Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  “No ice,” I said.

  After Christmas, John had somehow talked Marina into taking him back and was trying like hell to stay on the straight and narrow. As far as I knew, he had stayed away from Atlantic City, and of course it would be months until the horse racing started again. But there were plenty of ways he could get himself into trouble right here in Midtown, private poker games and the like, so I had been keeping my eye on him. In a way, Dom’s was the safest place for him. Drinking kept him mellow.

  I was half in the bag already when we carried our drinks from the bar to a table, and John noticed some of mine slosh up onto my wrist.

  “You all right, Hick?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “You sure? Your neck is red. Your neck always gets red when you’re in a lather.”

  “Maybe I’m just drunk.” I smirked. We sat down.

  “Well,” John said, “you probably are. But your cheeks get red when you’re drunk. Your neck gets red when you’re bent out of shape about something.”

  “Who knew you paid so much attention to my complexion?”

  John held up his hands in surrender and leaned back in his chair until it balanced on its two back legs. “How’s the Roosevelt beat?”

  “A little sparse with the holidays. Things should pick up with the inauguration.”

  “No warm-fuzzy exposé on their Christmas traditions?”

  I smiled, but it was a hard smile full of my secret pain, and John lowered his chair. “Come on, Hick. What’s going on?”

  My eyes skittered across the tabletop, over to the chopped wood piled on the floor. “I’m just in a jam. That’s all. It will work out.”

  “But it’s something to do with her?”

  I looked down into my drink—anything to avoid his eyes. I was dying to have somebody to talk to, but one of the hazards of being me was never being able to say a thing head-on.

  John should have known to back off then, but instead he pressed me. I couldn’t tell if he was just clueless or actually trying to be cruel. “Can I ask you something?” he said. “But you have to promise not to get mad.” He took a cigarette out of his case and offered one to me.

  Oh boy, I thought as he lit it. I nodded.

  “Does the first dame read your pieces?”

  I looked at him in surprise, felt myself relax. “I suspect she does now and then, but not the ones that only run in the Midwest papers.”

  He shook his head and exhaled a cloud. “No, I mean does she read your drafts before you file them?”

  I sat up. “Of course not. Where the hell do you get off, John?” He’d hit a nerve there. Nora never had to ask to see my articles ahead of time because I now showed them to her as a matter of course and kept my promise to steer clear of stories that made her uncomfortable. I knew I was hopelessly compromised, a disgrace to the profession I held dear. The last thing I needed was to hear it from John. “I can’t believe you would ask me that.”

  John held up a conciliatory palm. “All right, all right. I can only handle one angry woman at a time, and Marina has that market cornered. I’m sorry.”

  I glared at him. “I believe you were just about to say the next round is on you.”

  He went over to the bar and came back with two fresh drinks. I pouted a little while longer, through my first few sips. Finally John ventured another question.

  “Tell me the truth, Hick. What is it between you two?”

  Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter, I thought. “We’re friends,” I said.

  He nodded. “Good friends?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Better friends than you and me, Hick? You sure know how to make a guy feel left out.”

  Something about his face—mock hangdog but with those puckish eyes, enormous ears—made me laugh. I was getting plenty drunk, and it felt so very good.

  “Hick, you know what I think about you.” He leaned on his elbows and laced his fingers together. “You’re the best reporter, man or woman, I’ve ever known. You’re true-blue. You’ve taught me a lot.”

  “Oh brother,” I said. “Is this where you bring up my advanced age? Call me your ‘mentor’? This night keeps getting worse and worse.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that I’m worried about you. I—”

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  He bobbed his head, absorbing my words. “I hope you’re right.”

  My instinct for self-preservation was at war with a desire to get things out on the table. “Is there something you want to ask me?” I said, almost taunting him.

  “No.” He held up his hands again. “It’s none of my business.”

  “Oh, come on. We’re both adults. And I’ve never hidden who I am.”

  “Well.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “Maybe you should.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look, Hick. It doesn’t make any difference to me whom you like to see. I’m not going to lie—it is hard for me to understand. I’m from Ohio!”

  “And I’m from South Dakota! What of it?”

  He laughed. “I mean I’m not a worldly guy—I don’t pretend to understand it. But that’s your business, just like Marina is my sad affair. What I’m talking about is your professional reputation. You’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to protect yourself. It seems like Bill has his eye on you. Have you thought about what kind of career you’re going to have left when this is all over?”

  I sucked down my drink. The dark barroom swam; the curved backs of the workingmen who drank there shifted like whales in the swell. I looked at John and I so badly wanted to tell him everything right then: that I was in love; that my heart was breaking; that I knew I was ruining my work but didn’t know how to stop.

  “Hick, I’d hate like hell to see you get hurt.”

  I swallowed it all down with the last of my drink. “You know me. I always land on my feet.” I ordered another.

