Mary's Mosaic (6 page)

Since Dallas, Mary had experienced a rough year of adjustments, with no real end in sight. For months, she had attempted to retreat into her discipline as an artist. She was by now an established painter in the Washington Color School. Her dream of recognition as a contemporary abstract painter had started to be realized just five days before the horror in Dallas had struck. Her first solo art opening at the Jefferson Place Gallery in Washington had been
a solid success. Reviewing her paintings on November 24,
Washington Post
art critic Leslie Judd Ahlander heralded Mary’s artistry, writing, “Her work has always shown a quality which made one want to see more. Now she is working very hard and the results are gratifying indeed.” Describing Mary’s tondo (circular canvas) approach using acrylic paint, Ahlander had praised her presentation as “luminous and carefully thought out…. a lyrical and emotional statement rather than a cooly [
sic
] calculated one. It is easy to see that the artist has brought a great deal of thought to bear on the adjustment of areas and colors.”
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The recognition was an affirmation of the creative path she had long desired.

Mary’s painting had provided some respite in the wake of the president’s assassination and eventually led to a second 1964 exhibit in May with the Pan American Union’s
Nine Contemporary Painters: USA
exhibit in Washington. Three of her most recently completed works,
Fire Island II, Clearing
, and
Foxglove
, had been included in the show. Overall, the exhibit had been even more successful than her first. In November, it was due to be shipped to the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires for an international opening, her first worldwide public exhibition—one she would not live to witness.

Tormented since Jack’s death, Mary had refused to accept the lies being peddled to the public. At times despondent, she had asked her friend and fellow artist Bill Walton, a Kennedy insider who had escorted her many times to White House functions that included stolen moments with the president, “why Bobby wasn’t doing more about what had really happened to Jack in Dallas.” Bobby did have a plan, Walton told her, to attempt to retake the White House, but time would have to pass first. Best to keep throwing herself back into her work, Walton counseled, as Walton himself was doing.
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It wasn’t enough. She would take matters into her own hands, she had finally decided.
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Throughout the past year, she had made it her business to learn what had really taken place in Dallas that late-November day. Like most Americans, Mary grieved over the violent death of her president; for her, however, his departure had also been uniquely personal. She and Jack had not only been lovers, but had also grown into the deepest of allies—kindred spirits in the pursuit of peace for the world. It hadn’t been Mary’s first attempt at such a feat. Nearly fifteen years earlier, she had worked tirelessly with her then-husband, war hero Cord Meyer, to promote a world government structure that might maintain the hard-won, fragile peace of a postwar nuclear world. But Cord had ultimately chosen a different path and, in doing so, had foreclosed on their marriage. With Jack, Mary had finally prevailed. Everything, at least
for a few moments, had looked so promising. And that was really what she wanted—to give peace a chance.

Her prior access to Jack and his White House coterie had allowed her to quietly interrogate the few who would talk about that day in Dallas. She had read and collected some of the various reports and articles that questioned the falsehoods that had been propagated and were now worming their way into the public mind. Those writings occupied a special place in the bookcase in her bedroom, next to her diary, the final repository of reflections and analysis of what she had come to understand.
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The past year had also been a grueling duel with despair. It had taken a huge toll. “What’s the use?” Mary bemoaned to her dear friend Anne Truitt before she had left for Japan earlier that year. “Everything I love seems to die.”
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Melancholy had periodically opened the wounds of past losses in Mary’s life: her half-sister Rosamund’s suicide in 1938; the death of her father, Amos, in 1944. Neither, however, had prepared her for the unspeakable horror of losing her son Michael in 1956. That tragedy had propelled her into an emotional typhoon that she struggled long and hard to resolve. While scar tissue might stop the bleeding, the wound of such a loss (as every mother either imagines or knows firsthand) never really healed.

With her friends Anne and Jim Truitt having left for Tokyo in early 1964,
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Mary had recently, perhaps mistakenly, spoken to another woman she knew only peripherally, not realizing the woman had been sent to find out what Mary had learned about the dastardly deed in Dallas and its orchestration. Mary wasn’t going to sit by and let it happen all over again, she told the friend, who suggested that it might be better to leave well enough alone.
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The cover-up had reached its final public crescendo with the release of the Warren Report on September 24, about three weeks earlier. Mary had bought the abridged paperback version and read it with her trained editor’s eye, making numerous notes in the margins and turning down page corners for markers. Sensing it had been crafted as the final narcotic designed to deaden any serious inquiry or public scrutiny, she had furiously confronted her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, a CIA honcho who in turn had informed his close friend and colleague Jim Angleton, also the longtime godfather to her children.
¹²
Of course, it hadn’t been the first time she’d openly spoken out against their beloved Agency. During the preceding years, Mary—unlike other CIA wives—had been outspoken at cocktail and dinner parties, “always making wisecracks,” one Agency wife remembered, about what the CIA was doing in the world.
¹³

The art studio was cold when she entered it. Her morning ritual included turning on the electric space heater, pouring coffee from her thermos, and lighting up a Salem, so as to begin. The transition into painting allowed her to quiet, if only for a while, the challenges she knew she would soon ace.

