The Empire of Night

5

The next night Isabel Cobb ended her run in London as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. She’d swept out of her basement cabaret on the night of the most recent Zeppelin attack on London and it wasn’t until Friday morning that I saw her again, when she stepped into a first-class compartment at Victoria Station for the train to Broadstairs in Kent and she sat down across from the American journalist and German apologist Joseph W. Hunter.

Trask had booked the compartment so that she and I would be alone. But she entered playing a stranger, nodding at me and then ignoring me as she settled in, arranging her handbag next to her just so, its corners squared to the edge of the upholstered bench seat. I watched this with a vaguely squirmy sense of recognition. I always did that very thing with the pages of a story as they came out of my typewriter.

She finished with her bag and then smoothed her overskirt, though it hardly needed smoothing. It was a stage gesture. She looked quite summery in a blueberry bolero jacket and straw boater with a matching ribbon and pleated bow.

She turned her face to me now, even as I was thinking how she looked pretty good, and she tightened her forehead as if I were a young man on the mash.

I refused to play along. “We have the compartment to ourselves, Mother,” I said, in a tone of We both know this, so what are all the theatrics for?

She flared her hands in front of her. “Can’t we have a little fun, my darling? Improvisation? How long has it been since we rode a train together? We used to have so much fun.”

I shrugged and looked out of the window beside me. A conductor strode past blowing his all-aboard whistle.

“You were always a clever boy,” she said. “A talented boy.”

We rode enough trains together between theater towns to circle the earth and circle it again. For as long as I could think back, we would play roles together to pass the time. Over the years, I was everyone from a beggar boy running away from an orphanage to a dry goods commercial traveler who was Isabel Cobb’s biggest fan and overwhelmed to meet her. She once had hopes I’d follow her into the theater.

The train was moving now, and I turned back to Mother. She was watching out the window. Her face was blank. I knew the look. I’d seen it often, in stage wings just before she would make her first entrance. This blankness was all she would show of the actor’s inevitable terror of reinventing herself before a thousand strangers watching from the dark.

This time her audience would be smaller and she would walk among them and things were at stake far beyond entertaining a theater crowd.

I knew to let her be. The outward blankness would last until her entrance cue, and then she would come suddenly alive as if she’d flipped an electric light switch. I glanced at her only briefly and stealthily, but her preparatory state went on and on, through our run across the Thames and through Clapham and Herne Hill, with their old estates turning into middle-class commuter houses, and through our plunge into the dark of the long tunnel beneath the Crystal Palace. Here, the electric lights in the compartment flickered us into total darkness. We clattered through the blackness for a long moment, and when the lights flared back on again, I looked frankly at her and she had closed her eyes.

I believed her fear.

I wanted to reach out and take her hand.

But I knew better.

What would she take as her entrance cue on this day?

The lights blinked off once more and then almost instantly back on and her eyes were open, as if they had been all along and what I’d seen was wrong.

But she was still preparing.

Only when we were above ground and finished with London and into the county of Kent and we were rushing through vast hops gardens, the plants beginning to bloom into gold, ready for the seasonal pickers to come down from the slums of London, only then did she turn her face back to me.

“The curtain goes up,” she said.

I nodded.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“This role of yours.”

“And you, my son? I was quite surprised to learn about your own specialized acting career.”

“You already knew about me the other night.”

“Of course.” She leaned forward and patted me on the knee. “Aren’t we having fun?”

There was nothing to say to that. Of course she was.

I decided to watch the hops for a while.

Trask had briefed me before we parted at Buffington’s. I’d been invited to stay the weekend at Stockman House, his family estate high on the chalk cliffs between Broadstairs and Ramsgate. I was following Isabel Cobb, doing a feature story on her for the de facto syndicate of German-leaning American newspapers that were making my reputation. The news hook was the next stop on her tour of Hamlet. Berlin. A detail she deliberately withheld from our discussion of her tour in her dressing room. I was to stay alert to — even, at my discretion, seek out — evidence that Sir Albert was indeed actively aiding the German cause. My mother was doing the same.

“This will be an interesting test of your new identity,” Trask had said.

I wasn’t worried. There had been almost no images of me in the press over these half dozen years of my war correspondent notoriety. I’d insisted on that. My printed words were my public face. There was, however, another issue. I’d said to Trask, “She and I have kept it quiet for more than a decade, but the Germans surely know she’s my mother.”

He’d simply nodded. We were drinking brandy in the two Morris chairs after everyone else had cleared out of Buffington’s basement bunker.

“This is very risky for her,” I said.

Trask did a lift of the left shoulder and a tilt of the head in the same direction, both equally minute. A characteristic shrug I’d seen more than once. It usually was meant to stop a line of inquiry. But this time he also said, “She understands the risk. She’s made it very clear how disaffected she is with you. I understand she can be very convincing.”

I let that sink in. I tried to believe it. I said, “But why recruit her? Why take on that extra burden?”

“She was already undercover.”

“I know about that.”

“So I gather.” He smiled, slow and sly. Her Pinkerton work.

“You’re not saying she came to you,” I said.

