The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  ‘Let me take care of it.’

  ‘I can’t let you do that.’

  ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.’

  Hélène sipped her wine and turned to look across the rapidly filling restaurant towards the crowds now in full flow out on First Avenue. ‘Isn’t it nice to be arguing about something ordinary?’

  Seema was aware of her reputation for serenity. One of her colleagues, an Italian-American, was in the habit of referring to her as La Serenissima and had gone so far as to ask her whether this was a particularly Asian quality, or whether it was just … Seema. La Serenissima herself, amused, tended to see it as just a lack of the normal New York angst, that almost palpable agitation of many of her colleagues who could disturb the peace of a room just by walking through the door. Whatever the quality was, it seemed to have abandoned her now as she sat at her desk in the Bobst Library.

  Tracing references in a nineteenth-century farm book was mostly tedious work, and demanded patience: patience and peace of mind. And to be finding it difficult was perhaps not surprising, given that an hour ago she had buzzed Michael up to the apartment where he had again removed the three containers in plastic bags from his briefcase and placed them in a row on the bottom shelf of her fridge. She had no trouble believing his reassurances that they were perfectly safe. But she had already decided that she couldn’t face seeing them every time she took out a carton of half-and-half. She would buy a mini-fridge like the ones the students often had in their rooms. It would go in the cupboard under the spiral stairs. Stephen would carry it up to the apartment for her. Anybody else might ask questions.

  She picked up her pencil and again tried to focus; Jefferson had owned three slaves named Sally and it was not always clear which one was being referred to. Nor was the task made easier by the tendency of Southern slave owners to call every older black woman ‘auntie’ and every older black man ‘uncle’. She turned the page. Michael had been dashing between his breakfast briefing with Toby and his first official meeting of the day at the UN. Their goodbyes had been embarrassed and unsatisfactory, and it was clear that whatever there might be between them it was on hold, suspended, impossible to access except through the portal of the astonishing thing that had happened; the thing that now held them both together and apart.

  She opened her file and began running a finger down the page, putting a cross by the names of Sarah Hemings’ descendants who had names associated in some way with Thomas Jefferson: Madison, Wayles, Mary, Eston, Munroe …

  Marble Hill, Yonkers, Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Tarrytown, Ossining – the townships of the Hudson Valley flew smoothly by, the miles succumbing to the lulling rhythm of the train, the great river appearing and disappearing from view as Hélène headed north, tiredness a warm flood in her brain.

  She had hesitated before agreeing to meet in Toby’s room at the Algonquin. But it had to be somewhere private and in the event Toby had been business-like, getting straight down to the briefing, asking questions and scribbling rapid notes. Even their goodbyes had been almost formal, and she had known that he had been determined not to fall back on his usual jocular advances. When the time had come to depart, he had kissed her cheek and wished her bon voyage. And that was all. Though his eyes had held a different message.

  She had tried reading, but her novel seemed to belong to another world; a more real world. In the distance she recognized the great span of the Tappan Zee Bridge, the thousands of red tail-lights heading home to the suburbs, the stream of headlights making for an evening in the city. And then it was back to the sprawl of shopping malls and gas stations and the scattering of homes from whose chimneys smoke faded into the evening sky. Ordinary homes. Ordinary lives. Or maybe not.

  The great river reappeared, wider now, as she tried to focus on the future. The speech had not been made. There was nothing now to stop her going back to Africa. Darkness had begun to fall. And, as the view faded, it was to Grethe Rask that her thoughts turned, the rhythm of the train carrying her towards the appointment she had already made at McGill. She had served alongside the Danish surgeon in those scary Ebola days on the Zaire-Sudan border, and they had stayed in touch. Greta, too, had complained of tiredness in the months that followed, though she had continued working long days in the Red Cross Hospital in Kinshasa. Eventually, so she had confided, the weariness had come to weigh down every hour and, what with the weight loss and the repeated infections, she had decided to return home, suspecting a lymph cancer. No cancer had been found. But within a few weeks she had been unable to breathe without oxygen. On December 12th, 1977, at Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet, Margrethe Rask had died. She had been just forty-seven years old.

  Hélène shook herself free from the thought. There were a hundred possible causes for tiredness and weight loss, even for lymph swelling, especially if you lived and worked with patients in a poorly equipped hospital surrounded by every kind of infection, known and unknown. McGill would have the answer. Except that for Greta no answer had ever been found; she had appeared to die of pneumocystis, but since when was pneumocystis a fatal condition? The darkness was almost complete as the countryside began to open out again. It was a shame to be taking the night train.

  Stephen lay flat on the hotel bed hoping that the pain in his lower back would be temporary. Through the thin wall behind his bedhead came the strains of a protest song accompanied by the noise of several sets of footsteps. The whole place, it seemed, creaked and groaned with every movement on floors, landings, corridors. In a day or two, he would get his act together and move.

  In the meantime, the pieces of his weekend needed to be rearranged into some more acceptable picture. Michael was obviously going to be in the driving seat when it came to the medical detail, but the essential concept had been very much his own. The song about Steve Biko came to an end as he struggled to open the French windows, one of which had to be lifted slightly over a warped floorboard. Somehow the room managed to be both cold and stuffy at the same time. He pressed a hand into the small of his back, wondering whether to go out and read his book at one of the neighbourhood coffee bars.

