Ophelia: A Novel

By Bruce Damuth

It is 1959 when the governments Mission Control sends spy Malcolm Stuart to the university in Berkeley, California. Malcolm mistakenly believes he is leaving the world of espionage to train for something ordinary. But as Berkeley becomes a hotbed of civil unrest, Malcom begins spiraling into a decline that will continue through the next decade.

It is 1971 when a now thirty-four-year-old Malcolm meets Ophelia outside his apartment building. He is a graduate student attempting to restart a life plagued by misdirection, deceit, and manipulation. She is a free-spirited former dutiful wife now traveling nurse. Entranced by his undeniable attraction to her, it seems Malcolm has finally found refuge in the arms of a good woman. But as their lives become intertwined and their unspoken love grows, Malcolm has no idea of the battles he is about to face as parasitic maniacs lurk in the shadows and tragedy awaits.

Ophelia is the tale of one mans decades-long quest to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to find honest love and his place in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480819177

Bruce Damuth

Bruce Damuth served in military intelligence as a Russian linguist. He earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree in Language and Literature, worked a variety of jobs, and then taught high school English. Now retired, he resides in Hawthorne, Nevada. This is his first book.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

S he was twenty-nine. Brown, shoulder-length hair. A little over five feet tall and a waist you could slip your arm around as easily as the kiss to follow. Not drop-dead beautiful, maybe not even what you would call beautiful, but cute, demure, lovable, a sweetheart. An almost pouty lower lip you guessed played to her smoky, seductive voice and eyes as irresistible as an aurora borealis, e da per li occhi una dolcezza al core …

I watched her move, sentendosi laudare, benignamente d’umilta vestudo, e par che si’a una cosa venuta da cielo…

I was (sospira) in love.

And I thought, if I could talk to God, I’d ask for her.

But I was ten, and she was Constance Bonacieux, in love with D’Artagnan (Gene Kelly), then Helen Burger, in love with Glen Miller (Jimmy Stewart). She was June Allyson.

One of those sometimes-meaningless things that only subtly become part of a mindset. Life is full of them, and they run through your thoughts like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will one day be a portrait of your life, if you’re paying attention. Or not.

I hardly remember my first love. Kew Gardens, in the borough of Queens, New York. Of course, that was a different kind of love. She was a maid or housekeeper or nanny, I was just a toddler, but my mother let her go because I ran to her during my first experience with an electric storm. She left me a doll, but it was taken away. It’s the only toy I remember as mine of my first three years. Otherwise, I remember quite a lot.

Before that, there was antipathy. After that, there was Helen in kindergarten, Marylyn, Sandra, Gail, Joanne, and Natalie in the second through sixth grades, then Phyllis in the seventh and eighth grades. Hannah had a crush on me, but she was chubby. Phyllis is the only one I remember with affection. And she was the sexiest girl or woman I have ever known or seen – in movies, magazines, or anyplace else. She had the figure, but it was in her eyes. You can’t package that, and you definitely had to be there to see it. The sense she expressed between modesty and seduction could stop a heart or start a war.

Would I have wished Ophelia expressed that? No. That was for an age of pubescence or, at most, adolescence, a game children play to prepare for adulthood like the games of battle and cheering for the home team. But I have no doubt that the mature Phyllis was equally endearing to someone, just as Ophelia’s was to me.

The last time I saw Phyllis, the year after finishing high school, I was on my way to catch a train to New York City to join the army, to learn Russian, and become a spy. July 5, 1956. I met Ophelia in the late fall of 1971. The years in between were – as, indeed, all the years have been – totally unbelievable, would be appropriate, if they were fiction.

In 1959, Mission Control (the MC) sent me to the university in Berkeley, California. My contact there was Hestia, the daughter of an Army colonel based at Ford Ord in Monterey, California, born in Mississippi, but had spent all but the first and then current years of her twenty-seven years in Europe and Asia Minor.

We were introduced – This is almost like something out of Noel Coward or Graham Green – We were introduced, the weekend after classes began, by the son (I’ll call him David, though I didn’t see him often enough to have remembered his name after that week and I never saw him again) the son of a San Francisco psychiatrist. I had rented a room in an older house a few blocks from the university on Channing, just off Telegraph Avenue, and the MC arranged for David to rent an adjoining room, obviously for the purpose of casually (Oh, hi. Say, my girlfriend and I are going to Santa Cruz this weekend, and she’s got a girl friend …) meeting me and introducing me to Hestia, since he moved back to a frat house a week or two later.

Santa Cruz, just inside and north of the north point of Monterey Bay, 80 miles south of both San Francisco and Berkeley, has a marvelous, sandy beachfront on the Santa Cruz Anchorage opening to the bay and the Pacific Ocean,

Backed by a boardwalk with an amusement park and shops, it’s a popular summer resort, with a town behind it and motels for visitors. The beach is a couple hundred feet wide and about two miles long, divided by the narrow mouth of the San Lorenso River. From the north end of the beach, a wharf juts out a half mile into the Anchorage and houses restaurants and shops with parking, if your timing is right. It was a clear, beautiful day, temperature in the high eighties, water something over seventy degrees, but not much. The waves were nothing to excite a surfer, but enough to feel like ocean.

