“Absolutely.”
He was handsome enough, goodness knows. He was witty and companionable. They danced well together, a definite indication, he claimed, that they would get along fine in bed. He deferred to her at the conference table, a tonic for her ego. He was rich. Katharine didn’t remember her own mother, who had died when she was nine, very clearly, but she did remember one thing her mother had said: “Katy, it’s just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor one.” This had been said, half in jest, at the dinner table at the end of a polite argument over a bill at Woody’s. Her father was not poor. His salary, as Military Curator of the Library of Congress, was considerably above the average paid government workers. But he was poor according to the standards of people like the Walbacks. It was curious that out of the total advice her mother must have given her, this alone she recalled exactly. Yet she found it necessary to say, since she was resolutely honest, “Raoul, I’m not sure I love you. If I loved you, we’d be on the way to the mountains right now. You wouldn’t have to bribe me with marriage.”
“You haven’t given me a chance, really, to find out whether you love me or not.”
Katharine inspected him as she never had before. You look at a man differently after he suggests that you live with him for the rest of your life. Raoul did everything properly, everything right. His courtliness was a little something extra, like the dimple in the clean buttress of his chin. She had no doubt that their life together would be a symphony of gracious living, as glossy and impeccable as the color plates in Town and Country and House and Garden. Yet when she projected her thoughts ahead, she was disquieted. He would want her to quit her job, and eventually she would have to because there would be children. She would find her political discussions confined to discreet chitchat at receptions, and her research downgraded to equations involving boiled water, evaporated milk, Karo syrup, and pablum. He would want her to live in the Massachusetts Avenue house, at least for a year or two, but she doubted that twenty rooms would be big enough for both her and Raoul’s mother. Or fifty. She would find herself Mrs. Walback, junior, the one who had tried such an odd career, now producing grandchildren for the Mrs. Walback. She wondered whether, at this moment in history, she wanted children at all. The first legacy that a child should have was a reasonable chance to grow up. She said, “Sorry, Raoul, but I’m going to stay Katy Hume.”
He put his hand on her arm. He was so very civilized, Raoul was. She would bet that he never took a girl without verbal permission. “Think it over some more,” he said. “I’m going to ask again. Perhaps if we tried it out—”
“Are you sure that what you want isn’t simply a twirl with a girl?”
“Plenty of girls in Washington,” he said. “What I want is a wife. I’m choosy. I want you.”
“That’s a very pretty speech,” she said. “I’ll put the matter on the agenda.” 5
Katharine Hume’s apartment was as unorthodox, for a young woman, as her job. Dominating the living room, claiming most of two walls, was an enormous L-shaped desk, built to her specifications from drafting-table boards. Books were stacked on the desk. Books rose to the ceiling above it. Books monopolized most of the remaining wall space, and even narrowed the entrance corridor. From her father she had inherited a minuscule estate but one of the finest private military libraries in the country. She constantly augmented it, and acquired an impressive scientific library of her own. She never loaned a book, she never asked for any other gift, and when in New York she spent her days prowling for books on Fourth Avenue as most women scout for gowns and fur bargains on Fifth. On H-Parity Day she was reading a history of the German General Staff, Nettleship’s book on biophthora, and Sturtevant’s papers on the same subject. Her furniture, an old-fashioned sofa with graceful lines, a few still-sturdy Hepplewhite chairs, a Queen Anne lowboy—all was from the family house in Alexandria. The furniture seemed adrift, the individual pieces scattered like lifeboats in a sea of books.
She read through the late dusk until at last she could no longer ignore hunger and was forced to face a penalty of spinsterhood—the dreary alternatives, cook for herself or eat out alone. There is no joy in cooking for oneself. Even the juiciest roast is tasteless unless spiced with a friend’s praise. And eating in the gayest and most intimate French restaurant, alone, is an experience cold and cheerless as spreading a cloth on a marble counter in a bank. What she needed was a roommate, but the apartment wasn’t big enough for both a roommate and her books. That, or a permanent guy. Trouble was, the commission’s security people would frown on either a roommate or a beau unless they were provided with security clearances as aristocratic as her own. That limited the possibilities considerably. As if she talked in her sleep, or brought home classified documents. Being a logical and farsighted woman, she realized that if Raoul allowed her to eat alone often enough, she’d marry him, mother and all.
She had minute steaks in the refrigerator. She had decided to cook one of these, open a can of peas, and dine at her desk, when someone knocked. She supposed it was Callie Kantor, who worked for Interior and lived down the hall and sublimated, so she said, by raising parakeets and walking to work every morning. If it was Callie, she’d invite her out for a lobster dinner. “Come in,” she called, and opened the door.
Major Price came in, bulking ominous and piratical in the shadowed hallway, his cap tilted over his eye patch and scar. He lived only a few blocks away, on R Street, and he had been to her apartment with a few of the others for a Sunday brunch two weeks before. She was not surprised at his call. The relations of seven people who three days a week face each other across a conference table, as equals, are naturally informal. She said, “Sit down, Jess, and I’ll make you a drink. Bourbon?”
“With water. I saw your lights were on. I wanted to talk.”
“Go ahead, talk.” She went into the kitchen alcove and brought out ice and glasses and mixed drinks at her combination tea table and portable bar.
“I want to explain about this morning.”
“Not necessary,” she said. “Felix was right. You gave us all the information we required.”
“I just don’t believe in telling anyone—anyone at all—about future operations. Only ones who should know are the people who have to know to do their jobs.”
She handed him a drink and said, “Sit down, there.” She indicated the sofa. She sat at her swivel chair at the desk so her head was higher than his, an advantage if this talk was to be serious. “That reasoning is valid,” she said, “up to a point. Is there anything else?”
“Yes, there is,” he said. “There was a wing of B-Two-Nines on Okinawa in ’fifty-one. They were briefed to go up the Korean west coast and hit the Yalu bridges. Everybody in the wing was briefed. Not just the nine crews who were to make the strike. The night before the strike we lost a reconnaissance plane up there. Some of the crew bailed out, and were captured. They were good men, I suppose, but they talked. God knows what the Commie interrogators did to them. Anyway, when the nine B-Two-Nines got over the Yalu they were jumped by sixty Migs. We lost three up there, three more were washed out in forced landings in Japan, and one of the three that got back to Okinawa had its hydraulics shot out and blew up after a belly landing. We never ran unescorted B-Two-Nines up to the Yalu again. If we had got those bridges, just at that time—”