Second sight, p.38
Second Sight, page 38
David Patchen thought that Patrick Graham was a fool and an enemy of mankind, a disgusting hypocrite who had volunteered to believe and merchandise the lies the Russian totalitarians told the world about themselves, and was therefore an accessory to millions of political murders and other crimes against humanity. Nevertheless he invited him to his house for supper on the night after he dined at the Club with the O. G.
The invitation came at the last minute. In order to accept it, Graham and his wife, Charlotte, begged off a previous engagement to dine with a member of the Supreme Court. They were surprised to discover, when they arrived, that there were no other guests besides themselves. There was hardly room for any. Patchen and his wife, a mousy little woman with graying hair, lived in a tiny house like a packing box facing an alley off P Street. Graham had never been inside this house before, and he was so surprised by its extreme modesty that he did not, at first, notice the remarkable paintings and antiques that Patchen had collected over the years; his tastes had been formed in New Haven by Europhile professors, and he had no eye for American works of art and craftsmanship. After one glass of very dry manzanilla sherry, drunk in puckered silence in the cramped living room, Patchen led the party into the tiny dining room where they were all seated at a small round table set with plain white china.
A tuxedoed footman from a catering firm poured the wine; Graham knew the man and greeted him by name in Spanish (“¿ Cómo estás, Miguel?”); they had met many times before in other Washington houses.
“I haven’t tasted a drinkable Chateau Margaux in years,” Graham said, reading the label on the bottle in the waiter’s hand. “It was Tom Jefferson’s favorite Bordeaux, as you no doubt know.”
“I didn’t know,” Patchen replied.
“No? He bought some of the 1784 vintage—the best since 1779, Tom said—and wrote home about it from Paris when he was ambassador.” Graham had read this interesting fact a few days before in a popular book on wine and stored it away for conversational use. “The Margaux Jefferson drank was altogether different, of course,” he said. “You can taste the merlot in this. Funny how drinking unblended wine spoils you for these French concoctions.”
Charlotte Graham uttered a one-syllable laugh, “Ha! How about the Petit Verdot and the Cabernet Franc, Patrick? Can your palate detect those, too? Really! Why don’t you hit him over the head with the bottle, Mr. Patchen? That’s what my father would have done in a case like this … What is this, a ’78?”
“Yes,” Patchen replied, impressed.
“Is it good?” Martha Patchen asked. She was dressed as usual in somber homemade clothes. There was no wineglass in front of her, and her plate was heaped with vegetables; everyone else had been given the caterer’s trademark medium-rare beef filet with béarnaise sauce.
“It’s delicious,” Patrick said. “I see you don’t drink alcohol yourself. Very wise; I wish I could kick the habit. And we’d all be better off if we stuck to vegetables for good measure, the way you do. Do you feel better since you gave up meat?”
“I have never eaten the flesh of my fellow creatures,” Martha said.
“Never? Good for you. Why not?”
Martha gave Graham a long faraway look, but did not speak. She never watched television or read newspapers and had no idea who Patrick Graham was. He waited attentively for her reply. None came. Instead, a faint, fond smile spread over Martha’s plain face. Graham watched her in bafflement. She had just got back from Guatemala. Patchen knew that she was thinking of her Indians and very probably had not heard Graham’s question. After a long pause he answered for her.
“My wife is a Quaker,” he said.
“Really?” Graham said. “I didn’t know the Friends were vegetarians. Are you one, too?”
“A Quaker? By birth and upbringing, yes.”
“Amazing.”
“Why is it amazing?”
Graham smiled tolerantly. “Well, you drink wine and eat meat. And throw babies out of helicopters, of course.” This remark was meant, Patchen realized, as a pleasantry; Graham was demonstrating his sophistication, even a kind of wry sympathy, as if to say that he knew exactly what employees of the Outfit were paid to do, and while he could never do that sort of thing himself, he understood that somebody had to, given the nature of the imperialistic state for which Patchen worked.
Charlotte Graham changed the subject. “My, what a lovely lot of pictures you have, Mrs. Patchen,” she said.
Martha had come back to the present and she answered at once. “My name is Martha, please. Yes, aren’t they nice? I like the ones with fruit in them especially. They’re David’s hobby.”
“It must be a very expensive hobby. Isn’t that still life a Raphaelle Peale, and that portrait over there a Thomas Eakins?”
“I’m not sure. Does thee know the painters’ names, David?”
Charlotte did not wait for Patchen’s answer. “You’re not sure!” she said. “That’s wonderful.” She beamed at Martha as if she were a kindred soul. Since coming to Washington she had learned to discuss her hosts’ possessions—the Americans seemed to think it polite to do so—but she had never got used to it. The hired servant left the dining room. “Perhaps you could help me with another question, Martha,” Charlotte said. “Why do menservants in this country always wear dinner jackets? It’s a great puzzlement to me.”
“Do they always? This one is the first one we’ve ever had in the house. I thought he looked nice. Maybe it’s because those suits last such a long time. David has had his for years and years. He got it on sale at Brooks Brothers, so it was a good one, I guess.”
