Leaving the service each week, Talbot and Reverend Grant developed a little routine.

  “How ‘bout you join me for a round of golf at Congressional next Saturday, Reverend?” Talbot would ask as he reached for a handshake.

  “How ‘bout you agree to serve on the vestry, Talbot, so you can help me get a handle on the business side of things here? Then maybe I could afford to spend a Saturday golfing.” Eventually, both men made good on their proposals, although Talbot’s travel made regular attendance at vestry meetings difficult.

  Eleanor bristled at times with the chatty, cheerful congregants who buttonholed her with intrusive questions, asking her to contribute to the church cookbook they were putting together, to bring a casserole to the Wednesday pot-luck, or to volunteer in the nursery when she didn’t yet have children. The women of St. John’s found her difficult to slot into an understandable category, disinterested as she was in helming a committee or working her way into the church bridge club.

  After a year in the apartment, they scraped a down payment together and bought the Arlington townhouse, Eleanor thrilled they finally had their own space, with walls they could paint any color they wished and a garage that meant no more battling for street parking. Soon after that, they met Caroline and Rémy Auclair at a homeowners meeting and a fast friendship began. Eleanor had the Auclairs to thank for her employment, Rémy, more precisely, who worked for the city of Arlington Planning Department and had put in a good word when the library had an opening. After a protracted interview process, she was hired on the circulation desk, later moving into positions of more responsibility.

  The Bentleys made regular road trips to Atlanta to see his family, the pressures of work fading along with the thick city traffic as they ambled down Route 29 through Virginia. Eleanor found the view out the car window captivating, the Blue Ridge Mountains giving way to rolling hills and the Carolina cotton fields, the temperature warming the farther south they drove.

  “It’s almost like a different country,” she said on their first trip south. “So rural and spare. More lovely and quiet than I expected.”

  “You’ve never been this way before? Never visited a Florida beach?”

  “Of course not,” she responded. “Why would I?”

  It seemed reasonable to Talbot that a Smith professor might have had the means and inclination to take his family on a Florida vacation.

  “So where did your family vacation?”

  “Cape Cod,” Eleanor responded. “Or Boston. But we rarely left Northampton because my father didn’t like to be away. Perhaps that’s why his heart gave out when it did.”

  At his parents’ house in Atlanta, cocktail hour began promptly at five, after Tal’s father came in from the Piedmont Driving Club. Eleanor held up well through arcane discussions that dissected everything from the Soviet threat to the coupling and uncoupling of people Talbot had grown up with. Often, this was followed by a little dinner party meant to help Eleanor get to know Tal’s old friends and the important members of his mother’s circle. The two women in his life enjoyed a polite if not warm relationship, his mother often asking, out of Eleanor’s hearing, if there was a baby on the way, or at least plans at some point, for that to be the case.

  “We’ll see, Mother. It’s not really anybody’s business but our own.”

  “You’re nearly forty-one, Talbot,” she’d responded. “It’s getting embarrassing.”

  . . .

  His mother would remain embarrassed and disappointed. The children Talbot anticipated did not materialize and as they approached their third anniversary, their relationship seemed to stall. It had not matured into the comfortable interdependence Talbot had expected, something akin to the durable connection his parents enjoyed. Instead, Eleanor grew more aloof, dutifully tending to her library work, disinclined to share much about it with her husband. Despite his broad hints that he’d love to spend a day with her at one of the museums as they once did, she no longer offered him a curated tour. Their Saturdays walking Rock Creek Park—once sacrosanct when he was in town—grew rare, Eleanor preferring to sit with her coffee until noon, reading and re-reading sections of The Washington Post, before heading out to lunch with Caroline or a trip to Giant for groceries.

  Tal blamed preoccupation with her job, and began making broad suggestions that they head to the Shenandoah Valley or Virginia Beach for a weekend, or plan a night out with friends from their Georgetown days. Instead, Eleanor planned a weekend away without him—a trip to New York to shop and meet old friends from Smith.

