The Empty Glass (11 page)

28.

S
he was a housewife who had rented a room in her Georgetown duplex to a woman named Pamela Turnure, an aide in the office of the young, ambitious Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. The elegant, lovely, and poised Miss Turnure seemed the very model of the perfect tenant, but Mrs. Florence Kater soon became annoyed by the young woman’s behavior. Mrs. Kater had, as she’d told her own husband, Marty, clearly and repeatedly stipulated that her tenant keep “regular hours” and be “quiet.” The hours the lovely Miss Turnure kept, however, were anything but regular, the time she spent in her small apartment at the top of the stairs anything but quiet, her behavior more befitting a barmaid than what Mrs. Kater would have called a “lady.”

It turned out that the elegant Miss Turnure was making what Mrs. Kater called “violent love” in the upstairs bedroom, just down the hall past the staircase from Mrs. Kater and her husband. And when, annoyed, one night, by the fifth successive incident of “violent noise” from the “banging” of the bed and what she called “male mooing like an ox,” Mrs. Kater sat up in bed next to Marty, who asked what was wrong.

“It’s that woman again,” she said.

“What woman?”

“The Turnure woman! Don’t you hear it?”

“Go back to sleep, Mother.”

“But just
hear
it,” she said. “There’s a man in the house.”

“So she has a boyfriend.”

“It’s against the rules,” Mrs. Kater said.

She was a short woman whose auburn hair had begun to gray but was dyed and styled every week under the UFO-like hair dryers by Darlene, the single mom, at the beauty shop down the street. She wore pillbox hats and pearls and her hair surrounded the moon of her face in a fiery corona of Aqua Net. She was a woman of convictions that were sealed in the chamber of her heart where nothing could touch them. She liked rules, order, straight lines, neat answers, final decisions. She was a certain person who believed in certainty.

She was certain that her tenant was lying to her. She found her scuffed slippers near the bed with her toes, wrapped the bathrobe that hung on the bedpost around her faintly shivering body, and walked, still wearing her cap and curlers, to the tenant’s door and knocked.

She heard giggling. Shushing. Then nothing.

She knocked again: “What are you doing in there?”

“Decorating,” Miss Turnure said.

“I hear a man in there. No men are allowed in here.”

“I’m moving furniture.”

“I am trying to sleep. Please keep the noise down.”

A muffled “sorry,” followed by more giggling.

But Mrs. Kater was awake. She had never been a good sleeper. Sleep was even harder to come by now that she was older. There were pills by her bed but they made her feel groggy in the morning.

The male mooing continued. The banging continued.
Some decorating!
Mrs. Kater thought, wide awake and furious now in bed. It was (she later recalled) 1:16
A.M
. when, deciding to catch her pretty tenant in a lie, she went down to the parlor with a bay window overlooking Hope near the river and waited with her legs crossed under the bathrobe in the light from over the road. She waited almost without moving until, at 1:35, the door creaked upstairs; she heard more shushing and giggling as the yellow light spread onto the wall and floor. And into the light stepped a handsome young man with his shoes.

He held them twinned in his left hand as his right palm grazed the banister. He tiptoed down the stairs, rocking exaggeratedly back and forth, his head lowered as if wanting to know exactly what his feet were doing. Mrs. Kater, never reticent, marched across the floor to the carpet at the base of the stairs and stared straight into the face of the man who looked, surprised, at the fierce little woman in curlers.

“It was Senator Kennedy,” Mrs. Kater said later in the only interview she ever gave. “Senator
Jack
Kennedy. He gave me that smile that he gives everyone and held out the right hand that he holds out to everyone and said what I suppose seemed the right thing to say at the time, which was, ‘Good evening, ma’am.’”

“It isn’t evening,” Mrs. Kater said. “It’s
morning
. And you have woken me for the fifth time in a row. And for the last time! You with your male mooing like an ox.”

“I don’t moo.”

“You mooed.”

She did not care who this young man was, or how much money his family had, or how powerful his father was, or how far he was going. She did not care who he would become or what it might mean to the country or the world. He was the unwanted guest of a female tenant who had broken Mrs. Kater’s stated rules. The rules were quite clear and they were firm. The rules, however, had been ignored and this was “cause,” Mrs. Kater announced, “for eviction. I will,” she said, “evict her.”

Kennedy then showed the arrogance—what the Mob called
hamartia
—that was, despite his charm, the mark of the beast on his family. “Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t care what the fuck you do.”

