Too Much Too Soon

by Jacqueline Briskin

  * * *

  When the four Talbotts emerged from the elevator on the third floor of the Rayburn House Office Building, Anne gamely attempted to keep up the pace Alexander was setting in order to avoid the small crowd of media folk hustling in their wake. Before they had traversed the length of the hallway, Anne lifted her hand to the great bulge of her stomach, halting. “Hold up there, Gid,” she said.

  The other three slowed, as did the press entourage.

  “Everything okay?” Gid asked in a low, concerned rumble.

  Smiling and wincing, she said, “Our offspring’s playing soccer in there. Must be trying to work off the heady gourmet delights of White House cookery.”

  They had eaten plain broiled chicken—ketchup was available on the side—with unsauced asparagus in the private upstairs dining room with a noted Alabama heart surgeon, a wizened and legendary producer from Hollywood’s Golden Age, the cheery, overjeweled wife of a Mexican billionaire and the Presidential couple. A lofty mise en scène that should by rights have intimidated Anne into muteness. Instead, she had entertained the long table with her affectionately told tales of the New Guinea ancients whose oral histories she was taping.

  Crystal, woozy with lack of sleep and on edge with misgivings about the upcoming afternoon session of the hearings, had nevertheless been pleasantly surprised by her daughter-in-law’s success, and now she felt a tug of affectionate concern. “Anne, dear, you and Gid better go on back to the house and rest. We can manage.”

  “Everything’s cool,” Anne said. “The thing is, this particular May I’m not in shape for the thousand-meter race.”

  The cameras were whirring, and Crystal turned her head away. She glimpsed a swarthy, dark-haired man emerge from one of the pedimented doorways, easing along the corridor to slip in and become one of the dozen or so in their retinue. He doesn’t have a press card dangling from his neck, she thought fleetingly.

  “See you in a couple of minutes, then,” Alexander said. “Gid, this time you sit between our ladies.”

  Alexander took Crystal’s arm. Trotting at her tall son’s side, she fought her irritation with him.

  Will he produce that fake document himself? It’s not Alexander’s style, but then again he’s not himself about this whole deal. I hope to God he won’t hit out at Curt so that it’s obvious what he’s doing. I can’t bear Honora’s huge reproachful eyes again. What does she care anyway? She left Curt ages ago. Why can’t it be golden and sweet like it was when we were children, like it was yesterday on the Capitol steps?

  Her ankle bent inward. Gripping Alexander’s sleeve, she groaned with exaggerated loudness.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said sotto voce. “But I figured you’d prefer to stay ahead of the vultures.” He gripped her elbow, whispering, “Courage, ma mère, courage.”

  “I’ll survive,” she said with a note of maternal asperity.

  “Good. Because we’re about to face the foe.”

  On the far side of the knotted group waiting to be vetted outside the hearing chamber, Curt and Honora were striding along, their long steps synchronized, his arm protectively clasping her shoulders, she bent pliantly toward him. Whatever their marital arguments might have been in the past, it was obvious to Crystal that their reconciliation was not only public but private.

  Irrationally Crystal found herself blaming her sister as well as Curt for the mysterious harpies who fed on her son’s living flesh. As she moved toward her enemies, she again glimpsed the dark, greasy-looking man. Why was he so intent on Alexander? Why not? she asked herself. Everyone else was staring as the paired Ivorys and Talbotts confronted one another at the crush by the committee chamber.

  Honora murmured a greeting that was swallowed by the surrounding racket.

  “Good afternoon, Aunt Honora,” Alexander said. “Mr. Ivory—or should I call you Uncle Curt?”

  Father, Crystal thought, and from the pause knew that the four of them were joined in the correction.

  More flashes, and pressing forward of snouted motion picture lenses.