  For a while we sat in silence. In my stupor, I reminisced about the day the previous year when John and I, along with every other reporter in the solar system, had stalked the countryside around the Lindbergh estate when that baby went missing. We had tromped through muddy fields and old barns, looking for what we were afraid to find: a shallow grave or, if a miracle was in order, some sign of life. Near the Princeton highway, we had found an abandoned house hidden from the road, and I got a haunted feeling when I saw muddy tracks that looked fresh. Armed with a hockey stick from John’s trunk, we had walked through the rooms in the dark, afraid out of our minds. But we found nothing. Two months later, when we’d long been back in the city, a truck driver found the baby’s remains across the street from that very house. We had followed the tracks in the wrong direction. The AP man in Trenton caught the story and got a Pulitzer for his trouble.

  Was that what I was doing now? Following the tracks in the wrong direction?

  John slid his glass in a circle on the tabletop. “I’ll tell you something I’ve learned, Hick, for what it’s worth. Maybe it’ll make you feel better, in a strange way. In the end, we all pay the price to get what we get. Not even to get what we want,” he said wearily. “Just what we get.”

  The weeks passed and I filed my columns on Nora, describing her activities without a single quote from her and hoping no one would notice. I took care to get in before Bill in the mornings and then make myself scarce during the parts of the day when he tended to roam the newsroom. John promised to tell him I was out pounding the pavement. I felt like I was waiting for the blade of the guillotine to come down on my neck. And the only thing worse than fearing Bill’s wrath was not knowing what was happening over at Sixty-Fifth Street. It was driving me batty, but I didn’t dare write or call. I had to wait to hear from Nora first.

  One early February afternoon, I topped off my flask from the bottle in my desk drawer and hustled over to the Paramount in Times Square to see a matinee of Grand Hotel. If opera was my first
love, then film was her wayward younger sister—more sloppily dressed but with jokes that were dirtier and funnier. A few dozen people were scattered across the rows of burgundy velvet seats. I took one near the back, off the center aisle, just as the curtains opened and the projector clattered to life like a wheel on a rutted road. I tried to let the story carry me away from my problems. Nora and I had seen the film together back in November and loved it—all the intertwining stories, all the big stars. Something about it reminded me of reporting. As the man in the lobby says in the beginning, “People come; people go. Nothing ever happens.” That was it, exactly, all these years of my career. I had written thousands of stories, but I could never stick around long enough to find out how they ended.

  As the film unfolded, I delighted in the way John Barrymore and Joan Crawford circled each other. She was beautiful in the way a statue was beautiful—even her eyebrows seemed like lines etched in stone—but it was delicious to watch her brazen flirtation, how she could say just the right thing to keep Barrymore’s character coming back to her at the balcony, to ask her whether she had a gentleman, to ask whether she, a stenographer, might consider “taking dictation” from him one day. The line was so ribald you had to laugh, and yet I felt the thrum of recognition in it because I could see he longed for her like a thirsty man in the desert. And that was like me and Nora. Two starlets whose screen tests might break the camera, who shrugged at leading men and instead made eyes at each other across the set. Soon I might know just what sort of price we’d pay for going off script.

  A couple weeks later, I came home to a letter.

  Feb 12

  Dear Hick,

  Please meet me Wednesday at 2 on the corner of 65th and First.

  Nora

  I stared at the single sentence, dashed off in a hurry without so much as a darling. Was I supposed to read between the lines? Was I being invited solely as a reporter, once more, to cover a story? I wondered whether Louis Howe would be there too, or the president himself.

  I wore my heavy wool coat and took my steno pad with me. The wind off the river was cold and the sun reflected off the gray water. To the south, power plants and slaughterhouses churned soot into the sky, but I faced north, toward upward mobility. The corner on which she wanted to meet was just a residential block, with dormant gardens in front of row houses and an iron bench on the ice-crusted strip of grass near the street. I stood waiting in confusion in the cold for a few minutes until I finally saw her coming around the corner, just Nora alone.

  “Hick,” she said, and squeezed my hand with her leather glove.

  The tenderness I felt for her washed over me. I had nearly forgotten it, nearly drunk it away over the six weeks of worry since Christmas.

  “Nora, I have been so empty without you,” I said. She wasn’t angry with me; she wasn’t going to deny what we had. Relief overwhelmed me.

  She nodded. “I even miss your dreadful handwriting,” she said. I laughed and felt more at ease. “But I wanted to settle things.”

  My chest was tight. “And have you?”

  “I asked Louis to reassign Marcus to the boys at school. He is obviously vigilant.”

  I closed my eyes. “Is he ever.”

  “I do worry about them. It’s not as if I want Marcus to be punished. He didn’t intend to … do what he did. The boys will be in good hands with him.”

  “And what did Louis say?”

  “‘Fine, Mrs. R.’ He barely reacted. I don’t think he knows anything.”

  I shivered. “Oh, it’s so awful.”

  “We have had a terrible shock. I won’t say we are free from worry, but perhaps the worst is over?”

  I tried to let that sink in. Nora was ever the optimist, and I wanted to breathe easy too, but something sinister had been unleashed that night and it flared again in my mind when I recalled the disgust on Marcus’s face. It was hard to shake.

  “Is there a reason we are standing on this corner?”

  Nora looked at her watch and pointed to a Juliette balcony at the nearest row house. After a moment, someone opened the French doors and the drapes inside curled in the breeze. I heard the trill of a piano and then the familiar voice of a tenor, singing the role from Aida.

