34

A FEW WEEKS AFTER I SENT MY LAST MONTHLY LETTER TO KITTREDGE ON July 1, an envelope bearing a postmark from Arlington, Virginia, arrived at my hotel addressed directly to me. It contained no message, only a key wrapped in a tissue. The next day another letter, with a Georgetown postmark, contained a letterhead from a bank in Arlington on which was written the number of a safety deposit box. A third envelope brought a receipt for the first payment on the box, plus a notice that it was to be maintained by quarterly payments. A few days later, the pouch finally brought me a full letter from Kittredge with, as always, the name of Polly Galen Smith substituted for her own on the return address.

July 26, 1958

Beloved Harry,

I am back in Georgetown and will be heading up to Maine in a few days. Now that you have received your key and box number, let me inform you that when you return to Washington and open your Arlington box, you will find about thirty strips of 35mm negative in an envelope, and each strip contains ten to twelve exposures. Your letters to me are on that microfilm. I propose you take my letters through the same photographic process, then deposit them in a Montevideo box until you are stateside where you can lay them to rest with the Arlington cache. In the interim, of course, you must keep paying the stipend on the rent for the P.O. box. It will be worth it. Someday, when you and I are old, the letters might be worth publishing. The impersonal parts, that is.

Harry, you have no idea how close your correspondence came to being destroyed. In the closet of the little bedroom where you used to sleep over on occasion, there is a rough baseboard molding that I was able to pry off and re-nail without any great show. Behind that board was a suitable space, and over the last year and a half whenever your mail collected, I would get out my hammer. Of course, for short periods, it was simpler to interleaf your more recent communications between the pages of some book or magazine that Hugh would never pick up. The ABC of Crochet. Such stuff. Of course, about the time last month’s copy of Vogue was looking a bit pregnant, I would make sure I had recovered every one of your pages, and then would pop the trusty baseboard loose, squirrel away your letters, and nail back the board.

Hugh, however, has antennae that reach into God knows which cubbyholes, so he’s given my heart a start now and again. Once he even picked up the very copy of Mademoiselle which held your latest letter, rolled it into a cylinder, and began rapping his thigh with this improvised phallic instrument until, to my relief, he dropped the magazine to the floor without opening it, and pulled out a rock-climbing newsletter from the magazine rack. Some squeak. I thought I was in a suspense film. Another time he spent a weekend with a hammer going over boards in the house. Thank heaven for my own tendrils. I had touched up the paint on my battered baseboard nails just the week before. I couldn’t decide whether I anticipated him, or he was reacting to microscopically subtle shifts in the house. It’s frightening to live with a man who has the sensory apparatus of a cat. It’s also thrilling, and certainly helps to make up for the wretched, if most manly (ugh!), smell of Hugh’s breath after Courvoisier and Churchills. Smoking a cigar is the most intimate insult a man can offer to a woman. If you ever have a wife and want to lose her, just puff away in her antique bed on one of those giant tobacco-turds. How transparent are people’s vices.

I digress, but then I’m highly distractable these days. It’s only two weeks since I’ve come home, and in another ten days, we return to the Keep, where I intend to stay all summer, with or without Hugh. I need the Maine air more than my mate at this point, because, God, Christopher has gone into an awful slump while I was gone. He kept waking up out of frightful nightmares, in response, I think, to what his mother was going through thousands of miles away, and now my little boy looks awfully pale and sort of seedy, like a worried ten-year-old rather than his year and a half. His mother feels as if she has aged commensurately. The work I was doing taught me one terrible lesson: Things can go wrong! So the act of hiding your letters in Hugh’s domain no longer gave me wicked pleasure. The possible consequences were too large to take on any longer. As a result of my experience on the Project, I have passed from believing for the most part in good outcomes to expecting the worst. And the worst, I have discovered, lays waste to all that is good in oneself. How innocent I have kept myself to discover this only now! But I have, and your letters, your beloved letters, offered the naughtiest warmth all this time, and enabled my marriage to breathe. Carnally considered, I have always had an unholy high passion for Hugh—I don’t know any other men, but there can hardly be another so phallic. (He’s like the knobs and pistons of the Almighty Engine itself.) All to the good for a piece of frozen New England steel like me, but then there are also his deadening cigars, and his glacial powers of concentration on anything but me (until I happen to come around to his attention again). There, in the middle were your letters, a tender leavening agent. I could betray Hugh just a little and thereby feel loyal to him.

