Mr. Jones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Front Cover

  Half Title Page

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Specifics

  Author Bio

  Back Cover

  Also by Margaret Sweatman

  The Players

  When Alice Lay Down with Peter

  Sam & Angie

  Fox

  Copyright © 2014 by Margaret Sweatman.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Cover image: detail from Grand Central Station (1950) by Harold Roth, courtesy of Anton Alterman/Harold Roth Photography.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sweatman, Margaret, author

  Mr. Jones / Margaret Sweatman.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-914-3 (bound). — ISBN 978-0-86492-783-5 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8587.W36M57 2014 C813’.54 C2014-900119-3

  C2014-900120-7

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage, and Culture.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For my mother and father

  And you say, “Oh my God

  Am I here all alone?”

  — Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965)

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Blue Sea Lake, Summer 1953

  Emmett Jones watched his wife, Suzanne, in evening sun so strong he couldn’t make out the gold stitching on her yellow dress, though it was a detail he’d memorized. He was wishing the sun would set. He was thirty-three years old, impatient for the pleasures of the night, optimistic at dawn. Right now he felt intensely lonely.

  They were entertaining the undersecretary of state at External Affairs, Bill Masters, and his wife, Ethel, on the lawn that ran down from Suzanne’s cabin to the white stone at the shore of Blue Sea Lake.

  Suzanne had been listening to Bill Masters talk when she’d suddenly stood up and, with visible effort to calm herself, suggested, “Let me sweeten your drink, Bill.” Emmett looked at Suzanne’s lightly tanned cleavage, then down to her hips, to her knees, pressed together, suggestive yet gracious, wifely. She leaned over her Cape Cod chair and stretched her hand out toward Bill.

  Bill Masters held his glass out to her, its ice half melted around a slice of lemon, without interrupting his steady stream of talk. “The prime minister agrees with me,” Bill said with leering, wheezy confidence. “I told him, ‘Mr. St. Laurent, we’re going to put Emmett Jones through the most intensive, the most exhaustive, the most thorough investigation that any man can be put through, short of skinning him alive.’”

  Suzanne, her voice hardening like burnt sugar, asked Bill, “The same?”

  “You’re gonna look clean as a razor when we get through with you.” He gave Suzanne a glance — “Yeah, please, that’s fine” — and returned his attention to Emmett. “We’re gonna tell Security, ‘Go to it, boys, and take your time. Run him through his paces. You’ll see. Mr. Jones is an open book.’”

  The Joneses’ baby daughter, Lenore, planted on a white blanket on the grass, watched Bill’s mouth. She was drooling, a pearly flow bubbling over and soaking her undershirt.

  Sleep pooled in Emmett’s brain, towing him under. He stood up and held on to his chair till the dizziness passed. Suzanne came behind him, brushing her hand across his back. “I’ll put dinner on,” she said, her fury apparent to him alone — though perhaps also to the ears of the undersecretary’s wife, Ethel; maybe Ethel’s ears were tuned to female frequencies, where Bill’s were not.

  Ethel sat on a lawn chair with her ankles crossed, wearing a rayon paisley dress and stockings, despite the heat, and sporting beige, rubber-soled shoes with open toes, ready for the treacherous, grassy terrain by the lake. She was overheated. Thirty years in Ottawa and Ethel still dreaded being left alone with the men. She’d had a vegetable garden back in Moose Jaw when she and Bill were first married; she grew onions and garlic, radishes and rutabagas. Ethel watched helplessly as Suzanne gathered little Lenore onto her hip and stalked across the lawn toward the cottage.

  Emmett Jones knew how mad his wife was because she’d forgotten to refresh Bill’s drink. He went to the butler’s wagon and checked the ice.

  Bill kept talking. “We’re going to give those bastards down in Washington more dope than they’ll know what to do with.”

