The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  The bar seemed more crowded now, undifferentiated waves of sound crashing over him, seas of words building and breaking over faces and bodies and the too-bright lights that hurt the backs of his eyes. Jesus, blind as a welder’s dog and it’s not even seven o’clock. A slim young woman descended the stairs, looking around for her date. It would be good to see Hélène again though. God knows what she’d think of him these days. Didn’t think too highly of him back then, as he remembered it. And Seema of course, he’d always loved to gaze on Seema and admire. And Michael. Michael was his friend.

  Seema Mir had developed a mild aversion to working in the faculty library with its hushed, cough-inducing atmosphere. Instead, non-teaching days would usually find her in one of the Greenwich Village cafés or, if she needed the exercise, the reading room of the Harvard Club on 68th Street. It was true that some of her favourite haunts were public places and not especially quiet, but she preferred their buzz and vague background sense of connectedness to the self-consciously scholarly ambience of the Bobst or the Cooper Union.

  On this particular morning, Tuesday, May 6th, 1980, she had walked the forty blocks uptown to the public reading room of the New York Public Library. There, on one of the vast polished oak tables, she spread the various books and papers from which she was attempting to put together a genealogy for the Hemings family. But by eleven o’clock she was forced to admit that mapping the relationships of plantation slaves in nineteenth-century Virginia could not compete with the prospect of coming face to face again with Michael Lowell.

  There had been no correspondence. At first, it would have been too painful. And later, perhaps, too awkward. She knew he was living in Geneva, that he was still unmarried, that he had risen rapidly in his chosen career, as they had all known he would. But beyond that, nothing. She leaned back in her chair to look up at the rather absurd trompe l’oeil ceiling of clouds and cherubs. Probably he would not have changed much; he was not the type to put on weight or let himself get out of condition. Stephen had once said that Michael had contrived to look middle-aged in his early twenties. For a few more minutes she was able to focus on her work, but her thoughts soon drifted back to the question that had frayed her concentration all morning: would it be asking for trouble to accept Stephen’s invitation and meet Michael? She stared again at the ceiling. The cherubs offered no help.

  Talk about what’s become of us all … of old ideals and old friends …

  Impatient with herself, she began checking the dates for John Wayles, born Lancaster, England, who had been the first of his line to arrive in Virginia, and for his son, also John, who had fathered six children with an ‘Unknown African Woman’. Weren’t they all? She bit lightly on the metal ferrule of the pencil. She had, she realized, thought of Michael with increasing wistfulness over the years; drawn to his undemonstrative maturity. But hadn’t that been the problem? That he had been too mature, too steady? Wasn’t that the very reason she had said ‘no’, as gently as she knew how, when he had proposed to her so very formally in the Botanical Gardens at the end of that long Oxford summer?

  For a few minutes more she focused on the web of solid and dotted pencil lines that linked the names, across and down, ending with the twenty or so Fossetts and Hughes who were the direct descendants of her Unknown African Woman. Had she been a housemaid, or a cook, summoned from the kitchen to her master’s bed? Had she been Ibo, Yoruba, Ashanti? And what sort of relationship had it been that had created all of the lives spread out before her in the New York Public Library two hundred years later? It had been in a library, far smaller than this and smelling of age and mildew, that she had first met Michael Lowell. She put down the pencil and rested her elbows on the desk. What else had she been seeking when she rejected him? And look where opting for more excitement had got her. The previous week she had run into Howard in Bryant Park. It was only the second time they had met since the divorce and ‘unkempt’ had been the rather British word that had come to mind. They had chatted amicably enough, but she had refused his rather forlorn invitation to lunch.

  For the next half hour she copied on to one page all the notes she had on the Unknown African Woman: the daughter a mulatto, the granddaughter three-quarters white, the great granddaughter seven-eighths white, the descendants merging imperceptibly into the white world, probably without ever knowing that their forebears included both the Unknown African Woman and the six-foot-two-inch ‘straight as a gun barrel’ Virginia lawyer Thomas Jefferson.

  It would be fun to see Toby again as well, though they usually got together on his annual visit to Madison Avenue. Tom, too, though he was apparently in the process of relocating to New York anyway. She would take the weekend to think about it. Inching her chair back, sneakers squeaking on the polished floor, she began gathering up her papers, knowing that at the level of the mind where decisions are really made the question was already settled: she would be in Oxford as the leaves on the trees in St Giles were turning yellow and the streetlamps were haloed with the first tinge of frost.

  Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, May 14th, 1980

  Five thousand miles from the New York Public Library, in a sweltering outpatients’ clinic amid the corrugated zinc roofs of Abidjan’s slums, Hélène Hevré helped the boy to perch on the edge of the treatment table. He was a Mossi child of perhaps eight or nine years old, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and a thick swaddling of dusty rags around his right arm. The mother, hardly any bigger than her son, hovered in the doorway, speaking too quickly for Hélène to catch every word.

