The American Ambassador Read online

  “Yes,” Mother said. “Let’s, please.”

  But it was between Kleust and me. I said, “And the Germans.” He said, “I see.”

  “In Palestine,” I added, in case he had failed to get the point. I knew he hadn’t. He wasn’t that kind of German.

  “Of course,” he said. “The Germans also.”

  “The German people . . .” J. Press said. He began to bluster again, his plantation accent thicker and more disgusting. Yet I listened to him; he was not a stupid man, obviously. The Americans are dangerous because they are so easily underestimated. They seem to skim over the surface of things, and their listeners forget that that is often where things are, on the surface. He was off now on a tour of twentieth-century horrors, and how the Germans were not responsible for all of them. Most talented people in Europe, etcetera. The hardest-working. The most dynamic economy, etcetera. I tuned out then. I think that Herr Kleust did, too. I watched them talk and said nothing further. Eventually they returned to their discussion, the great crisis, and scandal; sex, money, and ideology. World-weary Americans are amusing, in the way that an adolescent in a three-piece suit and a fedora is interesting. So: the corruption of sex, ideology, and money, and nothing to be done about it, human nature being what it is. Old as mankind, old as the hills. The secret, according to the spy, was not to be surprised. You couldn’t allow yourself to be surprised.

  And then this idea came to me. I began to smile, thinking of it—that if someone had said, Hey, baby, have you heard the news? The Post had a piece about it. They’re burning folks out at Chevy Chase. Built a couple of ovens right next to the country club, eighth tee, going full-out, every day, every night, burning niggers! This asshole would listen and say, Well, waaaaaiiit a minute. We’ve heard all this before! That’s nothing new! What about Belsen and Auschwitz? What about Dachau? Let’s have a little perspective here!

  We were the last ones out of the restaurant. It was midnight but the port was busy, the Germans being talented, hard-working, and dynamic. The whores were at their stations, but began to drift in our direction when we appeared on the street. I swear to God, angel, one of them was carrying a teddy bear. The ambassador and Herr Kleust were talking, their arms around each other’s shoulders. My mother and the other embassy person stood huddled in the doorway. The whores came in closer. I was reminded of animals circling a garbage dump. The spy nudged me. He said, “Best-looking whores in the world, in Hamburg. Better’n Marseille or Singapore, or Saigon in the old days. You get a minute, you ought to go to Saint Pauli, just for the hell of it. Look, don’t touch. There’re fifty-seven varieties of clap in Hamburg.” He laughed loudly and made a motion with his hands, and the whores were suddenly alert. I was sick of him, his arrogance and presumption, and was about to reply when he walked away, looking for the cars. One of the whores was staring at me and I smiled and shook my head. They began to back off, into the shadows. I could hear the clanking of gears behind me, a ship being off-loaded. The air was gummy with salt and oil.

  They were standing together now, the ambassador and his wife and Herr Kleust. She was in the middle. They had their arms around each other, talking with animation, their breath pluming in the tart air. So happy to see each other again. She looked from one to the other, laughing. The ambassador had made a joke. Herr Kleust replied, the occasion for more laughter. She gave them each a peck on the cheek. Then they became grave, and I knew they were talking about the great crisis. I heard the ambassador say, God, sometimes he’s so difficult. So it was me they were talking about. They moved off into the shadows, arms around each other.

  You know the port of Hamburg, its noise and its energy, ships from every port in the world. Listening to it, I knew what I was going to do. I waved at them, and said I would walk back to the Prem. The ambassador said it was too far, and too cold. I said I needed the air, and did not mind the cold. I was very excited. I hurried away down the dark street. There was a whore in every doorway, sometimes I saw only a face or a flash of skirt. Naturally I heard their voices, harsh, coarse German. And I answered in kind, and heard their laughter.

  I left the others standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Someone had brought the embassy car, its lights casting long shadows in front of me. I ducked into an alley and looked back at the ambassador and his wife. I thought they were suddenly frail, without substance or nerve. They were without force.

  But as I told you, my parents are mediocre people.

  In any case, I did not see them again for three years.