  Emmett felt a surge of fury at the mention of Washington, at the gall of the Americans pushing External Affairs into investigating him, investigating one of their own. He turned his back to Bill and held aloft a bottle of gin. “Tonic or vermouth?”

  “Let ’em into every corner of your life, Jones,” Bill went on, oblivious. “Vermouth. Tell ’em everything, every bolt and screw.” He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees. “You still got your tonsils?”

  “Yeah. In fact I do.”

  Bill clapped his hands once, like a football coach. “Attaboy.”

  “What would you like, Ethel?” Emmett asked, turning to her. Ethel told him, with surprising energy, that she wanted a glass of water. In his exhaustion, he wished to protect Ethel, put her in a crate and mail her back to the nineteenth century where she belonged. When he delivered her a glass of water drained from the ice bucket, she gave him a desperate smile, embarrassment and sympathy in her brown, spaniel eyes. He made two martinis, added the twist, gave one to Bill, and quickly drank the other without speaking.

  “It’s what we’ve gotta do,” Bill persisted.

  Emmett took in the grounds surrounding the cottage —Suzanne’s cottage really, through her mother — the docks and boats and white pine that seemed to inhale the long sunlight. The place spoke of money with casual discretion, superbly beautiful. Bill had stopped talking and was holding his martini to his shapeless lips, refusing to take a sip until Emmett had capitulated, had agreed — he only had to tell External “everything” and he’d be in the clear; External would leave him alone and let him get on with his life; the Americans would back off.

  The rustle of aspen. Purple, silkily rolling waves from the white tail of a boat’s wake struck the shore. The long U-shaped dock composed of symmetrical planes of greying wood was a shrine to good taste, a discreet Canadian shrine. No obvious shrine paraphernalia, other than the butler’s wagon filled with gin that he’d rolled out onto the lawn at Suzanne’s request. No white paper pennants on sacred rope between the Jack pines, as there would be on Mount Fuji, paper pennants linking Japanese sugi trees. Sugi wouldn’t survive in this country, and he missed them, the supple Asian trees, and then he thought of his father, and his father’s Japanese mistress, and the mountain behind the house in Shioya near Kobe, where he grew up, where his father’s mistress had lived. He thought of the quietude of that house in Shioya, the Japan
ese insistence on stillness, on purity of form and intention — a pose. But here in Ontario, he thought, people pretend not so much to purity as to goodness, a family compact, an assumption of class, a birthright, a powerful, profitable delusion.

  Bill Masters was waiting. “Can’t say you’ve got any choice in the matter. Get the investigation over with, and you’ll feel a whole lot better.” Then he knocked back the martini.

  Suzanne called from the cottage: dinner was ready or would they like another drink? Bill held up his empty martini glass for a refill. But Ethel rose and swooped, deftly scooped Bill’s glass and turned so swiftly, she bumped her broad satiny hip across Bill’s Presbyterian nose. Bill followed her with his eyes as she piloted the uneven lawn to the stone stairs and wooden screen doors of the cottage. So there did appear to be one person on earth to whom Bill Masters was obedient. He gave Emmett a mother-is-calling grimace and heaved himself to his feet.

  Suzanne had set the table in the veranda with the white china, with a white vase filled with lilacs. Lenore was installed in her high chair beside Suzanne’s place at the head of the table, opposite her husband. Solemn Lenore appraised Bill Masters, her lips firmly closed around her favourite spoon, her hands freed to fool with the bits of chicken and carrot and cooled cubes of potato in her Winnie-the-Pooh bowl.

  The chairs were too low for the table, putting them all at some disadvantage. Suzanne served the chicken and asparagus and passed them each their plate, close beneath their chins. Ethel received her asparagus reproachfully, forced to commit a mortal sin, permitting herself a small protest: “At sixty cents a pound?”

  Thrift was not innate to Suzanne. Speaking openly about the price of anything struck her as vulgar. She may at times have been comparatively broke, but she’d certainly never been poor.

