Marchand Woman Read online

  She hadn’t cried for Robert. The realization shook her. Was she so far gone she could be stimulated to tears only by the synthetic?

  She couldn’t keep her mind on the job. Finally she gave vague instructions to Edith and went out, not quite sure where she was bound.

  Mort wasn’t in his office. She tracked him to the commissary. He gave her his public smile—a creeping revelation of capped teeth: His party manners and she couldn’t tell how he might behave if they’d been alone, unobserved. She hadn’t slept with him but at times she’d been curious what it might have been like: He had all his strengths on the surface and from this she inferred he might be a good lover, but good-in-bed was a phrase that had lost its meaning to her because she was going through a phase—at least she thought of it as a phase—in which she had convinced herself that you had to love with your mind and heart as well as your body. Meaningless sex was a stage she had endured in the early days after the divorce. For a while she had believed she had a stunted capacity for loving. She was no longer sure whether that was the case; she liked to think she was mature enough not to believe romantic nonsense (waiting-for-the-right-man-to-come-along) and lately she had begun to suspect perhaps she simply didn’t like men very much. She had experimented in her mind with lesbian fantasies but had found them unexciting, uninviting. Maybe I am just drying up, she had thought. Galloping menopause. Yet she still made herself beautiful before she went out to face the world each day; and she hadn’t let her looks go. But was it pretense? She didn’t know.

  “Sympathy,” Mort said, “is easy to give and embarrassing to receive, but I want you to know that—”

  “I know. You don’t need to say it.”

  “All the same, darling, if you want a hand to hold.”

  She listened abstractedly to the commissary’s rattle of cutlery, the heavy drone of voices. It was such a mundane scene; it made her feel guilt—Robert somewhere in a jungle, perhaps tied hand and foot: perhaps injured, in pain, perhaps in an agony of hunger or thirst. Keeping his upper lip stiff and bucking up the others, not out of any sense of heroics but simply because that was Robert.

  She said, “The one thing about you that’s driven me up the wall ever since we first met is that inane Hollywood habit of yours of calling everybody darling.”

  “I know. I can’t even remember where I picked it up.” Mort took her elbow and squired her to the cafeteria queue, talking about the picture. Her mind was on Robert and she hardly attended.

  When they’d eaten he said abruptly, “Have you ever wanted to get married again?”

  “I thought I did once. Briefly thought it. It didn’t work out. Fortunately I’d grown wise enough to look before I jumped in—so I didn’t jump.”

  “Cold feet?”

  “Yes. Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”

  “Tell me about your son. I never met him, you know.”

  “Robert,” she said. “Robert the survivor. How he endured the buffeting we gave him I’ll never know. That is the overriding guilt of my life—it’s part of the reason, I suppose, why I’m having such a hard time dealing with this.”

  “Nobody could have an easy time with something like this.”

  “I used to kidnap him from Howard. Did you know that?”

  “No. Must have been a while ago.”

  “Fifteen years ago.” She pushed her plate away. “It was one of those asinine custody things. After the divorce I moved out here with Robert and petitioned the court for permanent custody. California court. At the same time Howard was filing petitions in the Virginia courts—we’d been living in Alexandria. Howard still lives there. The upshot was the Virginia courts awarded custody to him and the California courts awarded custody to me. Howard thought I wasn’t a fit mother for him. He was convinced I’d ruin Robert’s life. I hired private detectives—they took him right out of an Alexandria schoolyard and dragged him all the way out here. It happened twice. What a dismal performance it all was—the two of us behaving like animals quarreling over a marrow-bone. I don’t think any of us ever recovered from it. Certainly Robert didn’t.”

  “That kind of kidnaping’s not illegal, is it. I mean you can kidnap your own child and it’s not a violation of the law.”

  “I’m not talking about that kind of guilt, Mort.”

  “Your ex is something to do with the State Department, isn’t he?”

  “It’s his career. At the moment he’s deputy Under-secretary on the Australia-New Zealand desk. He’ll be an ambassador one day.”

