Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  Questions. No answers. “May perpetual light shine upon him, and on all the souls of the faithful departed. Amen.”

  He looked at Karen, a small, bewildered figure clinging to her mother’s hand, and his heart ached for her. What would she remember of her father? A laugh, a touch, like some half-forgotten song? Would she sit in a room, years from now, certain that the universe was hollow at the center, that no God existed beyond the stars to hear her prayers, that safety was an illusion and meaning a sham? Could he ever hope to fill the void in her life where her father should have been? At least he could understand. Or would she come to hate him one day, when she learned that her father had died at his house, at his feet?

  Questions. No answers.

  He wanted to be with Mary, to help her, but she was surrounded by relatives in the days that followed the funeral, and there was, of course, the scandal. The paper played down the fact that Harry Springer had killed himself in the apartment of one of its photographers, but it was easy to read between the lines. People knew. People talked. She came into the paper once, looking tired and drained, the dark circles under her eyes adding ten years to her age. She looked at him as if he were a stranger.

  He went to her house late that night, after her mother and Karen were asleep. They talked, quietly, in the living room.

  “You’re coming with me, Mary. To New York.”

  She looked at him, uncomprehending.

  “Once I said I was going to make things happen,” she told him. “Remember that?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I was right.” She laughed, a bitter, mirthless sound. “I made his life happen. I made his death happen. He died hating me.”

  “No,” he said. “I think he died loving you.”

  “Maybe that’s worse.”

  “Don’t do this to yourself, Mary.”

  “I can’t lie to myself, Jay. I wish to God I could. But I can’t. I killed him, as surely as if I had held the gun, pulled the trigger myself.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No, it isn’t. There are things I never told you.”

  She told him, then, about how she had forced Harry to marry her by telling him she was pregnant, about the miscarriage, and about the loan she didn’t take that destroyed the last chance he had to raise the money to buy the laundry. He began to understand — a cold hand squeezing inside his chest — the depth of her guilt.

  “It’s so ironic, isn’t it? He wanted to keep me, and he couldn’t. I’ll never be free of him now. Isn’t that funny?”

  “No. It’s not. There’s me, Mary.”

  She looked at him.

  “He’s dead. You can’t do anything for him. I’m alive. I need you. It’s the only way it won’t all be a waste, don’t you see? Otherwise, what is there? There’s nothing.”

  “I know. Don’t you think I know that? But what if every time I look at you, I see him? What will that do to you, Jay? I’m so full of guilt there isn’t room for anything else.”

  Her face seemed to twist, its shape unfamiliar to him. He was no stranger to guilt himself. He awoke nights, sweating, feeling the soft, warm pieces of Harry’s brain in his hands.

  I don’t want to love her.

  He wanted to turn and run, to hide from the pain etched on her face. He could go now, and be safe. Nothing could hurt him, until the bullet in the high Himalayas. He could watch life go by, seeing, not feeling. Plenty of men, especially in his business, lived their lives that way, anesthetized. They did it with work or booze or just by always being on the move. He saw it in their eyes, the glaze of escaping. He could do it too. But then, he would always run, in his dreams, through a moonlit landscape, opening doors to look for something wonderful that would never be there. Either way, you paid.

  “I wish I was a Catholic, Jay, and I could find someone to confess to, someone who would say, ‘I forgive you.’ But there’s only me. And I can’t say it.”

  All he had to do was turn away. That was all.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t work that way. For little things, maybe, but for big things there’s nobody else who can do it, you have to do it yourself.”

  “Can I, Jay? Can I?”

  “Yes,” he said, thinking, Do as I say, not as I do. “If you had stayed with him, you would have looked at him every day and thought about all you gave up for him. What would that have done? Killed him by inches, maybe.”

  “I could have stayed. I’m strong. I could have done it.”

  “Goddamn it, what do you think you’re supposed to be? A saint? A martyr? Are you supposed to give up everything you want? Who made that rule?”

  “It cost so much, what I wanted.”

  “You didn’t do it to him. Life did. Or fate. Or whatever. Like it did to Don. And my father. And yours. Do you think you can control that?”

  “No. I can’t control that. But actions have consequences. I ignored them. For what I wanted.”

  “If you took that loan, you’d have had to stay with him. Give up any hope of working anyplace but the Blade. You’d have given up your life for his. Nobody owes anybody else a life, no matter what the reason! Not you, not anybody!”

  He stepped close to her and pulled her to him, pressing his lips to hers. She was cold against him, unresponsive, very much like, he thought, a corpse. It’s gone, it’s all gone, he thought.

  But then her lips opened, and he could feel her heart beating, and he kissed her desperately, savagely, as if the touch of his lips, his mouth, his tongue could be imprinted on her, could brand her so she could never forget it.

  He sensed her starting to pull back, but he held her with all his strength, feeling that someone else was trying to tear her away. He felt himself rising, and he pushed against her and slid his hand under her blouse, under her bra and touched her until she sagged against him, trembling. He thrust against her, not letting her escape, and when she finally pulled away, her breath was coming in gasps. He had the sense, somehow, that he had been wrestling with a dead man for possession of her, and that he had won.

