Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I swallowed. Of course he hadn't intended anything—when you've got a bad conscience, even "hello" is a double entendre. I tried to imagine what Ferdie was hearing, from what I was saying. It seemed to me that I was giving an excellent performance of the wife who has something to confess but can't quite get the words out of her mouth, and maybe down inside my head somewhere that was what I was trying to do-to make Ferdie at last so suspicious that he would come right out and ask the questions that I would have to answer.

Only Ferdie wasn't getting suspicious. He was, if anything, getting tenderly, forgivingly amused at his flutter-brained wife who couldn't seem to remember what it was she was talking about. "Ferdie," I said, "there's something I wanted to talk to you about.

You see, I've been—oh, what is it, Amy?" I asked, irritated, as she appeared in the doorway.

"Mrs. Kennedy is here to see you," she said.

"Oh, hell," I said. On the phone I could hear Ferdie's fond chuckle.

"I heard that," he said. "You've got company. Well, dear, at the moment we're double-parked in front of the club, and maybe you can hear the horns blowing. Let's talk later, all right?"

"That will be fine, darling," I said, frustrated, scared . . . and mostly relieved. Some day I would have to say it all to him, every word, every truth . . . but, praise God, that day was not yet. And when Jackie came in to tell me that she was going to carry me off to dinner—"Just family, really, but we want you to join us"—I accepted with gratitude.

It wasn't really a family dinner—none of the children were there-not even in the sense of political family, although Jack Kennedy's principal aide and his wife were at the table, because the only other guest was our old friend Lavrenti Djugashvili. Good host and gracious guest, sure, but I was surprised to see him, all the same. That made my presence a little easier to understand, because Lavi was a single man that evening and Jackie didn't like an unbalanced table. "No, dear Nyla," he said, kissing my hand, "tonight I am bachelor, because Xenia has gone back to Moscow to make sure our daughter is taking proper vitamin pills at boarding school."

"So what we are going to have," the senator said, "is just a normal informal dinner, because we've all had all the excitement we need today. Albert! See what Mrs. Bowquist would like to drink."

It isn't just wealth. Ferdie is just about as rich as Jack Kennedy, but when we have a normal, informal family dinner we don't usually have it in the dining room with a butler handing the dishes around. We have it in the breakfast room, and Hannah the cook usually puts the dishes on the table in front of us. The Kennedys were never that informal. We had our cocktails in the drawing room, with the portraits of the senator's three deceased brothers looking down at us, and when we went into the dining hall there were old Joe and Rose looking down at us in oil from that wall. The wines were all estatebottled, and the silver wasn't silver. It was gold.

And, actually, the whole thing did just what Jack Kennedy said he wanted it to do. It made the world real again. It was exactly the kind of small dinner party that marked a hundred nights of every year for me, even to the talk about the weather (hurricane on its way, rain expected to get worse) and Lavi's daughter's school grades, and how truly beautifully (Jackie told me again) I had played the Gershwin, and what a pity it was that the audience had been distracted.

The ambassador took me in, handsome blocky Russian face cheerful and admiring of my dress, the flowers on the table, the wine, the food. I'd always liked Lavrenti, partly because he really enjoyed music. It wasn't always the kind of music I understood. I'd gone once with him to hear some traveling troupe from Soviet Georgia, fifty squat, dark, handsome men bellowing out a-capella songs that seemed to be made up mostly of roaring, with interjecdons of Hai! and Hey! every few seconds. They were not my cup of tea, but Lavi's eyes were misting when we left; and I'd seen him affected just as much from the stage, while I was doing the Prokofiev Second. Which says something; because there's marvelous musicianship in that concerto, but the fraction of any audience that finds it touching its heart is minute.

And for nearly an hour we stayed off the subject of the other United States of America's invasion, and especially the subject of my Dom.

Jackie kept it going. She and Mrs. Hart were helping with a fund raiser for Constitution Hall, and the two of them had amusing stories about how Pat Nixon wanted to bring in a country-and-western group, and Mrs. Helms had a pet tenor from Southern Methodist University she wanted to give exposure to. As we were starting on the guinea hen and wild rice Jackie looked over at me and said, "Shall we really rock them, Nyla? Would you like to come and do something like the Berg?"

The senator shifted position uncomfortably—his back was obviously bothering him again—and complained, "The Berg? That's that squeaky-squawky one, isn't it? Do you really like that, Nyla?"

Well, nobody really "likes" the Berg concerto-I mean, it's like "liking" a rogue elephant. You have to pay attention to it, whether you like it or not. But it's a show-off piece, so I need to do it once in a while to keep the other guys impressed. And I can't do it very well at home, because Chicago's Orchestra Hall isn't up to it. It's fine for, say, the Beethoven or one of the Bruchs, which are so melodic and rhythmic that the orchestra doesn't really have to hear itself. But they need to for something like the Berg, and Orchestra Hall's acoustics aren't good that way.

While I was explaining all this to Jack Kennedy, I could see that

I didn't have his attention. His eyes were on me, but they were looking right through me, and he was stirring the wild rice around with his fork instead of eating. I assumed it was his back. So did Lavi. "Ah, Senator," he cut in, with that Russian-bear good humor that he used for sympathy, "why not come to Moscow to see doctors? Our Djugashvili Medical Institute, named for grandfather, not me, has best surgeons in world, no question!"

"Will they give me a new back?" Kennedy growled.

"Spinal transplant, why not? Have Dr. Azimof, best transplant man in world. Has done three hundred eighty-five hearts alone, not counting livers, testicles, I don't know what all. Have saying in Moscow, when world's first successful hemorrhoid transplant is done, Itzhak will do it!"

I laughed. Jackie laughed. Everybody around the table laughed, except the senator. He smiled, but the smile didn't last. "Sorry, Lavi," he said. "I'm afraid my sense of huma isn't working very well tonight." He put down his fork and leaned across the table. "Gary? Did you say they were flying Jerry Brown in—I mean, our Jerry?"

"That's right, Senator. They located him in Maine, but his flight was delayed on account of the weather."

The senator grimaced, rubbing his back. "Tell me about the weather," he said, waving to the butler to take his plate away. "God knows what use Brown will be," he commented, "but I guess he can at least give us some background on his opposite number, over there."

Hart chimed in, "I wish we had a better line on those other guys. Maybe we could find some more of their doubles here and get them in on this."

Neither of them were looking at me, but Jackie was. "Nyla," she said, "you know Dom DeSota, of course." And I figured out why I had been invited. Without ever saying an overt word, Jackie was giving me honorary status as a wife-anyway, a what-you-might-call fiancee. She could not have treated me better if Dom and I had been married. She might not have treated me as well, if Dom and I had been married, because Dom's reputation was thoroughly beclouded— Or maybe not, because she went on, "I think you spoke to him not long before he left for Mexico." Tactful! But Dom's chief aide must have been talking. "I wonder if he said anything about the reason?"