by Robert Clark
Just before dinnertime, Emily found her parents in the kitchen, as was their wont. Her mother stood at the counter while her father sat at the breakfast table near the back door. He held a cocktail, which he had the habit of regarding while he caused its contents—scotch whisky, water, and ice cubes—to swirl in the tumbler, and as he did this he talked to Emily’s mother.
“Not a bad day at all. I spent the whole day in the Medical Arts Building. Finished up with a drink with old Dr. Fields.” He cocked his wrist and set his glass in motion, watched the liquor spin and gazed into it. “Smartest man I know. Wears his age so gracefully. Wise and funny. And he says our new line is going to sell like hotcakes.”
“Which is?” Virginia asked, still kneading egg into ground beef for the meat loaf she was preparing.
“The next thing after tranquilizers. Antidepressants. Mood elevators.”
“Like bennies?”
“Like elevator shoes? Or Otis elevators?” Emily chirped from the doorway. Her father glanced over to her and smiled, and Emily might well have thought she was, after Dr. Fields, the second-wisest person he knew.
Edward turned back towards his wife. “Nothing so crude as that, as pep pills. These really address the underlying brain chemistry, the depression at its core.”
His wife scooped a cup of oatmeal into the bowl before her and said, “I thought people—unhappy people, anyway—were more anxious than depressed.”
“Neurotic people, you mean. Anxiety neurosis, it’s called.” Edward drank. “Maybe it seems that way. But this is the coming thing, the new frontier.”
“People are going to be more sad?” Emily asked.
“Not in so many words. At least I don’t think so. We’re just going to be treating the same conditions from a different angle. Because maybe a lot of anxiety neurosis—”
“Antsiness,” Emily interjected.
“—Antsiness, if you want, is really suppressed sadness. Someone’s presenting anxiety, but it’s really depression.”
“‘Presenting, ’” Virginia remarked. “You’re spending too much time around doctors.”
“Presenting, from Hollywood, in Living Color, anxiety, depression, and the neurosis orchestra,” Emily proclaimed. Her father smiled—when could Emily not make her father smile?—and so did her mother.
But then, in a mild yet serious manner, Virginia looked at Emily and noted, “But of course it’s scarcely a laughing matter. Not really.”
Emily nodded her assent. This was what adults did—her mother and the nuns at school in particular—when you began to have too much fun with them. They let you know that you were being permitted on their turf—their right to say and do pretty much as they wanted—only by their sufferance. Perhaps they wanted to let you know who was boss, or perhaps they feared you’d run amok, that you would career off some precipice and never recover from the fall.
Had she dwelt on her mother’s admonition, Emily might have felt hurt, but her father quickly added, “And of course, that’s why it’s so great that we can do something about it,” rather as if they were all in perfect agreement and were entitled to some congratulations for their right thinking. This indeed made everything all right, at least for Emily, and seemingly for her mother, who slapped the finished contents of her mixing bowl into a ball and said, “Of course.”
Emily did not really know anyone who was mentally ill or even neurotic, save through books and movies. She knew people, mostly people her own age, who were unhappy, but this was a temporary condition having to do with what one lacked or would prefer to lack. Her friend Monica Reardon, for example, lacked a boyfriend and was heavy in the knees, and these were simple enough problems, save in her imagining that the latter was the cause of the former. All would be well (this was a line from a prayer that her favorite nun of her whole life, Sister Mary Benedict, had taught her in kindergarten), for all the adults she knew were, in fact, happy—they were free (even the nuns with their vows, if you thought about it in the right way)—and her parents most of all.
