Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  Camelot

  Caryl Rivers

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Caryl Rivers

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com.

  First Diversion Books edition June 2013.

  ISBN: 978-1-626810-03-7

  To Steve, Connie and Lauren,

  and to Alyssa, Ogie, Zuey and Azalea,

  with all my love.

  And to the memory of Alan, the light of my life.

  The life and times of John F. Kennedy have been chronicled by a number of historians and journalists, whose work has been very helpful in the writing of this book. They include Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys; Nigel Hamilton, J.F.K.: Reckless Youth; Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Kennedys: An American Drama; Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy; and Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days. For the events of November 22, I relied on the account of William Manchester in The Death of a President. For many of the actual events described, the March on Washington, JFK and Martin Luther King press conferences, the visit of the astronauts to the White House and other events, I relied on my own firsthand observations and notes.

  He opened one of the glass doors that led from his office to the garden. It was dusk, the hour, in Washington, when the starlings began their raspy chirp from the ledges of government buildings, when the deepening twilight unearthed the ghosts of the city’s past. By day the buildings and monuments belonged to the civil servants and the busloads of tourists, but in the moments that formed the edge between daylight and dark, the past slid from its moorings for a brief instant. If he listened carefully, he could hear the footsteps of Cordell Hull clacking down the Gothic corridors of the Old Lady of Pennsylvania Avenue, the ugly building next door that had once housed all of State, War and Navy. He could hear the steady pacing of Abraham Lincoln on the polished floors of this very house, as Lincoln grieved for his son and tried to imagine a way to keep his bloodied nation from tearing apart. For an instant, he could see Jefferson walking up the avenue (which was only a dusty thoroughfare in a city not yet built when he first came to this house). Jefferson was saying, again, that slavery would ring like a firebell in the night through the years to come.

  By day, Washington was a dull town, where the wheels of bureaucracy ground steadily, monotonously on. At night, silence and muggers took over. Only at dusk, for a few minutes, the ghosts of history danced, and it was a magic place. Or perhaps that had just been in the overheated imagination of a sickly boy who read romantic stories and found the past a far better place to be.

  He stepped out onto the grass and looked to his right, half-expecting the shadow — like the city’s ghosts — to be there, a specter in his peripheral vision, sliding away so quickly he did not really know if he saw it at all. For many years, nearly as long as he could remember, it had been there, dark, silent and certain. He had grown used to death being there. It had made him not mordant but casual. He often asked his friends what they thought was the best way to die, prodded them, when they were skittish, to continue. Death was not a chill companion, its touch was damp and warm.

  He had felt it when he was swimming in the dark waters of the Pacific, after they shot his boat out from under him. When he was given the last rites of the Catholic Church after a back operation, the shadow was all around him, warm, deep and dark, the world a small point of light in the distance. He came back to the light, and to the world. His father thought the passage had made him invulnerable. His father had said to his friend, when the son was walking to the ocean’s edge, “God, Dave, did you see the legs on him! He’s got the legs of a fighter or a swimming champion. I know nothing can hurt him now, because I’ve stood by his deathbed three times, and each time I said good-bye to him, and each time he came back even stronger.”

  He looked to his left. The shadow was not there. He was Irish enough to know that it would never move too far away, but he was also Irish enough to believe in luck. There was no moment he could name when he knew, it did not happen suddenly. But slowly, surely, he was beginning to believe it could belong to him.

  He took several steps out into the garden and looked around. The future shimmered in the deep blue-pink haze, the shade of a lilac, that hung lightly over the city. It was not the place he had imagined would hold his destiny. When had his father’s dream become his own, exactly! No matter. Now, it was. He had been a boy longer than most men, well into his adult life, son of a father who at times seemed to grow so large he blotted out the sky. Now it was the son who cast the longer shadow. Inexplicably — it seemed to him at times a miracle — he had become one of the heroes in the books he had read as a thin, tired schoolboy with dark circles under his eyes. He was tall and strong and golden, and he would do battle with giants. It was nineteen hundred and sixty-three, and he was, at last, lucky.

  His name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  Her heels began to sink in the newly warm, moist earth of the Rose Garden. She had worn her prettiest, highest heels; a mistake. They were like lance points against the earth. She felt herself sinking, as if into quicksand. They would have to get a crane to pull her out, so deeply embedded were those stiletto heels. It would be mortifying. She would see it on national television — the crane was huge, and it was lifting her up, up, up, high into the air and out across Pennsylvania Avenue, and people were pointing and laughing.

  She saw a familiar face. “Look, it’s Sandor Vanocur,” she whispered to the young man standing beside her.

  “He’s around a lot,” Jay Broderick said. He was standing with his hand on his hip, his Nikon draped casually around his neck, as if it were nothing at all, being at the White House, waiting for President Kennedy to emerge. She envied his nonchalance. Each time she stole a sideways glance at the Secret Service men, with their hard, flat faces and watchful eyes, the muscles in her stomach quivered. It would not have surprised her in the least if one of them came over to her, took her firmly by the arm and led her away, saying, “We know you. You are Mary Elizabeth Springer, you are only the treasurer of the Class of 1956 at Belvedere High School, and you have no right to be here. Come with us.”

