“You look so familiar,” Kefauver told Charlie. “And not just because you resemble your father.”
People routinely greeted Charlie with a vague sense of recognition. His road to semi-notoriety had begun some years earlier when he’d purchased a heavy wooden trunk for his father’s birthday at a Brooklyn junk shop. He’d brought it home, picked the lock, and found it contained a dozen books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them the diaries of a former page at the Continental Congress. Nicholas Mezedes had recorded his intimate impressions of the Founding Fathers, some of whom were involved in rather scandalous behavior at the time. With Margaret’s organizational help and editing, Charlie had smoothed Mezedes’s prose into more colloquial dialogue and a compelling narrative. The resulting book—Sons of Liberty—had become a runaway bestseller. Charlie had thrived. Columbia University offered him a path to a full professorship. At the time, the public was infatuated with intellectual celebrities, and Charlie appeared on popular shows such as What’s My Line? and Art Linkletter’s House Party.
“You may have seen me on television a few years ago when my book on the Founding Fathers came out,” Charlie said now.
“Maybe that’s it,” Kefauver said. “I was on What’s My Line? too, you know!” He smiled.
Ushers began circling the lobby with chimes, alerting the crowd that the show was just minutes from starting. “We’d better head in,” Kefauver said, leading them into the theater.
“Maybe the senator can give you some advice on blocking the Goodstone funds,” Margaret said quietly to Charlie. “You need to rally folks.”
Charlie nodded.
“Jack Kennedy might help too,” she said. “He would be a great ally.”
“Great idea,” said Charlie. “And I’ll just join Ike on the links tomorrow and get him on board as well.”
She smacked him playfully on the shoulder.
The lights in the theater dimmed except for those closest to the stage. The crowd, well versed in protocol, applauded for the vice president and his wife, sitting in a prestigious box near stage left. The Nixons at first seemed uncertain the applause was for them, then stood hesitantly. The vice president offered a stiff bow and then a wide grin that couldn’t have looked less sincere.
“Oh dear,” Margaret whispered.
Kefauver nodded toward the vice president.
“Earlier this month, I met a guy who knew Dick during the war. They were stationed at Bougainville Island.”
“Where?” asked Charlie.
“It’s in Papua New Guinea,” Margaret told her husband. “Forgive Charlie,” she said to Kefauver, “they didn’t get much news about the Pacific campaign in the foxholes of France.”
“They don’t have newspapers in France?” Kefauver joked.
“Charlie was too busy trying to keep his platoon alive while they breathed in poison gas because of junky American gas masks,” Margaret said tartly.
“I didn’t get much news about anything when I was in Europe,” Charlie said, lightly squeezing Margaret’s hand. “It left some odd holes in my knowledge.”
“Anyway, Dick basically ran a burger joint for pilots there,” Kefauver said. “Beer, coffee, toast. But the most interesting thing this gentleman told me was that Dick was a cardsharp. He cleaned up. ‘Best poker face you’ve ever seen,’ he said. He bluffed just enough to guarantee that everyone stayed in when he actually had the cards.”
He leaned over as if confiding some great wisdom. “Watch out for the poker faces in this town,” Kefauver whispered.
Margaret intertwined her fingers with Charlie’s as the lights went out and the opening number of the musical began.
Charlie hated it.
Chapter Three
Friday, January 15, 1954—Morning
Georgetown, Washington, DC
Margaret paused to roll her eyes and suppress a smile while her husband, on his knees, gently kissed her stomach. She was standing at the bathroom mirror in her camisole, carefully applying her eyeliner, just recovered from another bout of morning sickness. So she wasn’t strictly in the mood to be touched, but she also didn’t want to push Charlie away.
“Bye-bye, little Alger,” Charlie sang to the baby in her womb. He made it a daily habit to come up with the worst possible names to bestow upon their impending arrival. “Good-bye, sweet little Hirohito Marder.”
Margaret laughed, then spat into the sink, wiped her mouth, and reached for her favorite pair of khakis. “I can’t believe these pants still fit,” she said, stepping into them. “I feel so bloated, like the boa digesting the elephant in The Little Prince.”
“And yet you still look très belle,” Charlie said in the grunty French accent he and his troops would use mockingly to lighten the mood. He eyed her valise while he knotted his tie. “Excited about the trip?” he asked, trying his best to hide his concern and, yes, disapproval of Margaret’s participation in the zoological study of the mysterious ponies out on Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands in Maryland. Prior to their move to Washington, DC, she had discussed writing a book about the ponies for a university publishing house, but the editors there—in addition to being dismissive of a woman zoologist—felt the book would need firsthand accounts from a full team in the field. Margaret had planned to spend her first year in Washington, DC, trying to secure funding and partnerships for such an excursion. Then, almost like magic, an older zoologist she knew—one who shared her minor obsession with the ponies—had called her in December and offered her a job as a researcher on his own trip to the very same islands. She could join his study and they could co-author a paper.
Charlie had supported her desire to keep working in her field. In theory. In fact, the opportunity for her to join the Maryland study was partly how he’d convinced her to abandon their lives in New York City and move to the nation’s capital for his new job. But ever since the baby news the week before, he’d deeply regretted their agreement. He kept imagining Margaret in a field getting kicked in the abdomen by a wild pony.
“So someone from the research team is picking you up?” he asked. “How long is the drive?”
“Two and a half hours, I think,” she said. “Wait, let me show you.”
She retrieved a map from her purse and showed him the route they’d be taking. They would drive from the city through rural Maryland and to the tip of an isthmus, then proceed by boat to the far island, Nanticoke. He followed her finger absently, picturing her out there in the middle of nowhere surrounded by wild animals and sleeping on the ground in a tent. He fretted but out loud said only, “Just don’t work too hard.”
Margaret chuckled to herself; Charlie was as easy to read as the top line of an eye chart. Did he think she couldn’t take care of herself? “I’ll be back a week from tomorrow at the very latest,” she said, yielding at the sight of his worried face. “We’ll be fine, I promise.” She patted her belly and gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile.
The ponies had been a fascination of Margaret’s since she was a child, when her mother had taken her and her sister on a long camping vacation after their father had been killed in an airship disaster. A few hundred wild ponies roamed the beaches and marshes of Susquehannock Island every spring and summer, then inexplicably crossed the bay every autumn to return to Nanticoke Island a few hundred yards south. No one knew where the ponies had originally come from or why they behaved the way they did or even how they made the trek. Margaret would be part of a small group of similarly fascinated zoologists, a loosely affiliated research team headed by Dr. Louis Gwinnett, whom she had met at an annual conference; they were going to try to figure out how and why the animals made the seasonal crossings.