Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  He wondered, sometimes, what his life would have been if his brother and sister had not died. He would not, assuredly, be president, and he liked being president very much. But what of that other life, the one he would have chosen for himself, that was not to be!

  Perhaps there would be time for that later. He would be a young man, barely into his fifties, at the end of a second term. Perhaps he would buy a newspaper, or write a syndicated column. He suspected that he would have been a journalist if fate had not intervened. How odd it would be if it turned out that he could have all of it, his father’s dream and his own independent life.

  Was God so capricious that he gave foe and Kathleen everything — beauty, charm, health, love — and then took it all away, while he gave their brother sickness and loneliness, and then showered him with all that should have been theirs! Was God a jester! A sadist! Or merely an observer. His mother firmly believed that God was just and fair.

  He was not so sure.

  The telephone on her desk jangled, and Mary picked it up.“Mary Springer, please,” said a crisp male voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “This is the White House Press Office. If you can come by this afternoon, we can do your picture with the president.”

  “Sure,” she said, trying to sound offhand. “What time do you want me?”

  “At four. The Oval Office.”

  She put the phone down and made a strange sound, something like a squeak. She was, after all, a member of the White House Press Corps. A shriek would not be professional. She got up, her heart pounding. She was going to meet with the president, in the Oval Office! She went home and changed her clothes four times before deciding on the right outfit: the silk blouse and the tailored skirt with the beige shoes, not too severe, speaking of a crisp — but not unattractive — competence.

  She drove into Washington, singing off-key all the way in. She could hardly believe it. She, Mary Anderson Springer, was on her way to a rendezvous with destiny. (Wrong president, but the right thought.) She wanted to leap out of the car when she stopped at red lights, and pound on the windows of adjacent automobiles and tell them she was on the way to the White House to chat with John F. Kennedy. They would doubtless regard her as daft. But Jay was off on assignment, Milt was out sick and Charlie was at the Rotary lunch, so she hadn’t even been able to crow a bit.

  When she walked into the West Wing, Mac Kilduff, the assistant press secretary, greeted her and ushered her into the Oval Office. Kennedy was seated at his desk, and he rose and walked over to her. She wondered if it was proper for the president to get up for a civilian. She felt the proper protocol might be for her to fall facedown on the rug, but after all, he wasn’t Allah, just the president.

  He extended his hand, a grin on his face. “Always a pleasure to see the Belvedere Blade,” he said. The mischief was there, in his eyes. He was teasing her, but she didn’t mind. The Belvedere Blade was hardly a shining light of the media elite. But John Kennedy — and his press people — knew that there were hundreds of small papers, and taken together they had millions of readers. The Press Office had set up a program whereby their Washington representatives could come in and get their pictures taken with the president by a White House photographer. Each picture would appear — usually quite large — in the hometown paper and would generate no end of goodwill on the part of the newspaper and its reporter. The Times and the Post men might sneer at such obvious press agentry, but the reporters who toiled in relative obscurity for papers in Terre Haute and Salt Lake City and Belvedere, Maryland, who never got to be on Meet the Press or Face the Nation, were delighted with the whole idea.

  “The photographer will be here in a minute,” the president said. “Want a cup of tea? It’s a fresh pot.”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, barely believing that she was going to be sitting in the Oval Office, having a cup of tea with John F. Kennedy. If he had said, “Want a cup of camel piss?” she would have said, “Yes, thank you.”

  He motioned for her to sit in a chair next to his rocker, where he settled as a maid brought in two cups of tea. She sat down and, without thinking, crossed her legs. After she did it, she wondered if it were the proper thing to do. (She rather liked her legs. They were long and slim, and with the short skirt in fashion these days, and the high heels, they could draw a man’s eye. They did. He looked. She thought, Oh, my God, the leader of the Free World is staring at my legs!

  “You’re young to be covering the White House,” he said. “Did you study journalism in college?”

  “No,” she said. “I never went to college. I worked my way up from typist.”

  He looked at her, appraisingly. “That’s very good. How did you manage that?”

  “I sort of brazened it out. I wrote a story and took it to the editor, and he liked it. So I got hired.”

  He laughed. “Once I wrote a story and took it to my father and it got printed. He was the ambassador to England. Your way was harder.”

  She grinned at him. He had a way of poking fun at himself without losing his sense of dignity. “I guess it was,” she said.

  “So, how am I doing in Belvedere?”

  “Everybody loves reading about you. And your family. When we run pictures of Caroline and John, the papers always sell out right away. It’s always the best-read page in the paper.”

  “Umm. How about my civil rights bill?”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s another story.” She told him, briefly, about the housing battle. He listened intently, taking it all in. When he focused his attention on you, it was as if nothing else in the world existed for him, and you felt you were saying the most important words that could be said. She could not help thinking, as she talked, how handsome he was. It was not so much the perfection of his features, which were even but unremarkable, but somehow, when he listened there was a seriousness so intense it was compelling, and when he smiled, or looked at you with those remarkable blue eyes, there was an aura that set him apart from ordinary people. Of course, she realized, part of it was the setting. The Oval Office and the flags and the naval painting gave out the crisp clean scent of power. But it was more as well. The ease with which he seemed to inhabit his own skin was infectious. Even now, despite the setting, she felt perfectly relaxed and at ease chatting with him. It was his doing, not hers. And, she observed, he had a lovely mouth, playful lips, quick to stretch into a smile.

