The evening wore on. The president toasted the honorable justices, the chief justice toasted President McCall, a soprano from the Metropolitan Opera sang a Massenet aria from Cendrillon followed by “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand,” and then the dancing began. Margaret Dudley rose and danced with John Broderick, and then brought him back to my seat.
“Thank you for letting me take you to my considerable bosom,” Margaret Dudley said to John Broderick.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘considerable,’ General . . .”
“Jack, we’ve known each other much too long for you to call me ‘General.’ Now. You know Teresa Kean?”
“Only by reputation.”
“Then go out on the dance floor and get to know each other better.”
The orchestra was attempting Gershwin’s “Summertime.” He was not a good dancer and did not seem to care that he wasn’t. He must have been in his early sixties, maybe sixty-five, trim, but too old for dancing to be an important part of his life, if it ever had been. Again I found myself the target of that disconcerting stare. He made no effort to speak. To make conversation, I said, “You really haven’t been here since Fritz Finn was president?”
He nodded.
“You must have been asked.”
Another nod.
“Then why come tonight?”
“Duncan Dudley asked if I would be available.” Margaret Dudley’s husband. “We knew each other at Princeton.”
“So that’s the reason.”
“No.”
His rudeness was like a baffle, useful in deflecting inquiry. I had the sense that he wanted to see if I would persist. Okay. His way then. “Do you ever give anything beside name, rank, and serial number?”
“Usually, not even that.” He looked at me directly for the first time and half smiled. “Actually I don’t like Duncan. Never did. He’s a burr of public life. Always attaching himself to someone who might do him some good. Dix McCall now, Margaret at the get-go. When she was young and fat. But he was smart enough to know she was very, very, very smart. Which is three verys smarter than he is. He’d fuck a pencil sharpener. And has. I never understood what Margaret saw in him. She’s all right.”
It was not the sort of measured conversation one usually hears at a White House dinner. I knew it was his way of not answering my question, but I was too good a lawyer not to continue my cross-examination, whatever his rudeness. “Why then?”
He pretended to listen to the music. “I hate Gershwin.”
He was dodging. I bored in. “Why?”
“Lush and sentimental. ‘Old Man River’ crap. ‘Tote dat barge, lift dat bale.’ ”
“Forget Gershwin. Why did you come tonight?”
“ ‘I got plenty of nothin’, and nothin’ is plenty for me.’ ”
Again. “Why?”
A pause. “You don’t give up, do you?” Another pause. “Duncan mentioned that you’d be here.”
I felt a chill. I knew what was coming.
“I knew your mother.”
“Why did she do it?”
We were in the bedroom in the carriage house just off Capitol Hill where I lived, the dinner for the Supreme Court justices already forgotten. He had told me in exact detail about my mother’s thirty-five-year odyssey as an itinerant bag lady, one with a small anonymous annuity from those who had been charged to protect her when she was young, famous, and solvent, one whose truest love in those halcyon years was a killer unimpressed by her fame and wealth and whose daughter she had borne and given up for adoption after he was murdered, one who as a woman in her increasingly unstable later years had married and discarded nine, ten, or eleven husbands. “I mean, why did she choose to live the way she did?”
“I don’t do why.”
I was startled. “What?”
“Motivation is a very poor explanation of character.” His tone was brusque, peremptory. “People behave the way they do because that’s the way they are. Change their circumstances and their behavior won’t change for the better or the worse. Put Jesse James on Molokai, he’s not going to turn into Father Damien.” He paused, as if considering whether he should continue. “Like your mother.” He propped himself up on his elbow. “Did you ever suspect?”
“A little,” I said after a moment. “When the story first began to come out. I really didn’t follow it that closely, but people wouldn’t let it go, and you wouldn’t talk. I was impressed by that. It was like something my father would do. Daddy—I’m a woman who has not led a sheltered life, but I still call him Daddy. I knew he was well regarded in the legal community—Pat Moynihan came to his rosary, and the mayor and Jack Javits to the funeral. Oh, God, I hate people who drop names. Forgive me for doing that.”
He shrugged.