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not here, not now.”

  “I know. But it’s all right. It’s all right.”

  She walked away from him, to the window, and she stared out at the street for a long time. When she came back to him, her face was different. The pain was not gone, but the haunted look in her eyes was no longer there. She was back in control now, he could see it. The cold hand began to release its hold on his chest.

  “There’s something I have to do, Jay. I have to understand it. Figure out what I did. Find the answers. If I don’t do this, I’ll always be in Belvedere, wherever I go.”

  He nodded. He thought of that probing intelligence, digging away, relentless, searching for answers. It could slice through piety, guilt, convention. It would not permit her, he thought, to throw her life away for a ghost.

  “Take the time you need. All the time. I’ll wait.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m going to New York. I’ll get a place. Big enough for all of us. For Karen. A big freezer, for Checkers.”

  “I’ll keep him crisp.” The merest hint of a smile was on her lips.

  “In New York,” he said, “when I get real horny, I’ll stand in the shower and rub soap on my tie.” He smiled. “But you’ve got to come quick, because I only have three ties.”

  She laughed then, and he saw a flash of her spirit, her delight at irreverence.

  We can still laugh. We have a chance.

  She left the next day, to spend a week in Florida with Karen and her mother, at the home of an aunt. On his last night at the paper, Jay went to Jules’s for a few beers with Milt and Sam and Roger. He was seized by a sense of loss at leaving them, which he covered with cheerful profanity about what a pisshole Belvedere was. They heartily, beerily agreed.

  “To New York,” Sam said, lifting his watered beer.

  “To The Washington Post.”
>
  “Screw the Post. They’re taking too long. I have this friend at Newsday—’

  He drove out of town alone, with his trunk and his camera in the backseat. He looked at the bank and City Hall and at Art’s Diner as they slid by. They had claimed four years of his life. Not the place he would have chosen, but there it was.

  He hummed a line of the song they liked, about New York. She sang it often, off key, complaining that “Mott Street” didn’t really rhyme with “what street.” Would she come to him? And if she did, what kind of a chance would they have? Would he feel the slush of Harry’s brain in his hands for the rest of his life? He wondered if his life was at last taking the curve he had expected, back around into darkness, the one that paralleled his father’s course.

  He shook his head. No more of that. “No more,” he said aloud, and he let his father go. He saw his father turn and walk back into the shadows, where he did not have to follow. He had been wrong about himself. He could love, and he wasn’t running away. Not anymore.

  He thought of her, kneeling, her head resting on his thighs, his hands caressing her, his lips against her hair. In the end, maybe passion would be stronger than guilt, stronger than the past, stronger than anything. Time and love could heal her, as they had him. But forgiving yourself was the hardest thing of all.

  He tried to say it, and, at last, he could.

  Ego te absolvo.

  He drove out of town and onto the broad highway that would take him north.

  The sun poured down on the limousine, baking the occupants, including the governor of Texas and his wife, and, sitting beside him, his own wife. He should have told her to wear something lighter than the pink wool suit, he thought. The scudding clouds that had covered the sun earlier that morning had all been blown away.

  They were heading from the airport towards the center of town, moving now at a good clip. He looked idly at the signs as they passed. One of them announced REAL SIPPIN’ WHISKY, and he grinned and thought to himself, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

  Soon the crowds began to thicken; the motorcade slowed down, and the waves and cheers washed over them. They passed a Coca-Cola bottling plant, where a thermometer showed that the temperature was well into the nineties. His wife had put on her large dark glasses, because she had been squinting in the sun, and he leaned over to ask her to take them off. “They want to see you. Those glasses hide your face.” She smiled and removed them, blinking in the fierce sunlight.

  At the intersection of Lemmon Avenue and Lomo Alto Drive in the city, a group of small children stood, holding a sign that pleaded, MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS.

  “Let’s stop here, Bill,” he called out to his driver, and he jumped out of the car and was instantly surrounded by the group of squealing children. He smiled; children always made him smile. He tousled the light brown hair of a child about his son’s age, and he solemnly shook hands with the other children. The Secret Service finally had to shoo the kids away so the motorcade could proceed.

  He hopped back into the car, and they were off again. The closer they got to the center of the city, the denser the crowds became, and every time his wife lifted her white-gloved hand to wave, cries of “Jackie! Jackie!” rang out. At one point, the crowd was so close to the car that Secret Service Agent Clint Hill leapt out of the following car and trotted beside the limousine, to protect her from overeager people who wanted to reach out and touch her.

  The president grinned and looked out at the crowds. He was starting to sweat from the intense heat, but the exuberance of the greeting lifted his mood. The ad in the Dallas paper was forgotten. Only a Goldwater sign held by two young men reminded him that not everybody in the throng was a political supporter. Running against Goldwater would be fun, he thought. Barry was a decent sort, even if some of his ideas were screwy. He’d love to debate Goldwater. There would be a real clash of ideas, and cultures, between them. It would be the Arizona Republican, the darling of the right wing, versus his own liberal-centrist, rational ideas. The right wing ran mainly on emotion. This Texas welcome, with people standing eight to ten deep, screaming and waving, was a good sign.

