Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  The notes were going to take a long time. She decided not to go home for dinner but to work straight through. She had been at it for hours when something landed on her desk.

  “What do you think?” Jay asked.

  It was a print of the photograph he had taken earlier of the old woman in the wheelchair. The face on the glossy paper seemed so real she expected to feel the ripples when she ran her finger across it.

  “Oh that’s good, Jay. Really good.”

  “It would be hard to take a bad picture of her.”

  “How can she be as happy as she seems? She’s old and she’s poor and she can’t get out of that damned wheelchair.”

  “She’s got her family.”

  “Yeah, but her son picks up garbage. Nothing’s going to change for them. They’re going to be right there at the bottom, picking up other people’s shit.”

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the earth. Or was it the meek who inherit the earth? I forget which batch of losers gets it.”

  “You are a cynic.”

  “Yeah, from way back. Hey, if we’re going to get philosophical, we might as well be drinking. Let’s see what rotgut Jules is pouring tonight.”

  They walked across the street to the Sahara Room, where they slid into a booth and Jay ordered two Scotch-and-waters.

  “We won’t be able to get to the White House tomorrow, ‘cause we have to go back to that slum. Jesus, that place is depressing.”

  “I kept half-expecting those people to grow fangs and foam at the mouth. Why did it surprise me that they’re people, just like us?”

  He took a swig of his drink. “People are scared of things they don’t get close to. I grew up with colored kids in D.C. You didn’t say nigger in my neighborhood, unless you said it real quiet. The people who were really uptight were the ones in Silver Spring and Bethesda. They thought people were getting mugged in front of the Library of Congress every day. People don’t want to know too much. They want high walls with barbed wire on the top.”

  “Not me. I want to know it all.”

  “You’re really big on that, aren’t you? I never saw anybody who wanted to learn the way you do. Know what? You’re horny for knowledge.”

  She laughed. “I guess I am, because I started so far back. When I first started, on the women’s page, I was scared to talk to you guys. I was sure I’d say something stupid.”

  “I thought you were stuck up.”

  “No, terrified. I didn’t go to college or anything. I was treasurer of the Class of ‘fifty-six, Belvedere High School, that was it. All I’d ever done. I still think some Secret Service man is going to drag me out of the White House because I’m not a real reporter, just the treasurer of the Class of ‘fifty-six.”

  “They’d get me too. Sergeant at arms, St. Anthony’s High, Class of ‘fifty-four. I only got elected because nobody could stand Barney Gretz because he had awful B.O. I was the only other candidate.”

  “But you were in the Army.”

  “Quartermaster Corps. We ordered toilet paper for Second Army.”

  “To me, even that sounds impressive. All I ever did was throw diapers in water and borax.”

  He smiled. “From borax to JFK is quite a jump.”

  “He really is a sexy man, isn’t he? After Eisenhower, my God. I wonder if those stories about his sex life are true.”

  “He’d be dead if they were all true.”

  “But Catholics aren’t supposed to do that stuff, are they?”

  “No. That’s what makes it fun.”

  “You don’t hear those kinds of stories about Nixon.”

  “Right,” he said. “That’s because Nixon never takes his suit off. He takes baths in his suit. He fucks in his suit.”

  She laughed, delightedly. “Oh, Dick, couldn’t we do it just this once without out clothes on!”

  “Shut up, Pat. Keep your gloves on and don’t drool on my tie.”

  “Take your shoes off, Dick. It hurts when you kick me in the shin when you have your, your — you know.”

  “Orgasm, Pat. The word’s orgasm. I can’t have one without my shoes on. I’m a Republican.”

  They both giggled, and she sat back in the booth as he ordered two more Scotches. The liquid and his presence across the table from her were creating a warm glow that seemed to fill the room.

  “Why is JFK so sexy?” he asked her. “Every woman I know would jump in the sack with him in a minute.”

  “It’s the eyes. They seem to look right through you. And power, of course. They say that’s an aphrodisiac.”

  “There goes the fucking ball game. That’s something I’ll never have.”

  “Not true,” she told him. “There are all kinds of power. You — shape things. Like the photo essay you did on the dump.” He looked at her blankly.

  “I’d been by it a million times, and all I ever saw was a pile of trash. But in your pictures it was so sad — all those lonely and discarded things. They seemed — alive. See the power that gives you?”

  He shook his head.

  “You created that dump. It’s your image that will stay in people’s heads. Not what they saw, but what you made them see. You have the power to change things.”

  “I never exactly thought about it as power.”

  “But it is. You know, I used to think life just happened. Then one night I was covering the board of education, and they were going to screw up getting federal money for a program for handicapped kids because the paperwork wasn’t done. I put the screwup in the lead, and it got to be a big deal, and the program got funded.”

