Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  “Whores,” Sherri said.

  Harry reddened and nodded.

  “Harry, I used to sleep with men I didn’t even know, just so they’d give me booze,” Sherri said. “There’s nothing you can’t say to us. We’ve heard it all.”

  “I always felt dirty when I’d been with them. The things they did, the way they talked. And they weren’t even ashamed. Sometimes I feel like going back to them just for … relief, because my wife and I, we’re not together. But I don’t want to do that ever again. I want to wait for my wife. I can’t make it without her.”

  “You’re doing it on your own, Harry,” Sherri said. “Don’t give anybody else the credit.”

  “But she’s who I’m making it for,” he said, “she and my daughter. I didn’t know how much”— his mouth was dry, he found it hard to say the words —“how much I loved her until I didn’t have her anymore. See, I have to earn the right to have her love me. And that’s what I’ve been doing, these last few months.”

  “Love isn’t something you earn,” Jim said.

  “Yes it is. I used to think it was something you got for free. I got for free, anyhow. But it isn’t. I have to earn it.” He paused. “I want to be a person worth loving.”

  “You are,” Sherri said. “You already are.”

  He shook his head. “No, not yet.” He looked around at the group. “But I will be.”

  The word came back from Birmingham; King was going full speed ahead with the campaign. The administration had asked him not to press now, with Police Commissioner Bull Connor still in office, but King had protested that the movement had a momentum of its own, it could not be stopped.

  He put down the phone and sighed. “That damn preacher is going to fuck me out of a second term,” he said, to the air.

  There was no rancor in the words that was not totally personal. For the son of a rich man, he had grown up peculiarly free from the casual bigotry of the upper classes. He had moved through Riverdale and Palm Beach and Hyannis Port without picking up any of the nasty, small burrs of prejudice that clung to most such people. Perhaps it was the curiosity he had inherited from his mother, for he had traveled more than most young Americans and met all sorts of people, high and low, and as long as they didn’t bore him, he did not judge them. The war was part of it; all sorts of men were thrown together by chance, and you might owe your life to someone with a very different pedigree.

  However it happened, he had come to an ease with people that was genuine. At his inauguration, as he waltzed gracefully and naturally with the wives of Negro officials, the word spread through the Negro community like an electric current. Eisenhower, though he had sent the troops to Little Rock, had kept a distance from people of a darker shade. Adlai Stevenson, the great liberal, had asked a friend to telephone Coretta Scott King when Martin was in jail, but he did not speak to her, on the excuse that they had not been formally introduced. (A young white civil rights worker named Harris Wofford was convinced that it was really Stevenson’s discomfort with Negroes, which he had observed on more than one occasion. He switched his allegiance to Kennedy.)

  His instincts, when he acted too fast to be tempered by caution — came from a basic decency and sense of fair play. During the campaign, his staff bickered loud and long over whether the candidate should telephone Mrs. King when her husband was jailed on a trumped-up charge in Georgia. How would it play in the South? But when his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver walked into his hotel room and said he ought to make a call, the candidate, weary from a long day’s campaigning, said, “What the hell, that’s the decent thing to do.” The phone call may have won him the election.

  His brother Bobby, whose emotions lay much closer to the surface, blew his stack and screamed that Shriver and his allies could have wrecked the whole campaign. But then, a few days later, when Bobby learned that King was going to get five months on a chain gain for driving with an out-of-state license, and was denied bail, he ignored good form and legal ethics to call the judge personally and ream his ass, saying that any decent American judge would have King out on bail by sundown. He was.

  The man in the Oval Office sat back in his chair and thought about race, something he did not like to do. What the hell more did King want, anyhow? He had used his Justice Department as a battering ram to force open Ole Miss, to protect the Freedom Riders, to enforce voting rights. Didn’t that man understand he had a whole world to contend with? An entire legislative package — education, housing, highways, defense — to get through Congress? A network of southern senators and congressmen could be coiled into an iron mesh that would keep anything from getting through. If you moved slowly enough, carefully enough, stroked and flattered and favored, you could get past them. But King was not going to let him do it.

  Damn.

  He’d had no background and no particular interest in matters of race when he came to public life. Harry Belafonte had briefed him, during the campaign, and found him untutored and unemotional on the matter, but willing to learn. Belafonte had told him it was King, not Jackie Robinson or any of the other Negro celebrities, who was the key to the hearts of the colored people; Belafonte said that civil rights would become to them a sacred crusade, and it was Martin who was at its center.

  The preacher’s father — after the phone call — came out for Kennedy, “despite his Catholicism.” The candidate learned of the statement as he was walking towards the campaign plane, carrying three-year-old Caroline in his arms.

  “That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it?” he mused. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father.” Then he grinned. “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

  When he had met with Belafonte, he knew Martin Luther King only as a preacher who had led a bus boycott in Montgomery, a minor figure on the political scene. How odd, he thought, that two men from such different places and such different temperaments should have been cast in leading roles in the ever-fascinating theater of politics.