  I looked at Nora.

  “He rehearses at the same time each day,” she whispered. “Sometimes I come to hear it.”

  “Tu sei regina,” he sang. “Tu di mia vita sei lo splendor.” It meant something like “Queen that reigns over me, you are the splendor of my life.”

  We stood side by side and faced the window, and the backs of our hands hung an inch apart. The biggest threat to both of us in all of New York City was not a sniper or a runaway bus but just the thing that hovered in that inch of space—the longing to close it. The longing to forget that we never could.

  A few hours later, I walked into the newsroom and headed straight to the first aid kit. My heart was as frayed as an old hanky, and I was ready for a drink. Over the last few weeks, I had managed to stay pickled morning, noon, and night, and today was going to be no exception. But before I got to the bottle, Bill rocketed out of his office.

  “Where is Mrs. Roosevelt?” he shouted. About a dozen heads turned my way. He was all coiled up, his eyes wild.

  “I don’t know,” I said, startled. “Home at the town house, I think. Why?”

  “Get the hell up there quick. Some crackpot in Miami just tried to shoot her husband.”

  Chapter Eight

  February 15, 1933

  I buttoned my coat as I ran across the lobby and out onto Madison. It had started to snow, and several taxis sailed by without slowing down. Finally, one pulled over and I barked the address.

  The crackpot “tried” to shoot FDR, Bill had said. What did that mean? Had he succeeded? My mind scrambled to understand it. In a crowd, the president-elect was a sitting duck in his open car, since he couldn’t run from the scene or quietly slip away through a crowd. He traveled with Secret Service men and bodyguards, but they couldn’t cover every angle. Whatever had happened, I was at that moment one of the only people in the country who knew about it.

  I thought of the millions of dollars and thousands of hours that had gone into raising this man up to the highest office in the land; I thought of all the hopes that rested on his shoulders. The taxi jerked through an intersection, and I braced myself against the seat with my hand. The entire American democratic experiment was in peril if that assassin were a good shot. Tomorrow’s articles could incite panic. Was FDR lying dead in some hospital bed? And was Nora in danger?

  Traffic crawled and the chorus of horns was like a church organ at a funeral. When the driver pulled up in front of the town house, I threw my money into the front seat and jumped out, racing up the wide stone steps. A servant moved the curtain aside and peered out before I had the chance to ring the bell. She opened the door and ushered me inside.

  “Good evening, Miss Hickok,” she said. Her eyes were puffy from crying.

  “Have they told you not to let anyone in?”

  She nodded.

  “Good girl.”

  “No one but you or Tommy, but she is upstate at a party meeting. We haven’t heard anything about Mr. Roosevelt.” She closed the door and took my coat.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said, though I wasn’t in the least convinced of it.

  The parlor was empty, so I went upstairs and into a room I had never entered: the president-elect’s bedroom. Nora sat on the foot of his bed clutching a handkerchief, though her eyes were dry. Her back was very straight and she looked pale. Behind her on the wall were dozens of framed pictures of family and friends, houses, horses, dogs, boats—the retinue of a wealthy, powerful man.

  “Hick, thank God,” she said. “What have they heard at the AP?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing more than you know already, sounds like. Someone tried to shoot him.”

  “We don’t know if he was hit. Louis has been trying to get through.”

  On t
he other side of the large room, Louis stood by a small oak table, jiggling the receiver with a cigarette between his fingers. “Operator?” he shouted a few times. “I need Miami. Hello?” He kicked the wall. “Damnit.”

  “Louis, please,” Nora said. I could see she was making a mighty effort to keep her composure.

  He shook his head with the handset pressed to his ear. “I knew I should have gone on that trip with him.” He slammed down the telephone and then lifted it to try again. “Operator!”

  “But it was a pleasure trip.” Nora looked at me, bewildered. “He was supposed to be on Vincent Astor’s yacht for his birthday. I don’t understand why he was even giving a speech.” Her eyes shot to Louis. “Has anyone called the boys? Or Anna? We can’t let them hear it on the radio.”

  I thought of Anna’s beau, the reporter from Chicago. “If she’s with Mr. Boettiger, she may know already. But first things first, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said, addressing her with care in Louis’s presence. “Let’s confirm that he’s all right.” I stepped carefully toward the telephone. “May I try?”

  He nodded, but, as soon as he set the telephone down, it rang. He snatched it up.

  “Hello?” Louis closed his eyes and the tension went out of his narrow shoulders. “Son of a bitch.” He looked at Nora. “It’s him. He’s fine. He didn’t even get hit.”

  Nora emitted a wail of relief that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She leaped over the bed and grabbed the handset from Louis. I could hear her husband shouting—the connection was bad— but laughing too, and I let out the breath I’d been holding for what felt like an hour. Suddenly, I was exhausted. On behalf of the United States of America, I was relieved he was all right. But watching her talk to him forced me to remember his primacy in her life, and it made me sorry for myself. I wondered whether his mistress Missy LeHand was down in Miami with him, listening while he talked with his wife. I was no better than Missy was; both of us were playing bit parts in this tale.