by Mario Puzo
And then on one of his trips home he was plunged into hell. Catherine was ill again, she was not there to greet him. And all his gifts and strength were meaningless.
Catherine had been the perfect wife for him. Not that she had been an extraordinary woman, but she had been one of those women who seem to be almost genetically gifted in the art of love. She had what seemed to be a natural sweetness of disposition that was remarkable. He had never heard her say a mean word about anyone; she forgave other people’s faults, never felt herself slighted or done an injury. She never harbored resentments.
She was in all ways pleasing. She had a willowy body and her face had a tranquil beauty that inspired affection in nearly everyone. She had a weakness, of course: she loved beautiful clothes and was a little vain. But she could be teased about that. She was witty without being insulting or mordant and she was never depressed. She was well educated and had made her living as a journalist before she married, and she had other skills. She was a superb amateur pianist; she painted as a hobby. She had brought up her daughter well and they loved each other; she was understanding of her husband and never jealous of his achievements. She was one of those rare accidents, a contented and happy human being.
The day came when the doctor met Francis Kennedy in the corridor of the hospital and quite brutally and frankly told him that his wife must die. The doctor explained. There were holes in the bones of Catherine Kennedy’s body, her skeleton would collapse. There were tumors in her brain, tiny now but inevitably they would expand. And her blood ruthlessly manufactured poisons to put her to death.
Francis Kennedy could not tell his wife this. He could not tell her because he could not believe it. He mustered all his resources, contacted all his powerful friends, even consulted the Oracle. There was one hope. At medical centers all around the United States there were research programs testing new and dangerous drugs, experimental programs available only to those who had been pronounced doomed. Since these new drugs were dangerously toxic, they were used only on volunteers. And there were so many doomed people that there were a hundred volunteers for each spot in the programs.
So Francis Kennedy committed what he would have ordinarily thought an immoral act. He used all his power to get his wife into these research programs; he pulled every string so that his wife could receive these lethal but possibly life-preserving poisons into her body. And he succeeded. He felt a new confidence. A few of the people had been cured in these research centers. Why not his wife? Why could he not save her? He had triumphed all his life, he would triumph now.
And then began a reign of darkness. At first it was a research program in Houston. He put her in a hospital there, and stayed with her for the treatment that so weakened her that she was helplessly bedridden. She made him leave her there so that he could continue campaigning for the presidency. He flew from Houston to Los Angeles to make his campaign speeches, confident, witty, cheerful. Then late at night he flew to Houston to spend a few hours with his wife. Then he flew to his next campaign stop to play the part of lawgiver.
The treatment in Houston failed. In Boston they cut the tumor from her brain and the operation was a success, though the tumor tested malignant. Malignant, too, were the new tumors in her lungs. The holes in her bones on X ray were larger. In another Boston hospital new drugs and protocols worked a miracle. The new tumor in her brain stopped growing, the tumors in her remaining breast shriveled. Every night Francis Kennedy flew from his campaign cities to spend a few hours with her, to read to her, to joke with her. Sometimes Theresa flew from her school in Los Angeles to visit her mother. Father and daughter dined together and then visited the patient in her hospital room to sit in the darkness with her. Theresa told funny stories of her adventures in school; Francis related his adventures on the campaign trail to the presidency. Catherine would laugh.
Of course Kennedy again offered to drop out of the campaign to be with his wife. Of course Theresa wanted to leave school to be with her mother constantly. But Catherine told them she would not, could not, bear their doing so. She might be ill for a long time. They must continue their lives. Only that could give her hope, only that could give her the strength to bear her torture. On this she could not be moved. She threatened to check out of the hospital and return home if they did not continue as if things were normal.
Francis, on the long trips through the night to her bedside, could only marvel at her tenacity. Catherine, her body filled with chemical poison fighting the poisons of her own body, clung fiercely to her belief that she would be well and that the two people she loved most in the world would not be dragged down with her.