  The two had met, on occasion, but they were always somewhat ill at ease with one another. Perhaps it was because each man saw in the other something missing in himself. For Martin Luther King, conscience called him to huge and noble deeds, into the lions’ den. Yet there was a side of him that loved the celebrity status those deeds brought with them. He railed against the “Cadillac preachers” who neglected the needs of their people, but he also loved riding in Rockefeller’s private plane and dining with the literati on Martha’s Vineyard and being called personally by Lawrence Spivak of Meet the Press. He envied the ease with which John Kennedy moved in that glittering world, envied his seeming freedom from the tortured conscience that would let the preacher accept the amenities but have difficulty enjoying them. Beyond that glittering world lay a dark path to Golgotha, and he would go down the path if that was to be his destiny.

  The man in the Oval Office wanted no truck with Golgotha, and had no intentions of going there. He found the preacher’s talk of noble suffering pretentious cant; he’d had a taste of suffering and wanted no more. King’s intensity, his focus on the moral dimensions of every situation, struck him as narrow and stifling. He guessed that Martin couldn’t take a piss without pondering its meaning. He certainly couldn’t have escaped agonizing about the girls in the motel rooms.

  The Irish played politics with zest; it was, after all, a sport. There was little of the gamesman in the tortured preacher, he thought. And yet. Yet … He had a sense that the preacher brought out the best in him, arranging the choices in such stark terms of good and evil that he was forced to throw caution to the wind and side with the good. He did well when backed into corners. But he wanted to reach for the stars, and King was always making him stare at the ugliness at his feet. There was something in Martin Luther King that he lacked; he did not understand it, exactly, but he knew it without giving voice to it. Bobby had it. His father had it, too, in a very different way. He thought that if the preacher had not been so schooled in the ways of
God, he would have made a great Irish pol.

  He got up, walked to the window and looked out. It was dusk, his favorite time, and the ghosts were beginning to stir. He had the strange sensation that he and the preacher would be a part of those stirrings one day, that the two of them were locked together in some strange dance that would probably last as long as they lived. Where it would lead, he had no idea. He only knew the music would not stop.

  She had been sent out to interview Donald Johnson, the minister’s nephew, who was helping to organize the protest against the urban renewal plan. He had agreed to talk to her, because the paper had come out editorially against the current plan, and its influence, while not thought to be decisive, could certainly help.

  She could see right away that this wasn’t going to be easy. He stretched out his hand to shake hers, but there was no give in his body. He stood stiffly, his eyes opaque, giving nothing away. She would have thought, Arrogant, and then perhaps, Arrogant black man, if everything about his body language were not so familiar. It was her own in places where she thought people felt she didn’t belong — in police headquarters and her first city council meeting. She could see it in their eyes. What’s a broad doing here? You kept your back straight and your eyes blank, made a fortress of your body and they couldn’t get at you, if you did everything just right.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” she said, and he nodded, his body still stiff and his eyes wary. She couldn’t figure it out, at first, why he would be this way with her. She was hardly intimidating. Then she realized that, to him, she was not simply a pleasant looking young woman, she was the press. The white press. She had power. Often, she forgot this and was startled to see people react to her in a peculiar way. Sometimes she enjoyed it; at other times, like now, it made her edgy because it seemed so absurd. As a reporter you were supposed to be objective, you weren’t supposed to have feelings or to take any sides. Sometimes that didn’t work, because people didn’t trust robots. Sometimes you had to be human to get anything coming back at you.

  “I think what you’re doing is very brave,” she said. “And necessary.”

  She saw something stir in those opaque eyes. He was checking, to see if she was conning him or mocking him. Another familiar reaction. He apparently decided she was not, and his body relaxed, almost imperceptibly, but she caught it. She suggested they go to Art’s Diner for a cup of coffee, a less formal setting than the city room. They slid into a booth, and she asked him about his experiences. He told her of riding in the second of two buses into Alabama; they got word that the first bus had been stopped and burned by Klan members, and some of the riders hospitalized. When they pulled into the terminal, they intended to walk into the “whites only” lunch counter, because the Supreme Court had banned segregation at facilities serving people crossing state lines. A group of men bearing bricks and clubs refused to let them get off the bus and demanded that the Negroes riding in front go to the back of the bus. The whites stormed onto the bus and knocked one man unconscious, forced the Negroes to the back and stayed in the middle of the aisle, blocking the way, as the bus pulled out onto the highway again, heading for Birmingham. One Negro reporter for Jet magazine, trying to distract the whites on the bus to keep them from getting any more violent, gave them preview copies of the magazine’s next issue, with a cover story on the Freedom Rides.

  “So there you were, riding on the bus with this bunch of thugs through Alabama, and they were reading about the rides all the while?”

  He smiled, faintly. “Instant media.”

  When the bus pulled into Birmingham and everybody stumbled off, there was a melee that involved Klansmen, cops, press and innocent bystanders. One white man emerged from the men’s room with a startled look on his face and was set upon by three Klansmen. A white photographer from a Birmingham paper was clubbed with an iron pipe, and a mob dragged a white radio reporter out of his car and smashed all the windows. Don was knocked into a pile of trash boxes and managed to get out to the street, where he was able to catch a cab to the home of one of the movement leaders.

