Mary's Mosaic (7 page)

After Dallas, Mary’s towpath excursions had become a sacred refuge, even in inclement weather. Not a drinker like so many of the other women in her circle, and willing to face the fury within, she had made walking an antidote for her agitation. But about a month or so after Jack’s assassination, she later told her friend Jim Truitt, she had set out on the towpath one day in wintry weather, determined to sustain her fragile equilibrium, only to confront further anguish instead of the solace she’d sought. A short but violent snow squall had materialized, making visibility difficult, if not impossible. Coming
toward her through the blinding snow was a ghostlike chimera taking form as it neared. It wasn’t until she was nearly face-to-face with the person, she said, that she recognized Jackie. The two fell into each other’s arms, crying and consoling one another in embrace, as only women know how to do.
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Mary’s discretion was always paramount, her capacity to comfort someone else even amid her own deepest anguish somehow readily available when called for. Jackie was adrift. Her life—and all of history—dramatically, irrevocably shattered, she needed as many anchors as she could find.

“Jackie kept repeating how happy she and the President had been in the White House,” Mary later disclosed to Truitt about that day.
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She hadn’t disputed Jackie, although she easily could have, in view of the life she’d enjoyed with Jack. Mary had understood his conflicted hunger as perhaps only a uniquely enlightened woman could, viewing his sexual “wanderlust” for what it was—a symptom of his patrician hatred of the rejection he had been forced to endure from an empty, cold, and distant mother.
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She wasn’t threatened by it. “In addition to art, Mary was an acute judge of masculine character,” her friend Anne Truitt would remark years later.
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Historian Herb Parmet, in a groundbreaking biography of Jack, had interviewed a close confidential source who knew the score. The source had observed that Jack enjoyed a very different, and very special, life with Mary. “He could talk in ways she understood and their trust was mutual,” Parmet would write in 1983. “When he was with her, the rest of the world could go to hell. He could laugh with her at the absurdity of the things he saw all around his center of power.”
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M
ary continued walking in her customary westerly direction, as the October noonday sun warmed the morning chill. Throughout the past year, there had been several incidents of someone intruding into her home.

The incidents started in January, only weeks after Dallas. Then, after being away for some time that summer, she was sure someone had been inside her house while she was gone. In another instance, she had found the heavy basement door, which was impossible for her to move even with the help of her two sons, ajar. But the finale had been seeing somebody leaving her house as she had walked in. She was sure of it.
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What were they after?

As an artist, Mary’s philosophical perspective had undergone a major transformation when she embarked on a journey of personal exploration of mind-expanding potions in the late 1950s. So profound had been her journey that it allowed her to see her world in a way she had never before envisioned or experienced.
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It may have also allowed her some deeper resolution about her
son Michael’s death, though nothing would ever dishonor his spirit in her life. Nonetheless, despite Michael’s departure, Mary’s awareness had expanded into the recognition of the connectedness of all living things, the breathing atomic structure of everything physical, all coexisting peacefully in harmony with one another. Here, cosmic joy was real, a blessing given to all who were willing to surrender. And here, within a sublime expanded consciousness, such exploits as domination and war lust were seen as infantile—mere vestigial reminders of an arrested evolutionary history.
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What if world leaders—those political titular heads of state—could experience the sacred connection of life force in harmonious coexistence, just as many artists and poets had envisioned? The pace of human evolution itself might take a giant step forward, ending the rampant Cold War madness, she told Timothy Leary in 1962.
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At first, it had only been a pipe dream, something she imagined mostly within. Yet fate somehow kept managing to place her across Jack’s path—or was it Jack across hers? She had sought Leary’s counsel, but her discretion once again erected the boundary. She would never name names, never reveal her real plan. He had kindly given her some tools, suggestions for how to guide others through the psychedelic Garden of Eden. She had shared her emerging experience with a small group of eight women who were willing to engage a few powerful men in Washington. Leary, unaware of what was really taking place, said he would continue to periodically make himself available to help her.
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Mary had decided she’d take it in steps, and so one hot summer night in July of 1962 she and Jack smoked marijuana together in the White House residence. She was curious as to how he might react. At first, he had become “hungry” for food—”soup and chocolate mousse”—before their amorous embrace that evening, where she might have held a more tender man. The connection may have frightened him initially, but her self-assured presence and trust likely conveyed that he was, however momentarily, safe—safe in her arms, safe in her love, even safe in his own realization that it might be possible for him to face the sordid, fragmented sexuality that kept him from his own redemption.
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Like Mary’s ex-husband Cord, Jack too, was broken; and unwilling, or too frightened, to confront his world of wounded vulnerability—ironically the gateway from which real intimacy often sprang.

