by Paul Wolfe
Lukas downed his drink. It seemed to explode momentarily in his throat and GI tract, but he recovered quickly and held his glass up for Chazz to refill.
“The CIA erased all links to the assassination,” he said. “Angleton called Bill Sullivan of the FBI and rehearsed the questions and answers he’d give to the Warren Commission. Who else but the head of counterintelligence could ensure a national security cover-up of a counterintelligence nightmare?”
I didn’t bother to ask him how he knew. There’s a time to ask questions and a time not to ask questions, and the time not to ask is far more important than the time to ask.
“Oswald had handlers, Mary. He was overseen when he defected to Russia, he was overseen when he came back to New Orleans, and when he moved on to Dallas, they got him a job at the Texas Book Depository. Listen to this. The book depository was owned by an oil millionaire named D. H. Byrd. Who was Byrd? He was the founder of the Civil Air Patrol. Lee Harvey Oswald joined the Civil Air Patrol when he was a teenager.”
“Oh, what a tangled web,” I said.
“In the Civil Air Patrol, Oswald met a pilot named David Ferrie, a semi-deranged right-wing fanatic. They grew close, and then less close, because Ferrie was also queer and couldn’t always separate business from pleasure in the matter of young men. But Ferrie was the personal pilot of Carlos Marcello and the New Orleans mob. More important, he was a central figure in the Bay of Pigs invasion force, and was immersed in the anti-Castro Cuban underground in Miami.”
“Oh, what a tangled web,” I repeated, and lit a cigarette.
Lukas was now in overdrive. Chazz stood listening intently. “More than once, Ferrie was heard to proclaim that JFK was a dead man, but he was simply echoing a universal feeling down there since the betrayal at the Bay of Pigs. So . . . Lee Harvey Oswald pretended to be part of a bogus chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a stunt meant to create a false impression of him as a Marxist. What was the address of his chapter of Fair Play for Cuba? The same address as David Ferrie’s office, on Camp Street in New Orleans.”
“They won’t get away with it,” I said.
“You notice no one asks why Oswald was in Dallas. Or how he got the job. Or how he was able to defect to Russia. Or how he was able to come back at the height of the Cold War and receive financial support rather than punishment. No one asks. But who ran the fake defectors program, and who served as general manager for all of Oswald’s various handlers? Yes, James Jesus Angleton.”
I used to read from Aldous Huxley to Jack, back when there seemed a world we could change, but I never read him the line I now quoted from memory.
“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
OCTOBER 5
I’m nobody! Who are you? So said Emily Dickinson. She wrote it in a poem I read at Vassar, and I understand her perfectly, sweet Emily who never went out and lived in her thoughts. Last night I lay with my fat tabby Evangeline, free of the burden of having to be someone. The social mirage of this town eventually feels like hard work, the nightly constructing of yourself into a someone in order to meet all the other someones.
Evangeline and I luxuriated in being no one in particular; we were free, except she was free to doze, to be no more than a blob of fur with eyes, while I was compelled to pick up my mangled, dog-eared copy of the Warren Commission report. Eventually I will put this book down and confront Cord and James. Eventually I will not let them get away with it. In the meantime, I assemble data. I scour facts, building a case no one wants built. Which is why I finally got up, the confusion growing in Evangeline’s little marble eyes, and headed down the hill again to Clyde’s.
When the sounds of the closing door echoed and then died on a deserted M Street, I saw Lukas waiting, as if he had no one else to talk to either. I nodded to this big burly man whose glasses slip down his nose from perspiration, and he came to the stool beside me.
Chazz was wiping up the bar next to us, and I nodded to him.
“Who the fuck was Jack Ruby?” I asked. Information is a measure of order in the universe rescued from randomness.
Lukas pushed his glasses up his nose, pausing for about a thousandth of a second to assemble his thoughts, and then spoke. “A mobster. A Mafia operative. Clearly doing the bidding of Carlos Marcello in New Orleans. Dallas falls under Marcello’s jurisdiction, don’t forget.”
“Why did he kill Oswald?”
“Why indeed? Something must have gotten fucked up.”
“Fucked up.”
“Yes, Oswald was apparently meant to be eliminated immediately, but something got fucked up.”
