witnes2

1 surprise meeting

1 SURPRISE MEETING

"Charlie Webber?"

He looked up at her from the paper he was reading in the hotel lobby in Philadelphia. She was probably his age. Her hair was neatly coifed and almost white. A smart pale blue suede suit set off her seasoned trimness and complemented her blue eyes. In a face with the look of well earned wear, her eyes reached into his memory. He began to connect them to a name but for a second it did not come.

"Right?" Charles hesitantly said, folding the paper, getting up.

The second passed by the time he was fully on his feet, and there was Kate McQueen again for the first time in more than four decades, a lifetime.

They spoke conventional expressions of surprise and showed the good feeling of the unexpected. They complimented each other on resembling their former selves enough to be recognized.

Kate then wondered if he was staying at the hotel for long. Charles said he had never left the region and lived out beyond the Main Line, not that many miles from their old hometown on the Schuylkill River. He said he was in the city for a meeting of a non-profit board he still belonged to. He was killing a half-hour in the hotel lobby before walking down Broad Street to his meeting. As always, he had allowed extra driving time for the afternoon traffic, which turned out to be unneeded.

He just retired, he told her, after a career as a consultant in corporate "human resources." They used to call it personnel when he started, he said; it became industrial relations before morphing into human resources. He and his wife, Mary Ann, were thinking of a permanent move to southern Arizona--that was only talk for now, though.

"But you, Kate? " Charles said, surprise still on his face. A memory of an intensity from long ago was stirring in him.

After they graduated from college, Kate went to Washington like many young women who wanted a career in the 1950s. She found it in the Civil Service and worked at this agency and that, it seemed, forever. Never married, she said—and moved on without expanding what doubtless was a story. She too was hoping to retire--in a year or so.

Kate thought Charles should remember her older sister from the town when they were growing up--Veronica. Charles nodded as if to say yes. Veronica now lived in Philadelphia. Periodically, Kate took the Metroliner to Philly to see that Veronica was managing. Nothing life-threatening. Just the burdens of being beyond seventy and living alone. Veronica's apartment was small for two, so Kate stayed in town at the hotel when she visited. After she retired from Washington, she said she probably would tie up with her sister somewhere. Maybe at the Quaker retirement village out near Oxford.

"Washington," Charles said. Of course Kate would have gone to Washington. She got hot for politics when they were in college. "So, you stuck with the political scene for a whole lifetime, Kate."

She said the Civil Service of course was not politics. But she confessed that she had not lost her fascination with the business of the City of Washington in all the years. She enjoyed the spectacle of the biggest political extravaganza in the world.

She was there on Pennsylvania Avenue when the caisson carried JFK to Arlington. She watched Nixon's helicopter fly him away from the White House lawn on that last terrible journey in 1974, the day of America's release from the bondage of Watergate. She knew Carter was going to be a lousy president as soon as she saw how sincere he and Rosalyn really were; our greatest ex-president, though, she said. Kate felt entertained in a vaguely wicked way, she confessed, by the conflation of Hollywood and Washington when Ron and Nancy came to town and brought morning to America again. This was despite her view that his conservative revolution had been seven parts entertainment to three parts political substance.

By the Bush years, her capacity for sheer fascination had lessened. Still, she had taken the measure of Bush’s man Norman Schwartzkopf a couple of times, after his Desert Storm fame. He reminded her of something from their college years, the apparent naivete of Eisenhower. Charles groped for a phrase she had attached to Ike in the college paper when she announced for Adlai Stevenson.

"Falsely pious," Kate remembered.

When Charles asked about the Clinton climate, Kate offered a shrug of mock fatigue. Monicagate already was moldering, less than a year after the Senate let the "amiable rake"--Kate quoted a pundit--go free.

She had a perky smirk even as a little kid, Charles now began to recall. By the time they got to college, it had matured into an omnibus look of irony, an adaptable instrument in her arguments with him and others. He watched something reminiscent of it crawl slowly across her face when she said the word "rake."