  PART ONE

  1

  AMBASSADOR NORTH’S apprehension had begun with a pain in his wrist, noticed one afternoon while he was fishing offshore on Middle Ground, the boat tipping gently in the chop where the Sound’s floor dropped abruptly from six to sixty fathoms. He thought the pain was caused by the oppressive southwest wind, the prevailing wind at the end of summer, blowing for days, humid and unnerving; the fishing was terrible. It was a noisy, surly wind, putting everyone on edge, even Elinor, who was usually unaffected by climate. He thought the wind was the New England version of the mistral or the tramontana, hot northern winds that agitated livestock and drove people indoors, unbalanced. But as it came from the southwest, it was related to the sirocco, the North African wind that swept the Mediterranean to oppress southern Europe. The southwest wind brought the damp Gothic humors of the American South, altogether foreign to the bony New England coast, Tennessee Williams seducing Cotton Mather.

  Disorienting and perverse, the wind was ample cause for psychosomatic complaint. But when the wind stopped—it took twenty-four hours to do so, a torrential rain in the evening, then a slow swing around the compass until the next afternoon when, centered in the Maritimes, it moderated, becoming chilly and dry—the pain did not go away. His wristwatch and wedding band were tight on his skin. He joked that the metal was contracting, along with his shirt collars and trouser waistbands. This continued for a week.

  Then one night at dinner he turned to laugh at something Elinor said—“You know, sometimes I like you as Jules and sometimes I like you as Jim, and tonight I’m in a Jules mood, how about you?”—and his cigarette dropped to the rug. They were finishing a fine conversation, the one they had every now and then: how exceptionally lucky they were in their choice of each other, what fun they had, how well their lives fit. This home leave, spent entirely at their cottage on Lambert’s Cove, had been particularly tranquil and playful. The undertow was less charitable: and we haven’t needed anyone else. How nice it’s been, just us two. She’d said, “I can feel it coming on, another attack of the smugs. It’s just as well we’ve only got a week left. Our home leave. Except it seems less and less like home. Is something burning?” He found himself staring at his two naked fingers poised comically half an inch from his mouth. His left hand was numb, inert as a piece of sculpture. The absence of pain was alarming and he drew back, the laughter dying, and put his hand in his lap, out of sight. Deep within him, something turned over but he forced his WASP’s smile; his mother’s smile, turning aside his father’s Jewish frown. At times like these, you were thankful to be half-WASP. He sat very still, looking out the window at the lights across the Sound, beyond Middle Ground, the interval of the lighthouse beacon as regular as heartbeat. She said again, “Bill, what’s burning?” He smiled an apology. The cigarette was smoldering on the rug. He picked it up with his right hand and stubbed it out, crushing it angrily into the ashtray—and went early to bed, though not to sleep.

  In retrospect, all that seemed to carry significance, an irony of some kind, unintended consequence.

  Lying in bed that night, he made a list of friends and their recent infirmities: herniated discs, prostate troubles, sciatica, hemorrhoids, and the disagreeable symptoms that announced them. In all these cases he had been consulted, a reliable, sympathetic, worldly friend, no stranger to hard times. Their wives had said to them, Talk to Bill North, he’s been through the mill, no-nonsense Bill. He always listened carefully, t
hen gave the obvious advice: See a doctor. And he would give them Brian Fowler’s telephone number. But it was the time of life when no one wanted to see a doctor, for fear of what might turn up. It was fear of cancer. He always tried to make a mordant joke, for Christ’s sake, we all drink too much, smoke too much, work too hard, exercise too little, it’s a perfect profile and if we know one thing about our generation we know that nothing’s predictable and that perfect profiles don’t exist and won’t apply. Talk to Fowler.

  He’d said to Dick Hartnett, who was nursing a hemorrhoid the size of a golf ball: How many times in your life has the fear of the known been worse than the fear of the unknown?

  And Dick had looked at him in amazement. Ah, Bill. You know better than that. Always.

  Precisely, he’d said.

  One by one his friends went to their doctors and one by one they stopped smoking and cut down on the drinking. Hypnotism, acupuncture, Valium, Smokenders, cold turkey. Aperitifs became popular, Lillet, Dubonnet, Campari, vermouth—with Perrier and a twist, and a smile of surrender. Cough syrup, thirty-two proof. Designer cocktails. They hated to do it, the sacrifice of the evening Martini or Scotch on the rocks evidence of mortality no less conspicuous than falling hair, chronic insomnia, or blood in the urine.