  “How’d you come to marry him?”

  “You can’t imagine how often I’ve asked myself that very question.”

  “Well?”

  “It always comes up lame no matter how I parse it. My brother brought him home one fateful day in nineteen fifty-one. Howard’s very bright, you know, and he came from one of those nearly Main Line families, the Lundquists of whatchamacallit. Oh it’s all so tedious. Those cufflinks you’re .wearing look like golden manhole covers. Do they signify anything?”

  “They’re five-dollar gold pieces, vintage eighteen eighty. A gift from somebody I used to know. Go on—tell me about you and Howard.”

  She slumped with memory. “I had a fantastic pathetic terrible crush on him. I was in school—you know. In my freshman pleated skirt and saddle shoes. But I was never one of those apple-pie country girls. There was a little group of us. We were determined to be as sophisticated as Noel Coward and as witty as Dorothy Parker. My dorm came to be known as Villa Cirrhosis and our little crowd was known all over campus as The Vicious Circle. You know how it is. Kids.”

  She made a face. “I was very forward and I suppose quite good-looking in an unformed way. After I got rid of the braces on my teeth. Anyhow I had all kinds of gentlemen admirers and most of them had acne and fruity drawls, I couldn’t stand it. I met Howard and formed a towering crush instantly. My God, I was eighteen, Howard was nearly thirty. Do you know how girls mistake quietness in men for maturity?”

  “I guess.”

  “He was good-looking. Although actually he’s much better looking now than he was then. It took him years to get the baby fat out of his cheeks.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.”

  “You’d like him, Mort. He’d like you. He’s easy to get along with—he’s got all the social graces, he’s up on current events with that engagingly impressive manner of somebody who knows all the inside dirt about anything you’d care to mention. He doesn’t drop names; he drops facts. He can tell you the real inside story behind the Rhodesian troubles or the making of King Kong, anything. I was thoroughly impressed, and madly flattered by his noticing me. I remember how surprised I was by how hot his face looked the first time he asked me out for a date.” The memory provoked her wry chuckle.

  “So you were married and lived unhappily ever after.”

  “We had a good year or two,” she said in a muted way.

  “What went wrong?”

  “Everything dried up at once. Robert was born just before Christmas in nineteen fifty-five and I think that was supposed to occupy my complete attention while Howard was off solving affairs of earth-shaking importance in his office. I hated every minute of it. The little snotling wasn’t my cup of tea. I was still too damn young—I missed the freedoms I’d had.” She felt the tears coming. “You can’t believe how quickly our marriage degenerated into one of those ‘You already owe me three back-rubs’ things.” She plucked at a ragged fingernail. “I find it fascinating to realize that the first time I met Howard I believed him to be a man so smooth you could skate on him. How the polish wore off. It’s inconceivable I could have misled myself so completely.”

  “We’re none of us immune to that,” Mort said. “I’ve been married three times.”

  “A typical Hollywood success story.”

  He prompted her. “And then you got divorced.”

  “That was the most humiliating part of it. He left me, you know. Not the other way round. Doe
s that surprise you?”

  “Some, yes.”

  “I guess I’d decided to make the best of the bad bargain for Robert’s sake. Trying to force myself to grow up and behave like a responsible adult. I was working in documentary films then, in Washington for one of the TV stations. It gave me outside contacts with the world and I was willing to settle for that. At least I had part of a life. Then Howard found a little blonde somewhere. For a little while he persuaded himself he couldn’t live without her. It was only an excuse to screw up the courage to leave me. He left one day while I was at work. I didn’t know where the hell he was for three days. I had the cops searching, I called everybody at the State Department, I was distraught—not because I missed him but just because I was so completely in the dark. I feel the same way right now about Robert but I’m older and I suppose it doesn’t show so much, except for this silly talking jag. Then I got his letter in the mail. I suppose it was easier for him to say that kind of thing in a letter. It was a twelve-page single-spaced diatribe, typed. Meticulously listing all my faults.”

