Years ago, Kate asked Alicia when she’d fallen in love with Jack, and the answer was “right away.” Alicia felt the same about Benny, though this child in no way resembled the baby she left behind.
“Mama?” Benny said, to Nova.
Nausea pooled deep inside Alicia.
“Der, der,” Nova said, gesturing. “Come, tell Nova what zee problem.”
She hoisted Alicia from the ground, which was quite a feat given her diminutive frame. After ushering her to a sofa covered in old newspapers, Nova prepared tea. She dropped in a glug of whisky before bringing it to Alicia, who took the drink because she didn’t know what else to do.
“Mama, what’s Auntie Leesy doing?” Benny asked, prancing on her tiptoes.
Auntie. Another dagger to Alicia’s heart.
“Resting, sweetheart,” Nova said. “It’s been a long journey.”
“What’s America like, Leesy?” Benny asked.
“Oh, well, it’s—”
“How is Paris? Weren’t you just in Paris? Mama used to have a cabaret act there.”
Hearing the way Benny spoke filled Alicia with ever more love for the girl, and for Nova. Was there a more darling creature on the planet? Novella had done a splendid job.
“I never saw Novella’s act,” Alicia said. “But I’m sure it was grand, like everything she does.”
Alicia beamed at her friend over the cup of tea.
“Do you like music?” Benny asked. “What kind of songs?”
Benny continued to pepper her with questions, hardly waiting for one answer before spitting out the next. Not unlike her father, Alicia thought with fondness, and a few more tears.
“Okay I go to bed now,” the girl said. “Benny is tired. Night night.”
“Good night, sweet thing,” Alicia said.
Oh, precious Benny. Alicia would die if something happened to her.
At once, a vision hit her, with swiftness and with force. A picture. Her mother’s face. In a flash, Alicia realized she’d never forgiven Mamusia for handing her off to the Church.
Father was different. Dads were practical. Mothers were supposed to want you at their side. He might’ve paid vast sums and brokered unconscionable deals, but Father wasn’t the only person who sacrificed to keep Alicia safe.
“Przepraszam, Mamusia,” she whispered.
I’m sorry, Mother.
“Novella,” Alicia said hoarsely after Benny wandered up to the loft. “We need to talk about Benedetta.”
Nova bit her bottom lip.
“I must tell you…” Alicia said, chest aching, eyesight blurry. “You’ve done a magnificent job raising your daughter.”
“My daughter?” Novella said, her voice high.
Alicia nodded, for it hurt too much to speak. All around, the cats on Nova’s walls stared at her with contempt.
A mother’s job was to keep her child loved and protected, and Alicia had already done this, thanks to Novella. Fred had his warnings, but her daughter’s safety was about so much more. Benny was three years old. She had a personality, memories, a life. How could Alicia rip a happy, colorful girl from the only home she’d ever known? It would break Benny’s heart.
“She is my daughter?” Novella asked, to be sure.
“Has been from the start.”
“Oh, Alicia!” Novella leapt at her, smothering her in a hug. “I was hoping you say zat!”
“You wanted her all along?” Alicia asked, unsure whether this made her feel better or worse.
“Yes! Of course!” Novella said. Then added, “But she was not mine.”
“She is yours. I wish it could be another way, but this is for the best.”
It was astounding to see how much Benny had changed the woman. No longer the belle of café society, Novella Palmisano was now off the Via Veneto map. She avoided clubs, and newspapers couldn’t claim she was the most common factor in Roman scandals. To think, this loving woman once sued a reporter for calling her a “good girl at heart.”
“What will you do now?” Novella asked.
Alicia shrugged, and offered half a smile.
“I’ll always be Benny’s auntie.”
“Yes! Of course!”
“Aside from that, I’ll try to press on,” Alicia said. “I have no choice but to live my next life.”
JUNE 2016
LOS ANGELES
They sit near the sidewalk, mimicking any other brunching couple, with their sunglasses and coffee and unwashed hair.
