The Company Page 7

  In another moment down went Alice after it, never once

  considering how in the world she was to get out again.

  Snapshot: a three-by-five-inch black-and-white photograph turned sepia with age. Hand-printed across the scalloped white border is a faded caption: “Jack & Leo & Stella after The Race but before The Fall.” There is a date but it has been smudged and is illegible. In the photograph two men in their early twenties, brandishing long oars draped with the shirts they won off the backs of the Harvard crew, are posing in front of a slender racing shell. Standing slightly apart, a thin woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a man’s varsity sweater has been caught brushing the hair out of her wide, anxious eyes with the splayed fingers of her left hand. The two young men are dressed identically in boating sneakers, shorts, and sleeveless undershirts, each with a large Y on the chest. The taller of the young men, sporting a Cossack mustache, clutches an open bottle of Champagne by its throat. His head is angled toward the shirt flying like a captured pennant from the blade of his oar but his eyes are devouring the girl.

  1

  NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1950

  RACING NECK AND NECK BETWEEN THE BUOYS, THE TWO SLEEK-SCULLED coxed eights skidded down the mirror-still surface of the Thames. Languid gusts impregnated with the salty aroma of the sea and the hoarse shrieks from the students on the bank of the river drifted across their bows. Rowing stroke for Yale, Jack McAuliffe feathered an instant too soon and caught a grab and heard the cox, Leo Kritzky, swear under his breath. At the four-fifths mark Leo pushed the pace to a sprint. Several of the oarsman crewing behind Jack started punctuating each stroke with rasping grunts. Sliding on the seat until his knees grazed his armpits, Jack made a clean catch and felt the blade lock onto a swell of river water. A splinter of pain stabbed at the rib that had mended and broken and mended again. Blinking away the ache in his rib cage, he hauled back on the haft of the oar slick with blood from a burst blister. Slivers of sunlight glancing off the river blinded him for an instant. When he was able to see he caught a glimpse of the Harvard eight riding on its inverted reflection, its oars catching and feathering and squaring in flawless synchronization. The cox must have decided the Harvard boat was slipping ahead because he notched up the strokes to forty-eight per minute. Balanced on the knife edge of the keel, coiling and uncoiling his limbs in long fluid motions, Jack abandoned himself to the cadence of pain. When the Yale scull soared across the finish line just ahead of the Crimson’s hull, he slumped over his oar and tried to recollect what whim of craziness had pushed him to go out for Crew.

  “Rowing,” Skip Waltz shouted over the din of the New Haven railroad station, “is a great training ground for real life in the sense that you’re taking something that is essentially very simple and perfecting it.”

  “In your view, Coach Waltz, what’s the most difficult moment of a race?” called the reporter from the Yale student newspaper.

  Waltz screwed up his lips. “I’d say it’s when you reach for the next stroke, because you’re actually going in one direction and the hull’s going in the opposite direction. I always tell my men that rowing is a metaphor for life. If you’re not perfectly balanced over the keel the boat will wobble and the race will slip through your fingers.” The coach glanced at the station clock and said, “What do you say we wrap this up, boys,” and made his way across the platform to his crew, who were pulling their duffle bags off a low baggage cart. Waltz rummaged in his trouser pocket for a dime and gave it to the Negro porter, who touched the brim of his red cap in thanks. “Anyone for a Green Cup down at Mory’s?” Waltz said.

  “Mind if I take a rain check, coach?” one of the oarsman asked. “I have a philosophy oral at the crack of eleven tomorrow and I still haven’t read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.”

  One after another the rowers begged off and headed back to college with their duffel bags slung from their shoulders. Only Jack and Leo and Leo’s girl, Stella, took the coach up on his invitation. Waltz collected his Frazer Vagabond from the parking lot down the street and brought it around to the station entrance. Leo and Jack tossed their duffle bags into the trunk and the three of them piled in.

  Mory’s was nearly deserted when they got there. Two waiters and a handful of students, all wearing ties and jackets, applauded the victory over the arch enemy, Harvard. “Green Cups for my people,” the coach called as the four of them pulled up high-backed wooden chairs around a small table. For a while they talked about scull weights and blade shapes and the ideal length of the slide along which the oarsman travels with each stroke.