  He sat down again on the bed. If by any chance the balloon did go up then he would also be needed to provide the counter-narrative, probably written from a prison cell. Tell the story from a perspective that valued the lives of the poor and the oppressed as much as those of the rich and powerful. His role, in that eventuality, would be as a kind of embedded historian: in fact precisely the historian as ‘conscious tool of history’ that Marx had envisaged.

  He crossed to the kitchen area and opened the fridge. It had been right of course to allow the samples to be kept at Seema’s. Somewhat squeamishly, she had bought a mini-fridge especially for the purpose and carrying it up the four flights of stairs had done something to his back. If he was going to stay, he should probably join a gym. After they had transferred the containers, still in their plastic bags, to the little Frigidaire, she had rushed back to NYU, where she had been due to lecture on the quaint topic of Slaves and Smallholdings.

  Carrying a Coke, he returned to the open window. Not that his own academic career could any longer be described as mainstream. In fact the pieces of his weekend that he was having most difficulty in accommodating were the two letters that had been handed to him at the desk that morning. The first brought news that the History Workshop Journal would not be publishing his article on ‘The Social Production of News’ on the grounds that they would soon be bringing out a piece on a similar topic by Stuart Hall. The second enclosed details of final salary payments and pension rights.

  Looking down on the noise and traffic that Monday morning, he could not help thinking of the peaceful quadrangle he had left behind. Even if his star had been fading, he had belonged there in a way that he could never belong on 23rd Street. In fact exactly where, now, did he belong? The street below was thronged with people hurrying to and fro as he lifted his head to the fire escape and the narrow strip of day above. He belonged, he decided,
to what they were now embarked upon. He and the others whom he had summoned together. He held on tight to the handrail and looked down again to the street.

  If only all these people knew.

  20 | The curvature of the earth

  What Toby wrote that day, travelling eight miles above the Atlantic at approximately twice the speed of sound, had nothing to do with ‘capturing the in-flight experience’ or ‘slapping down some initial thoughts’. Instead he was focused on what Hélène had told him at The Algonquin, struggling to edit her words, phrases, half-finished sentences, into a coherent message while trying to preserve something of the pain and the anger – and the tears when he had pressed her to describe in more detail what he had never seen and could not imagine.

  To see a mother cradling her child’s head for hour after hour; to see the little head turn suddenly on a body that is unnaturally still; to want to stop even that small movement because it’s so obvious there’s no energy left in the child’s life. To see the pink inside the mouth and the wrinkled grey of the skin, the colours of its life and death; to see the uncomprehending panic in eyes which are still the clear and lucid eyes of a child. And then to know – in one endless moment – that life is gone.

  He crossed it all out and turned back several pages to the list of facts and figures he had extracted from his breakfast meeting with Michael, beginning to write quickly in a pencil scrawl unintelligible to anyone but himself.

  The drinks cart passed by unnoticed as he read through the paragraphs he had written. Something in the back of his mind told him to pause and re-imagine the reader, not the Hughes guy but whoever might see it next, probably someone in Washington. It was an odd brief – write something that will convince a handful of people that what they are reading must never be allowed to be seen by anyone else. He rested the notebook on the food tray and began to read again, making deletions, remembering his Faulkner, killing his darlings. The essential thing was to hit the right tone. It didn’t need extravagance or too much in the way of rhetorical flourish. It needed to be spare, serious, sane; it needed to be so normal and responsible that there was no way it could be dismissed as the work of crazies, hotheads, fanatics, zealots of any stripe. In the end, it had to make a case with which reasonable people might feel moved to agree.

  He placed the notebook on the empty seat beside him and stretched his arms and legs as best he could, blinking and looking around at the discreet cream and grey-blue décor of the cabin. Two rows in front of him, the pale lemon lights on the bulkhead tracked speed and altitude. Writing his initial pitch wouldn’t be difficult. There was only one reason why anybody would pay eight thousand dollars for a one-way trip across the Atlantic. And it wasn’t the ‘in-flight experience’, which was cramped in the extreme, the kerosene-like smell of the re-heaters lingering in the cabin, the windows the size of a stunted grapefruit, the headroom a contradiction in terms, the Connolly leather seats tighter on the bum than normal business class. He reclined the seat again, feeling it tilt all in one piece, pressing his thighs up under the tray. It was all embarrassingly obvious. A Concorde ticket came with its own sonic status boom. All that was required was some sort of a figleaf to cover the nakedness of the ‘ego-libido’ as Toby himself had christened it. And there it was in those pale lemon lights on the forward bulkhead. Mach 2.2, proclaiming how exceptionally important one’s time was. Unlike the aircraft itself, its appeal was not rocket science.

  He glanced at his watch. Damnation. Halfway there already. He turned back through his pages and began again to read.

  These children die with the rash of measles (2 million a year), with the convulsions of tetanus (1.2 million children a year), with the paroxysms of whooping cough (1.5 million children a year).

