To the Spy I'm Named For
Whenever we discuss the photograph, my dad describes you as packing heat: “R wasn’t just a diplomat, Stacy, if he was out in the jungle packing heat—he was a spy.”
I thought we’d discovered this fact after you died, but on a recent phone call during the pandemic, my dad said he’d always known. When I asked how, he presented an anecdote drawn from his deck of cards:
“In my early twenties, R asked me to move to Paris to work for Voice of America. The catch was that I couldn’t be married, which could only mean one thing—he was a spy, and he wanted me to be a spy. If I’d agreed, you wouldn’t be here. Aren’t you glad I didn’t take him up on it?”
My dad spoke mischievously as he recounted this bit of lore from his youth—that he’d almost been recruited by you, his elder cousin, the diplomat-spy. We’d been having this conversation for years.
Playing along now, I said, “I’m very glad you didn’t take that job, Dad. But did you make the spy connection at the time? I thought you saw the Paris offer differently once we learned about R’s spying career in the paper.”
“I always knew what R was doing, Stacy.”
In the photograph, one my mom enlarged and framed, you’re caught mid stride walking down a dirt road cut through a forest. It’s Uruguay or Paraguay, my dad thinks. In the 1950s or early ’60s. Your face is in shadow under your cargo hat, your eyes under a brow like my dad’s, like mine. You wear a look that could suggest cunning or love. Around your waist, a belt with what appears to be a gun, a knife, and something else. You’re soft around the middle, your neck a bit loose. You aren’t a young man, but you’re engaged in something physical—what?
“R was a cloak-and-dagger guy,” my dad said casually.
“A cloak-and-dagger guy?” I said. “I thought he was mainly an intellectual.”
As a child, I’d known you as a mythic presence. You were a man of the world, a friend of Eudora Welty in your youth. You’d published a book, a collection of tales by diplomats. The paperback, signed to me, as I remember, sat in our living-room like a grail. I can still see you talking to my dad in your study on Hilton Head Island, wearing a blazer in the afternoon, waving a cocktail, gesturing toward this or that volume on the wall of shelves behind you. My parents lauded your brilliant mind. Like you, they got out of Mississippi. You were an incarnation of the possible—they’d given me your name, perhaps as an aspiration, or a prophecy.
*
In 2018, my dad and his wife, C, moved to the South Carolina coast, just opposite Hilton Head Island. A lifelong dream of my dad’s—to retire where you’d lived. I told them I was ready to write the book about you, the R novel, as we called it, and on my first visit from Boston, they took me to some of your places.
We went sailing over the bridge, a hard-blue sky above, the glittering Calibogue Sound below. As we turned into Sea Pines, a place of my childhood, I had the sense we were entering a wood, or a time-gap, so high were the ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss. We parked at the cemetery and wandered like Lilliputians among the outsized trees, my dad, in his seventies, trying to feel through body-memory where you and your wife were buried. Watching him in his baseball cap and shorts as he moved among the shadows, I thought he looked like a boy.
He found the gravestones beside a tree and called us over. At his feet, two stone plaques. The name—yours and mine. We held our voices at bay.
From here, the order of our pilgrimage blurs. We drove to the road where you and your wife bought one of the first lots. The house stood refurbished and pristine, the back porch on stilts and overlooking the ocean. The view was blocked somewhat by a mansion. Not in the 1960s, my dad explained. You could see straight to the water, stretched out like the skin of an old animal.
He must’ve told me again how you and other muckety-mucks, retired from government, would sit on that porch, awash in martinis, discussing subjects—Vietnam? Cold War maneuverings? He couldn’t recall.
For facts we have bones, some unconfirmed. The Associated Press. Foreign Service. CIA. US Information Agency, we believe. South America—we know a lot of what the CIA did there. What did you do? What did you sanction?
I got out of the car to step closer to the porch, as if the place held you in it, across the border of dimension, as if I’d be able to feel you there, feel that scene with the muckety-mucks, their talk overwhelmed by ocean sound, made small by it, another generation of men trying to move history this way and that, another kind of Lilliputian, and my young father sitting along the edges, piecing bits together, something dark from your days in Buenos Aires, in Asunción.
Later, he said I should include another spy in the novel to give your character someone to confide in. He’s writing a thriller himself, and I consider all his ideas. When I asked if putting two retired spies on one island would be too much, he said there actually might’ve been others.
We pulled up to the house on the golf course, where I’d visited you when young. Dad showed me the windows that belonged to your study, the room I remember—you there in your checked blazer, the urbane R, standing in front of that wall of bookshelves, ice rattling in your cocktail. Perhaps you took down your book and signed it for me, your namesake, your sleeve slipping over the top of your spotted hand. I recall being awed, wanting to ask where you’d lived, what it was like—as if I could feel it, the curtain, keeping something back.