Later on, she had admittedly made “a mistake in recruitment” in her small psychedelic group of eight women. “I was such a fool,” she had anxiously told Timothy Leary in Millbrook, New York, in September 1963. “A wife snitched on us. I’m scared,” she’d blurted out, then burst into tears.
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Discreet as ever,
Mary never mentioned names to Leary, but she had feared the worst at the time. With her husband dead, Katharine Graham now wielded more power in Washington than ever before. Mary had considered Katharine’s husband, Philip L. Graham, whose name she never mentioned to Leary, to be “a friend of mine,” a friend whom she described as “losing the battle, a really bloody one. He got drunk and told a room full of reporters about me and my boyfriend.”
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Leary hadn’t realized at the time that Mary’s “boyfriend” was the president. But the worst part was that Phil Graham had just allegedly committed suicide, another detail she kept from Leary, who couldn’t quite fathom why the usually bold, courageous Mary was so upset. That day with Leary at Millbrook, she had voiced her worst fear, that even her own life might be in danger, finally asking whether, if she showed up unexpectedly at some point, he would be able to hide her. Yes, he could, he reassured her. But nothing had happened. There had been no repercussions. Maybe Phil Graham did commit suicide after all, she may have thought as she kept walking, perhaps not realizing that her paranoia had in fact been a case of heightened awareness.

T
he Potomac River was to her left as the towpath also veered left, narrowing a bit as it paralleled the elevated Canal Road to her right. Mary approached the narrow, thirty-foot-long wooden footbridge that spanned the shallow spillway drainage. It was almost the halfway mark to Fletcher’s Boat House, her usual destination before turning back. The path ahead was empty. She stepped into a dense arbor of mature black cherry trees, river birch, and box elders, its wildness protruding beyond the city’s boundary. It was likely one of her favorite parts of this particular route because of its comforting solitude. Dappled by sparking sunlight, the Potomac could be seen through a scrim of branches down a steep embankment and beyond a thicket of fire-scarred trees. But for the intermittent drone of passing cars above and to her right, she was alone with her thoughts and all of nature.

Unaware that she had been under surveillance for the past several weeks, and oblivious that day to the fact that she was being stalked, Mary might well not have heard the footfalls gathering speed behind her.
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She had no reason to be concerned. Park Service police regularly patrolled the area, though for some reason they weren’t present that day. Other pedestrians, bicyclists, and the fishermen and boatmen who frequented the river almost guaranteed the towpath’s security in daytime. Mary had never feared for her safety in this place, or any other for that matter, despite the concerns her friend Cicely Angleton would later express that day. “Besides being one of the prettiest girls
in the world, Mary had great courage,” recalled her Vassar classmate Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, the daughter of author F. Scott, remembering their days as apprentice journalists in New York. “I wouldn’t go down into those subways at night, but Mary was never afraid. ‘Oh nothing will happen,’” Scottie remembered Mary saying.
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The towpath was an unlikely venue for an assault in broad daylight, yet Mary was abruptly seized from behind. Her assailant wrapped her in a close, hard embrace, pinning her arms against her side. Immobilized, the vigorous, athletic woman came alive as she fought hard to escape the lock of an aggressor she probably couldn’t see. Squirming, groaning, trying to break free, she realized the strength of her attacker, and instinctively yelled out, “Somebody help me!” Again and again, she called out beyond the three-foot retaining wall of the canal to the passing automobiles on Canal Road less than 150 feet away.
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A muffled explosion sent a ringing, echoing roar through her ears. She must have smelled the stench of burning flesh and gunpowder as something hard and hot seared into the left side of her skull just in front of her ear. A gush of wet warmth poured down her face, soaking the collar of her blue angora sweater, turning it red.