We swam for a while, an obvious ice-breaker, then Hestia and I walked along the beach and talked about life, our lives, and the way things were. I don’t know what kind of build-up I had been given, and, while our conversation flowed easily and happily, I couldn’t help feeling there was more to our meeting than I had anticipated.

Here’s the thing. There are a few things I can’t or won’t explain, here. Perhaps in what Ophelia and I came to call an Egress File, I will explain those things, but, for now, I’ll just say Hestia and I hit it off, and, from that time, we began dating.

Hestia was all her name implied, keeper of the hearth and home, and we became more involved than I was prepared for. Good looking, she was a few inches shorter than I, blonde, wavy hair to her shoulders, perhaps 120 pounds, a nice straight nose, small mouth, small waist and more than adequate hips and bosom. I suppose if I had been psychic or even a little paranoid, I would have figured out she was to be much more than a contact, and I might have lived happily ever after with the three or four or five children she was built for in some kind of government affiliated complex, with the constantly nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Maybe. Of course, she could have told me – she certainly hinted at it – but she didn’t, and I have no idea what the consequences would have been if she had. For starters. I wouldn’t have believed her; she would have had to have shown me, and, then, I don’t know what I would have done. I saw it, once, some years later, but the trauma precursing a later PTS had begun to take its toll, and by then I was repressing responses.

It was fun for a while. Hestia was a Psych Major in her fourth year, and I, an incoming freshman, in a last minute decision, wavering between English and Psychology, had signed up as a Psych major, a big mistake, as it turned out. I had just enough popular knowledge of the subject to think psychology a suitable course of academic pursuit for me and just enough familiarity with Freud (Nietzsche is peachy, but Freud’s enjoyed) and Sophocles (I want a girl, just like the girl, that married dear old dad) and phallic symbols to argue about Hamlet’s Oedipal complex and the significance of swords, guns, and smoking to the male psyche, all of which was all the rage in the fifties, as I recall. With that very naïve understanding of what the academic study would yield, I went for it.

We had just come from watching Olivier’s Hamlet at a university showing, recommended by my English professor who had made a big deal of Hamlet’s hesitance to confront the murderer of his father and his appeals to his mother, and, naturally, the psychological school of criticism fashionable at the time raised the issue of Oedipal associations.

My professor, Hestia said, doesn’t really go along with a lot of Freud’s interpretations, and in class yesterday he joked about how many pipe stems he chews through every week. He said, ‘I must really have a problem,’ and we all laughed.

We were in the Ratskeller on Telegraph Avenue, a couple blocks from Sather Gate, the entrance to the UC campus. The Ratskeller, evoking images of clandestine meetings and radical philosophies in my young, Hollywood imbued imagination, seemed the perfect place to engage in controversy and challenge or defend the intellectual thought of the day, activities for which, I believed universities were noted. Over steins of beer in the dark but public cellar, wooden tables of two-by-six slats with benches to match, peanut shells covering the concrete floor to manifest indifference to the physical world, no music back then, but the room filled by the sound of ideas about science and art and freedom of speech and philosophy. Very romantic. Well, I was young –

The one that gets me, I said, is that stuff about Hamlet having a thing for his mother.

He seemed to have – that scene with his mother in her bedroom.

Well, maybe Laurence Olivier did, but Hamlet – I don’t think so.

Hestia laughed, and I added, "Besides, it doesn’t go along with the thinking of the time. I doubt anyone, then, even Shakespeare, would have suggested such a thing.

Wasn’t it part of the Greek dramas…?

First of all, Oedipus didn’t know Jocasta was his mother. Second, Shakespeare, according to Johnson, didn’t read enough Greek and certainly didn’t read Freud –

We, both, laughed at that.

Then, I continued, third, Sophocles wasn’t translated until the eighteenth century, and fourth, it’s absurd. Look. Hamlet is basically a detective story, and he spent the whole play just trying to get proof of what he suspected – And that’s why all the delay, too."

The ghost –

That’s just a dramatic affect to show Hamlet had reason to suspect his uncle of murder, and Shakespeare, like Donne and other writers of the time, were familiar with ‘litigious men’ and the ‘law’s delay’.

Hestia appeared impressed, and I felt so smart I couldn’t help smiling proudly. Today, of course, somebody would have said, Everybody knows that, but even then, though I felt I had made a case, I knew it was nothing an average audience wouldn’t have known intuitively.

Or, Who cares?

And maybe that was the thing –

But that wasn’t enough. I went on, The thing is, if Shakespeare wrote it today, he would have had to have written a happy ending, Ophelia doesn’t die, and she helps Hamlet catch Claudius, who confesses –

Do you think Claudius has a conscience?

Well, Shakespeare did, and so did Hamlet. So Claudius confesses, Hamlet gets the throne – worth millions of dollars, of course – marries Ophelia, somehow Gertrude is proven innocent, Hamlet makes a treaty with Fortinbras, they all live happily ever after, the audience goes home feeling safe. And we both laughed at that idea.

