Allegiance (7 page)

“I want to do something that's mine,” I say. “That my father didn't give me, or your father for that matter.”

“Something that's yours.” There is an odd high note in her laugh, one I can't recall hearing before.

“What?”

“He's good.” She shakes her head. “A nameless patch of foreign ground or the Main Line rosary. I heard that speech. He practiced it on me. Working at the Court is wonderful, and I'm glad you're doing it, but that's not what's yours.”

“What is, then?”

Suzanne hesitates a moment, her lips parted. “I am, Cash.” Now her eyes are pleading. “I'm what's yours.”

I don't know what to say. Behind the face I know, I can suddenly see other faces I remember. Here is Suzanne Skinner, the little sister of my best friend, Bob, who tagged along with us to movies, and I see her round and serious face set in defiance when we tell her to go home. Here is Suzanne Skinner, the little girl running along the dock at Northeast Harbor, and I see her eyes go big as she wraps skinny arms around her knees and jumps off the end in a shrieking ball.

The Judge's house and my father's were near each other, on the leeward side of Smallidge Point, and the dock was sheltered enough that you could swim if you were brave, for a little while at least, until the sea reminded you that you were a creature of warmth and air and light and had best be getting back to your own world. Year after year we tested our endurance against the cold and sailed to the islands and roasted corn and lobster. Year after year we played tennis and explored the pine forests and bicycled to Jordan Pond when the salt sea's chill was too great. And it seemed timeless, for although we grew bigger and stronger, we were still children, and children never foresee childhood's end.

But then came a summer when the air changed, or I did, and certainly she did, and we were not children anymore. Bob was in town and we swam in the ocean, though she no longer jumped in a shrieking ball. We wrapped ourselves in towels against the cold, and when we were warm enough we lay on our stomachs on the dock, with our heads turned to the side, so that I studied her damp cornsilk hair and she looked out over the water. And then we lay on our backs, with our arms at our sides, and the sun in the blue sky coaxed a sweet resiny smell out of the pine boards and shone so bright that my closed eyelids glowed as though crowned with halos.

I tasted the salt on my lips and in the back of my nose, and I lowered my eyes to where the glow was less. Then I opened them just a slit, looking down my nose through the drops that still clung on my lashes, and I saw my hand, and another hand next to it. And I thought for a while about how close they were, and how all of the years we'd lived and all the miles we'd traveled had brought us to this spot and this second and not a couple inches closer.

You can say that about any moment in your life, of course, and any place you are, but it seemed true for this one, which was full with something as though the past had piled up inside and waited to burst out into the future. But it was still waiting, and the fullness made those inches seem very important, so important they couldn't be crossed in the second it would take to put my hand in hers. So I shut my eyes again and let my hand lie there and almost jumped when I felt her fingers on my palm.

I opened my eyes fully, and she opened hers, and she smiled quickly at me. It was the same smile I had been seeing for fifteen years, but it was different,
and the face was different, which I had been seeing for fifteen years. Her hand stayed there just long enough to show me it wasn't an accident. Then she was pushing herself up and diving off the dock so that as I struggled to a sitting position and shielded my eyes from the sun I could only see the water falling back on the spot she'd gone in.

But I remembered her hand in mine.

And I remember that face that smiled at me on the dock, which is now the face looking at me in Wanamaker's, and I wonder at how the connection between two things that are so distinct can be so hazy, for I find I don't really know how we got from there to here.

“I'm what's yours,” Suzanne repeats, and in her face I see all the faces.

“And I'm yours,” I say, and I lean forward and kiss her quickly. Then I step back, and before she can contradict me or tell me not to promise what won't come true, I'm away and out the door.

The hot air hits me like a wall, and I think again of the waves lapping the dock at Northeast Harbor, the warm water lying atop the cold. Sometimes it was just a skin that you'd pierce without noticing, sometimes a thicker layer, like a cloudbank afloat. But if you dove more than a few feet it would get cold indeed, till it took your breath and you'd have to turn back. That was how that summer felt, as though each day was a step further into a realm that chilled me with awe. But now there is nothing but heat, and I am stepping from the cool of memory back to the present, to the world where schoolchildren refuse to recite the Pledge and Justice Black asks to see my backhand.

