11/22/63: A Novel (106 page)

“Hello, Donald,” I say. “See you’ve still got the round mound of sound.”

Donald Bellingham looks up and smiles. “Never leave for the gig without it. Do I know you?”

“No,” I say, “my mom. She was at a dance you DJ’d way back in the early sixties. She said you snuck in your father’s big band records.”

He grins. “Yeah, I caught hell for that. Who was your mother?”

“Andrea Robertson,” I say, picking the name at random. Andrea was my best pupil in period two American Lit.

“Sure, I remember her.” His vague smile says he doesn’t.

“I don’t suppose you still have any of those old records, do you?”

“God, no. Long gone. But I’ve got all kinds of big band stuff on CD. Do I feel a request coming on?”

“Actually, you do. But it’s kind of special.”

He laughs. “Ain’t they all.”

I tell him what I want, and Donald—as eager to please as ever—agrees. As I start back toward the end of the block, where the woman I came to see is now being helped to punch by the mayor, Donald calls after me. “I never caught your name.”

“Amberson,” I tell him over my shoulder. “George Amberson.”

“And you want it at eight-fifteen?”

“On the dot. Time is of the essence, Donald. Let’s hope it cooperates.”

Five minutes later, Donald Bellingham nukes Jodie with “At the Hop” and dancers fill the street under the Texas sunset.

At ten past eight, Donald plays a slow Alan Jackson tune, one even grown-ups can dance to. Sadie is left alone for the first time since the speechifying ended, and I approach her. My heart beating so hard it seems to shake my whole body.

“Miz Dunhill?”

She turns, smiling and looking up a little. She’s tall, but I’m taller. Always was. “Yes?”

“My name is George Amberson. I wanted to tell you how much
I admire you and all the good work you’ve done.”

Her smile grows a little puzzled. “Thank you, sir. I don’t recognize you, but the name seems familiar. Are you from Jodie?”

I can no longer travel in time, and I certainly can’t read minds, but I know what she’s thinking, just the same.
I hear that name in my dreams.

“I am, and I’m not.” And before she can pursue it: “May I ask what sparked your interest in public service?”

Her smile is now just a lingering ghost around the corners of her mouth. “And you want to know because—?”

“Was it the assassination? The Kennedy assassination?”

“Why . . . I guess it was, in a way. I like to think I would have gotten involved in the wider world anyway, but I suppose it started there. It left this part of Texas with . . .” Her left hand rises involuntarily toward her cheek, then drops again. “. . . such a scar. Mr. Amberson, where do I know you from? Because I
do
know you, I’m sure of it.”

“Can I ask another question?”

She looks at me with mounting perplexity. I glance at my watch. Eight-fourteen. Almost time. Unless Donald forgets, of course . . . and I don’t think he will. To quote some old fifties song or other, some things are just meant to be.

“The Sadie Hawkins dance, back in 1961. Who did you get to chaperone with you when Coach Borman’s mother broke her hip? Do you recall?”

Her mouth drops open, then slowly closes. The mayor and his wife approach, see us in deep conversation, and veer off. We are in our own little capsule here; just Jake and Sadie. The way it was once upon a time.

“Don Haggarty,” she says. “It was like shapping a dance with the village idiot. Mr. Amberson—”

But before she can finish, Donald Bellingham comes in through eight tall loudspeakers, right on cue: “Okay, Jodie, here’s a blast
from the past, a platter that
really
matters, only the best and by request!”

Then it comes, that smooth brass intro from a long-gone band:

Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . .

“Oh my God, ‘In the Mood,’” Sadie says. “I used to lindy to this one.”

I hold out my hand. “Come on. Let’s do the thing.”

She laughs, shaking her head. “My swing-dancing days are far behind me, I’m afraid, Mr. Amberson.”

“But you’re not too old to waltz. As Donald used to say in the old days, ‘Out of your seats and on your feets.’ And call me George. Please.”

In the street, couples are jitterbugging. A few of them are even trying to lindy-hop, but none of them can swing it the way Sadie and I could swing it, back in the day. Not even close.

