by James Philip
These days she only wore her uniform when she was in Philadelphia; or on a military base, things worked better if she behaved and looked like a civilian.
In the beginning she had honestly believed that what she was doing made a difference, that in some way the Air Force was actually trying to ‘care’ for its countless irreparably ‘damaged’ survivors. The funny thing was that she still believed that Curtis LeMay genuinely cared; but whether his ‘concern’ was motivated by compassion for ‘his boys’ or by a simple desire to minimize the contagion within his remaining Bombardment Groups was a moot point.
Caroline Konstantis got out of the car and stretched the tension out of her shoulders. She smoothed down her calf-length cotton dress, enjoyed the feel of her hair falling freely, touching her mainly bare shoulders in a distinctly unmilitary fashion, and luxuriated in the warmth of the sun on her arms. Before the war she would have regarded today’s ‘frock’ as a party dress that revealed far, far too much of her less than prime flesh, and the positively wanton suggestion of shallow cleavage, quite scandalous. However, that was then and this was now. Her figure had always been trim, skinny in her younger days, a little fuller in her middle years. The last eighteen months ‘on the road’ had rescued her from a sedentary desk and classroom-based lifestyle that had been sucking the vitality out of her frame. It was years since she had seen enough sun to develop a healthy tan; years since she had felt remotely at one with herself. The World had gone to Hell, the country was falling apart around her but she had accidentally re-found herself. Or at least that was what she pretended.
Notwithstanding her qualms – something mid-way between teenage ‘prom nerves’ and the existential angst that often assails one in middle age when contemplating a thing that is patently foolish – she felt alive.
The sad thing was that she had almost forgotten what that was like.
That morning’s edition of the Lost Angeles Times reported that ‘Chicago Is Burning!’ on the front page above a story about the British Embassy in Philadelphia having been damaged by a car bomb, and on the inside cover that the man the East Coast newspapers called the ‘Pied Piper of Greenwich Village’ was playing at the ‘gala reopening’ of a club called ‘The Troubadour’ on Santa Monica Boulevard that night. The continuing melodrama of the trial of a dirty cop called Reggie O’Connell’ had taken up three whole pages further into the paper. There were pictures of a buxom blond, the cop’s wife who had turned State’s evidence, and another of a rangy, handsome, unkempt man in his twenties; the musician Sam Brenckmann – a man whose single ‘Brothers Across the Water’ had been playing in most of the diners and bars she had ducked into in the last two or three months – whom it seemed was, coincidentally, a co-owner of The Troubadour and one of Reggie O’Connell’s most high profile victims.
Everywhere else outside California the papers were full of news of shootings, crackdowns by the police, vile accusations against the political classes in general and the person of the President in particular; but here in California there was still plenty of ‘normal news’.
The Los Angeles Times was full of it; orange growers in ‘the Valley’ were worrying about the likelihood of a drought on account of the exceptionally dry winter, the State Governor Pat Brown had tabled re-drafted plans to bridge San Diego Bay and for new road building plans in the Bay Area. In downtown San Francisco the Adjutant General of the West Coast Confederation National Guard, Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, was taking the salute at a parade honoring the men who had fallen ‘pacifying the gangs of the Sierras’.
Here in California there was still a sense of civil society, of order and something vaguely like ‘normality’ on the streets of Berkeley and elsewhere which struck her every time she crossed the state line or stepped off an aircraft at LA or San Francisco. Granted, law and order even here was a fragile thing and there were a lot of places in the state where she would fear to drive or walk as a woman alone; but mainly, she still knew that she was safe most places, especially in the Bay Area and down south in Los Angeles.
The small, utilitarian bungalow hurriedly thrown up in the World War II boom years seemed exactly as it had before. The yard was a little neglected and the grass out front an inch or two overlong.
The dwellings in this part of town were constructed to a pattern; one or two bedrooms, a living room, bathroom and small kitchen, the main rooms separated by a narrow hallway. Damaged slates on the roof had been repaired since her last visit a month ago and a battered Chevy pickup sat on the concrete pan beside the end wall. The TV aerial on the gable of the building was silvery new and the drapes on the front room windows were drawn against the heat of the summer sun.
There were three wooden steps up to the small porch.
The door was freshly painted, matt white like the exterior walls of the property to reflect the heat of the California sun outward. Caroline stood at the top of the steps, turned and took in her surrounds one more time. The war workers had moved on years ago and students had moved in. Across the road at intervals of fifty yards the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority had posted signs; many of the houses on that side of the street were condemned, under notice of demolition to allow work to start on the new tramways planned to link Berkeley and the whole eastern Bay Area. The October War had put a hold on all that and it was only recently that Governor Brown had begun resurrecting California’s ambitious pre-war infrastructure plans.
Her hand moved to the newly fitted circular bell button wired into the right hand frame of the door at shoulder level. Up close she could still detect the tang of fresh pain work. The place had been virtually falling down three months ago. The last time she had been in the Bay Area the best part of four weeks ago the outside walls were flaking, and the insides the building had been a tangle of wiring and lifted floor boards, the power turned off most of the time. The last month had seemed like forever and as her finger hesitated over the bell push she was suddenly tingling with anticipation, and fear.