  The swarthy man had positioned himself three feet or so to their left. He wore a cheap, nondescript brown Dacron suit, white shirt and black knitted tie too narrow for style. Nothing about his clothing or his haircut was unusual. He looked utterly commonplace. So why should her attention be drawn to him? Because, she realized, his was a parody of normalcy. Surrounding him was an aura of wildness that set him apart from the rest of the journalists. His muscles were flexed tauter, heavier moisture gleamed on his Levantine flesh. His eyes protruded a bit, as if being crowded from his head. The pupils, contracted to wary pinpoints, stayed fixed on Alexander.

  She gripped her son’s arm, feeling the lean muscles, wanting to draw him away from the feral gaze, yet unable to speak.

  Did I have time to warn him?

  This fine point would haunt her the rest of her life.

  She saw the hand reach under the Dacron jacket. A movement swift, yet also incredibly predictable. And she was not surprised when the hand withdrew holding a gun, a smallish pistol, the familiar accoutrement of countless movies and television shows. So much for all the metal detectors and security, she thought.

  He’s aiming at Alexander.

  He wants to kill Alexander.

  Later, later she would wonder why, if her thoughts drifted so leisurely, she didn’t have time to scream a warning.

  A body hurled between the gun and Alexander, moving so swiftly that in the blur she didn’t realize immediately that it was Curt.

  Simultaneously, a sound like a twig cracking. Acrid smoke. Curt’s mouth opened, he swayed from side to side and back and forth, like one of those inflatable plastic punching toys that never topple. But he was toppling. Hands reached out to break his fall.

  The crowd had the Capitol police pinned near the doorway, and if the dark-skinned assailant had intended to escape he would have had a good chance in the confusion that was eddying outward. Instead, he planted his feet apart, raising his left hand to steady his right wrist as he aimed again at Alexander.

  The second shot cracked just before the screaming filled the universe.

  “A-a-l-e-e-x-a-a-a-n-d-e-e-e-r . . . .”

  69

  Honora never saw the gun.

  Curt’s fingers on her shoulder dug through her clothes and into the flesh for the briefest fraction of time. After that he moved instantaneously. She had no time to register bewilderment or astonishment. Like a defensive fullback, he hurled himself at Alexander. The tackle never made contact. At a sharp, cracking sound Curt halted. He swayed an uneven circle, his face bewildered, his feet not moving. Then his torso sagged.

  Adrenaline blazed through Honora, filling her muscles with strength. She grasped his waist, not realizing she was sobbing with the effort of lowering his limp heaviness gently to the marble. She knelt over him.

  Still uncertain what had happened, she saw the neatly indented hole just to the left of his top jacket button.

  As bright redness oozed onto the dark Italian silk-serge, she pressed the base of her thumb against the slippery fabric, a primitive, instinctive attempt to stay the blood. During the war the upper forms at Edinthorpe had taken Red Cross: now her mind refused to conjure up more of those classes than a vision of the coarse cotton triangles they’d used to tie tourniquets, and the unsubduable, girlish giggles that had accompanied the bluff, gray-haired gym mistress’s demonstration of the groin pressure point.

  There is a Reaper, whose name is Death, and with his sickle keen he reaps the bearded grain at a breath, and the flowers that grow between.

  Why remember poetry and not how to stay the flow of her husband’s heart blood?

  “Honora . . . .” The struggle of Curt’s whisper heaved, slippery, below her hand.

  She looked at his face and shivered. How could his ruddy, vigorous color have drained so quickly? The boat tan overlaid his sudden pallor with the yellowish hue of beef suet bought at a cheap butcher’s.

  “Honora?”
He was staring up at her.

  Never before had she been so aware of his eyes, the blackness of the pupils, the brown lines radiating into the topaz iris and the dark brown ring that encircled it. A thin, s-shaped squiggle of redness showed in the left sclera. Moisture clumped his thick, straight lashes.

  He had commanded her attention, therefore she dare not distract herself by shouting for a doctor.

