The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “They said blunt trauma to the face and chest. A fractured rib and nasal fractures. And echees . . .”

  “Ecchymoses.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bruises. They tried to put a cucumber up my ass.”

  “Jesus, you poor kid.”

  “I’m not a kid.”

  “You are to me. I’m old enough to be your mother.”

  “Sure, if you reached sexual maturity at five.”

  “I was very advanced for my age,” she said. “Can I smoke in here?”

  “If he doesn’t mind.” I tilted my head in the direction of the guy on the gurney next to mine. “Do you mind, mister?” I said. “If she smokes?”

  He merely groaned.

  There was a red prayer candle under his gurney. It was technically illegal, a fire hazard, but this was a Catholic hospital, so what’s illegal?

  “Now.” Jo lit a cigarette. “What happened?”

  “They beat me up.”

  “I can see that. Who’s they?”

  “What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”

  “What?”

  “Hell-if-I-know,” I said, and told her everything: the B. F. Fox van, the intruder in the Savoy with a work order for nonexistent work, done by a nonexistent company at a nonexistent address, and ending when I told them where the diary was. As I spoke, she wrote in her reporter’s notebook, quickly slipped from her purse.

  Ah, so this was no mere social call.

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “I woke on the grounds of the Triple XXX Ranch, and the next thing I knew . . .”

  I was at a liquor store along the service road. The rain had stopped, leaving puddles in the lot. The neon sign above the door buzzed like an insect, the I missing from LIQUORS.

  A bell rang overhead when I stepped into the fluorescence. A man stood on the ladder to the right, stocking shelves above refrigerator cases in his overalls. A woman sat on a swivel chair behind the counter covered with cigar boxes and small racks of sexual aids. On the shelf behind her, “nature” magazines were wrapped in brown paper. The cigarette dropped from the woman’s lips when she saw my bloody clothes and face.

  She opened her mouth, as if to scream, but “It’s okay,” I said. “I need a cab.”

  “I’m calling the police!”

  “Please.” I took my wallet from the pocket of my bloody pants and tried to hand her money, but all I found was the Get Out of Jail Free card.

  Thirty minutes later, the paramedic in the back of the ambulance was leaning over me, saying, “Do you know your name?”

  “Ben Fitzgerald.”

  “Do you know where you are, Mr. Fitzgerald?”

  “In the back of an ambulance.”

  “What happened, Mr. Fitzgerald?”

  “I took a cab.”

  “He’s delirious.”

  At the hospital, the resident injected me with morphine and packed my nose to stop the bleeding and applied the cold compress. And the next thing I knew I opened my eyes to find Jo looking like Vivien Leigh. Dressed like Edith Head. With her bag from I. Magnin.

  I. Magnin was where she bought most of her clothes. That and Bullock’s on Wilshire. But the clothes inside this particular bag were men’s clothes, nice ones: Sulka underwear, socks, a silk undershirt, a Van Heusen shirt, a striped tie, high-rising slip-on Bond Street shoes with square toes and wingtips, and a chocolate-brown worsted pin-striped suit.

  “A suit.”

  “It’s brown for town,” she said. “With black stripings, see?”

  “Sure.”

  “Now let’s get you into some respectable drawers.”

  “I’m not supposed to put on underwear, Jo. I’m in a hospital gown.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead in a hospital gown.”

  “So you’ll die at home.”

  “With dignity—and stiletto heels. Come on.” She held the underwear up. “It’s lovely. Sulka makes such adorable vicuña dressing gowns.”

  “You know you have a tendency to overemphasize certain syllables in words? Webster is turning over in his grave.”

  “Webster never wore Sulka. Go on: I won’t look.”

  She dropped her cigarette to the floor, crushed it with her heel, and handed me the pair of briefs.

  I had some trouble slipping them on under the hospital gown. She helped by lifting my legs.

  “No fair,” I said, adjusting the briefs. “You peeked.”

  “I didn’t have much choice,” she said. “Did anyone ever tell you that you have a great ass?”

