He diverted attention during the midday food break by challenging the guard, Landau, to a shooting competition. He had positioned the parked trucks between the contest and the hide he had dug for her. He had marked the hide with a page torn from a book. It was the title page from Hansel and Gretel, one of the books he had bought for her, and she saw it fluttering, white, on the ground. So skilfully had he concealed the hide, that she would never have found it otherwise. It was like those his unit used to dig in the steppes in the east to ambush Russian tanks. They would let the tanks roll past them and emerge and attack the tanks from behind.
‘It sounds a desperate strategy,’ she had said to him.
He had thought about this. ‘All battle is desperate,’ he had said. And he had held her.
The hides on the steppes had been nothing like as elaborate. They had not been so secure and spacious and safe as he made hers. But he was kind and her comfort was a consideration to him as the felling party completed its work and loaded the trucks and departed the denuded wood and night fell and freedom beckoned.
He had gifted her his love and his child and her freedom.
How did you explain that to your daughter? How did you tell something like that to your daughter, when your daughter still had a crush on Paul Newman from when she saw him play Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun?
In the lobby of the Carlyle, they were piping seasonal music through concealed speakers. Nat King Cole was encouraging anyone listening to have themselves a merry little Christmas. Porters bustled in leather shoes that clacked across the glossy marble floor. The concierge wrote something with a fountain pen in the massive ruled ledger on the reception desk. People entered the lobby through the revolving door, the men’s swagger coats and the women’s furs innocent of snow from chauffeured cars and then the sheltering umbrellas held over them in their cosseted transport.
She had cycled across half the country on a stolen bicycle by night to meet him at a rendezvous at a deserted farm by the Odra River. The train ride he planned for them to take through Germany to Austria and the border with Switzerland filled her with appalling fear. She thought seriously about abandoning Hamer and his plan, going to Warsaw alone, or hiding in Poznan, where she knew people. But Warsaw was a charnel house and in Poznan she would endure a botched abortion and bleed to death. Perhaps also by then she had begun to love him.
The events of the war seemed a world and a lifetime ago here, in America, with its abiding wealth and its young president and its new mood of optimism and hope. But Julia saw Martin Hamer whenever she looked into her daughter’s face. She had made him a promise. As the light that had burnt so strongly in him dimmed in his eyes, she had made him a promise. And he had smiled. And the light had died. And the promise had never been kept.
Her struggle with the secret made it seem sometimes, absurdly, as if the war was something that had happened only to her. She had to remind herself that it had touched everyone and many had been damned by it. In Hollywood, the same Sam Fuller made B-movies who had fought from the beach at Normandy to the rubble of Berlin as a grunt with the 1st Infantry Brigade. Jack Kennedy, upstairs in his presidential suite, had lost a brother and almost perished himself fighting in the Pacific. At Cape Canaveral, Werner von Braun ran America’s rocket programme, his pedigree the missiles that had come close to destroying London in the years when he put his science at the happy service of his führer.
In a few weeks it would be 1961. Natasha was seventeen and had a crush on Paul Newman and read JD Salinger and Françoise Sagan. She thought Che Guevara a romantic freedom fighter, Byronic in his flowing locks and jungle combat fatigues. There was a picture of Martin Luther King tacked to her wall. She agreed that Kennedy was her country’s best hope, but only for the want of a more radical alternative. She believed in the New Frontier and talked about voluntary work in Africa or Israel or a shanty town in Brazil. And Julia was going to sit her down and tell her that her father was one of the iron warriors of the Blitzkrieg who had visited a new dark age on Europe. Worse, that he had been a hero of the thousand-year Reich, decorated in the Reich Chancellery, a moist-eyed Hitler presenting the medal with his own, tremulous hands.
‘I’ll lose her,’ she said out loud. ‘I’ll tell her and I’ll lose her and I’ll never, ever get her back.’
Julia looked at the man’s wristwatch on her arm. The phosphorescent paint on the hands and numerals had faded over the years in the sunshine of California and the watch no longer glowed in the darkness as once it so luminously had. She needed it less in the night, though. She slept better than she had in the early period of her arrival and Natasha’s infancy in San Francisco. Her sleep was still imperfect, but it was better than it had been in those early, difficult, desolate years. And so long as she remembered to wind it, and she always did, the watch still kept perfect time. She looked at it in the lobby of the Carlyle because her meeting with the president had been scheduled for 3 p.m. and now it was almost three-thirty.