  In this infinitely stretched moment, she was possessed of a metaphysical certainty, a true religious’s fanaticism. Only through her gaze could she infuse Curt with a redemptive life force. The totality of her visual concentration negated her other senses. She didn’t hear the cries and stamping of the terrified crowd; she was oblivious to the pushing. She smelled neither the smoky acridity of the gunfire nor the sourish pungency of panic. She scarcely felt the brutal, unintentional kick between her shoulders, but steadied herself with her hand. Later she would find it impossible to believe that three members of the NBC team, defecting their duty to their network and the public’s right to know, had been next to her, circling Curt’s recumbent body to protect him from being trampled in the pandemonium. The second and third shots she registered only by Curt’s blinks. She never heard Crystal’s demented shrieking.

  She stared into Curt’s eyes as if guiding him through the depths of some dark, primordial forest.

  * * *

  When the sharp sound rang outside in the corridor Joscelyn was already in the committee chamber. She never would have identified the sudden, dry crack as gunfire if it weren’t for the ensuing blast of shouting. She immediately fell prey to her childhood fear that the very worst, either physical or metaphysical, had occurred. Jumping from her chair, she rushed in the direction of the left door.

  Frenzied people were thrusting their way inside to escape the shots in the corridor, while many of those inside—either newsmen or spectators fearing that they were trapped and would be mowed down—attempted to push their way out. Over the sounds of panic repetitively came the question: “What’s happening?”

  Joscelyn was trapped in the crush. As a keening wail rose over the mob sounds, higher, yet higher, Joscelyn elbowed and clawed her way to the exit. Briefly caught against the mahogany jamb, she used her fists to emerge into the corridor.

  A lurching, shoulder-held camera partially obscured her vision of Crystal, who was staring down at the floor. The lovely mouth was a wide-open red circle from which came that piercing, blood-chilling shriek. Gid Talbott was shouldering his way through the crowd. Heavy features contorted, he dropped out of Joscelyn’s line of vision.

  Some radio or TV correspondent was shouting near her ear, “This is awful, awful, oh my God, like Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. Blood everywhere. An unknown assassin has shot Alexander Talbott and Curt Ivory. From here it appears both men are dead.”

  She thrust herself toward a human knot. Three men had linked arms to protect Curt as he lay sprawled on his back. Honora knelt over him, her dark head bent close to his, her expression calm, her lips tender, as if she were about to make love to him.

  Jesus, is she ever out of it, Joscelyn thought. She superimposed the vision of another prostrate male body bleeding onto marble that wasn’t gray but pink.

  Somebody’s got to take charge, she told herself.

  An exhilirated calm descended on her, a calm made all the more powerful by her fear. Her mind working swiftly, she used her well-developed skills of organization.

  “Get a doctor!” she shouted. “Get a doctor over here quickly!”

  “There’s another body, I think it’s the assassin. I hope our camera’s picking him up. There’s some question whether he was shot by the Capitol’s police force or whether he turned his weapon on himself.”

  “And call for the ambulance!” Joscelyn bawled. She was aware that the security people should already have dispatched this message, but she had learned how often in crises people forgot their jobs. “There’s always an ambulance stationed in back of the Capitol.”

  She ducked below the swaying men who surrounded Curt, and in this crawling position laid her hand on his bloodslick chest. His heart reverberated below her palm. She began to unbutton the soaking shirt. Almost immediately, competent masculine hands took over. “I’m a physician,” the man said, squatting next to her as he smartly ripped the Egyptian cotton.

  “He’s still alive,” Joscelyn said.

  “We’re trying to get our camera through to get a shot of Curt Ivory . . . .”

  Joscelyn for the first time focused on Curt’s face. The flesh seemed to sag back with the force of gravity. She jumped to her feet again. “Has anybody called that fucking ambulance?” she shouted.

  A crew was racing a gurney and equipment along the wide corridor.

  “Here!” Joscelyn shouted in a commanding tone to avert the paramedics from tending the other fallen. “Over here!”

  “Will you please move back, everybody.”

  “Mrs. Ivory is kneeling over her slain husband’s body—”

  “Let us through!”

  An ambulance attendant was pushing an oxygen mask over Curt’s face while another said, “Gotta rush him over to the Capitol Hospital.”

  Joscelyn instantly recollected denigrations of that hospital from her stint on the Washington subway. “No,” she barked. “The George Washington University Hospital!”