Graham hid a smile. Charlotte avoided his glance. “It would be, coming from there, of course,” she said. “Isn’t Brooks Brothers the shop where President Lincoln bought his Inaugural overcoat, Patrick?”
“Yes,” Graham replied. “I believe Richard Nixon bought his clothes there, too.”
At almost any other table frequented by the Grahams, this sally would have provoked laughter. Here it produced silence.
Graham said, “Are you an acquaintance of Dick Nixon’s, Martha? He was a Quaker, too, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, poor man.”
“You sympathize with him?”
“Yes, of course, they have tormented him so. But I feel even more sorry for his enemies.”
Sorry for his enemies? What was this? Both Grahams were fully alert now.
“You do?” Charlotte said. “Why is that?”
“Because they hate him so that they put their own souls in jeopardy.”
“My dear Martha, what an original way to look at it. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.”
“They have made Mr. Nixon stand for evil and they think that all it takes to be virtuous is to hate him. It is the sin of pride. My husband calls it ‘the politics of self-congratulation.’ Nixon arouses something primitive in people. David says Nixon is a Neanderthal among Cro-Magnons; they thought their ancestors had killed them all, and when they saw him and heard him speak they wanted to kill him without knowing why. It was an instinct, a voice from prehistory; he made them remember their own suppressed guilt. If Nixon had looked and sounded like a Kennedy and committed exactly the same crimes, my husband says, the people who hate him would all love him instead. I don’t know about that, but it’s very sad to hate someone so much that it makes you love all the wrong things.”
Patrick Graham, who had never before been in the same room with someone who was willing to defend Richard Nixon, was visibly shocked and offended by Martha’s words. He turned to Patchen. “Is that what you say?”
“It sounds like me,” Patchen replied, smiling fondly across the table at Martha, who had innocently gone back to her plate of vegetables.
“It’s a good thing you only sound like that in the privacy of your own home,” Graham said. “Unfortunately, you seem to have married a female Candide. I can sympathize.”
His voice was clipped, cold, different from the mellow one Patchen knew from his broadcasts. Off-camera, Graham spoke with a faint upper-class English accent that simulated his wife’s. He had adopted her two-fisted table manners, too, and the overbearing tone of voice in which she asked rude questions of strangers. She was famous for asking such questions, questions that Graham lacked the breeding to put to a guest when he was not looking into a camera. Like his other acquisitions, his titled wife was an asset to him—”the jewel in the crown,” as a witty writer called her in the “Style” section of the Post. Everyone knew she had come down in the world by marrying Graham, but like many before her, had done so at a price she regarded as satisfactory. Although some of the most famous blood in England flowed in her veins (through ancestors bastard and legitimate she was related to four English monarchs in three different dynasties), Lady Charlotte was penniless, the only surviving descendant of an ancient but now extinct line of improvident earls. The Grahams’ marriage was not a romantic one; Charlotte was not so déclassée as that. She and her husband were friends and partners in his career; that was all. It was enough for Graham. She gave honest value in return for his money, tutoring him in the politics of friendship, running an efficient house and filling it with important people who almost invariably went home happy. Sexually they lived their own lives. According to the Outfit’s files, she had conducted at least six brief love affairs in the five years of her marriage to Graham, all with elderly senators and Cabinet members entrusted with sensitive national secrets. Her regular lover was a member of the British secret intelligence ser vice, well known to the Outfit, with whom she had been sleeping since her teens. It was assumed that her Washington adulteries were in aid of her husband’s career. They were always followed by a sensational broadcast embarrassing to the Administration. Graham’s own infidelities were numerous but fleeting, and nearly always involved very small women with long black hair—”spinners,” as one of Patchen’s sources called them. This, Patchen knew, was because Graham, while at Yale, had fallen hopelessly in love with a petite, spirited, dark-haired Viet Cong sympathizer who had later married Horace Hubbard’s younger half-brother, Christopher’s cousin.
All this, and more, passed through Patchen’s mind as he nodded politely at Graham’s last insult. He knew a lot about his guests—not, as Graham suspected and feared, because the Outfit had ever gone to the trouble of investigating either one of them, but because he and his wife kept turning up in cameo roles in the lives of people who were of interest to the many other government security agencies that shared gossip and information with the Outfit as a matter of routine. Graham, of course, had his own files, very like the government’s, filled with gossip, innuendo, meaningless detail, malicious invention by disaffected friends, and the occasional kernel of truth that was most likely of all the items in the dossier to be discounted or overlooked. That was why he was here tonight.
After the exchange about Nixon, Graham fell into a hostile silence. This suited Patchen, who did not want to make small talk with him anyway. Charlotte, having struck gold once, spent the rest of the dinner plying Martha with questions. Martha was glad to answer them, and Charlotte learned about her Indians, the guaro cult, Maximón, and Martha’s hope of rescuing at least some of the children from a life of alcoholism.
“How dreadful,” Charlotte said, on hearing a description of the drinking hut and the ceaseless beat of the marimba.
“I wouldn’t use that word,” Martha said. “Their religion makes them quite happy.”
“I should think it might.” Charlotte’s eyes danced with what Martha mistook for a sympathetic light. “Do they do anything else whilst performing their religious duties besides gargle the guarol”
“They copulate.”