And with that he left the house and the sleepless housewife behind. She watched him walk, shoes in hand, his untucked white shirt trailing like a duck’s behind, across the street.

Now, Mrs. Kater was not timid. She was not a woman to be, as she called it, “deterred.” She was mad now. Her tenant, a guest who had broken the rules and who did not seem to care, was “making violent love”—Mrs. Kater’s words—to the famous senator from Boston. A man who in the darkness of her own living room, carrying his shoes, had said “fuck” to her. To her! Mrs. Florence Kater! Well, she would not sit “idly by,” she said, while two good-looking young people kept her up all night on account of what she called “rutting.” Who did they think she was? Well, she was Mrs. Florence Kater.

And she had a plan.

•   •   •

S
he found the Kodak 44A, 127 roll film camera at Don’s Photo on Eighteenth Street. It took twelve pictures a roll, each 44mm square. It was the first camera, Don explained, that featured a plastic lens, but “don’t worry,” he told Mrs. Kater. “It’s very high quality: Perspex.”

“What’s Perspex?”

“A glass alternative. From Combined Optical Industries.”

“I don’t care about that,” Mrs. Kater said. “Can it take pictures at night?”

“Of course.” He pointed to the flash. “See?”

She paid for it, returning to the house near the nice park and the river. She ascended the steps that seemed higher each day and removed the keys from the pouch of the purse where the keys always were and put the bronze in the lock of the door. She was turning the key when she heard the giggling.

Giggling? Like the giggling she had heard last night. And the man’s voice. That man!
That man!
The senator was back!

She opened the door and stepped into the living room.

Her husband!

Her husband stood, grinning and (she noticed) beltless, before the swivel chair on which the lovely Turnure sat with legs extended, as if applying nail polish, revealing panties beneath her short skirt. She wore hose that made her legs look, as the French say, “more nude than nude,” and she gazed girlishly up at Marty (her husband!) as he lazily slapped the bottoms of her bare feet with the flyswatter.

It wasn’t even summer!

“Shoo,” Miss Turnure was saying as Mrs. Kater stepped in. “Shoo, fly.”

“Marty!”

Marty spun and Miss Turnure looked up, the mirth in their eyes dying. Marty lowered the flyswatter, comically raised as if to strike the lovely Miss Turnure. His lower lip protruded. Lovely Miss Turnure herself lowered her pink feet to the floor. They pressed firmly against the wood—but, Mrs. Kater noticed, her toes wiggled luxuriously.

“Hello, Mother,” Marty said.

“Don’t call me that. For godssakes, Marty: What are you doing?”

“Killing flies.”

“On Miss Turnure’s
feet
? Dear God!”

•   •   •

T
hat night a siren sounded through the window. Martin, a heavy sleeper, had sunk to bed like a sack of cement and was snoring. He had been snoring since midnight. Mrs. Kater, on the other hand, was awake and staring at the ceiling. Waiting.

She sighed. The Kodak 44A was under the bed, loaded with film. At 1:25, she thought she heard the door open downstairs. She sat up. She was wearing curlers under a plastic hairnet; white cold cream covered her face. Her ears twitched like a fox’s.

She heard the creak of wood and footsteps on the floorboards as someone walked through the living room. She heard the same feet climb the steps. She stood and walked across her own floor to the door that was open partway. She peered through it and watched as Senator Kennedy, D-Mass., crept with shoes again in his hand to the door across the hallway.

A light came from under the Turnure woman’s door. The senator opened the door, and for a second she saw rosy Pamela standing nude against the light from inside. She was smiling. She giggled softly, then opened the door, exposing her pink breasts, taking the senator into her arms.

They shut the door.

Mrs. Kater swallowed.

It wouldn’t be long now.

It never was.

She walked to Marty in the darkness. “Marty,” she whispered, shoving him with her hands. “It’s them again.”

“Wha,” he muttered, still snoring.

“It’s happening again.”

“Go back to sleep.”

But of course she could not, and knowing that she only had a few minutes left, she retrieved the camera from under the bed and tiptoed down the stairs to the front of the house and saw that the senator, D-Mass., had left the front door unlocked. More villainy! More treachery! For all she knew, half of the night street was now inside her home!

She walked outside, shutting the door behind her, and waited in the bushes to the right of the front door, camera in hand.