The thing was I knew so little, but we talked so of the assumed madness of Edgar Allen Poe, the periodic style of Faulkner and how, like Shakespeare, he variously spelled his name, the remains of the ancient Greek civilization, which Hestia had seen, and psychology of authors, The Fifty Minute Hour, Rebel Without a Cause, The Three Faces of Eve, Hidden Persuaders, A Few Buttons Missing, Brill’s Freud, fads, the beat generation (still in flux) with its stream of consciousness poetry and degrees of jazz (cool to hot) …

Conversation with her was easy and fun, often agreeably satiric and amusing. But it was all a cover. What little I knew, largely from my reading during some of my spare hours while on active duty in the Far East, went a long way, Hestia was impressed, but I felt like a dilettante, an inchoate Felix Krull, clever but not very deep, for, despite – or, rather, because of – my role in espionage, what I knew of how the world works was miniscule. I really didn’t understand evil, evil as in Gestapo, KGB, extermination camps, Mengelean Fascist experimentation on human beings, megalomaniacal and self-righteous arrogance, and the unspeakable fate for which I had been set up. Thank God, I was never caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, although, sometimes,I feel like I had been.

When I was separated from active duty earlier that year, I thought I was leaving the spying and eavesdropping world and mentality behind to train for something ordinary, a life of suits and ties, weekends of leisure, a wife and friends, long and, maybe, loud conversations about books, writers and artists, inconclusive discussions about life, theories and speculations, or some such notions of life after college. I had no idea that Berkeley was about to become a hotbed of civil unrest. More to the point, I had no idea of the passive role I was assigned by the MC.

It was a combination of things clandestine and hypothetical beyond the any legality, morality, any ethical consideration, and so top-secretive that even those engaged in the project don’t know what it’s for or about. Certainly not the end result.

Now, so many years later, the ironic truth of it all is clear enough to yield some judgments, but I will reserve those for the Egress File. I’ll just tell you that, for an accumulation of reasons, I went into a decline that continued through the next decade and until I met Ophelia. Something was wrong, and I didn’t know what. I began drinking too much, lost interest in my classes, dropped out of college, and broke it off with Hestia. Of course, that also meant I was dissociating from whatever plan she and the MC had anticipated for me, and she cried when I told her, But, then, the MC hooked me up with a student who lived off-campus and was probably recruited for her unstable background. She lied to me, gave me gonorrhea, lied to me some more, and I continued on down the social ladder. How I climbed back up from that is a story in itself, but I’ll save that for another time, if I have enough. At the time, I didn’t understand what was going on.

I understand now, and I see your fear. You are born, do animal things for a while, die, and the universe continues to expand, as indifferent to your life as you are to your mother’s first labor pain, so I might as well be writing this for someone a few light years away, but I’m not.

CHAPTER 2

I met Ophelia two weeks before Thanksgiving in 1971, the day I returned from my second trip to Virginia. That summer, after completing my Bachelor’s requirements at the university in Sacramento, California, at the invitation and insistence of my brother, Don, and my father, I had flown to Virginia for my second back operation for a herniated disc which was practically making me a cripple. In August, I returned to Sacramento, rented a studio apartment on Newman Court, a short cul-de-sac off Carlson Drive that began a block away at the J Street thoroughfare fronting the California State University in Sacramento, and began my course work for a Master of Arts in Language and Literature.

My apartment was on the ground floor, front, of the small complex of fifteen one-bedroom units, enclosing a courtyard and a swimming pool, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac opposite a Scottish Rite Temple and accessing Mormon and Catholic properties, the Newman Center. The door to my apartment opened on the breezeway into the complex, and opposite my door was the bank of mailboxes for the apartments. That’s where I met her.

My unit had originally been the office for the complex, but it had a kitchenette off the living room/bedroom with a sofa bed, and a walk-through closet that led to a bathroom with a shower. One side of the closet was shelved, probably for linens, but I used it for my books – a complete set of Durant’s history, Coplestone’s philosophy, a complete set of Shakespeare my grandmother had given me, textbooks on British and American literature I couldn’t part with, collected essays, Greek classics, the writings of Faulkner, Hemingway, Dickens, Twain, Shaw, Strinberg – eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century novelists, playwrights – dictionaries, handbooks, and so on. The stuff of an English major. The other side had a clothes rack. Overlooking the street at the front was a picture window. At the back, the kitchenette, a smaller window looked into the courtyard through the iron stairway leading to the second story.

My unit was small, but easy to clean, the location was convenient, and the price was right.

The other units, one bedroom apartments, were occupied, with one exception – that of Ophelia – by students, all younger than I, most sharing with friends, one by a married couple, young men and young women, undergraduates in their early twenties, late-comers to the hippie generation, the drug culture, middle class and discreet, seriously students but uninhibited by the protocols of decorum, unfettered youth with whom I shared little interest, certainly not pot or the music, so I passed from my apartment to my classes and back aloofly, and my studies were uninterrupted and productive – at least for a while, for part of the semester, until I discovered the explanation for so many non-sequential and bizarre intrusions into my life, until I began to understand the true nature and