Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

I should perhaps have left the table then, or minutes before, or never been at the table, but I thought, still trying, there must still be some way, some way to repair this. And one of the other guests said, pacifically, Well, you know, they may not have deliberately suppressed them. The documents may just not have been found till now, in all those boxes. And I said, very slowly, This is the nineteen-eighties, here we are at lunch, but if we are talking about any documents at all, the sort of documents you mean are the Protocols of Zion. Well, Sylvia edged a little away, and the other guests became rather intent on their eating. Diana said, I should perhaps have studied the matter more deeply before I speak, because with your background, your heritage, you would be sensitive to all the implications. And we were, how to put this, we were still at this point, friends. I said, Look, it’s not a matter of background. I should hope I would know enough, feel obliged to know enough, about this matter in our century, no matter what my background was. And it went on, this edgy, awful conversation, and the point is, I did not leave. I argued, but I did not leave. Later, when Diana walked me to the courtyard, I was still trying. I said, I’m sorry, your poor daughter, she must have been surprised to have set off such a stormy discussion. Diana said, No, it was my fault; I should have studied the matter more deeply, so that I had the documentation when I spoke. I said, Diana, there is no documentation. She said, again, something about my background. I said, It’s not a question of my background. There was, after all, the catastrophe of the six million. She said, Even if it was only three million, I should be more careful what I say. The clear implication of her three million was derisive, as though the actual quantity were fewer and she was being generous. I said, Look, I don’t want to haggle over millions. Some people have begun to say that there were no millions at all, that the whole story is untrue, a conspiracy of Zionists and bankers. Now she said, Yes, and in a way I am more concerned with the millions of Russians, for instance, who died also; but who received much less publicity.

He said, Kate, give me your flight number. I’ll meet you at the airport. We need to spend some time together. He said other things as well.

This is how it began. The turning point at the paper, as it happened, was the introduction of the byline. There had always been bylines, of course, but only on rare stories and those of the highest importance. Sometime in the early sixties, the paper began to put bylines on nearly all stories, by everyone. No one could have predicted where this would take us. It seemed, at first, a step in the direction of truth, of frankness. Part of every story had always been, after all, says who? But the outcome, in retrospect, was this. From anonymous reporters, quoting, as a matter of the highest professionalism and with only the rarest exceptions, from named and specific sources, we moved gradually, then rapidly, to the reverse: named reporters, with famous bylines, quoting persons, sources, who remained anonymous. There were several results. The reporter himself, with his celebrity, his byline, became in many cases the most powerful character, politically and otherwise, in his own story. The “sources” lapsed, became sometimes highly placed officials floating as facts rumors to which, like pollsters, they wanted to test a reaction, sometimes disenchanted employees or rivals, trying to exact a revenge, or undermine a policy, or gain an advantage, sometimes “composites,” a euphemism for a more or less fictional character introduced for some specific purpose of the reporter’s own; finally, perhaps inevitably, absolute fictions, inventions of the reporter’s to enhance his byline, meet completely new journalistic pressures, advance his own career. Within a period of months, three of the most important newspapers in the country printed stories that were absolute fabrications. The first of these, which invented a child and implied that he was typical of a whole, heretofore unrecognized category of children, was the most obviously false. Any editor, any reader whose intelligence, whose common sense, had not been blunted by the new appetite for this sort of investigation, would have recognized at once that the story was not and could not be true. But first, they tried to get it a prize, and got it. Then they called it a hoax (not the mot juste, surely); and went on to say that the story existed, somewhere, just not in this instance, that they were the victims of on the one hand a hoax and on the other a vendetta, and that they would find the true instance of just such a child. Finally, they spoke of the talent for fiction. What an odd notion it was that fiction was just a matter of getting facts completely, implausibly wrong.