  “Good for you.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m not trying to say how great I was. For the first time I realized that things are what somebody says they are. And that night, I was that somebody. There are two kinds of people in the world, those that tell and those that get told.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  “But I never knew that. I was always one of the people that got told. I think women are, a lot.” She laughed, realizing that she was talking too much, made expansive by the liquor — they were on their third Scotch —and his attention. It was new to her, having someone listen. “Do I sound like I’m making a speech? But there were so many things I was supposed to think, and be, and I never asked, Who made the rules? And why? And when you start to ask, oh, that’s when it gets scary!”

  He nodded. “Like when you say, ‘That thin guy, in the dress and the beanie, he’s infallible? You got to be shitting me. And if he isn’t, who is?’”

  “It changes everything, once you start to ask, because then you have to make your own rules. I don’t want to be one of the people who gets told anymore.”

  He grinned, a crooked grin that she found utterly charming. “You certainly aren’t.”

  “Do I sound like a pompous ass? It sounds brave, but I’m scared a lot of the time. Who am I? What the hell do I know? Besides, people don’t like you if you go around saying the emperor has no clothes.”

  “I like you,” he said.

  “Even if I am a little crazy?”

  “You’re not boring.”

  They sat in silence for a minute, enjoying the buzz of the drink and the intimacy. Then suddenly, Jay said, “Oh shit!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The puppy. I was supposed to print the pictures of the fucking Puppy of the Week.”

  “Do you have to do it tonight?”

  “I promised Milt I’d leave it for him before I left. I swear, I may go berserk one day and strangle every fucking puppy from here to Hyattsville.”

  They finished their drinks and walked out into the street. The lights were on in the Blade building and they could hear the presses humming in the bowels of the building. The night lights from the empty stores dropped pools of light onto the sidewalk, and the air was cool against their faces. They walked across the street to the parking lot. Jay stopped,
suddenly, and looked up at the sky. He was tall and lanky, ungainly almost, and an unruly piece of light brown hair fell across his forehead.

  “A ring around the moon,” he said. “I think it’s going to rain tomorrow.”

  “I wonder if it’s an old wives’ tale, about the rain?”

  “No, I believe all those old turkeys. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. It’s better than the weathermen with their fucking charts.” He started to walk, and then he stopped again, inhaling a gulp of the night. Then he threw back his head and laughed, a clear, warm sound that split the night around him. Mary felt her lips stretching out, the laughter bubbling up. The night air and the liquor made his elation contagious.

  “Oh shit, I’m drunk,” he said, and she thought that was hilarious. She had an inspiration. “Last one to the car is a rotten egg!”

  He started off at a zigzag run across the lot. She ran after him, awkward in her high-heeled shoes. He was giggling drunkenly, and she passed him three feet from the car and slammed into it.

  “You’re a rotten egg,” she gasped, and then collapsed, laughing, against the fender.

  “Oh shit,” he said again. He started to laugh uncontrollably and sat down on the pavement. Their laughter rolled and ebbed and burst out again. Mary’s ribs ached so that she thought they might crack. When it was finally spent, they grinned at each other, stupidly. “God, we ought to know better than to slurp down the good stuff after a steady diet of Jules’s beer,” he said. “Too rich for the blood.” He got up, slowly. “Fuck the puppy. If Milt screams, fuck Milt.”

  “Fuck the world,” she said.

  “That’s right. Fuck the world!” He smiled again, the crooked smile that was so irresistible tonight.

  She was still grinning as she went into the Blade building to get her car keys. When she came out, his car was gone. She stood for a minute, looking up at the luminous circle around the moon. The night was charged with a sense of the future, as magical and dazzling as the ring in the sky. The intensity of yearning was such that she did not know if it was pleasure or pain. She only knew she thought she would die if it went away. She stood staring at the sky for a long time, and then walked over to her car, got in it and drove away.

  He leaned back in the chair at his desk and smiled. It had been one of his better performances: Cuba, the space program, disarmament — only one question, thank God, about race — and a little joke at a question by Mae Craig that brought the expected laugh. He could always get a laugh, not from scripted jokes but from a remark that came, often, from his own oblique angle of vision.

  He understood irony in a way his father never had, used it as a weapon, which was very un-Irish of him. But then, he was American in a way that his father never was, in the sense that there was nothing in him of the old, dark hates and fears, the burning need to belong. Boston, with its narrow streets and its narrow minds, had never really been his home. His father, bred in those streets, had found many doors closed to him. He simply put his head down and charged, but even when he succeeded past his wildest dreams, some of those doors did not open. When the Cohasset Country Club refused him entrance, he said, “Those bigoted sons of bitches barred me because I was Irish Catholic and the son of a barkeep.” He moved his family out of Boston, to places like New York and Palm Beach, and his second son grew up surrounded by contradictions.

