Chapter 9 - Present Tense
While Auggie was sleeping, Claire went downstairs to check out the Internet. She snuck down the steps and tried to muffle the sounds of her computer booting up. She went to Google and typed in ‘MARILYN MONROE.’ As usual, that topic brought up thousands of hits. She noticed sites like, Marilyn Monroe: Home Wrecker, From Glamour to Scandal, and Marilyn: The Lady is a Tramp. They seemed a bit harsh, but Claire passed them over for, The Rise and Fall of Marilyn Monroe. “Fall?” she thought to herself. “What do they mean by fall?”
Claire clicked on the site and several photos popped up. She read about Marilyn’s history from her first film to her last. That’s when Claire noticed that Marilyn’s last film was “The Misfits,” just as it had been in the previous timeline. Her face suddenly ran red as she feared she wasn’t successful after all. She scanned the page for a death date but found none. She was utterly confused at this point and decided to read on. She clicked on Web site after Web site, searching for as much information as she could find.
She found a site called The Life and Times of Marilyn Monroe and began reading about a car accident...a hitman...shock and dismay....the mafia...the Kennedy’s....the scandal. Claire couldn’t believe her eyes. The man she ran into that night in the past was a hitman named Tony Piccelli. He named the Kennedy brothers as his bosses. The Kennedy’s denied the accusation, saying it must have been a ploy by the mob to soil the Kennedy name and get the Attorney General off of their backs. Regardless of who did it, Marilyn, obviously feeling betrayed, spilled the beans about both sorted affairs with the Kennedy brothers. She gave a tell-all interview to Life Magazine and the press went wild.
Jack Kennedy resigned the presidency. Resigned? Claire thought, suddenly feeling a cold chill down her spine. She didn’t expect her actions to have such far reaching consequences. “But wait, if he resigned, does that mean he wasn’t assassinated?” Claire thought. She continued reading.
Bobby was disgraced and stepped down at the same time. “Does this mean he never ran for president”? Claire thought. Because if he never ran for president then he was probably never assassinated either. Claire’s mood took a 180 turn. She was suddenly beginning to feel like she fixed the world. Eunice and Jackie Kennedy got divorces and took the men for half of their fortunes. “Serves them right,” Claire thought.
But then Claire found her way to the dark side of the story. Her precious Marilyn was disgraced. People shunned her as a whore and she never worked in show business again. Claire paused at that, just staring at the screen. “My God, what did I do?” she thought. “Well, Marilyn didn’t work again, but she lived, that’s something, right? She kept going. Jack Kennedy died in 1963, a month after his November divorce and resignation. He was found on his bed with a single gunshot wound to the head. “How can that be?!” Claire accidentally said out loud. She whipped her hand over her mouth and looked around the room. She sat as still as a statue for the next few minutes to make sure that she hadn’t woken up Auggie. When she was confident that he hadn’t heard her exclamation, she read on.
Investigators believed Jack’s wound was self-inflicted, but the crime scene had been tampered with, so the investigation remained opened even now. Claire was saddened by this revelation. She tried to convince herself that a month longer on this earth outweighed the tragic way in which he died. “His life was tragic the first time around,” Claire rationalized in her mind.
She continued her quest for information. It turned out that Bobby Kennedy was killed in 1970 in a mysterious shooting involving alleged mafia members. Claire rationalized in her mind once again, “Well, he got to live two more years, though, that’s something, right?” She was growing more and more skeptical that she had done the right thing.
Claire went over these events and justifications in her mind, but she kept coming back to the same conclusion. Marilyn, Jack and Bobby Kennedy all lived longer than they had originally in Claire’s timeline, “so what was the harm?” she thought. Claire continued scouring the Net for more information. She read the same accounts over and over again. Marilyn’s fall from grace, and the Kennedy brothers’ deaths. Finally she came across a site that said that Marilyn Monroe was still alive and living in reclusion in Los Angeles. “Oh my God, she’s still alive,” Claire said again accidentally out loud. This time she didn’t care if Auggie heard her or not.
Marilyn was still alive which means that Claire still had hope that perhaps she did the right thing by going back in time. She decided right there and then that she had to speak to Marilyn again. Claire needed some assurance that someone appreciated what she did. She wasn’t sure what she was going to tell Auggie, but she would worry about that tomorrow. For now, Claire shut down her computer and back to bed with conflicting emotions swirling inside, and making her sick to her stomach.
The next day, Auggie had a million more questions. “Did it hurt?” “Was there a jerking motion?” “Who did you see?” “Where did you go?” Claire made up more stories to keep her eager husband happy. He was pleased with himself and his invention and Claire didn’t want to do anything to spoil his celebration.
Auggie walked around all day trying to pick the proper name for the device. Auggie’s Time Machine, Time Warps by Auggie, and The Augginator, were all sillier than the first. Auggie was like a child who had just rode his first bicycle by himself without the training wheels. “When can I train you to use the controls so I can go back?” was his next question.
“I--I don’t know. I don’t know if I would be comfortable having your life in my hands, Auggie,” was Claire’s honest reply. After seeing how she had changed the timeline so much when all she intended to do was save one life, Claire was hesitant for anyone to go back again. Auggie seemed suspicious of her inhibitions, but nothing further was said about it.
