At that very moment, Margaret, Louis Gwinnett, and two other researchers were sitting cross-legged around a campfire, drinking soup from thermos mugs. They had set up camp between the surf and a string of ponies, which had been within sight until sundown. The researchers on Susquehannock Island reported via walkie-talkie that no ponies had yet made the journey from Nanticoke to their location; Gwinnett’s team was determined to be awake and watching when they did.
Nursing a flask of whiskey, Gwinnett talked campus politics with the two researchers from the University of Wisconsin, graduate students named Isaac Kessler and Matthew Cornelius. Margaret kept silent, fermenting in her marital angst. The moon was waxing crescent with only 3 percent visibility—Gwinnett hoped the cloak of darkness would help their mission in observing the ponies—so the stars shone particularly bright. Kessler, gazing at the constellations in the stars, misidentified Lupus, the eleven-starred wolf, as Lepus, the eight-starred hare. It was impossible for Margaret not to correct him.
“I learned about the constellations from my uncle,” she explained after rectifying his astronomical error. “He was a park ranger, and he loved to take my sister and me outside late at night—he said he was ‘teaching us the sky,’” she said. “For Lupus, he told us a very dark story about a wolf.”
“Children’s stories are always macabre,” Gwinnett observed. “I suppose it’s to prepare them for real life.”
“Seriously,” said Cornelius. “I was traumatized by Bambi and Dumbo. What’s Walt Disney’s obsession with killing off moms?”
“Dumbo’s mom wasn’t killed, she was just imprisoned,” corrected Kessler.
“There does seem to be a common theme of losing a parent, or both parents,” said Margaret. “Snow White and Cinderella lost their moms, hence the wicked stepmothers. And wasn’t Peter Pan an orphan?”
“What was the wolf story your uncle told you?” asked Gwinnett, nudging her and handing her his flask.
“It’s a weird one,” she said, declining his offer. “Golden apples are being stolen from a tree and the king sends his three sons—the youngest is Ivan—to figure out who’s doing it. They set out on horseback and come upon a sign and three paths. One path will lead to cold and hunger. On the second, your horse will die. On the third, your horse will live but you will die—”
“Oh, I know this story!” said Gwinnett. “It’s Ivan and the Gray Wolf! Does it end with the brothers chopping up Ivan but the Gray Wolf brings him back to life?”
“Yes! So awful for a child to hear!”
“That’s an old Soviet folktale,” Gwinnett said.
“Huh,” said Margaret.
“Watch out, Doc,” said Kessler. “Her husband’s a congressman. Talk too much about the Gray Wolf and next thing you know, you’ll be sitting before the House Un-American Activities Committee!”
“What does your husband think of McCarthy, Margaret?” Gwinnett asked.
“He hates McCarthy,” she said. “But he hates the Communists too.”
“Is he Democrat or Republican?” asked Cornelius.
“Registered Republican, but he kind of inherited that from his father, an admirer of TR. Truly not a particularly partisan man. He’s only been there a few months.” She paused and was surprised to find her eyes tearing up a bit while she thought about him. “He’s just Charlie.” She shook her head, glad the dim light made it hard for anyone to see her clearly.
“But surely Charlie has an opinion on the madness that has infected Washington,” Gwinnett said. “Seeing Reds under every park bench, thinking people who merely want a more just and equitable society are trying to undermine America. People are fighting for a better world. They see the United States inflicting pain and suffering on places such as Cuba and Puerto Rico and Korea. They see our ideals falling by the wayside as the big corporations take over our politics and wrest control of our foreign policy. Americans who want racial justice and harmony aren’t to be ostracized. We’re to be listened to.”
Margaret had met plenty of Communists at Columbia; they had once been common throughout the academic world. For many, joining the party had been dilettantism, a passing fad, a trendy and vaguely rebellious form of socializing. Some saw it as just the natural extension of idealistic, progressive activism—a way to support racial equality and labor unions and to oppose fascism. By the late 1940s, however, the barbarism of Stalin’s USSR was evident to all—even those who had previously tried to explain away his Great Purge as a mere internal matter. Upon Stalin’s death in 1953, even progressive editorialists who had heralded his efforts alongside FDR during World War II had to mention the millions of dead bodies upon which his kingdom had been built.
The Cold War and the presence of Soviet spies in the United States made it Columbia University’s particular shame, however, that the Ivy League college counted a number of Soviet agents among its alumni, including one who’d ultimately been sent to the Gulag and executed by Stalin, another who’d worked his way to a senior position in the FDR and Truman administrations, and, most infamously, Whittaker Chambers, who’d ultimately switched sides and been the key witness against accused Soviet agent Alger Hiss. The university’s leaders had become, a bit too late for Charlie and Margaret’s tastes, sensitive to their campus hosting so many fifth columnists; one outspoken history professor had been fired two weeks before he appeared in front of McCarthy’s committee.
Margaret had been at parties and faculty mixers with the academics fired for Communist ties. They were tiresome; whatever bold truths they told about the United States were undermined by their blindness to the crimes of Stalin. Neither she nor Charlie cared for them. But she’d come to know how they talked and the terms in which they couched their beliefs, and right now Gwinnett sounded like one of them.
“Margaret?” Gwinnett said, having received no response to his question about Charlie.
“Hmm? Oh.” She’d been lost in thought. “Charlie isn’t a fan of either McCarthy or the Communists.”
“With respect,” said Kessler, “how does that make any sense? It’s a battle between the two. One has to pick a side.”
Shrouded by darkness, Margaret rolled her eyes at the graduate student and his insistence on seeing the world in stark simplicities.
“I’m afraid I’m with the grad students here, Margaret,” Gwinnett said. “An ideology based on the equality of mankind positing an end to fascism and an end to war is being challenged by a drunk demagogue. If you don’t stand for—”
An echo from the beach on the other side of the brush stopped Gwinnett midsentence, and all four turned toward the noise; above the low din of the tides came the distinct sound of splashing. Margaret, first to her feet, grabbed her flashlight and jogged to the beach, Kessler and Cornelius at her heels, their flashlights providing a jumping set of lights on either side of her. She looked back and saw that Gwinnett was well behind them, presumably having stopped by his tent to grab equipment of some sort.
Margaret hadn’t run in years, and she almost surprised herself at how quickly she moved, even with child, racing through the brush of the forest and dunes. The strength of her desire to see the ponies making their curious journey—if that’s indeed what the splashing was—could not be measured. The mystery could never truly be solved, she knew, beyond the concept of instinct, but the possibility that she might be able to learn how the trek was made each year and prompt some scientific discussion about it made her heart pump faster.
Switching from running on dirt to the soft sand slowed her, as did the incline of the dune, allowing Kessler and Cornelius to pass her. After cresting the top of the dune, she descended to the beach, but without any moonlight, the sound of the splashing was all they had to guide them. Their flashlights showed them where sand met surf, but that was it.