Finally the nightmare seemed to end. Again she was in remission. Francis could take her home. They had been all over the United States; she had been in seven different hospitals with their protocols of experimental treatments, and the great flood of chemicals seemed to have worked, and Francis felt an exultation that he had succeeded once again. He took his wife home to Los Angeles, and then one night he, Catherine and Theresa went out to dinner before he resumed the campaign trail. It was a lovely summer night, the balmy California air caressing them. There was one strange moment. A waiter had spilled just a tiny drop of sauce from a dish on the sleeve of Catherine’s new dress. She burst into tears, and when the waiter left she asked weeping, “Why did he have to do that to me?” This was so uncharacteristic of her—in former times she would have laughed such an incident away—that Francis Kennedy felt a strange foreboding. She had gone through the torture of all those operations, the removal of her breast, the excision from her brain, the pain of those growing tumors, and had never wept or complained. And now obviously this stain on her sleeve seemed to sink into her heart. She was inconsolable.
The next day Kennedy had to fly to New York to campaign. In the morning Catherine made him his breakfast. She was radiant, and her beauty seemed greater than ever. All the newspapers had polls that showed Kennedy was in the lead, that he would win the presidency. Catherine read them aloud. “Oh, Francis,” she said, “we’ll live in the White House and I’ll have my own staff. And Theresa can bring her friends to stay for weekends and vacations. Think how happy we’ll be. And I won’t get sick again. I promise. You’ll do great things, Francis, I know you will.” She put her arms around him and wept with happiness and love. “I’ll help,” Catherine said. “We’ll walk through all those lovely rooms together and I’ll help you make your plans. You’ll be the greatest President. I’m going to be all right, darling, and I’ll have so much to do. We’ll be so happy. We’ll be so good. We’re so lucky. Aren’t we lucky?”
She died in autumn, October light became her shroud. Francis Kennedy stood among fading green hills and wept. Silver trees veiled the horizon, and in dumb agony he closed his eyes with his own hands to shut out the world. And in that moment without light, he felt the core of his mind break.
And some priceless cell of energy fled. It was the first time in his life that his extraordinary intelligence was worth nothing. His wealth meant nothing. His political power, his position in the world meant nothing. He could not save his wife from death. And therefore it all became nothing.
He took his hands away from his eyes and with a supreme effort of will fought against the nothingness. He reassembled what was left of his world, summoned power to fight against grief. There was less than a month to go before the election and he made the final effort.
He entered the White House without his wife, with only his daughter, Theresa. Theresa, who had tried to be happy but who had wept all that first night because her mother could not be with them.
And now, three years after his wife’s death, Francis Kennedy, President of the United States, one of the most powerful men on earth, was alone in his bed, fearful for his daughter’s life, and unable to command sleep.
Sleep forbidden, he tried to stave off the terror that kept him from sleep. He told himself the hijackers would not dare harm Theresa, that his daughter would come safely home. In this he w
as not powerless—he did not have to rely on the weak, fallible gods of medicine, he did not have to fight invincible cancerous cells. No. He could save his daughter’s life. He could bend the power of his country, spend its authority. It all rested in his hands and thank God he had no political scruples. His daughter was the only thing he had left on this earth that he really loved. He would save her.
But then anxiety, a wave of such fear it seemed to stop his heart, made him put on the light above his head. He rose and sat in the armchair. He pulled the marble table close and sipped the residue of cold chocolate from his cup.
He believed that the plane had been hijacked because his daughter was on it. The hijacking was possible because of the vulnerability of established authority to a few determined, ruthless and possibly high-minded terrorists. And it had been inspired by the fact that he, Francis Kennedy, President of the United States, was the prominent symbol of that established authority. So by his desire to be President of the United States, he, Francis Kennedy, was responsible for placing his daughter in danger.
Again he heard the doctor’s words: “It is an extremely aggressive strain of cancer,” but now he understood their full implication. Everything was more dangerous than it appeared. This was a night when he must plan, to defend; he had the power to turn fate aside. Sleep would never come to the chambers of his brain so sown with mines.
