A Map of Betrayal: A Novel

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My mother used to say, “Lilian, as long as I’m alive, you must have nothing to do with that woman.” She was referring to Suzie, my father’s mistress.

“Okay, I won’t,” I would reply.

Nellie, my embittered mother, had never forgiven my father for keeping another woman, though he’d died many years before. I kept my promise. I did not approach Suzie Chao until my mother, after a tenacious fight against pancreatic cancer, succumbed last winter. Death at eighty — I can say she lived a long life.

Still heavy with grief, I got in touch with Suzie, first by letter and then by phone. She lived in Montreal, far away from my home state, Maryland. When forsythia began to bloom in my backyard, she mailed me my father’s diary, six morocco-bound volumes, each measuring eight inches by five. I hadn’t known he kept a journal, and I had assumed that the FBI seized all the papers left by him, Gary Shang, the biggest Chinese spy ever caught in North America. The diary recorded his life from 1949 to 1980. He hadn’t written every day, and the journal was more like a personal work log. One of the volumes bears a quotation from Nietzsche on its first page: “Preserve me from all petty victories!” Another opens with Franklin Roosevelt’s words: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The last volume starts with a claim from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “Unearned suffering is redemptive.” My father was fond of aphorisms and filled a notebook with hundreds of them, but that little trove of wisdom was in the FBI’s possession now.

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