“He would never talk once he made up his mind not to. I never gave who I was much thought, but I knew he knew. He’d defended Jacob King right after the war—it was mentioned in all his obituaries—and so I found the trial transcript and I found the billing receipts and as the executor of his estate I had access to all his financial records and saw that there was a blind trust set up about the time I was adopted, one where I was the ultimate beneficiary. It was something I just didn’t want to investigate, and when I finally got interested, my mother couldn’t tell me anything—she has trouble remembering my name. Because of you, or not you, really, because you never said a word, but what others made of what you weren’t saying, I knew more or less when Blue Tyler’s daughter was born, I knew when I was adopted, I knew when the trust went into effect. As a lawyer you make inductive leaps, you’re taught to use the facts to present a credible story to the jury. That we were the same person was a story that seemed . . .” I looked for the proper word. “Tenable.” Then I added, “Possible.”
“You never tried to contact me.”
“You wouldn’t have told me.”
“Right.”
I traced the vertical foot-long white scar on his sternum that indicated open-heart surgery, then ran my hand over the hairs on his lower stomach. “Why now?”
“I’m sixty-two,” he said, tapping the scar on his chest. “I have a prosthetic aortic valve, a plastic St. Jude model—the only reason I tell you that is because I suspect you have a lawyer’s passion for specificity. Anyway. I had the copyright to your mother’s life, and I wanted to pass it on to the one person to whom it could possibly matter.” His dinner jacket and pleated shirt were thrown over a chair, and his studs and cuff links littered the floor. A small smile. “Before . . .”
I knew where “before” led, and I did not want to go there.
He waited for a moment, then rolled over and ran his finger over the aureole of my right breast. “Well . . .”
“Yes.”
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and walked to the chair over which his tuxedo jacket was hung. From an inside pocket he removed what seemed to be a small sewing kit, and then sat on the edge of the bed. “I suppose I should have told you this before,” he said after a moment. There was a thin hypodermic needle, a small medical bottle, and some alcohol wipes inside the kit. “At a certain age, one becomes close in the most unseemly way with one’s urologist. He becomes like”— he hesitated—“a penile priest.”
Sex was suddenly on hold.
“Mine is a Bengali Sikh. Dr. Singh. Dinakar Singh.” It was if he was in a confessional, explaining some form of aberrant behavior to a priest. As I had done too often when I still believed, after a fashion, in God and Holy Mother the Church. “Actually I’m not sure I could have talked about this to someone not from the third world. Jerry Caplan at Beverly Hills Medical, say. Leonard Lewis at UCLA. Bucky Kantor at Cedars. Phyllis Haney at St. John’s.” He was talking too fast. “A Haitian would have been fine. A Samoan. An Eskimo. The best goddamn man in Sri Lanka. But not someone I might see at Spago. Dr. Singh wanted me to have a penile implant.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear this.”
“Then you don’t have a passion
for specificity?”
Was there any way to end this conversation in a lighthearted manner? No. Just go with it. As far as it goes.
“My . . .” He pointed to his flaccid equipment. “What word are you comfortable with? Penis? Dick? Prick? Cock? Johnson?”
“Johnson,” I said too quickly. I had a very extensive lexicon on this subject, largely but not wholly learned while engaged in bedroom acrobatics with Budd Doheny, but this was one I’d never used before.
“Then johnson it is. And you might have noticed, Mr. Johnson here is shaped like a T square.”
I had noticed that.
“A condition called Peyronie’s disease.” He saw my blank look. “Do you floss regularly? Morning and evening and after meals?”
Where was this going? How do you answer? “When I think of it.”
“Why?”
“Because the hygienist says I should.”
“To get rid of what?”
A Budd Doheny photo session with umbrellas and reflectors was never as strange as this. “Plaque.”
“Right. Plaque. That’s what Peyronie’s disease is. Plaque. But instead of in your teeth or your gums, it’s in your johnson. And you don’t go to a periodontist for it, you go to a urologist. When I was a kid, I was told hair would grow on my hands if I masturbated too much. Forget the hair on your hands. It’s plaque in your johnson. From overuse, I hope. And the plaque makes it difficult to . . .” A deep breath. “. . . get it up.”
