The Redhunter (44 page)

“Do you mind, Harry?”

“No. Not really. Go ahead.”

Harry’s voice was quiet, but Alex found in it a trace of encouragement.
He was right—Harry spoke again. “No. I’d like to hear about it. When did you meet my mother?”

Alex poured himself a brandy. “My father brought me to America when I was just seventeen. When you checked in at Columbia
as a freshman in those days—I don’t know whether that was true in your case, but it was certainly true in 1922—a senior student
was assigned to look after you for a couple of weeks. Show you where things are, where you need to go to select your courses.
My senior counselor was the tall, blond, blue-eyed, slightly emaciated Jesse Bontecou. He was a World War One veteran and
had married the summer before his senior year. He was more than merely formal in the care he took of me. Jesse invited me
to his own apartment for dinner. His wife—I find it easier to speak of her so, rather than as your mother—was enchanting,
and thought me especially sad and lonely, a young Englishman with absolutely no one to look after him. They took me for weekends
at his mother’s house on Fire Island—Mrs. Bontecou was a widow, of course.

One night Dorothy had to stay in New York, I forget why. Jesse took me fishing, and at night, sharing his room, Jesse asked
if I liked poetry. I replied by quoting to him—in its entirety—I still remember it—one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, the “I
come to bury Caesar” one. He was enthralled and asked if I would listen to some of his poetry. I did so, avidly. Jesse was
delighted, and from that day until—until four years later, he’d send me a copy of every poem he composed.”

“Yes,” Harry commented. “He kept them all. They filled three bound volumes. Low Library at Columbia has them.”

Alex continued. “His graduation present from his mother, you may or may not have been told—you may have been told and forgotten—was
a month in Europe. I saw them off on the
Olympic
early in June. A great party, a dozen of his classmates and a few from my own class who, through me, had got to know him.

“Exactly one day after they set sail I had a desperate telegram from Jesse at sea. He had got word that his mother had died
of a heart attack. He knew, because we had chatted about it, that I was at loose ends—Father had planned to take me to England
for the summer vacation, but I wasn’t especially looking forward to it and hadn’t made a reservation, more or less waiting
for my father to take the initiative.
The long telegram—you didn’t have ship-to-shore telephone service in those days—asked me if I could go to their house in Fire
Island to look after things. And added that if it suited me, I was welcome to stay there until Jesse and Dorothy got back
in August. ‘
PLEASE CALL MOTHER’S LAWYER AND ADVISE IF YOU CAN DO THIS
.’ The cable gave the telephone number.

“I called my father, who was in Philadelphia. I think he was rather relieved that he wouldn’t have to return to England with
me on the same boat—Father never much enjoyed human company. He said I could return to England for a late summer vacation—there
were sailings every day back then—or, if I wished, I could remain on Fire Island and ‘travel about, get to know something
about New England.’ He sent me a cashier’s check at the Fire Island address.

“So there I was, a—precocious—British student getting ready to enter sophomore year, camped down in a comfortable cottage,
in the middle of June, a lovely beach, trees and rosebushes on either side of the house. The family lawyer, old Mr. Ferguson,
I think his name was, came in to see me, gave me a list of matters to look after, instructed me to forward utility bills and
save all others until Jesse returned, and told me he had signed me up for a guest pass at the Fire Island Club.

“I was deliriously happy. Eighteen years old, with a private dwelling at my disposal, a beach, a village and country club
within walking distance, my father’s fat check in my pocket. I found it a perfect setting to write my first contribution to
the
New Masses,
on the excesses of the capitalist class.”

“Did you use your own name?”

“No. Not because I had any notion that twenty years later I’d be engaged in espionage. But because for all that my father
was a nonconformist, he would not have liked to see an article in the
New Masses
by Viscount Alex Herrendon.”

“Back then the British socialists weren’t all that heated up about Soviet Communism, I know.”

“Correct, but the Communists were a revolutionary order. And Father didn’t want his son associated with socialism of that
type. Anyway, I spent a fruitful and pleasant summer at Fire Island and went back to school in the fall.”

“Your father and mother and I remained close friends after he graduated. In the fall of my senior year Jesse called. He said
he
wanted to talk to me. He came in just after I had made myself some soup. He had been drinking. I thought, Oh, my God, there
has been a family quarrel! He said he wanted to read me a poem he had just composed. I listened, but not patiently. He hadn’t
come to my apartment on Ninety-second Street to read me his latest poem. So I said, after clucking my approval of his verse:
‘What’s the matter, Jesse?’ He reached in his pocket and showed me a letter from a doctor. The language was full of technical
terms, I remember. But its meaning was very clear. Jesse Bontecou was infertile.”

Alex paused. Then he looked up. “Harry, do you want further details? Or can I just say that it was back at the cottage on
Fire Island that spring, spending a few days of concentrated reading there. The call for Jesse came in, a former classmate,
now at graduate school at Harvard. T. S. Eliot was coming to Cambridge and would give two lectures. Chance of a lifetime!
Jesse could meet and talk with the brilliant poet. Dorothy insisted he go. I said I would go back to my apartment in the city.
Wouldn’t hear of it! I was to stay right there and keep Dorothy … company. Jesse would be back in three days.”

“That’s when it happened?”

“Yes.”

“Were you still at the cottage when my father got back?”

“No. I told your mother to tell him I simply had to get back to New York because I hadn’t brought enough work with me.”

“But you saw him after that?”

“Yes. We both thought I should. But six weeks later she called me. She had been to the doctor. I never saw Jesse again.”

SEPTEMBER 1953

The letter was addressed to “Harry F. Bontecou, Class of 1950.” Willmoore Sherrill liked to remind his former students that
they were of junior rank.

