An Imperfect Spy Read Free

whose parenting habits were described on the signs with frank amazement: the male alone looked after the hatching egg. And then there were the snow monkeys, who had had, one cold winter, to be removed to warmer quarters: they were, it seemed, less suited to American than Japanese urban cold.
    Central Park has hills I used to sled on, Kate thought, surrendering to memory and its inevitableresentments, hills now flattened for endless expansion of the Metropolitan Museum, providing them with more galleries than they can guard, therefore more than they can open. And where in Central Park was the Shakespeare garden? Farther uptown, she seemed to remember. She had not visited it since being conducted through it as a child. It was said that every plant mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays grew there. Kate, who could scarcely tell a narcissus from a hyacinth, a primrose from a pansy, and had not the faintest idea what chamomile looked like, though she remembered well enough Falstaff’s words about it—oh, the hell with Central Park, though in fact Kate loved it still. She did, however, remind herself that Central Park contained only two statues of famous women: Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland. She supposed one would have to include the new mammoth bear at the playground on East Seventy-ninth Street, female, one supposed, since it sported on each side a cub. Male bears, one understood, went their solitary unencumbered way. And then the bus had come to the end of its route, and the driver opened the doors with a finality that demanded the immediate departure of all within. Kate began the familiar trudge along the avenue to the Theban.
    “I must begin,” Kate said into the microphone, facing the parents, some alumnae of the faithful sort and, she noted with dismay, what appeared to be the greater part of the upper-school faculty, “by franklystating that although I shall try fairly to present the arguments on both sides of today’s academic debates, I am myself on one side, and do not believe that someone on the other side would speak to you as fairly as I shall try to do, or would deny his or her conviction that that side alone spoke for the good and the true. I hope this makes my impartiality clear.”
    That said, Kate proceeded with her speech. It was not long, and was greeted with more than polite applause and enthusiasm. Many came to speak to her afterward, including members of the faculty, all in Kate’s saturnine view astonishingly young. Kate refused the punch offered at the reception following and, when asked if she would like anything else, requested a glass of soda water. Kate was handed this by the headmistress, and was only at the last minute able to prevent herself from exclaiming as she tasted it. For the drink was vodka and tonic, complete with a slice of lime, visually quite indistinguishable from plain soda water. Kate discreetly smiled her gratitude, and bent herself to the mannerly parent waiting to talk to her.
    It was only when the event appeared to be drawing to a close, and those at the reception were dispersing, that Kate was confronted by a woman older than most of the audience. She had that air, common to a small percent of Theban graduates, of having since the age of ten thought fashion and beauty aids too boring for words and of having found no reason,in the intervening years, to change her mind. Only the woman’s speech betrayed her highly educated status.
    Kate and the woman withdrew into an uninhabited corner, and Kate prepared herself for the usual memories of an earlier and, by definition, better time, an agreement that often oddly accompanied praise for Kate’s remarks, as though the listener had altogether failed to take in their hardly conservative import. But this woman, it became immediately clear, agreed with what Kate had said because she had heard it.
    “Might we talk somewhere away from the madding crowd?” the woman said. Oh, God, Kate thought, but fortified with her vodka, she