by Uwe Johnson
Marie hasn’t left the building. When the telephone rang she had just gone down to the basement to ask Jason for advice adjusting her TV antenna. She watched the whole route, starting at Lexington Avenue, up and down Park Avenue, all the way to the cathedral and past the coffin. She didn’t need to go in person. She wasn’t there, and yet she’s even learned the basics about how to make a sign of the cross. She was there with the TV. Of course we couldn’t find her today either.
June 8, 1968 Saturday
A day in front of the TV. But we won’t spend it unsupervised. When Mrs. Cresspahl called D. E., Mrs. Erichson had to go get him from the car, he was just about to drive off, as Marie had called and asked him to, in fact. The child wants a referee too.
Bring her back to me, D. E.
To you?
Away from the Kennedys.
Didn’t she get this obsessive joy in grief from you?
If it’s from me get it out from her. Bring her out of it.
You’re giving me free hand?
Get her back, D. E.
By eight thirty a.m. he’s arranged his long bones in our apartment, on one of the Salvation Army chairs, with his back to the luminous park so he can’t be suspected of paying insufficient attention. Next to him he’s set out a tin with eight ounces of tobacco, three pipes, all kinds of implements, and now he requests a liter of tea—he’s ready for a lengthy undertaking. He is dressed more for the weekend in the garden in New Jersey to which he invited us, down to his sneakers; with his expression of somewhat sleepy gravity he is giving a good imitation of a professor who’s up to the task of one more long exam. The language is American English.
His preparations managed to put Marie off balance; his role forces her to be the organizer. She moves the TV set back and forth in front of him, apologizing for the distorted picture; he nods gravely. He may be an authorized professor of physics and chemistry but he doesn’t know how to improve the technology of this kind of machine. – The tube is overworked: he determines, his objectivity an unanswerable reproach; Marie nods meekly. She can’t prove he said it pointedly, but her pious feeling slips a little. Now she’s sitting next to him and he can touch her consolingly on the neck, the arm, it’s allowed. He strictly refrains, out of respect for her grief, and by reflecting her behavior he forces her to question it. Having expected nothing less from him than proper silence during the programs, she soon can’t stand it anymore.
Around nine she sucks in air through her teeth, as if in sudden pain, for there on-screen a staticky distorted picture appears, sliced up into its own shadows, of the widow of the day in the moment of crossing herself. Her face shines out bright and clear in its jinxed surroundings. D. E. looks at Marie in surprise and perfunctorily explains: The raster, you know. She nods, innocent and teachable. The raster. I see.
Mrs. Cresspahl would have long since burst out, against her will but needing to score a point: This Robert Kennedy of yours, he had Martin Luther King’s phone tapped! That’s the kind of attorney general he was, just so you know! But now she’s unable to make these further pedagogical mistakes, and is moreover amused by her sidelong glances at the pair sitting stiffly in front of the TV. She gets carried away by sudden mirth, she smiles, whether from gratitude or elation. She gets in return an indignant sidelong look from D. E., as if there’s nothing to laugh about here, and obediently withdraws with the radio into the one room whose door can be firmly closed.
WQXR, the voice of The New York Times, broadcast on 96.3 MHz, is now going to show her educated readership how a Grand Old Lady of the World behaves upon the death of a murdered adversary. Cheerfully, respectfully, she describes a well-respected banking firm and recommends its services to the public. Worthy Auntie Times not only earns a little pin money by advertising for friends, she launches into the ether with plugs for her own in-depth features she’ll be selling tomorrow. It’s her station, after all, she refers to herself by name, she is it. She’s not prepared to accord her fallen foe an iota of indulgence: she honors the dollar undeterred, no one’s giving her anything for free.
