Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  I am confident that the American people would be as appreciative as I am if they knew of the good work you were doing behind the scenes in getting the studios to act with one patriotic voice.

  If fellow-traveling unions are to be allowed to pull the strings in Hollywood, it is inevitable that moving pictures, which appeal so intimately to so many millions, will speak to these millions in the secret code of the Politburo. This is not something we can allow to happen.

  On the other matter you mention, I certainly understand your concern about how actions your son John has undertaken there might affect his future. I agree with you that this man Fortunato is thoroughly unsavory and that connections with him would have a negative effect on a young man’s ambition to participate in public life. Such a man debases our society and is not worthy of U.S. citizenship, which in any case is not his by right of birth. I also agree with you that if Fortunato continues his criminal activities it should be in the country from which he came rather than in our own great nation.

  As you may know, I do not enjoy the same intimate relationship with the current administration that I did with FDR. Nonetheless, I have approached presidential aide Gen. Harry Vaughan, and he has agreed to bring up the question of Fortunato’s deportation with President Truman at an appropriate time. I will keep you advised of what develops.

  In the meantime I wish you continued good luck in your work, whose success is vital to every American.

  —Sincerely yours,

  The signature “Edgar” cut through the typed “John Edgar Hoover.”

  Thinking it would put pressure on me, I guess, Goldman had highlighted “Fortunato” and “your son John,” the yellow marker pen connecting these words and making them into questions. But of course he didn’t understand the only real epiphany of this sordid letter: that the Old Man was moving against Fortunato at the exact moment he was making the vile bargain with Val that she thought would protect her father. She believed the Old Man when he told her that he could have Fortunato sent back to Calabria with the snap of his finger. She was almost right.

  The third Xerox, different from the other two in time, place and substance, was of an antique snapshot with serrated edges, taken with a Brownie, that showed Jack and me standing on the bank of the Spree River crossing our streams of urination in a perfect X during the 1937 trip we took to Europe. We were smiling broadly, not only from the bladder relief, but also because we’d escaped getting arrested at a stop in Berlin less than an hour earlier for yelling “Hell, Hitler” at a Nazi Youth rally where everyone else was robotically chanting “Heil.”

  This photo had been taken by a hearty burgher who’d stopped his bicycle on a spillway above us when he saw what we were doing. Its distorted perspective made it look like our penises were touching. The bicyclist would probably have turned the roll of film over to the Gestapo as evidence of our degenerate antisocial activities if Jack hadn’t offered him a five-dollar bill for it. That this photo should eventually have come into the Old Man’s possession is a mystery but not a surprise.

  At first I thought that Goldman had included it with the other two as a little gift of nostalgia for me. But then I read the scrawled P.S. at the bottom of his note: “I must tell you that I find it genuinely moving, this love of yours for the President,” and understood that love had invisible italics that made it a shot across my bow. This Xeroxed page might actually have been the real reason he had made contact—a little graymail to make me more willing to “just tell stories.”

  I hope it will not disappoint him to know that he is hardly the first to launch such innuendoes and that I am very far removed from giving a shit. As early as our first year at Choate, Headmaster St. John had become concerned enough about my relationship with Jack to peremptorily order me one afternoon to the infirmary, where the school doctor performed what at the time was the gold-standard test by inserting a tongue depressor deep in my throat. He had to report back to the headmaster that I gagged, unlike certifiable queers.

  Others lobbed insults over the years—among them, Ethel’s psychopathic brother George Skakel, who once screamed at me unprovoked in the middle of an extended family dinner to stay away from his sons, and the ever-awful Gore Vidal, who at a 1976 cultural event in D.C. introduced me to a couple of congressmen as “the aging Queen of Camelot.”

  But strangely, the Kennedys themselves never wondered—not about me and not about me and Jack, which suggests that for all their power and glory they always remained at heart peasants from County Wexford, who, having reluctantly acknowledged that the world is round, refused to believe that it also has peaks and valleys.

