The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  “The scene, and the cave scene.”

  I said nothing at this point, but I had my suspicions.

  “Well,” he said. “I better go. I just wanted to come by and say good-bye.”

  “What about your folks?” I said.

  “Shit on them,” he said. “Mom deserves everything she gets.”

  “I understand you were down there at the room at the hotel last Wednesday. The Wednesday of May the 29th.”

  “Yes, I was.” He looked up eagerly. “I hung around for a while. Knocked on the door a few times. There wasn’t anybody answering. But I knew they were there. You can sort of tell. You can tell an empty room from one with people in it.” He half-shrugged, in a peculiarly French way. “Then, finally, I went away.”

  I had absolutely nothing to say to that. “Look,” I said. “If there’s anything you want, or anything you want done for you from down there, you’ll let me know, won’t you? Hunh?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. His eyes were eager. “And if there’s anything you want me to do for you, you’ll let me know, too, won’t you? You can always reach me General Delivery, Cadaqu?s.”

  “What do you want me to tell your folks?” I said.

  “I don’t give a shit what you tell them. No, wait a minute. I guess I don’t mean that. Don’t tell them anything.”

  “You don’t want them to know where you are?”

  “I sure don’t want them coming after me. Tell them nothing.”

  “All right,” I said. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He went to the door, clutching his book.

  I was standing by my little bar. “Look!” I called sharply. “I guess you know I think you’re all fucked up and full of shit, don’t you?”

  He turned. “Oh, sure,” he said, and grinned. It was the first time he had grinned since coming into the apartment, and it was singularly like Harry’s grin I had seen so often. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Who aint?”

  He went out.

  The next day was Wednesday. The Wednesday of June the 5th. That was the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot. Of course, in Paris, with the time lag, we did not know about it until later in the morning. In any case, the word was out that the French transportation and mail services would be going back to work sometime during Thursday. Some other industries, steel, automobile plants, weren’t giving in yet. But the trend was clearly toward getting French society back into harness. De Gaulle clearly had won.

  23

  I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT that if I had been smarter, or more prepared for what Hill was going to throw at me (or not throw at me, rather), I could have helped him more, instead of failing him. I feel I have to take responsibility for that. But that sudden mysticism routine of his threw me. It was so unexpected. And by the time I was able to muddle through it all, and try to come up with some sort of understanding statement that might pull him out of it, he already was gone. Long gone.

  And that was the last I was to see of Hill. I have not seen him since. I assume he is still in Cadaqu?s, sitting crosslegged and meditating in some cave, but I do not know. He was still there, and still meditating, when I received his second postcard in late June. I did not answer it, and that was the last word I have had.

  I’m sorry he ever met those hippy flower-people types, who apparently from his postcards are living with him, on his money, of course. He told me that much. There apparently is a whole colony of them.

  Anyhow, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy pushed the May Revolution completely off the front page of the Paris Herald. It did the same with almost every French paper. Of course, the word had been flashed, and everybody across the world had heard about it on the radio before any of the papers could come out with the news. But of course, everybody wanted to read the details.

  I remember it was my Portuguese who brought me the news. She came into my bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning and woke me, an absolutely unprecedented thing for her to do. Actually, she was a young woman, much younger than she looked, and unmarried, a virgin apparently, perpetually saving something which no one any longer wanted to bargain for. She never came in my bedroom unless I called her. But now she was wringing her hands and tears were streaming down her trusty Portuguese face. She had apparently just heard it on her equally trusty transistor in my kitchen. “Oh, Monsieur,” she kept saying. “Oh, Monsieur!”

  I guess everybody felt the same sense of horror and chill. It was as if God had truly abandoned us all, by letting the lightning strike twice. At least, that was what everyone I talked to later in the day seemed to feel. It was certainly what I felt.

  I remembered when John Kennedy was assassinated back in ’63. This second time, there was not the totally struck-dumb desolation and total despair, the numbness we all felt when the older brother was shot in ’63. Maybe we were more used to it now, coming so soon after Dr. King. But by the same token, in a way, this hurt worse. I remember that time, when Jack was shot, I wandered around Paris in a daze for two days—going to bars I knew that were frequented by Americans, searching out Americans, and finding them, in all the American-frequented bars, where we all sort of just stood together like wet birds buying each other drinks and nodding our heads and saying almost nothing.

  There was not that, this time. But in another way there was an even greater desolation, a greater horror, because of its having happened twice to Kennedys. And of course this time there was hope. Robert Kennedy could be operated on. Everybody hoped, hoped against hope. Of course next day he was dead. I guess nobody really ever believed that he would make it. But there was always this thing of it having struck us twice.

  I had met Bobby Kennedy a few times at parties in New York when I was back in the States on business for the Review. But I had never formed any real opinion of him. He certainly appeared to be quite an egotist. And he certainly took great and careful care to maintain and project his public image and role as the Young Defender. Also he had let his hair grow longer. I always had the feeling that, politically, he had seized a cake that he did not have a knife big enough to cut. But then who did have? Nobody.

  But then in addition to all of that, which sounded carping to me now, there was something definitely tragic about him. Almost as if he definitely knew what to expect.