In the other room, D. E. hasn’t yet invited the child to visit a funeral parlor in New York where dead people are lying with their sharp noses pointed upward too, equally Catholic but with no prospect of a burial in the most chic cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but he is playing a game with Marie. Each player gets a point if they’re the first to identify by title the dignitary being conducted through the checkpoint and into the cathedral before their eyes. They were tied on the secretary general of the UN, the head of the United Auto Workers union, the president of the United States, and the former head of the CIA; Marie scored wins on almost all the others, from poet Robert Lowell to Senator Eugene McCarthy—only with Lauren Bacall does D. E. say he got her first; Marie doesn’t notice anything. Then they start guessing the colors in the procession since the TV set doesn’t supply them: they sense the white of the seminary students, mistake the brown of the monks, the olive green of the army chaplains, the purple of the monsignori, and the violet of the bishops, but agree on the scarlet of the cardinals; by this point, Marie, simply by being forced to imagine a colored picture, has gained insight into the finer details of the staging. D. E. is able to compare one meaning of “service” to another, and she lets herself go along with him in estimating the costs.
She won’t yet crack or laugh at jokes with him, but every now and then they give each other one of their old looks, sly and conspiratorial, like for instance when the surviving Kennedy brother’s voice cracks near the end of his eulogy. She is still trying to honor his teary tone, but D. E. expresses some of her own suspicion with his remarks about the dead man’s motto,
“Some men see things as they are and say: Why?
I dream things that never were and say: Why not?”
Once he’s cited the source of the tearful quote (George Bernard Shaw), complete with a short history of Fabianism, he is able to add: Even when they borrow they take the best.
After that she looks a bit more suspiciously at the eight half-orphans carrying bread and wine in golden vessels up to the high altar; she is not moved to defend the water sprinkled on the coffin, meant to call down from Heaven God’s purifying mercy, nor the swinging of thurible filled with incense, meant to carry the prayers of the faithful up to God. She’s had to recite such things all too often in school, against her will. She gradually comes to see what’s happening in the cathedral as a private ceremony, which is taking her Kennedy away from her, and during the playing of the slow movement from Mahler’s Fifth by thirty members of the New York Philharmonic she can’t yet put into words how the Kennedys look when they’re borrowing, but she reveals the thought, with a painfully amused sidelong glance. The cheerfully galumphing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” unnerves her again; she can’t defend herself against D. E.’s reminder that the tune was stolen from another song,
John Brown’s Body Lies a-Mouldering in the Grave
about the abolitionist’s attack at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The theft bothers her, as does the suggestion of a rotting body, plus there’s the sense that this is educational material she will never hear from Sister Magdalena, and all the thinking she has to do about that dries the corners of her eyes. Before long she’s arguing with D. E. over the placing of dead Catholics vis-à-vis the altar—feet toward the altar and head under the stars of the flag, she points out to him, so that eventually she cries out: But they’re carrying him out of the cathedral head down!
At first the only joking she permits D. E. is at the expense of the other Mrs. Kennedy, the president’s widow, who stood rigid and unmoving on the top step outside for almost four minutes, you can all see me, right?, never mind if the motorcade gets hopelessly delayed, she wants her share of the limelight, and finally Marie does say, half embarrassed, half annoyed: That’s just what she’d like. She’s practically inviting someone to shoot!
Her store of reverence took a serious hit with the news from London inserted into the program.
The fact that a man suspected of the murder of Martin Luther King had been arrested at Heathrow Airport, that they finally caught him after such a long time but on this very morning, today of all days, a perfect link to the spectacle of the senator’s burial—it’s too pat, too calculated, it feels to her like a trick played by grown-ups who think kids are dumber than they really are. The precision work bothers her, and even if she doesn’t quite doubt the truth of the report it still seems damaged somehow by its placement. – They’re trying to distract us! she says angrily. She’s been distracted.
She is also being unscrupulously unjust, heaping criticism on the president’s widow for her desire for yet another bullet and further fame; the current president, Johnson, has long since finished his journey from the New York cathedral back to Washington; the train with her senator’s coffin is still in Pennsylvania Station. The commentators on-screen are so at a loss that they allude to the train that carried the assassinated Abe Lincoln, tell stories from the history of the station, one mentions the renaming of Idlewild Airport.