Jack Kennedy was not naturally a punctual man. It had taken Bobby to eradicate in him the habit of setting off for an engagement at the time he was scheduled to arrive. He had this blue-blooded insouciance. He almost never carried cash, believing the Kennedy name good for a tab anywhere. It was the same thing as when he would get hot on the quay in the sun at Hyannis Port and pull off his sweater and discard it, expecting someone to pick it up after him because someone always did and always had, all his life. He’d tip the contents of a dresser drawer on a bed, looking for a missing cufflink. The household staff at the Kennedy compound were long-suffering about such habits. But Bobby didn’t share Jack’s insouciance. Bobby behaved in a much more conventional way. It wasn’t that he possessed to any greater degree the instincts of the common man. If anything, Julia thought the opposite to be true. But Bobby was austere and strict in observing social protocols. He reminded her of certain orders of Catholic priest, arrogant in the strength with which they stuck to their vow of poverty.
Jack was arrogant only about his intellect. He thought himself much cleverer than any of those rivals who had sought the nomination. Julia thought he was cleverer than Humphrey, certainly cleverer than Johnson and probably cleverer than Stevenson too. He had written two books and would remind you of the fact. But in other ways he was surprisingly humble. The privileges of upbringing had made him tardy and untidy but he remained astonishingly approachable for a man about to assume the highest office in the land. This was why, looking at her watch again, she knew that something was not right. Even if the president elect was behind schedule, she would generally get the offer of a cup of coffee and the latest on Washington from a gossipy staffer in an ante-room in the presidential suite. But she was here instead, waiting, perhaps forgotten about.
She noticed then a man staring at her from the opposite side of the lobby. He was leaning against the wall under an Audubon painting. He was a slight, shortish man in a trilby and a belted raincoat and the fawn fabric of the raincoat was darkened on the shoulders with patches of melted snow. And snow sat like dew on the trilby and dripped as melt-water from its brim. No chauffeured ride for him, or cosseting umbrella on his journey from wherever to mid-town. He was sallow skinned and his gaze was dark-eyed, even and detached. He looked seedy and out of place in the opulence and polish of the Carlyle lobby. But he looked relaxed. There was a defiant, almost militant justification about his positioning and posture. You don’t think I belong, then throw me out, it said. Just come on and try. Seeing that she had become aware of him, the raincoat man smiled slightly, and nodded. The smile was a disconcerting glimpse of narrow yellow teeth.
Julia’s arm was squeezed then and she turned to see Bobby settle on his haunches on the chair next to hers. She could tell from his posture that he wasn’t staying. And she knew with equal certainty that she was not going up to the presidential suite.
‘He’s asleep, Julia,’ Bobby said. He still had the pin in his suit lapel they’d each worn for the count in Cape Cod on the night of t
he vote. He looked very handsome and sincere and boyish. It was hard not to think well of him, looking like this. It was a gift the Kennedys shared. ‘His back went into spasm and the doctor couldn’t pump any more cortisone into him and so he gave him something that’ll make him sleep for a couple of hours. We’ve got a masseur from the New York Athletic Club manipulating his back.’
‘Somebody good?’
‘Well,’ Bobby said, ‘he’s a democrat.’ He smiled at the floor and then looked at his watch. ‘Jack’s got a big speech tonight.’
‘I know. It’s why I dropped by.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Want to go do something for a couple of hours? Buy something?’ He smiled again. At her this time. He was at his most charming, on his best behaviour. ‘There are worse towns for that.’
She almost laughed out loud. The thought of Bobby Kennedy enjoying a shopping spree was beyond her. ‘I’ll go and buy Natasha’s Christmas present,’ she said.
‘Perfect,’ Bobby said. He rose.
‘Do you happen to know that fellow over there?’
