Watergate by Thomas Mallon Page B

made arrangements with a lawyer, William Bittman, a connection of Jackson’s who, conveniently enough, lived and worked here in Potomac.
    At that point he’d flown home under a false name and been picked up by Dorothy, who had returned from England. They went straight from the airport to Bittman’s office and paid him the first thousand dollars of his retainer with money from the EOB safe. Considerably more, twenty-five grand, soon arrived from somewhere—Mitchell, presumably,if Liddy could be believed. And then “Mr. Rivers” was calling Bittman and asking to speak to “the writer’s wife.”
    Involving Dorothy had been their idea, whoever “they” were; presumably her movements would attract less notice than Hunt’s own. Either way, she was perfectly willing. Today at lunch, as she made herself memorize what she would tell Mr. Rivers over the pay phone, she had been febrile with purpose and determination.
    Through the study’s open door, he could now hear her downstairs, talking to their daughter Kevan, who was on her way back to Smith in a couple of months. (Would John Mitchell be picking up the tuition, too? Along with his other daughter’s medical bills?) Hunt rose from his desk and went to listen at the landing, hoping to make certain Dorothy wasn’t telling Kevan anything she shouldn’t. He also hoped to convince himself that his wife really felt as content with everything as she claimed to be.
    He did not like what he heard. He’d almost rather they be discussing “Mr. Rivers” than the subject they were on: some pamphlet sent by the Smith College health services that seemed to be practically an advertisement for the availability of contraception.
    His only disagreements with Dorothy involved the grubby new world in which their children were coming of age. It angered him that his wife took the same relaxed view of sex and pot that he would expect from some hip divorcée or social worker. She and Kevan were scandalizing the Guatemalan maid by reading aloud passages from the pamphlet.
    To avoid hearing any more laughter from the whole feminine trio downstairs, he closed the study door and turned on the portable television near his desk. There was no escape: live from the Democratic convention that would nominate McGovern tonight, some harridan in blue jeans was complaining about how the party’s platform committee had been insufficiently deferential to “welfare mothers.” The term was proving even more detestable to his ears for the way it somehow seemed to encompass Dorothy, who’d now be living a life of envelopes and handouts.
    She had stood by him through every secret turn his life had taken for more than twenty years, even when that meant living over a whorehouse, as they’d done while he was station chief in Mexico City—whereon top of everything else he’d been extortively accused of hit-and-run. They’d met only a couple of years before all that, in Paris, after her French divorce from her first husband, when they were both on the staff of Averell Harriman’s Economic Cooperation Administration—the only two non-left-wingers in the Paris office.
    He was getting nowhere with this letter in front of him. What he’d really like to do is
call
Colson, but that, of course, was impossible. As he looked at the unusable phone, it, too, seemed one more conveyance toward yesteryear, reminding him of the weeks he’d spent in Vienna, in 1948, while Dorothy remained in Paris. Each time he’d tried to call her, all the taps on the line between the two capitals would siphon the current and sever the connection.
    They’d get away from here in a few weeks. Bittman, thank God, had managed to keep him free on bail. In a week or so he’d have to be fingerprinted, and give a handwriting sample at the courthouse downtown, but after that there’d be a brief judicial lull, when he and Dorothy could go down to Florida. He pictured it now: fishing off a dock in the Keys with Bernie, neither of them saying