And here we come upon the oddest thing. What it was that people were actually caught at. Falsifying laboratory results. Falsifying medical credentials. Falsifying degrees. Falsifying military records, personal histories. And it was not, it was never , though this was supposed to be an era of investigative reporting, it was never journalists who caught the falsifiers at all. And, though this was supposed to be as well, the age of information retrieval, when everybody’s records were on file in everybody else’s computer, everywhere, people risked their falsifications, and were never caught by computers, either. And, of course, in a way, this was not entirely a bad thing. Because, since well before the earliest days of the republic, it had always been a tradition, first a frontier and then an immigrant tradition, that there should be crannies of identity, that a man should be free to make up, in this free country, a new life and a new name.

Well, sometimes it may be just a matter of hanging around until the breaks can find you. The brakes? No.

This is about a murderer with whom I recently had lunch. I had never met him. His trial had been widely covered in the press. He had been convicted, but not yet sentenced. My view, and Jake’s, was that he was guilty, but that the evidence against him had been fabricated; that he had done it, in other words, but nonetheless been framed. The host for this lunch was a designer. He asked me, I think, on an impulse. I hesitated. But what kind of journalist, what citizen of my time am I, I thought, if I take it that just because a man has been found guilty of murder — specifically, attempted murder, of his wife — he is in fact guilty; and even if he is, what kind of journalist am I not to see such a person, once, at lunch. I had also this relation with the host, Billy Warren. Eight months before, he had invited me to dinner, in honor of old friends — a couple who were in town only briefly, from abroad. That day, that very day, when I came in from my country house, I had found on the door of my apartment a Notice of Eviction, paragraphs of which had been encircled by our landlady, who had perhaps again been drinking, in nail polish of a particularly vivid red. I was going to take the train back to the country that same evening after dinner. Somehow, I arrived at Billy’s apartment early. Well, not early, but fifteen minutes after the time I had been asked for, which in that group meant I was by far the earliest guest. The host was still buttoning his cuffs when I arrived at his door, carrying my little suitcase. I’ve been evicted, I said, a little breathless. Billy blanched, then said chivalrously, and with real kindness, Do you need money? I didn’t, but what a kind reaction, especially since he must have thought from the suitcase that I had some thought of moving in.

Anyway, when I went to Billy’s lunch, I arrived fifteen minutes late, and again that was too early. This time, not even the host was there. The cook, or in any event an employee who was cooking something in the kitchen, let me in. The sole of my shoe had been loose for days, now it was flapping. As I waited, it occurred to me to ask the man in the kitchen for some glue. He found some Elmer’s Glue-All. I carried it to the living room, to a place well away from the carpets, near a window. I took off my shoe, glued the sole, put the shoe back on. And some of the glue dripped from the sides. With a Kleenex from my purse, I wiped the highly polished floor boards. This left the polish dimmed. It seemed clear to me that a wet cloth was required. Carrying my shoe in one hand, Kleenex and Glue-All in the other, I crossed the carpet back toward the kitchen. The doorbell rang, the door opened, and the murderer walked in. We introduced ourselves. I said, I can’t shake hands, you see, because I’ve been, my hands are. I let that sentence lapse. With shoe back on, and a wet rag in my hand, I returned to the dimmed boards near the window, and began to wipe them off. Though the window was closed, there were some leaves scattered on the floor. I had wondered briefly, when I came in, whether they had blown in earlier, or whether they were from a houseplant which had for some reason been removed. I ignored the leaves, and concentrated on the spot, which was in fact dull, or at least less shiny than the highly polished floor around. Then, I turned to the murderer, shook hands, said, How are you? We sat on a sofa. I asked, Where are you staying now? He said, Well, I’m not in the penitentiary yet. I said, No, I meant was he living in Boston, where his house was and his trial had taken place, or in New York. In New York, he said, I’ve had enough of Boston, thanks very much. A silence. I said, Does nobody talk to you about anything else? He said, Well, they’re going to talk about nothing else when I’m not present, so I might as well talk about it when I am. Face it, you see, I’m a vedette.