  He consulted his notes of the morning, copying out more legibly the epitaph on twentieth-century medicine that Michael had quoted to him: ‘Brilliant in its scientific breakthroughs, ingenious in its technological invention, and woefully inept in its application to those most in need.’

  He read on, scribbling in the margin at points when anything snagged in his brain, nagged by the feeling that something was falling short, some intangible element that would give the pitch more bite, more purchase on mind and memory. It was not an unfamiliar feeling, this realization that a piece of work was almost there but not quite, the edge still slightly rounded instead of being cut-to-the-touch. He had even experienced something similar when playing chess, knowing that he was missing some advantage that lay just out of the mind’s reach. He thought for a few minutes more and began to write again.

  Ten minutes later he closed the notebook and flexed his fingers, pushing his feet out under the seat in front. In another hour or so he could have had the piece finished, ready to send as soon as he got to the office. But there wasn’t time. Raising a hand to the window he could feel the heat of the plane’s friction through the air, though the plane itself was so steady as to seem locked in ice.

  Half-crouching, he made his way back down the plane. ‘Like the inside of a covered wagon,’ was how a Braniff executive had described it. He smiled at one or two of the passengers who met his eye. How many of them would also have valued a little more of this precious, uninterruptable time? Even before he had returned to his seat, he had clinched the centrepiece of the pitch. The stewardess, elegant, gorgeous, leans towards the distinguished-looking, mature businessman working on his papers as he returns home in the hushed luxury of Concorde, the panel showing Mach 2.2, the curvature of the earth just visible (cheat a little bit, use a shot from space). Cut for a couple of frames from her lips to the label on the vintage Champagne, then back to the businessman, glancing up briefly, appreciatively, but refusing the champagne with a polite, distracted smile, before returning to his work. The figleaf. The moment of refusal. A Savile Row figleaf. Guaranteed to put supersonic bums on supersonic seats.

  He returned to his seat and opened the notebook. ‘Hélène’ was written at the top of the page. He had been so intent on his task that they had not spoken of anything else. She had wished him luck with the writing, then lingered just for a moment in the doorway. But he had merely muttered a bon voyage and let her go. He had known that it might be a long time before he saw her again. But nothing he could think of to acknowledge the fact had seemed in any way appropriate. He had merely raised the notebook in salutation, and held her eyes as the elevator doors had closed between their lives.

  He looked again at his watch. He would do the polishing tonight. There would be no one at home. And it was not something he wanted to carry forward into his week at the office. He glanced up at the flight information on the forward bulkhead. Mach 2.0, whatever it meant, was far too fast to be returning to his world. From the undersized window it was indeed just possible to see the dazzling blue-and-white curvature of the earth, way too far below. But above was a blackness that was odd on a daytime flight. The answer came to him only slowly. The darkness was not sky. It was the darkness of space. And for the first time the wonder of it came to him, the terrible unfamiliarity of being poised on the margin, suspended between the familiar atmosphere of the world he knew and the inhospitable beyond.

  Part Two

  21 | All over nervous

  One of the pluses of Tom Keeley’s mid-career change from the Centers for Disease Control to the New York Times was not having to be in the office by nine. Often he worked late into the evening, but not having to leave early meant a leisurely breakfast with Caroline, after the boys had left for school, and it had quickly become a cherished part of the day – sitting at the kitchen table with a second cup of coffee, or going back to bed for an hour and making love in the light, airy room that looked out directly on to the Connecticut countryside, or just talking over the joys and worries of bringing up two teenage boys.

  ‘Everything was fine until I asked if I’d missed anything at the reunion. And then suddenly she’s all over nervous.’ Caroline interrupted his account of the previous day’s lunch with Seema Mir by offering t
o make more toast. He followed her into the kitchen. ‘Said it had been good to see the others but couldn’t wait to get off the subject.’

  ‘Maybe it was to do with that other guy, Michael. Don’t they have history?’

  ‘They were an item that year in Oxford, for sure.’

  ‘So maybe it was a big deal and all, seeing each other again?’

  ‘Could be. But she seemed more scared than anything. And the thing about Seema is, she’s usually so … I don’t know … composed.’

  22 | We wish to make it clear …

  Nyon, Switzerland, Friday, February 6th, 1981

  Michael poured himself a glass of wine and carried it through to the dining table. It was not quite dark, but a winter mist had descended on the town and all that was visible were a few milky street lights and, here and there, a window already lit in the mansards of the Rue Delafléchère.

  He turned on the lamp and opened the package delivered by special courier earlier in the day and marked ‘Personal’ in three different places.

  This is to inform you that the senders of this letter are in possession of lyophilized smallpox virus. As evidence of this, a sample in a sealed vial has been left in a rented locker on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal, New York. Key enclosed.

  Failure to respond to the demands set out below by midnight Eastern Standard Time on March 6th, 1981 will result in the statement accompanying this letter being released to the media, along with a second sample of the virus.

  In order to avoid this, it will be necessary for the President of the United States to make a public commitment to the goal of universal child immunization by the end of the current decade.