And why not? Maybe because he was confused himself.
“What did you mean,” Walter asked, interrupting him, “about Dipe never doing anything by accident? You mean he came after you? Purposely?”
The old man leaned back in that Essene chair, that hard untenable rack of a chair, and leveled a contemptuous look on him. “Don’t be a jerk, Walter — of course he did. Some of those guys we knew in G2 stayed on after the war and wound up in some pretty high places. Depeyster kept in touch.”
“So you were a spy,” Walter said, and the emotion was gone from his voice.
Truman sat up, cleared his throat and turned his head to spit on the floor. For a long moment he fiddled with the rubber band that held his hair in place. “If you want to call it that,” he said. “They convinced me. Made me see the light. Them and Piet.”
“But—” Walter was defeated, his last hope a fading contrail in a leaden sky. The rumor was truth. His father was shit. “But how could you?” he insisted, angry in his defeat and loud in his anger. “I mean how could anybody convince you — words, how could words convince you — to, to screw over your friends, your own wife, your”—it still stuck in his throat—“your son?”
“I was right, that’s how. I did what I did for a higher principle.” The old man spoke as if he had no problem with it, as if it hadn’t destroyed his life, taken his family, made him into a drunk and an exile. “There might have been people like Norman Thomas around, people like your mother, but there were also devious little shits like Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, who set us all up, traitors and crazies like Greenglass, Rosenberg, Hiss, who just wanted to kill everything we had in this country — and they were right there in the Colony too. Still are.”
“But your own wife — I mean, don’t you have a conscience? How could you do it?”
The old man was silent a moment, regarding him fixedly over the lip of the bottle. When he spoke, his voice was so soft Walter could barely hear him: “How could you?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Your wife — what’s her name?”
“Jessica.”
“Jessica. You lost it with her, didn’t you? You fucked her over, didn’t you? And for some reason you can’t even name.” Truman’s voice came on again, caustic, harsh, a snarl that overrode the wind. “And what about Depeyster Van Wart—‘Dipe,’ as you call him. He’s your man now, isn’t he? Screw Hesh. Fuck the old man. Dipe’s the one. He’s more your father than I am.”
The old man’s eyes were bright with malice. “Walter,” he whispered. “Hey, Walter: you’re already halfway there.”
Walter suddenly felt weak, terminally exhausted, felt as if he were going down for the count. It was all he could do to rise shakily from the chair. “Bathroom,” he murmured, and staggered toward the back room. He tried to walk tall, tried to throw back his shoulders and tough it out, but he hadn’t gone five steps before his feet got tangled and he slammed into the doorframe.
Bang. End of Round Two.
For a long while Walter knelt over a bucket in the frigid closet that served the old man for a bathroom, his insides heaving, the sweetsour stench of his own guts overpowering him. There was another smell there too, the smell of his father, of his father’s shit, and it made his stomach clench again and again. His father’s shit. Shit in a bucket. Christina and Jessica. Truman and Walter.
There was a barrel of water in the kitchenette. Walter cupped his hands and splashed some on his face. He put his mouth to the tap and drank. Outside, the night went on. The old man, rock-still in his chair, meditatively sipped his drink. Walter shivered. The place was cold, though Truman had stoked the stove with coal till the iron door glowed on its hinges. Walter crossed the room, picked his parka up from the floor and shrugged into it.
“Going someplace?” the old man said, faintly mocking.
Walter didn’t answer. He plucked his cup from the arm of the chair and held it out for the old man to fill, glaring so hard Truman had to look away. Then he shook a Camel from the old man’s pack, lit it and settled back in the chair. It would go three rounds, he could see that now. Then he could take the plane back to Van Wartville and he’d be free of his ghosts forever—Father? What father? He never had a father—damaged, but free. There was another possibility, of course. That the old man would triumph. Lay him out. Crush him. And then he’d board that plane with his tail between his legs and go on home to a life scrambled like a plate of eggs, pursued and haunted till he died.
“You’d do it again,” Walter said finally, jabbing, probing, “you were right, a patriot, and my mother, Hesh and Lola, Paul Robeson himself, they were the traitors.”
Truman brooded over the bottle. He said nothing.
“They got what was coming to them, right?”
Silence. The wind. The snow machines. Muffled shouts. Dogs.
“The children too. I could have been there that day, your own son. What about the children playing in front of the stage — did they deserve it too? Do patriots beat the shit out of Communists’ children? Do they?” Walter was reviving, coming alive again, so hot for the fight he forgot which side he was on. Let him refute that, he thought. Let him convince me. And then I can rest.
Truman rose with a sigh, stirred his drink vaguely and then crossed the room to where his own coat — animal skin, just like the Eskimos’—hung from a peg. He took down the hat that hung above it, a Sergeant-Preston-of-the-Yukon sort of affair, leather and fur, with earflaps pinned up like wings, and dropped it on his head. He circled the chair twice, as if reluctant to sit, and then, mashing the hat down low over his eyes, he eased himself down again. “You want black-and-white,” he sighed. “Good guys and bad guys. You want simple.”
“ ‘I was right,’ you said. ‘I loved her,’ you said. So which was it?”
The old man ignored the question. Then he looked up suddenly and held Walter’s eyes. “I didn’t know she was going to die, Walter. It was a divorce, you know, that’s how I saw it. Happens every day.”
“You twisted the knife,” Walter said.
“I was young, confused. Like you. We didn’t shack up in those days, you know, we got married. I loved her. I loved Marx and Engels and the Socialist revolution. Three and a half years, Walter — it’s a long time. It can be, anyway. I changed, all right? Is that a crime? Like you, like you, Walter.
“Your mother was a saint, yeah. Selfless. Good. Righteous. Those eyes of her. But maybe too good, too pure, you know what I mean? Maybe she made me feel like shit in comparison, made me feel like hurting her — just a little, maybe. Like your Jessica, right? Am I right? Goody-good?”
“You’re a son of a bitch,” Walter said.
Truman smiled. “So are you.”
There was a silence. Then Truman went on. He’d been wrong to hurt her so deeply, he said, he knew it, and this life was his penance, this talk his act of contrition. He should have just left, got out. He should have warned her. But for a year and a half he’d been meeting secretly with Depeyster, LeClerc and the others — vets, like himself — and he’d fed them information. It was no big deal — minutes of the association, who said what at party meetings — nothing, really, and he didn’t take a cent for it. Didn’t want it. He’d turned around, one hundred eighty degrees, and he believed in his heart that he was right.