  And they would take her away, to some dark, secret chamber in the bowels of the White House, where J. Edgar Hoover would beat her with a rubber hose. President Kennedy would walk by and say, “Edgar, aren’t you being a little rough?” and J. Edgar would reply, “You never read I Was a Communist for the FBI! They are everywhere. Even in Belvedere High School.” The president would nod sadly and say to her, “Sorry, kid, I tried.”

  She shifted her weight, pulled one of her heels from the earth. Her apprehension turned to dismay. The dirt clung to the suede as if it had been coated with glue. Surely they were ruined, and they were brand new and cost her fourteen dollars. Thrift was bred into her bones; for an instant, she even forgot to be terrified.

  Another face swam into view. It was pale and creased, but the eyes seemed young and alert. The man wore a striped dress shirt with what seemed to be an unusually high collar, which gave him an aspect that was distinctly not contemporary. He could, she thought, have been a gentleman from the nineteenth century.

  “Eddie Folliard from The Washington Post,” Jay told her, and she said, “Oh,” letting her breath out a little. She had seen his byline often in the crisp, bold Bodoni type of the Post. Names in those bylines seemed like the names of gods. Occasionally, she would try to imagine her name in that Bodoni type,
but she felt both guilty and a little apprehensive as she did it. Such hubris might bring down punishment from His Terrible Swift Sword. When she was a child, she’d had nightmares about that sword after the Reverend Mr. Swiggins’s Sunday sermons. It was a metaphor of which he was fond. The sword was huge and sharp and glittered in the air, and it cut down sinners in a single bloody stroke. After such dreams, she straightened her room and did not lie for a week.

  She turned and saw, standing next to her, a youngish man with a bemused look on his face. He was so familiar that at first she wondered if someone else from Belvedere could possibly be there. But then she realized it was David Brinkley, wearing the same expression he wore on The Huntley-Brinkley Report each evening, one that said the world was certainly an odd and interesting place. That was how it was with television people. They weren’t like movie stars, remote and glorious. You saw them so often in your living room that it was easy to mistake them for the grocer or the man who sold you shoes.

  “Hurry up and wait, it’s always like this around here,” Jay complained. He seemed so much older and sophisticated here — in a way that he did not back at the paper — that she stepped closer to him, to move into the circle of his nonchalance.

  “Hi, Jay, how’s it hanging?” A reed-thin man, whom she judged to be in his early thirties, moved next to Jay.

  “Jeez, I could use a sale. What’s AP buying these days? I got zilch the last stuff I sent.”

  “The new guy likes tits. But respectable, no nipples. No bodies, unless it’s mob guys or coloreds.”

  “I got one. Mob guy, twenty-seven bullet holes, had a sex change, grew up in Harlem.”

  “Bullet holes in the tits?”

  “Nope. Got her in the crotch.”

  “Crop it at the waist and you’re golden,” the thin man said and walked away. Mary fairly hissed at Jay: “We’re in the Rose Garden at the White House!”

  Jay chuckled. “Photographers would crap on the Taj Mahal. We’re not civilized.”

  Just then the door to the Oval Office opened and out walked John Kennedy — followed, a few steps behind, by John Glenn and Alan Shepard. Her jaw dropped, unattractively. She hauled it up again. Her first time at the White House and she got the president and two astronauts. What a stroke of luck.

  The members of the press corps surged forward and crowded around. Kennedy’s lips parted in the beginning of a mischievous grin. He liked surprises.

  “A couple of servicemen dropped by. They’re not Navy, but we fed them anyway,” he said.

  “What did you give them?” asked Reuters. Reuters, for some reason, had a thing for menus.

  “C rations on the Eisenhower china,” Kennedy said. “Military all the way.”

  The two astronauts grinned, and the reporters pounced; it was more than they had expected. The announced guests were a bunch of kids from Iowa who were giving the president a 4-H award, and a diplomat from Cameroon. The president stood like a proud papa displaying precocious children as the astronauts fielded questions.

  Mary moved, carefully, so as not to attract attention, to the edge of the throng and found a spot where, if she wanted to, she could have reached out and touched the president. As she did so, an errant shaft of sunlight caught the president’s head, glinting from his brownish auburn hair. All Mary could think of was the haloed Christ praying in a beam of light in the garden of Gethsemane — a favorite piece of art of the Reverend Mr. Swiggins. She stood absolutely still, looking at him. He was, she realized, larger than his pictures made him seem, full in the shoulders and chest, the lines in his thickening neck quite visible, but his face tanned and young. He seemed so remarkable, standing in the beam of sunlight, that all she could do was stare. He must have somehow felt the intensity of her gaze because he turned his head to look at her, and for a moment those bright blue eyes looked directly into hers. Startled, she looked away. But then, since the other reporters seemed busy with the astronauts, she spoke. Afterwards she wondered how on earth she had ever gotten the nerve.

  “Mr. President, can we really beat the Russians to the moon?”

