Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Who is it?”

  “Harry Field. Tom!”

  “Oh, Tom.”

  “I’m calling to tell you how sorry I am.”

  “About Jack?”

  “About Jack.”

  “It’s all right, Harry. I had three Valium as soon as I heard the news. Now I feel all right. I had already taken three Valium before that. It may be for the best. Jack was a tired man. I used to feel sorry for him, but I think it is all right now because I am tired too. I understand his need for rest.”

  “How are you?” I asked as if we must absolutely commence this conversation over again.

  “I am fine,” she said, “taking into account the limitations of my condition. But I do not know if you want to hear about that.”

  “I do want to,” I said. “I wanted to reach you so soon as I heard the news about Jack.”

  “Do you know, I was just lying here. I was looking out the window. It is a nice day in Chicago. It is odd for something like this to occur on a sunny day.”

  I was about to ask how Sam Giancana might be, and hesitated, but then it occurred to me that it would not matter very much what I said considering how much Valium she had taken. “How is Sam these days?” I asked.

  “I do not see him anymore. He sends me a check every week, but I do not see him. He became so angry at me that we stopped speaking. I think that was because I kept cutting my hair shorter.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I do not know why. Well, yes, I do. A girlfriend of mine named Willie said that long hair absorbs more than its share of nourishment from the physical system. I did not know that I could afford any excessive expenditures of vitality. So I kept cutting my hair. Then I had it shaved off. It seems more simple to wear a wig. It’s a blond wig. I think it would look good on me if I were not overweight. I am also having a hysterectomy next week.”

  “Ah, Modene.”

  “Do you have tears in your eyes, Harry? I do. I guess that is one for the Guinness Book of World Records. To shed tears after swallowing three extra Valium.”

  “Yes, I have tears in my eyes,” I said. It was almost true. With but a little more effort, I would not have had to tell another lie.

  “You were very sweet, Harry. I used to believe sometimes that you and I might have a chance, but, of course, there was always Jack. I want you to feel good about that, Harry. You see, we met too late. Jack and I were already star-crossed. Now he’s gone. I do not find that a shock. I knew he did not have long to live.”

  “How did you know, Modene?”

  “Because I do not have much time either. It is in my palm, and it is in my charts. It is in my innermost feelings. I always knew that I would age quickly. I suppose I felt that I only had half as much time for it all.”

  There was a pause. I could think of nothing to say. Therefore, I said, “If my travels take me to Chicago, should I come to visit?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t want to let you look at me now. It is too late. If it were not too late, I might think of seeing you again, but, Harry, it is too late. I am en route to the end of the road. Where the shadows dwell.” She paused. “Do you know,” she said, “it has just come over me that Jack is dead. That lovely man. He is dead. It was so fine in character for you to call, Harry, and give your condolences. Otherwise, I would be the only one to know that I am a widow. In a manner of speaking, I am. Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You are a fine man,” she said.

  She hung up on those words.

  39

  THE NEW REPUBLIC, DEC. 7, 1963

  BY JEAN DANIEL

  Toward three o’clock, Fidel Castro declared that since there was nothing we could do to alter the tragedy, we must try to put our time to good use in spite of it. He wanted to accompany me in person on a visit to a granja de pueblo where he had been engaging in some experiments.

  We went by car with the radio on. The Dallas police were now hot on the trail of the assassin. He is a Russian spy, says the news commentator. Five minutes later, correction: He is a spy married to a Russian. Fidel said, “There, didn’t I tell you? It’ll be my turn next.” But not yet. The next word was: the assassin is a Marxist deserter. Then the word came through that the assassin was a young man who was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, that he was an admirer of Fidel Castro. Fidel declared, “If they had had proof, they would have said he was an agent, an accomplice, a hired killer. In saying simply that he is an admirer, this is just to try and make an association in people’s minds between the name of Castro and the emotion awakened by the assassination. This is a publicity method, a propaganda device. It’s terrible. But you know, I’m sure this will all soon blow over. There are too many competing policies in the United States for any single one to be able to impose itself universally for very long.”

  We arrived at the granja de pueblo, where the farmers welcomed Fidel. At that very moment, a speaker announced over the radio that it was now known that the assassin was a “pro-Castro Marxist.” One commentator followed another, their remarks becoming increasingly emotional, increasingly aggressive. Fidel then excused himself: “We shall have to give up the visit to the state farm.” We went on toward Matanzas where he could telephone President Dorticos. On the way he had questions: “Who is Lyndon Johnson? What is his reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?” Finally, and most important of all, “What authority does he exercise over the CIA?” Then, abruptly, he looked at his watch, saw that it would be half an hour before we reached Matanzas, and practically on the spot, he dropped off to sleep.