  “Is it true that Yale rowers invented the slide?” Jack inquired.

  “You bet,” Coach Waltz said. “It was back in the 1880s. Before then oarsmen used to grease their trousers and slide their butts up and back along a wooden plank set in the hull.”

  When the Green Cups arrived Coach Waltz raised his glass and saluted the two crewmen. Cocking his head, he casually asked them if they spoke any foreign languages. It turned out that Jack was fluent in German and could get by in Spanish; Leo, an ardent, angry young man who had been raised in a family of anti-Communist Russian-Jewish immigrants and was majoring in Slavic languages and history, on a full scholarship, spoke Russian and Yiddish like a native and Italian like a tourist. The coach took this in with a nod, then asked whether they found time to keep up with the international situation, and when they both said yes he steered the conversation to the 1948 Communist coup d’état in Czechoslovakia and Cardinal Mindszenty’s recent death sentence in Red Hungary. Both young men agreed that if the Americans and the British didn’t draw a line across Europe and defend it, Russian tanks would sweep through Germany and France to the English Channel. Waltz asked what they thought about the Russian attempt to squeeze the allies out of Berlin.

  Jack offered an impassioned defense of Truman’s airlift that had forced Stalin to back down on the blockade. “If Berlin proves anything,” he said, “it’s that Joe Stalin understands only one thing, and that’s force.”

  Leo believed that America ought to go to war rather than abandon Berlin to the Reds. “The Cold War is bound to turn into a shooting war eventually,” he said, leaning over the table. “America disarmed too soon after the Germans and Japs surrendered and that was a big mistake. We should be rearming and fast, for God’s sake. We need to stop watching the Cold War and start fighting it. We need to stop pussyfooting around while they’re turning the satellite countries into slave states and sabotaging free elections in France and Italy.”

  The coach said, “I’m curious to know how you men see this McCarthy business?”

  Jack said, “All right, maybe Joe McCarthy’s overstating his case when he says the government is crawling with card-carrying Commies. But like the man says, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  “The way I see it,” Leo said, “we need to put some pizzazz into this new Central Intelligence Agency that Truman concocted. We need to spy on them the way they’re spying on us.”

  “That’s the ticket,” Jack heartily agreed.

  Stella, a New Haven social worker seven years older than Leo, shook her head in disgust. “Well, I don’t agree with a word you boys are saying. There’s a song on the hit parade…it’s called, ‘Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).’ The title says it all: we ought to be enjoying ourselves because it is later than we think.” When everyone looked at her she blushed. “Hey, I’m entitled to my opinion.”

  “Coach Waltz is talking seriously, Stella,” Leo said.

  “Well, so am I. Talking seriously, I mean. We’d better enjoy ourselves before the war breaks out because after it breaks out we won’t be able to—the ones who’re still alive will be living like worms in underground fallout shelters.”

  On the way back to the off-campus apartment that Leo and Jack shared (when they weren’t bunking at the Yale boathouse on the Housatonic) with a Russian exchange student named Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, Leo tried to argue with Stell
a but she stuck to her guns. “I don’t see the sense of starting the shooting all over again just to stay in some godforsaken city like Berlin.”

  This exasperated Leo. “This pacifism of yours plays right into Stalin’s hands.”

  Stella slipped her arm through Jack’s, lightly brushing a breast against his elbow. “Leo’s angry with me, Jacky,” she said with a mock pout, “but you see my point.”

  “To tell the truth, I see two of them,” Jack said with a leer.

  “I hope you’re not trying to beat my time,” Leo warned.

  “I thought crew shared everything,” Jack said.

  Leo stopped in his tracks. “So what are you asking, Jack? Are you asking me to lend you Stella for the night?”

  “You’re doing it again,” Jack warned good-naturedly, “exposing the chip on your shoulder.”