What had been his wish? To arrive at a successful destiny of the Kennedy name? But he had been only a cousin. He remembered his great-uncle Joseph Kennedy, legendary womanizer, one who amassed gold, a mind so sharp for the instant but so blind to the future. He remembered Old Joe fondly, though he would have been Francis Kennedy’s opposite politically if he were alive today. Old Joe had given Francis gold pieces for his early birthdays and set up a trust fund for him. What a selfish life the man had led, screwing Hollywood stars, lifting his sons high. Never mind that he had been a political dinosaur. And what a tragic end. A lucky life until the last chapter: the murder of his two sons, so young, so highly placed. The old man defeated, a final stroke exploding his brain.
Making your son President—could a father have greater joy? And had the old kingmaker sacrificed his sons for nothing? Had the gods punished him not so much for his pride but for his pleasure? Or was it all accident? His sons Jack and Robert, so rich, so handsome, so gifted, killed by those powerless nobodies who wrote themselves into history with the murder of their betters. No, there could be no purpose, it was all accident. So many little things could turn fate aside, tiny precautions reverse the course of tragedy.
And yet—and yet there was the odd feeling of doom. Why the linking of the Pope’s killer and the kidnaping of the President’s daughter? Why the delay before stating their demands? What other strings in the labyrinth were there to be played out? And all this from a man he had never heard of, a mysterious Arab named Yabril, and an Italian youth named, in scornful irony, Romeo.
In the darkness he was terrified at how it all might end. He felt the familiar always-suppressed rage, the dread. He remembered the agonizing day when he had heard the first whisper that his uncle Jack was dead, and his mother’s long terrible scream.
Then, mercifully, the chambers of his brain unlocked, his memories fled. He fell asleep in his armchair.
CHAPTER
3
The Member of the President’s staff with the most influence on Kennedy was the Attorney General. Christian Klee had been born into a wealthy family stretching back into the first days of the republic. His trust funds were now worth over a hundred million dollars, thanks to the guidance and advice of his godfather, the Oracle, Oliver Oliphant. He had never wanted for anything, and there had come a time when he wanted nothing. He had too much intelligence, too much energy to become another of the idle rich who invest in movies, chase women, abuse drugs and booze or descend into a religious viciousness. Two men, the Oracle and Francis Xavier Kennedy, led him finally into politics.
Christian first met Kennedy at Harvard, not as fellow undergraduates but as teacher and student. Kennedy had been the youngest professor to teach law at Harvard. In his twenties, he had been a prodigy. Christian still remembered that opening lecture. Kennedy had begun with the words: “Everybody knows or has heard of the majesty of the law. It is the power of the state to control the existing political organization that permits civilization to exist. That is true. Without the rule of law, we are all lost. But remember this, the law is also full of shit.”
Then he had smiled at his student audience. “I can get around any law you may write. The law can be twisted out of shape to serve a wicked civilization. The rich can escape the law and sometimes even the poor get lucky. Some lawyers treat the law the way pimps treat their women. Judges sell the law, courts betray it. All true. But remember this, we have nothing better that works. There is no other way we can make a social contract with our fellow human beings.”
When Christian Klee graduated from Harvard Law School he had not the faintest idea of what to do with his life. Nothing interested him. He was worth millions, but he had no interest in money, nor did he have a real interest in the law. He had the usual romanticism of a young man.
Women liked him. He had a smudged handsomeness—that is, classic features just slightly askew. A Dr. Jekyll beginning to turn into Mr. Hyde, but you would notice that only when he was angry. He had the exquisite courtesy attained by the patrician rich in their early schooling. Despite all this he commanded an instinctual respect from other men, because of his extraordinary gifts. He was the iron fist in Kennedy’s velvet glove, but had the intelligence and courtesy to keep it hidden from public view. He liked women, had brief affairs but could not summon up that feeling of true belief in love that leads to a passionate attachment. He was desperately looking for something to commit his life to. He was interested in the arts, but had no creative drive, no talent for painting, music, writing. He was paralyzed by his security in society. He was not so much unhappy as bewildered.