  The photographer came in and snapped several pictures of them as they were intent on their conversation. Then the president rose, and she got up too, and he walked with her towards the door.

  “Do me a favor, Belvedere Blade,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, surprised that he would ask for something from her.

  “Talk to me from time to time. Tell me what they’re thinking in Belvedere. I’m cooped up in this place, and sometimes I need somebody to tell me the truth. Only that. Not what I want to hear. The truth.”

  She nodded. “I’ll do that.”

  Driving home, she thought about that request. It had never occurred to her that the president might need someone to give him correct information. At his command were all the powers of land and sea, a mighty navy, an army that made the legions of Rome seem puny, a network of global communications that stretched from seas to mountaintops and broad plains. Tons of information, oceans of it, poured from across the planet into the tiny end point of the Oval Office.

  But she knew, too, that people had a motive to shape that information into a form pleasing to the ear of the man who sat in the office. People liked to tell powerful men what they wanted to hear. Careers hung on that fact. She saw it even in the microcosm of the Blade, where reporters rushed to Charlie with good news, but when the news was bad, they either kept it to themselves or tried to shape it in a way that would at least keep the teller in a good light. Yes, it was easy to see why a president would need people — even unimportant people like herself — to tell him the plain, unvarnished t
ruth.

  She had noticed, of course, that he had looked at her legs several times. It was a practiced male glance — not a leer or a furtive peek, not something calculated to make her uncomfortable. It was just — there. She wondered, idly, what it would be like to kiss that lovely, playful mouth. Quite nice, she thought. The president would not be one to stick his tongue right in a person’s mouth without so much as a by-your-leave. He might get around to it eventually, but he had manners and would work up to it, she thought.

  What if she were not a respectable married woman, and had wished — like so many other women undoubtedly did — to arouse the libido of the president? What would she have done? Would she have put down the cup of tea, unbuttoned her new silk blouse, and used the same phrase she’d imagined for Jay: “Well, here they are; they aren’t huge knockers, but they are kind of nice. So, do you like them or not?”

  What would he have done? Would he have been horrified? or simply have gotten up from his rocker and jumped on her, right in the Oval Office. And what would that have been like?

  As she pulled up to the turn at the corner of Thirteenth and Piney Branch Road, she realized, with sudden horror, what she had been thinking about. Good God, her slide into degradation had been rapid! The Reverend Mr. Swiggins had been right; even a few evil thoughts could drag one down into the pit of unspeakable depravity. A few days ago she was undressing Jay Broderick, fantasizing about his penis, and now, great heavens, she was thinking about kissing the mouth that had said, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” and flashing her tits in the Oval Office. Charlie Layhmer would be truly horrified this time.

  “Oh, my God, you’ve gone from undressing a staff member of the Blade to the President of the United States, the commander in chief! This is probably treason.”

  “No, it was me who was undressing, he was just sitting there.”

  “Humping on the rug in the Oval Office is just sitting there?”

  “Do you really think it’s treason?”

  “Let’s ask J. Edgar Hoover.”

  So there she’d be, again, in the White House basement, with J. Edgar wielding the rubber hose. The president would walk by, and he’d say, “Edgar, what did she do this time?”

  “Sir, she had a sexual fantasy about the President of the United States. Clearly a felony.”

  “About me! What was it!”

  “It was only a short one, sir, ” she would say apologetically.

  “She flashed her tits in your office, Mr. President. With the flag in full view.”

  “They are very nice ones, Edgar. Do you want to do it again, Belvedere Blade?”

  “Yes sir, if you’d like.

  “Mr. President, remember the dignity of the office! Hail to the Chief! God Bless America! The bombs bursting in air!”

  “Oh, Edgar, you’re such a spoilsport,” the president would say. And he would sigh, regretfully.

  “Sorry, kid, I tried. I like tits, but I guess Edgar’s right. We just can’t have them flashing about willy-nilly, can we?”

  When the pictures arrived a few days later, in a plain brown manila envelope with the words WHITE HOUSE printed in the upper-left-hand corner, she ripped it open eagerly. There were two eight-by-ten glossies. In one, she had her mouth open like a guppy, disgusting, but in the other she was speaking with a properly serious look on her face, and he was listening intently. She took it into Charlie Layhmer’s office, but not before deliberately wiping from her mind any images of boobs or penises, presidential or otherwise.

  He looked at the pictures, and his whole face brightened. He knew, of course, that it was all set up by the Press Office, but it would be a conversation piece at the next Rotary lunch. He would let it slip, casually, of course, that the Blade had a special relationship with the White House, and JFK chatted with its reporters on a regular basis (and, if they were to infer with its editor as well, he would not disabuse them of the notion. The next time he pissed one of them off, they might remember that they were talking to a man with powerful connections and not threaten to pull their ads).

