"I would like to fill out an application for a position with the firm."
Delphine kept on typing.
"You have people who do undercover work, I believe, like mingle with students or go to political meetings. I am referring to collecting information. I want to apply to become an undercover agent. I have a verified alias. I have served in the armed forces. And I have lived abroad in a situation that gave me special depth into the communist mentality."
Delphine was not surprised. They had some thought-provoking individuals walking in unannounced at 544 Camp. This address tended to draw people from a colorful range of backgrounds.
She stopped typing long enough to give the young man an application. He said he had to get back to work at the coffee company around the corner but he would fill out the form and return it in the morning. Then he was gone.
David Ferrie came out of the small back room and said in his routine disbelieving whisper, "Who on earth was that?"
"He has a verified alias."
"Do we have forms for undercover agents?"
"No. It's just a normal form."
"Like height and weight."
"Whatever it says. I don't know."
"Like insanity in the family. Or give us the history of your disease."
"It says whatever you want it to say, Dave. I'm very, very busy."
"How can a person explain his disease on a printed form?"
David Ferrie went into Guy Banister's office, which was empty, and looked out the street-side window, trying to catch a glimpse of the young man whose voice he'd just been listening to. Had he caught something familiar in the tone? Would he be able to match a body to the voice? He looked at the swarm of people moving down the street. Dark folks aplenty, he thought. But no sign of the sweet-voiced boy who wants to be a spy.
In Fort Worth
Even coming back he was a military man. His father was a veteran. His brothers were in the service. My own brother was a navy man. We were a serviceman family. He sent me a regular allotment every month out of his pay and when he heard about my injury, which I said in a letter, he put in for a hardship discharge, as I was disabled from work and trying for six months to collect on my claim. He was stationed in California then and they let him go early in order to help his mother. This is the injury of a candy jar falling off a shelf that four doctors have taken x-rays of my nose and face and there is travel time and carfare and the store is still holding tight to their cash. I am a disabled woman who can't collect. It is like the days of Mr. Ekdahl, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account who fixed it so my welfare was ignored.
I am leaving out Lee had a beautiful voice and sang beautifully at age six in Covington, Louisiana. He sang a solo in the Lutheran church, "Silent Night," and that can be verified.
Now this boy comes home from the service and says he will work on a cargo ship and send money home to me. That was our only conversation over three days where he slept on a cot in the kitchen, which was the only place I had for him, plus he told me that he passed his high-school-level tests, Mother, which I don't know why you need this to lift crates on a boat. He was here only parts of three days before packing a bag and leaving. Then I received a letter postmarked New Orleans that he has booked passage on a ship to Europe. It is painful to accept, your honor. There is nothing in the letter that says cargo. There is nothing about he will work his way for a certain time until I have found a larger place for us to live. It is, "I have booked passage." It is, "My values are very different from Robert's or yours." It is, "I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand."
It is the struggle hanging over my life that made him go away.
Postcard #3. Aboard the freighter SS Marion Lykes bound for Le Havre. The oddball loner has little to say to the three other passengers on the sixteen-day crossing. Gray seas, high swells, missed meals. He tells them he is going to school in Switzerland but doesn't mention the name of the institution or the course of study he plans to follow. He avoids a passenger's friendly attempts to take his picture. She is a nice enough lady whose husband is a lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, retired. You'd think in the middle of the ocean he'd be able to sit on deck without answering questions from some clear-eyed military type. He talks least of all to the fourth passenger, his cabin mate, a boy just out of high school and on his way to France to study French. He is a Texas boy and just close enough to Lee outwardly to be the world's preferred version of the type.
It is like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.
He watches them at dinner in the officers' mess and he thinks he knows why they look so satisfied with themselves. They have begun to feel the bond of being American. They almost glow with self-awareness, headed for foreign shores, surrounded and attended by a partly foreign and mainly dark-skinned crew, delighting in their own straightforward and affirmative ways, their democratic values, their moral strength, the way they hold their knife and fork, smiling over the glitter, and this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation.
The spiral rind of a tangerine sits in a white saucer in front of him. He thinks of the nine months he spent at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in California, after Japan. He continued his Russian studies, learned some Spanish (it was the time of Fidel Castro) and developed a neat little deception for the venture he was now engaged in.
At the base library he found a catalogue listing the names of colleges abroad. He scanned the list for obscure schools in certain locations, then wrote away for an application. Albert Schweitzer College. Churwalden, Switzerland. He needed to invent a reason to travel abroad because a Marine has two years in the reserve after active duty.
On the application form he listed under special interests: Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology, Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.
Vocational interest (if decided upon): To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.
In certain light the sea goes green, a slow dullish tumble he watches from the deck. When he goes below again he lies on his bunk, aware of the great slow creaking of the ship, like a mind stirring around him. Hawsers are ropes for mooring.
On the Albert Schweitzer application he made it a point to mention that after the term was completed he planned to attend the summer session of the University of Turku-Turku, Finland.
Hidell creeps closer to the East.
19 June
Mary Frances parked under an oak tree on the circular drive outside the College of Education Building, or Old Main. It pleased her that Win's office was in the oldest building on campus. The building pleased her with its arched entranceways and two-story columns. Den ton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees-all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard. Being happy was a small awareness, the sum of small awarenesses, day by day, minute by minute, and you knew it now, in the hair and skin as much as in the heart.
Suzanne sat next to her mother, arms at her sides, slim white legs pointed straight out, a show'of mock obedience. They were not talking to each other.