She was who she was, fifty-one years old and he was...who he was, young enough to be her son; her son’s age in fact, give or take a few months and the way she was feeling now, in this moment, in the heat of this moment seemed just plain wrong.
It was one thing to rationalize her current psychological-emotional condition as some kind of delayed ‘war psychosis’ – God in Heaven she had seen enough different manifestations of that in the last year to fill a dozen research papers – but another entirely to extricate herself from its grip. Even, that was, if she was remotely motivated to so do, which she was not!
In another woman – before the war – she would have written it off to a mid-life crisis, some kind of reaction to an old, tired, failed marriage that neither party had the wit, inclination or energy to terminate twenty years ago, or to straightforward menopausal hysteria. But she had walked away from her unhappy, unfulfilling marriage before the October War, and her ‘time of life’ had come and gone early in her forties. In retrospect that had hastened her divorce although at the time it had all passed her by because she was so immersed in her work; one study after another for the Air Force resulting in a string of widely published reports which had eventually won her the prestigious teaching chair – and tenure - at the School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.
The truth was that she was no longer the woman she had been before the October War; and that the cataclysm had liberated her from each and every one of her former life assumptions. The World had truly gone mad and the old rules no longer applied. How else could she explain that after flying into San Francisco yesterday evening she had been in a near-hysterical emotional flux, hardly able to sleep last night, up stupidly early to bathe and preen like she had not done for nearly thirty years! She had agonized over lingerie like a debutante – selecting a dark lacy brassiere and a chic French-style open girdle - and whether or not to wear nylons on such a warm Bay day.
Oh God, mutton dressed as lamb...
Once upon a time she would have guarded her �
�professional and ethical standing’ with her life; but did any of that stuff really matter anymore? Every time she read the papers or turned on the TV or the radio the World seemed to be crazier!
A couple of months ago they had learned that the Russians had only been playing dead. Now they were in Baghdad!
Yesterday the news had been that President Kennedy had met the British Prime Minister at Cape Cod and sent her away empty handed, declaring: ‘the days when Europe and the Middle East were US spheres of military influence are over. America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’ Henceforward, ‘I have always been and always will be an America First President!’
Caroline Konstantis’s index finger depressed the bell button.
There was a distant mechanical ringing.
Nathan Zabriski opened the door.
He was a man of slightly above average height, five feet nine or ten, trimly dapper, with his dark hair crew cut and his face closely shaved that morning. He was the sort of man who looked at home in uniform, today he was wearing a check shirt and new blue jeans.
He looked tanned, fit.
In his grey-green eyes nameless agitation played.
He shifted on his feet like a man mystified, or perhaps frightened.
“I missed you,” he said simply, as if he was ashamed.
Chapter 4
Saturday 6th June 1964
Federal Emergency Management Administration Compound, Kensington, Maryland
Fifty-five year old Lyndon Baines Johnson’s craggy face creased into a welcoming smile as Gretchen Brenckmann-Betancourt was shown into the small conference room. The tall Texan held out his hand.
“I apologies for not being able to accommodate you in my schedule the other week in Philly,” the Vice President began. Six feet three inches – and some – he often towered over an interlocutor but his visitor was only shorter by a few inches in her high heels.
“Please,” the willowy brunette reassured him, “I completely understand, sir.”
Gretchen knew that the Vice President’s ‘schedule’ was anything but crowded. LBJ had begun to disengage from the rest of the Administration several weeks ago, now the talk was that he had broken with it – on less than amicable terms - over the outcome of the Cape Cod Summit. That was not to say that Johnson was any less of an ‘America Firster’ than Jack Kennedy, far from it, just a different sort of America First man. Throughout the spring he had lobbied for a strong line to be taken in the Midwest, to allow the military its head. In the Deep South he had wanted to play the Civil Rights card for all it was worth, hold it over the heads of Southern Democrats like a hammer that could fall at a time and place of his choosing; instead the Administration had tried to be all things to all men and forgotten the first rule of politics: you do what you have to do to win.
Many Administration insiders had suspected that the President’s decision to ditch the alliance with the British would be the last straw for LBJ. Repudiating the ‘special relationship’, and most likely provoking the downfall of Margaret Thatcher’s – vexingly bellicose regime – was probably going to play well with the American people, for a day, a week, maybe longer but who picked up the pieces after the Red Army conquered the Middle East?
As Gretchen’s father had observed: ‘Isolationism sounds like a great idea right up until the day the gas pumps start to run dry!’
Lyndon Johnson retained his hold of the woman’s hand a moment; long enough for them to both make eye contact. When the daughter of the Democratic Party’s East Coast kingmaker paid a house call a wise man acted with due deliberation.
Johnson had known Gretchen Betancourt’s father over thirty years; had it not been for Claude Betancourt's marvelously adroit behind the scenes maneuvering he might have been the man nominated to face down Richard Nixon in 1960. However, that was all in the past. Now that old Joe Kennedy was dead and the Kennedy boys had blown up half the World the old rules, the old allegiances were meaningless. So, when a man like Claude Betancourt sent an old enemy an emissary it behooved him to listen to what she had to say.