Bobby looked across the lobby. ‘Know would be an exaggeration,’ he said. ‘But I know who he is. And what he does. He’s a hack reporter. They think there’s a cover-up concerning Jack’s health. Have you spoken to him?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Don’t. Happy shopping, Julia.’ He bent and kissed her on the cheek and walked away.
You need a shave, Bobby, she thought, buttoning her coat against the snow and walking towards the revolving hotel door. A cover-up concerning the health of the president elect, she thought. It was scandalous. She tried not to glance at the man with the raincoat and the yellow smile. Next they would be saying Joe Kennedy paid for votes. They would be claiming Jack Kennedy had been unfaithful to his wife.
It was dusk when she walked onto Madison Avenue. She was glad to escape the lobby of the Carlyle. It always smelled faintly of cigar smoke there. It was one of the affluent, ubiquitous smells of New York’s plusher public interiors. But it was more than that to Julia. It took her back even more vividly than did the sound of ‘Silent Night’ being sung, to circumstances she would rather not be reminded of. So it was good to get out into the chill of the encroaching evening, which only smelled, on smart Madison Avenue, of truck oil and steaming shit, dumped by the horses ridden by the mounted police, and raw cold blown off the East River and stale heat through subway vents and Charles of the Ritz and Shalamar and Chanel No. 5 dabbed behind the ears and on the necks of Madison Avenue’s well-wrapped, Christmas women.
She would not buy Natasha a Christmas gift. She had said that for Bobby’s benefit. When Bobby was nice, he made you anxious to accommodate him. It was as though the effort of his being nice was so great and so rare that you felt not just privileged, but compelled to do anything you could to sustain his generous mood. You didn’t want to be the one to disappoint and disillusion him. She thought that he was probably aware of this effect. Niceness was just one more tool of manipulation for Bobby. He was a brilliant manipulator. He was, let’s be honest, a gifted and terrible bully. But he did it all in the service of his brother and if you believed, as Julia did, you forgave him for it. Just as if you believed, you forgave Jack his transgressions. But she would not buy Natasha a Christmas gift. It had been just something convenient, in the circumstances, to say.
She had paid already for ’Tasha’s ski trip. The elastic-wrapped roll of hundreds offered by her daughter’s smashed godfather had not in the end been required. Julia smiled, as the snow tumbled through the confused winter dusk of Madison Avenue. When did it grow truly dark, when the lights of skyscrapers illuminated the night all the way up to the stars and the weight of falling snow whitened the ground? Oh, Bill, she thought. Bill. Where do I put you in my heart? That was a hard one. It was harder than finding the precise moment of nightfall on a December street in Manhattan. It was easier to think of what to buy as a token Christmas gift for her impossible-to-buy-for daughter.
The money for the trip to Austria was supposed to be ’Tasha’s Christmas present. But she had one child and earned more money than she could easily spend. Julia didn’t want to spoil her daughter any more than was inevitable, but she did want to bring her pleasure. So she would, of course, buy her a gift; for the day itself. She would buy her a saddle. She would buy ’Tasha a splendid western saddle from one of those dude ranch places out in California. She loved to ride as much as she loved to ski. There was little point in buying her trinkets from Bloomingdales or Tiffany’s. The girl showed no interest in scent or jewellery. She showed little interest in clothes, beyond an attachment to her black winter coat. Julia smiled and shivered at the same time in the cold. She was slipping on the pavement, but so was everybody else, and she needed to stretch her legs after her wait in the Carlyle lobby. Natasha adored her long black winter coat. Julia thought the coat lent itself to romantic fantasies. Natasha felt exotic and perhaps mysterious in the coat. She certainly looked exotic, with her arctic-blue eyes and heavy, flaxen hair tumbling over its tailored shoulders. Her daughter hadn’t the remotest idea of how beautiful she was. It was one of her many impossible charms.
She would go to Greenwich Village and browse in the bookshops there. She would buy a book and smoke a cigarette in a coffee shop and then go back to the Carlyle and maybe, if there was time, talk to the president elect about the tenor of his speech. It was a speech on organized labour and the need to stamp out union corruption. The subject was closer to the heart of Bobby than it was to Jack, she knew. Jack was committed to tackling the corruption. He owed a lot of his electoral support to blue-collar voters and didn’t enjoy their exploitation. But it was a tricky area to sound strong on without seeming to side with the bosses. And apart from when he drew his navy pay, Jack was not a man who had ever worked in a regular job. It was a question of pace and emphasis and vocabulary. It was particularly important now that Kennedy’s every public utterance could become a banner headline. It was the stuff Julia had been helping with for almost three years.