  They were almost right. The love of my life was a platonic love except for once. Toward the end of spring term of our first year as roommates, after I had established myself as sidekick everlasting, Jack had another bout of his chronic illness, this one coming on so fast and violently that I thought he would die. Joe and Rose, who had been through countless of these crises, didn’t take this one seriously until I called them a third time in a full panic and said that they’d better come quick because his fever had spiked to 104 and the Choate doctor had no idea what to do.

  Jack had already gone past his usual giddy defiance of death, past the fast talking of high fever, past the deep full-body ache and joint freeze that made him keen with pain. This time it seemed that he had surrendered to his sickness and was allowing it to carry him away.

  Barely aware that I was keeping watch, he was looking straight up at the ceiling, holding up his quivering hands like a baby fearful of being rolled over.

  “I’m going away from here,” he whispered as his eyes flipped white.

  Then: “Please, God; please, God; please, God,” the words straddling the line between prayer and blasphemy.

  And then, dimly sensing I was with him: “Oh, Lemmy. Please. Help. Me.”

  But how? I’d already given him alcohol rubs to keep him from burning up and forced him to drink several cups of hot water laced with minced garlic, my mother’s no-fail remedy.

  Desperate to keep him from passing into the next world, I pulled back the sheet and was hit by heat from the blast furnace of his body. His sternum poked up pathetically through his parchment skin. He was panting like a dog. I began to cry. And then, not knowing what else to do, I took his silky boyhood in my hand and raised him from the dead.

  Did I save him? Or exploit him? Or both? Did this act, so much more consequential in its implications then than now, even matter?

  These are questions of fifty years’ duration that have never been answered. But this much I know: After the shivering spasm and involuntary bucking of his body, his tremulousness abated and he seemed to cool a bit and finally fell into a sleep that was troubled but not the coma I had feared. He was able to speak semicoherently to his parents when they arrived two hours later with a specialist from Boston University’s School of Medicine.

  This fugitive moment was incinerated in his fever; Jack never talked about it afterward and neither did I. There was never any need. As long as he was around, the role of accomplice kept me well sublimated. It wasn’t until the years after Dallas, when I was so alone and trapped in the past tense and so consumed by fantasies of Niccolo Fortunato’s possible involvement in Jack’s death and even Kick’s, that I sometimes found myself in the stalls of public restrooms looking down at two sets of pants and underwear puddled on the floor while making what Jack himself no doubt would have called the beast with four feet.

  The Kennedys were oblivious to this new self of mine. I continued to be a fixture at their ceremonial occasions and functioned as their institutional memory in matters particularly involving Jack’s early years. Only Jackie seemed to notice. She once approached me, post-Onassis, at some social function and initiated a conversation that ended with her saying elliptically in that breathy voice of hers, “It isn’t what you do that’s important, but what people see you as doing. So be careful, dear Lem, and be discreet.”

  We both knew what sh
e was talking about.

  “Discreet,” I said to her with a reassuring smile, “is my middle name.”

  And so it has been until now.

  Hollywood

  October/November 1945

  THIRTEEN

  When the Old Man turned up at the door of the Malibu beach house while Jack and Val were still away at the mountain cabin, he pushed his way right into the living room, not bothering with a salutation. He wore an overcoat despite the early promise of heat, and the brim of his hat was jammed low on his head, bending his ears downward like Elmer Fudd’s. Behind him was his henchman Molly Maguire, with the look on his face of someone listening to music no one else could hear.

  Arriving a few seconds later was a thin, slightly stooped man wearing an ice cream suit with black and white spectator shoes. Even in his natty attire, this man seemed an animated aberration. His gait was so loose-jointed that he appeared to ooze rather than walk. His face looked like it had been assembled from a box of spare parts: large doggy ears; a liver-colored birthmark splattered expressionistically on his jaw and neck; discolored front teeth resting on his lower lip. Frog eyes provided the finishing touch, the right one looking piercingly ahead while the left one wandered lazily to the side.