More and more often these days, he noticed, an unexpected event would collapse time. This time, an aging woman who had interrupted his reading became the girl he grew up with. Without effort he could reconstitute the frisson of their years together in school and then at their small college near the town. He would have to work later at the particulars.

END 1 SURPRISE MEETING

GO TO 2 TOWN KIDS

2 town kids

2 TOWN KIDS

Charles and Kate arranged to meet for lunch next day at a small Italian restaurant around the corner on Locust Street. That evening and into the late-morning drive to center city, Charles leafed through memory. He poked around in mental closets for the equipment to get through an hour with an apparent stranger who brought the surprise of long-gone familiarity.

Walking toward Locust Street from the parking garage, he thought--well, at least there was their common ground, their growing up in the town. It was a steel town like other steel towns along the river. Families from here and there in Europe made it a mixed stew; but the very heterogeneity of origins made kids come together. Effortlessly they created something profoundly local, socially intimate.

Though he lived no more than fifteen miles from the town today, Charles rarely went back to the depleted scene that it had become. The town of their childhood was gone. Yet he still knew its geography, the rhythms of its streets and its open spaces, the massive heart of heat and steel at its core. A map of remembered faces and feelings and events lit up in his mind whenever he willed it into being. He knew that Kate would carry this map in her memory as well as he.

When the steel plant closed years ago, its disappearance symbolized the completion of a whole universe of reference. It lived outside of time for town kids like him and Kate. In some part of their consciousness, they now remained linked to a life they led together, though worlds and years separated them.

Wherever they sustained their bruises and rose to their moments of fulfillment, whenever they faced their particular version of the unfairness that they did not believe in when they were seventeen, each bent, or laughed, or cried with a certain style, unmistakable to one another. It was the artifact of their common origin as town kids. None ever spoke of it because none was fully conscious it existed. It was the turn of phrase, or turn of head, that enabled Charles to identify Kate in the second or two it took him to stand in the lobby when she had confronted him.

But the more he scrolled through memories, the more vivid became a dilemma: Charles realized that he could not meet Kate for lunch as if she were just another generic "town kid" from long ago. He and she had a particular past. She would remember that past as well as he remembered it. She will want to talk about us, he told himself. The thought at first amused him. What did it matter? Still, even now, he wanted to manage something like this appropriately. In his orderly way, he would have liked to arrive for lunch with a clear agenda. He wanted a nice path from the definition of the issue to its resolution, just in time for light dessert and farewell.

When he walked into Luigi's and saw her already seated in a far corner, where they would be able to talk in comfort, he knew how impossible that would be. He would have to field it all ad hoc. I can't say anymore who we really were, Charles thought. He could recreate only traces and fragments of scenes at elementary school and high school. And, of course, from college there was the memory of an intensity—heat rising in the midst of exciting confrontation. The concrete events from which that intensity arose had come back to him in a burst. Charles slipped into his chair beside her at the table, thinking that one way or another the Hiss-Chambers case will get onto the agenda. After all the years. After he and she had become different people.

END 2 TOWN KIDS

GO TO 3 CONFESSION

3 confession

3 CONFESSION

"It's hard to believe," Kate said after they ordered, "we remain the same people for a whole lifetime." Charles raised his eyebrows to ask her to go on. She had been remembering what she imagined to be the first day she had ever seen Charlie Webber. She was six years old and arriving with her mother at Thomson Street Elementary School on the first day. Charlie, she said brightly, was coming up the steps at the same time with his mother. She has been as busy, Charles thought, as I since yesterday, putting us in place in her memory.

"We were in the same classes all through elementary school," she said. "In junior high and high school, there we were, in all the college prep classes."

"And then on to the college for four years," Charles added, neatly completing their educational story.

"So you see, we can remember the same things," Kate said. "That shows we really were there and we really are the same people now."

Charles was thinking differently but decided against contesting the point. She had to get this established, he surmised, before she could go on. He looked at her aslant so that she did not catch him. It was as if he were back to that moment yesterday in the hotel lobby when he could not think of her name, when she was just a well-dressed woman of mature years interrupting his reading. Intensity, yes, he thought again. Palpable, almost, even now.