Over the next week, every chance Claire got, she researched Marilyn on the web, in libraries and bookstores. She wanted to know all she could before she paid Marilyn a visit. Claire read one scathing account after the other. The Marilyn Monroe she knew and loved was covered up by the horrible scandal. A scandal that Claire helped create. “No, no I didn’t make it,” she would convince herself. “Marilyn did that all on her own. It’s not my fault she chose to name names,” Claire rationalized. But it was getting harder and harder to reassure herself.
Claire was at the bookstore looking through a book titled, Marilyn Monroe and Other Scandalous Women of Our Time, when a curious onlooker started up a conversation. “Awful, isn’t it?” said the woman.
Taken aback, Claire replied, “oh, yes.”
The woman was older than Claire, perhaps in her fifties. She had salt and pepper hair and was carrying a huge straw purse. The dress she was wearing had the most awful flower pattern Claire had every seen. The woman looked at Claire over small reading glasses.
“That woman took down the entire Kennedy family in one fail swoop,” she said.
“I guess so. She’s kind of the Monica Lewinsky of the sixties I suppose,” Claire chimed in.
“The who?” the woman looked confused.
“Monica Lewinsky,” Claire repeated. Seeing that the woman still looked confused, Claire added, “You know . . . President Clinton’s mistress?”
This time the woman looked at her like she had two heads. She began laughing. Claire furrowed her brow and asked, “What’s so funny?”
“I’m quite sure we’ve never had a president named Clinton, Sweetie.” With that, the lady turned around and decided to move on to more sane people to converse with.
Claire was frozen. “We never had a President Clinton? How can that be? How could saving Marilyn have changed so much?” she thought to herself, feeling desperate. “Impossible,” Claire said out loud, trying to reassure herself.
Still bewildered, she decided to look for American History books. She browsed isle after isle of books like The Kennedys: America’s Disgrace, and Kennedy, Portrait of a Broken Man. She finally decided on a bo
ok called The 1960s. She purchased the book and brought it home to study.
Auggie showed slight concern for Claire’s new interest in history, but he was too busy coming up with marketing schemes and public relations operations to really take an active interest. He thought it was just curiosity after having seen part of the decade that Claire never lived in up close. Most nights, he locked himself in the lab.
Claire had never been a veracious reader, but she swept through The 1960s like a tornado. Her face fell stark white as she read through the chapter on 1962. Lyndon Johnson didn’t handle the Cuban Missile Crisis with the same cool, collected patience that Kennedy had in Claire’s timeline. On the contrary, he panicked. On October 20, 1962 the United States launched massive air strikes against missile instillations in Cuba. Khrushchev responded by attacking Florida. After seeing the destruction in Havana and Miami, the entire world was calling on the two leaders to bring the conflict to an end or risk launching World War III. The U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of La Paz on October 29, 1962 and war was averted, but not before hundreds of thousands of civilian lives were lost.
In the mid 1960s we got out of Vietnam almost as quickly as we got in it. “This has to be a good thing,” Claire thought, because so many lives were saved. President Nixon defeated Johnson in 1964 and under the leadership of General Westmoreland, the Vietnam conflict ended before the outset of the 1960s. The only problem was that, in this timeline, tactical nukes were used. The President wanted to see what the USSR and Chinese reaction would be. It wasn’t good. A little town in West Germany was wiped off the map in retaliation. The Cold War was bigger and stronger than it ever had been in the old timeline.
The turmoil didn’t end there. Without help from the Kennedys, the civil rights movement stymied. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, there were no others to take up where he left off. The civil rights movement would take an additional decade to come to fruition. Without Bobby Kennedy to take on the mob, their territories increased and opposition decreased. Ted Kennedy never became a senator and Mary Jo Kopechne never went to Chappaquiddick because she was never a member of the Bobby Kennedy for President Campaign staff. “Well,” Claire thought, “there are two definite pluses.”
Then she saw 1969. “Russia lands on the moon,” a subtitle read. “We never landed on the moon?” Claire was astounded. “Of course, that was Jack Kennedy’s dream.” Our nation wasn’t in a hurry to follow through on the dream of a disgraced man. The result? The Soviets beat us to it. The Soviets beat us to a lot. “Everything changed,” Claire thought. Even music was different. Without an extended conflict in Vietnam, folk music never dominated the music scene. The Beatles wrote sappy love songs and The Who never broke a thing on stage. The once turbulent 60s from Claire’s timeline were a relatively tame decade in this timeline. In fact, the most notable event besides nuclear weapons was the fall of the Kennedy family.
The final chapter of The 1960s had a brief synopsis on how the events of the 1960s affected the proceeding decades. Claire found out that although thousands of lives were saved in Vietnam, tens of thousands were lost in the 1980s in the Saudi-Iraqi War. OPEC tried to strong arm President Reagan into increasing petroleum prices to an all time high. Rather than roll over, Reagan went to war. The Saudi-Iraqi War was now more like Vietnam than Vietnam was. Thousands flocked to Canada to avoid the draft. Claire kept going over the facts in her mind, especially about the Saudi-Iraqi War. How could her actions have led to an entire war? She was grief-stricken. She felt sick to her stomach and thought she might pass out.
But even with that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and all of the knowledge Claire was gaining, she was still convinced she did the right thing. She saved a life. Was it her fault that saving a life turned out to have such huge consequences? Who’s to say all of these changes weren’t for the better? Who’s to say the current timeline wasn’t how it was supposed to be all along? “Perhaps Marilyn should have a say herself,” Claire thought. She was ready to meet her idol face to face.
Saving Marlilyn Page 9