  “We’ll run this three columns, front page,” he said. “Write a story on what you talked about.”

  She went back to her desk and tried to write the story without making it too self-inflating. As she struggled, one of the pictures whooshed away from under her nose. She looked up. Jay was examining it closely.

  “Hey, impressive, you and the president.” He looked closer. “There’s a speck of dust on the print. Mine never have those.”

  “You can get a picture of yourself with JFK, too,” she said. “Sign up in the Press Office.”

  “I’m not a reporter. Just a photographer.”

  “I don’t think that matters.”

  “Yeah, I think I’d like one of those. I’ll send a copy to Father Hannigan. Inscribed. ‘You thought I’d never amount to anything, you old fart. Up yours. Affectionately, your former student.’”

  When the picture ran, Charlie had copies of it laminated so he could hand it out to everybody who stopped by the paper. He mailed copies of it to the advertisers, and he ran it in a full-page house ad for the newspaper which suggested that, along with the Post, and Times and the Herald Tribune, JFK ingested the Belvedere Blade over his morning coffee. She began to realize that she needn’t have worried about Charlie being a mind reader. If he’d had an actual picture of herself and JFK humping on the Oval Office rug, he wouldn’t have been horrified at all. He’d have run it four columns with the caption “Belvedere Blade has close ties with President Kennedy.” Milt would have made them airbrush out her tits, of course. It was a family newspaper.

  She did look at the picture more often than was seemly. She kept a copy of the house ad in her bottom drawer, so she could pull it out and look down at it without anyone else in the city room knowing what she was doing. She could still hardly believe it; there she was talking to the most important man in the world, and he was listening.

  But she did remember what he had asked her. “Talk to me from time to time. Tell me the truth.”

  She looked at the picture, and she made him a promise. That was the least she could do after committing treason.

  “I will,” she said. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

  The jukebox in the Sahara Room played “Ebb Tide”; it usually did on Saturday nights, since that was one of three songs you could dance to. Saturday nights the kids from the junior college invaded, pushing the regulars to the bar or to booths in the corner.

  Sam Bernstein sipped his Scotch and looked at Jay. “Not a bad crowd tonight. The college girls are starting to look good.”

  “Keep thinking statutory rape.”

  “Right now I think twenty years in Sing Sing might be worth it.”

  Jay sipped his beer. “So how come you aren’t in D.C. this weekend?”

  “I got a lot of stuff to do on the urban renewal coverage. Things are really popping.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to shoot the meeting at AME Zion tomorrow night.”

  “Hey, Jay, see that one over there? The blond? She looks like she might be at least nineteen.”

  Jay looked. “Seventeen, not a day more.”

  “She’s cute.”

  “Cute? Yeah, they’re all cute. But they’re so goddamn young. They don’t even remember Tom Dewey, for Chrissake.”

  “This is your criterion for an acceptable woman?” Sam asked. “That she remember Tom Dewey?”

  “Or Alger Hiss. I’m not picky.”

  “Great pickup line. ‘Hey, babe, come to my place and we’ll talk about Alger Hiss.’”

  “My only other one is ‘Wanna fuck?’ Alger Hiss is classier.”

  “So how did you stand on Joe McCarthy?”

  “I prayed for him a lot.”

  “You did what?”

  “He was practically a saint at St. Anthony’s High. Every morning after the Our Father we said ‘And God bless Senator McCarthy.’”

 
“You were praying for Tail-Gunner Joe?”

  “What did I know? They told us he was going to get the Commies. Commies torture Catholics and make them renounce their faith.”

  “Joe Stalin had a purge in Northwest Washington?”

  “They had me believing it.”

  Sam got up, and Jay watched the young girls and boys, dancing with their cheeks pressed together. The sight depressed him. He traced the swirling pattern of the Formica table with his forefinger, wishing he had a dollar for every night he had spent like this, drinking in a bar and thinking maybe he’d pick up some girl. He thought, inexplicably, about Debra Paget, with whom he had been in love for about five years — before his taste got refined and he started thinking about Jacqueline and her white gloves. He had seen every forgettable movie Debra Paget had ever made, epics in which she wore a sarong or a toga and spoke her lines with the sincerity of a realtor selling underwater lots in Florida. He fell in love with her bee-stung lips, but even more with her shoulders, which were small and round and achingly vulnerable. It was dumb to fall in love with shoulders — everybody else lusted after boobs. Debra Paget’s boobs were very nice — the parts that hung out of the togas, at any rate — but it was the shoulders that got to him. Debra Paget, where was she now? Probably married to a Texas oilman, a great, vulgar hulk of a man who bought her pearls and humped her on satin sheets, the small shoulders pinned under a chest curved like a barrel, sprouting coarse hair the color of sand. Sweet Debra. Life was cruel.

  He smiled to himself, thinking of the agony of loving Debra Paget. He’d had the most amazing fantasy life from early on, and Debra had been a big part of it. She was a near occasion of sin for him, no doubt about that. He had thought himself the world’s biggest lecher. Walking to confession, he left a visible trail of filth behind him like the contrail of a jet. Of course he always guessed wrong and got the booth with Father Hannigan.