•   •   •

T
he picture that she finally took,” Jo said, “showed Senator John F. Kennedy emerging from the front door of the Kater brownstone in Georgetown with his shoes in his hand. Mrs. Florence M. Kater sent it to thirty-two journalists. Myself included. She also sent it to the FIBS.”

“The Fibs.”

“The FBI. She was almost unhinged. Her sense of justice, sense of religion as a Catholic—all of these things were ‘grievously wounded.’ That’s what she said in her letter. She was a nut but what bugged her about Mr. D-Mass. was that he had lied. He claimed to have principles but he’d lied. He didn’t give a shit. He only cared about himself and his success. And Mrs. Florence Kater wanted the world to know the truth.”

“So what happened to the photographs?”

“That’s the whole point: nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“Blackout. Shutdown. Nothing. Every journalist I knew went to their editors. And their editors went to the publishers. The photo of Senator Kennedy went all the way up the food chain. And that’s where it vanished. No one would touch it. Not with that proverbial ten-foot pole. Mrs. Kater checked the papers every morning. And not just the
Washington Post
. She checked every paper she’d sent the picture to, and not one reported the story. She couldn’t understand it. She was sure something had gone wrong. She made phone calls. No one called her back. She made appointments. They were canceled. The world was closing off. And then her house was robbed, her precious jewelry stolen. But what really galled her, what offended her in the deepest part of her being, and down to her core, was the fact that when she returned to the bedroom after snapping Kennedy, that night, she had seen Marty’s hand moving frantically under the bedcovers.

“He was masturbating,” Jo said, and leaned down to kiss me.

29.

J
o.”

“Shh!”

“The nurse.”

“Fuck her.”

“Guy over there.”

“Is so doped up he won’t remember in the morning.”

She was kissing me again, leaning over the gurney when I said, “Jo?”

“Mmm.”

“Who answered your phone?”

“What?”

“I called you earlier. A man answered.”

“Oh, that was
you
,” she said. “My father.”

“Your father.”

“I take care of him sometimes.”

A voice: “What are you doing?”

I looked up.

It was the nurse.

“I’m just searching for some marbles,” Jo said, standing. She brushed the waist of her dress, and turned to me: “I didn’t see any Greenies, did you?”

“No.”

“I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” the nurse said. “And you were smoking! I can tell you were smoking!”

“It’s
that
.” Jo pointed to the votive burning under the nearby gurney. “The candles aren’t exactly up to code, are they?”

“
God
is the code.”

“God isn’t the fire department.”

The man groaned.

“You, you hussy,” the nurse said, “are the whore of Babylon.”

“As long as my reputation hasn’t reached Beverly Hills.”

“May God forgive you.”

“I don’t care about forgiveness,” she said. “I just want my marbles back.”

The nurse left in a huff.

We finished the Canadian Club.

“So what does that Florence Kater story mean?” I said.

“It means the Kennedys can do whatever they want. After Kennedy was elected, he made Pamela Turnure Jackie’s press secretary, for crying out loud.”

“Okay, that’s one thing. But you’re not really suggesting that JFK and Bobby killed Marilyn Monroe.”

“They had motive. She was prepared to go public.”

“The brothers weren’t anywhere near Los Angeles that night.”

“How do you know?”

“It was in the papers.”

“Do you always believe what you read?”

“Jack was in Hyannisport. Bobby was in Gilroy. That’s three hundred miles away. On Saturday, Bobby went horseback riding. On Sunday, he went to church at nine-thirty. Are you telling me that the attorney general of the United States sort of magically disappeared after horseback riding, flew out to Los Angeles to kill Marilyn, and managed to show up again for church by Sunday morning? It’s not possible.”

“Then who took off outside Peter Lawford’s house?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Jeanne Carmen said there was a
contretemps
with Lawford’s neighbors the night Marilyn died.”

“Who’s Jeanne Carmen?”

“An actress. Does it matter? She said the neighbors were annoyed by the sand in their pool.”

“The sand?”

“The helicopter kicked it up when it left the Lawford property. The neighbors heard the noise. Who was in that helicopter, Ben?”

“It couldn’t have been Bobby Kennedy.”

“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Irving Berlin,” she said. “Inga Arvad was a Nazi. Judith Exner was a mob moll. And all that got swept under the rug. Why was Marilyn any different?”

“Because she was a movie star?”

“That’s not what Jeanne said. She said it wasn’t about sex,” Jo said. “It was something much more scandalous.”

“What’s more scandalous than sex?”

“Politics,” she said.