  40

  August 12, 1964

  Dear Harry,

  Is this our longest period of not writing? It is curious. For months, I have had no desire to reach you by way of a letter, yet so often I was truly close to picking up the phone. I couldn’t, however. After your lovely declaration to me, was I to cry out, “Hello, Harry,” as if that impassioned avowal from you did not exist? Yet I could not say, “I feel as you do.” For, I don’t. I certainly didn’t. Your last letter arrived on Monday, the 25th of November, probably about the time that Jack Kennedy’s funeral procession was progressing—oh, so slowly!—up Pennsylvania Avenue toward St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Your poor letter. I read it while sounding the bottom of the most lugubrious mood I have ever known. That night I was certain Lyndon Johnson would be a disaster, and I expect, sooner or later, he will fulfill this prediction, for he impresses me as the greatest of William Faulkner’s characters—the linchpin of the Snopes family.

  No surprise, then, if I felt lugubrious. To lose a man one values and have him replaced by a person one despises does give meaning to the sour melancholy of the word. By the next day, I recognized that a condition so dismal was but one more form of protection against real horrors. Your letter became a monstrosity. I thought: What if all these unspeakably horrid speculations about Marilyn Monroe in which you and Cal seemed to revel were also a contribution to Oswald’s deed? A clergyman I know once said that American society was held together by God’s sanction. All that kept us from bursting into our vastly inchoate parts was the divine blessing. One has to wonder if that is not exactly what we have used up. How many transgressions does it take? I thought of Allen and Hugh and that frightful game they played with Noel Field and the Polish Communists, and then I tried to ponder upon my own small horror in Paraguay, which I still cannot confess to you, nor wholly to myself. I writhed at the dreadful game Hugh wanted you to play with Modene, and the business that brought you and Cal to Paris—I don’t even want to contemplate what that might have been. Yes, multiply such deeds, and one has to wonder what kept Jack alive so long—particularly when one adds his own transgressions to the list. So I disliked you for declaring that your devotion to me was absolute and then in effect saying, “Well, that’s done. Let’s move on!” I had, as you can see, no immediate happy reaction to your letter, but I
was suffering that night from my own pauper’s share of widow’s grief—a pauper’s share. For if I had always thought that I liked Jack Kennedy, now I recognized on the night of his funeral day that I had loved him in all my starched and chaste fevers—what an unfeeling fool I had been about my near motives. Of course, innocence is my protection against Daddy’s madness entering my skull, and Hugh’s maniacal will taking possession of my womb. I blamed Hugh most of all for Jack Kennedy’s death—I was close to madness.

  Do you know what saved me? It was the thought of Bobby. I fell in love again, but this time with no carnal nestings concealed. I think I came to love Bobby Kennedy out of the depth of his suffering. I have never been in the presence of a man wounded that deeply. They say he said shortly before he went to bed on that dire Friday night in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House, “God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well,” and then he closed the door. The person who told me this was standing in the hall and heard him break down, heard that little monolith of granite, Bobby Kennedy, begin to sob. “Why, God?” he cried out.

  When Bobby asks, “Why, God?” the question has to hover over a metaphysical divide. He is that serious, after all. I believe he was asking whether there is indeed an answer, or can the universe be absurd? For if an answer existed, he would have to have the courage to descend those terrible steps into the depth of his motive and his brother’s motive over all these years. Were they striving for the ideal of a more exceptional America, or were they enjoying the perversities of the game?

  You know, for months after that, he went to his office and met with his assistants, tried to conduct business, and was like a dead man. He did not care. He knew that he had lost more than a brother. The private telephone he had once had installed on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk so that the Director of the FBI was obliged to pick it up and answer him personally was now moved to Buddha’s outer office, where the secretary, Miss Gandy, is adept at saying no to all persons less august than her sacred boss. Bobby was now less august. Lyndon Johnson and Buddha are old friends, and the Attorney General’s office has been put out on a siding. The great war against the Mafia that Bobby saw as the fundamental purpose of his job was put out with him. Neither Hoover nor Johnson had any particular wish to take on the Mafia. Hoover never gets into a battle he is not certain of winning, and the American Communists are a much easier foe; Lyndon Johnson is not about to fight all those boys who oil his gears. So the Syndicate flourishes, and Bobby is out. Hoover doesn’t even speak to Bobby anymore. Johnson, you see, has given Hoover a special exemption from the law that requires old government bulls to retire at the age of seventy. “The nation cannot afford to lose you,” said Johnson to J. Edgar in the Rose Garden before the press and the cameras. Perhaps you saw that moving moment in the history of our republic.

  So, yes, the brother was lost and the power was stripped. Jimmy Hoffa remarked to a reporter, “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.” Yes, the ultimate irony is that he is no longer dangerous to his enemies. A secretary-treasurer of one of the Teamster locals sent a letter to Bobby explaining his plan to solicit money to “clean, beautify, and supply with flowers the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  Yet, Bobby is not free of guilt. There is always the shade of Marilyn Monroe. And Jack’s Modene. And all of the others who have to disturb his Catholic sense of behavior. I do not know what went on with Cal and you and Hugh and Castro but I can guess, and I do not know if Bobby knew what he was activating when he kept pushing on Harvey and Helms. Bobby knows so little about us. One night he began to talk of muffled suspicions and stifled half-certainties, and said to me, “I had my doubts about a few fellows in your Agency, but I don’t anymore. I can trust John McCone and I asked him if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and he said he had looked into it and they hadn’t.”

