Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  On November 22, the family had rushed into the Old Man’s room and turned off the television to keep him in the dark about what had happened. When they finally got up the nerve to break the news to him, Big Joe began to scream and thrash around, spittle flying out of his mouth and his face turning purple. He tried desperately to form sounds, and according to what his caretakers later told me, he screamed a slightly different nonword, one they hadn’t heard before—something like “Nuuto”—over and over, before slumping down in his wheelchair and falling asleep.

  They were convinced that this was an insignificant anomaly, the snap of a synapse brought on by the intensity of the event, resulting in a slight and momentary deviation from the same sound he had been making for so long. But I always thought it was the Old Man’s heroic effort to name the man he believed responsible for his son’s death: Fortunato.

  Nicky Fortune survived the Old Man by several years. Said to be “in retirement” when he was finally subpoenaed by the Church Committee in 1976 for hearings that marked the first and last time Mob involvement in the assassination was ever investigated by Congress, he was by then a stately white-haired figure wearing mulberry-colored linen leisure suits and glasses that darkened when he stepped into the sunlight.

  The other aging mobsters snuffled and sniggered as they bird-walked their way through their appearances before the committee. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for Fortunato’s turn and anticipated the furor he would create when he took his seat proudly and, now that the baby teeth of his vengeance had grown to their maturity, told the country how he had made the Kennedys pay on the installment plan for the death of his daughter. But he failed to show up on the day he was scheduled to appear, and the federal marshals dispatched to bring him in returned empty-handed.

  I concluded that the reason for this anticlimax was that he knew he would be asked about things other than his personal vendetta and decided at the last minute to go into hiding rather than betray the blood obligations of omertà. I thought maybe he would surface again with second thoughts. But twenty-five months later Niccolo Fortunato’s very partial remains, identified by the one finger not totally decomposed, were discovered in a toxic waste site in Milwaukee, and this story which I have carried with me all these years finally came to an end.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  As I’ve said, Jack never uttered another word about our brief interlude in Hollywood after we left town. During the years of his climb to the summit, when he was becoming a different person from the imp of the perverse I’d first known—his wit scripted; his heart grown lazy from lack of exercise; his sexual appetites now so bureaucratized that he didn’t bother to learn the names of the parade of women who serviced him, simply referring to each of them generically as “Kid”—he never once spoke of Val or even said her name. I didn’t either, and in time I stopped wondering about what had really happened to her, although the ache of her absence never left me.

  At first I thought Jack might have preserved her memory in some secret chamber of his heart, a place he visited in secrecy and solitude. But eventually I decided that he had simply banished her altogether as a heartache and an encumbrance and a drag on his forward motion.

  But once, only once, he slipped up and showed me how wrong I was.

  After he beat Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. for the Senate in 1952, thus exacting delayed revenge against the Brahmins who had oppressed two generations of his Irish peasant forebears in Massachusetts, Jack, although just thirty-five, was ready to spend the rest of the decade in a final push to the top. But some of his advisers told him that while it might be permissible to be single as a senator, he’d better marry if he didn’t want to be derailed on his way to the top by competitors in the Democratic Party who were already concerned enough about his rise to start a whispering campaign against him.

  At first he was incredulous. “How can a pussy-mad erotomaniac who gets a headache if he doesn’t get laid at least once a day be accused of being queer?” he once asked me, of all people. Then he walked away before I could answer, shaking his head and muttering, “This is total horseshit.”

  But over the next year, the advisers kept on him and he finally began to think that maybe he should find a woman he could stand being around for more than a few hours at a time. Jackie, of course, was the perfect answer to his problem—someone easy to look at whose rococo personality was able to hold his interest intermittently, the coincidence of their names underscoring the fact that in their collaborative selfhood they were two peas in a pod. He knew she’d be an asset and decided to tie the knot.

  His bachelor party in September 1953 was one of those great Kennedy moments. All his friends were there, roaring boys for the evening participating in a choreographed swagger of mead-hall vaunting, jokes sharp enough almost to break the skin, sudden outbreaks of slap-boxing, attempts to give wedgies, and shot-glass mano-a-manos. The Old Man, still functional then, sat on the sidelines with the handful of other elders repeating twice-told tales of possibly apocryphal bachelor parties he had attended in prewar England, where naked call girls hidden by dangling lace cloths roamed around on their knees under the long refectory tables, secretly unzipping the pants of the guests in evening dress and fellating them while they ate.

