Private Life (52 page)

away the fibers, then cut it into four neat pieces.

"Are you a spy, then?" This was very bold, she thought.

"I've known a spy or two. But look at me."

She did. He was wearing a yellow tie, had a yellow square in his pocket, and his

hat, she had seen when he checked it, had a yellow band.

"No one ever forgets me."

"Surely there are flamboyant spies."

"There are, but it's much more difficult for them. They have to keep so many

things straight--not only separate
things
but the separate
stories
that make up their roles.

Their lives are short."

"As

spies?"

"That, too. Anyway, I'm too lazy to be a spy. And so I am not a spy."

"Now."

"Now."

"But."

"But, as I told you, when I was a young man in Petersburg, I did romantic spying

for my friend Bibikova, and it was an invigorating exercise for a young man with an

overabundance of daring. Spies, Margaret, are like all other sorts of criminals. They are

either too smart for the job or too stupid for the job. I'm sure the Germans and the

Japanese looking for American spies are gnashing their teeth in frustration at the poor

material they have to work with." He laughed.

Then the wave came, the wave she thought she had worked herself away from, or

talked herself out of, the wave of feeling toward him that was so painful and

inconvenient. It was the stories, of course, that did it, himself as the foolish protagonist,

making his merry way through a colorful landscape, always discovering too late where he

had gone wrong. In his stories, suffering and death were hardly worth remembering-what was important were the telling details. The tiniest, most fleeting thing was

preserved, while routine disaster was forgotten. The effect was to bathe him in a golden

light--a light that shone from her eyes, a light that shone brightly and steadily even

though she knew he was untrustworthy, mysterious, old, full of vanity, a failure in the

larger scheme of respectable success. The golden light made him look utterly unique and

therefore precious. She closed her eyes and felt the wave pass through her and, with a few

breaths, ebb again. She said, "You'll never guess what Andrew has been doing all these

years when I thought he was making himself an expert on the pictures."

"He has been guarding our shores."

"How did you know?"

"He told me. Or, rather, he sent me a letter."

"What did it say?"

"Well, there were three of them. One asked for my help in finding out what Albert

Einstein is doing with that nest of Nazi physicists whom your husband has been onto for

more than twenty-five years. I wrote back and said that I was not privy to any physicists'

plots. He wrote back and said that he considered all of German physics, which seems so

theoretical, to be mere preparatory ground for their real goal, which is to construct an

unprecedented weapon of some sort, to be used against Britain, though a submarine

carrying the weapon and getting into New York Harbor or up the Potomac was, is, also a

possibility. That letter I didn't answer. The third letter listed eleven suspicious sightings

he had made around the bay, and asked what I thought about them. I was impressed at

how active he is at his age."

"Andrew is very suspicious of everyone's loyalties, including mine. His, of

course, are evident, because, although he's never been to sea, he's a retired captain of the

navy."

"And he always thinks of such things in a very direct way. That's his nature. But

this protracted commencement of the war means that other people's loyalties are still in

suspension. He's right about that. Look at that fellow Mosley. He could play around a bit

with Hitler, and do so in a public way, but he didn't do that after '39. When the war comes

to us, loyalties will solidify." By his tone, they could have been talking about any old

thing, but he gave her a glance, unhappy, naked, rare. She said, "I am so full of dread."

"We all are," said Pete.

Margaret stared at him, wondering if he was thinking of Stalin and Hitler, or of

something more personal and tragic, but as always, she could not bring herself to pry. She

glanced away, then said, "But when you talk to me about things, they make sense, and

when Andrew talks to me about things, they make no sense. That's the terrifying part. I

know what I think, and then he tells me something, and what I think collapses into bits

and pieces. That's the kind of dread I mean."

Pete smiled at last. He said, "Not mere death, then."

Somehow, this was reassuring.

That evening, she asked to see Andrew's letter recanting his accusations. When he

brought it out, she said, "Tomorrow morning, I am going to type this, and then we are

going to walk to the post office and send it together."

He agreed, and they did. His letter read, in part: "I now believe that in the heat of

present political and military circumstances, I have misinterpreted things I have seen

around me as signs of something larger, when, actually, they are signs of nothing. I now

believe that Mrs. Kiku Kimura and her daughter, Naoko Kimura, and her son, Lester

Kimura, are not guilty of any activities that might be of interest to the military authorities,

and I now believe that Mr. Pete Moran (or Krizenko) is an innocent party also." He

apologized for his "overzealous patriotism" and admitted that he was an old man. It was

Margaret who was left to wonder, though only about Pete, and only in the way that she

had always wondered about him.

DORA returned from Europe, in trouble with her paper for being too outspoken.

She was giving talks, and the gist of her talks was that Europe was no place for

Americans, and that even the British weren't worth helping, because they were "mealy

and corrupt to the core." As for the French, they had "swooned" without a fight, and now

everyone was fleeing into the countryside, "and what will they find? The farmers and the

villagers will have hidden their food and fuel, and they will simply cross their arms, keep

their mouths shut, and watch their countrymen and -women die." Pouring money and aid

into Europe was simply "flushing it away"--"How can you prop up those who refuse to

stand?" All of Europe had been rotted from within by "recreational communism" on the

part of the privileged classes. She was violently anticommunist when she wasn't violently

anti-Nazi, and her tour gave her the pleasure of "breathing air unpolluted by ideology,

sweetened by the practical effects of self-reliance." Her letters to Margaret went on and

on in the same vein. She was slated to speak in Sacramento.