  Sitting with the newspaper in my apartment, I remembered one night at a lawn party in Martha’s Vineyard where I was visiting, when some of the Kennedy clan had whipped over in their boat from the Cape, and when after all the shouted hellos and laughter and drinks and the barbecue itself, I saw him sitting by himself on the old porch rail, a porch rail which came right out of another time. He had one foot in its expensive loafer up on the rail and was clasping his knee and looking out over the lawn and smiling, all alone, enjoying the moonlight and the party. There were lots of children squealing and playing on the dark lawn, and there was a local band of sorts playing a modified rock. Kennedy simply sat, smiling, enjoying, his blond shock of longer hair hanging down over his forehead.

  In my Paris apartment, reading the June 6th issue of the Paris Herald, suddenly I turned away choked up, and tears spurted into my eyes making it impossible to read further. I put the paper down.

  I always was an awful slob.

  Still, others felt the same way.

  We saw it all that night on TV at the Gallaghers.

  Louisa was practically beside herself. Her eyes were stary and wide like a mad woman’s and she hardly spoke to anyone. In a soft voice Harry told me it was McKenna who had informed them, apparently at about the time my Portuguese was informing me. She was up and having breakfast with their Portuguese, when they heard it, on their Portuguese’s transistor radio, and she rushed into their bedroom and woke them up to tell them, sobbing and crying. McKenna had once met Bobby somewhere too, and he had played a minute with her, and tossed her up, and so for her he was a sort of special private possession.

  Only Samantha Everton seemed completely unmoved. But I am convinced she w
as much more moved than she was willing to let on.

  “Well, he was ambitious,” she said with a shrug.

  “We’re all ambitious,” I said, with deliberate ambiguity. “In one way or another.”

  “True,” Sam said, and smiled at me. “But political ambition carries with it certain things. You takes your chances.”

  “Well, he was certainly a good and great thing for your people,” Ferenc Hofmann-Beck said suddenly.

  Samantha turned to smile at him. “I aint got any people, baby,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

  Louisa was staring at her with those wide, goofy eyes, but not even seeing her I think. A sort of contortion of revulsion writhed itself across her long horseface and thin-lipped mouth. “I think that is incredibly calloused.”

  “I suppose,” Sam said, and smiled at her too. “But you’ve led such a protected life with all that money that you don’t know what goes on out there in real life. You’re safe.”

  At this point Harry stepped in. “You haven’t led such an unprotected life yourself,” he said with a smile. “Born in Europe, and going to all those ritzy Swiss and Parisian schools. Like Brillamont.”

  “I’ve been out there,” Sam said, and smiled again. “And I’m here to state that it aint at all like you cats think.” She laughed suddenly. “Now America can choose between two slobs. Two slobs so much alike you can hardly tell them apart. It’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee. That’s America for you. That’s America, to me.”

  Louisa had already turned away and was standing looking out the window at the river, hardly listening, probably not listening at all. I thought it was high time I tried to break it up.

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose a lot of interpretations will be put on it. Yours is one. I have one of my own. I think it is a case of a nonman trying to assert himself. A silly little Arab immigrant boy, probably certifiably insane, but whom society hasn’t even bothered to look at or test, whom society stares through like a plateglass window and doesn’t even bother to see, tries to prove his existence in the only idiot way he knows how. A boy who’s never done anything—and hasn’t the brains to, I hasten to add—except deliver groceries on an old bicycle in that great sprawl of smog called Los Angeles decides to force society to notice he is there. So he guns down the richest, handsomest, most fortunate, most publicized member of the world celebrity set that he can get access to. His motives as stated by himself, all that Arab junk, don’t mean a thing. The real motive is that he wanted attention, wanted to make the world admit he existed.

  “I think that’s the real problem, and I think that’s the problem somebody has to try to solve.

  “You could do what Sirhan Sirhan did,” I said, smiling at Sam. “I think you could very well do that.”

  “No, I couldn’t,” Sam said at once. Then she smiled. “Or maybe, by God, I could.” She gave me a long look. “Yes, by God, I think I could, Mr. Hartley.”

  “Anyway,” Harry said in a soft sad voice, “that’s an interesting proposition, Jack. I’d like to discuss that with you.”

  He took me by the elbow and led me off toward the bar. “Maybe he wanted to prove to himself he existed.”

  “No. Too romantic,” I said.

  At least, I had succeeded in changing the drift of the conversation.

  When I look back on it, it seems to me now that the killing of Bobby Kennedy, whom we all knew—or at least had met—was the trigger point where everything began to go bad for us. By us I mean the Gallaghers, and me. I can’t call myself a Gallagher, really. Though I was very close to them, and I am McKenna’s godfather.

  It is my well-thought-out certified opinion that if the rest of what happened had not happened, there would have been no problem with Hill. I can’t prove that, but I believe it. He would have come home eventually I think, and straightened himself out. But what happened, did happen.