As my dad drove us out of Sea Pines, I observed the light, filtered through the oaks, and puzzled over how I would construct you out of just a few bones—impressions, the atmosphere of a study, my father’s early memories. I didn’t know where we’d put your book. I could try to dig up facts, but how would I discover the real, the true, that inner dimension, perhaps unknowable even to yourself, something encrypted in my own body, in my name?
*
“What unseen threads pull on our imagination? What makes us choose the paths we take?”
One night several years ago in Sarajevo, I went out to a pub in a converted Ottoman-era house. Foreign Service types frequented the place, situated above a cemetery where people killed in the ’90s war are buried. I spent some of that evening talking with a friend from the US Embassy. At least, I think we had this conversation at the pub, or perhaps we circled back to it there. I’ve written the scene as fiction, and now I can’t be sure.
I remember asking my friend, who was also a writer, if she planned to publish anything about her experiences overseas. She said that back in the States, she’d found a book of stories written by diplomats and might want to put together a similar project.
“Wait,” I said. “Is this an old book? Edited by a man called R?”
She told me it was.
I couldn’t bring the words out of my throat. No one other than family had ever spoken to me about your book. Standing in an Ottoman courtyard above a war cemetery, above the river where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, I felt as if time and geography had collapsed. As if you’d reached me there, in a city where history had shifted its plates, reached me through another writer in the Foreign Service, nudged me for some purpose—but what? I wondered if our connection, forged by my parents, had somehow drawn me to the Balkans, where I collaborated with poets and storytellers, and to this gathering of embassy people, among whom I felt both a sense of intrigue and an odd familiarity. What unseen threads pull on our imagination? What makes us choose the paths we take?
Talking with my friend, I only vaguely remembered the tale you’d written for your book—it was set in Asunción. Eventually, I realized she had a more intimate knowledge of your writing than I did, and likely of Paraguay, its decades-long dictatorship, America’s role there. And I felt ashamed.
*
During the pandemic summer, my dad took a terrible fall and later was rushed to Savannah by ambulance for emergency brain surgery. I lay in my bed in Boston, on the cusp of urgent surgery myself, and waited for news in a clench of refusal. No, my dad was not leaving. I needed him. He had to finish his thriller. I still had to pull back the curtain on your life—to give him that knowledge. Since the trip to the island, I’d only dabbled in research—why had I held off for so long? Perhaps, unconsciously, to guarantee a future for my dad and me—we would always have a project to do together out there. But that morning, as he lay on an operating table, I could feel the finite nature of time. The future was here.
In autumn, I found and ordered a copy of your book—it arrived the day I early-voted in the 2020 election. Boston got hit with a snowstorm. Near dusk, I discovered the package on our porch. With the snow coming down, I turned to your Asunción story by lamplight—an account of a Paraguayan aristocrat spooking a boorish US congressman. Your sophisticated language, your wit, your élite perspective: a mirror of your mind. Or another curtain.
A second copy of the book showed up a few days later. A surprise from my dad and C, a nicer edition with a jacket and a blurb from Henry Kissinger. Inside the back cover, I found your photograph. You in that same checked blazer, talking on the phone from behind a desk piled with papers. I tried to describe to my dad the sensation of looking at you, of reading your biography and the list of cities where you’d worked. Later, when I told him I’d finally spoken with an investigative journalist about how to start researching your spy activities, my dad interrupted me.
“Why don’t you just make it up?”
“What?” I said. “Don’t you want to know?”
I felt stunned—we’d been collaborating about you all my life.
“It’s fiction,” my dad said with the glee of one who’s finished his thriller. “You can make it up—you can lie!”
I took in his words. He knew you; he’d walked the earth with you. Maybe his memories were what he wanted to live with. Was it possible I didn’t want to know, either? And wasn’t the real, the true, the essential you someone I would imagine anyway—the flesh hung on the fact-bones? Maybe my dad thought research would get in the way.
We half-joked about my borrowing one of the characters in his thriller, a Vietnam veteran, for the R novel. “I never know what that Bubba Meeks is going to do,” my dad quipped.
We laughed about the possibilities, while outside my window, the cold Boston night, the coming winter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stacy Mattingly is a writer living in Boston. She launched the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012 and later helped lead the first Narrative Witness exchange (Caracas-Sarajevo) for the International Writing Program. She has recently completed a first novel set in the present-day Balkans.
Read Stacy’s “Behind the Essay” author interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Rene Böhmer.