By the time Dora got to Sacramento, her farthest point west, the Luftwaffe had

bombed Dublin, the Germans had invaded Russia, and American men were registering

for the military draft. Margaret drove over there to see her in time for lunch on the day of

her talk in a hall that had been rented by several ladies' organizations. She waited in the

lobby of the hotel. Across the small rotunda, she saw the elevator doors open. Out

stepped three people, a young man with a little girl by the hand, and a fusty old woman in

what looked from a distance like a calico dress from fifty years ago--high neck, sleeves

that were puffy around the shoulders, skirt with no drape at all, and very little waist. The

skirt was long, and the woman had on low heels. Margaret thought of the song "Sweet

Betsy from Pike" and realized that this throwback was Dora, costumed as an American

pioneer. She laughed one laugh, but it was the dress, above all, that persuaded Margaret

of Dora's sincere conversion--not only had the always trim Dora thickened, she had also

gone back to her early habit of designing her own clothes. She was smiling. She hugged

Margaret. Her hair was white. She said, "Recognize me, darling?"

"No."

"Vanitas vanitatum."

"What does that mean?"

"It means, 'Vanity, thy name is Europe.'"

"It

does?"

Dora took her elbow and propelled her into the restaurant. She may have gotten

old, but her grip was as strong as ever. They sat down, and she ordered a T-bone steak

with a baked potato, and a wedge of lettuce with Thousand Island dressing. Dora said,

"Darling, you're gawking."

"It's--"

"Just

a

steak."

"But you've never been a big eater."

"I have a new plan. I am going to be a fat old lady living on my farm in Missouri-"

"In Missouri! You hate Missouri."

"Yes, right outside of Gumbo. I bought a hundred acres that back up onto the

river. Lovely open country, and you can see the bluffs on the St. Charles side. Least of

evils, in a way, but, darling, I'm so old now, all my local nemeses have passed on." She

ate a big bite of her steak. "I closed the deal last week."

"What about the newspaper?"

Dora shook her head. "They're with Roosevelt all the way. He's going to force

them into this war. Eleanor is behind it, her and her commie friends--"

"Mrs. Roosevelt isn't a communist!"

"--her and her commie friends. And so I am retiring to the middle of the country

and writing my book and raising my chickens and hogs, and I'll walk around the place

every day with my shotgun and kill rattlesnakes, and every time I get one, I'll shout, 'Take

that, Ickes!' 'Take that, Hopkins!'" She laughed.

Margaret said, "You are joking, then."

"I'm laughing, but I'm not joking. How are you?"

Instead of telling her, Margaret said, "Everyone around here is convinced that the

Germans and the Japanese are spying on our every move."

"But they are wrong. Hoover has been beating the bushes for spies for ten years,

and the most they've come up with is two deadbeats who couldn't find jobs. They're going

to talk about spies until they're blue in the face, just to get you suckers out here in

California worked up and ready to fight." Dora waved her hand.

"Andrew thinks the Japanese want the Philippines and Hawaii."

"Maybe they should have them. And maybe the Germans should have Austria and

the Italians should have the Balkans. What difference does it make? No one can answer

that
question, I'll tell you that."

"Dora!"

"Yes, if they decide they want Mexico, let's stop them. Or Alaska. But they aren't

going to decide that." She leaned forward and stared at Margaret. "They are not going to

decide they want Catalina Island."

"Of course not, but--"

"I've had a dose of Europe and Europeans to last me the rest of my life. You never

saw so many people so quick to run to some squirmy little fellow and kneel at his feet

and say, 'Tell me what to do, Duce! Tell me what to do, Fuhrer! Tell me what to do,

Comrade Stalin!' Gives Roosevelt goose bumps. You can see it in his eyes."

About every issue she had an opinion, and her opinions were expressed with some

wit, but always a note of stridency, as if she knew she was losing the battle but she

intended to fight it anyway, no matter what. When she got up to leave, Margaret felt that

Dora barely noticed she was going, so wound up was she about what she intended to say

to the ladies' groups at six that evening. The next day, Dora took the train to Reno, and

after that to Arizona and then east.

ANDREW maintained that planning the attack on Pearl Harbor was what had

brought Albert Einstein to the West Coast. But he insisted to Margaret that he had made

no "report."

The day after the attack, she called Mrs. Kimura twice in the course of the day

and Pete three times, but no one answered the phone. The next morning, she took the

early ferry, and she was at the Kimuras' by eight o'clock. She had been there once before,

in the summer, on the way back from a visit to the new botanical garden in San

Francisco.

Always, with the Kimuras, she tried to be more polite than she was naturally,

because they seemed more sensitive than most people--Naoko responded to a whisper the

way her other friends responded to a declaration. So she stood quietly in their entryway

for about ten minutes, occasionally knocking very lightly and one time ringing the bell.

Finally, she awakened from her reverie and knocked three times quite briskly. The door

opened. She stood there with both hands on her purse, and then she pushed it farther, and

stepped into the room. She shouted, "Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Kimura? Naoko?" But

there was no answer.

The front room was not in disarray, but an envelope and two pieces of paper lay

on the floor, a pair of shoes had been dropped willy-nilly in the middle of the room. She

went out into the hall and saw that their newspaper from that morning had been kicked

aside by someone passing through the entryway. She picked it up. She returned to the

apartment, into the kitchen. Yesterday's paper was sitting on the kitchen table, unread.

Beside it was a cup of tea, full, and next to that was a half-peeled orange. She went back

out into the entry, then she went down the stairs and outside. She sat down on the front

step and waited.

The street was empty. Every conversation, every radio broadcast, every

newspaper article was now about the war, but on the front step of the Kimuras' apartment

building, all was quiet. Up and down the street, the shops were closed and the lights were