  “This is Beaufort.” The Old Man saw me staring at him. “He used to work for Edgar and now he works for me. He’s got a little bit of wall-eye, but we don’t care…”

  At this point, the strange-looking man sidled up and issued a correction, his words arriving on a thick cloud of juniper: “Divergent strabismus, actually. Wall-eye is a misnomer.”

  “… because we don’t judge a book by its cover,” the Old Man ignored him. “Beaufort knows his stuff. He has a good attitude—can-do; one of those guys who believe that the glass is always half full.”

  “Right, because he drank the rest of it,” I heard Molly Maguire mutter.

  The Old Man shot him a warning look before addressing me: “Where the hell is Jack?”

  “He’ll be back soon,” I replied.

  “I asked you where he is, not for his schedule.” He turned away irritably and went into the bedroom to begin scrabbling ratlike through Jack’s personal belongings.

  “Howya?” Molly elbowed me in the ribs as he moved to station himself at the doorway with his arms folded over his chest, like one of those Secret Service men in the Kennedy future.

  “Working away,” I repeated a phrase I’d heard him use dozens of times himself.

  “Working away.” He nodded agreeably. “Aren’t we all.”

  Molly was brawny but balanced, looking like he could throw a hard right cross while doing a soft-shoe. A ringer for the character actor Victor McLaglen, he was bald on top but had a healthy fringe above the ear; a jaw that looked like it could break a fist; and a tuneful Irish voice. The skin on his hands was rough as stucco.

  “How’s Bridget?” I asked.

  “Fierce, as always,” he chuckled.

  Bridget was the name Molly had given the straight razor that nested like a viper in the side pocket of his jacket. Jack and his brothers liked to tell about the time he turned her loose on some petty criminal who’d made the mistake of threatening the Old Man on a Boston street corner. Striking in a blur, they said, Bridget left this man with a hand clapped over the blood spurting from the side of his head as he searched for his severed ear, which lay like a dead frog on the sidewalk.

  Molly’s given name was Francis Aloysius Maguire. According to his legend, he had been brought to Boston from Ireland as a child sometime before the turn of the century by his widowed mother, who died soon after their arrival. He was fifteen and living with distant relatives and sometimes on his own when the Old Man happened to be walking through Roxbury one day and saw him hitting ferocious line drives in a sandlot baseball game.

  Big Joe had just entered Harvard and was desperate to make the team as first baseman, so he hired this raw-boned boy to help him with his swing, in return giving him food and space for a bedroll on the floor of his dorm room and soon after paying him a few dollars a month to provide what he called “beef on the hoof.” Because of Francis Maguire’s anarchic fearlessness, Mr. Kennedy had at some point early in their lifetime relationship rechristened him “Molly” after the Molly Maguires, the secret society of Irish immigrant workers that had launched a terror campaign against the predatory mine owners in the Pennsylvania coal fields during the nineteenth century.

  It was a challenge for Molly to sign his name; he first had to inscribe small circles over the paper like someone warming up. But he had a keen intelligence and was a determined collector of arcane facts and phrases, including some in French and Latin. He could bring Big Joe to tears with his sentimental blarney and send him into knee-slapping, gasping paroxysms of laughter with his corny jokes. (A shady-looking guy comes up to a businessman in Times Square, opens his jacket, flashes some photos and says, “You want to buy some pornography?” The businessman says no. “Why not?” asks the shady-looking guy. The businessman says, “Because I don’t own a pornograph.”)

  I’d first met Molly at Palm Beach when I came down from Princeton one spring break to be with Jack. The afternoon I arrived, he and the Old Man were in the “bullpen,” a private males-only enclosure off the family pool. Their noses were white with zinc oxide, their chest hairs swirled with cocoa butter, and their naked groins draped carelessly with white gym towels.

  Jack and I stood there in the shadows watching them for a minute. Then he got that glint in his eye and whispered, “I’ll give you a fin if you take off your clothes and walk in there and do ‘I’m No Angel.’”