A devil’s game. I believe in matrimony, you know. I do think sacraments are taken between God and oneself, and are just as binding as legal contracts are supposed to be in all of the corporate, judicial, industrial world. Such contracts can be broken, but not too many or society’s ills reach critical mass. By analogy, I think if too many sacraments are violated, God communicates less with us. So, marriage to me is a holy vow.

I was ready, therefore, to say I love you and good-bye, dear man, but then, how could I leave you wholly frustrated by the constraints of my vow not to talk about what happened to me during the Project. I have the oddest sentiment that I must tell you something equally secret, equally important to me, or I will violate our own unspoken pledge. That covenant weighs on me as much as my vow. I do manage to travel in the heaviest circuits, don’t I, but then I am very much like my father—greedy for absolute knowledge on the one hand, and somewhat timid about the world on the other. My father solved his dilemma by stuffing all of Shakespeare into his commodious brain and thereafter subsisting on the massive snobbery of his scholarly holdings. At its worst, it was, I fear, a somewhat turdlike existence—forgive me, Father!—but then my Daddy Professor may have been a catalyst drawing down ugly forces onto others. Did I ever confide in you about the ghost of the Keep, Augustus Farr? I’ve been visited by him, and—this I have never told anyone—the first time was on that Easter night so long ago, when Daddy read to us from Titus Andronicus:

Whilst Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold

The basin that receives your guilty blood.

Do you recall? Inwardly, I was transfixed. I clearly pictured my own wrists as stumps holding a basin in which was the head of my beloved Hugh. You, for some reason, hovered in the background. It made me wonder if you were the executioner, and this was the oddest way to picture you since I certainly thought you were the most attractive young man I had ever met, just as pretty as Montgomery Clift, and so solemn, so shy, so intensely filled with purpose. Best of all, you were not yet formed. It is your salvation that you had no idea how nifty you were to women in those days or you would have gone hog-belly-up, as I fear you have in the year and a half you’ve sported away in your Uruguay brothels. But, then, I am close to attacking you again, which is a danger sign I have come to recognize. I think it is because I have an implicit dread of what I am going to tell you next. On that long-ago Easter night, I had a fearful experience. Augustus Farr, or his incubus, or whatever creature it may have been, visited me in my bed at the Keep, and submitted me to horrors. I felt like a dark and dirty midwife to Shakespeare’s bloody foils and foul deeds. I was in the filthiest transport of carnality, and little beasts of the underworld inhabited my mouth. Do you recall how earlier that afternoon I had spoken so prettily of how Hugh and I had our Italian Solution? That night, Augustus Farr became my sexual guide into those dark and stinking depths where beauty also dwells, and I realized what Hugh and I were actually doing with one another while I was still ostensibly a virgin. Later, on my wedding night that same summer at the Keep, Hugh, formally and most bloodily, did at last deflower me, and I had the connubial good fortune to come into union together with him, spasm for leap, leap for spasm, and he vaulted like a goat from height to height, and knew how to fall, a most extraordinary experience, yes, I may now be hurting you, dear Harry, but I do pay cash, and when confessing, will confess all, yes, there, in the last long illimitable leap, was Augustus Farr, ensconced, limb and breath, with Hugh and me. My greed must have called him forth—my greed that went as deep as my father’s buried mountains of lust and lore. I had never known that good and evil in oneself could speak to each other with such force and by such a dance.