  He looked at her again, those blue eyes seeming to appraise her, and suddenly she was terrified once more, thinking that he must be about to say “What are you doing here? Somebody remove this person, it’s all a mistake, her being here.”

  But he didn’t. She looked so absurdly young, and green, that he smiled and said, “Yes, it’s the new ocean, and these are the men who will sail it.”

  She scribbled furiously in her notepad, making sure to get every word just exactly right, and UPI stepped in front of her and asked a technical question about the Russian lead in space. Then, very quickly it seemed, the president said he had to get the astronauts back home before taps, and they were gone, and the shaft of sunlight fell on the steps where they had been.

  “We’d better get back,” Jay said. “I got something at four.”

  With the rest of the reporters, they walked back through the corridor that led to the large foyer to which the small press cubbyholes were connected. She tried to walk as nonchalantly as the other reporters, not gaping at the pictures on the walls. She and Jay strolled out the door and down the driveway past the guard booth, out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where Jay had found an illegal parking spot a block away. He ripped the ticket off the windshield and tossed it into the backseat of his battered 1955 Chevy. Mary climbed in and was able to maintain the aura of cool detachment until the Chevy hit 15th Street. Then she began to bounce up and down in the seat.

  “He talked to me! Me! The President of the United States talked to me! Oh, my God!”

  Jay looked at her and laughed. “See. I told you that nagging Charlie for a White House pass was a good idea.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t easy. I had to cut my thumb and let the blood drop on his desk while I swore I’d only go there on my days off or before working hours.”

  “I got off easy. I promised him my firstborn.”

  “Oh, Jay, it was so exciting. The astronauts! I almost wet my pants when the three of them came through the door. Is it always this exciting?”

  He shook his head. “Mostly it’s boring. You just sit around the press room waiting for a photo op and you get two minutes with the prez and some ambassador from Lower Slobovia and you sit some more and you get a lid and that’s it, no more news.”

  “Jay, I’ve got an exclusive quote. I don’t think anyone else was listening.” She told him what Kennedy had said.

  “With my pictures, that’s a center spread for sure.”

  “President Kennedy told the Belvedere Blade —”

  He interrupted her, “Told Mary Springer and Jay Broderick from the Belvedere Blade.”

  “Oh yeah, right. I took a lot of notes, I can do color about how the astronauts looked, and the Rose Garden. And the literate conversation about tits and coloreds.”

  He laughed again. “That you’d better leave out.”

  She smiled and thought, all of a sudden, about Mary Jane Jelke, the most stuck-up girl in Belvedere High, sipping her coffee, the bile rising in her throat when she read about Mary Springer chatting with the president. The nasty taste would climb all the way up her throat to her (once perfect, now fatty) cheeks and she would choke on it. Maybe she would gasp and die, her dirty bleached blond hair spreading out across the words By Maty Springer. Vengeance was indeed a dish best served cold.

  She liked the taste of it. She smiled. Why settle for a tiny bite? She thought about the three girls she had envied most in high school.

  Barbara Brownlee. She was the majorette for the Belvedere High School band, and she strutted down Main Street wearing skintight white short-shorts and a halter top with spangles, bewitching the crowd by wiggling her cute little butt at them while she threw her baton high into the air. She usually caught it. Once she missed, in the Fourth of July parade, and knocked one of the Worthy Matrons of the Eastern Star who was marching just ahead of the band momentarily sensele
ss. The matron lay sprawled in the street, with her white parade dress hiked up over her rolled-up stockings and bulging thighs. Barbara didn’t usually miss. But that day, the town fathers were relieved that they had nixed the flame batons that Barbara liked to use. The Worthy Matron might have been immolated right there on Main Street, perhaps upsetting the children as they munched on their hot dogs.

  Mary practiced to be Barbara, secretly, in her bedroom, with the baton she had bought from Kresge’s, wearing her underpants and a bra, trying to wiggle her ass the way Barbara did. She smashed two mirrors and a lamp before she realized that her hand-eye coordination left something to be desired. She tried wiggling her behind — which was cute and curvy — but it never seemed to come out right. She looked as if she were having a seizure, which, she concluded, was not very bewitching. If she led the parade, she’d wipe out a whole battalion of Worthy Matrons and get carried off by the paramedics to boot.

  Mary fane Jelke, she of the pretty cheeks. She was, by Belvedere standards, rich, since her father owned several convenience stores. Mary Jane had her own convertible and an air of insolent disdain that comes from small-town money and the best clothes in school — in her case real angora sweaters, fourteen-karat gold pins to wear on her collars and a real alligator bag and shoes. Mary bought an angora sweater and turned out to be allergic to bunnies, bunny fur being the main ingredient of angora, and broke out in huge red hives. When she tried insolent disdain, the school nurse stopped her and asked if she were feeling unwell.

  Becky Bellingrath. She was a tall, thin girl with smoky blond hair who described herself as a beatnik. She always carried a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and she wore black turtlenecks and long black skirts and a black beret. She said she planned to die before she was thirty, and she wrote poems about sex and death, which she read aloud in English class, much to the befuddlement of Mr. Wattles, who was hard of hearing anyway. She would stand up and recite, in a deep, throaty voice: