‘Our husbands and I inquire as to whether you would do us the honor of taking tea and refreshment at our Shore home this evening,’ read the note on colored stationery, without letterhead. I had become so trained to look for the letterhead first that the blankness of the First Lady’s notes seemed almost high-handed.
And it was well-known scuttlebutt—scuttle, I suspected, from the butt of Margaret’s old cartoonist, who had sketched me as a W.C.-Fields-nosed flower girl, holding the ’68 train of Johnson as bride—that Mrs. Johnson wanted Lyndon out, and saw his office/me as the rival she’d never had in life. ‘Our husbands,’ then, fit what I would hear.
Too, we could never name the heady perfume that had risen from Mrs. Johnson’s notes and seduced Duverger from the first. He had shopped, sniffing, for days, and had fixed the central scent as essence of bluebonnet before he had become unable to leave our home altogether.
Duverger was dying of something that was not malaria. All four of my salaries went to Bethesda, where Duverger was not covered and where the staff, like Aquinas before God, could think of nothing to do but define his decline via what it was not. The doctors between whom I had shuttled my seated, coughing husband could isolate nothing but a pattern in his susceptibility to the uncountable diseases that came and thrived in the petri dish that was Washington.
For these last many months I had lain at nighttime holding a man dying of a pattern, encircling with my white arm gray ribs that became more and more defined, feeling pulses through a wrist too wasted narrow to support the length of its long-nailed hand, watching his stomach cave and his hips flare like a woman’s and his knees bulge like balls from his legs’ receding meat.
‘Suis fatigue. M’aimes-tu?’
‘Tais-toi. Bois celui-ci.’
‘M’aimes-tu?’
An ever weaker me, blinking the cornered translucence of all my connections, I saw Lyndon himself fading before a carnivorous press corps; a war as nasty and real and greenly-broadcast as it was statistical and fuzzily bordered to those of us who read and acted on the actual reports; a reversal of his presidential resolve that the government’s raison was before all to reduce sum totals of suffering; a growing intuition of his own frailty as two more well-concealed infarctions left him gaunt and yellow and blotched, his eyes seeming to grow to fit the face that settled into itself around them.
Duverger, who hadn’t the strength to leave, was gone. He had taken my notes and left none of his own. Nothing in the vase below the mantel’s autographed photo and little Klee. Amid tissues and the popped aluminum shells of antinauseants, I read the finely penned note from Mrs. Johnson, hand-delivered by one of my own distant subordinates in Mail. I breathed at what rose from the note.
‘Wardine has prepared some praline mix which I find to complement camomile tea very nicely, Mr. Boyd.’
‘Thank you, Ma’am.’
‘Thank you that will be all Wardine.’
The black servant in black stockings and a doilied apron wiped away the last of the cold cream that had masked the First Lady’s round sharp face. She adjusted the pillow under Mrs. Johnson’s feet and withdrew, her back always to me.
I coughed faintly. I wiped my forehead.
‘My own husband is near death, child.’
I had arrived late by taxi at the Johnsons’ private home, retained from his days as a Senator, a turreted post-plantation thing on the very eastern shore of the Potomac delta that pouted lip-like out into the Atlantic. I could hear ocean and see lightning bubbling over a cloud roof far out to the east’s sea. A horn in a channel moaned. I felt at the glands in my throat.
‘You don’t look well at all yourself, Mr. Boyd.’
I looked about. ‘Will the President be able to join us, Ma’am?’
She looked at me over her cup of steam. ‘Lyndon is dying, child. He has had great and additional… trouble with the illness that has been troubling him all these years.’
‘He infarcted again?’
‘He has asked not to be alone on this night.’
‘He’s supposed to die tonight, you’re saying?’
She readjusted the hem of her robe. ‘It’s a great trial for all of us who are close to the President.’ She looked up. ‘Don’t you agree?’
I was wary. There were no doctors. I’d seen only the ordinary number of Kutner’s men at the gate. I sniffed meatily. ‘So then why aren’t you with him, Ma’am, if he doesn’t want to be alone?’
Lady Bird took a tiny bite of praline. She smiled the way elegant ladies smile when they chew. ‘I am with Lyndon every moment of every day, dear child. As he told you. President Johnson and I are too close, we believe, to afford one another real company or comfort.’ She took another little bite. ‘Perhaps those come from others?’
I sipped at the sweet tea in the wafer-thin china cup. The cup was almost too delicate to hold. A wave of complete nausea went over me. I hunched and closed my eyes. My ears rang, from medicine. I wanted to tell Mrs. Johnson that I didn’t believe what she, who had flown to Dallas in a fighter-jet, was sitting there calmly eating a cookie and telling me. I really wanted to tell her I had troubles of my own. I didn’t want to tell her what they were. I wanted to talk to Lyndon.
‘So I’m to go sit up with him, Ma’am?’
‘Are you all right, Mr. Boyd?’
‘Not exactly. But I’d be honored to sit with President Johnson.’ I tried to swallow. ‘But I very much doubt, with all due respect, that the President is actually dying, Ma’am. No two consecutive presidents have ever died in office, Mrs. Johnson.’ I had researched this for a form letter reassuring citizens who’d written for reassurance in 1963.
Mrs. Johnson adjusted her robe under herself on the pink sofa. Everything about the room was as a First Lady’s personal private parlor should be. From the mirrors with frames carved like tympana to the delicate oriental statuary to the crystal place settings spread out upright for display on white shelves to the spiraled rug whose pattern swirled into itself in a kind of arabesque between my couch and Mrs. Johnson’s. I closed my eyes.
‘You too, Mr. Boyd,’ she said, snapping a cookie, ‘seem marked for a… a kind of frailty by the evident love and responsibility you feel toward others.’
I heard an expensive clock tick. I decided what this was about and somehow just withdrew my thoughts from Duverger and the books. I swallowed against a hot flash. ‘I’m not in love with the President,’ I said.
She smiled wonderfully as what I’d said hung there. ‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Boyd.’
‘I’m sure it looks bad, my being sick just when he’s sick,’ I said. I held onto the arm of my sofa. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard several stories about me and about how I’m supposedly in love with Mr. Johnson and follow him around like a love-starved animal and want to be intimate with him and enjoy such a close working relationship with him because I love him.’ I’m afraid I retched the bit of the camomile and praline refreshment I’d taken. It hung in a dusky line of retch over my topcoat and slowly collected itself in my lap. ‘Well I’m not,’ I said, wiping my mouth. ‘And please excuse me for retching just now.’
‘Mr. Boyd,’ she said. ‘Dear Mr. Boyd, I have no reservations about your feelings for Lyndon. I appreciate beyond my poor power to express it your devotion to my husband, to the responsibility and tasks the Lord has seen fit to assign him. I appreciate your feelings toward my husband more than I can say. And I believe I understand what those feelings are.’ She looked delicately away from my lap. ‘I was speaking of your husband.’
I was dabbing at the puddle, swirled with praline. ‘And this my-husband-your-husband business, Ma’am. I’d just ignore as much scuttlebutt as you can. Rumors are seldom all true,’ I said. I stood, to facilitate my dabbing.
Mrs. Johnson’s forehead furrowed and cleared. ‘Your husband, Mr. Boyd.’ She produced a sort of pink index card as I stood there. ‘M. Duverger,’ she read, ‘a Caribbean Negro with diplomatic immunity, civilly married by you in 1965.’ She looked
up from the card. ‘He has been kind enough to provide Lyndon the company and attention he has required during his illness.’
I tried to focus on the rug. ‘Duverger is here?’
‘As you were north, doing what Mr. Donagan described as integral postal work for our organization in New Hampshire,’ she said, tidying the cookie tray. ‘He arranged for Mr. Kutner of the Service to bring your husband to our home to be presented to the President. Who is dying.’
I sneezed. She sipped. I looked for something in her face. I had an unreasonable need to see whose script was on the index card she’d produced. These balanced off urges both to race to Duverger’s side—though the Shore home was huge, and I’d never been past the rear hall—and to know how on earth Coby Donagan could have said the work I’d been north doing was important. I wanted so many different things all at once that I could not move. The First Lady sipped. ‘So Mr. Johnson knows I have a husband?’ I said.
‘How, child, could he not know?’ Lady Bird smiled kindly. ‘How could he not know the heart of a young man who has emptied his life and his own heart into the life and work of Lyndon Baines Johnson?’
I began to feel for Mrs. Johnson a dislike beyond anything I’d ever felt for Margaret. She sat there, coiffed, in a robe, eating pralines. I felt simply awful. ‘Is Duverger all right?’ I said hoarsely. ‘Where is he? Has he died? He’s been dying, is the thing. Not Mr. Johnson. That’s why I think I’m sick. Not Mr. Johnson.’
‘They have been conversing together, Mr. Boyd.’
‘René has hardly any English.’
She shrugged as at the irrelevant. ‘They have had several conversations of great length, Lyndon has told me. And preserved them, as you two did.’
‘How could Duverger not have said he was coming here? Is he dead?’
‘M. Duverger has impressed Lyndon as a truly singular Negro, Mr. Boyd. They have discussed such issues close to Lyndon’s heart as suffering, and struggles between sides, and Negroness. It was the best my husband has felt since you and Mrs. Teane finally removed him from his office, he told me.’
‘Is he dead, I said,’ I said.
She ate. ‘Are you as privy as I to what my husband feels, David?’ She looked for response. I wasn’t giving any if she wasn’t. ‘My husband,’ she continued, ‘feels responsibility as you and I feel our own weight. The responsibility has eaten at him. You have watched him. You have been his sole comfort for almost a decade, child.’
‘So you really are afraid he’s in love with me.’
Whether from resemblance or real grief, I noticed, she answered questions as Lyndon did; she answered them as tangents, on a kind of curve that brought her now in close, now out on her own course. Now she tittered Southernly, a white hand to her mouthful of refreshment. Her hair was confined in a kind of net.
‘Lyndon cannot, he insists, for the life of him understand why new generations such as your own see everything of importance in terms of love, David. As if it explained feelings lasting years, that word.’
I could see Kutner’s shadow, and another, move from foyer to kitchen. I rose.
She said, ‘Love is simply a word. It joins separate things. Lyndon and I, though you would disagree, agree that we do not properly love one another anymore. Because we ceased long ago to be enough apart for a “love” to span any distance. Lyndon says he shall cherish the day when love and right and wrong and responsibility, when these words, he says, are understood by you youths of America to be nothing but arrangements of distance.’
‘Is that Kutner and Coby Donagan I saw going into the kitchen?’
‘Please sit.’
I sat.
She leaned in. ‘Lyndon is haunted by his own conception of distance, David. His hatred of being alone, physically alone, no matter atop what—the area of his hatred in which your own devoted services have been so invaluable to us—his hatred of being alone is a consequence of what his memoir will call his great intellectual concept: the distance at which we see each other, arrange each other, love. That love, he will say, is a federal highway, lines putting communities, that move and exist at great distance, in touch. My husband has stated publicly that America, too, his own America, that he loves enough to conceal deaths for, is to be understood in terms of distance.’
‘So we don’t even love each other, then?’ I stared at her crystal place settings, arranged and never used, hot with nausea. ‘Two close people can’t love each other, even in a sort of Platonic way?’
‘You stand in relations, my husband says. You contain one another. He says he owns the floor you stand on. He says you are the sky whose presence and meaning have become everyday.’
I coughed.
‘Surely love means less?’
I realized, again, what Mrs. Johnson was talking about. I almost retched again.
‘Mrs. Johnson,’ I said, ‘I was talking about Duverger and me.’ I tried to lean as she had. ‘Does Mr. Johnson know that Duverger and I love each other? That my first thoughts, when I found the notebooks and him gone, were for him? Does he know that I love?’
The shadow apart from Kutner’s was Wardine, the First Lady’s Negro servant, who was skilled with cold cream.
‘And who wrote that card, about me, you read from?’ I said.
‘Someone in the room above us,’ Mrs. Johnson said, not pointing, ‘where the two husbands inside us have withdrawn,’ not looking at me once, ‘have removed themselves to positions of distance, must know that we love, child. He simply must. Don’t you agree?’ She inclined to the china pot, lifted its wafery lid to let Wardine check its contents. Upstairs. I was on my feet. She could tell me to sit as much as she liked.
‘The President won’t die, Ma’am.’
‘Don’t you agree?’
Wardine poured for her mistress, then came for my cup.
‘Ma’am?’
She leaned, dispensing sugar, speaking to her own sharp bird’s face as it trembled on the surface of her tea like the moon on water. ‘I asked you, boy, whether or not you agreed.’