For a long time I felt that Augustus Farr did not try to come near again, not after that wedding night, but I think he may have succeeded in putting his signature upon my marriage. Of course, marriage occupies so many strata in oneself that it may be overdramatic to speak of a malign imprint upon an entire relationship. On the other hand, a clove of garlic in a wedding cake is nothing to ignore!

Farr, however, did not appear again until the sixth month of my pregnancy, during Hugh’s and my vacation in ’56 at the Keep, but then he certainly showed up on an August night as we were having sexual congress. Call it that because Hugh was more than a little backed-up before my large belly. Polly Galen Smith once told me that she was making love right up to the day before her baby was born—just so madly does she adore sex!—but this was hardly true for Hugh and me. We were having sexual congress. On that particular night of which I speak, however, I felt as if I were the plumpest concubine in a seraglio, and wholly depraved. I remember wishing that someone could watch Hugh and me.

Such subterranean stirrings must have communicated themselves to my dear partner, because now there was nothing collegial any longer—Hugh and I were mad for one another all over again, and I felt the baby stirring and very much a part of us. Then, suddenly, we were a good deal more than that. An evil presence—call it what you will—was also with us. In the full silence of the night, I could feel the libidinous resonance that evil knows how to deliver. I find it not at all easy to relate even now, but I had rosy-hued (that is, fiery) visions of human degradation and heard cries of pleasure reverberating in the fetid pits below. Augustus Farr was as near to me then as my husband and my unborn child, there partaking of our Saturnalian rites. I felt that if I did not stop at that instant my child-to-be was going to be taken away in some fiendish exchange. I remember thinking, “It’s just a thought,” for I was fearfully excited and wanted to go on, and Hugh, I remember, took us through the plunge with a loud and inhuman cry. Then I began to weep for I knew that Augustus Farr had been there with us. I did not wish to believe it, and can hardly write this now—my hand trembles—but he had stolen—well, I won’t write down my dear child’s name. He walks at an odd pace these days, and sometimes I think there’s a devil’s hitch to his gait. He does have a very slight in-turn of the right foot, and Allen is his other godfather. We actually celebrated the idea of two godfathers, one for Alpha, one for Omega. Christopher can choose between you when he grows up. As of this writing, you are the only godfather who is aware that there is another. Please don’t feel insulted. You are certainly equal in my mind to Allen.

Well, I won’t say any more about Farr on this occasion. I can only remark that I have not lost my presentiment that the transactions of the spirit underworld are very much connected to us here, and since then I have felt, irrationally or not, that Christopher’s safety depends on my fidelity to Hugh. This loyalty, I have come to conclude, is weakened by your letters. They are making me fall in love with you.

Now, from the moment I saw you in my parents’ parlor at the Keep, a part of me knew that you and I could go through life together, wonderfully comfortable and intimate with one another. I’ve always loved you, you see, but it never used to count for more than a collateral enrichment to my devotion for Hugh.

During the last couple of years, however, your letters have stolen a place in my heart. I have come to dislike you, hate you, feel horrible jealousy, and worst of all, been tormented by a cunning little sense of anticipation which speaks of sexual concupiscence. To put it plain, and I detest this piece of vernacular because it is so accurate and allows no illusions, I have had the hots for you, yes, the foul, yearning, roller-coaster hots of all the gut-bemired sentiments, exactly what used to belong entirely to Hugh. Now it was being stimulated by you as well. Alpha and Omega had shifted in their agreement, and I knew what it was to be carnally in love with two men at once. Bad enough if it is Alpha for one and Omega for the other—that is a common human condition. It may even be half natural (if also the Devil’s greatest hole-card) that all of us find it easy to be in love with one person by way of Omega, and another through Alpha. But I feel as if you have gotten into both. My poor Alpha and Omega both are damned, for they are each half in love with you, and that succeeds in confusing my balance.