  “It was so English,” he gave one of his beaver-toothed smiles. “The idea that nobody was supposed to be able to tell by the look on your face when your custard truck crashed.”

  A few minutes later, Dave Powers stepped up on a chair and yelled for quiet. Jack’s gofer, body man and master of Paddywhackery, Powers also had a decent tenor, and this evening, after clinking a spoon on a champagne flute to quiet the room, he launched into a quavering a cappella version of “Danny Boy.”

  Jack rolled his eyes and pretended to endure it, and when Powers segued into “Tura Lura” he yelled, “One song’s bad enough, but a medley?” Still, he loved the performance and whistled through his fingers while it went on.

  I thought Powers would at last stand down after “Red Is the Rose,” but he signaled for quiet again. “One last favorite of the groom-to-be,” he said.

  Then he launched into “How Are Things in Glocca Morra,” now a standard as a result of the long-running success of Finian’s Rainbow once Yip Harburg finally got it to Broadway in 1947.

  My heart jumped and I watched Jack closely for a reaction. Under the influence of the sentimental moment and the free flow of alcohol, many were daubing at their eyes as Powers sang with a crooner’s dreamy hand movements, but Jack’s minimalist smile didn’t waver, not even in the verses I thought might break him:

  Is that willow tree still weapin’ there?

  Does that lassie with the twinklin’ eye

  Come smilin’ by and does she walk away,

  Sad and dreamy not to see me there?

  After Powers was done singing; after the tournament of toasts, each one pitilessly evaluated after the fact by Jack himself; after the naked girl jumped out of the cake and ran for her life holding her hands over her sweet spot like a chastity belt; after the last champagne bottle was emptied and the last joke told and everyone had filed out—including the Old Man and his thugs, and all the cousins and friends and the hangers-on and poseurs and old Navy pals—there were only four of us left in the room.

  Teddy was standing with an arm propped against a fireplace mantel. Bobby, exhausted from organizing the event, had sunk into a Turkish chair, his tux jacket flung on the floor and the ribbon of his black bowtie hanging down on his white shirt front. Jack sat on the floor resting his always aching back against the front of the sofa on which I lay nearly passed out. He was slightly tipsy, a very rare state for him, and smoking a cigar.

  “It’s not the end of the world, Johnny,” Teddy thought his big brother needed to be comforted for what lay ahead. “Think of all the muff you’ve left behind on the trail of broken hearts. Every one of them a trophy.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby saw an opening for one last fraternal dig. “But also think about the math that l
ies in your future: not thousands of women, but one woman thousands of times.”

  Jack seemed lost in his own thoughts as they rattled on. Then, when the brothers momentarily ran out of words, he looked up at the ceiling and said, “There was this one girl.”

  I waited with my heart in my mouth. When he didn’t say anything else for a long moment I thought he’d gotten control of himself and that would be that. But the nature of the event had jimmied the lock on the door I thought he’d never open again. Rotating his cigar slightly with his thumb and forefinger as he blew on its glowing tip, he continued, into the poetry of the memory that he now allowed to rise up within him.

  “What I remember most is the heat of her, the kinetic warmth, in those last few days when our time together was ending. We would go off to our room and get in bed and I would feel a sort of panic because of her heat which was beyond sweating, so hot I felt singed by her. She was above me—that’s how I remember it—her face like a pale moon dodging in and out of clouds of hair, sometimes dropping tears on my face, always pressing her hands down on my chest as if performing artificial respiration. And her faint humming. It wasn’t loud, but it was musical, accompanying the effort to make me live and breathe and come to her. I felt that she was in me, rather than vice versa.”

  Then he stopped.

  His brothers looked at each other, stunned. They had never heard anything like this from him before. Neither had I.

  “Sounds like a great lay.” Bobby finally gave a nervous grin after a long silence. “But like Teddy says, marriage isn’t the end of the world. Consider it a jumping-off point. And don’t worry, Johnny, there’s more where she came from.”

  Jack continued looking up at the ceiling, nodding slightly without agreeing, as he blew smoke rings that chased each other furiously but dissolved without ever catching up.

  This oral history by Lemoyne Billings was conveyed to the John F. Kennedy Library by a deed of gift dated May 9,1981. In accordance with Mr. Billings’s wishes and the notarized letter of transfer he signed, this document is to remain sealed from public view and usage for no less than forty years after his death, which occurred in New York City on May 28,1981.

  —Daniel Goldman, Senior Archivist