  Five dollars was real money for a scholarship boy during the Depression, so I got my nerve up, stripped down to my birthday suit and pranced into the bullpen crooning in my best Mae West imitation, “Aw, come on, let me cling to you like a vine. Make that low-down music trickle up your spine. Baby I can warm you with this love of mine. I’m no a-a-angel!”

  Big Joe never looked up from the paper he was reading, but Molly gave me a sideways slitty-eyed smile. “Whatever Jack is paying you to expose that little fella of yours to this infernal sunshine is not enough.” He shooed me away: “So go along now, cover yourself up, make an act of contrition and leave poor Mr. Kennedy to read about the world’s financial catastrophes in peace.”

  Now, standing at semi-attention outside Jack’s beach-house bedroom, Molly joined me in watching the oddity of Beaufort slowly moving around the living room, running his fingers along its crevices and recesses, picking up objects and caressing them before setting them down again.

  “I know your thoughts, Lemoyne,” Molly said in a stage whisper. “That this is an abnormal being, more like a newt than a person. And you’re right. The Giver of Life must have been asleep at the loom the day this brute was made.”

  Beaufort sensed that we were talking about him and came toward us. His good eye gave me an incisive look while the roving one seemed to be checking the room for something more interesting.

  “Let me introduce myself properly. I’m Emile Beaufort. Of the Baton Rouge Beauforts.”

  “I’m Lemoyne Billings of the Baltimore Billingses.”

  Beaufort nodded and moved away after giving me a handshake that was limp, damp and brief.

  “Fuckwit!” Molly whispered. “Supposed to have been one of Hoover’s best snoops at the FBI before becoming a lick-arse to Mr. Kennedy. They say he can fit a tiny Kodak into a Kotex box and get a photo of cupid’s warehouse without the lady even knowing; and record a voice from a hidey-hole fifty feet away and make it sound like a fly in the ear; and use his little moving picture camera the size of a potato to capture a naked couple jagging all unawares in their parlor, although from the looks of him I don’t imagine he’s got very much going on in the trouser department himself. But having a face like a wheelbarrow full of rectums is a terrible price to pay for all these talents.”

  “I can hear, you know,” Beaufort said, his wandering eye giving us a morose look from the o
ther side of the room.

  Molly ignored him: “The Boss calls him ‘a sharp tool.’ I guess that’s part of the reason he’s here—to help cut the red menace out of the motion picture world.”

  “And who better?” Beaufort spoke to our conversation.

  “Pride is the fool’s ambrosia,” Molly replied caustically.

  Both of them shut up the instant the Old Man reappeared.

  Beaufort sidled up to Big Joe and said unctuously, “I’ve seen enough. My cab is still waiting, so I think I’d better go. I’ve set up shop at the Hotel Highpoint on Western Boulevard and I’ll be there if you need me.”

  “I know the Highpoint. It’s a goddamn fleabag.”

  “I have a suite.”

  “What did that run you, all of three bucks a night?” the Old Man jeered.

  “It’s quite nice,” Beaufort was wounded. “It will do well enough for my purposes.”

  The Old Man watched him leave, then grabbed the phone off the kitchen counter, gave the operator a number and promptly began muttering, “Come on, I don’t have all day.”

  He gave a few terse instructions to whoever finally answered, ending by saying, “… and I want you to get the Schencks, the Warners, and the others in a room as soon as possible. But leave that limp dick Louie Mayer off the list. And start prepping them to face the fact that these cheese dicks in the Association of Studio Employees actually represent a threat to our way of life.”

  Hanging up, he gave me the once-over and I got the same queasy feeling I did the first time I met him.

  “Jack didn’t think I would find him,” he exulted.

  I gave a noncommittal look.

  “So what the hell’s going on with him anyway?”

  “Well, he’s writing his column for Mr. Hearst.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Lemoyne.” He came several inches closer. “You know what I mean. What’s with this girl he’s shacked up with? Her knickers are all over his bedroom.”