She takes my hand like a woman in a dream. She
is
in a dream, and so am I. Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief . . . but brevity
makes
sweetness, doesn’t it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get it back.

Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and catch her easily by the arm.

“Sorry, clumsy,” she says.

“You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits.”

Before she can ask about that, I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that moment I hope one thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man, one who disposed of John Clayton’s fucking broom once and for all.

She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music, but I hear her—I always did. “Who
are
you, George?”

“Someone you knew in another life, honey.”

Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance.

January 2, 2009–December 18, 2010

Sarasota, Florida

Lovell, Maine

Almost half a century has passed since John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, but two questions linger: Was Lee Oswald really the trigger-man, and if so, did he act alone? Nothing I’ve written in
11/22/63
will provide answers to those questions, because time-travel is just an interesting make-believe. But if you, like me, are curious about why those questions still remain, I think I can give you a satisfactory two-word response: Karen Carlin. Not just a footnote to history, but a footnote to a footnote. And yet . . .

Jack Ruby owned a Dallas strip joint called the Carousel Club. Carlin, whose
nom du burlesque
was Little Lynn, danced there. On the night following the assassination, Ruby received a call from Miss Carlin, who was twenty-five dollars short on the December rent and desperately needed a loan to keep from being turned out into the street. Would he help?

Jack Ruby, who had other things on his mind, gave her the rough side of his tongue (in truth, it was the only side Dallas’s Sparky Jack seemed to have). He was appalled that the president he revered had been killed in his home city, and he spoke repeatedly to friends and relatives about how terrible this was for Mrs. Kennedy and her children. Ruby was heartsick at the thought of Jackie having to return to Dallas for Oswald’s trial. The widow would become a national spectacle, he said. Her grief would be used to sell tabloids.

Unless, of course, Lee Oswald came down with a bad case of the deads.

Everybody at the Dallas Police Department had at least a nodding acquaintance with Jack. He and his “wife”—that was what he called his little dachsund, Sheba—were frequent visitors at DPD. He handed out free passes to his clubs, and when cops showed up there, he bought them free drinks. So no one took any particular notice of him when he turned up at the station on Saturday, November twenty-third. When Oswald was paraded before the press, proclaiming his innocence and displaying a black eye, Ruby was there. He had a gun (yes, another .38, this one a Colt Cobra), and he fully intended to shoot Oswald with it. But the room was crowded; Ruby was shunted to the back; then Oswald was gone.

So Jack Ruby gave up.

Late Sunday morning, he went to the Western Union office a block or so from the DPD and sent “Little Lynn” a money order for twenty-five dollars. Then he wandered down to the cop-shop. He assumed that Oswald had already been transferred to the Dallas County Jail, and was surprised to see a crowd gathered in front of the police station. There were reporters, news vans, and your ordinary gawkers. The transfer hadn’t occurred on schedule.

Ruby had his gun, and Ruby wormed his way into the police garage. No problem there. Some of the cops even said hi, and Ruby hi’d them right back. Oswald was still upstairs. At the last moment he had asked his jailers if he could put on a sweater, because his shirt had a hole in it. The detour to get the sweater took less than three minutes, but that was just enough—life turns on a dime. Ruby shot Oswald in the abdomen. As a pig-pile of cops landed on top of Sparky Jack, he managed to yell: “Hey, guys, I’m Jack Ruby! You all know me!”

The assassin died at Parkland Hospital shortly thereafter, without making a statement. Thanks to a stripper who needed twenty-five bucks and a half-assed showboat who wanted to put on a sweater, Oswald was never tried for his crime, and never had a real chance to confess. His final statement on his part in the events of 11/22/63 was “I’m a patsy.” The resulting arguments over whether or not he was telling the truth have never stopped.

Early in the novel, Jake Epping’s friend Al puts the probability that Oswald was the lone gunman at ninety-five percent. After reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I’d put the probability at ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine. Because all of the accounts, including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in just the right place to get lucky. Were the odds of it happening just the way it did long? Yes. So are the odds on winning the lottery, but someone wins one every day.

