On Green Dolphin Street (34 page)

“I can’t quite believe it,” he said.

Mary bit her lip. She thought her duty was still to be calm.

They began to talk about Elizabeth and about their lives together. James went to the shelf and brought over a photograph album, with the help of which they reconstructed the days of Mary’s life and of her parents’ marriage, as though they both needed to be reassured that they had really taken place.

Until they called the undertaker and set in motion the clumsy processes, the rituals and the forms, the headstone and the services, there was a period of intimate calm when Elizabeth was still theirs. It was the middle of the night; there was no longer any sound of traffic outside, just the occasional crackle of wood from the fire, which James had built into a blaze. It was a relief that there was no need anymore to pretend that everything was somehow bound, however improbably, to return to normal; at least they could now admit that all was changed.

They talked with a candor induced by the knowledge that there was nothing left to conceal; they remembered what Elizabeth had been like, what they had loved about her and what they had never understood, the mysterious motivations, the corrugations of her individual temperament. For long periods they were quiet, exhausted, but with a sense that something had happened in its proper place; they were made silent by awe.

When dawn came, James went to the table in the corner of the room and poured two glasses of whiskey, in which they drank to her life. Then he went upstairs again and sat by the bed; at nine o’clock he came down
and told Mary to telephone the undertaker. He retired to the garden when the men came; he averted his eyes from their straining and heaving and their unintentionally comic manner.

The time difference meant that it was not until the afternoon that Mary was able to telephone Charlie in Washington. He was sitting in his office, catching up with what he had missed at the morning meeting from Edward Renshaw.

When Mary put into words the events of the previous twenty-four hours, her sequence of thought was suddenly interrupted by a memory of Louisa as a baby first walking in her parents’ garden, and of her mother’s face filled with rapture as she watched the small girl, with her blazing blue eyes behind thick lashes, solemnly explore. It was this image that prevented her from speaking, and in Washington, down the Atlantic cable, Charlie heard the silence as she tearlessly struggled to expel the weight of loss—of mother, of child, of all that patiently accumulated joy—from her throttled lungs.

Chapter 16  

I
n the television studio the carpenters were hammering at trestles, while a floor manager moved two lecterns onto a stage under the instructions of a man with a crew cut named Don Hewitt. A vacuum cleaner started up as the set was inspected by various grave men in suits, Nixon’s runners, who asked that two tiny spotlights be trained on their man’s eyes to brighten the darkness of his campaign fatigue. Kennedy’s advisers glanced at the set and reported no difficulties.

Frank checked his watch. The debate was due to begin at eight-thirty Chicago time, which meant that East Coast papers would be holding the front page and he would have to file his story paragraph by paragraph as the event proceeded. The reporters who would pose questions would remain in Studio 1, but the bulk of the press would take the broadcast by monitor or by radio feed in smaller rooms within the Channel 2 building.

Don Hewitt, who was directing the program, whistled loudly to attract the attention of one of the workmen; his tie was at half-mast and the stresses of the moment were legible in his face. If he was suffering so palpably, Frank thought, how bad must the candidates be feeling? He had seen Nixon arrive at the building earlier that afternoon, and as he stepped
out of the car he struck his injured knee against the edge of the door. A spasm passed across his face, from which the blood was vanishing; but he mastered his pain and struggled into the building, where he made a show of being companionable with the CBS executives, slapping one on the back and even joking with a press photographer. The most recent opinion poll showed him leading Kennedy by one percentage point.

Nixon had addressed five different Chicago wards the night before, and Frank went with the entourage for the pleasure of seeing parts of his hometown again. The names Dearborn, Wabash and La Salle were as much a part of him as his fingernails, but some of Nixon’s California aides were puzzled at the length of the great thoroughfares, unable to tell from a street number whether they were aiming for a teeming junction in the Loop, a residential backwater in the northern sprawl or a South Side project; late at night one staff car lost its way following local instructions to Go-Eathy Street, unaware that this was the historic pronunciation of Goethe. Then in the morning Nixon addressed the carpenters’ union; when reporters asked whether he should not be preparing for the evening debate, his campaign manager replied that the vice president had knocked out Alger Hiss and outpointed Mr. Khrushchev: debate, indeed, was his specialty.

Frank sat in the studio. Something of the nervous atmosphere had infected him; he was powerfully aware of being at home, that a fifteen-minute ride down Michigan Avenue would take him back to where he had begun and where he never wanted to return. A Nixon aide leaned over him. “Frank, you’re a local. Is there a pharmacy near here. We need some Lazy Shave.”

“Why not get the guy a real shave?”

“His skin’s so thin that even if he’s just had one, his face still looks dark beneath the lights. Gotta cover up.”

“There’s a drugstore two blocks down on Michigan.”

Nixon was standing on the stage, talking to Don Hewitt. He wore a pale suit and tie, and the collar of his shirt was at least an inch too big for him since he had lost weight in the hospital. There was an awkwardness about him that had always reminded Frank of someone he had known,
but it was not until that moment that he recognized who it was. Godley. Aaron Godley, the man in his platoon who could never fit in; the man who wanted passionately to be liked, but who was so inauthentic, so lacking in spontaneous life, that when marching he could not make his arms swing in time with the appropriate leg.

At that moment Kennedy sauntered onto the stage in a dark suit and tie; the photographers were drawn to him, leaving Nixon standing lonely and aghast. Eventually Hewitt was able to bring the candidates together formally.

“How’re you doing?” said Kennedy.