It took a while for them to come around to talking about college. Before that, they named names of schoolmates and teachers. Miss Dunlap in first grade. Mr. Winworth in sixth grade, their homeroom teacher. Presences shared in their minds, poles around which each of them could define something essential about what they believed they had been, what they now were (as Kate saw it).

Finally, Kate came to the issue she seemed to have brooded about. They were always the brightest students in class, she said, all through Thomson, and then when they were thrown together in classes at the junior and senior high school.

"I have a confession," she said.

"You’re forgiven," Charles replied with a grin and the sign of a blessing before she could say it.

"No, I need to tell you. I used to want to get the best grade every time, and you made it hard. I worked harder than you did in school. I used to go home and work hours to stay ahead. When I got the better grade, I would feel I shouldn't have, that you should have gotten it. When you would beat me out, I'd feel devastated. I was trapped in this double bind in elementary and some of high school."

She finally escaped, she said, when he stopped taking studies seriously for the remainder of high school. She sensed that he changed half way through their junior year, and she didn't have to strive that hard to outdo him.

Charles received this late news about himself--half a century late--with a bemused look. He could almost remember. He could imagine that he competed with her in some off-handed way. He could see himself taking malicious glee from beating her at a game of getting A's. But whatever held between them in school days, it was something else, from college, that crowded Charles's memory as they talked.

Charles said she did have it right about his slacking off in high school. He had a wild time by the gentle standards of the 'forties in the town. The older guys in the Emmet Street gang folded around him and a couple of other kids his age. It was a whirl in his faded memory—large quantities of beer, long nights on the corner, bragging and boasting, taunting tattered gangs from the other side of town. It came down to moving through a ritual out of boyhood. None of the others had the natural interest Charles had developed in learning things in school. When he gave that up in favor of the ritual, none of them knew what a sacrifice he was making. Lacking perspective, Charles did not know either.

"It took the shock of college to show me the waste of my days," Charles said to Kate.

END 3 CONFESSIOIN

GO TO 4 SLIPPERY RIDES

4 slippery rides

4 SLIPPERY RIDES

It was not until she was into her quiche and he his flounder that they got around to college. Even bright kids of the town had limited horizons and restrained ambitions in the years after World War II. Only a fraction of their high school class went on to college. The majority went to work in local factories and offices if, in the case of the men, they did not get drafted or volunteer for the Navy. Korea heated up just as they were graduating.

Most of the college-bound kids headed for Penn State or a state teachers' college. A few, Charles and Kate among them, commuted instead to the private liberal arts college a few miles from the town. The prejudices of the time allowed them to think their choice was the best. Although poorly endowed and limited in reputation, the college was, in fact, academically a challenge for kids with the limited equipment conferred by the town high school.

"That beat-up Plymouth coupe," Charles recalled. "Pre-war." His father had bought it for him to commute the five miles from town to college. Charles paid his father back with summer earnings from his labor gang employment at the steel company. He would park the Plymouth on a grade at the edge of campus so that it would kick-start when the starter failed, as it often did.

"Those slippery rides up Hall Hill in winter," Kate echoed.

She started commuting with him after a hard couple of months riding to campus by a circuitous train-and-bus route. Kate remembered asking him how much he would want for gas if she rode with him. Neither of them could remember the deal.

By the time she started riding with him, Charles was going with Mary Ann. Mary Ann had moved to the town in their senior year of high school. She soon found Charles and abetted his rocky move out of boyhood. Charles never knew whether Kate knew that her riding daily with him was a worry to Mary Ann. He would assure Mary Ann that Kate was like a sister he grew up with. Mary Ann would look at him skeptically, feeling she knew more about women than Charles. Nevertheless, their commute to college became routine. Mary Ann stopped bothering about it after a while.

Their daily commute together ended soon after their Hiss-Chambers encounter. With a second glass of wine before dessert, Charles decided not to wait for her to bring up what happened--he would do it. If she was right--if they were the same people they were then--the Hiss-Chambers matter was a part of the integument of their shared continuity. Now that she was here across from him, making him confront things he had thought he would never confront again, he felt he had to carry on to some conclusion.