  “When is it going to sink in?” Stella told Jack. “The chip on his shoulder is what he’s all about.” She turned on Leo. “Let’s get something straight,” she said, her face a mask of seriousness. “You don’t own me, Leo, you only have the franchise. Which means that nobody borrows Stella unless Stella decides to be borrowed.”

  The three started walking again. Jack was shaking his head. “Damnation! Leo, old pal, old buddy, are we numskulls—I think we’ve been on the receiving end of a pitch!”

  “Stella’s not making a pitch—“

  “I don’t mean Stella. I mean Coach Waltz. When’s the last time coach talked politics with any of his rowers? Remember what he asked us just before we headed for the Roach Ranch? Do we think patriotism is out of fashion? Do we think one man can make a difference in a world threatened by atomic wars? And remember his parting words—about how, what with Yevgeny being the son of a Russian diplomat and all, it’d be better if we kept the conversation under our hats.”

  “For cryin’ out loud, Yevgeny’s not a Communist,” Stella declared.

  “Jesus H. Christ, I’m not saying he’s a Communist,” Jack said. “Though, come to think of it, his father would probably have to be, to be where he is.” He turned back to Leo. “How could we miss it? The coach’s got to be a talent scout. And we’re the talent.”

  Leo flashed one of his famous sour smiles. “So who do you think he’s scouting for? The New Haven Shore Line?”

  “It’s got to be something connected with government. And I’ll lay you odds it’s not the National Forest Service.” Jack’s Cossack mustache twitched in satisfaction. “Well, damnation,” he said again. “Skull and Bones didn’t tap us, Leo, but I have a hunch a society a lot more mysterious than one of Yale’s secret societies may be about to.”

  “How can any society be more secret than Skull and Bones?” Stella wanted to know but by now both of her companions were absorbed in their own thoughts.

  Making their way single file up the narrow, dimly lit staircase in a seedy building on Dwight Street, pushing open the door of a fifth-floor walkup, tossing their duffels into a corner, they found their Russian apartment-mate slumped over the kitchen table, his head on Trevelyan’s American Revolution. When Jack shook his shoulder Yevgeny yawned and stretched and said, “I dreamed you guys became the first boat in the Harvard-Yale classic to come in third.”

  “Leo went to a sprint at the four-fifths mark,” Jack said. “Yale won by a nose. The two oarsmen who died of exhaustion were buried in the river with full honors.”

  Stella set the kettle to boiling. Jack threw on a 78-rpm Cole Porter record. The “troika,” as the three roommates styled themselves, pushed the rowing machine into a corner and settled onto the floor of the tiny living room for one of their regular late-night bull sessions. Yevgeny, a sturdy, sandy-haired young man whose pale eyes seemed to change color with his moods, was majoring in American history and had become something of a Revolutionary War buff; he had pored over Pennypacker’s General Washington’s Spies and Trevelyan’s The American Revolution and had actually followed in Washington’s footsteps, walking during winter recess the route the Continental Army had taken from Valley Forge across the frozen Delaware to Trenton. “I’ve figured out the big difference between the American Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution,” he was saying now. “The American version lacked a central unifying vision.”

  “The Americans were against tyranny and taxation without representation,” Jack reminded his Russian friend. “They were for individual rights, especially the right to express minority views without being oppressed by the majority. Those are unifying visions.”

  Yevgeny flashed a wrinkled smile. “Jefferson’s ‘All men are created equal’ didn’t include the Negroes who worked in his nail factory at Monticello. Even Washington’s supposedly idealistic Continental Army was run along elitist principles—if you were called up you could pay someone to take your place or send your Negro slave.”

  Stella spooned instant coffee into mugs, filled them with boiling water from the kettle and handed them around. “America’s central vision was to spread the American way of life from coast to shining coast,” she commented. “It’s called Manifest Destiny.”

  Jack said, “The American way of life hasn’t been all that bad for a hundred fifty million Americans—especially when you see how the rest of the world scrapes by.”

  Stella said, “Hey, I work with Negro families in downtown New Haven that don’t have enough money for one square meal a day. Are you counting them in your hundred fifty million?”

