Past Perfect Read Free

slightly. There was zero James Bond glamour in my work. Most of it entailed reading communiqués from our own people, reports from other agencies, and analyzing illegally obtained financial data on the assets of certain world leaders and their associates. I was figuring out stuff like how much of, say, our thirty-five million in military aid to a certain country in Central America wound up in el presidente’s offshore account in a bank on the isle of Jersey. (Ans: $7,608,300.) Then I’d write up my findings in snappy, don’t-fall-asleep language for reports to be read by congressional and executive branch staffers.
    So snappy was I that my writing soon got me out of the Economic Study Group. Six months at the CIA and I got transferred to a completely different area. My new gig was working for the deputy chief of the Office of Eastern Europe Analysis, a congenial unit save for the über-chief, a nasty Kentuckian who had let his hair grow out with the Beatles and still, all those years later, sported giant gray sideburns and low-hanging bangs the color of aluminum foil. Nothing boring in this department. Every day I came to work feeling alive: something exciting will happen today. And usually something did. I walked through the halls with that confident, chin-up stride of an astronaut.
    The nearly two years I worked for the Agency might have been a mere blip on the radar screen of anyone else’s life. But this was my bliss. Twenty-three months of knowing not just that I loved what I was doing, but that my work mattered. To me. To my country. Nothing else I’d done or would ever do would feel so right. Then suddenly it was over. And I had no place to go. I couldn’t find another job.
    A prospective employer would call the Agency’s personnel department and all he would get was a terse confirmation that, yes, Katherine Schottland had once been an employee. Had I left of my own accord or been fired? Was I competent? Stable? A patriot? A traitor? No comment. This went on for nearly five years, until Nicky was born; his birth gave me a sweet though colicky excuse to stop looking for work.
    Throughout that time, Adam was so decent about my not finding a job that it only added to my shame. “Stop worrying about it,” he told me. “Millions of women stay home and are perfectly happy. Go to museums, read, get a master’s in something. I can handle it as long as you don’t want a mink coat or rubies.” But I needed to know I could do something worthwhile, or at least earn money, so until my eighth month of pregnancy, I did cooking demonstrations in my father’s stores: deep-fried potato nests in Boston, food processor pastry in Palm Beach. I drove up and down 1-95, staying in chain motels that seemed to mandate their chambermaids not to clean under the beds.
    When Nicky was three, Adam took a job as a pathologist with the Bronx Zoo, and we moved to New York, to City Island, a salt-sprayed, yellow-rain-slickered boating community, one bridge and a few miles from the zoo in the Bronx. When my parents visited our small and perhaps too cutely decorated (by me) apartment for the first time, my father had an ear-to-ear grin that was so phony it could have been painted on. He managed to say, “Very sweet,” as if that poor kid from Brooklyn he always talked about having been wasn’t him after all. My mother opened a window, took a deep breath, and said with a too-toothy cheering smile, “The air here is so wonderfully bracing!”
    Not that I felt any pressure about living the wrong life in the wrong neighborhood, but we moved to Manhattan the summer before Nicky went off to kindergarten. I tried again to get a real job and, once again, potential employers who seemed so interested at my interview became cold after checking my credentials. Why didn’t I lie and say I’d worked for my father the whole time? He’d have me draft a brilliant recommendation he’d be glad to sign. How come I didn’t merely drop the Agency from my