“And how was Ruby allowed so easily into the police station?”
“How indeed?”
“And here’s something I’ve wondered. Have you seen the photographs? They were moving Oswald through the tumult and crowd in the police station right before Ruby ran up to shoot him. All the officials in the police station were wearing black suits and black cowboy hats. All except one. The single officer walking right beside Oswald in the chaos of the police station, the one escorting him to the area where Jack Ruby waited, was wearing a white suit and white cowboy hat. Am I the only one who noticed that?”
“You’re very observant.”
“I’m a visual person.”
OCTOBER 9
Sometimes being alone hits you, as if absence itself is the presence of something malevolent. I walked down Warren Commission Hill again toward Clyde’s. This is my absurd new name for Thirty-Fourth Street. It was late, late in the Georgetown evening, and I was aware that in Washington, a putrid saloon in the deathly hours of the morning may be one of the few places truth could live.
Lukas was at the bar, lost in desperate chatter around some young blonde. Her drifting attention veered between boredom and bemusement, a woman’s unconcern with a man’s rat-tat-tat.
When will men learn that need is toxic? Fumbling pursuit preceded by no sign of interest tells a woman you are after her, and if you are after her, she knows you perceive her as having high value, and if her value is high, your value will be low, and you have just telegraphed yourself as unworthy of consideration. I decided to save Lukas from further failure in the evolutionary game and beckoned him to the other side of the bar.
“I heard a story from a reporter in Texas,” he said. “There’s this man named Virgil Pennebaker, and he happens to be on the overpass as the motorcade arrives, a few hundred feet away from the grassy knoll. He sees two men in the railroad yard behind the wooden fence at the top of the knoll, and something strikes him as odd. They are in a heated discussion and dressed rather strangely: one wears a dark business suit with white shirt, tie, and fedora, the other the striped overalls and cap of a railroad worker. Virgil turns toward the motorcade just as Kennedy’s limousine turns onto Elm Street, and when he looks back to the knoll, Suit Man is holding up a rifle perched on the pickets of the wooden fence. Boom. A spark of light erupts, a puff of white smoke, as if a cigarette were being lit, but Virgil knows it’s the rifle firing. He watches as Suit Man throws the rifle to Train Man, who starts running north into the railroad yards. Virgil looks down and sees Kennedy’s car roaring beneath the overpass, heading for the entrance to the freeway. He can clearly see the president and Jackie slumped down, he sees blood everywhere, he can even see what’s left of the head . . .”
I told Lukas it was enough. I was nauseated and teary-eyed. I heard Jack mumbling “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” in the low voice people use when they speak to you in dreams, and it was time to leave. But Lukas put his hands up to restrain me, and for a nanosecond I thought I was the young blonde from the other side of the bar and Lukas was escalating his pickup maneuver to include physical restraint. Then I saw he was just sweaty and pathetic, another man turned buffoon around women, begging me to stay and hear the end of the story. He signaled Chazz to pour me another bourbon, and I exhaled deeply.
“Virgil looks back to the grassy knoll when the limousine passes underneath him, and there�
�s Train Man, disassembling the rifle, putting it into a suitcase, then running north and disappearing into the railroad yards. It sounds like a tall tale, but the journalist who related the story knows that Virgil’s vision is extremely sharp. Virgil Pennebaker is a deaf-mute. He sees what others don’t see—he just can’t communicate it. And every attempt to inform the authorities becomes one more nightmare. He is dismissed, ignored, ridiculed by police and FBI. And when the truth-seekers of the Warren Commission come to town searching for witnesses at Dealey Plaza, Virgil Pennebaker’s testimony proves of no interest to them.”
“The words of a deaf man falling on deaf ears,” I said.
My drink was finished, the blonde was gone. I felt that loneliness would be preferable to the pain of more information, and I kissed Lukas lightly on the cheek—the closest he would get that night to the sweetness of a female body.
OCTOBER 7
How many definitions could we have redefined ourselves into? How many shapes could we have twisted ourselves into to obey the geometries of love? Cicely Angleton and I once heard a poet read at the Jefferson Place gallery, and I still remember a line: “The full recognition of the other in their otherness.” Maybe that’s as close to love as you can come. Jack and I came close.