He had, of course, tried drugs for a brief period; they were, after all, as integral a part of American culture as they had once been of the Chinese empire. And for the first time he discovered a startling thing about himself. He could not bear the loss of control that drugs caused. He did not mind being unhappy as long as he had control of his mind and body. Loss of that control was the ultimate in despair. And the drugs did not even make him feel the ecstasy that other people felt. So at the age of twenty-two with everything in the world at his feet, he could not feel that anything was worth doing. He did not even feel what many young men felt, a desire to improve the world he lived in.
He consulted his godfather, the Oracle, then a “young” man of seventy-five, who still had an inordinate appetite for life, who kept three mistresses busy, who had a finger in every business pie and who conferred with the President of the United States at least once a week. The Oracle had the secret of life.
The Oracle said, “Pick out the most useless thing for you to do and do it for the next few years. Something that you would never consider doing, that you have no desire to do. But something that will improve you at least physically and mentally. Learn a part of the world that you think you will never make part of your life. Don’t squander your time. Learn. That’s how I got into politics originally. And this would surprise my friends, I really had no interest in money. Do something you hate. In three or four years more things will be possible and what is possible becomes more attractive.”
The next day Christian applied for an appointment to West Point and spent the next four years becoming an officer in the United States Army. The Oracle was astounded, then delighted. “The very thing,” he said. “You will never be a soldier. And you will develop a taste for denial.”
Christian, after four years at West Point, remained another four years in the Army training in special assault brigades and becoming proficient in armed and unarmed combat. The feeling that his body could perform any task he demanded of it gave him a sense of immortality.
At the age of thirty he resigned his commission and took a post in the operations division of the CIA. He became an officer in clandestine operations and spent the next four years in the European theater. From there he went to the Middle East for six years and rose high in the operational division of the Agency until a bomb took off his foot. This was another challenge. He learned to use and manage a prosthetic device, an artificial foot, so that he did not even limp. But that ended his career in the field and he returned home to enter a prestigious law firm.
Then for the first time he fell in love, and married a girl he thought was the answer to all his youthful dreams. She was intelligent, she was witty, she was very good-looking and very passionate. For the next five years he was happy in marriage, happy as the father of two young children, and found satisfaction in the political maze through which the Oracle was guiding him. He was, finally, he thought, a man who had found his place in life. Then misfortune. His wife fell in love with another man and sued for divorce.
Christian was dumbstruck, then furious. He was happy; how could his wife not be? And what had changed her? He had been loving and attentive to her every wish. Of course he had been busy in his work, to build a career. But he was rich and she lacked for nothing. In his rage he was determined to resist her every demand, to fight for custody of the children, deny her the house she wanted so badly, restrict all monetary rewards that come to a divorced woman. Above all, he was astounded that she planned to live in their house with her new husband. True, it was a palatial mansion, but what about the sacred memories of the life they had shared in that house? And he had been a faithful husband.
He had gone again to the Oracle and poured out his grief and pain. To his surprise the Oracle was completely unsympathetic. “You were faithful, so that makes you think your wife should be faithful? How does that follow, if you no longer interest her? Of course it is more natural for a male to be unfaithful. Infidelity is the precaution of a prudent man who knows that his wife can unilaterally deprive him of his house and children without a moral cause. You accepted that deal when you married; now you must abide by it.” Then the Oracle had laughed in his face. “Your wife was quite right to leave you,” he said. “She saw through you, though I must say you gave quite a performance. She knew you were never truly happy. But believe me, it’s the best thing. You are now a man ready to assume his real station in life. You’ve got everything out of the way—a wife and children would only be a hindrance. You are essentially a man who has to live alone to do great things. I know because I was that way. Wives can be dangerous to men with real ambition, children are the very breeding grounds of tragedy. Use your common sense, use your training as a lawyer. Give her everything she wants, it will make only a small dent in your fortune. Your children are very young, they will forget you. Think of it this way. Now you are free. Your life will be directed by yourself.”