Call it an experiment in the science of personal remembrance, he thought to himself. The previous evening, sitting alone in the den, sherry in hand, he felt their Hiss-Chambers thing come back to him in a kind of spontaneous explosion. He did not have to labor back into it.

END 4 SLIPPERY RIDES

GO TO 5 SOCIAL SCIENCE CLUB

5 social science club

5 SOCIAL SCIENCE CLUB

He and Kate began college as History majors. Kate, however, took an introductory course in Political Science with Professor Mahon. His popularity with students arose from the wit with which he surveyed the contemporary political scene circa 1950. It was a liberal wit, warmly ironic. But students sensed it rested on a serious conviction that the conservative strain of American politics was intellectually untenable. For some small-town students endowed with adventurous minds, Mahon looked like the all-knowing tour guide who would take them to sophisticated drama beyond their narrow experience. When Kate heard Mahon's hilarious glosses on cartoons from The New Yorker--a reading requirement in his classes--she could not get enough. She became a Political Science major.

By her junior year, she was president of the Social Science Club. That made her responsible for organizing discussions of issues at monthly meetings. As Charles remembered, she tilted the agenda in favor of the liberal orthodoxy of the time. She and the coterie she joined thought that the anti-Communist frenzy was a form of conservative madness. They took the social welfare program of the ‘thirties as an eternal given. They argued for a stronger United Nations. They mocked the stuffiness of Republicanism, sensing that in some disgusting way the exuberance of twenty-year-olds would stiffen and freeze in its ambience.

Charles was sure that Kate felt through all the activities of her club the gently affirming spirit of Professor Mahon. As a faculty member, he avoided overt partisanship. But the perceived tendency of his mind, tracked assiduously by Kate and her friends in classes, gave them a clear political road map. They knew he would approve.

After Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination came out in 1950, Mahon soon declared its preface canonical. Kate, he recalled, had Trilling quotes at her fingertips. She wagged her finger once at him in the car as she recited by heart: "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." When Charles raised his eyebrow and glanced across the seat at her, she continued: "It's the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation." Even after a half century, Charles thought he could feel the heat of her sincerity and the levity stirring in him. He thought she was going over the edge.

Charles stayed a respectful distance from Kate and her friends without turning away from her. As Kate’s thinking metamorphosed into a sound like someone else’s, glibly limned, he came to realize how differently he was learning to feel about things. He switched his major to Economics when he realized that he wanted to get into a corporate job after college. Professor Smythe, the head of the department, was an unreconstructed free-market thinker. He sanctified the simple supply-demand ratio. Keynes to him was a crackpot—in some lectures, a demon. When references to New Deal and Roosevelt or Truman came into class discussion, he would visibly change, in spite of his effort to remain professorial. Charles watched Smythe’s body contort and his face screw up in distaste whenever a student baited him with a favorable remark about a pump-primed economy.

Smythe did not become the pied piper to Charles that Mahon became to Kate. Charles laughed at Smythe’s cartoonish extremes as often as other students. In the car, he and Kate would swap Smythe anecdotes, one more risible than another. It was their way of swimming together in the warm camaraderie of studentry.

But this did not still in Charles’s mind the growing sense of distance between Kate’s ideas and his. He felt a need for certainty of a kind that conservative economic theory gave him, at least the way he understood it as a novice. To himself he scoffed at Kate’s embrace of trade unionism—what could she really know about international labor organization and its discontents? Smythe’s harping about the insanity of fussing with market forces seemed funny—but Charles had a hard time presenting the Keynesian alternative credibly to himself. Old Smythe seemed to have something; obviously Kate would never see that.

He cringed when Kate derided the stick-in-the-mud style of the political right. It became obvious after a while that she felt current, with it, when she flew a liberal flag and criticized the conformist monotony of middle class conservatives. Still, he knew Kate from years of schoolroom intimacy. He could excuse even as he scoffed, hardly conscious that her capacity for enthusiasm expanded his own.

