early forties, too late to change his specialty or his professional fate.
As she spoke, we occasionally interrupted to ask for a point of clarification, or to steer her back on track. She had become chatty, and it was clear she needed to talk about this, not cathartically, I thought, but more as somebody indulging a tale they now knew ended on a satisfying note.
At times her narrative was chronological and organized, at times free-flowing and disconnected. Theresa frequently paused to light a fresh cigarette, and she twice left the kitchen to refresh her "sherry." It was late afternoon; at the rate she was "refreshing," she would be in the cups before dinnertime.
As a general rule, incidentally, I never put ex-wives on the stand. They make awful witnesses. They cannot recite the past objectively-- they know their Sir Galahad on the shimmering white steed turned out to be a self-indulgent cad riding a fetid pig.
Yet, if I listened carefully, I was starting to form a picture of this man who died so weirdly in his bed the night before.
Cliff was raised in a small upstate New York town, father a garage mechanic, one brother, one sister. A local parish priest saw a young boy with spunk and intelligence and awarded him a free ticket through the local parish school. Cliff became the only one from his family to matriculate from high school, then college--to wit, Colgate--doing it the hard way--on brains, sleep deprivation, part-time jobs, and desperation. As with so many young men of his era, no sooner had the sheepskin greased his palm than Uncle Sam intervened to borrow a few years of his life. He was sent first to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, where he mastered Arabic, then Farsi, followed by an assignment to a military intelligence center, at Fort Meade, Maryland, which, for sure, beat the alternative enjoyed by so many of his hapless peers--humping a ninety-pound ruck in the boonies of Southeast Asia.
And what jumped out from this narrative arc, in my view, was the moxie of the man. Having escaped a deeply impoverished background, he put himself through college, then was selected by the Army for advanced schooling, then for high-level intelligence work, and the piece de resistance, he bagged a colonel's daughter. Given the Army's fraternization codes, this is akin to a commoner laying wood on a princess and, for Cliff, a big bump up in the social registry. With his entry into the Defense Intelligence Agency, he became a white-collar professional, an educated man in an honorable line of work, which--with luck, skill, and the right breaks--could lead to bigger things.
In the end, as Freudians say, it's all about ego, and in my experience, self-made types are particularly susceptible to an omnivorous sense of self-worth.
So now we were past the early years, the marriage, the house, the two children, and Theresa, now past her fourth gin, was starting to slur and giggle at inappropriate moments. She said, "Throughout the seventies he was on the Iranian desk. In 1982 he was shifted to the Iraqi section, a real backwater. He thought it was the end of the world. Nobody cared about Iraq. Back then, Iran was the career-maker, and as I said, Cliff knew Farsi. He complained bitterly to his bosses and they claimed that's where they needed him."
Incidentally, Bian's questions seemed more oriented toward their marriage and family life, which, I think, is one of those X versus Y chromosome deals. I, being a male, am confident that life's mysteries and puzzles are all rooted in money, power, and lust. Men and women investigators bring different things to the party, but it seems to work out.
Predictably, Bian asked, "How did this affect your marriage?"
"If anything, Cliff became a more attentive husband, a better father. He always worked long hours . . . he began to scale back. He coached Little League, learned to play golf, spent more time with the kids."
She lit another cigarette and drew a long breath. "The eighties were good for us. Happy years. He was professionally bitter, but our marriage was healthy. No fights, no stresses." After a moment, she added, "Until 1991."
"When Iraq invaded Kuwait," I guessed.
"You've got it."
"What happened then?" Bian asked.
"The beginning of the end . . . or maybe the end of the beginning. Those thoughts are so interchangeable, don't you think?"
No, I didn't think, and I found it instructive that she would.