Serena Palmisano feels hungover, though she didn’t finish the glass of wine she poured last night. Across from her is Lee Perenchio. His hair is chaotic and disordered, made worse as he repeatedly rakes his fingers through it. They’ve been in Los Angeles five days. It is as though they haven’t slept since Rome.
Serena scrutinizes the others who are eating and laughing, when they’re not staring into their phones. She wonders if anyone else is contemplating their DNA. Her grandmother might not be Nova. As for her potential grandfather, it’s too much to consider.
“This whole thing is nuts,” Lee says, tapping his straw on the table before sliding it from its wrapper.
The JFK possibility is nuts, but mostly his mind is on Serena, and how she’ll soon be gone.
“I don’t know what to think.” Serena grabs her head with both hands. “Do I want to be related to Alicia Corning Clark? Or your John Kennedy?”
“He’s not my John Kennedy.”
Serena shrugs, stumped. Doesn’t JFK belong to all Americans? Isn’t this why the country loves him so? The Camelot business, one brief shining moment, and all that?
“If Alicia Corning Clark was your grandmother,” Lee says, and stabs at his eggs, “how would you feel about it, and the fact she left your mother?”
“According to that letter, it was to keep her safe. Same reason Jackie O married that ugly, unpopular Greek. Alicia wanted to give her child the best life, and she left her with the best person.”
Serena does not miss the parallels to Alicia’s own childhood. She looked it up last night. Before the war, there were one million Jews in Poland, and five thousand survived. In Alicia’s hometown of Łódź, only a few hundred lived out of several hundred thousand. It was a miracle that Alicia was one of them.
“I can’t believe you came all this way,” Lee says, “to meet with the lawyer, and take a DNA test, and now you don’t want the results?”
“Who says I came for those reasons?” she asks with a grin.
Lee blushes and takes to aggressively stirring his orange juice with the straw.
“That’s very sweet,” he says, “but I still don’t understand why you’d give up this chance.”
“Why are you so bothered that I don’t care to be rich?” Serena asks, picking up on his sentiments, as she’s taught herself to do.
They haven’t known each other long, but they know each other well, which is a different and much better thing.
“I didn’t have the money to start,” she continues. “Why do I need it now? Of course, I need money, but not to that degree.”
And if she is Alicia’s heir, and accepts the estate, then William the doorman and the others will be left with nothing. They were there for Alicia every day. They took her to appointments and tended to her needs. William found Alicia’s body splayed across the floor. Alicia promised these men that she would change their lives. Who is Serena to take that away?
“While I admire your integrity—” Lee starts.
“Integrity?” Serena snorts. “Not being a greedy bastard isn’t an admirable trait. Maybe in Milan.”
Lee rolls his eyes.
“What about your lineage?” he asks. “Nothing could replace your grandmother, but you could be part of an enormous family, the family, at least here in the States.”
Lee had been surprised that it was possible to determine Serena’s potential link to JFK. He’d been dead some fifty years but, apparently, this is not so long. A few years ago, DNA was used to prove that Thomas Je
fferson sired children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves.
“Serena,” he says. “You might be a Kennedy.”
“That’s a downside.” She sniggers. “One gets the impression that sometimes not even the Kennedys want to be Kennedys.”
“What about finding out if you’re related to Alicia Corning Clark?”
“I’m not sure I have the willpower to find out one and not the other,” she says. “Then I think of the hassle…”
She blubbers her lips.
“Surely, they’d need to find my mother first, and then inform the other people named, and what a disaster it’d become.”
This one decision could spider into ten more, and probably four times the problems. The judge can’t simply say, “You’re the heir, here’s your money.” Alicia Corning Clark’s death, and her history with JFK, was in the news. Some sources mentioned the possibility of a “love child” and the doorman, bellman, and lift operator have spoken to the press. If Serena receives the estate, certain people will be mad, and others will demand to know, is she also related to JFK?
Serena imagines blog posts and gossip columns and people knocking on her door. She thinks about the thousands of things written about Alicia, and the people who trailed her for years. What a miserable way to live.