He shrugged again. This time it did stop the inquiry. But he added, “It could actually make her more interesting to them.”

At that, I should have had a thought about something I’d seen in her dressing room, but I got distracted by her being “interesting” to the Germans.

Trask even followed up on my distraction, though he figured he was simply giving me a more direct answer to my question of why her. He said, “She happened to be the best possible person for our Sir Albert. He is her ardent fan.”

The hops seemed to have vanished. The field passing was full of cows.

I turned back to Mother.

“There is something to say to that.” This came out of my mouth before I realized I was alluding to a thought of a few moments ago that I’d not given voice to: what was there to say to her “Aren’t we having fun.”

“Have I missed something?” she said.

“We can’t take this as fun,” I said. “Of course you knew about me and Trask when I saw you in your dressing room. You knew long before that.”

“So?”

“So what the hell were you doing making a show of my being your son? The stage manager knew me on sight. My photo was stuck in your mirror. You did your underappreciated-and-deeply-concerned-but-proudly-loving-mama act with the suffragettes.”

“I am underappreciated and deeply concerned,” she said.

“Trask surely told you these people are dangerous.”

“I am proudly loving too,” she said.

“Your fate. .”

“Always that,” she said.

“Your fate with the Huns,” I said, firmly, “depends on their belief that we are estranged, you and I.”

“I know that,” she said.

“Then how could you publicly play the opposite?”

“It wasn’t public. This man would never in an eon talk with suffragettes or stage managers. And when he came backstage I hid your photo.”

I flipped my hands in the air in exasperation.

“So Mr. Hunter,” she said, suddenly lighting up in her stage-star way, immediately turning me into this guy. As if that was all it would take to put my concerns to rest. “You and I share some strong sympathies that are, I’m afraid, quickly becoming unpopular in our country.”

She engaged my gaze and she was looking at me with veiled but lively eyes and she was smiling a very small, crooked smile. This pose was filed under Faintly Superior Solicitousness. She was inviting me to get into character with her now. Like old times on a train on the way to a performance.

“Wrongheadedly so,” I said. “This is not the first time our country has had trouble choosing its friends.”

For a very brief moment her smile flashed wide: Isabel smiling at her son Kit playing along with her. Then she plunged back into her playlet. “You are so right, Mr. Hunter. So right indeed. But this weekend you will have a chance to write about the greatest actress of the American stage celebrating her triumph as Hamlet in London and then traveling on to play the tragically fated prince in Berlin. I will, by my art, build a bridge between these two warring nations. I take no sides. I love the English but I also embrace our German brethren.”

“And do you embrace our host this weekend?” I asked.

There was a stopping in her and then a fluttering out of her part, just a little, in her hands. I tried not to show any pleasure at getting her to briefly lose her performance composure. My sense of our old game of this indeed made me feel a sort of pleasure. But for me to have flustered her with that cheap innuendo meant there was some bit of truth in it. And there was no pleasure in that at all.

She recovered quickly. “Mr. Hunter, I never took you for a yellow journalist.”

I played at backing off. “I mean, of course, in the same way you would embrace the good people of Das Deutsche Reich.”

“Well, do forgive me, Mr. Hunter, for misunderstanding you. I am sadly accustomed to young men taking an inappropriate interest in my private life, which is none of their business.”

I turned my face to the windows. The cows had given way to apple orchards, the small, green earlies already beginning to appear.

“We need to talk in our actual selves,” I said.

“And what are those, exactly?” she said.

I looked at her.

Our eyes connected but didn’t hold. She turned her face to the long, even rows of apple trees whisking by. “All right,” she said.

“Your man Albert. .”

“He is not my man,” she said.

“Your target Albert.”

“Yes?”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“I’ve said things about America privately to him that make your little pseudonymous odes to the Fatherland sound wishy-washy.”

“Wouldn’t that make him suspicious?”

“I’m exaggerating.” She said this instantly, shrugging.

“Let’s talk straight,” I said.

“What I said felt that extreme,” she said. “It’s easier for you to write this drivel than it is for me to say it face to face. But I’ve made myself look as potentially good for the German cause as your J. W. Hunter. And I worked up to it. I know how to play that role with a man. Oh, sir, I’ve got this little secret that some people would think unsavory but I feel I can trust you.”

“Sounds effective.” I said this with an edge I didn’t want. She didn’t either. It was her own fault for putting it in those terms.

We looked at each other and silently called a truce.

She said, “I think he believes me. And he was receptive. You could feel him expanding, glowing. But this was just loose, still rather indirect talk. His receptiveness is nothing like proof.”

“There’s one thing I worry about,” I said.

“What’s that, dear?”

“He’ll see a resemblance in us.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“The eyes,” I said.

“No,” she said.

“We have the same eyes.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “You have your father’s eyes.”

In those rare occasions she’d let herself refer to him, however vaguely—always vaguely — she meant it to stop the present conversation. She had never identified my father except that his name was Cobb and he was dead and I’d received from him some good traits and some bad traits. Unspecified. To her credit, she had never once, no matter how angry or frustrated she became with me, never once had she invoked my dead Cobb of a father as being responsible for my behavior. And perhaps a dozen times over the years she’d said that the one thing I got from my father were my looks, which she heartily approved of. Just my looks. The eye thing — that they, specifically, were his — this was new. And unwelcome.