  Yevgeny spiked his coffee from a small flask of cheap cooking cognac and passed the bottle around. “What motivated Washington and Jefferson, what motivates Americans today, is a kind of sentimental imperialism,” he said, stirring his coffee with the eraser end of a pencil. “The original eastern seaboard revolution spread from coast to shining coast over the bodies of two million Indians. You Americans carry on about making the world safe for democracy but the sub text is you want to make the world safe for the United Fruit Company.”

  Leo turned moody. “So what image would you reshape the world in, Yevgeny?”

  Jack climbed to his feet to put on a new record. “Yeah, tell us about the unifying vision of Stalin.”

  “My central vision doesn’t come from Stalin. It doesn’t even come from Marx. It comes from Leon Tolstoy. He spent most of his life searching for a unifying theory, the single key that would unlock every door, the universal explanation for our passions and economics and poverty and politics. What I really am is a Tolstoyist.”

  Leo said, “The universal explanation—the force that conditions all human choice—turns out, according to Marx, to be economics.”

  Stella nudged Jack in the ribs with an elbow. “I thought sex was behind all our choices,” she teased.

  Jack wagged a finger in Stella’s face. “You’ve been reading Freud again.”

  “Freud’s mistake was to generalize from a particular,” Yevgeny went on, bending forward, caught up in his own narrative. “And the particular in his case was himself. Don’t forget that many of the dreams he analyzed were his own. Tolstoy moved far beyond himself—he caught a glimpse of a force, a fate, a scheme of things that was behind all of history; ‘Something incomprehensible but which is nevertheless the only thing that matters,’ as he has his Prince Andrei say.”

  Leo poured the last of their open bottle of cooking cognac into his cup. “Human experience is too complex and too inconsistent to be explained by any one law or any one truth.”

  Jack said flatly, “All visions which lead to concentration camps are flat-out wrong.”

  Stella waved her hand as if she were in a classroom. “What about America’s concentration camps? They’re harder to identify because they don’t have walls or barbed wire. We call them Negro ghettos and Indian reservations.”

  Yevgeny said, “Stella’s got it right, of course—“

  “What about the Iron Curtain?” Jack blurted out. “What about the slave nations imprisoned behind it? Damnation, a Negro can walk out of the ghetto any time he wants, which is more than you can say for a Pole or
a Hungarian.”

  “Negro soldiers fought World War II in segregated units run by white officers,” Yevgeny said sharply. “Your Mr. Truman finally got around to integrating the armed forces last year, eighty-four years after the end of your Civil War.”

  “Arguing with the two of you has a lot in common with beating your head against a wall,” Jack said wearily.

  Yevgeny climbed to his feet and produced another bottle of cooking cognac from behind a stack of books on a shelf and passed it around. The members of the troika each poured a shot of cognac onto the coffee dregs at the bottom of their respective cups. Yevgeny raised his cup aloft and called out his trademark slogan in Russian: “Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!”

  “Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela,” Jack and Leo repeated.

  Stella said, “You’ve told me before but I always forget. What’s that mean again?”

  Leo supplied the English translation: “To the success of our hopeless task!”

  Stella swallowed a yawn. “Right now my hopeless task is to keep my eyes open. I’m going to hit the hay. Are you coming, Leo, baby?”

  “Are you coming, Leo, baby?” Jack cooed, mimicking Stella.

  Leo threw a dark look in Jack’s direction as he trailed after Stella and disappeared into the room at the end of the hallway.

  In the early hours of the morning, as the first ash-gray streaks of first light broke against the Harkness Quadrangle, Leo came awake to discover Stella missing from the narrow bed. Padding sleepily through the silent apartment he heard the scratching of a needle going round and round in the end grooves of a record in the living room. Yevgeny was fast asleep on the old couch under the window with the torn shade, his arm trailing down to the linoleum, the tips of his fingers wedged in Trevelyan’s masterpiece on the American Revolution so he wouldn’t lose his place. Leo gently lifted the needle from the record and switched off Yevgeny’s reading lamp. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he noticed a flicker of light under Jack’s door on one side of the living room. Expecting to catch Jack burning the midnight oil, he gripped the knob and softly turned it and inched the door open.