“I don’t need a test to tell me who I am,” she says. “I’m Serena Palmisano, raised by her grandmother. Serena, a Roman who needs to complete her university degree. A girl who has a strange penchant for tall American boys.”
“Serena,” Lee mumbles, then exhales slowly. “So, this is it? This is where the story of Alicia Corning Clark ends?”
The story of us, he does not add. For when she’s done with Alicia, Serena will be done with him.
“I’ll take a few more days to think about it,” Serena says. “But, I don’t need a big life, only a happy one.”
Lee closes his mouth and nods as Serena rips off one end of her croissant. As she chews, Lee looks up and they lock eyes.
“About this life…” he wants to know, undertaking what feels like the largest possible risk. “How do I factor in?”
Serena is glad he’s asked, because she wonders the same.
“You’re an American.” She swats at the air, as Lee knew she would. “Surely you will devise a plan to push your way into my existence. Loud and grumbly, like a bulldozer.”
“Just so you know, I’ve signed up for an Italian class,” he says. “I hope to be fluent inside three months.”
Serena smiles, tilts her head. This man knows how to play her in the perfect way.
“I’ll have you know I contacted Georgetown this morning,” she says, and stares at her plate. “To figure out what I need to start again. I should probably graduate at some point, don’t you think?”
“I think that. I think that very much.”
“Who knows, perhaps my credits will transfer somewhere more exciting.” She grins. “Stanford? Is that close to Silicon Valley?”
“It’s pronounced sili-ken, not sili-cone. Tell me, who shall I bribe to make that happen?”
“Aho, you’ve been ruminating on Kennedys too long if you’re thinking bribes.”
He chuckles. Serena feels his laughter on her. How she adores this sunny California boy.
“Well, Serena Palmisano,” Lee says, for he never lets a moment get too still. “Sounds like we’ll be meeting somewhere in the middle. A good thing, too, since that’s my favorite place to be.”
DID JFK AND ALICIA CORNING CLARK HAVE A SECRET LOVE CHILD?
Daily Mail Online, July 11, 2016
NEW YORK
Two men wait for their lawyer in a conference room, on the twentieth floor of a nondescript building in Midtown.
William, a doorman by trade, has on a suit purchased in some prior decade. He is large, and has a walrus mustache. Felix, the elevator operator, wears a blue work shirt, with his name and the building stitched in navy. He is bald. They both have glasses. They once knew the same woman, Mrs. Clark.
Her first name was Alicia and she was the heir to a sewing machine fortune, courtesy of her second husband, who died in his sleep thirteen days after they wed. Before him was a British actor, Edmund Purdom. After was a Bahamian bodybuilder turned health minister whom Mrs. Clark divorced in the eighties. Between and among these three was a hit parade of actors, celebrities, and heads of state. Mrs. Clark spared no detail when relaying her antics to William and Felix and the third man, George Rodriguez, retired four years ago and difficult to locate. He is called “George the Bellman” in Mrs. Clark’s will.
“I’ve always adored men named George,” she used to say, although none of them could think of an old-time star she’d dated with the name. “They have the best hearts.”
Sometimes it was hard to believe her stories, and they’d heard a lot of them in their decades working at 955 Fifth, an exclusive co-op close to the Met, where Robert Redford once lived. A real-estate agent said they planned to list Mrs. Clark’s place for a cool five million.
William works the graveyard shift, and Mrs. Clark was a terrible sleeper, and this is how they became friends. For the better part of three decades, she visited him in the dead of night and told her madcap tales.
Mrs. Clark talked about the famous people she loved, names from yesteryear like William Holden, Gary Cooper, and Tyrone Power. Omar Sharif. Roberto Rossellini. Major-league pitcher Bo Belinsky. Warren Beatty. Katharine Hepburn. Various princes and kings.
She spoke of her first husband and their nasty divorce, and her third husband, whom she was married to the longest. Curiously, she never mentioned the second. Mostly, she spoke of John F. Kennedy, the man she loved above all.