“Copulate? You mean all together?”
“No. They just crawl over to one another as the spirit moves them. No one knows who the children belong to; after they’re born the mothers hand them back and forth to be nursed, so after a while they don’t remember which is theirs and which is somebody else’s. I’ve finally realized that that’s the way they want it to be; it’s part of the cult to obliterate personal identity.”
“It sounds like they’re on to something. If they don’t claim the kids as their own, though, I shouldn’t think they’d mind your taking them away.”
“But they do mind, terribly. Last summer the Maoists came and took some of the boys and girls.”
“Maoists?” Charlotte said. “In Guatemala?”
“That’s what they call themselves. It means they kill more than the other guerrillas do.”
“How dreadful. How did the grown-up Indians feel about the Maoists?”
Graham broke in. “Why would they tell a middle-class American woman that?” he asked.
Martha turned to him. “They don’t tell me anything, but they cried for days. They knew they’d never come back, that the girls would be raped and the boys would be turned into slaves.”
“Is that the Nixonian line this week?” Graham asked. “Have you ever seen the Guatemalan army operate in an Indian village?”
Charlotte said, “Patrick, hush. Go on, Martha.”
“If the children go, the cult dies,” Martha said. “They understand that.”
“What could be sadder?” Charlotte asked. “How many of these sad little creatures have you rescued?”
“None, so far.”
“None? None at all? Haven’t you ever asked if they’d let you take them?”
“There’s nobody to give permission because nobody knows their own child. Besides, what difference does it make if you take them away by force or by lying?”
“And how long have you been working with these people?”
“Well, I’m taking care of the children of the first children I knew.”
“And the originals are in the drinking hut? Blimey, what a book you have!”
“A book?”
“You’ve never thought of writing a book about all this?”
“A book? No, I haven’t. How could I? They trust me.”
“What?” What did trust have to do with anything? Charlotte gave Martha a searching look and saw that she meant what she said. “Never mind. I wonder why you keep on. How long have you been going down there, exactly?”
“Since before David and I were married.”
“And how long is that exactly?”
Martha was beginning to blush under this interrogation. Patchen intervened. “There’s coffee in the other room if anyone wants it,” he said, standing up.
Charlotte said, “I don’t drink the stuff, it keeps me awake, and I can’t think that Martha does, either. Do you, Martha?”
“No.”
“I thought not. You two go away and drink your coffee and tell each other boring stories. Martha and I are quite happy as we are. Aren’t we, Martha?”
As Patchen led him into the living room, Patrick Graham, like a fundamentalist after an argument with a freethinker about the existence of Satan, was still seething. Graham had, in fact, been raised in a strict Christian home in Ohio, and in his mind (though he fought against the imagery) Karl Marx closely resembled Moses, V. I. Lenin played the part of Jesus, and Joseph Stalin and his cohort were the Disciples. Graham believed in some deep recess of his being that the Soviet state was a kind of Kingdom of Heaven made visible on earth. There the secrets of every heart were known to the examining angels, the whole truth about past and future, called “History,” stood revealed, and those who perversely refused to believe in History were remorselessly sent to Purgatory (the Gulag) or Hell (the cellar of Lubiyanka Prison).
To conceal his anger and disgust, Graham examined another still life hanging on Patchen’s wall; it was badly framed in the kind of dark wood that had not been used for such purposes for years. He suddenly remembered that a painting by one of the Peale brothers had recently been auctioned off for a couple of million dollars at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. “Is this a Raphaelle Peale, too?” he asked. Patchen nodded. Graham walked—or, rather, as he later told Charlotte, the room was so small that he leaned closer to the picture, an eerily lifelike rendering of a plate of lemons and a speckled trout. “How,” he asked, with his face very close to the painting, “do you afford these museum pieces on a civil servant’s salary?”
“I bought them a long time ago, when they were cheap and unfashionable.”
“How much did you pay for this one?”
“Four thousand dollars, I think.”
“Jesus!” The word came out of Graham’s mouth as a little yelp of envy. “It must be nice to have inside dope.”
“I’d never heard of the artist. I just liked his pictures.”
Graham, who bought everything on the basis of fashion, did not believe that anyone would invest in a work of art merely for the pleasure of looking at it. He shot a quick skeptical glance toward Patchen and uttered an even quicker snort of laughter. “I see,” he said. “If you say so.” He looked around him at the walls and ceiling. “I don’t suppose you have to worry very much about anyone stealing them, with the kind of electronic security you must have in this place. Are we on camera now?”
In fact Patchen did not even own a burglar alarm, but because he did not want to do anything to erode Graham’s bottomless suspicion of the Outfit and himself, he smiled and said, “It’s always wise to make that assumption.”
Miguel entered with a tray. Graham refused the weak Maxwell House coffee he offered, but accepted a glass of port from a decanter. Patchen sat down on a straight chair. Graham settled onto a sofa opposite him and sat back, crossing one leg over the other, the picture of relaxed self-confidence.
“All right, my friend,” he said. “What is all this in aid of?”
Patchen placed his own glass on the low table between them. “I asked you here to call upon your patriotism,” he said.