  As he talked, he turned, in her mind, from a Hero of the Civil Rights Movement to a man her own age, whose smile was easy and natural when he relaxed.

  “Weren’t you terrified?” she asked.

  He seemed to hesitate a minute, and then he said, “Yeah, I was scared shitless.” He laughed. “I saw some news photos of myself getting off the bus, and I looked so brave and resolute. Inside I was thinking, What in the hell am I doing here?”

  “Like you were in a bad movie?”

  He laughed again.

  “Yeah, exactly. I kept thinking, When was the cavalry going to come charging in?”

  “Except they’d be on the wrong side.”

  “You got it. We were the Indians.”

  “Some of those guys would have killed you.”

  “Oh yeah. Once, people were beating on the sides of the bus with their fists, with boards, anything. If the driver hadn’t gunned the motor and driven out, they probably would have killed us.”

  “I don’t understand that kind of crazy hatred.”

  “I don’t either. But I’m learning. I grew up pretty sheltered, middle class, in D.C.”

  “Are your parents pissed at you?”

  “You bet. I guess I can’t blame them. They worked so hard to keep me safe, then I haul my butt down to Alabama.”

  “I understand the way they feel. They wanted you to have it easier.”

  “Yeah, but who’s going to do this? Some sharecropper, who can hardly keep body and soul together? We’re the ones who have to do it, the lucky ones. If we let Jim Crow live, then the Constitution is a farce, the Bill of Rights is a joke. Equal justice means equal, period.”

  “Did it surprise you? The level of the violence?”

  “Oh, we were warned. But nobody can really tell you what it’s like. I saw the faces, full of hate, and it’s funny, at first I sort of looked around to see who they were mad at. I mean, what could they have against me, Mrs. Johnson’s good little boy? I was a Boy Scout and I won the spelling bee.” He laughed again. “For a minute I had this crazy idea that I could get out of the bus and say, ‘Excuse me, but I have my Forest Safety badge and I won the spelling bee by getting the word extraterrestrial.’ And they would step back and drop their lead pipes and say, ‘Oh, we didn’t know it was you. It’s those other people we don’t like. The Niggers.”

  “But it didn’t matter whether you could spell extraterrestrial. You were still a Nigger.”

  “I could walk on water and I’d still be a Nigger.”

  “They they’d really be pissed,” she said. “The first guy who did it was a Jew.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, heartily. She was curious about something, so she asked.

  “Do you ever feel,” she said, “that you see things that other people — white people — don’t see?”

  He looked at her, curiously.

  “I mean,” she continued, “it’s like there’s something there, and it’s huge, like a big rock, and you see it and the people around you just walk by it, and they don’t see it. And you think it’s you who must be crazy.”

  “You feel like that?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  “I never thought any white people did.”

  “I don’t think men do. I do. It happens all the time.” She thought it odd that now they were sitting and talking so easily, almost as friend to friend. She had never asked anyone about the rock as she thought of it, but she thought he might know.

  “I think,” he said, “that when you’re not in the group, when you’re an outsider, that gives you a third eye. You haven’t been taught all the same things, you don’t always react the same way or feel the same way, so you see things the group can’t see.”

  “But that’s good, isn’t it? It gives you something extra.”

  “But you pay a price for that something extra. A lot of times, people don�
�t want to see what you see.”

  “And if you tell them, they get pissed.”

  “To put it mildly,” he said.

  “Belvedere’s role in the space program, do you believe this?” Sam was sitting at his desk, staring at a blank piece of paper.

  Jay looked up “Charlie’s big on space. Every time NASA has a press conference, he lets me go.”

  “Yeah, we don’t cover Frederick because it’s five miles outside our circulation area,” Mary said, “but if Mercury II passes 500 miles overhead, that’s a local story.”

  “What the fuck are you going to write about Belvedere and the space program?” Jay asked.

  “Well, there’s Alf G. Guttenheim, from Miller Avenue. He was a pastry chef on the USS Kearsarge. He made a big cake that said A-OK GORDO on it when Cooper came back.”

  “Yuri Gagarin, eat your heart out.” Mary laughed.

  “And then we have Harvey Millerburton. He works in the cafeteria at Cape Canaveral. Puts mashed potatoes on plates with ice cream scoops. Can man reach for the moon without mashed potatoes?”

  Harvey Millerburton and Wernher von Braun,” Mary said. “Riders to the stars.”

  “Yeah, but Harvey didn’t try to wipe out London on the way.”

  “I guess Alf G. Guttenheim is my lead. How many fucking paragraphs can I get out of a vanilla cake with jelly filling and ‘A-OK’ out of spun sugar?” He sighed. “Maybe I’ll do it as an epic poem. ‘I sing of Alf G. Guttenheim and his spray can of whipped cream, who first from Belvedere’s streets did sail the wine dark sea.’”

  “No astronauts even drove through Belvedere?”

  “I’ll try Happy Hours Motel. Maybe one of them brought a floozie out there.” Sam picked up the phone. “Yeah, John Glenn. Tall fella, wears a white suit with a helmet. There’s twenty-five bucks in it for you.” He put the phone down. “A Good Humor man, that’s as close as they get.”