Camelot
Page 38
She had watched as an army of world dignitaries walked down the curving drive of the White House; never again in her lifetime, she thought, would so much rank and power be assembled together in one place; Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, small and wizened in his khaki military uniform, walked next to the tall, gaunt, imperial Charles de Gaulle. It was a remarkable sight.
The air on that day was crisp and cold, and the notes of the funeral march rang out, sending shivers right through her body. It seemed she felt rather than heard them. In her mind she could still hear the clack of the hooves of the riderless black horse, the boots inverted in the stirrups to symbolize a fallen leader, as the horse moved down the avenue. Every sight, every sound, burned with a terrible intensity, that day.
“He made us think we could do anything,” she said to her daughter. The little girl looked up at her. “Can we do anything?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But we have to try.”
She stared into the flickering light of the flame. They would move on, they would grow older, the people who were young with him. He never would. He would walk through their minds’ eyes ever young, ever laughing, always standing, the cold wind whipping his reddish brown hair and the air frosting his breath, telling them to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. There would be other presidents, older, wiser, who would do more than he did. Lyndon Johnson was already steering his legislative program, including the most far-reaching civil rights bill ever signed into law, easily through the shoals of Congress. But no other president would belong to them the way he did. He touched something in the young in a way few other public men ever did. No matter what happened, that would not change. The men who wrote the lyrics were right, it would always be one brief, shining moment for them; always, in their memories, burnished and gleaming as the years rolled on. No matter what the historians wrote, no matter what other, colder eyes saw about him, he was part of them when they were young, and that would never change. The way they lived their lives would be different because of him. In her own work, she thought, there would always be the belief, We can change things. We can do anything.
She looked at her daughter. Would there be someone like him for her generation? Or would there be only more gray men, who never touched them at all?
She had a sudden urge to leave something there; she didn’t know why. She had brought nothing along. But she reached up for the red silk scarf that was around her neck, and she took it off and tied it around one of the white pickets. It seemed right, a bright spot against the earth.
“Good-bye,” she said, and she took her daughter’s hand again, and they went down the hill to where the cab waited. She looked back and could still see the scarf, fluttering lightly in the evening wind.
They got into the taxi, and the driver, a young black man, said, “It’s a good place for him to be, isn’t it? I mean,” he added, “if he has to be dead.”
She nodded. “Yes, it’s a good place.”
“Now it’s the airport, right?”
She leaned back in the seat and put her arm around her daughter. The little girl snuggled close to her.
“Yes,” she said. “To the airport.”
Also by Caryl Rivers
Indecent Behavior
Girls No More
Virgins
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