  “He sounds like a real bastard.”

  “Not really. Together we were bad—we were terrible for each other, we brought out the absolute worst. We made each other into wretched creatures. I used to think I hated him, of course. Now I’m not sure. Maybe I made him into the thing that I hated.… Am I coming to pieces, Mort? Christ, I feel as if somebody somewhere is sticking pins in a wax effigy.”

  “You’re jittery. It’ll pass—you’ll settle down. You’re strong.”

  “Strong. In the sense that a skunk is a strong animal.”

  “Oh, come off it, darling.”

  “There you go again. Didn’t I warn you about that?”

  “I most humbly beg your forgiveness.” He showed her his grin. “You started out to tell me about your son.”

  “Do you know what I think of when you ask me about Robert? A picture he pinned up in his bathroom. A photograph of General Patton pissing in the Rhine. It was so Robert, so quintessentially Robert. He’s so greedy for life and at the same time so alienated by it. He went through a wild period in college, much wilder than mine was. One time I went down to the University of Arizona to visit him, a surprise visit, and got to Tucson fairly late at night. I stopped in front of a fraternity house that looked like the right one and asked a kid if Robert Lundquist lived there. The kid was sitting on the porch reading under a light. He looked out into the darkness at my car and said in a bored voice, ‘Yeah, he lives here. Bring him in.’ I think he stayed drunk two whole semesters and spent another year or two high on grass. But you know he turned out all right in spite of everything his parents could do to screw him up.”

  Her voice broke. “So greedy for life.”

  “How’d he get into the Peace Corps?”

  “Howard wanted him to go to law school. Robert didn’t want that. He still hasn’t got any idea what he wants to do with himself. He told me a few years ago he thought it was ridiculous to have to make those decisions at nineteen. When you’re fifty years old, why should you have to spend your life in libraries and courtrooms because some kid decided thirty years earlier that you ought to be a lawyer? And you know he was absolutely right. So he volunteered for the Peace Corps. It was something worthwhile to do while he was making up his mind about the future. That’s all—nothing peculiar. But he’s got a great deal of dedication. One of the facts he keeps harping on—he’s a computer-bank of random facts—is that the governments of the world spend the same amount of money on children every year that they spend on deadly weapons every two hours. Once I asked him why he hadn’t joined radical protest groups, and do you know what he said? He said he didn’t believe in protests because in order to be a protester you had to take an inferior position to the people with whom you were pleading. When he went off to Mexico he said he was doing his bit to try and help the children win out over the cannons. So if you’re asking me if I love my son, the answer’s yes. How could anybody not love a kid like that?”

  But just then she was thinking about the hope she’d had, and never articulated aloud to a living soul, that perhaps one day Robert would come and live near her. She’d tried to stand back and convince herself that she was making a mistake to count on Robert, even just in those fantasies, to fill the role of strong man in her life. But she didn’t really care. All she knew was that she wanted him near.

  Mort covered her hand with his own; he scowled earnestly. “He’ll get out of it, darling. I know he will.”

  “I hope he does it before I fly to pieces,” she replied.

  Chapter 2

  At eight that night she couldn’t stand it any more. She backed the car out viciously against the mailbox post and drove away leaving bits of red glass in the street.

  She walked into the lobby in high dudgeon, browbeat the clerk into revealing the room number and went up in the elevator with a tourist couple and a bellboy. The Iowans were talking about Knott’s Berry Farm. She had to curb her tongue to keep from screaming at them to shut up.

  Howard answered the door in T-shirt and shaving cream; evidently he’d been expecting room service. He went all colors at the sight of her.

  She thrust past him into the room and kicked the door shut.