  Ethel seemed to grow more plump nestled in her chair. “My daddy used to grow asparagus,” she said. “We’d be sent out to find it. There were eight of us children, you know. I was the eldest of eight.” She began to speak to Lenore in her high chair. “It grew like grass, and it didn’t mind the drought if it had a bit of sun and a bit of shade. That was the Great Depression. I think we might have starved without our garden.”

  Lenore, dangling her silver spoon from her mouth, turned her grey eyes on Ethel.

  The change of venue, the unfortunate chairs, his wife’s disclosures, all of this seemed to have put Bill Masters off the scent. He shook his jowls, declining the wine: “No, thanks, don’t care for the stuff.” Emmett watched him deposit a thick slice of chicken breast behind his molars and chew; he observed the chicken go round inside Bill’s cheek and unwillingly imagined Bill making love to Ethel. Bill caught his eye and said, “Whaza matter?” Then perhaps for the first time Bill noticed that there was a baby present, Lenore, giving Bill the full benefit of her gaze. “You’re gonna choke on that spoon,” said Bill.

  Suzanne took the spoon out of Lenore’s mouth and put it in her bowl. Lenore’s chin and fists were glistening with drool, her cheeks were chapped and brightly red, but she never took her eyes off Bill.

  Suzanne said, “I think it’s terrible, what happened to the Rosenbergs.” Emmett was silent. She was familiar with that particular, disapproving silence. He didn’t like the topic. “But it is,” she insisted. “They were murdered! That was state murder!” She looked quickly at Lenore to see if she understood — Lennie still refused to talk, but that didn’t mean she didn’t understand — and lowered her voice. “Executed. That poor woman.” She appealed to Emmett. “The two of them, ending like that.”

  “But they were communist spies, my dear.” Ethel was tucking into her dinner when she said this and seemed to have surprised herself by speaking. “I read it in Time,” she explained apologetically to Bill.

  “Hunh,” said Bill.

  Emmett’s hands rested palms-down on the table. He was staring at his plate loaded with food. The Rosenbergs had been killed in the electric chair one week ago today, at eight o’clock in the evening, as a matter of fact. He shook his head; he had water in his ear from swimming, it was hard to think straight. The FBI had used Ethel Rosenberg — he saw Ethel Masters stoically fold asparagus into her mouth; the sun was low behind Suzanne’s back, burning the image of Suzanne and Lenore onto his retina and illuminating Ethel Masters’s facial hair — they’d used Rosenberg’s wife to try to crack him, psychologically break him, make him talk.

  Emmett wanted to be alone with Suzanne. To hold her, to tell her, It’s come to this, my love, my life, a very bright light, a manmade uranium sun, has led us here. So don’t let them break you, but be bold, be righteous and forgetful.

  He said to Bill, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done for my career.”

  Bill was eating. “Just cooperate and it’ll all blow over in no time.”

  “No, seriously. I might not have a chance to thank you later.”

  “What are you talking about, Emmett?” Suzanne asked.

  “I mean, I might not have a chance to say very much, while I’m under investigation.” Both ears were plugged so his voice sounded in his own head. He realized that he yearned for their sympathy. He did feel self-pity, and he was angry, very angry. He said, “Do you believe the Rosenbergs gave the A-bomb to the Russians, Bill? Simple as that?”

  “Sure. That’s why they went to the electric chair.”

  “And all those people killed in Korea, we should blame the Rosenbergs for that. Right? Julius and Ethel.” Confidingly to Bill’s wife, “Her name was Ethel too.”

  Bill thought about it and agreed, “Yeah. And communists like them. You can’t tell me the Russians would’ve figured out how to make an atom bomb without help from fools like Rosenberg.”

  “Why not?” Emmett was behaving recklessly; Suzanne wanted a drink. He went on, carelessly, stupidly, “We did.”

  “We most certainly did not,” said Ethel. Emmett Jones appeared to be drunk. These people, they act like bohemians. And with all that money behind them. Goes to show you. Anglicans.