I confess he had my attention. In a criminal courtroom, a lawyer sops up information. About calibers and the particularity of exit wounds and DNA. This was my learning curve on Peyronie’s plaque.
“So Dr. Singh’s solution was a penile implant. A reservoir under your abdominal muscles, a pump in your scrotum, and two cylinders surgically implanted in Mr. Johnson. ‘Squeeze that pump,’ Dr. Singh said, ‘and you will be hard as a rock.’ ” He mimicked a subcontinent accent. “ ‘Hard as a rock, Mr. Broderick.’ No, thank you, I said, I already have one prosthetic device . . .” He pointed to the foot-long scar on his chest. “. . . my St. Jude valve, and two would be pressing my luck. And anyway, the only person I ever heard of who had a tube in his johnson was Paul Castellano, and he ended up getting shot in front of Spark’s Steak House by John Gotti’s guys. He was seventy-five years old, and he had the tube so he could screw his Puerto Rican maid; she looked like a sumo wrestler from her pictures. He deserved what happened outside Spark’s for that alone. So what’s your backup? I asked Dr. Singh.” He removed the needle from its kit and inserted it through the rubber stopper on the medical vial. “Penile injections.”
I was furious. I sat bolt upright, and tried to cover my nakedness with a pillow. “You brought that with you tonight? You thought you were going to score? At the White House? With me?”
He smiled reasonably. “When you go out at night, you don’t slip a package of condoms in your purse. Or your diaphragm? Or an RU-486 pill?”
How did he know? Because he had spent a lifetime in the trenches of the sexual battlefield, of course. Not unlike me. “It’s not the same.”
He brushed away my answer. “I could do it in the bathroom, I could do it here, or I could leave. Your call.”
I waited for a moment. “I’m not sure I could watch.” Which meant that leaving was not the call.
“Because it’s anti-romantic?”
I nodded.
“At a certain age, romance becomes problematic,” he said. “Transient and overrated.” He took the needle in one hand, and rested his semi-tumescent cock on his thigh with the other. “This, however, is interesting.” He smiled, holding the hypodermic for a moment. “A 30-gauge ultrafine needle.” Another smile. “It takes some getting used to. Closing your eyes is not the best way to proceed.” He was like a dentist explaining a root canal. A driblet of liquid appeared at the top of the needle. “Two raindrops of a high-potency corticosteroid, by name prostaglandin E-1, into the spongy tissue here . . .” He showed me. “. . . where there’s no nerve ends, and where you can take the needle . . . and poke it in . . .”
He thrust, humming the mournful dirge of the bull ring. “. . . like a bullfighter finishing off a bull.”
I shuddered and turned away. When I looked back, he was smiling. “It takes a moment, but it works.”
It did.
We watched Nightline afterwards. Live from an execution at a prison somewhere in the Midwest. There was Poppy McClure wearing a black designer duffel in the prison parking lot. Lecturing Ted Koppel in his Washington studio about George Bernard Shaw’s views on the death penalty. “Ted.” She was fiddling with her earpiece. “Are you telling me you are not aware of Shaw’s attitudes on the death penalty? Even as soft on Communist Russia as he and the Webbs were?”
“Do you know her?” Jack said.
“Only from the various green rooms we’ve been in together.”
“She’s a horror.”
“Actually, she’s rather funny. Once you get past her politics.”
“Is there anything else?”
I suppose he had a point. I still liked her. “I was on C-Span a few years go. She’d been on a day or so before. The story I heard was her husband was screwing an intern in the green room while she was on the air.”
“Serves her right.”
“For what?”
He looked at me for what he seemed to assume would be a lecture. On-screen there was a shot of the ambulance that would remove the body of the deceased from the prison premises and then a tight shot of a window on the second floor that was identified as the room where the electric chair was located. Most of the victims whose rights I lobbied for were in favor of the death penalty. I wasn’t, but it was an opinion I chose never to make public, and always cut off any discussion of what my view actually was.
I changed the subject. “I read you were going to write a movie about that black man who was skinned alive out there. Parlance. Edgar Parlance. And the two who killed him.”
