“Hard to believe,” I replied. “I thought you had him laid out on the biographical mortuary table, all dissected and examined and stitched back together again.”
“Far from it,” Goldman replied sternly. “There are still many lacunae in the record.”
Lacunae was obviously a tasty condiment in his mouth, and he paused for a second to let me appreciate its use before continuing.
“Take the fall of 1940, for example,” he was now reading from notes on a yellow legal pad he’d taken out of his briefcase, “when he was at Stanford for a summer session. That’s an episode about which almost nothing is known. It’s one of those blanks we hope you might be able to help us fill in.”
“Afraid I can’t be of much assistance there,” I replied honestly. “Jack and I were a couple of years out of college then and I was working at my first real job. I think he went out to Palo Alto on a whim. His brother Joe Jr. was still the focus of the Old Man’s attention then, so Jack was free to remain in his cowboy–Indian chief–fireman phase without having to worry about where he was headed.”
Goldman listened with a skeptical look and then cleared his voice before offering a deal: “You can be perfectly frank with me in your responses, Mr. Billings, and not have to worry that anything you say will become public before you’re ready. Our interviews are very secure. Some of our subjects seal their oral histories for thirty or forty years after their death before anyone, including scholars, can see them. Their wishes are scrupulously respected.”
I forced myself not to ask him what the half-life of plutonium is.
“I just want to make sure you know,” he continued patronizingly, “that you can speak freely without worrying that what you say might cause unpleasantness during your lifetime.”
“Which we know will not be all that long,” I said.
Goldman rolled his eyes in a feigned rebuke of my ghoulishness as his index finger moved to the next item on his page.
“Or the time at the end of the war when he was out in Hollywood for several weeks. What about that? This is the longest period of his adult life where we lose sight of him altogether. You certainly must know about this because materials in the files indicate that you were out there with him.”
Remembering that Jack always said my face registered lies like a polygraph, I bent over to retie my shoe.
“It was so long ago,” I came up after taking a deep breath. “These days, I’m lucky to remember what I had for breakfast.”
“But you were there during that time, right?”
I nodded.
“What exactly did the two of you do?” Goldman was in full prosecutorial mode now.
“Same old thing. Jack chased women and I held his coat for him when he caught one.”
“That’s it?”
“It was only a few weeks.”
The archivist plowed grimly ahead: “What about his father? Calendar entries I ran across in our files indicate that he was in Hollywood at roughly the same time the two of you were.”
“It wasn’t a family outing. As you probably know, Mr. Kennedy had been involved in the movie business during the late Twenties and early Thirties, and often spent time in Hollywood afterwards.”
“How were he and the President relating then?”
“Relating? Come on, Mr. Goldman, as a student of this family you’ve got to know that whether he was fourteen or forty and whether he was in Hollywood or Hyannis, the greatest problem Jack Kennedy faced, almost until the day he died, was not the Cuban missile crisis or the civil rights movement or Berlin or Vietnam. It was his father and how to keep him at bay.”
“Thanks for all this—very valuable,” Goldman said insincerely as he put his yellow pad back in the briefcase and moved to Plan B. “The other thing I hoped to discuss with you during this visit is primary source materials—letters and other items we know you accumulated during your long relationship with the President.”
I was not surprised that rumors about my little archive had reached Boston, probably via Jackie, who always spends some time rummaging around in it when she drops by to encourage me to adopt what she calls, in that breathy voice of hers, a “healthier lifestyle.”
In fact, I have been cataloguing and cross-cataloguing my letters from Jack since November 22, 1963, when overnight the past became the jail I keep trying to break back into. I have segregated them into batches marked “dirty” and “clean,” and annotated each one with a typed gloss explaining the context in which it was written. I tell myself I am serving history. In truth, I manufacture excuses to handle these pieces of paper because they provide the tactile jolt that keeps my heart from giving up.
“I do have some correspondence.”
Goldman lifted his briefcase onto his knees and rested his forearms on it, leaning forward avidly. “I know you’re probably not ready yet to consider gifting them …” I began shaking my head, and he made a course correction: “… but for now, can you give me a sense of the nature of your holdings?”
I stood up, and after the vertigo subsided I walked over to my file cabinet and extracted a couple of manila folders. In the mirror I saw Goldman surreptitiously pull a small tape recorder out of his briefcase.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he said nervously when I turned around.
I shrugged and sat down with the letters. He slid close to me, holding the mike like an Olympic torch.
“This is dated April 13, 1936,” I picked a letter at random. “Jack had left Harvard for a couple of weeks to go to the family’s second home in Palm Beach to recover from a bout of his mystery illness. I was in my second year at Princeton and he’d asked me to come down and keep him company. He wrote it when I was driving back to New Jersey.” I read:
Dear Lemon: The seat of your car must have had a delectable smell after having you sit on it for twenty-four hours. When I get back to school, I’ll have to do some pretty stiff cramming to get ready for exams. Speaking of which, I suggest you cram up your chocolate speedway all that stuff about being too busy to meet me in New York for May Day.