“You should write a book,” William used to say, “with the life you’ve lived.”
“Are you kidding?” Mrs. Clark would scoff. “I’d have to leave out the best parts, lest the you-know-whos have me killed.”
She meant the Kennedys, and her bouts of paranoia were not infrequent. She often thought people were following her. God forbid she see some member of their family in Bergdorf’s. She’d hide in her apartment for a week.
“They killed Marilyn Monroe,” she said.
William assured her that they’d all heard that conspiracy theory, and many others besides. Just because people said it, did not make it true.
“It’s on tape,” Mrs. Clark swore. “And, sure, they all talk about Marilyn, but no one mentions Mac, the family payoff guy. He died in a mysterious car crash a few weeks before Jack was killed.
“Did you know Frank Sinatra’s son was kidnapped because of them? And what about the socialite Mary Meyer? Friend of Jackie’s, lover of Jack’s. Mary planned to write a book but was murdered, in broad daylight, while jogging near her Georgetown home. They never found her killer, or her manuscript. Also, have you heard of the gossip columnist Cholly Knickerbocker?”
“Only from you,” William would say.
She could go on like this for hours, outlining a veritable dossier of Kennedy comrades who’d met mysterious ends.
“Knickerbocker’s real name was Igor Cassini. He and his wife Charlene were pals of the Kennedys, until Bobby got his panties in a twist and indicted Igor for failing to register as a resident alien. Charlene wrote a scathing letter to Jack, and Jackie exiled them from social relevance. She made life so miserable for the woman, Charlene downed thirty sleeping pills to end it all. Though many think she was forced.”
There was another gossip columnist, too: Dorothy Kilgallen. She was murdered while investigating the truth behind the JFK assassination. Ms. Kilgallen had an entire folder filled with support for her allegations. Like Mary Meyer’s would-be book, it vanished when she died.
Every once in a while, when it was very late, or she’d had too much Pernod, Mrs. Clark would say there’d been a child, a little girl fathered by JFK and given to someone else to raise. If William asked her about it the next morning, she’d panic and take it all back.
Mrs. Clark had one picture of her a
nd the president, which she kept on the nightstand beside her bed.
“There were dozens more,” she said. “Plus, letters that’d make your heart skip a beat. But my idiot first husband torched it all in a fit of fury and lust.”
Felix had no patience for her stories of romance. To him, Mrs. Clark described her childhood, probably because she recognized a fellow foreigner. She grew up as a well-off Jew in Poland, content until the Nazis unleashed. As a girl, she went into hiding and her parents went into concentration camps. Her mother survived, but came out a fragment of herself. This was, William and Felix both assumed, why Mrs. Clark was so convinced people wanted to cause her harm.
Felix didn’t care to have so many details. He wanted to do good work and keep his job. He’d been warned not to get too friendly with the residents, but Mrs. Clark didn’t let him keep his distance.
“Felix, don’t worry,” she’d say. “You’re going to be blessed.”
She was going to put him in the will, was what she meant.
William deemed himself Mrs. Clark’s closest friend. Felix thinks he makes too much of it, but facts are facts. When Mrs. Clark became too weak to travel to the Bahamas, and there was no one left in her life, William stepped in. He escorted Mrs. Clark to her appointments, and on shopping trips to Bergdorf’s and Saks. Sometimes, Felix came. George the Bellman carried her bags.
In 2001, Mrs. Clark wrote a will, leaving a million dollars to each of them, and the rest to the Humane Society—odd, since they’d never known her to own a pet. She had a real thing against cats.
“When I’m gone,” she used to say, “make sure they know I was important.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” William responded, unsure who she meant by “they.” “You’re too stubborn.”
Once, William asked if she’d gotten what she wanted out of life. Mrs. Clark thought about this for some time.
“I have a beautiful home,” she said. “And more money than I could ever spend. But before all of this, there was one year in Hyannis Port, when, for one bright shining moment, I had it all.”
The Summer I Met Jack Page 45