With a desperate lunge, Mary broke away, stumbling across the towpath to the wooded embankment border. Seeking refuge somewhere at the border’s edge, holding onto a nearby birch tree, she brought her gloved hand to her left temple, only to draw away great smears of blood that darkly stained the leather glove. Assaulted by waves of nausea and weakness, falling to her knees and fighting to retain consciousness, she braced herself from falling farther, clinging to the smooth birch tree trunk. Failing to kill her with his first shot, the assailant seized her again, even more roughly. This time, he dragged Mary from the embankment clear across the towpath, out of the shadows and into the sunlight toward the canal’s edge, her paint-spattered PF Flyers vainly seeking traction against the pebbled dirt, leaving parallel tracks that would mark the last path of her earthly life. Still, she struggled. But she didn’t scream again. As she lost strength, her voice may have been quieted by both pain and fear. Or perhaps she silently beseeched the passing cars above, before something hard was pressed against her body over her right shoulder blade.
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Mary likely didn’t hear the second explosion. There was only the hot path of metal that tore through her chest, severing her aorta. As the last echo of gunfire faded, death forced her final surrender and she fell upon the grassy ledge at the water’s edge.

2

Murder on the Towpath

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

—Adolf Hitler

H
ENRY
W
IGGINS
J
R
. thought he heard “a whole lot of hollerin’” coming from the canal.
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An employee of University Esso Service Station at Pennsylvania Avenue and 21st Street in Georgetown, Wiggins had been dispatched to pick up Bill Branch, the mechanic at the employer’s other Esso Service Station at the north end of Key Bridge. Together, they were to service a stalled Nash Rambler sedan abandoned somewhere in the 4300 block on the north side of Canal Road. They had just arrived and Wiggins was taking out his toolbox when he heard screams coming from the canal. At first, he explained to police, he didn’t pay too much attention: “…you know, that area down there—it could have been some kids playing, or a bunch of winos fighting.” But then, he said, both he and Branch had thought they heard a woman screaming. The screams lasted for twenty seconds or more, they estimated, with the woman pleading, “Help me! … Help me! … Somebody help me!”
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A gunshot rang out from the same direction as the shouting.

Henry Wiggins was a heavy-set, twenty-four-year-old black man who had served in the Army in a Military Police unit in Korea, and he was still fast on his feet. On hearing the shot, he had dashed across Canal Road toward a stone wall at the edge of the embankment overlooking the canal. Seconds before he got there, he heard a second shot. When he peered over the wall and down across the canal, Wiggins saw a man, “a Negro male,” standing over
a woman who lay motionless and curled on her side. Minutes later, Wiggins would give the police a description of the man, recorded on the department’s Police Form PD-251. The “Negro male” was listed as having a “medium build, 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 10 inches, 185 pounds.”
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Also listed were the clothes Wiggins said the man was wearing: a dark plaid golf cap; a light, beige-colored, waist-length zippered jacket; dark trousers; and dark shoes.
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Police would later measure the distance from where Wiggins stood at the wall to the murder scene to be 128.6 feet. It was close enough to make out specific details, certainly close enough to see that the woman was white, that the man standing over her was black, and that he stood with his hands down at his sides. “He was facing toward me but his head was bent down. He was looking at the body lying on the ground. Then, he looked up toward the wall where I was standing. He saw me. I was looking right at him,” Wiggins recalled.
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