T
he hour was approaching noon as she stepped back from her morning’s meditation—a tondo focus of unprimed canvas containing “swaying velvety semicircles of color” so rich in vivid acrylic pigment.
¹⁴
Whether that morning’s endeavor was further informed by her recent thematic, ongoing analysis of peace and harmony wasn’t known, but Mary’s former intimacy with artist Ken Noland in the late 1950s had given her a particular vantage point for her evolving exploration. Noland’s “target” paintings had influenced her, as they had expressed a distinct commentary about war. She had taken this target circular device in her most recent painting,
Half Light
, and expressed the four elements—fire, wind, water, and earth—using color to underscore harmony with the earth, and the universe itself. Her “one-world” harmony in the past year may have been an homage to Jack and their shared vision for world peace. It was, after all, only a vision—perhaps her vision, or their vision—of where mankind should always be focused now and in the future. There was still purpose to be explored, and she would continue to fight, even without Jack. Seven years later, someone by the name of John Lennon would sing a song called “Imagine,” capturing where Mary had been headed.
¹⁵

While Mary’s work that morning may have echoed her recent painting
Half Light
, something within
Half Light
’s conception of one-world harmony might have died in order to be reborn. Hope and despair in the end had been engaged in an epic battle, and not just in her life alone. Stepping back from her morning’s work, she might have thought of naming the painting
Lost Light
, or just
No Light
at all. The title would eventually emerge—as it always seemed to—however private the artist’s meaning for the world to see. Her mother’s discipline, from which she had built her own, would ensure it.

The day beckoned her to be on her way. Her usual long walk after a morning’s artistic focus was another workday ritual she always looked forward to. The paint was still damp on the circular canvas. Having positioned an electric fan toward the wet painting, she collected her Mark Cross leather gloves and her sunglasses and pulled on her blue cable-knit angora hooded sweater over a lighter sweater and white oxford cloth shirt.
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There was no need to take her purse; she liked to walk freely with no encumbrance. Her paint-spattered PF
Flyer canvas sneakers likely squeaked across the wooden floor as she pivoted out the door.

The October breeze suggested the cooler days ahead, bringing welcome relief from Washington’s oppressive humidity, which sometimes lingered well into September. Even so, by noontime the day had already warmed. Circling the block to N Street, Mary walked down the steep incline of Thirty-Fourth Street toward the C & O Canal towpath. Crossing the inevitable M Street traffic, she found herself face-to-face with an approaching limousine, the long, black, official kind with government license plates that at an earlier time could have been taking Jack to some official function or meeting.

“Good-bye, Mary,” yelled Polly Wisner, one of Washington’s more aristocratic women. The wife of Frank Wisner, one of the founding fathers of CIA covert operations, Polly was preparing to fly to London without Frank, whose descent into a labyrinth of depression, mania, and compulsive talking, or logorrhea, had finally ended his intelligence career in 1962. Mary would never know that a year later, in 1965, Wisner would be found dead, an apparent suicide, a small-gauge shotgun his final companion. His daughter would wonder whether her father had suffered some kind of delayed guilt reaction over the CIA’s recruitment and shelter of a number of high-level Nazis after the war.
¹⁷
But the small-gauge shotgun somehow kept emerging as “the final companion of choice.” Just a year earlier, in August 1963, Mary’s friend, Philip L. Graham, owner-publisher of the
Washington Post
, had allegedly embraced such a firearm for himself. There would be others, too, all unbeknownst to Mary. In 1977, the CIA asset George de Mohrenschildt, once in charge of keeping Lee Harvey Oswald positioned in Dallas, would also appoint the small-bore shotgun as his final companion—immediately before he was to be interviewed by an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Mary would not survive to witness the self-destruction that would explode in the years to come. She passed Polly Wisner, undoubtedly waving in response to Polly’s greeting, and moved onward toward the canal towpath. Polly would be the last acquaintance to see Mary alive.
¹⁸

As she continued walking, Mary might have cheered herself with thoughts of Thanksgiving and the anticipation of being reunited with her two boys, Quenty and Mark, due home in a little more than a month from their respective boarding schools, Salisbury and Milton Academy. She had been to Salisbury the preceding academic year to visit Quenty, the handsome son she’d called “mouse” when he was younger. There were those in the extended family who privately felt Quenty had been scarred by his father, Cord, and, of course,
by the death of his brother Mikey. Like his father, Quenty had been known to exhibit a cruel disposition that was often visited on those more vulnerable and defenseless in their immediate and extended family. The meanness was a phase that Mary hoped he would grow out of, as children sometimes did. At Salisbury, Quenty was coming into his own, his athleticism in basketball and tennis readily apparent. During Mary’s visit, his schoolmates had gawked at her the entire time, later telling Quenty his mother was “incredibly beautiful.”
¹⁹

The towpath was nearly deserted that Monday as Mary proceeded westward from Georgetown out to Fletcher’s Boat House, a distance of about two and a quarter miles. Still, there was one young couple up ahead walking in the same direction as Mary. Just as they disappeared around the first bend, a young man wearing red Bermuda shorts ran past her on his way west. He was probably a student at Georgetown University, whose Gothic Healy Clock Tower soared above the tree line on a bluff overlooking the canal.

Once doomed to be replaced by a freeway, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal had been saved through the efforts of Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. Douglas had led protest hikes the entire length of the canal in 1954, wanting the most perfectly preserved example of America’s canal-building era to be designated a national historic park. He had personally undertaken the campaign in the spirit of his boyhood hero, Gifford Pinchot, Mary’s uncle and a pioneering conservationist who had twice been elected governor of Pennsylvania. In 1905, Gifford Pinchot had been appointed the first head of the U.S. Forest Service by President Teddy Roosevelt, his close friend.

While the C & O Canal itself had been declared a national historical monument under President Eisenhower, efforts to make it a national park had failed until President Kennedy took office, only because, according to one source, Mary had lobbied hard for the proposal.
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Jack was, according to one insider, amused by Mary’s entreaties; he found them endearing. Eventually, however, he came to rely more on her, convinced that her counsel had critical value on even more important issues.
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