  Now he could trade stories with them. I’ve got the damnedest pain in my wrist. And he could grin about that because it was a bagatelle. There was no such thing as cancer of the wrist. Then, clearing his throat: Actually, it was a pain but it isn’t a pain anymore. It’s a numbness, actually; there’s no feeling at all. And the laughter would die away because numbness was a signal, if not of cancer then of something neurological. And these were dangerous, sudden times. Two friends had died of heart attacks while jogging and each man was fifty exactly. Not forty-nine or fifty-one but exactly fifty and both had died immediately, on the spot. One had died in Beirut and the other in Rock Creek Park. And North had imagined them dying at an angle, arms stiffening, eyes glazing, and feet askew, the pavement rising up to meet them—and suddenly the moment freezing, like a film stopped in midframe. The last conscious thought would be an astonishment: a defiance of gravity. Al Murillo, dead on the Corniche in Beirut, had written a light piece for the Foreign Service Journal describing the perils of jogging in Lebanon, which sections were safe and which were not, and the signs to watch for. An amusing piece, everyone said so, though the slightest bit—supercilious. In Rock Creek Park near the P Street beach, Joe Deshler had been dead an hour before anyone found him, his body stripped clean as a Mercedes in Anacostia, his watch, wallet, and running shoes gone. He was found by a friend, and immediately identified, otherwise his body would have disappeared into the morgue, tagged John Doe.

  These two deaths had happened within a month of each other, part of the same equation, spiritually linked; someone sneezes in Tokyo, and a tornado changes direction in Kansas. They were good, close friends and when they died it was as if part of North’s own history had died; his memory was no longer subject to verification. Murillo, Deshler, and North had been members of the same Foreign Service class; all three had served in Africa. They had become specialists in the problems of the Third World or, more accurately, the problems of the United States in the Third World. They had corresponded frequently, long droll letters; nothing had been as expected. Their careers were so different from those of their heroes, Bohlen, Thompson, and Kennan. The Third World, always simmering on the back burner. Adlai had cared, but Adlai was dead. Things changed quickly: the Europeans withdrew, the Russians advanced. Batista fled, the Congo fell apart. Sukarno, Sihanouk, Nkrumah. There were new rules and when Kennedy died and the Vietnamese won their war, newer rules. These were events to which North had been witness—though, amazingly, he had missed Indochina, feeling at the time like a master musician playing Dubuque while the rest of the orchestra was at Carnegie Hall—and his memory, he knew, was no longer trustworthy. It was flabby and unresponsive, like an athlete’s body gone to seed. Too much junk food had gone into it, and it was nothing he could rely on in a crisis, or swear to in court. Of course there were the documents, but the documents—memorandums of conversations, action memos, National Security Council directives, CIA estimates, congressional mandates, various minutes of emergency meetings here and there—told only part of the story and often not the most important part, They were like obits. Vital statistics did not describe a life. What was it about Age Fifty, and a career in the government?

  How fragile we are, Elinor had said, but he had shaken his head: Not fragile, strong. But soon to be overwhelmed. He had said this under his breath at graveside at the most recent Washington funeral—Joe Deshler’s, his wife and daughters seated, stricken, on folding chairs—as the officiating Lutheran spoke of everlasting life, the divinity of Christ, and the pressures of government service.

  This was not a cheerful inventory, and it kept North awake. He, Murillo, and Deshler; in the early nineteen sixties, when they were in Africa together, they felt like pioneers. Their ambassadors were political appointees, well-traveled men, but new to diplomacy and ignorant of the Third World. Deshler’s ambassador was a man of charm and wit, a midwestern businessman of humane instinct. Son of a gun, he’s said after six months in-country, this is worse than Chicago. It was not graft on a colossal scale, because the country was so poor; but everything there to be stolen was stolen. However, the country was free of Communists and that was a problem. Every year a problem with the foreign aid appropriation because there was no Moscow-inspired internal threat. In fact, as the ambassador observed, there were more Communists in Chicago. There were more Communists in one department at the university than there were in B——. But it was a bell curve. Each year, he predicted, there would be more Communists in B——, while in Chicago, of course, there would be fewer. What had Melville said about his whaling ship? My Yale College and my Harvard. That was what North felt about Africa, and wherever he went thereafter, Africa went, too. The continent had not had the same effect on Murillo and Deshler. Poor Joe Deshler—Africa had become an obsession and after 1970, as he freely admitted, he wasn’t worth a damn as a Foreign Service officer. He no longer knew where his deepest loyalties lay. When he died in Rock Creek Park, he was on loan to the Agency for International Development.