  Her trip coincided with a ten-day assignment Talbot had in Europe, assessing the political winds as the Marshall Plan helped Europe begin its healing. The billions of dollars flooding into the Continent were doing magnificent work, he saw. Eleanor would be thrilled. He thought of her the entire time he was there, especially on his overnight in Italy, and again in Paris, where he picked out some French brassieres and panties for her—lacy, sexy little things he hoped she would see as an invitation.

  When they reunited, she seemed especially happy to see him and eager to learn about his trip. Her time with her friends had been therapeutic, he thought, as she seemed to be making a renewed effort to connect with him in ways that might knit their relationship back together, restore the intimacy of their early marriage. She’d even bought him a gift: a beautiful Cheney briefcase in chestnut brown leather, nicer than anything he’d owned before. He would jettison his old Swaine attaché immediately, just to show her how much he appreciated her gift.

  So. They’d been apart, but she was still thinking about him. A step in the right direction, he thought.

  “Parliaments across Europe are leaning into democracy, Ellie, one by one,” he said between bites of lasagna. He’d stopped by their little Italian place after he’d landed at Andrews Air Force Base that afternoon, the owner happy to pack entrees and bread into foil trays for him to take home. “It’s a very, very hopeful sign. Greece has run the communist rebels out and Turkey is stable. Italy is rebuilding—Florence looks like a jewel. We’ll have to go back soon so you can see it. But Germany—wow. Berlin is a tense mess.”

  “All the former Allies fighting over it?”

  “Sort of. There’s still so much to put back together. Transportation doesn’t work. Unreliable food supply. But the longer-term concern is that the Soviets might wall off their sector. They say they have to protect Germans in the east from the fascists in the west.”

  Eleanor scoffed. “Oh, I’m just sure Germany is crawling with fascists these days. All the people who slept through the Nuremberg trials and still think fascism is the ticket. But that’s a little farfetched, isn’t it? To think they could build a wall around a city, across neighborhoods, separating families. Wouldn’t a wall have to be ridiculously high to keep people from crossing over? Sounds unworkable to me. Soviet hyperbole.”

  Talbot paused before he answered. “We think it’s years off, but they’re serious about it. We’ve heard them talking. So in the near term, they’ll be busy placing assets—human and technical—in the western sectors.”

  Was the source credible? She wanted to know. “Maybe they just want to distract attention from other things.”

  “It’s solid, Eleanor. The squishy intel never gets very far, certainly not to my team. And there’s an operation we’re getting going that will soon help us verify that and much more. But enough geopolitical intrigue. How was New York? All you’d hoped? How are your friends?”

  “They’re well. We did all the corny things: tea at the Plaza, buggy ride around Central Park. We plan to get tickets to The King and I when they go on sale and see it the next time we get together.”

  “Tourists,” he chided.

  “Make fun of me if you like. I enjoyed every minute.”

  “What else? I want to hear every detail.” He reached for her hand, happy to be connecting with her, to see her relaxed and comfortable with him.

  “It was fine.” She rose to take her plate to the sink, her back to him as she rinsed it.

  “Where’d you go?”

  “What? I’m here. Just cleaning up.”

  “Ellie,” he began, “it feels like you don’t want to broach anything, I don’t know…personal. Just politics and generalities.”

  She turned to look at him, baffled, and gave a little shrug. “No, Tal, I just answered your question and we’d sorta reached the end of that conversational string. Ok. What else?” She leaned against the kitchen counter and began counting on her fingers. “Let’s see. One, I loved being in New York and we’re all going to get together in a couple months and do it again, as I said. Two, work is work. Nothing really new going on. We’re about to audit the catalog—usual stuff. Three, I had a wonderful dinner last night with the Auclairs at Rive Gauche in Georgetown. Rémy says the Coq au Vin is the best you’ll get outside of Paris so we’ll have to go. French chef and everything. Four, the Electrolux broke—just spewed dust everywhere as it gave up the ghost—so we need to get a new one. So that is the sum and substance of what you missed while you were gone. I’m glad you had a good trip.”