Harry, do you have any conception of how monumental is Hugh’s importance to me? The part of myself that is not free of worldly desire has to respect all the strengths and powers he can and does endow me with. I could never bear living in any role inferior to the higher powers of society. (My father, who is exactly like me, turned into an insufferably pompous pedant about the time he realized that he rang no loud bell in the grand and vaulted halls.) I may be worse. And then my mother’s buried ambition might be even greater. How, otherwise, did she get so dotty?

So, I took on the Project. I can tell you that it dealt with the manipulation and control of other humans, and the means employed soon became solemn and sticky. It was full of explosive potential for TSS if it were ever to come out publicly. Indeed, Hugh and Allen were so afraid of something going wrong that they decided to try it out in a controlled environment, governmentally speaking. Do you know where? In Paraguay. I was probably less than a thousand miles away from Montevideo. I dreamt of you every night, and lusted for you in an empty bed, horrified that my womb, yes, womb, could permit such disloyalty to Hugh. How I hated you for rooting away in the spoor of every low brothel. I know you did that. And once or twice, I almost bought a plane ticket to drop in on you for a weekend. That’s how bad it got one dip below the navel. Hugh came to visit and thought he had a wild woman on his hands.

Anyway, as you learned by way of Chevi and Libertad and Varkhov and Zenia, yes, what a nasty little vein of crotch-turpitude (yes, I like that) is loose in us. I have discovered how harsh is my secret nature. One person, one of our subjects, was destroyed in Paraguay, and I, while not the initiator, was the monitor of the accompanying experiments, and I did not feel quite as sick over it as the occasion called for me to be. We live in a great moral truss-work, after all. To fight the Opponent, we will dare evil ourselves, and I feel as if I have. Only I did not come back with a compensating good. Our experiment failed. Have I endangered my soul?

The answer shows in curious fashion. I feel, as I say, ten years older and bleak as hell within. As soon as I came back to Georgetown I decided, therefore, on certain measures. Since I had taken on a bold gamble, and it resulted in negative and messy results, the patina of failure was close to inhabiting my career permanently.

I made, in consequence, two decisions. I saw Allen Dulles and asked for detached duty. I am going to try to write my postponed major opus on Alpha and Omega. He gave me, somewhat to his relief, I think, his private blessing, and I am off to Maine, where I will work all year, and conceivably for years to come. Whatever it takes—which is the expression we used in Paraguay for getting the ugly deed done.

That was the first decision. For the second, I decided to cease living with you in my mind. I mean, by this, that we stop corresponding. Then, much as I wished to keep your letters, I decided it was too dangerous. If Hugh ever discovered them, it would smash my life. (Since I have been instrumental in smashing at least one South American’s life, I felt vulnerable to the frightful costs.) Besides, I was getting addicted to your letters. The only answer was cold turkey. I would put your correspondence in an office shredder.

When it came to it, however, I could not, no, not destroy your offering completely. So I used my office equipment (at which I’m now a practiced soul) and microfilmed this record of Harry Hubbard’s mind, and heart, and nose, such as it is, for Uruguay and for me, and deposited the package in your new box. I’ve also just shredded the whole heavy pack, nearly a carton full of your last twenty months and more of writing to me on your dime-store stationery. And felt so dizzy and out of sorts afterward that I did something never done before and went into a bar alone after work, sat down at a cocktail table trembling at such exposure of myself in a public place (still a Radcliffe girl!), and downed two bourbons neat before I stood up, surprised that no one had accosted me, went home, and explained away the whiskey breath by confessing it had been one hell of a day. Christopher cried when I started to kiss him.

There it is. I am serious to the death over this, Harry. We are not to communicate with each other, and I will refuse to see you when your tour is over and you come back to Washington. Pray for me to do good work in Maine. How long our separation intends to go on is beyond my intuition. I sense it will be years. Perhaps forever. I would not give you up if I did not love you. Please believe me. I must cling to my sacrament. Under it all, I believe that God still bleeds when we break our vows.

I love you,
Good-bye, dear man