The cloacal references made Daniel flinch, so I selected another note, written a few weeks later from Cambridge and more in keeping with what he probably regarded as Jack’s normality.
Dear Lemmer: It’s coming to the point where I can get tail pretty much as often as I want now, which is definitely a step in the right direction. With luck, I’ll be demonstrating the beast with two backs in person when you arrive this weekend, which will probably be as close as you’ll ever get to the fertile crescent yourself. Just finished a statistics seminar, by the way, in which we learned that one out of every ten men at Princeton has the syph.
Daniel’s minimalist smile was replaced by proprietary interest when I added a couple of sentences from a hurried postscript ordering me to line up a place for us to stay during Army-Navy game weekend and concluding with the warning: “I’ll have the hottest thing ever with me and I don’t want you running into my room every five minutes to find out how my bruised cock is doing.”
“Who was she?” Daniel asked.
“Who remembers? Who could keep track? By this time, as I’m sure you know, Jack had already gotten the idea that it was transfusions of sex that kept him alive. That’s why he was always on the lookout for new blood. For him it was quite literally a matter of I Fuck Therefore I Am.”
“Yes, quite the cocksmith.” Daniel obviously liked the man-to-man stuff.
I thought his picture needed to be more complex: “But for all that, a passive seducer whose technique was to display all his assets and leave women standing there with their mouths watering as he danced off. And never one to worry about inflicting orgasms or otherwise obsess over a girl’s sexual well-being as if she was a car always needing to be polished or have its engine tuned. On the contrary, he was happy to be a whambam-thank-you-ma’am kind of guy who couldn’t wait to get into a woman and couldn’t wait to get out. ‘Jack B. Quick,’ he sometimes called himself. It wasn’t because he was som
e kind of pernicious narcissist, as some of his biographers have claimed, but because however much he needed the boost sex provided him, he dreaded the contact itself.”
Daniel tried to take all this in.
“Shouldn’t surprise you,” I continued loading him down. “You of all people must know that Jack Kennedy had been picked at and prodded and hurt and humiliated by physicians since he was a boy. This made him noli me tangere to the core. The problem he faced all his life—metaphysical, that is, not situational—was how to fuck without touching.”
Daniel blinked a couple of times and then resumed his look of doggy expectancy as I read a few more excerpts that illumined a few tiny stars not yet seen in the Kennedy galaxy. But the hungry way he lunged at every small fact began to grate. So I put the manila folders down, forced a yawn and shook out a couple of Inderals from the vial on my end table.
“Time for me to get my heart rate steady enough that I can get through my afternoon nap without a major incident,” I explained. “I warned the people at the library that this would happen.”
“Oh yes, I was told that you might tire.” He gathered his things. “I guess I’d better grab the shuttle and head back home.”
He ejected and pocketed the used tape cassette, loaded a fresh one, and then placed the recorder on the coffee table, shooting a greedy look at my filing cabinet: “Perhaps I’ll leave it here in case you might want to read a letter or two into the machine every so often and give a little commentary like you just did.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Stories,” he wheedled as he headed toward the door without picking up the tape recorder. “Just tell stories. That’s all I’m asking.”
As if it’s that easy; as if we tell stories rather than them telling us; as if the past is not constantly shape-shifting and interrogating those who think they hold it securely in their hands; as if some stories don’t have the power to consume the wick of the teller’s life in their flame.
What he was asking awakened the bitch in me. “So you want me to just lay down on my couch here and free-associate into your machine?”
“That would be great,” he was proud to catch the allusion. “Just say the first thing that comes into your mind.”
I sprang the trap: “Actually, Jack hated psychoanalysis, you know.”
“How so?” Daniel was alert to the prospect of another tidbit.
“Like others back in those unenlightened times, he thought it was ‘too Jewish.’”
He blanched: “I knew that his father had some anti-Semitic inclinations, but…”
“Yes, you’re right,” I soothed. “Jack wasn’t really prejudiced against Jews.”
A look of relief came over his face, and I struck again: “But he was curious about them. You ask for stories. Here’s one you may not have heard. The two of us were having lunch in the Choate dining hall shortly after we met when one of the handful of Jews at the school, a boy named David Levy, sat down with his tray across from us. I remember him as having curly black hair and big brown eyes and he seemed to be a nice fellow. But Jack stared at him all the time he was eating his meal. Never said a word; just stared. Levy finally blushed and put down his fork and asked why he was doing this. Jack replied, quite pleasantly, ‘Because I’ve never seen a Jew eat before.’”
Daniel blinked rapidly, then raised his shoulders in a shrug that implicated his eyebrows and was out the door.
This morning I awoke to another thick snowfall that silenced New York and gave it an implausible façade of purity. The fat flakes were drifting down so slowly outside my window that it seemed almost possible to see the distinctive pattern in each one.
I scanned my shelves for a book to snuggle up with, but then my eye lit on the tape recorder still sitting where Daniel put it a week ago. I picked it up for the first time, turned it on and went through the usual routine—“Testing-one-two-three.” Stop-rewind-playback. “Testing-one two-three.” I knew that the microphone I held, like memory itself, was an instrument of betrayal.