"Dirksen and Ford, my god, Charlie," she said. "Nixon and McCarthy—they’re too much to believe. Where’s their sense of humor? The world's painted a whole bunch of colors, not just their black and white." Charles normally reacted to her assertions with a look of quiet studiousness, a mask for unstated complexities within.

Kate’s interest in the political scene became well known on campus after she started writing an opinion column for the weekly student paper. This had given her the platform from which to launch her campaign for the presidency of the club. Winning handily, she had vowed to shake up the campus with lively debate.

So, when Whittaker Chambers's confessional book, Witness, came out in 1952, Kate was ready and waiting.

END 5 SOCIAL SCIENCE CLUB

GO TO 6 WITNESSES

6 witnesses

6 WITNESSES

Kate and Charles were in high school, oblivious, when ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers publicly fingered Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviet Union. The drama unfolded before Kate became politically sensitized in college. By then, Hiss’s guilt for perjury and his imprisonment had rigidified rather than changed the opinion of typical liberals. They thought Whittaker Chambers was a crooked little man carrying a warped, gigantic sense of himself--a grotesque. He remained the butt of the liberal press.

Hiss, languishing in prison, remained the wronged son of the liberal left. President Harry Truman called Chambers's initial charges a red herring. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, hearing of Hiss's conviction, said he would not turn his back on him. Harvard experts embraced Hiss in his bid for a new trial. The new Democratic candidate for President of the United States, Adlai Stevenson, had spoken for Hiss as a character witness.

Hiss supporters continued to pick at Chambers's testimony after the conviction. Professor Mahon kept up a running report to his students. He delivered it with an underlying though seldom-spoken anticipation--new evidence any day could show up to overturn the verdict. The "papers" hidden in Chambers's pumpkin patch were fraudulent. Chambers had broken into Hiss’s home and forged letters on his old Woodstock typewriter. He had made a counterfeit typewriter that performed with the same flaws as the original Woodstock. The sequence of events described by Chambers was out of whack. The date he said he left the Communist Party did not mesh with the dates of the papers he purloined from Hiss. Somewhere in all that, Hiss's vindication seemed all but certain.

Most of the students on their quiet campus, far from battle, took little note. But Kate, once she got into it, and her small circle of friends fed the flame of indignation at justice gone wrong. When the Chambers book appeared, it received predictable reviews from the left and the right. It outraged Kate that some reviewers saw honesty and philosophical depth in Chambers's ponderous pages. This was a climactic challenge. Someone had to attack the book frontally on campus. She knew no one better than herself to do the job. Kate scheduled a meeting and drummed up attendance around the campus. Her announced aim was to discuss Witness. Her intent was to destroy it.

Charles initially had small passion for the issue. Kate, however, talked excitedly in the car about the abominable flaws of Witness. He finally promised her he would come to her meeting. She loaned him her copy of the book. He took more time than he could afford to read it through, all 800 pages.

He gradually grew amazed as he plowed on in late hours. Chambers's stately sentences, the careful structure of his thought, his anguished personal testimony, his Quaker rebirth, his portrait of a stoic family under siege of the press, his willingness to destroy himself as a price for exposing the Communist Party, his compassion for the people he exposed, his certainty of the cosmic clash between a godless Communism and a Christian America, his dramatic sense of himself as a player in that clash, his confession and his witness--Chambers's voice rang right in Charles's mind. He instinctively knew the measure of this prose. He therefore felt in touch with the substance of the man who wrote it. The words of Witness seemed to come to him through the conduit of his--Charles's--own mind.

At 2:00 in the morning, rain falling outside, the house deadly quiet, Charles put down the book after reading the last page. He said to himself, "No one could write this book who was not in his heart of hearts an honest person." He did not know how he knew this but he was certain of it.

And he realized he was in trouble. How could he sit quietly while Kate did her demolition job on Witness?

END 6 WITNESSES

GO TO 7 ANGER & SILENCE

7 anger & silence

7 ANGER & SILENCE

Sipping wine and then carefully putting the glass in front of him on the table, Charles said, "Did you see the book recently out by Tony Hiss about his father?" He figured that the way she responded would fix the terms of the experiment.