  “Ma’am, he’s in bad shape, the nearest hospital’s the Capitol.”

  “He’ll die for sure there,” somebody called out. “Do what the lady says. Take him to George Washington.”

  “Key figures in the payoff scandal, Alexander Talbott and Curt Ivory, were shot only moments ago by an unknown gunman.” The reporter’s voice was high and staccato. “Before Capitol police could apprehend the unknown murderer, he turned the gun on himself . . . .”

  “Ivory appears to be alive, however Alexander Talbott is dead . . . .”

  70

  Joscelyn and Honora were in a large, private room at the George Washington University Hospital. Both women had kicked off their shoes; the bloodstained jacket of Honora’s new yellow suit had been thrown on the bathroom floor while Joscelyn’s navy flannel was neatly hung over the back of a chair. On the bed table was a litter of cups, Lipton’s teabags oozing brownly into the saucers. They had been here approximately seven hours, and Curt had been in the operating room all that time.

  It was Joscelyn who had inveigled the hospital staff into allowing them to use this room, and coerced them into placing a guard by the nurses’ station to prevent intruders; she who had secured tea from the aides. Once three other Ivory vice presidents arrived, however, her executive energy abandoned her and she let the trio take over. They were manning the public phones in the downstairs waiting room and answering the unanswerable queries about Curt’s condition that flowed in from around the world. Periodically they came up to speak to Honora, whom only one of them had met before. She looked glazed during their rapid, high-key conversations, which avoided the operating room and centered on the impact of the shooting on the Morrell Hearings. (The consensus was summed up in one remark: “Bad as this is, at least it’s broken up the damn committee’s momentum.”)

  Joscelyn’s anxieties expelled themselves in hyperkinetic motion. She was forever blinking, rotating her shoulders, straightening her skirt around her narrow flanks, pushing back her hair, pacing around the room.

  Honora sat with her hands loosely clasped in her lap: blood had dried on the yellow wool, but she did not see the rusty streaks. Her eyes were focused on some distant, unseeable point. Her abnormal immobility had increased as the hours dragged by.

  “Honora,” Joscelyn said.

  Honora turned reluctantly.

  “They said the creep bastard who shot Curt looked like a Mideasterner.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “I’m convinced he had some connection to Khalid. The way I see it, Khalid and his bunch were afraid that Alexander was about to spill some very hot beans about Khalid, that he was about to incrim
inate the Holy One.”

  Honora’s glance begged for silence.

  Joscelyn couldn’t stop. “Everything fits like a perfectly planned scale model. The assassin’s appearance, his killing Alexander, his killing himself, the lack of ID.” (A black and white television rested high in the wall opposite the bed, and she had kept switching channels for News Updates, catching repetitious confirmations of Alexander’s death and of the assassin’s suicide—Police found no identification on the corpse—and one cryptic, Harold Fish, key witness at the Morrell Hearings, could not be reached for comment. There were many zoom shots of the hospital’s exterior—the George Washington University Medical Center where Curt Ivory, accused of bribery and corruption, hovers near death as doctors attempt to remove a bullet from his heart. Just before the seven o’clock national news came on, Honora in a strangled voice had requested that the set be turned off.) “And remember what Morley Safer said about Fish being unavailable? I’ll bet a million bucks that he’s unavailable on a permanent basis.”

  Honora glanced at her watch. “Five to ten,” she whispered.

  “Thoracic surgery takes forever, and getting out a bullet is far more complicated than your run-of-the-mill bypass.”

  Honora closed her eyes.

  Her sister’s hunger for silence reached through Joscelyn’s raw compulsion to speak. Oh, fuck it, she thought, biting her lip and scratching ferociously at the itch between her shoulders.

  At a tentative rap, they both jumped, simultaneously turning to the door with frightened expectancy.

  “Who’s there?” Honora whispered at the same instant as Joscelyn said loudly, “Come on in!”

  It was Gid. “I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.

  Honora blinked, shaking her head. “No, not at all, Gid.”