  “No.”

  “With or without the cucumber. You could bounce a quarter off that ass.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather buy a Clark bar?”

  She leaned over and kissed my forehead.

  “Hey, that’s nice,” I said.

  She kissed me again: this time, on the mouth.

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Makes my head hurt.”

  “That’s what morphine is for.”

  “Morphine doesn’t work for that kind of hurt.”

  “Maybe this will.” She took a pint of Canadian Club from her purse. “I figured you could use it.”

  “Just don’t let the nurses see.”

  She cracked the seal and looked around. She frowned. “This is awfully familiar.”

  “What?”

  “No water glass.”

  “The service here is awful,” I said. “Waitress!”

  Jo put her left forefinger on my lips. “Shh!”

  “Nurse!”

  The nurse arrived. “Mr. Fitzgerald?”

  Jo spun around, shoving the bottle into her purse.

  “May we have a water glass, ma’am? Make that two?”

  “Mr. Fitzgerald.” The nurse did not move. “I’ll have you know that this is not a restaurant.”

  “No wonder the food is so bad.”

  But the whiskey was good. It helped all kinds of hurt. Jo sat on the edge of the gurney, and we drank it straight from the bottle, since the Evil Nurse never returned. Jo passed it to me, and I passed it to her as I told her that Bobby Kennedy was “the enemy within.”

  “Well, of course!” Her eyes widened. “That’s it! The diary is about Bobby. Well, it’s right there: She called him the General. He was the attorney general, and he wore white socks with a black suit, and he was the ‘altar boy,’ the mama’s boy. Which is what Bobby is. Or was.”

  “It just seems odd.”

  “What?”

  “The attorney general of the United States was fucking Marilyn Monroe? Seriously?”

  “I’ll take that and raise you twenty: The president of the United States was fucking Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the president of the United States.”

  “So that makes him perfect? He has a cock.”

  “I have a cock.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Not all men are cheaters, Jo.”

  “Oh? And you?”

  “The heart of all morality is staying out of certain rooms.”

  “You were caught in a woman’s hotel room.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “That’s an excuse? Tell that to the Kennedys.”

  “I believe in the New Frontier.”

  “The New Frontier is hooey, Ben, like everything else about the guy: It’s public relations, advertising. They sold Jack into that job the way they’d sell soap. Joe Kennedy said this, in an interview. You think that guy believes in what he’s selling? JFK has been packaged for your consumption. You think he’s not cheating on Jackie? When he was elected, one of his aides said, ‘This administration is going to do for sex what the last one did for golf.’”

  Jo said that Kennedy had carried on an “illicit relationship with another man’s wife” during World War II and [redacted] with a woman in Las Vegas. He dated a woman named Ing
a Arvad, who’d attended the 1936 Summer Olympics with Hitler. He dated a woman named Judith Exner, who was also dating Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana. There were others, too—so many that Jack could never remember their names. “Kid” was what he called them. “Hello, kid,” he once told a woman in his hotel during the 1960 campaign. “We have only fifteen minutes.”

  Fifteen minutes was all he ever needed.

  “And then,” Jo said, “there was Florence.”

  “Who?”

  “Florence M. Kater. You never heard of her?”

  “No.”

  She handed me the bottle and said, “Drink.”

  28.

  She was a housewife who had rented a room in her Georgetown duplex to a woman named Pamela Turnure, an aide in the office of the young, ambitious Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. The elegant, lovely, and poised Miss Turnure seemed the very model of the perfect tenant, but Mrs. Florence Kater soon became annoyed by the young woman’s behavior. Mrs. Kater had, as she’d told her own husband, Marty, clearly and repeatedly stipulated that her tenant keep “regular hours” and be “quiet.” The hours the lovely Miss Turnure kept, however, were anything but regular, the time she spent in her small apartment at the top of the stairs anything but quiet, her behavior more befitting a barmaid than what Mrs. Kater would have called a “lady.”