OCTOBER 9
When Jack said he had to go to Dallas, against reason and argument, I think he felt free somehow. I think he knew.
They had already rehearsed it. They had already tried out two assassinations on him. He told me about it, he knew about it. One in Chicago and one in Tampa. Each operation called for multiple shots from a high-powered rifle, and a patsy who would be framed to take the blame, someone to be set up as a lone nut, some disenchanted soldier with a strange background. Each operation was exposed before it could come to fruition. Which led to Dallas. Dallas was where it would all come together, deep in the phantasmagoria of Texas.
Dallas. Where John Birchers called desegregation an attempt to transform the South into a black Soviet Republic in order to mongrelize the white race. Where the Reverend Billy James Hargis launched his Christian Crusade to expose Satan at the heart of the United Nations, world Communism, and President Kennedy. Where H. L. Hunt, the richest man on earth, proclaimed through his radio station that Medicare would make President Kennedy a medical czar with potential life-and-death power over every man, woman, and child in the country. Where a man named Jimmy Robinson received a ten-dollar fine for burning a cross on the lawn of Jack Oran, a survivor of Auschwitz who had undergone castration at the hands of Dr. Joseph Mengele. Where Major General Edwin Walker flooded the city with Wanted posters that bore a photograph of Jack Kennedy and the ominous headline: WANTED FOR TREASON.
All this, Arthur Schlesinger had told me, and I passed it on to Jack. I told him what everyone told him, that if he went to Dallas, they couldn’t guarantee they’d bring him back alive. Bobby told Jack not to go at Bobby’s birthday party, just two days before the trip, and I heard Jack’s answer to his brother. He was so serene. He quoted Winston Churchill’s description of the heroic soldier Raymond Asquith: “When the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.”
It happens like that sometimes; the cloud that condenses from the particles of ourselves lifts, and underneath is freedom. Timothy Leary said we are composed of trillions of cells, and in each of those cells are trillions of something smaller, atoms, and in each of those atoms, somehow, if you dig far enough, you will find an empty space. We are empty space, me and my short blond hair and my big mouth, and Cord, humiliated on that dance floor, and that diagram of the next assassination, and Jack smiling in the White House the way he smiled at me at the Winter Festivity Dance at Choate, and my ghost sister Rosamond on her quicksilver stallion, we are, in the end, all empty space. Still, we are charged to carry on. A billion-year sentence. Except. Except. Except.
OCTOBER 11
I dreamed of Rosamond last night, ghost sister on her moonlit horse, back at Grey Towers in the season of jabbering crickets. She returns to me these days, growing vaster in my thoughts as the vista of my life grows smaller. Daddy Amos was on the piazza in this dream, writing another of his diatribes against war, or perhaps some manifesto about higher wages for miners—it all occurred in the space of a milky blur. But hoofbeats pounded Daddy’s gravel paths and woke me up, and she called to me as she passed. I didn’t hear her, but I knew she was saying my name: Mary, such a plain and obvious name it seemed to me. The churning woke me up, and I knew Rosamond was on her moonlit horse. Excalibur was his name. It was midnight in my dream, the hour she used to ride, and now she rode in the neurons of my brain as I slept, her hair flying back like crystallized wind. I watched from the casement of a bedroom full of rabbits, and thought: my sister is mercury, and I am lead. I will never fly like her. Then I woke up sweating—Rosamond, never to return, my older sister who took her own life—and I cried in my pillow. It is midnight. I am on the horse now. Will I be a ghost soon? Is she calling to me from where she sleeps?
* * *
That was where the diary ended. James Jesus Angleton closed the pages. His bone-thin fingers brushed a leather cover daubed with cloudbursts of paint. He lowered the book onto the coffee table in his den. It had been a slow read, the writing a slow-going left-leaning feminine hand. It appeared to have been written in bursts, some of the text seemingly plucked from memory against the ravages of human forgetfulness, some more reflective, as if intended for an audience it would never reach.
In a decade of counterintelligence and the voluminous scrutiny of documents, he had rarely lavished such fevered intensity on a piece of writing. It was a murder mystery tuned to the highest pitch, in which he himself was a main character.
