Because her emotions disgusted you?”

The muffled mike didn’t pick up everything Olin said, so the first part of his response was missing. “The University of Chicago deserved better than the Red faculty that infested the campus in those days. She was one I could prove to have an association with a Communist front. If I could have proved it about any of the others, I would have seen that they lost their jobs, too, young man. Don’t imagine this was about race or about sex. It was about the safety of America.”

“I’ve seen the photograph-it’s in the university archives. How did you know it was Ms. Ballantine? And how did you know where it was taken? I guessed it was her troupe because the masks were like those she’d brought back from French Equatorial Africa, but you couldn’t have known that.”

“I haven’t talked about this for forty-plus years, young man. Why should I tell you?”

“Because I’m going to write about it. If you don’t tell me your story, I’ll make assumptions about what you did and why you did it, and that will be the version that the whole world will know.”

The tape was muffled here, but then Olin called out to Domingo Rivas to help him get to his desk. I hadn’t seen Marc’s tape recorder anywhere, but he must have owned a good one, because it picked up the sound of Olin’s walker tapping across the floor. Marc apparently followed him, because I could hear Rivas’s soothing murmur, “Yessir, here we go, sir, a few more steps,” and then the noises of the lock in the drawer scraping open and Olin muttering what Rivas had reported when we spoke last week: “I am old and the time for holding on to secrets is past. Even the secrets that I’ve kept from myself.”

Papers rustled. It was maddening to sit in Marc’s car and not know what he’d been reading.

After a moment, Olin said, “I signed one copy, Calvin the other. Julius Arnoff witnessed the documents and put a third copy in Lebold, Arnoff’s vaults.”

Marc exclaimed, “But why did you sign it?” “Calvin signed one copy of what?” I screeched. “Mr. Bayard sent you the photograph?” Marc said. “He gave it to me. After Llewellyn sent me to him.” “Mr. Llewellyn?” Marc echoed. “Who owns T-Square?”

“Oh, you work in his organization, don’t you, young man? I had forgotten T-square was his precious magazine. Yes, he’d signed all those checks and we had him dead to rights. Bushnell wanted to lock him up: he hated Negro agitators even more than he hated Reds, and he figured Llewellyn as a Red-and-Black agitator. But I knew what kind of slippery bastard Calvin could be, so I believed Llewellyn. We called Calvin before the committee. He sat there smiling as though he owned the world. My God, I hated that smile more than anything else about him. I let him smirk his way through his testimony, and then I made a mistake.”

Marc was too experienced a reporter to push; he waited until Olin picked up the story himself. “I confronted him after the meeting and told him we had Llewellyn’s testimony. That I was going to put it into the record the next day, that he’d bullied Llewellyn into writing those checks. Unless Calvin began naming names. And if he didn’t, he could go to prison. He said he’d have to think about it, but I knew Calvin would never go to prison. He loved himself too much-he wouldn’t make the grand gestures of people like Pelletier or Dashiell Hammett. Calvin came back to me two days later with the dancer’s photograph. And Pelletier’s name. Of course, we already had Pelletier in our sights, and we didn’t care much about the dancer.”

“Only enough to destroy her career.” Marc spoke hotly, forgetting his reporter’s facade.

“She destroyed it herself, young man, by taking part in those Communist activities. But we couldn’t prove she’d ever given them money, or been a party member, so we let her go. I told Calvin he had another day to give me some real names, and he came back in the morning-with that letter.”

“That was enough? Why did you let Mr. Bayard off the hook?” Marc sounded bewildered, as bewildered as I felt.

“It’s there in the document, young man. I don’t want to discuss it.” The tape ended soon after that, with Marc thanking Olin, and the apartment door shutting behind him. I ran the tape to the end, but there wasn’t anything else on it.

Geraldine and I stared at each other in the dark car.

“Your young man went to Renee after that, didn’t he?” Geraldine said. “Marc was careful; he wouldn’t publish anything without checking the whole story,” I agreed sadly. “If he hadn’t been such a good journalist, he wouldn’t have died.”