  “It was fine. Got done what I needed to.”

  “Excellent,” she responded, patting him on the arm and leaving the room.

  Had she heaved her plate of lasagna at the wall, he would have felt just as thrown off. Why did she hold him at arms’ length? What point was she trying to make? Was it intrusive, his wanting to know how she spent her days, what she was feeling? Joy, boredom, insecurity, confidence, worry, hope—she seemed to want to manage it all smoothly and by herself, a stubborn vestige, he suspected, of her wartime trauma and accumulated losses that continued to contaminate their life together.

  Her phlegmatic interiority had once fascinated Talbot. He’d seen it as a sign of her depth, her brilliance, that she was the kind of introvert who needed space to think, to process, and recharge. He realized now that it had become a tool for her, hardening in an instant into a wall he couldn’t scale, a door he couldn’t enter if she wished him not to. He wondered what wire he had just tripped to make her run away from an intimate conversation, a normal conversation between two married people. If he didn’t know better, he might suspect she was involved with someone else. But there was no evidence of that. When he reached for her in the night, she still responded. With the lights out, her breath on his neck, her hands pulling him to her, he could believe their problems were minor and solvable.

  A baby, he hoped, might draw them closer. Among their circle, having children was a given and, comments to his mother notwithstanding, Talbot expected to have a family like virtually everyone he knew. He’d overheard Caroline and Eleanor discuss the kind of mothers they hoped to be, test out names they might use, paint colors that would work in a nursery. It gave Tal confidence he would join the parent ranks in due time.

  . . .

  Nine months later, Talbot spent a soggy week in London, darting from hotel room to meeting room for conferences with the Royal Air Force about a planned joint endeavor. As his plane touched down at Andrews, he looked forward to seeing Eleanor, enjoying a glass of bourbon, eating a hearty something without cream sauce, and sleeping in his own bed. But the military staff car left him at the doorstep of a dark and empty house. Her car was in the garage so he assumed she was out with Caroline, somehow missing that he was due home this evening. He fixed his cocktail, swilling his bourbon and waiting for his wife.

  As he debated whether he was more hungry than tired, whether to rustle up something to eat or head to bed, Eleanor arrived, stepping from a taxi looking pale and tired. Talbot greeted her at the door, taking her by surprise and causing her to drop her tote bag in the doorway. The afghan blanket she often pulled around herself on cold evenings spilled out. She tucked it back in the tote then stood to face him.

  “Welcome back, Talbot. I missed you,” she said quietly, reaching her arms around him and leaning hard into his chest.

  “What is it, Eleanor? Are you not feeling well?” He extended his arms, leaning back so he could look into her eyes. They were dull, distant. She would not meet his gaze.

  “I had a doctor’s appointment,” she said. “I didn’t plan on hitting you with this the minute you arrived home. But…he had news for me.”

  Talbot cupped her face. “Tell me.”

  “It’s not serious. But it’s not good.” She leaned back into his shoulder so he could not search her eyes as she spoke. “I had some tests run over the past few months, Talbot, and they seem to indicate I can’t have children.”

  Talbot was stunned, realizing suddenly that this must be the source of her sadness, something she had worried about and carried alone without leaning on him, never giving him the chance to share the burden; suffering, while people they knew seemed to grow their families without effort. She continued.

  “They said I can’t hold a pregnancy—the way I’m built, the way my body responds. And they can’t really treat it,” she said, her demeanor composed, eyes moist, but not giving way to weeping as another woman might—as he might have expected. “It just happens with some women.”

  Talbot didn’t entirely accept this. He had a million questions. There was always something that could be done, some intervention. Wasn’t there? Didn’t some women stay in bed for their pregnancies, then bear healthy children? What about surgery? Could that correct it? How could this door be slammed shut like this when he didn’t even know they were trying to open it? Why had she borne this alone?