  Fighting against the tiredness washing through her system like some debilitating internal tide, she began unwrapping the layers of progressively less dusty rags. Bared, the boy’s elbow was swollen, the skin wrinkled, inelastic. The bones had healed well, but whoever had treated him had splinted the break straight out. Tearfully, the mother began reciting in undulating Mooré rhythms all the things that the boy could no longer do with his useless stick of an arm. Nodding her head in sympathy, Hélène laid a gentle hand on the child’s shoulder. The only X-ray machine had been out of commission for over a month.

  Two or three more relatives had ventured in, murmuring support: the boy was useless; could not wield a daba, could not tie a knot, could not pour water or light a lamp, could not hook a cocoa pod. Once the screen had been tugged into place, Hélène eased the boy into a lying position and asked the assistant to fill the sink with water. Speaking in a calm whisper, she explained what she was about to do. It would hurt. But the pain would not last long. And soon he would have his arm back. The boy set his face in a fierce expression and stared upwards at the ceiling fan. More relatives had now appeared in the consulting room. The tallest of them, peering over the top of the screen, was starting up a running commentary. Unwrapping a roll of dry casting, Hélène handed it to the trainee and nodded again towards the sink. The boy was still staring determinedly at the slowly turning blades.

  Steadying herself, she pinned the boy’s upper arm to the table while her right hand slipped underneath the forearm. On the other side of the screen the commentary grew more excited, provoking a rhythmic whispering which might have been prayer. Holding her breath, she began to lift the forearm away from the table, steadily applying the pressure until there was a sharp ‘crack’ and a stifled moan from the boy’s compressed lips. Hélène glanced down. The boy’s eyes were squeezed tight, the jaws locked, the muscles of legs, stomach, buttocks held rigid so that the thin body had lifted slightly from the table. As the forearm reached the upright position the boy let out a long hiss of breath. Behind the screen, the mother had begun a low moaning.

  Nodding to the trainee to hold the boy’s arm in place, Hélène formed wet rolls of plaster into a casting around the now-bent elbow. Finishing off with a clean gauze, she placed the arm across his chest while she fitted the sling. ‘Courageux, courageux,’ she said, handing him a tissue while the trainee pulled the screen aside. The relatives surged forward, all talking at once as Hélène took a bottle of
Fanta from the fridge.

  Ten minutes later, she was sipping iced water on the veranda of her quarters, tucked away along with five or six other bungalows in a corner of the compound. It was the hour of relaxation, the outpatients gone and the worst of the day’s heat over. On the table beside her, an envelope postmarked Oxford had been slit open with a bamboo paper knife. She removed the straw and raised the glass to her lips, draining the last of the iced water. Even before she had begun to read, the green ink had stirred a faint memory.

  We’ve lost touch, the months drifting into years and the years into decades.

  The exhaustion seemed to be washing over her in slow, irresistible waves. Surely this was something more than ordinary fatigue? Or could it be just the accumulated tiredness of years of overwork? Stephen Walsh, by contrast, obviously had leisure to muse over old friends and time passing. And to add a sly, handwritten postscript. I heard back from the others before I’d even located your whereabouts. They’ll all be here, though I have a suspicion Toby’s only coming in the hope that you’ll be there.

  She sank back into the chair. Perhaps she would feel less tired after the rains had freshened the air. All day the skies had been promising a downpour, and now the first warm drops were beginning to spill over on to the dust of the compound. In Haute-Volta, where she had been all the previous week, the real rains had already begun and had quickly turned the loose, laterite roads into swirling red rivers that had slowed their progress to a crawl. The little girl had died just a few minutes before they pulled in to the village, the tiny body wasted, the legs widest at the knee, the skin grey and stretched across stark ribs. Her name had apparently meant ‘Bright Hope’.

  … talk about who we were and what we were going to do.

  Later, back at the clinic, she had begun filling out the forms: Cause of death – measles. Forms that would be used to tick boxes in municipal offices generating more forms in the Ministry of Health and eventually be forwarded to the regional office of the World Health Organization in Brazzaville and thence, in the fullness of time, to WHO headquarters in Geneva where they would one day no doubt appear on the desk of Dr Michael Lowell. It would be good to see Michael again, and he might need to be reminded about the thousands of Bright Hopes.

  Her eyelids drooped. On her next home leave, she would get herself checked out at McGill. She might even be able to take in Stephen’s little reunion on the way. Why had she ever lost touch? With Seema, who had been her closest friend and had now become an American citizen. And with Toby, her long-lost love, her Australian Lord Byron, her chain-smoking Ginsberg who had howled at every convention and who was now apparently an advertising executive.

  She sat up, wanting more water and staring again at the letter: surely she was strong enough to face Toby again with a lighter heart; to push into the attic of childish memories those weeks that had seemed so deeply scarring at the time; to smile at the memory of his wounding loss of interest when she had refused to sleep with him in that long, hot summer at the dawn of the 1960s.