“You are a very busy man,” the woman went on, “and I completely understand why your preference was for a low-profile meeting in a confidential location.”
Johnson retrieved his hand and waved for the woman to take one of the two comfortable chairs in front of his borrowed desk. Neither he nor she spoke while aides brought coffee and shuffled out of the room.
The man had noted how stiffly Gretchen walked, concluding that the life-threatening injuries she had sustained at the State Department Building during the Battle of Washington still troubled her more than she was prepared to admit. She had been in the room in which Under Secretary of State George Ball had died, she had been shot the by insurgents and left to die in the burning State Department Building. By the time she was discovered, more dead than alive the best part of a day later, the doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital had practically given up on her. Comatose for several days and at one time feared paralyzed; that she was so self-evidently back on her feet only six months later was a minor miracle.
“I’m glad that you seem so recovered, Mrs Brenckmann,” Johnson observed.
Gretchen Betancourt’s marriage had been a hastily organized popular circus that had filled the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, prompting a veritable media fiesta in the surrounding streets and parks despite the inclemency of the weather that day.
She was an American aristocrat and her husband the second son of the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The President and half his Cabinet had attended the ceremony; afterwards Gretchen had been the star of the show and photographs of her hanging on the arms of the great and the good of the Republic had filled the papers and preoccupied the big TV networks for days.
Johnson had only met the lucky groom a couple of times, both occasions in passing but all his sources said the guy was ‘rock solid’, a chip off the ‘old block’ unless you talked to anybody close to the Secretary of State. The State Department had fallen out of love with its ambassador in Oxford long before the ‘ructions’ of the first week of April. People close to Secretary of State Fulbright said Walter Brenckmann had ‘gone native’ and intuitively mistrusted Daniel, their troublesome envoy’s second son. Not least because Dan was one of Claude Betancourt’s protégés and he was immovably embedded in Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Office for the Commission on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War. The kid was a lawyer like his father, cut it seemed, from the same utterly reliable, stoic fabric that had originally earned his old man the patronage of the Betancourt family.
The Vice President had never quite got to the bottom of that.
It had something to do with Walter Brenckmann’s time in the Navy. Claude Betancourt’s people in Quincy had kept his two-bit attorney’s firm alive while he was away during the forty-five war, and during the Korean War the son of one of Betancourt’s buddies had been on Brenckmann’s ship. When Brenckmann had returned home from Korea he had become Claude’s go to ‘quiet man’, the guy he sent for when a thing needed to be resolved amicably, without fuss of bother, because everybody in Boston knew that Walter Brenckmann had a knack of fixing things in such a way that everybody walked away thinking they had won. Or so the legend had it.
Either way Daniel Brenckmann had played his walk on, supporting part at the society wedding of the year with perfect calm dignity. Gretchen Louisa Betancourt, whom everybody had expected to walk down the aisle on crutches had, leaning on her proud father’s arm slowly, hurtfully progressed down the length of the great church; and thereafter Dan Brenckmann had been there to catch her if she fell, as he clearly planned to be the rest of his fairy princess’s life.
That sort of thing mattered a lot to an ambitious young woman like Gretchen Betancourt.
The most profound lesson of Johnson’s own life was that with the righ
t partner by one’s side the sky was the limit, and quite literally, all things were possible. Claude Betancourt’s wealth and political muscle might not always be at his daughter’s back; but Dan Brenckmann would always be there.
“Thank you. I am much recovered, Mister Vice President,” Gretchen declared, careful not to overdo the winning, flashing smile she occasionally unfurled to dazzle and disarm the unwary. None of the normal tricks were going to cut the ice with this man. Her father had known both the President and the Attorney General since they were children; he was still close to both men, rather in the fashion of a fond uncle sometimes despairing of the antics of his nephews but he respected and in some small way, actually feared LBJ. The tall craggy Texan had been the ringmaster of the Senate before he accepted a demotion to become Jack Kennedy’s running mate in 1960. For much of Eisenhower’s presidency Johnson was the master of Capitol Hill and it must have been maddeningly galling for him to have to watch from the sidelines as the rich kids from New England crashed the ‘family car’. “I think married life suits me!”
The Vice President chuckled, charmed before he knew it.
On the day of the ‘great wedding’ he was visiting troops on the front line in Illinois. Every time he thought about what was going on in Chicago he inwardly shivered. Mayor fucking Daley! If that shithead Daley had left the military to do their business in the spring the situation might, conceivably, be under control by now. Left to his own devices the Governor of Washington State, Al Rossellini – granted, with a whole barrel-load of help from neighboring Oregon and Pat Brown in California – had re-asserted control over and pacified all the bomb-damaged parts of his state. But for the President’s infantile meddling the situation the Midwest would now be back ‘under control’.
Johnson had tacitly expected Claude Betancourt to make advances to him before now. Perhaps, the latest bloodletting in Chicago and Milwaukee had set new alarm bells ringing?