  He tried to pour Ethel some wine, but she put her hand over her glass so he poured some for himself, drank it, and said, “I could’ve sworn we dropped a couple of A-bombs on somebody.”

  Ethel, coldly, crisply: “That was not our decision.”

  “Well,” Bill said, wiping his mouth, “it was a lousy end to a lousy war.” He pushed his chair away from the table. “Very nice,” he told Suzanne.

  Suzanne, stunned by her husband’s wayward speech, roused herself. “Oh! What am I thinking?” She pried Lenore out of her high chair. “You need a bath!”

  Ethel said she’d gather the dishes, and Suzanne thanked her and fled, jostling her solemn child under her arm. When Ethel took Emmett’s untouched plate, she gave a little sniff and said, “Think of all those starving children in China.”

  With Ethel clattering in the kitchen, and Suzanne off bathing the baby, the men were left to their own devices. It was solstice, so the sun didn’t seem to set but to swerve to the south, leaving the stage for the entry of an orange moon. Bill and Ethel were to stay the night and drive back to Ottawa after brunch tomorrow, a Sunday. Emmett observed vaguely, “I believe Suzanne made a pie.” They sat on, stymied, until Bill finally said, “Ah, come on, Jones,” and stood, put his hands in his trouser pockets, and strolled away from the table. “Pour me a real drink, will ya?”

  The place was built entirely of red pine in 1878. Emmett felt compelled to tell Bill this, his voice trembling, while he poured them both brandy. The veranda wound nearly full circle, with a tall, sloping ceiling. It was furnished with comfortably sagging furniture. And of course, there was art: framed posters of Maxfield Parrish and several of Suzanne’s photographs — conventional, for the most part, aside from one nude: a man’s thin back, his ribs, his bones like silver forks.

  “Nice place,” agreed Bill, looking like he wanted to go home.

  Emmett didn’t light a lamp and was warily gratified that Bill didn’t insist, make some wisecrack, Pretty romanti
c, Jones. Ya want me to go blind? Bill drank his brandy and appeared to be appreciating the moon on the water.

  Emmett was standing behind Bill in the near dark when he asked quietly, as if bemused, “Why doesn’t Ottawa protect me?”

  Bill jumped and turned, almost angry. “That’s exactly what we’re doing! Jesus!”

  “In a secret investigation by the RCMP.”

  “It’s gotta be private. You want everybody to know?” Bill turned his back again; he gazed at the rippling moon on the lake with something like resentment and added, “Actually, it’s in the hands of External’s Security Panel. Harold Gembey’s in charge. Harold’s working close with the RCMP.”

  “Harold Gembey. Great. Just great. Thank you very fucking much.” The servile bastards at External. He was acquainted with Harold Gembey in Security. Gembey was a long-time civil servant, started there in the middle of the war, and he’d turn on any man if he could make himself look cleaner than clean. He’d be obsequious with the Mounties, obsequious with the FBI.

  In the dark, Bill turned again to look at him. “You’ve got nothing to hide, do you, Emmett?”

  “Everybody’s got something to hide.”

  “Oh, sure.” Bill seemed to be trying to come up with something, some secret of his own he’d need to conceal; he shifted from one foot to the other, thinking. Finally, he leaned forward, breathing into Emmett’s face, and in a low voice he said, “Look, pal. You’re young. Idealistic. These guys, these RCMP fellows, you’re gonna find they’re decent, real Boy Scouts. The man who runs the operation is no sucker. He’s navy, a vet, a young fella, like you. He’s not stupid, he knows something’s up with the Russians, ever since Gouzenko.” Igor Gouzenko was the cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa who’d defected right after the war, exposing a Canadian spy ring in the process. “We’ve gotta protect ourselves from the communists. Come on, Emmett. Frank Miller down in Washington, he thinks you’re a commie. So? Just answer the questions and straighten him out.”