The smell of my soiled topcoat was the smell that came, faint, from under that door. The gently feminine clink of Lady Bird Johnson’s willow-necked spoon was the masculine sound of my heavy old undergraduate ring rapping firmly against the carved panel of that great bedroom door. I rapped. A spasm passed through me, my gut, and I held until it passed. Something else moaned, businesslike, in the harbor.
The big door was silent, tonight, in November, 1968.
Forget the curved circle, for whom distance means the sheer size of what it holds inside. Build a road. Make a line. Go as far west as the limit of the country lets you—Bodega Bay, not Whittier, California—and make a line; and let the wake of the line’s movement be the distance between where it starts and what it sees; and keep making that line, west, farther and farther; and the earth’s circle will clutch at that line, keep it near to what it holds, like someone greedy with a praline; and the giant curve that informs straight lines will bring you around, in time, to the distant eastern point of the country behind you, that dim master bedroom on the dim far eastern shore of the Atlantic; and the circle you have made is quiet and huge, and everything the world holds is inside: the bedroom: a toppled trophy has punched a shivered star through the glass of its case, a swirling traffic-flickered carpet and massed wooden fixtures smelling of oil soap and the breath of the ill. I saw the big white Bufferin of the President’s personal master bed, stripped to sheets, variously shadow-colored by the changing traffic light at the Washington and Kennedy Streets’ intersection below and just outside. On the stripped bed—neatly littered with papers and cards, my notecards, a decade of stenography to Lyndon—lay my lover, curled stiff on his side, a frozen skeleton X ray, impossibly thin, fuzzily bearded, his hand outstretched with dulled nails to cover, partly, the white face beside him, the big white face attached to the long form below the tight clean sheets, motionless, the bed flanked by two Servicemen who slumped, tired, red, green. Duverger’s spread co
ld hand partly covered that Presidential face as in an interrupted caress; it lay like a spider on the big pill of the man’s head, the bland, lined, carnivore’s mouth, his glasses with clear frames, his nasal inhaler on the squat bedside table, the white Hot Line blinking, mutely active, yellow in a yellow light on Kennedy. Duverger’s hand was spread open over the face of the President. I saw the broad white cotton sheet, Duverger above and Johnson below, the sharp points of Johnson’s old man’s breasts against the sheet, the points barely moving, the chest hardly rising, the sheet pulsing, ever so faintly, like water at great distance from its source.
I wiped mucus from my lip and saw, closer, the President’s personal eyes, the eyes of not that small a person, eyes yolked with a high blue film of heartfelt pain, open and staring at the bedroom’s skylight through Duverger’s narrow fingers. I heard lips that kissed the palm of a black man as they moved together to form words, the eyes half-focused on the alien presence of me, leaning in beside the bed.
Duverger’s hand, I knew, would move that way only if the President was smiling.
‘Hello up there,’ he whispered.
I leaned in closer.
‘Lyndon?’
JOHN BILLY
1. WAS ME SUPPOSED TO TELL SIMPLE RANGER
Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed. Brought up the Ranger to date on Chuck and Mona May Nunn’s boy Chuck Junior, closest thing to handsome and semi-divine we got here in Minogue Oklahoma, good luck bad luck man, who everything that hit him stuck and got valuable, but on whom of this late time the vicissitudes of human relatings had wrought grief and retinal aggravation to such a extreme that C. Nunn Jr. lost his temper to a nameless despair and got him some vengeance.
Told Nunn’s tale to Simple Ranger, the damaged dust-scout, who is a old man, watched his farm blow away in the hard and depressed highwindy days of the Bowl, got farmless, but however angled some job out of F. Delano R.’s WPA and set himself up in a plywood shack on the Big Dirt between here and El Reno, drawing government pay as a watcher for major or calamitous dust. Stayed out there near on forty years til looking at the dust made him damaged. Now he’s too old not to be back, roving the streets in a kind of crazy d.j. vu, Minogue Oklahoma’s own toothless R. Winkle, wants to re-know the lives of his people and their children after forty alone years of trying to make out the shape of his farm in the air. Buys me my personal beers with the checks some Washington D.C. computer sends him too much of, and I tell Simple Ranger things about Minogue only he don’t know.
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