"Ogod, Charlie, imagine all that excitement and anger long ago, still current through a son's testimony like that. I did read it. I wanted to weep for the Hisses. But I had to smile at us."

She too had realized last night that they would inevitably get around to what happened. Charles felt himself instantly lean closer to Kate. Something like gratitude washed over him--for something not quite expressible, yet, anyway.

So, like archaeologists together, they scraped away the sediment to find pieces of that remembered experience. Over their sorbet and coffee they fitted the pieces together with deliberation. They both wanted to get it just so. Not as it was, but as they saw it now for what it was.

Last night, Charles had wondered whether Kate, after so many years, would still have the same view. We're the same people we were, she had insisted when they had first talked in the hotel lobby.

"I sat last night and tried to picture that meeting room, as well as I could," said Charles. "There couldn't have been more than twenty-five of us there, but I guess I've always thought of it as a vast crowd."

"I think I behaved as if it was a vast crowd," Kate said. "Dr. Mahon shot me up with more self-importance than I should have been granted, if I remember right."

"I remembered that you had them in the palm of your hand. You were a piece of work that night, Kate."

"Ninety percent of them, probably, were my pals. Even so, I prepared like a dog for that speech."

Kate leaned forward and stared at the pepper mill in the center of the table, without seeing it. She tried to reconstruct the shape of her ancient argument, speaking in the flat voice of recollection. "I felt passionately about two points," she said.

One was that the liberal movement had rescued the USA from fascism. She acknowledged that liberalism took some of its nurturance from socialist roots. It was understandable--"I may have said excusable"--if that linked it in some peripheral way to the Marxism of Soviet Russia, our allies in the war. Alger Hiss had done loyal work in helping craft the United Nations. You simply could not dismiss the words of support for his character from the great people of the liberal movement. Two Supreme Court Justices, the Secretary of State, others. Hiss was from a respectable intellectual tradition. Lying of the sinister sort that Chambers was describing was just not in the code of that tradition.

"What did I know, Charlie?" Kate said, turning her face to look frontally at him.

Her second point, felt even more passionately, held Whittaker Chambers to be a knave. Chambers's failure to come clean at the outset about the espionage that he and Hiss allegedly did together was evidence enough of a fatally duplicitous nature. His sappy explanations in Witness would have been laughable if they had not been so maliciously destructive of a good man. In his pretentious prose, he had the gall to crown himself shield of the Republic and defender of the Christian faith. Nothing, Kate argued, revealed better how warped a little man he was, motivated by God only knew what neurotic twist of character, derived from a deviant family. When the courts finally opened the case for the new evidence amassed in support of Hiss, Chambers, she knew, would be unmasked as liar and charlatan.

"Those were the very words, Kate," said Charles. "I couldn't let them stand."

Her old smirk transmuted into something kinder even as it moved across her face. "And you rose to your feet and you denounced me," she said.

"It was you who insisted I read the book. It was like a revelation to me, but not of the sort you hoped for. I didn't rise to denounce you. I rose to say that no such book could come from the hand of a dishonest man. It was too sane and solid, I thought then, to be the concoction of a crackpot."

"To say so was to denounce me," Kate repeated softly to herself.

She had sought last night, she said, to recapture how it felt for a childhood schoolmate and fellow commuter to denounce her in front of her college friends and followers. She had tried to re-enter the feeling she had when she learned, a day or two afterward, that he was taking a room in a dormitory on campus--thus ending their rides together.

"I thought you hated me, Charlie. I thought you didn't want to talk to me again." He saw her as if she spoke through a scrim, looking out at him fuzzily.

"I thought you were so angry at me for contradicting you," he replied, "that you would never want to talk to me again."

They did, of course, talk, but not about the meeting. They knew each other so well that the habit of years carried them forward. The Hiss-Chambers affair, however, never resolved. It remained unfinished through all the time that separated them from their youthful selves, the time that had pushed them on through lifetimes, up to this moment, as they sat composed at lunch, as if in a painting. Charles realized last night that they had never spoken a word about the incident again. Kate had too. Until this moment.