Her father was looking into his drink again. He gave it a final swirl and downed the last of it, sighing as though he had completed a great and fruitful labor. “No, it was a lovely day, all in all. A lucky day.” He stood and put his hands on top of the chair he had just vacated and looked up. “Why, on the way home, while I was driving up the hill by the cathedral, I could swear a dollar bill blew across the road, right in front of the car. Had to be. No mistaking it.” He looked at his wife as though she might disbelieve him, and then to Emily with an assurance that she could somehow confirm what he was saying. “I suppose I could have stopped and grabbed it. But there was a breeze and I wanted to get home. Still, I see it”—and he grinned a little sheepishly, as if to say you could take him for a fool if you were so inclined, but that was no concern to him—“as a sign.”
3
AS WAS HIS HABIT, WILLIAM ROSE BEFORE SEVEN, well before his mother, whose sleep he never disturbed. He ambled out of his room and through the kitchen, filled with the detritus of his mother’s guests the evening before: the brimming ashtrays, the shriveled lemon slices, the bottles and glasses in whose bilges stood the residues of various liquors and mixes, the curds of waxen hollandaise bobbing in the dishwater in the sink.
William took a box of raisin bran from the top of the refrigerator and milk from inside it and put them on the kitchen table. He sat down and then rose again to get a spoon, and as he leaned over the silver drawer, he heard the sound of the newspaper against the front door.
He opened the door in time to hear the steps of the paperboy echoing in the hall and the lobby door slam in his wake. He picked up the paper. The headline ran flat and heavy across the top of the front page, as if it had been laid on with tempera and a stencil:
KENNEDY SHOT IN CALIFORNIA
Primary Victor Targeted in Los Angeles Hotel Kitchen
William read the headline twice, and then the first paragraph of the news story, less to absorb its content than to let the last motes of sleep clear from his eyes and his mind, to determine what he was supposed to do.
He never disturbed his mother, whose custom was both to retire and to rise late, in the mornings, and often they did not see each other until lunchtime or, when school was in session, until late in the afternoon. But he knew with a certainty that had been rare to him in his life that he ought to wake her for this as surely as if their house were on fire.
Emily’s father had gone out on his rounds that morning and then come home for good at lunch. There was detectable throughout the city a tacit agreement that the business of the day should be slowed if not halted outright pending reports from the hospital in Los Angeles.
Edward ate toast and tomato soup with Virginia in the kitchen while Emily took her lunch in the den, before the scarcely audible television, the broadcast day cleft into slices of game shows and soap operas set between bulletins from Los Angeles.
Virginia heard the squeaky rasp of the letter slot opening and the mail falling to the floor in the vestibule. She called out to the den, “Emmy, would you get the mail please?” and then she turned back to Edward. Emily had been half-overhearing them, and when she came back to the den and began to sift through the mail in her lap she continued listening.
“They did it because he was Catholic, because he was Catholic and he was going to win.” Her plate rang out as she set her soup spoon down.
“It’s not quite that simple,” Edward said. “Surely.”
“They shot him because he’s Catholic just like they shot the other because he was colored.”
“Negro.”
“A Negro. But it’s the same thing,” Emily’s mother insisted. It was, Emily thought, her mother’s way to insist on things.
“Things are almost never the same thing. Which is not to say it’s not terrible,” Emily heard her father add quickly. It was her father’s way to insist that things were not as her mother insisted, although he always allowed that they were undoubtedly a little bit th
at way.
“I know.” Virginia paused and added, “I’m going to mass.”
“That’s good. That’s fine.” Emily heard the sound of her parents standing and, she guessed, her father picking up the two bowls, two plates, and two spoons and carrying them to the sink, then their thud and clatter against the stainless steel. Virginia called into the den, “Emmy, what did the postman bring?”
“Nothing much. Some bills. A letter.”
Virginia kept her vigil in St. Luke’s Church, before the shrine of the Blessed Virgin. William’s mother, whose name was Jane, kept hers at her kitchen table, inscribed in coffee marks and stubbed-out cigarette ends. The coiled cord of the wall telephone trailed across the floor to her chair, bore the length and breadth of her conversations with her friends, the people she had seen only last night: Jack, the union foreman and precinct organizer from the brewery below the hill; Mark and Sally, the university professor and his Montessori teacher wife; Frances, her high school girlfriend who ran the library at the county art museum and also curated husbands, showing her last accession the door a scant seven months ago.