Lots of people helped. Jack tended to write his own speeches and then have Sorensen and Schlesinger and sometimes Pierre Salinger look over them and make their individual suggestions. Jack was inclusive by nature. He was writing his own inauguration speech and was determined to make it the best and most memorable since that delivered by Thomas Jefferson. But in framing the speech, he was seeking opinions on what informed people thought mattered most to the nation. He would be chief executive but would lead a democracy and he never allowed himself to forget the fact. It was why you could forgive the flaws in him, Julia thought. The flaws were considerable. But the man was so much more considerable than his flaws.
She had first become aware of his name eleven years before she met him. In 1947 he had campaigned for the admission into America of eighteen thousand displaced Polish soldiers, victims of the Yalta Conference, expedient pawns in the merciless hands of Stalin. She had read about it in San Francisco when still a college librarian. His campaign had been a success. What had struck her had not been so much the compassion and the selfless idealism (there were not many exiled Poles registered to vote in Massachusetts), but the fact that he still cared, two years after the end of the war, about what happened in the world beyond American borders. It was a time when not very many politicians in America did.
He had not changed at all, she thought, in the years since she had first spoken to him at the Lawford party under a table umbrella in the dripping rain. He would sit with his tie loosened in a chair cushioned or angled to accommodate the discomfort from his back and he would refrain, in her company, from smoking the little panatelas he habitually liked. This had not been discussed between them. Somehow, he had sensed her discomfort with the smell of cigars. They would go over the pace and cadence and drama of the speech he was to deliver. She would make the suggestions everybody made, she supposed, but she would coach him, too. She had polished film soliloquies delivered by Brando and Clift
and by the Welsh actor, Burton. She understood better than most people the relationship between the delivered word and the drama of the moment. On her better professional days, she had seen the first conspire brilliantly to create the latter. She had colluded in that conspiracy. Sometimes, she had orchestrated the conspiracy herself.
It didn’t matter where you were in the room with him. Kennedy would sit, it seemed to Julia, in his own privately cast penumbra of shuttered light. He would be at the still centre of something that shimmered with photogenic attraction and impermanence. His presence provided so compelling a visual and auditory moment she couldn’t help but think it somehow staged. But she was certain it never was. She heard all the stories about the girls, about the mob money with which Sinatra was supposed to have provided his campaign. None of it took away from the odd, fleeting magic of his presence. He possessed such a strong, transitory spell. It was all very paradoxical and she hoped her instinct was wrong. She was confused by it, in the strength of what he said, in the face of his resolve and certainty, when she shared with him what brief time she was allowed to. She felt a gloomy presentiment that the world would not be privileged to enjoy the gifts of John Fitzgerald Kennedy for very long. She prayed she was wrong. But she looked at the faces among his staff sometimes, and she knew that others shared this odd and baseless anxiety.
Julia slithered, her progress as sedate and inevitable as a liner being launched, across the slope of an icy sidewalk. And she decided that the sane time had come to hail a yellow cab to take her to Greenwich Village.
Perusing the East Village bookshops she found a handsome, leather-bound edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which she bought for Bill. She did not think Bill would gain greatly in insights or spirituality from reading Bunyan’s thumping allegory. But he liked muscular prose and would appreciate the thought. It would look good on his bookshelf, there among the signed volumes by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whom he had known in his undiminished days before the war, when Martin Hamer had been his friend. She bought novels in French by Sartre and Colette for Natasha and a translation of the collected verse of Pablo Neruda for herself. She saw a wonderful set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and was tempted, because Jack Kennedy talked a lot about the Roman Republic and its enduring historical lessons. But they were far too heavy to carry. So she went to a store that sold periodicals and bought Paris Match and Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar instead. Jack would have understood. Probably, she thought, smiling, he would have approved.
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