  It turned out that the elegant Miss Turnure was making what Mrs. Kater called “violent love” in the upstairs bedroom, just down the hall past the staircase from Mrs. Kater and her husband. And when, annoyed, one night, by the fifth successive incident of “violent noise” from the “banging” of the bed and what she called “male mooing like an ox,” Mrs. Kater sat up in bed next to Marty, who asked what was wrong.

  “It’s that woman again,” she said.

  “What woman?”

  “The Turnure woman! Don’t you hear it?”

  “Go back to sleep, Mother.”

  “But just hear it,” she said. “There’s a man in the house.”

  “So she has a boyfriend.”

  “It’s against the rules,” Mrs. Kater said.

  She was a short woman whose auburn hair had begun to gray but was dyed and styled every week under the UFO-like hair dryers by Darlene, the single mom, at the beauty shop down the street. She wore pillbox hats and pearls and her hair surrounded the moon of her face in a fiery corona of Aqua Net. She was a woman of convictions that were sealed in the chamber of her heart where nothing could touch them. She liked rules, order, straight lines, neat answers, final decisions. She was a certain person who believed in certainty.

  She was certain that her tenant was lying to her. She found her scuffed slippers near the bed with her toes, wrapped the bathrobe that hung on the bedpost around her faintly shivering body, and walked, still wearing her cap and curlers, to the tenant’s door and knocked.

  She heard giggling. Shushing. Then nothing.

  She knocked again: “What are you doing in there?”

  “Decorating,” Miss Turnure said.

  “I hear a man in there. No men are allowed in here.”

  “I’m moving furniture.”

  “I am trying to sleep. Please keep the noise down.”

  A muffled “sorry,” followed by more giggling.

  But Mrs. Kater was awake. She had never been a good sleeper. Sleep was even harder to come by now that she was older. There were pills by her bed but they made her feel groggy in the morning.

  The male mooing continued. The banging continued. Some decorating! Mrs. Kater thought, wide awake and furious now in bed. It was (she later recalled) 1:16 A.M. when, deciding to catch her pretty tenant in a lie, she went down to the parlor with a bay window overlooking Hope near the river and waited with her legs crossed under the bathrobe in the light from over the road. She waited almost without moving until, at 1:35, the door creaked upstairs; she heard more shushing and giggling as the yellow light spread onto the wall and floor. And into the light stepped a handsome young man with his shoes.

  He held them twinned in his left hand as his right palm grazed the banister. He tiptoed down the stairs, rocking exaggeratedly back and forth, his head lowered as if wanting to know exactly what his feet were doing. Mrs. Kater, never reticent, marched across the floor to the carpet at the base of the stairs and stared straight into the face of the man who looked, surprised, at the fierce little woman in curlers.

  “It was Senator Kennedy,” Mrs. Kater said later in the only interview she ever gave. “Senator Jack Kennedy. He gave me that smile that he gives everyone and held out the right hand that he holds out to everyone and said what I suppose seemed the right thing to say at the time, which was, ‘Good evening, ma’am.’”

  “It isn’t evening,” Mrs. Kater said. “It’s morning. And you have woken me for the fifth time in a row. And for the last time! You with your male mooing like an ox.”

  “I don’t moo.”

  “You mooed.”

  She did not care who this young man was, or how much money his family had, or how powerful his father was, or how far he was going. She did not care who he would become or what it might mean to the country or the world. He was the unwanted guest of a female tenant who had broken Mrs. Kater’s stated rules. The rules were quite clear and they were firm. The rules, however, had been ignored and this was “cause,” Mrs. Kater announced, “for eviction. I will,” she said, “evict her.”

  Kennedy then showed the arrogance—what the Mob called hamartia—that was, despite his charm, the mark of the beast on his family. “Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t care what the fuck you do.”

  And with that he left the house and the sleepless housewife behind. She watched him walk, shoes in hand, his untucked white shirt trailing like a duck’s behind, across the street.