– Which I undertook solely to keep New York clean: D. E. says incautiously, and immediately worried; she nods pensively, lips pursed. Her dead Kennedy cannot be separated from the staging of his last journey; his family represents him; this is how he would have wanted it. – No: Marie says. She would vote against renaming it Kennedy Station.
Her stubbornness persists for a while yet, the TV set stays on, but she’s lost her agitation and excitement. The course of events has become predictable. She will see the old-fashioned observation platform of the last car many more times, and the coffin placed on six chairs there; the camera in the helicopter will show her both trains many more times; but she still has to face the American character of the drama. There are three trains—the first to intercept any explosives (one reporter quickly corrects his mistake, “dummy train,” into the correct official term: “pilot train”); the third consisting of two diesel engines, for repairs and the consequences of any new assassination attempt. But it is none of the thousand famous friends of the Kennedys on the funeral train who are struck down, it is two onlookers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, hit and killed by an express train going the other direction on the opposite tracks. This interjection of the everyday disappoints Marie, but D. E. doesn’t take advantage of the first sign of boredom, it’s only at nearly two o’clock that he uses Annie’s bath thermometer (prewarmed) plus some demented science to demonstrate that an implosion of the TV tube is imminent. It’s Marie who presses the button, and as a favor to D. E. she takes him to the Mediterranean Swimming Club in the Hotel Marseilles. She keeps her eye on him as they leave the apartment. He says goodbye to Mrs. Cresspahl with a casual air, not a triumphant one.
It’s hot on Broadway, as if the street is being roasted from below as well as above. A predictable crowd is dawdling busily along, with only the heat sweeping the east sidewalks sparklingly clear of people. With no fear of TV cameras, the Upper West Side goes about its business—women in curlers out shopping, young men in undershirts discussing the day in the shade of the awning outside the Strand Bar or carrying bags of laundry into the laundromats. Whatever the TV stations may have shown of the flags at half-mast on Fifth Avenue and the solemn crowds along the coffin’s route, here it’s a normal Saturday. Only a few stores cover their displays with black-framed photographs of the senator, or funeral ribbons, and hardly any are closed; Mrs. Cresspahl can get her four bottles of spring water (the tap water is disgustingly brown from deposits in the main pipes that have washed up from the changing water pressure, since children throughout the city have been turning the fire hydrants into street showers and the adults are sitting at home in front of their TVs for the third day in a row); she has no trouble finding the extras to go with the proper lunch D. E. has graced us with. And Marie eats up much of her sorrow with herring from Denmark on black bread from West Germany. She would have felt that it was indecent to be hungry, but she doesn’t notice, because D. E. finishes not one second ahead of her. We’ll hand the child over to you yet, D. E., you know how to be a legal guardian after all.
By around three the TV is repeating segments of the morning’s broadcasts, since the train doesn’t pass before the cameras often enough and the crowds on the platforms along the route to Washington can only produce the same waving, shouting, and swinging of signs yet again. Marie has the younger brother’s eulogy practically memorized by now and knows in advance the place where his voice starts to break. Meanwhile the train has been driven at reduced speed for the onlookers so many times, and has been plagued by so many mechanical difficulties, that it’s hours behind schedule, and one more of D. E.’s calculations works out: tired from swimming, Marie nods off, right in the middle of the discussion of whether the broken brake shoe on the last coach would be called a tormoznoy bashmak or tormoznaya kolodka. She is so fast asleep that she slides down until she’s lying against the back of the sofa; she doesn’t hear the hollow sound of the engine’s bell on TV coming to an end, nor the closing door.
Riverside Park seems no emptier than usual, and maybe The New York Times tomorrow will have counted for us to prove it. Mrs. Cresspahl isn’t hoping to run into anyone on the steps, dried out in the heat—she’s looking for secluded nooks and finds one just before the underpass to the Hudson River promenade, a staircase well sheltered by trees where she can put her head against Prof. Dr. Erichson’s chest and cry uninterrupted, never mind propriety or pride. In such situations, some people administer regular strokes, down over the other person’s shoulder blade, like you do for a disconsolate horse; this one here just holds tight, doesn’t try to touch you more than you want, doesn’t talk.