“You had a big crowd in Cleveland,” said Nixon, flatteringly.

Hewitt asked the candidates if they wanted makeup and Kennedy declined; Nixon gruffly followed suit, as though he did not want to play the girl. Frank wondered if they had found the Lazy Shave yet.

The huge television cameras were wheeled up close, then, under instructions from the gallery, backed off again as each candidate took his place at his lectern.

“Can you hear me now speaking?” said Kennedy. “Is that about the right tone of voice?”

When the technical checks were over, they retired to their separate rooms. Frank and other reporters were shown to their places by Channel 2 secretaries while the small invited audience took their places in the studio seats. Frank was on his own in a booth with a television monitor, a telephone line and his typewriter. He called his office in New York to make sure there had been no change in procedure, then settled down to wait. An audio speaker in the corner of the room was relaying the dialogue between the floor manager and the director.

“Ten minutes to air.”

On his monitor, Frank saw Nixon reappear on the stage, where he mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Don Hewitt, wearing a jacket by now and with his tie properly done up, came to join him, more out of compassion, it seemed, than necessity.

He went over the rules one more time and Nixon nodded, his gestures alternately dismissive and ingratiating, as though he wished to show that
as vice president he was superior to a gimcrack medium such as this, but also desperate to be accepted by its leading players.

“ ‘Cut’ means that’s it?” he said.

“Get out gracefully,” said Hewitt.

“Five seconds.”

“Aah …”

“What I mean is, you want to quit quickly. How, how much?”

“What I figure is,” said Hewitt calmly, “when you see thirty seconds …”

Nixon patted him on the shoulder, as if to show that he knew all this, really, but was above it. He was alone again, staring fixedly at the studio door, through which Kennedy was expected to emerge.

“Five minutes to air.”

Frank checked his typewriter ribbon and licked his lips. He felt an ache in his stomach such as he had not felt since the minutes before his platoon was ordered to attack.

“Three minutes.”

Nixon was staring at the closed door like a man hypnotized.

“Two minutes. Running up. Sound.”

The door swung open. Kennedy strolled across the platform to his place; he barely glanced at Nixon as he went by.

Mary eyed the television high up on the wall in the New York bar where she had met Frank the morning after they had first made love. Throughout the crowded room, the faces of the drinkers were turned up toward the fuzzy screen, which was concluding a New Magic mascara commercial. It was noisy with the hum of male gossip and friendly derision; the barman, whom she remembered Frank referring to by name as Ray, made sure that his own shouted badinage gave no sign of preference for either candidate. Mary smiled uncertainly at him when he brought her drink, wishing she knew enough to engage him in talk of baseball or whatever game it was that he and Frank had discussed.

She looked back to the screen and imagined families all over America gathered round their new television sets, their TV dinners on their knees
in the living rooms of their little box houses. What an extraordinary country this was, she thought, with its prodigious ability to invent itself and then persuade the world its innovations were inevitable. The commercial break ended and a resonant male voice regretted that viewers would not be able to see the program that normally aired at that time,
The Andy Griffith Show
.

The bar went suddenly quiet as the screen showed two men standing uneasily behind their lecterns with a third, the “moderator,” Howard K. Smith, at a desk between them.

“Turn it up, Ray!”

“Switch the channel, whydontcha! We’re missing the game.”

Through the snowstorm on the glass Mary could see a bleak gray set, into which Nixon in his pale suit seemed to blend; on being introduced, he twitched and gave a little half-sardonic bow; Kennedy, dark-suited, inclined his head fractionally and stared past the camera like a mountaineer surveying a distant crevasse.

To Mary, her head full of death, the remarkable fact about either man was that he was alive. She felt an edge of jealousy toward each of them, as though it were she herself who had been deprived of life, or that they breathed at her mother’s expense. How dare they carry on as though nothing had happened, as though domestic policy, the subject of the first debate, had any lasting importance? She wanted to communicate to them as they stood in their distant studio, feeling no doubt that some tide of history was running through their fingers, that no such thing in fact was happening; that for all the eyes upon them they were merely shadows on the grass.

“Mr. Smith, Mr. Nixon,” Kennedy was saying, “in the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question is whether this nation could exist half slave or half free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the
world
will exist half slave or half free …”

He had a slight lisp, Mary noticed, and he pronounced the word “harf,” in what she presumed was a Boston accent; but she could not concentrate on what Kennedy said. She had returned two days earlier from London in order to be with Charlie for the opening of the new Embassy; she was exhausted
by the time change, the conversation that had been dredged from her at the party following the ceremony, but above all from the weariness that was her way of feeling grief.

She had still shed no tear for her mother, but her limbs ached. For days after the body was gone, she walked about the house with her father, her arm through his. He would go from the sitting room to the kitchen, where he would stand and stare out on the damp garden, then walk down the hall to the dining room and gaze out at the street, where the people contrived to carry out their business as though nothing had happened.

The smell of polish and cut flowers remained unchanged. The latch on the kitchen door snapped and echoed as before; the landing window, still scarred from the tape of the blackout, trembled in its loose frame when the autumn wind blew; the cistern rattled and clanked as it had done on the day of Mary’s birth. Everything was the same; nothing was the same.

James could see that the future was a place without comfort, but it was not the future that concerned him; it was the past, which, like Mary, he felt had deceived him and only just revealed what down all the long years it had been planning. He had thought himself content in that expanse of time, had believed it to be his friend, but saw it now for what it had been all along: a smiler with a knife.