Just tell stories …
That had always been my role. Jack himself was a conversational counterpuncher, someone who liked a good tale but wanted to avoid the jeopardy of the telling, so he was always ordering me to give command performances. “Hey Lemuel! Tell about the time we sailed to Europe on the Normandie and I saw Primo Camera’s name on the passenger list and arranged the surprise wrestling match for the two of you…” Or: “Come on, Lemur, tell how Zip the Pinhead and Mignon the Penguin Girl both came on to you that day we were wandering through Times Square and stopped at Hubert’s Flea Circus…”
But while he loved a good story, no one was more aware than Jack of the dark powers of narrative. One summer day in 1963, a couple of months before Dallas, we were sitting in the Oval Office, just the two of us, and he was musing about what he’d do after the second term he now felt sure he would win. How to make his post-presidency unique? That was one question. But more importantly, how to deal with all the digging around in his life, his intimate life, that was bound to take place once the office and the glamour he had brought to it no longer protected him?
After staring out the window for a while, slowly tapping his front teeth with his index fingernail, as he often did when ruminating, he said, “There will be good books about me and bad books about me, but the best books about me will be those that never get written.”
I got his point: my silence, far more than anyone else’s, would be golden in the days to come.
It is still a powerful injunction even now. But I’ve carried this burden with me for too long. Night is coming and it’s time to lay it down once and for all.
Hollywood
September 1945
TWO
Late in the afternoon of Labor Day 1945, Jack’s Lincoln Zephyr sedan was inching its way down Hollywood Boulevard. The traffic was stopand-go because everyone was out celebrating not only the holiday, but the end of gas rationing and the end of the war that began six years and two days earlier with the invasion of Poland and formally concluded the previous morning when the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri.
“Mother always makes a big deal of Labor Day,” Jack said, revving the motor to encourage the car in front of us to move forward a foot or two. “Last day of the year to wear white or seersucker.”
I had been watching the Zephyr’s temperature gauge for warnings of vapor lock, but its big V12 continued to thrum confidently in the rolling standstill. Jack had recently bought the 1941 classic with money from the newspaper job he’d had for the past couple of months. He got it for $685, about half the original cost, from a man in Redondo Beach who had driven it less than five thousand miles in four years because of the wartime fuel shortage. It was as close to a new car as you could get at a time when automakers were still almost a year away from full conversion back to domestic production.
We were caught in the middle of the Highland intersection when the signal changed. While drivers on our right and left laid on their horns, I watched the people streaming in and out of the stores. They were not yet buying, but looking with fierce determination, trying to convince themselves that the spoils of victory were really theirs—a new dress or suit; a house in one of the dozens of Southern California tracts already on the drawing board; membership in the middle class; power and glory; dominion. They had just inherited the world but weren’t sure what to do with it.
Then we started up again, stuttering toward the Egyptian Theatre, which was still playing Anchors Aweigh weeks after its release. Jack looked across me at a pair of Betty Grable lookalikes in short shorts and halter tops keeping pace with us on the sidewalk. They were Vargas-girlish with bloody lipstick and sandy hair pompadoured in front and bobby-pinned above their ears. Their walk, stilted by high heels, churned their buttocks in a way that made him laugh out loud with pleasure.
“Now that, my friend, is what they mean by The Shape of Things to Come! Bare Midriffs! Mile-High Thighs! Good God, w
ill you look at that.”
Trying to do my part, I leaned out the window and panted, “Hubba-hubba.”
“That’s the way they make them out here in Lotus Land.” Jack kept looking hungrily at the girls’ long-legged strut. “Can’t you just feel your finger running up the leg from the ankle to the back of the knee and then all the way up to the gates of paradise?”
The girl nearest to us turned around with a coy smile. I had forgotten that teeth could be so white.
She sent an air kiss over her shoulder and Jack slapped his cheek to let her know she had hit her mark.
“No doubt about it, they’re fine,” his voice fell into a register of fatalism. “But you have to remember that sooner or later, every one of them, however gorgeous, is going to be a giant pain in the ass for some poor guy.”
We picked up pace and got as far as the Pantages before coming to a standstill again. Men in crisp military uniforms were sauntering out of the theatre at the end of a matinee.
“Looks like a dress rehearsal for a film about demobilization.” Jack took on the persona of hardened combat vet he’d already flashed a few times that day. “Were these people out here in Shangri La ever really at war? Or did they just stash their Nipponese friends and neighbors in concentration camps after Pearl Harbor and figure, okay, now we’ve got things under control, let’s get back to normal?
“Listen to this: I’m coming down on the train from San Francisco the other day and there’s this Army second looey sitting across from me. When he told me he’d been stationed here in Southern California for the duration doing staff work, I asked if he’d ever felt he was in any danger. He thought for a minute and said, ‘Well, there was that time in ’42 when a Jap submarine surfaced up near Long Beach and lobbed a couple of shells onto the sand. That had us going for a few days.’ Had us going! Can you believe that crap? We’re out there ducking fifty calibers, and they’re back here stateside worrying that their beach time might be interrupted!”
Things in Glocca Morra Page 2