  When Elinor came to bed, he feigned sleep, his left hand tucked awkwardly under his chin. He thought of rolling over, then didn’t. He couldn’t get his mind on sex and keep it there. His dead hand distracted him. He continued to flex his fingers, feeling her beside him, her heat and the rhythm of her breathing, not quite asleep; she moved and touched his foot with her own. Your move, Jules. Her foot was warm and he backed into her, the underside of his thighs against her knees. Her touch was comfortable and familiar, without reserve. And we haven’t needed anyone else, he thought; a two-edged thought. She mumbled something, turning, and he was alone again. He shut his eyes and saw the cigarette, white against the dark shag of the rug and the accusing wisp of smoke.

  Then he was dozing, moving back and forth among his dead and troubled friends, his wife, and his absent son. He was trying to ignore his numb hand. By concentrating on his friends he thought he could make a separate peace. But Bill Jr. forced his way inside, an occupying army: Bill Jr. at seven, ten, thirteen, sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-four. He watched the boy grow, taller and broader; listened to the voice deepen; watched the smile disappear.

  Sleep would not come so he carefully got out of bed and crept into the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. A low counter separated the kitchen from the living room. On a table at the far end of the living room, dimly seen by moonlight, were family photographs in silver frames, their national archive. Elinor in a bikini on a beach near Mombasa, almost twenty years ago. He and Elinor with Jomo Kenyatta at the race course in Nairobi, the Mzee’s fly whisk only inches from her nose, the old bull rank with bed, whiskey, and cigars; Elinor maintained his only equal in pure animal grace was Richard Burton. Elinor with an animated Robert Lowell in a pub in Hampstead,
both of them jolly and tight, their moods matching the rosy glow of the pub. He and Elinor in black tie, talking to Lyndon Johnson at a reception in Washington; no, listening to Lyndon Johnson at a reception in Bonn, the former President’s hands deep in his trouser pockets, jiggling coins and his private parts, telling them about his library, greatest of all the presidential libraries, the most complete, the handsomest, and in Texas, magnet for scholars worldwide, he himself overseeing each detail (though North remembered, too, Dunphy, the old man’s aide, late at night, with the former President in bed and out of the way, conducting a monologue, he and Elinor listening with the attention you’d give a great cellist playing tragic Mozart in your own living room, the concert for your ears only. They were downstairs in the ambassador’s residence, Dunphy suddenly announcing: “We thought he was FDR. And greater than FDR because he was a man of the people, not an aristocrat come down from the Hudson Valley. LBJ knew common Americans at first hand, and was native to the newest region of the country, not the oldest, and had passions—what passions!—and a parliamentary skill that took your breath away. But he could never overcome the manner of his arrival, and then that fucking war. He’s brokenhearted now, won’t last a year. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? He hears it day and night, it won’t go away. I thought of the war like this: a storm that had been gathering for a hundred and ninety years, breaking suddenly, a deluge. He had the best minds around him, and he took their advice. The best minds were wonderfully articulate when talking about war. It became their academic specialty. And they were wrong and he was wrong, and there was never a greater error in the history of the presidency. What consequences! If he had come to the presidency on his own, what an eight years he, and we, could have had! That war is going to go on and on, and LBJ will be dead in a year. And I’ll go back to Washington and make a lot of money because that’s the other change I’ve seen. It happened just the other day, it seems. Money in Washington. You’ve never seen so much money, it’s a great sea of money, and there for the taking. For the asking. And as for you, you’re young yet”—he nodded at them both, his eyes welling—“you and your wife have lived abroad all this time, and you’ve never served in Indochina. My advice is, Stay away from it. Avoid the war, not because it will hurt your career, because it won’t. The Foreign Service is going to need somebody who is not in love with the memory of Indochina. It is not the only memory there is. Indochina is an aberration, an aberration for him, and for the country. Let’s go to bed now. I’m going upstairs to check on the old bastard. He’s probably reading, not asleep at all. He has insomnia. Many people would say that’s a small price for him to pay, and perhaps it is. But, as I say, he’ll be dead in a year. And our fellow citizens, or many of them, will be happy. But I like to remember a man on the best day he ever had, so I’ll remember him in the well of the House of Representatives, shouting—it was a shout, you’ll remember—And we shall overcome! And knowing what it meant. Or knowing it as well as any white man can know it, and feel it, too. You should have seen him, after he made the speech. And knew its effect. He spread his arms wide. I think he thought he could fly, that night. He took it all, ears, tail, and hooves. I’m going now, and as you know we leave early in the morning. I don’t know what we’re doing here, in the Federal Republic of Germany. We go to Paris tomorrow and then somewhere else. And then back to the ranch. I’ll be in Washington in a year. When you come back, look me up. I’ll be in the book, the yellow pages, under attorney at law. . . .”).