END 7 ANGER & SILENCE

GO TO 8 VARIOUSNESS & LASTINGNESS

8 variousness

& lastingness

8 VARIOUSNESS & LASTINGNESS

"You could not know," she said, "how often I thought about it, long after we left college." He said he probably could know. He too had thought about the passion of that meeting long afterward. In some subterranean channel, he never had stopped thinking about it because it never had come to closure. Kate nodded knowingly.

Talking now, Charles and Kate felt themselves trying to weave a fabric that would enfold the aging persons they were with those ambiguous beings in college.

Charles: "Chambers got to me because of who I was, Kate. Not because he had a persuasive argument."

Kate: "My take on things changed after Johnson was run off the stage in the smoke of the 'sixties."

Charles: "I was a pretty tight-assed kid, craving structure and certainty, whether or not it was credible. Like Chambers."

Kate: "Reagan should have made me sick, but I was ready for him by the time the country swung right."

Charles: "The end of the world seemed possible when we were kids. Fear saturated the air so much we scarcely knew we were breathing it. The war; the bomb; the doomlike cast of the Communist empire; the profit-and-prudery still holding Main Street in thrall. Chambers cast the soul of man and God together and it seemed so accurate then to place hope in them."

Kate: "Hiss wrote a defense of himself in the late 'fifties. I wanted to believe it--I did believe it. Because that's what I wanted. But it tore a small hole in my righteousness. Later I was able to tell myself that I had taken no loyalty oaths."

She smiled sadly when she told Charles of her final meeting with Dr. Mahon after he retired in the early 'eighties. His high good humor remained intact, although his mind had tended toward the porous. Had Kate brought up the Hiss affair, she guessed he might just have shrugged and chuckled. Hardly a shred of their master-follower relationship survived. She knew by then she had moved on to someplace new.

Charles mused about the vicissitudes of living, about raising kids in a tumultuous time of change, about faiths falling and new ones rising, about seeing unthinkable change in the roles of women, blacks, Latinos, and gays ("Still, I lament the loss of the word for other uses"), about the expansion of the zones of social permission beyond their wildest youthful imagining, about the remarkable end of Soviet Russia. It took more than half his lifetime, Charles said, to allow things to enter that would not neatly fit.

"Hiss and his circle were probably dupes of the Soviets," Kate said finally.

"Chambers was doubtless a dupe of his own apocalyptic certainty," Charles said finally.

The shadows on Locust Street outside the restaurant window were growing as their lunch date lengthened toward an end. In the sepia tones cast around their table, Kate and Charles quietly closed the Hiss-Chambers affair. Hiss was never vindicated, and he died a guilty man. The American liberal wing played a useful role despite its naivete, maybe even because of it. Chambers was an absolutist throughout, first for Communism and then for God and Flag--and therefore wrongheaded. When Communism lost, God and Flag didn't win. "The market won," Kate laughed. Charles smiled in agreement.

On the street afterward, outside the restaurant entrance, Charles took Kate’s hands in both of his and looked squarely into her face. She hugged him then, brushing her cheek to his. They had not expected to meet. Nor did they think to meet again. Holding them a moment longer together was the insight they now shared. It took all their lives to make them into the people who could do what they did gently and well today.

"Anyway," Kate said brightly, her girlish smirk restored, "it was mostly about the piss-and-vinegar of being young, don’t you think, Charlie?"

On the way home after they finally parted, Charles was caught in a jam caused by a two-car crash on the Expressway. He was glad for the solitude in the quiet car as he waited for emergency crews to clear the way. It gave him the chance to think. By the time he arrived late for dinner with Mary Ann, he believed he had it about right. Through a chance meeting, Kate had permitted him to complete something in himself. He seemed to have done the same for Kate. It was what nearly anyone growing up in their hometown when they were kids would eventually want to do for another.

Only after some days would the variousness and lastingness of his remembrance lead Charles to think of it as a kind of love.

END 8 VARIOUSNESS & LASTINGNESS