  His mother said, “Be careful. Listen to the priests, accept the limits,” but his father’s whole life sent the message that nothing, even religion, must interfere with ambition. Family was a sacred word, and yet he grew up lonely, his father devoted to business and his older son, his mother to the problems of the rest of her brood. War was supposed to be glorious, but he found it veered from tedium to tragedy. He dreamed of heroes, but he became one by accident. He let the saga of his PT boat be used to get him elected, but he never thought himself a hero. He had been in love, passionately, several times, but he had seen his parents’ marriage, and happily ever after seemed a sham. He had the ability to charm, but he had worked at it; a sickly child and a second son had to earn attention. Under the charm was the certainty that things were not always what they seemed and that life was not fair. After all, his brother had been golden and kissed by the gods, but death took him in an instant. His sister Kathleen, to whom he had been especially close — admiring her spirit, her independence — had seemed destined to be the most glamorous of them all. He heard of her death in a plane crash while he was listening, with a friend, to the song “How Are Things in Glocca Mona!” and he turned his head away from his friend and wept, suddenly the only one left of the three siblings some people called “the golden trio.” Once, asked what he wanted, his father had blurted out, “Everything.” The son knew, at an early age, that everything was not possible.

  Perhaps it was this understanding that gave him a sense of himself that his father, even at the height of his power, never had. Most people who met him marveled at it. Standing next to him, Martin Luther King envied him that presence, and of course the good looks. King, for all his magnetism, worried about his looks, his rough skin. He would have been astounded to know that the president sometimes looked in the mirror and, seeing how the steroids he took for his Addison’s disease puffed out his face, was taken aback. “I don’t recognize it, ” he said to friends. “It’s not my face at all.”

  Lyndon Johnson was puzzled by him, tried to figure out how “this young whippersnapper, malaria ridden and yellah, sickly sickly, who never said a word of importance in the Senate and never did a thing,” had moved so far in front of him. He concluded, much later, that people must have seen a dignity in fohn Kennedy that they liked; otherwise his ascendancy made no sense at all.

  The irony, and the sense of being able to stand aside and to see himself and others at a distance, came partly from a close acquaintance with pain. To the world he presented the image of health and vigor, but like so much about him, this was invented with difficulty. In his childhood, he often escaped into that world of reading and wondering with which his family had little patience. He sometimes thought he was an alien, from some distant planet, dropped by accident into the bosom of this robust, combative band of earthlings. He learned to play and fight and run like the others, and when he could not, he learned to handle the pain with a joke, to hide his deepest fears with a quip. Some called it detachment, but only a few who knew him best understood it was his way of keeping the pain at bay. Once, hospitalized with what was thought to be leukemia, he wrote to a friend, “They are mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat, drink and make love, as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral.”

  He remembered that Ernest Hemingway had once written that life breaks people, and that some of them are stronger in the broken places, once they have healed. Perhaps it was so with him. He was a rich man’s son, but that had not protected him from pain and death. Nobody in this life was protected.

  Still, he was the President of the United States, and he had beaten Big Steel and had stared down Khrushchev, and there was much of the nation he had bent to his will. He trusted his own intellect and his instincts, but he knew enough not to think that the wind would always blow his way, that he would always be the master. Shakespeare said it best, he thought, in the exchange between Glendower and Hotspur in Henry IV:

  Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

  Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;

  But will they come when you do call for them?

  The truck was parked in front of the house: GUTWALD CLEANING AND DRYING: WHEN APPEARANCE COUNTS. Mary pulled her car behind it, frowning. His timing had always been terrible.

  She got out of the car, and the door of the house opened and a familiar shape was framed in the lighted doorway. She would know that shape anyplace. In a world of shadows she would recognize his way of moving, shoulders down as if he were walking against the wind. She walked towards him across the lawn.

>   “Hi, Harry,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said. “I was passing this way, so I dropped off your mother’s coat. Thought it would save you a trip.”

  “Thanks. I was going to pick it up in the morning. It is a help. How are things going?”

  “Good. Really good. I was telling your mother, Mr. Gutwald is planning a new branch in Frederick. He’s talked to me about managing it. If it comes off. It’s not definite, but it looks good.”

  “Harry, that’s great. Just great.”

  “We’re looking for a building. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Frederick. I’ve got a lot of ideas for the place. I’ve learned a lot about the business in five months. A lot.”

  His face was animated. Enthusiasm had always made him seem young and vulnerable. She felt her innards soften. Was it Harry, the liquor, or something else?

  “The coin-op places are starting to cut in on our business. So I told Mr. Gutwald, why not beat them at their own game? Put in some machines for people who want them. That way we don’t lose customers. The clothes never come out of the coin-op looking as good as they do when they’re pressed. But people have to try them. Anything new.”

  “Sounds good. This Frederick thing, how definite is it?”

  “Well, not one hundred percent. But he’s sold on the idea. It was my idea, actually. We ought to be able to find a spot.”

  “Harry, you won’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t go through. I mean, you know how business is. Things don’t always work out.”