HAYNES WAS RIGHT
about everything, I decide on the drive back. I didn't have any time to see Suzanne, but just being back in the familiar world of Philadelphia was enough to calm me down. Of course the work is important. And of course my suspicions were silly. Why would anyone want to follow me?

In Washington I reach to put the key in my apartment door and it swings open at the touch. All my calm vanishes in an instant. The Nazis have come for me after all. This is it. There will be a trench-coated figure seated at the table, a Luger and a glass of my Scotch in the pool of lamplight before him. “Ve haff a proposition, Mr. Harrison.” I back halfway down the hall before I reconsider. If they are clever enough to get past the doorman and enter my apartment, they are probably clever enough to lock the door behind them. Leaving it on the latch is the mark of an overworked and tired man, not a Nazi superspy. The mark, in fact, of someone like me.

Slowly I push the door open and creep inside. My heart beats a little faster as I flick on the light, but sure enough, the apartment is empty. I set my hat on the rack, shrug out of my jacket, and loosen my tie. I open the sliding paper screen that serves as a closet door and take down a coat hanger. Then I stop. There on the floor of the closet is a muddy footprint. I step into it, trying to remember how that might have happened, and my shoe doesn't fit. And for a long time, I stand like an idiot inside my closet, looking down at the print of someone else's shoe on my waxed cherry floor.

• • • • 

The next morning I go straight to the Marshal's office. In deference to Haynes, I do not mention Nazis. I feel like I'm being followed, I say. I wonder if someone could check that out.

The Marshal is a kindly looking man, middle-aged and quilted with comfortable flesh. His haircut suggests a military background; his tone is reassuring. “We observe everyone on the Court grounds,” he says.

Would it be possible, I inquire, to have someone with me elsewhere?

Now there is an edge of suspicion in his voice. “We provide security details for the Justices,” he says. “If they request. You clerk for Justice Black, is that right?”

“Never mind,” I tell him. The last thing I want is the Marshal informing Black that his new clerk is exhibiting the onset of dementia praecox. I walk back to my desk and sit down in front of a pile of cert petitions. Then I notice a new piece of paper, a handwritten note.
Meet me at the Uptown
, it says.
Eight p.m.

I do as much work as I can in the morning, which is little enough, and get Black to stop the tennis early by losing the third set so abjectly he shakes his head in disappointment. “I thought you were learning something.” And by a quarter of eight, with a tightness in my belly attributable only in part to the indigestible steak lodged there, I am standing in front of the Uptown Cinema on Connecticut Avenue.

The theater has a Deco brick facade and a marquee promoting
Mr. Lucky
in large black letters. Double glass doors show my reflection. Across the street the hill falls away toward Rock Creek Park; down Connecticut to the right is the National Zoo. Evening is a feeding time, and primal cries rise above the traffic. I look from side to side along the street and am caught by surprise when Gene Gressman walks out from the box office with a tub of popcorn in one hand.

“You're a trusting sort,” he says. “To come here all alone.”

“What makes you think I'm alone?”

Gressman laughs and dips his hand into the popcorn. “Ah, Cash. Don't try to be someone you're not.” He chews in silence for a moment, watching me. “This is the part where you ask me why we're here.”

“Why are we here?”

“Because it's not safe to talk at the Court.”

“What?”

He gives a surprisingly full-throated laugh. “No, I just wanted to see a movie. You like Cary Grant?”

“Doesn't everyone?”

“Well, come on. I got you a ticket.” He shakes the popcorn bucket at me and takes a step toward the doors.

I remain where I am. “No, really, why are we here?”

“We're going to see a movie,” Gressman says. His voice has grown more serious. “Then we're going to talk.”

