They were married three months later, and for years, almost until the very end, neither one could imagine ever being without the other.
Now, as Stone packed a small overnight bag, he found that he could not help thinking of what Saul had told him the day before. He thought about the Alfred Stone affair, and he wondered how something so long past could have anything to do with what was now happening in Moscow. He walked over to the stereo and switched on the radio, which was set to his favorite FM classical station.
A piece by Mendelssohn – the Italian Symphony – was just ending, and then the portentous, gravelly voice of the announcer came on, giving an interminable synopsis of Mendelssohn’s life, then continuing, in annoying detail, about Mendelssohn’s E-flat Octet and how it prefigured the classical themes he would later develop, and how restrained his romanticism was, and how–
Stone snapped the radio off. He zipped up his suitcase and ambled over to the tall windows that looked out onto Central Park West. He watched a young woman walk by with a foolishly manicured poodle, then a couple with matching hooded college sweatshirts. He could not stop thinking about the Alfred Stone affair, and he realized suddenly that he dreaded going to Boston.
Alfred C. Stone, professor emeritus of history at Harvard, lived in a comfortable three-story clapboard house on Hilliard Street in Cambridge. It was the house Charlie had grown up in, and he knew all the odd corners, the places where the floorboards creaked, the doorknobs that didn’t quite turn. And the smells: lemon-oil furniture polish, wood fires, the not unpleasant mustiness of a hundred-year-old house.
The house was in a part of Cambridge where academics lived next to old money, where you never flaunted your wealth and you drove dented old Volvos and Saabs and wood-sided station wagons. The neighborhood was at once proper and Cambridge-informal, far enough from the punks and the riffraff of Harvard Square, but close enough so you could walk in and go to the right bank and shop at the right grocery store and maybe pick up an unstylish shirt at the Andover Shop.
Alfred Stone was seated behind his desk in his study, wearing his customary tweed suit, when Charlie arrived. He had been retired for four years, but he always wore a suit, as if he might suddenly be called upon at any moment to teach an emergency class on the New Deal and the Roots of Postwar Liberalism or some such thing.
He had been a handsome man, before his arrest and imprisonment had turned his life upside down, before he had begun to drink too much. His auburn hair was mostly gray now, and his cheeks were webbed with the fine broken capillaries of a heavy drinker. His horn-rimmed glasses, habitually smudged, had carved deep red ridges on either side of the bridge of his nose.
Beside the desk, in a loose heap on the floor, was Alfred Stone’s labrador retriever, Peary. Charlie had found him in the pound and given him to his father as a birthday present two years before. Peary sleepily raised his head, acknowledging Charlie’s presence with a slow wag of his tail.
“I think he has a real soul,” Alfred Stone said. “I’m convinced of it. Look in his eyes, Charlie.”
Charlie looked. Peary returned the look quizzically, gave another wag, exhaled noisily, and sank slowly to the rug.
“He’s a good influence on you,” Charlie told his father. “Why ‘Peary,’ by the way? I never asked.”
“This dog just loves being outside. So I named him after the polar explorer Robert Peary.”
“Peary’s a great name.”
“You know you’re putting on a little weight?”
“Just a little.” Charlie instinctually pinched his waist. “Too much sitting in front of the computer, and not enough climbing.”
“Maybe that’s it. Also, you quit smoking. Drink?” Alfred Stone got up from his desk and walked over to a small bar he’d arranged on top of a glass-fronted bookcase. He lifted a two-liter bottle of cheap Scotch, the liquor of a serious drinker, and turned to Charlie questioningly.
“Not in the afternoon, Dad.”
“Don’t get moralistic on me.”
“I’m not,” Stone said, although he knew he was doing precisely that. “Alcohol fogs my brain in the afternoon.” He added archly: “I need a clear head to fathom matters of national security.”
“Well, I don’t,” the elder Stone muttered, pouring his drink. “Lord knows, nobody’s asked me to do that in almost forty years. Anything interesting these days?”
Stone knew that his father rarely asked about Parnassus, respecting the super-secrecy, and when he did he expected his son not to answer. Charlie replied with a rumor that was all over Moscow and therefore not at all secret. “I think one of the Politburo members has got a bad heart.”
Alfred Stone returned to his desk chair and leaned back slowly. “They’ve all got bad hearts.”
Charlie grunted as he sank into a leather club chair. He liked the light in his father’s study at this time of day. The sun came in at a slant, casting a warm hue over the highly polished hardwood floor, the ancient Oriental rugs, the brown tufted leather couch, its surface scarred by hairline cracks, where Alfred Stone took his naps.
And the floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases, painted white. The shelves of history books that revealed Alfred Stone’s interests: Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Churchill’s history of English-speaking peoples, Acheson’s Present at the Creation, Truman’s memoirs, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.
The walls were cluttered with framed pictures: a black-framed photograph of the young Alfred Stone, beaming with excitement, with Harry Truman (and autographed “with fond regards”); a photo of Alfred and Margaret Stone with Winthrop Lehman, taken at some formal dinner; a silver-framed picture of Margaret Stone, her hair done up in large Mamie Eisenhower curls, smiling knowingly.
“What?” Alfred Stone asked.
Charlie realized that he had muttered something aloud. The sunlight had shifted now, and it was shining directly in his eyes.
“Nothing,” Charlie said hastily, turning his head. “Listen, when was the last time you saw Winthrop?”
“Winthrop? Oh, it’s been years. I know he’s having some party in a couple of days, a publication party for his memoirs or something. I was invited. Weren’t you?”
Stone remembered the invitation, which he’d filed away, planning not to go because he expected to be up in the Adirondacks. “Yes, I was, come to think of it. Are you going?”
“Probably some very high-toned affair. No, I don’t especially want to, but I wish you would.”
“Maybe I will. I …” He shifted again, then moved the armchair, putting a ripple in the carpet as he did so. “There’s something I want to ask Winthrop about, actually.”
His father was still leaning back absently in his chair. “Aha.”
“I ran across something that I think has to do with, you know, with what happened to you. The McCarthy stuff and all that.”
“Oh?” His father involuntarily hunched his shoulders. A nervous tic began in his eyes, the old tic, which afflicted him whenever he was tense.
“I know you don’t like digging all this up. I realize that. But did you ever hear the phrase ‘Lenin Testament’?”
Alfred Stone stared at his son a beat too long, his face frozen, except for the old tic in his left eye, which was now wildly out of control. His reply, when it came out, was hushed: “What?”
“You’ve heard of it, then.”
The elder Stone removed his glasses and massaged his eyes. After a while, he spoke again, this time much more nonchalantly. “You’re the Russia expert. Didn’t Lenin leave some sort of testament behind, criticizing Stalin and so on?”