  Now, Mrs. Kater was not timid. She was not a woman to be, as she called it, “deterred.” She was mad now. Her tenant, a guest who had broken the rules and who did not seem to care, was “making violent love”—Mrs. Kater’s words—to the famous senator from Boston. A man who in the darkness of her own living room, carrying his shoes, had said “fuck” to her. To her! Mrs. Florence Kater! Well, she would not sit “idly by,” she said, while two good-looking young people kept her up all night on account of what she called “rutting.” Who did they think she was? Well, she was Mrs. Florence Kater.

  And she had a plan.

  • • •

  She found the Kodak 44A, 127 roll film camera at Don’s Photo on Eighteenth Street. It took twelve pictures a roll, each 44mm square. It was the first camera, Don explained, that featured a plastic lens, but “don’t worry,” he told Mrs. Kater. “It’s very high quality: Perspex.”

  “What’s Perspex?”

  “A glass alternative. From Combined Optical Industries.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Mrs. Kater said. “Can it take pictures at night?”

  “Of course.” He pointed to the flash. “See?”

  She paid for it, returning to the house near the nice park and the river. She ascended the steps that seemed higher each day and removed the keys from the pouch of the purse where the keys always were and put the bronze in the lock of the door. She was turning the key when she heard the giggling.

  Giggling? Like the giggling she had heard last night. And the man’s voice. That man! That man! The senator was back!

  She opened the door and stepped into the living room.

  Her husband!

  Her husband stood, grinning and (she noticed) beltless, before the swivel chair on which the lovely Turnure sat with legs extended, as if applying nail polish, revealing panties beneath her short skirt. She wore hose that made her legs look, as the French say, “more nude than nude,” and she gazed girlishly up at Marty (her husband!) as he lazily slapped the bottoms of her bare feet with the flyswatter.

  It wasn’t even summer!

  “Shoo,” Miss Turnure was saying as Mrs. Kater stepped in. “Shoo, fly.”

  “Marty!”

  Marty spun and
Miss Turnure looked up, the mirth in their eyes dying. Marty lowered the flyswatter, comically raised as if to strike the lovely Miss Turnure. His lower lip protruded. Lovely Miss Turnure herself lowered her pink feet to the floor. They pressed firmly against the wood—but, Mrs. Kater noticed, her toes wiggled luxuriously.

  “Hello, Mother,” Marty said.

  “Don’t call me that. For godssakes, Marty: What are you doing?”

  “Killing flies.”

  “On Miss Turnure’s feet? Dear God!”

  • • •

  That night a siren sounded through the window. Martin, a heavy sleeper, had sunk to bed like a sack of cement and was snoring. He had been snoring since midnight. Mrs. Kater, on the other hand, was awake and staring at the ceiling. Waiting.

  She sighed. The Kodak 44A was under the bed, loaded with film. At 1:25, she thought she heard the door open downstairs. She sat up. She was wearing curlers under a plastic hairnet; white cold cream covered her face. Her ears twitched like a fox’s.

  She heard the creak of wood and footsteps on the floorboards as someone walked through the living room. She heard the same feet climb the steps. She stood and walked across her own floor to the door that was open partway. She peered through it and watched as Senator Kennedy, D-Mass., crept with shoes again in his hand to the door across the hallway.

  A light came from under the Turnure woman’s door. The senator opened the door, and for a second she saw rosy Pamela standing nude against the light from inside. She was smiling. She giggled softly, then opened the door, exposing her pink breasts, taking the senator into her arms.

  They shut the door.

  Mrs. Kater swallowed.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  It never was.

  She walked to Marty in the darkness. “Marty,” she whispered, shoving him with her hands. “It’s them again.”

  “Wha,” he muttered, still snoring.

  “It’s happening again.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  But of course she could not, and knowing that she only had a few minutes left, she retrieved the camera from under the bed and tiptoed down the stairs to the front of the house and saw that the senator, D-Mass., had left the front door unlocked. More villainy! More treachery! For all she knew, half of the night street was now inside her home!