  Howard said, “I’m sorry. You don’t know what a day it’s been. This problem came up at the conference and then I had to drive one of the Japanese to the airport and of all the damn stupid things the car had a flat and the idiots hadn’t included a spare, and the poor bastard missed his plane and we had a hell of a flap—”

  “Soon to be made into a major motion picture,” she said with icy disbelief. “You left instructions with the desk that you weren’t taking calls from me, didn’t you. I’ve been phoning you for six hours.”

  “Carole, damn it, I’ve got nothing to tell you. They’ve had nothing to tell me.”

  “It was on the car radio just now. It’s been on the news for hours. They’re Cubans.”

  “All right. What of it? Nobody knows where Robert is. Isn’t that the bottom line?”

  “You might have had the courtesy to call me. At least to let me know they’re getting somewhere.”

  “They’re going in circles,” he said. “Accumulating useless facts. Don’t you think I’ve been keeping in touch with Washington? There’s nothing. Nothing hard.”

  She sat down, handbag in lap. “If it’s not too much strain I’d appreciate your telling me everything you know.”

  “I could give you twenty minutes of utterly useless information. Would that help?”

  “What I want from you,” she said with quaking control, “is the stuff that hasn’t been in the news. And don’t give me any of that need-to-know horseshit. I’m his mother. I need to know.”

  He went to the bureau where he’d scattered the contents of his pockets; he picked up the wristwatch and looked at it. He actually looked at his watch. She wanted to scream at him.

  “I’ve got a plane to catch,” he explained.

  “You don’t go out this door until you’ve talked to me.”

  He wiped the foam off his jaw with a towel. “Over the years it’s belatedly occurred to me that you have an abrasive wit and the acidulous instincts of a barracuda but just possibly, behind those defenses, you’re as vulnerable as any of us. So I’m going to ignore this fishwife assault. Now if you’ll just take it easy for a moment—”

  “I don’t want your goddamned forgiveness, Howard. I want information.”

  He found a cigarette in the litter. “All right. If it’ll ease your mind. There’s nothing in it that helps us. First you must understand that it isn’t my department. I’ve been on the horn with Mark Blaisedell but it’s been hard to get a clear picture so early. To some extent it’s a Central Intelligence Agency matter and I’m sure you know how jealous they are of information—they don’t share it with State unless they’re forced to. I don’t have the clout to force them. It’s possible they know things we don’t know but there’s nothing I can do
about that.”

  “Just tell me what you do know.”

  “Well it’s our best judgment that the terrorists probably are Cuban exiles. We don’t know who they are, actually, but the circumstantial evidence points to that conclusion. This morning a ransom demand, a penciled note, was received through the mail slot of a Venezuelan newspaper in Caracas.”

  “Howard, I know that much. I’ve heard the radio. What did the ransom note say?”

  “They want ten million dollars. In cash. American dollars. Small bills, unmarked. And they want eleven political prisoners released from jails in Latin America.”

  “What prisoners?”

  “Five in Venezuelan prisons, four in Colombia, two in Mexico. They were convicted of various guerrilla crimes—hijacking, violating gun laws, murdering Cuban communist rebel organizers, so forth. What they have in common is that all eleven are anti-Castro people. They’re not all Cubans but they’re all right-wing. Two of them are Germans from Paraguay. Therefore we’re assuming the people who kidnaped Harrison Gordon and Robert must be anti-Castro Cuban exiles who want to get their leaders out of jail and raise money to finance guerrilla action against Cuba.”

  “What’s being done to rescue the hostages?”

  “Very little, I imagine. It’s not like Entebbe, you know. Nobody knows where the hostages are. How can you mount a rescue expedition if you don’t know where to send it?”

  She said, “Will the ransom be paid?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t know whether the eleven prisoners will be released. It’s not up to me, Carole.”

  “What’s Washington doing about it?”

  “I don’t know what pressures are being applied. This thing’s in the laps of the governments of Mexico and Venezuela and Colombia. It’s up to them to decide whether to meet the demands or not. They’re the ones against whom the demands were levied. Officially it’s not Washington’s problem—only indirectly, since some of the hostages are Americans.”