  He stroked her hair, kissing the top of her head, thinking.

  “Eleanor,” he began slowly, “we still have each other. We have us.” She looked up at him, as if to verify he truly meant what he said. “We’re still a family—just us two—whatever happens. But, maybe there is something that can be done medically. And we haven’t talked about adoption, but we could look into that at some point. Lots of couples do that.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said simply, her smile wan. “I think we need to accept this and not be eaten up by it. God knows I’ve spent enough time worrying about it.”

  “But what did the doctor say exactly? What did he recommend? Has he got experience with this? Because I think we at least need to get a second opinion.”

  Eleanor seemed unwilling to volunteer further details and given her obvious fatigue, he didn’t push. She said she needed him to sit with her and accept it. She asked him not to take this on as a problem to tackle as he was accustomed to doing—strategically, from multiple directions, calling in the experts, applying pressure.

  “Maybe we should talk with Reverend Grant. It might do us some good to sort out what’s just happened.” Eleanor shook her head and told him to stop, saying her sorrow and disappointment had consumed her for so long, that she had no more energy to discuss it. Only later did he realize he’d made a terrible error, not wading into their sadness and parsing fully what it meant for them, as painful as it was. Maybe if they had met together with her doctor, or consulted an adoption agency—even if it never resulted in adding a baby to their family—it would have drawn them closer, revived their marriage. A grief shared might have turned them toward one another instead of opening a fissure that only grew with time.

  “Anyway, your job, Talbot—it consumes you. Maybe that was not going to be ideal for raising children. And I’ve been thinking that perhaps, I’m meant for other things. I have my job at the library and I’ve had the idea of volunteering at the National Gallery—now I won’t have to give any of that up. And that’s good and in a way, it’s… I don’t know, liberating.”

  He tried to agree with her, to affirm and soothe her. But learning they would never be parents turned out only to liberate her from him, to turn her attentions toward professional interests and away from the family she and Talbot comprised. Where he had received her news as a gut punch, an emotional loss he would need time to absorb, Eleanor behaved tactically, re-sorting her list of priorities as if not having children were merely an item to take off life’s list, not a wrenching, irreplaceable loss. Although they never discussed it, Talbot believed she struggled with shame in not joining the province of motherhood, shame she covered by seeming not to care, her natural reserve amplified and impenetrable.

  Their physical relationship persisted, soon characterized mostly by bedtime encounters after the lights went out—Eleanor no longer climbing into the shower with him or wafting past him in an open robe but receptive when he reached for her. The relationships he soon developed with other women, he told himself, were an inevitable consequence. It wasn’t sex he was primarily after but confirmation that women still found him interesting, brilliant, in charge. A man in his line of work, with the stress and the secrecy, needed a counterweight, a mechanism to verify the fact of his charms, elicit admiration from those around him, most especially his romantic partner. Even with the playacting and temporariness that characterized his serial intimacies—he didn’t love these women—it gave him great satisfaction to know he held them in his sway. The way they followed him down this road—from the initial earnest interest, that gave way to flirting, then word games and double entendre, that finally led them to his bed—told him, at mid-life, that he retained essential powers.

  The general kindness and deference Eleanor showed Talbot kept him from provoking fights with her, from threatening divorce unless she opened up to him. There were, in truth, no divorced men at CIA because personal failure could too easily be conflated with professional incapability; how could an officer who couldn’t move his marriage in a particular direction do the same in clandestine maneuvers? Instead, there were men whose wives lived apart from them because aging parents needed a hand or their teenagers needed to continue school in a particular neighborhood or they owned houses realtors just couldn’t sell. Such arrangements satisfied the agency’s code. Talbot rationalized that his extracurriculars were required to maintain the status quo in his marriage, and therefore, stability in his job.