In the late afternoon and early evening they gathered around her, replenishing her larder with liquor, cigarettes, and potato chips. William stood in the doorway or sat off to one side, watching and listening, leaving only long enough to fetch another bag of ice from Ramaley’s. He pedaled through the sultry and deserted streets, steering one-handed, the side of his chest closest to his heart numbing by slow degrees as he clutched the bag against it, while the other side sweltered. It was a curious sensation.
By eight o’clock, although there had been no word from California, they spoke as if Bobby were dead, or so it seemed to William, who sat on a stool next to the refrigerator and watched them through a thickening bank of smoke.
“Regardless, he’s out of the race,” said Mark.
“So it’s just us against Hubert,” said Frances.
“What I want to know is, who gets his delegates?”
“Please don’t be crass, Jack. Just for now,” said William’s mother.
William sat and watched and overheard these things, and it seemed to him the very epitome of adult power and glory: how merely by sitting and talking (as he might sit and talk with his friends on the wall at the top of the park, their bicycles heaped around their feet), history and the future were made, or at least undeniably shaped, extruded from the press of grown-up worry, opinion, and surmise. Or so it seemed to William, for these were the most important and impressive people William had yet known and they were speaking of important things in a time of crisis.
At Emily’s house, the Byrnes were at their prayers. The notion that they ought to say the rosary together had struck Virginia during mass, and she bore it home like a hot supper whose very readiness precludes any argument against it. Edward and Emily could only assent. Emily fetched her rosary from the drawer in her nightstand where it rested between a jar of Noxzema and a red-haired troll mascot.
Edward thought he had a rosary somewhere, but could not think where it might be. Emily supposed it was in the tackle box above and to one side of the workbench in the basement in which were contained his combat ribbons, his fraternity pin, tokens and prizes won at carnival booths and fairs, ammunition in various sizes and configurations, foreign coins of several nations and denominations, scapulars issued thirty years before at Sacred Heart School—things that when Emily had looked through them had struck her as assuredly the property of a boy who had subsequently become a young man. But that this young man might have thereafter metamorphosed into her father seemed unaccountably strange, for surely he had always been her father, immutably so.
Edward sat empty-handed at the edge of the ottoman in the living room as Virginia began to say the first decade and Emily’s voice fell in just behind hers. Edward joined in, muttering, droning a bass line beneath his wife’s and daughter’s sopranos.
Nor could it be said to what end this was done; perhaps to no end at all, but entirely as means. It was the buzz and hum of God, the sound, more real than any belief or inkling or assent, that assured Emily that God indeed existed; existed more, rather than less, than other things. The voices and the prayers riding on them were a current, a breeze on which the world was being held aloft, not by will but by submission. In theory they were saying, imploring, Let Robert F. Kennedy live, or if not live, let this be enough because we cannot bear anymore. But in practice, all that could be said was Have mercy on the one hand and Thy will be done on the other; in all, nothing more than Let be what will be. And yet they prayed as though if they stopped, their very house might collapse on their heads.
Emily knew the mind might wander but would return, that they were doing entirely the thing that they ought to be doing. For her mother, Emily supposed, it was as a shawl she was wrapping herself in, the same shawl that had warmed her as a girl and had warmed her mother and her mother’s mother. She could—as she could not in the case of her father—picture her mother being a child, if not necessarily a girl much like her. But for Emily herself, prayer partook less of memory and time than of time bound to motion, as when, scarcely aware she was doing it, she rocked herself in her bed, a pendulum swung from the tender clockwork of her body, tipping itself into dreams, into peace.