Probably the most useful source-materials I read in preparation for writing this novel were
Case Closed,
by Gerald Posner;
Legend,
by Edward Jay Epstein (nutty Robert Ludlum stuff, but fun);
Oswald’s Tale,
by Norman Mailer; and
Mrs. Paine’s Garage,
by Thomas Mallon. The latter offers a brilliant analysis of the conspiracy theorists and their need to find order in what was almost a random event. The Mailer is also remarkable. He says that he went into the project (which includes extensive interviews with Russians who knew Lee and Marina in Minsk) believing that Oswald was the victim of a conspiracy, but in the end came to believe—reluctantly—that the stodgy ole Warren Commission was right: Oswald acted alone.

It is very, very difficult for a reasonable person to believe otherwise. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

I was also deeply impressed—and moved, and shaken—by my rereading of William Manchester’s
Death of a President
. He’s dead wrong about some things, he’s given to flights of purple prose (calling Marina Oswald “lynx-eyed,” for instance), his analysis of Oswald’s motives is both superficial and hostile, but this massive work, published only four years after that terrible lunch hour in Dallas, is closest in time to the assassination, written when most
of the participants were still alive and their recollections were still vivid. Armed with Jacqueline Kennedy’s conditional approval of the project, everyone talked to Manchester, and although his account of the aftermath is turgid, his narrative of 11/22’s events is chilling and vivid, a Zapruder film in words.

Well . . .
almost
everyone talked to him. Marina Oswald did not, and Manchester’s consequent harsh treatment of her may have something to do with that. Marina (still alive at this writing) had her eye on the main chance in the aftermath of her husband’s cowardly act, and who could blame her? Those who want to read her full recollections can find them in
Marina and Lee,
by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. I trust very little of what she says (unless corroborated by other sources), but I salute—with some reluctance, it’s true—her survival skills.

I originally tried to write this book way back in 1972. I dropped the project because the research it would involve seemed far too daunting for a man who was teaching full-time. There was another reason: even nine years after the deed, the wound was still too fresh. I’m glad I waited. When I finally decided to go ahead, it was natural for me to turn to my old friend Russ Dorr for help with the research. He provided a splendid support system for another long book,
Under the Dome,
and once more rose to the occasion. I am writing this afterword surrounded by heaps of research materials, the most valuable of which are the videos Russ shot during our exhaustive (and exhausting) travels in Dallas, and the foot-high stack of emails that came in response to my questions about everything from the 1958 World Series to mid-century bugging devices. It was Russ who located the home of Edwin Walker, which just happened to be on the 11/22 motorcade route (the past harmonizes), and it was Russ who—after much searching of various Dallas records—found the probable 1963 address of that most peculiar man, George de Mohrenschildt. And by the way, just where
was
Mr. de Mohrenschildt on the night of April 10, 1963? Probably not at the Carousel Club, but if he had an alibi for the attempted assassination of the general, I wasn’t able to find it.

I hate to bore you with my Academy Awards speech—I get very annoyed with writers who do that—but I need to tip my cap to some other people, all the same. Big Number One is Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. He answered billions of questions, sometimes twice or three times before I got the info crammed into my dumb head. The tour of the Texas School Book Depository was a grim necessity that he lightened with his considerable wit and encyclopedic knowledge.

Thanks are also due to Nicola Longford, the Executive Director of The Sixth Floor Museum, and Megan Bryant, Director of Collections and Intellectual Property. Brian Collins and Rachel Howell work in the History Department of the Dallas Public Library and gave me access to old films (some of them pretty hilarious) that show how the city looked in the years 1960–63. Susan Richards, a researcher at the Dallas Historical Society, also pitched in, as did Amy Brumfield, David Reynolds, and the staff of the Adolphus Hotel. Longtime Dallas resident Martin Nobles drove Russ and me around Dallas. He took us to the now-closed but still standing Texas Theatre, where Oswald was captured, to the former residence of Edwin Walker, to Greenville Avenue (not as gruesome as Fort Worth’s bar-and-whore district once was), and to Mercedes Street, where 2703 no longer exists. It did indeed blow away in a tornado . . . although not in 1963. And a tip of the cap to Mike “Silent Mike” McEachern, who donated his name for charitable purposes.