  So I have to address myself to that. And I can not avoid this obscure feeling that if the second Kennedy had not been killed like that, so totally uselessly, by a stupid silly little Arab boy, what happened to us mightn’t have happened. I know this is a superstitious idea. Dumb, stupid, idiotic, animal. Like making up a God to account for why the lightning struck your hut. But then, I am a superstitious man. Damn it all, I am. But maybe Sam might have reacted differently, with less cynicism. And maybe Louisa would have been less distraught, and more capable of thinking her way through.

  In any case, on June 6th, a Thursday, police cleared out the Government-owned Renault auto-assembly plant at Flins, out the Autoroute de l’Ouest near Mantes. The move came at dawn, and caused new street demonstrations that day in Paris which nearly turned into renewed street fighting. In a case of mistaken intention, a demonstration of students at the Arc de Triomphe thought that a group of several hundred middle-aged ex-paratroopers marching up the Champs-Élysées was a deliberate counter-demonstration to their own. In fact, the ex-paras were only holding a march to pay homage to the Eternal Flame of the Unknown Soldier that rests under the Arc. Students and workers started singing the “Internationale”, and the middle-age veterans countered with the “Marseillaise”. Fist fights broke out all over the Champs-Élysées, and were stopped only when a student leader and a para leader climbed up on the roof of a car together to explain to the battlers that neither group knew about the other’s demonstration, or when or why or what for. By this device renewed street-fighting was averted.

  On Friday of June 7th French workers and students fought daylong skirmishes with the police at Flins, while trying to reoccupy the assembly plant which the police had thrown them out of the day before. The students apparently drove out all the way from Paris for the fight. The Government claimed that at least 1,000 workers were trying to get back into the plant to clean it up in the hope of getting back to work.

  That night, the Friday, le Général went back on TV in a widely publicized interview that went on for a whole hour. He was interviewed by a journalist named Michel Droit, the same man who had interviewed him back in 1965 during the last crisis of his Government, and it was a pretty intellectual discussion, with le Général doing most of the talking. He talked mostly about the “mechanical society” and its great accomplishments, but he added that on its debit side it tended to make objects out of the workers, and that he felt that both Capitalism and Communism tended to contribute to this soulless mechanization. He was hoping, he said, that his new plan for “participation” would be a third way which would give all workers a sense of identity by having a say-so in what their firms and their management decided to do. But, he added, the Unions had always been against him on this because it would take away some of their power. He talked some about University reforms, too. It was a real old-fashioned fireside chat, and he made himself look pretty good. It was an interesting soft-sell after the “hard” line he had taken on May 30th. And you certainly could not fault him on his intellectual ideas or his statements. In the end though it was the same pitch. All was lost, he warned, if the French did not follow him. The only alternative was a massive Communist take-over, which with its totalitarian system would cause the very dehumanization process he was seeking to avoid.

  I found it difficult to care much, after the Bobby Kennedy California debacle. It was hard to be interested.

  It was on Saturday morning, Saturday June the 8th, just as I was getting out of bed, that Harry Gallagher called me from his own apartment down the quai. It was just noon.

  “I’ve got to see you, Jack. And I’ve got to see you right now.”

  “Well, can you give me an hour?” I said, perhaps a little plaintively. I do hate to be disturbed during my morning toilet. And Harry knew that. I was suddenly reminded of Hill his son, calling up the other day. I had not yet decided to tell the parents about Hill’s departure. “Can it wait that long?”

  “No, it can’t,” Harry said. “I’ve got to see you now. I’ve been hanging around cafés since dawn, not wanting to disturb your repose. But now you’re up. It can’t wait an
y longer.”

  “Well, you don’t mind if I shave while we’re talking, do you?” I said irritably.

  “No, I don’t mind if you shave,” he said. “I don’t mind what you do. I don’t give a damn if you jerk off while we’re talking.”

  “That’s highly unlikely, I think,” I said drily.

  “I’ll be right down,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. I was in my bathroom when he arrived.

  He perched himself on the side of my bed like some long tall nervous bird, an ostrich maybe.

  “Well, what is it, Harry?” I said, “God damn it?” I peered out, my face still two-thirds lathered. I had a bath towel wrapped around my waist.

  He did not answer immediately and I ducked back in and wiped my razor carefully with the hem of the towel and began to strop it. You must always be quite sure that no beard hairs are left on the razor when you strop it because they will mix in with the pâte and cause a dulling effect. “Do you want a drink or something?” I said.

  “I already made myself one on the way in,” he said, holding up a glass and coming to the door. He leaned against the jamb.

  I went on shaving, skimming the first layer of beard and the lather from the right side. “Well, what the hell is it, Harry?”

  “I don’t quite know how to say it,” he said. He took a deep breath and let it out in an explosive sigh. “Well, Louisa is having an affair with Samantha.”

  I flatter myself that I didn’t nick myself badly. I pulled up the skin of my cheek, to see if I had gotten it all under the jawline. That is always one of the hardest places to get baby-pure clean. “What’s the matter with you, Harry?” I said. “You’re losing your mind or something like that?”

  “Of course I’m losing my mind,” he said in what I have to admit was an icy-cold, steely voice. “There’s more. Sam left today.”

  “Left?”

  “Left Paris. For Israel. At Louisa’s suggestion. She’s going via Rome.”

  “That’s good news,” I said.