Dear Harry,

You are overdue in visiting with me. I remember that you left Washington to spend your Labor Day vacations with your mother
here in New York even in the hectic years 1950,1951, and 1952. This year promises to be more troublesome in the matter of
the Communist world-wide offensive, notwithstanding the happy event of Stalin’s death in March, than any one of the preceding
years, and it is concerning recent events and their meaning that I think you should consult with me. Now, if your plans bring
you to New York as early as September 4, that is the day on which I have agreed to teach an introductory seminar for my students
in the next semester. It would be instructive to them to hear you talk, and instructive for you to hear their questions, and
perhaps my own. But after they are gone I’d wish a few hours with you. We can go to the West End Bar and you can pay the bill
since, without knowing the exact figures, I must assume that an aide to Senator McCarthy is paid more than a mere tenured
associate professor in the department of political science at Columbia. Besides which, you will recall that I was a Trotskyite
at Cambridge in 1935, which datum will justify your dining with me in order to investigate my subversive past. If my understanding
of the ways of Washington is correct (and I teach political science, you will remember), then that would entitle you to reimbursement
for our dinner by the United States Treasury. Advise.

Ever, Willmoore Sherrill

Harry enjoyed the archly idiomatic style and the hortatory voice of his former professor. And he held out for “Willmoore,”
as he had been instructed to call him, sympathy and admiration, and felt also a considerable debt to him. It was he who had
given him advice, in 1948, on how to frame the critical debate with the pro-Wallaceite Tom Scott: an important event on campus.
Mostly, it was Sherrill who—for Harry—had penetrated the shibboleth so popular with the reigning intelligentsia. It was that
the Communists were just another political party, entitled to the same treatment as Republicans or Democrats or, for that
matter, socialists.

Dear Willmoore:

Look, these are hard times for the cause, and I wouldn’t want to stand two hours before twenty of your trained student assassins
to answer questions about Joe McCarthy, which is what they would spend their whole time doing. I ask myself in the morning
when I pick up the paper outside my door: Was there
ever
a time when Senator McCarthy didn’t dominate the front pages? I mean, it makes
no
difference what he does and says, it is blown up into a story, usually accompanied by denunciations in the editorial pages.
And in the
Washington Post,
of course, the almost-daily cartoon by Herblock, whose portraiture is insecure these days: Sometimes, when you see drawings
of Joe McCarthy, you can’t absolutely tell whether he looks like Hitler or like Genghis Khan. Yesterday he was depicted half-shaven,
crawling out of a sewer. So: No, I won’t appear at your seminar, but yes, let’s dine. September 4 is okay. Unless I hear from
you I’ll pick you up at your Fellows’ suite, 7
P.M
.

Harry was on time. Willmoore opened the door dressed with the neat bow tie, wearing an off-yellow shirt, tweed coat, gray
flannel pants, cigarette, as ever, between his fingers.

“Come in, Harry. I just got back from a faculty meeting.” He removed his jacket. “I could use a drink. Next year I’m going
to put in for an increase in salary if I have to attend faculty meetings. You still drinking scotch? One of my students, Henry
Gardiner the Seventh, or maybe Eighth, gave me a bottle as a Christmas present, even though his grades don’t require my subornation—I’d
be giving him a good grade anyway.”

Willmoore retrieved ice from the refrigerator in the little kitchen, poured the whiskey and soda, and waved Harry toward the
leather couch he had become so familiar with as an undergraduate and friend.

“Now,” said Willmoore, sitting himself opposite with his bourbon on the rocks, “let’s get down to business. Your McCarthy
is hurting us.”

Harry decided to stand fast.

“What’s Joe—McCarthy—doing that’s all that different from what he was doing when you were cheering him on?”

“He’s fucking up.”

“People said that back in the Wheeling days, though their language was a little better than yours.”

“Yes, but Harry, listen to this. In 1950 we had a Democratic administration that was in charge of the future of the country.”

Willmoore rose, drink in hand. He liked to stride, forward and back, in the room where he wove his spell on his seminar students.

“Truman accepted Yalta. He went to Potsdam and confirmed the slavery of Poland. His foreign-policy advisers wrote a policy
for China that gave the country to the Communists. They invited an aggression in Korea. Soviet agents stole the secrets of
the atom bomb. Alger Hiss was convicted of spying even while our president was denouncing his prosecution as a red herring.
Henry Wallace captured the left wing of the Democratic Party and, except for a freak, would have cost the election to the
Democrats, hardening the Democratic left and putting them in control of their party. But now?—”

“I know what’s happened now, Willmoore. Yeah, Eisenhower came in, we sort of stopped the North Koreans, and a lot of security/
loyalty risks have been ejected. I guess you can add that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in June, which made a symbolic
point. So what you were saying back then, in June, in your letter to
me—that the general will in America was working to ‘exclude’ the pro-Communists—that’s happened. So shouldn’t Joe McCarthy
get some of the credit?”

Willmoore sat down again. He had brought a folder of newspaper and magazine clippings from a drawer in his desk.

“Now listen here, Harry.”

He opened it on the coffee table.

“Your boss McCarthy writes to Senator Thomas Hennings. What
is
Hennings? He is a Democratic senator from Missouri, a lawyer in private life. Your boss McCarthy is struggling to validate
his basic case made before the Tydings Committee. Something called the Gillette-Monroney Committee is established, to review
your boss McCarthy’s conduct during the Tydings campaign. One of the senators who will decide his fate will be Senator Hennings.
So what does he ask Hennings to do? To
disqualify
himself from the Gillette committee. Why? Because Hennings’s old law firm in St. Louis represents the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. So? The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
editorialized against the Smith Act and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
has attacked—your boss McCarthy,” Willmoore bent his head over his clipping, “ ‘along the same lines followed by the
Daily Worker,’
to use McCarthy’s language.