Emily did not wonder if it was wrong or even a sin when she thought of the letter she had received today in the midst of their prayers. She knew Our Lady would bring her back to Herself, even as she recollected the words not of the Hail Mary (which was less a set of words than a tune she might almost wordlessly hum) but of the letter, parsing yet again the sentences, recollecting once more what she could remember of him—something of his hair, the shy insistence of something he had once said in her presence, something of the girth of his calves.
After they were done, there was still no news from California, and there was nothing more to be done but sleep. They shut their doors. Emily heard her parents undress and wash, and then nothing more. She wondered, as she had occasionally found herself doing in the last few years, if they made love, and by what sounds or signs this might be indicated. She wondered if worry and sadness, as on a night like this one, precluded it or perhaps encouraged it.
Emily sat in her bed with the light on. She was writing the boy, or thinking about what she would write him when she wrote him. She wrote the whole letter in her head, and then she said another prayer and switched out the light.
At a quarter of four in the morning, when the world is as asleep as it ever becomes—when if either Jane or Edward and Virginia had crept into their children’s rooms they would have found them as deeply encradled in slumber as infants—Robert Kennedy was pronounced dead. That, so much of the time, is how history befalls us.
4
ON THURSDAY HIS BODY WAS FLOWN FROM LOS Angeles to New York, and on Friday there was the mass, and the train bearing the coffin to Washington through the stifling heat, and the burial in the evening at Arlington; and in all that time, although it seemed that William never left the kitchen or the charcoal glare of the little television on the table—that the death was a kind of water beneath which they were all now submerged—he never let Emily slip his mind. He had been tracking his letter to her all that while, in the little corner of himself that was not stunned or frightened by what had happened in California. He imagined the letter sleeping among the other letters at the big downtown post office, passing along belts and through tubes and slots and at last into a sack that was trucked up the hill to a substation and then to a military-green transfer box in Emily’s neighborhood. Then—and it must be in the midmorning, with the heat beginning to build on the lawn, but the cool still hanging damply under the shadow of her porch—he heard the postman’s steps ringing up her steps and the yawn of the mail slot and slap of the letter descending at last onto her hallway floor.
But in love—and what else is there to call such regard, such attentiveness, such constant mindfulness?—everything is a sign, an augury that demands interpretation.
Nor does it brook any gaps in its knowledge: A silence is not a silence but a message; an absence is not an absence but a reminder of presence elsewhere; the failure of something to occur does not suggest that it is as yet undone, but that a different thing altogether has been willed.
So even as William pictured his letter homing towards Emily and settling like a dove onto her threshold, he imagined it going astray, fallen into a floor grate at the post office, entangled in the pages of a magazine and delivered to the wrong address, or sailing over Emily’s doormat, catching some heretofore unknown floor draft, and gliding under a hallway table or chest of drawers never to be discovered until Emily’s parents moved out seventeen years hence to retire in Arizona. Or more simply and therefore more likely, one or the other parent would intercept the letter, open it, and confront her with it, and Emily would be entirely on his account in grave trouble, grounded or shipped off to a boarding school deep in New Hampshire, and, needless to say, would hate him.
William had calculated that he might receive a reply by telephone as soon as Wednesday or a letter by Thursday. So when he had neither by Friday (and because of the funeral it was unclear whether there would be mail at all that day) he began to despair, and a vision of the most appalling outcome imaginable began to congeal in his mind: that she would read his letter, assay its contents, and share it with Monica Reardon as the dumbest, absurdest, dorkiest, stupidest thing ever to befall her in her whole life. With their rising titters and shrieks of laughter, word of it would spread through Annunciation and on to the guys at Sacred Heart and so even to the Academy, where he would be upbraided not only for striking out with a girl, but striking out with a Catholic girl. Throughout the city, or at least the swath of it from Snelling Avenue in the west to Dale in the east, he would be mocked, scorned, and laughed at. Guys would cruise the apartment house, braying over their radios as they drove by. The worst of them would put burning sacks of dog shit on his doorstep.