  Thanks to an out-of-date address, Tom Keeley received his invitation a week or two later than the others. When it finally arrived on the morning of Saturday, May 17th, 1980, via his office at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, he passed it wordlessly across the breakfast table to his wife.

  Caroline scanned it. ‘We’re on vacation that week.’

  ‘I know. Good excuse.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you liked to have gone?’

  ‘Not madly, no.’

  She looked at him suspiciously over the top of her reading glasses. ‘So-oo, no ex-girlfriends you’d like to spend the weekend with?’

  He gave her a saintly smile. ‘I spent all my time studying.’

  On the Sunday he wrote a brief, handwritten reply, thanking Stephen for the invitation but telling him that, on the dates in question, they would be taking the children on a two-week tour of their own home state of Virginia. He sent his best wishes for the weekend and asked to be remembered to the others.

  Tom Keeley never expected to hear anything more about the reunion. He was wrong.

  2 | I would know her by heart

  Thursday, October 2nd, 1980

  Hélène Hevré arrived at Heathrow Airport at a little after seven o’clock in the evening after a six-hour flight from Félix Houphouet-Boigny International Airport, Abidjan. Toby Jenks was there to meet her. It would probably have been more convenient for her to take the coach directly to Oxford, but Toby had written imploring her to stay overnight in London and travel up to Oxford with him on the following afternoon. Rather weakly, she thought afterwards, she had agreed.

  Over the two decades since they had last seen each other, it would be fair to say that she had carried with her a vivid mental image of the man who had broken her young heart, and so she had been more than a little shocked to be greeted by the older, larger, sadder figure who had stepped forward, arms outstretched, as she had emerged from the baggage hall. To her own mortification, it had taken her a second or two to recognize him. And she had suffered on his behalf.

  Things had been easier once they were seated side-by-side deep in the leather seats of his sports car, a dark red coupé of an exotic make she failed to recognize. ‘So unbelievably unfair, Hel. No, I mean really unfair. You just haven’t changed one little bit. No, I mean it, not one little bit. Must be your incorruptible virtue.’ The comment cut through the years to the time when he had first teased her about her alleged puritanism. Back then, it had been all part of his pride-protecting banter following her rejections of his over-confident sexual advances. But now, twenty years on, it seemed that allusions to her supposed virtuousness were not only to be revived but also routinely contrasted to his own self-confessed decadence.

  ‘Are you cold, sweetheart? I expect it’s all a bit of a shock.’

  ‘I’m fine, Toby, really.’

  ‘Damn this traffic. Who are all these people? Where are they all going?’

  Hélène Hevré had in fact changed, becoming one of the not inconsiderable number of women who are more attractive at forty than at twenty. She had lost weight when she had first gone to live in Africa, and had lost even more over recent months. The once unformed face had found structure and the pale-blue eyes that had once contributed to an impression of blandness, were harder and more experienced, narrowed by the light of the tropics and, Toby did not fail to observe, startlingly attractive against the warm gold of her skin.

  He changed down aggressively and turned off the North Circular. ‘Got to lose all this.’ Hélène remained silent, absorbed by the striving of the city as they left the stream of traffic and began to thread a way through the narrow streets around Lammas Park.

  ‘Of course I haven’t changed much either. You needn’t bother to tell me.’ He glanced quickly at her with a slight wince, a pained ‘what can I do?’ facial expression with which she was to become familiar.

  ‘You don’t look particularly happy, Toby, if that’s what you mean.’ The manner, too, had changed. He had not remembered directness among her many qualities.

  ‘Happy? Of course I’m not happy. Nobody’s happy. How very Sixties of you, sweetheart.’

  Hélène watched a group of young mothers struggling to negotiate pushchairs through the revolving door of a glass-fronted coffee shop. ‘But you’re happily married, yes?’

  ‘There you go again.’ He reached to pat her knee but she intercepted his hand and placed it back on the wheel without changing her expression. He held out his open palm and she gave it a gentle slap, the old games beginning as if the years between had never been. For a second or two he made a pretence of being rebuked and concentrated ostentatiously on driving.

  ‘Okay, I’ll confess to being a little bit married. But not the other thing.’ He changed up as the traffic thinned a little on South Ealing Road and turned again to glance at her with an exaggerated cheerfulness. ‘As a matter of fact I’m rather seriously semi-detached at the moment.’

 
Hélène smiled and continued to look out of the window, avoiding any examination of her own feelings at meeting the man Toby Jenks had become. Like Ottawa and Montreal, London had also shifted up several gears since she had last looked upon its streets. Every second her eyes seemed to sweep up more wealth, more variety, more clamour for attention than could be seen in all the villages of the Sahel put together. ‘So have the others arrived?’