He looked up. The fire still burned in the stone fireplace, and a phantom of fireglow danced in his black-framed glasses. The flames now rhymed with thoughts engulfing the mind behind the lenses, and he lit up a Virginia Slim.
Mary had told Anne Truitt of the diary, letting her know it was hidden in a mahogany box on a shelf in her studio. Should anything befall Mary, she should retrieve it at all costs. Mary had forebodings. She told Anne of her sense that forces were closing in. She would arrive home and find things moved. There were beeps on her phone, some mysterious electrical current intruding on her conversations. There was growing criticism from Agency wives, warning her to be cautious.
Angleton would never have known about the diary had he not been tapping Mary’s phone. And he would never have retrieved it had he not picked the lock of Mary’s studio just minutes ahead of her sister, Tony Bradlee, and her husband, Ben. This rapid descent on a diary in a painting studio had been ignited by the event now detailed on the front page of the Washington Post and spread before him on the coffee table:
WOMAN ARTIST SHOT AND KILLED ON CANAL TOWPATH; MRS. MARY PINCHOT MEYER WAS A FRIEND OF MRS. KENNEDY.
The story spoke of a forty-three-year-old blond socialite from Georgetown and her mysterious death on the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath by the Potomac, two bullets fired at close range, one in the heart and one in the head.
Angleton imagined the body lying there, inert. A churning arose from someplace invisible and invaded his chest, something that felt much like longing. It was so long since he had felt something. He still could not fathom where life goes when it leaves the flesh, a mystery that endured though he had earned his salary on death, though he had witnessed and supervised and sighed and turned his back on so many instances of life being taken from so many bodies.
But she was different. She was Mary. He had kept a memory locked inside him, and the memory had never left through all the years and all the lies and all the brutality confronted on a daily basis. It had survived all the hard liquor and cigarettes he pounded into his body to keep from feeling. It was a flash of flesh. A summer morning in Pennsylvania when Cicely was still in Vassar and had taken him to meet her roommate. They had parked on the curving driveway of the estate a
nd walked around to the back. And there she was, on the grass, on a blanket, on her stomach, nude, her buttocks quietly offered to the sun and to any witness happening by. The buttocks were neither too big and too fleshy nor too flat and bony, but, for the glands and hormones of the college-age James Angleton, a kind of perfection of proportion. It was a transgression to see them, as he stood holding Cicely’s hand, staring at two white cheeks and imagining the darkness that lay between them. And then, when Cicely called out to her friend, the blonde had simply looked up and smiled, smiled radiantly, he had to admit, unembarrassed and oblivious to her state. She sat up, exposing delicate small breasts with rather large nipples, the transgression continuing to the front, and, reaching for a robe, exposing a small glimpse of moss between her legs. She kept smiling, unconcerned, and James Angleton never forgot the sight. He went on to marry Cicely, went on to become godfather to Mary’s sons, went on to partner with Mary’s ex-husband in the cesspool of counterintelligence, went on to feel continual jolts of pain as her assignations with the degenerate young president John Fitzgerald Kennedy were reported to him on a weekly basis. And now she was gone, and he held her diary, the final transgression: the white flesh of her buttocks, the triangle of hair between her legs, and now her diary.
He had tried to warn her. He had tried to stop her learning the secrets of her lover’s death, what the mélange of anti-Castro Cubans, CIA operatives, foreign-born shooters, and mobsters all referred to in code as the Big Event. He had tried, in short, to save her life. But as powerful and adept as he was in controlling counterintelligence in the CIA, he was helpless to stop the forces from silencing a woman. Just as he had been helpless to stop them silencing a president a year earlier. It is a strange brand of tragedy to be aware of crimes of immense proportion but crimes you cannot stop because you care first for the survival of the Company, and second for the survival of the nation. He had done his best to riddle her with fear, to make her cease asking, to make her stop talking, to tame her, but as he knew from the day of the buttocks on that spring day in 1940, she lacked the gene of fear. She was a woman unsprung, and maybe someday all women would be like her, fearless against a world that for millennia had blocked them from the levers of power. He wondered what such a world would bring.