I found my next breath hard to take. Impossible to take. And I could hear the clatter of my heart in my ears. Perhaps I had my father’s heart as well. Perhaps he’d died of a heart attack. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to worry about Sir Albert Stockman looking into my face and seeing my mother and smiling and nodding and later telling his men to kill us both in our sleep. Maybe this clatter was my last.

“You’ll be just fine, Mr. Hunter,” my mother said, quite low. Not a stage whisper. Not stagey at all. She meant to sincerely encourage me. Encourage us.

I nodded and turned my eyes to the window and saw nothing and then I turned back to her.

“What did Trask say he expected of you?” I asked.

“Whatever I can give him,” my mother said. “But at worst, when I get to Berlin, if Albert is what we think he is and he believes my performance, we expect the German secret service will approach me to be useful to them.”

And now Trask’s declaration struck me as it almost did in Buffington’s basement, that this recruitable German agent being the mother of a very effective enemy of Germany made her even more interesting to them.

I was so unaware of cursing in response, I could not even say, exactly, which curse it was that I’d used.

She said, “When a son replies to his mother with the exclamation ‘Fuck me,’ she is faced with a choice of several interpretations, none of them pleasant.”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. “Your first ‘useful’ act for the Germans will be to try to lure me into a trap. You understand that, don’t you?”

You could see the same stopping of breath in her that I had felt over my father’s eyes. She was silent for one beat and another and then she said, so quietly that I could barely hear it above the clack of the train wheels, “Fuck me.”

“That’s the right interpretation,” I said.

“Mr. Trask surely knows this,” she said.

“Of course he does,” I said. “And it’s what we have signed up for, you and I. You understand that too.”

“Yes.” Another pause. And she added, “He’ll have a plan.”

“We will have a plan,” I said. “We all will.”

She nodded.

And we both watched sightlessly for a few moments as the Kentish landscape rolled past.

It was time to get to work. I said, “Have you been to Stockman House?”

“Not yet,” she said, squaring her shoulders to me. “But ‘house’ is British understatement, I’m told. It’s a castle. Just not a terribly old one. Built in the middle of the last century by his grandfather.”

“Is he all inheritance? Or does he have his own dough?”

“He’s got plenty of his own. He’s an industrialist, he says. Metals. But if you push him — and I quickly learned not to — it’s all milk cans and Oxo tins and dustbins. He’s the Industrial Titan of Milk Cans, and he’s a bit touchy about it. For some years now, of course, he’s a member of Parliament, and that’s who he thinks he really is.”

“Does he have family?” Though I tried hard to keep a just-trying-to-get-the-facts tone in my voice, even I could hear the fidgety undertone.

She looked at me for a beat, sizing up my intention with that question. Which was, at least in part, to understand the extent of his romantic availability to her.

Does the punk kid you once were ever fully vanish, especially when it comes to your mother, especially when she’s the only blood family you ever had? And when that mother keeps casting you in his role, as she’d done ever since we’d boarded this train, and when you and he and she are sharing serious personal risks, his child’s issue takes on a new relevance. She had to get close to this man, but not too close.

“A daughter in Scotland,” she said. “He’s a widower.” She paused, waiting for me to openly become the young man with an inappropriate interest in her private life.

I declined. I fed her no cue. She still had the stage.

She said, “His wife died a couple of years ago. An accident.”

She paused again. I made a little wide-eyed chin dip to ask for more.

“She fell off a cliff,” she said. “He lives on a cliff.”

“An accident?”

“Officially.”

“Unofficially?”

“I asked our Mr. Trask that very thing.” The ham in my mother came suddenly to a sizzle: she paused and let it roll on.

I finally asked. “And?”

“He shrugged.”

“Be careful of this Stockman guy,” I said.

“I just have to keep charming him. You’re the one who’ll need to be careful.”

“Is this how the boss did it?” I executed Trask’s little shoulder lift and head tilt.

She answered with a similar exact replica of Trask’s shrug. “That way,” she said, as if it were different from mine. It wasn’t.

I didn’t debate the point. I was finished bantering with my mother. We had more important business together. I looked out the window. The apple trees had become cherry trees. Far beyond them a church spire rose against the gray sky in a grove of village roofs.

Mother thought she sensed my mood, though she was a step behind now.

“Just so you know,” she said. “Sir Albert’s crazy about me.”

I kept my eyes on the flash of cherry trees and, flickering among them, baskets and ladders and figures reaching up. The trees were fruiting.

“He’ll probably touch my elbow.” She paused.

I concentrated on the cherries.

“Or put his hand on the small of my back.”

I thought about picking sour cherries one summer day in my childhood. Somewhere in upstate New York. It must have been near a summer theater.

“I will take his arm. Do you understand?”

I turned to her. I nodded. I made myself say, “It’s all part of the job.”

As soon as I said it, I believed it.

And my mother leaned forward, reached out, took my hand, and squeezed it.