  He glanced at his wife. There were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip, and now and then she had to close her eyes because of the sun’s hot glare, but she kept smiling and waving, and the crowd went wild. She was going to be dynamite in the coming campaign; he made a mental note to tell her so.

  The motorcade made several sharp turns, a zig and then a zag, before it hit the straightaway again. The Trade Mart, where he was to make a speech to the pillars of the Dallas establishment —Democrats and John Birchers alike — was only minutes away, and the motorcade was only five minutes late, a good performance. He looked up ahead and saw a patch of green amid the urban landscape around them: Dealey Plaza.

  fust ahead, standing near a large pine tree that grew on a grassy knoll next to the road, a Dallas businessman named Abraham Zapruder was fastening a Zoomar lens on his movie camera. He had forgotten to bring it to work with him that morning, but his secretary had cajoled him until he went home and got it. How many times, she reminded him, did you get to take home movies of a president!

  Not far from him stood a young Texan who had brought his wife out to see the president pass by He looked up to a window in the Texas Book Depository and said to her, “Do you want to see a Secret Service agent!”

  “Where!” she asked him.

  He pointed up to the window, where a man was clearly visible, holding a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.

  “In that building there.” She looked up to see the man standing unnaturally still, the rifle held close across his chest, a military stance.

  Inside the limousine, the wife of the governor of Texas twisted around in the jump seat in which she was riding and said, “You sure can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President.” He smiled at her and answered, “No, you can’t.”

  He looked away from her and out again at the road. Not far ahead, through an underpass, was the Trade Mart. He began running his speech through in his mind, as was his custom. As he glanced to his left, something peculiar happened. The shadow was back, he saw it there, in his peripheral vision. That was very odd. He had lived so long without it.

  But on the grass, standing beside his tall, young father, was a small boy, one who had to be about the age of his own son, John. The boy had lifted his hand tentatively, to wave at him. He smiled, caught the boy’s eye and waved back. The boy gave a little squeal of delight and waved harder.

  There was a sudden, sharp sound. The Secret Service agents in the car behind thought a firecracker had gone off. They rarely heard small arms fire out-of-doors. The Texans who were hunters knew at once it was the sound of a rifle.

  There was a strange tingling sensation in his throat. He lifted his hand to the spot where he felt the sensation and looked straight ahead. The shadow was no longer on the fringes of his vision. He was staring, now, directly at it, into its cold, blank eyes.

  No, he thought. Oh, no, not now. Not now!

  And then he heard, and saw, nothing more.

  EPILOGUE

  “Could you stop here for a few minutes?” she said to the cabdriver.

  “Sure,” he answered. “A lot of people want to come here.”

  She stepped out of the cab and took her daughter’s hand, and they walked slowly up the hill; the heels of her shoes sank into the newly warm earth as they walked. The leaves on the trees were the light, fresh green of early spring.

  She paused and turned her head to look out at the city across the river. It was twilight, and the just-vanished sun was leaving a blue-pink haze, the shade of a lilac, hanging low across the tops of the buildings. It was a special time, she thought, mystical. The marble of the buildings still held the pink of the vanishing sun, and they were easy to identify, nestled, now, in their new wrapping of green: the Lincoln, across the river, where Martin Luther King had given his grea
t speech; the Jefferson, with the new buds already starting to appear on the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin; the Capitol, its lighted dome signaling that Congress was still in session. No matter where she went — and she thought she would travel far in her lifetime — there could be no more beautiful spot on the planet than Washington in the spring, at twilight.

  She turned back, and she and her daughter walked to the edge of a white picket fence, hardly more than knee-high, in a spot on the hill below the mansion that had once belonged to Robert E. Lee and was now a part of Arlington National Cemetery. There was no one else there at the moment, but the people who had been there before them that day had left their traces: two flags, sunk into the soft earth, and a small bouquet of spring flowers. She stood silently for a moment.

  “What’s the big match for, Mommy?” her daughter asked. She smiled. The little girl had a way of putting things that never failed to delight and astonish her.

  “It’s the eternal flame. It never goes out. It’s for President Kennedy.”

  “Is he in heaven too?”

  “Yes, I think he is.”

  She remembered the day she had first seen him, in the flesh, standing on the steps of the Rose Garden, in the shaft of light that made him seem so extraordinary. She had a recurring fantasy — one that first came to her on that terrible, endless weekend. She wished she could go back in time, to that afternoon, to stand once again with the heels of her pink suede shoes sinking into the earth. When he turned to look at her, she would say to him, quietly, “Mr. President, please don’t go to Dallas in November. Whatever you do, don’t go to Dallas.” Or sitting in his office, waiting for the photographer, she would blurt it out. “Don’t go to Dallas. Don’t go.” If only she could go back in time.

  Five months ago she had stood on the White House driveway with the other reporters, as a press aide handed out small, round badges that said, TRIP OF THE PRESIDENT, on them. She had so wanted to go on one of the presidential trips — was scheduled to go on one, in fact. But not this one.