The theater is huge; it must hold a thousand or more. The walls are lined in cloth and the seats are red velvet, even up in the peanut gallery, where Gressman leads me. We are almost alone in the balcony, twenty feet above the main floor.

Mr. Lucky
gives us Cary Grant as the draft-dodging gambler Joe Adams, falling for the society heiress he's set out to fleece. I understated it, answering Gressman's question. I love Cary, with his tumbler's walk, his nimbus of poise and grace. Nothing about him is accidental; all is chosen, created, crafted with purpose. We watch as Joe abandons his schemes and turns his gambling boat into a war relief vessel, sailing for ravaged Europe instead of the beaches of Havana. By the end he has made himself a hero, stepping out of the fog into her arms as she waits on the dock.

“Reminds me of you, in a way,” says Gressman, as the lights come up.

“Thanks,” I say. “I've always liked his style.”

The laugh is softer this time. “Not Cary. The society dame. Who can't see what's going on. But whoever's playing you might not be as soft-hearted as Joe Adams.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know some things. Who's following you, for one.”

“So you were listening to us.”

“It pays to keep your ears open.”

Gressman's tone is unapologetic and his aftershave excessive. I have not
even fully forgiven him for the stunt with the doors, but it is bad form to hold a grudge. And I want to hear what he has to say. Someone believes me. “All right, who is it?”

He leans in close, giving me a good whiff of Old Spice, and lowers his voice. “Nazis, looking for revenge.”

“Jesus! I knew it.”

Gressman laughs again. “You're obsessed with the war, aren't you? You're missing what's going on here.”

“What's going on here?

“Nothing with the Nazis.”

“Then who?”

“The FBI.”

“What? Why would they follow me?”

“Think about it.” He leans back in his chair. “I was here for Pearl Harbor, you know. You must have still been in school.”

“Columbia.”

He nods. “I don't know what happened in New York, but there was panic here. Crowds running around, troops in the streets. We thought there would be another attack. We thought it was part of something bigger. There were soldiers around all the main buildings. People were hoarding food. And then for weeks afterward there was hysteria about spies. The FBI picked up a lot of people. Mostly aliens, mostly out West. But they grabbed some here, and they put some of the ones they didn't grab under surveillance. Citizens, too. I thought I saw some guys tailing me for a while.”

“You did?”

“Sure. It actually makes sense for them to worry about the clerks. There are no confirmation hearings for us, no background checks; the Justices just bring in whomever they want. So now we're at war and the brass gets antsy, they ask Hoover to send some guys out. See who you're meeting with.”

The lights are up now. We are totally alone in the balcony. In the theater below a uniformed usher sweeps candy wrappers down the aisle. “You really think the FBI would be worried about me?”

I didn't intend a comparison, but Gressman evidently perceives one.
Something flashes in his eyes. “Right,” he says. “I'm a pinko from Brooklyn, but you. Why would anyone check you out? Maybe they just want to know where you got that suit.”

There is a sharpness in his tone that I cannot account for. “There's a man in town,” I say.

“Of course there is.” Whatever it was passes across his face again and is gone. “Look, it's not you. I expect they watch everyone for a bit. It's just that you noticed.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But would they go in my apartment?” I explain about the footprint.

Gressman considers for a moment. “Interesting.” He taps two fingers on his lips. “I don't know. But then again, how do you know how long the print's been there? Maybe it's from months ago.”

I close my eyes, trying to remember. It's true; I can't swear I saw the floor clean before. Maybe when the manager carried out that folded mattress . . . “But what if it's not?”

“Well, it could be someone else. Lots of people would love to know what's going on inside the Court. There's plenty of money to be made if you know how cases are coming out.”

“There is?” I have a hard time seeing how to turn a profit on Constitutional interpretation.

“Sure,” says Gressman. “You know what's going to happen to some corporation, you can trade its stock. The boring business cases, that's where the money is. And there have been leaks. Sometimes Drew Pearson predicts results in the paper. Maybe they're trying to see if you leave confidential memos in restaurants.”