  I told that story to Hugh. You know how rarely he laughs aloud. He actually struck his thigh. “Yes,” he said, “McCone was just the man to ask.”

  “What,” I asked him, “would you have answered?”

  “I would have told Bobby that if the job was done properly, I would not be able to give a correct answer.”

  It is sad. Bobby wanders about in that deep pain. His blue eyes are now a clouded milky sick-pup color. He strives to conceal the hurt, but his expression continues to say: “I am going to live, but when will the pain cease?”

  Do you know Jacqueline Kennedy has dimensions I did not expect. She was reading Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, searching for her own answers, I must suppose, and she made a point of lending Bobby the book. He spent hours, then days last Easter reading and memorizing passages. The one that meant the most was from the Agamemnon. Bobby read it to me: “Aeschylus says: He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

  In every life there is one literary passage meant for each one of us alone. Bobby does not acquire his understanding of new subjects through his intelligence as do you or I or Hugh. We proceed by pushing our intelligence to the cutting edge, hoping to explore the nature of new material; Bobby acquires new knowledge through his compassion. I believe he has greater funds than anyone I ever encountered. (At least within Omega. They say that when he plays touch football now, he knocks old friends down for the fun of it. Alpha, obviously, still can snarl.) But compassion, “that awful sum of pain” (Euripides, my friend), is close to him. He has underlined passage after passage in The Greek Way. “Know you are bound to help all who are wronged,” he takes from the Suppliants. Yes, he will be an expert yet. He also quotes Camus: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” Do you know that the first time he went out after Jack’s death it was to a Christmas party at an orphanage—yes, the last live nerve of a politician can never be extirpated—but nonetheless, it had to be painful to go out, my God, you could see it hurt him to walk—there was no part of his body between chest and groin that was not in pain. He entered the playroom of the orphanage where these children were all waiting to see him, and although they had been romping they now went silent. It was such an extraordinary event for them. One little boy, about six years old, a black boy, ran up to him and cried out, “Your brother’s dead. Your brother is dead.” I think the boy wanted no more than to be recognized as someone who was bright enough to remember what he had been told: A big man was coming over whose brother had died. This was the man.

  I was at that orphanage, Harry. You can conceive of the rent in the atmosphere. “Your brother is dead!” We all turned away. Some awful wave of disapproval must have washed out from us all over that little boy, for he began to cry. Do you know, Bobby seized him up and hugged him close as kin, and said, “It’s all right. I have another brother.”

  That was when I fell in love with Bobby Kennedy. Harry, I suspect that I tell you all of this not to avoid facing into the wonderful first page of your letter, but to attempt to explain to you that in the course of feeling love for Bobby, and so opening myself at last to some stirrings of compassion for others, I have come nearer to you. I have a feeling about us. I do not know how it will come about, nor in which year, nor do I even hope for it to happen too quickly—I confess a fear bordering on awe. Knowing our small compass for wisdom or suffering, I fear that our pains, when they arrive, will seem all-sweeping. But this I do confess—I am no longer in love with Hugh. That is to say, I love him; I respect him enormously; and all too many of my physical reflexes, to put it so, have been dragooned. They respond to him. He owns my body more than I wish, or desire. But I do not like him any longer. He has such contempt for the dead Kennedy and the live one; and there I have drawn the line. I cannot feel compassion for his horrible boyhood any longer. I am a wife incarcerated in the jail that holds all unhappy wives—I have half a marriage. I am one wit
h the legion of women who have half a marriage.

  So I think that our day will come. You must wait, you must be patient—we cannot make a single false move. I would be too afraid for you, for me, and for Christopher. But I do live with the first page of your letter, and perhaps time will wait for us. Perhaps there will come a time that is our time. I never said this before. I say it now. I love you. I love you with all your faults, and, God, Harry, they are compendious, you lout.

  Kisses,

  Kittredge

  AFTERWORD

  WASHINGTON ROME

  1964–1965

  1

  PATIENCE WAS TO PROVE AN OPERATIVE WORD. MY AFFAIR WITH KITTREDGE did not commence for another six years, and then, for several years we would meet once a week, or sometimes, given the demands of circumspection, no more than once a month, until the dreadful hour when Hugh and Christopher took their tragic fall, and we were wed in the haunted ravine of that event.

  All this lay ahead. I was to live for a long time with the shock of the assassination in my heart and in my bones, and it was even in the air I breathed at Langley, until time reduced at last my sense of that momentous catastrophe and it blended into the history and whispers of the halls, the weight of the fact now no greater than itself—another impost on the guilt of our lives.

  Harlot, however, turned unrelenting in his powers of exaggeration. He knew the seed of consternation that now dwelt in the taproot of many an Agency dream; he memorialized The Day. He ended with a monologue I was to hear more than once, if always with different and most specially chosen associates.

  “On that unique Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963,” was the way Harlot usually began, “I can tell you that we all congregated in the Director’s meeting room on the Seventh Floor for a bit of summitry, all of us, satraps, mandarins, lords paramount, padishahs, maharajahs, grand moguls, kingfish, the lot.