He shook his head. “No one to root for.”
“Parlance.”
“You don’t root for a dead man. What’s his backstory? Will anyone give a shit three years from now when a picture, if it’s made, which I doubt, comes out?” He yawned and stretched. Mr. Johnson still stood tall. It suddenly reminded me of the field hockey stick I used as a teenager at St. Pius V Intermediate School. Sister Boniface was the coach. What she told my parents about me was that I was a delicate stick handler. A skill perfected, after field hockey, in more one-night stands than I preferred to count. “That’s the upside of the needle,” Jack said when he saw me staring.
Again I traced the scar on his chest and then moved my finger slowly south of his navel. Dr. Singh’s proposed implant with its pump, reservoir, and dual cylinders could not possibly have been any more efficient than the needle carrying the two raindrops of prostaglandin E-1. Maybe Jack was right about romance. There was something to be said for efficiency. And for stick handling. “Some upside.”
The wakeup radio switched on to NPR as it did automatically every morning at five. Weekends I did not do the StairMaster or the rowing machine in the exercise room I had fitted out in the large pantry off the kitchen. There was no BBC World Update on Saturdays, just concert music. Mozart’s Concerto number 3 in G major, with Itzhak Perlman on the violin and James Levine conducting. I listened for a moment, stretching and wiping the sleep from my eyes. When I finally put my feet on the floor, I stepped on one of his cuff links. I looked back at him. He still had a hard-on. His right leg hung out of the bed, but his cock stood up like a rocket on a launching pad. I was full of cock metaphors. Lacrosse stick last night, rocket this morning. The needle and the vial of prostaglandin E-1 were on the bedside table along with their tiny carrying case. I wondered if he had given himself an extra boost. As a way of wishing me good morning. I massaged the hard-on for a moment, getting in the mood, but he did not move. His eyes were closed, his face peaceful but drained of color. Even before I said “Jack,”
I knew he was dead. I felt for a pulse in his neck, but there was none. On his wrist he wore a MedicAlert bracelet. I read the instructions: “Aortic valve prosthesis—takes anticoagulants—allergic to penicillin.” Already there was evidence of postmortem lividity pooling at his thighs. I could not think of what to do, so I gathered his studs and cuff links from the floor and put them on the table next to his penile injection kit. Then I took his credit cards, California driver’s license, and money clip from his tuxedo trousers and placed them next to the studs and cuff links. Next I folded his pleated dinner shirt and hung it and his bow tie and his dinner jacket in the closet. Then I sat in the chair and tried to follow Itzhak Perlman. Mozart soothed my nerves as I tried to guess what had happened, and what I had to do next. In my criminal practice I had read countless death certificates. I knew the words appropriate to the failure of an aortic prosthesis. Myocardial infarction. Pulmonary embolism. Rheumatic valvulitis with stenosis and/or insufficiency. Bacterial endocarditis. Stroke. Suddenly I got up, went over to the bed, and tried to pull his paisley boxer shorts over his buttocks. Over his fucking cock. His body fell heavily onto the floor. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. So much for getting him dressed. For a moment I felt like crying, then went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I was still naked. His come stained the sheet and was crusted on my stomach. Shower. I could always think in the shower. I let the water flow over me and for some demented reason decided to wash my hair. I felt like Mary Martin in South Pacific. I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair, wash that man right out of my hair, and send him on his way. Except he was dead. Not that easy. Was this worth learning about my mother? And my father? I always tend to forget him. What did Jack say? About my being a victim’s rights lawyer and my father being a steady provider of victims. Goddamn Jack. What would it cost to disappear him? Who could do it? No. Pull yourself together. Do not do anything illegal. Better to be embarrassed than disbarred. I dried myself off, pulled on a pair of jeans and a cashmere sweater. My nipples looked like chestnuts under the cashmere. Not something I wanted the boys from EMS to see. Under the circumstances. With a stiff and his still-stiff johnson alongside my bed. I pulled off the sweater, found a bra, wadded toilet paper in the cups, put it on, and then the sweater over it.
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