The Thomas Berryman Number (8 page)

“No,” Rosten smiled wider. “But I heard a lot about them.”

He stood up, and we started our walk to the executive editor’s office. Calmly puffing his pipe, picking motes and strings off his white shirt, Lewis reminded me to try to be politic.

Moses Reed is what people of a certain age around Tennessee, men and women, would call “a man’s man.”

He’s tall, always well-dressed, with wavy black hair just hinting at gray. He may have played football somewhere or other—Princeton, I’d heard somewhere—and though under six feet tall, he’s considerably broader than I am. He appears to come from money.

His office looks like a wealthy man’s dining room. Only some photographs of famous men (Ernest Hemingway kicking a can up a solitary road … Churchill smoking a cigar in a high-rimmed bathtub … Bobby Kennedy playing football) spoil the dining room effect.

There is no desk in the office; and no typewriter.

There are antique chairs with embroidered seats. Plus an oblong mahogany table for tea. And a Sheffield tea service.

It’s difficult to imagine Reed as a ragamuffin growing up in Birmingham, Alabama—which he was.

Seven of us sat at the highly polished table. A work session. Everyone in crisply starched shirttails except me.

Francis Parker, the conservative
Citizen
publisher—peevish, but a fair man, I’d heard; Reed, transplanted Georgetown journalist, the executive editor; Arnold Beckton, the managing editor; Rosten, metropolitan editor; two other up-and-coming editors; and Ochs Jones, shooting star of the moment.

This was journalism by committee. It’s always a disaster. No exceptions.

My heart was in my throat. I kept clearing my throat and trying to catch my breath. The attempts to catch my breath made me yawn.

A stooped black lady was pouring coffee and giving each of us a fresh-sugared cruller. The middle-aged Sunday editor was spouting wit from
Sports Illustrated
stories as though it was essential wisdom.

The mood of the room was jovial right up until the coffee lady left.

Then the jokes stopped abruptly. Each of the others solemnly shook my hand and congratulated me. Reed said a few introductory remarks about the importance of the story I was working on. Then he opened up the floor for questions. They came like a flood.

Was Ben Toy’s testimony reliable? Was I sure?

Why hadn’t we been able to trace down Harley John Wynn thus far?

Who had hired Berryman?

Where was Berryman right now?

Had anything been done to follow up on the story of the Shepherd brothers out in Washington?

How did the Philadelphia gunman fit in? Did Ben Toy know him?

Exactly what did I think had happened on the day of the shooting? How was young Bert Poole connected?

I answered about eighty-five percent of their questions, but that isn’t necessarily a winning percentage in a meeting like that. At least two of the editors were trying to score points by throwing me stumpers.

I began to make excuses for some of the things I’d done. Then quite suddenly Reed was standing over me at the table.

He was smiling like a genial master of ceremonies, turning one of his editors’ serious and valid questions into a cute little joke. I felt like a vaudeville comedian about to get the hook. Reed had stopped me in midsentence.

“That’s fine,” the broad-shouldered man said. His fingers were moving lightly on my arm.

“I think that’s just fine, Ochs.” He pointed down the table to Lewis Rosten. “We have a few exhibits to show all of you now.”

Very suddenly, I understood the purpose of the meeting. It was all a show. All theater for the publisher’s benefit.

Lewis dutifully passed around the credit card and phone checks on Berryman; then the photographs of Harley Wynn; finally the picture of Thomas Berryman and a typed report he’d written on the story’s progress. His report was just long enough, I noticed, not to be read right away.

Francis Parker was nodding thoughtfully. He asked Rosten a few informal questions and I found myself being talked to by Reed.

“Don’t you be hesitant to call me, even at my home,” was one of the things he said. “I expect you’ll have to go back up North again. Is that all right?”

I said that it was what I had in mind and Reed took my shoulder again. He was emotionally involved, and I couldn’t believe how much so.

We both caught the last of what the publisher was saying. Because of the general tone of the meeting, it sounded both important and dramatic.

“Right on through since 1963, every newspaper in this country has been trying to break a story like this one. None of them has … I believe, however,” he said, “that Moses, Lewis Rosten, and Mr. Ochs are about to do it right here.”

Mr. Ochs or Mr. Jones, I remained keyed up for the rest of the day.

I finally got started home around seven that night.

My eyes were tired, watery, blurring up Nashville’s streets and traffic. Tex Ritter’s Chuckwagon, Ernest Tubb’s Records, Luby’s Cadillacs flashed out and welcomed me home. I was yawning in a way that could have dislocated my jaw.

Nan tells the story that I put my head down in the middle of dinner and went to sleep beside the roast beef. I remember finishing dessert, so that much of her story is exaggeration.

On the other hand, I don’t remember anything much past finishing dinner that night.

I do remember one other phrase of Nan’s. “It’s like somebody trying to become somebody who other people wish they were,” she said.

She didn’t say that I was trying to become a newspaper superstar; she just made her statement.

Nashville, July 15

I had slept in my white suit on the living room couch.

A white platter of glistening pork sausage and eggs passed by my eyes as they opened on morning. Canadian geese flew over a lake under the sausage.

My little Cat sat down on the quilt somebody had used to cover me up the night before.

She’d brought sausage, eggs, waffles and strawberries, a Peter Pan glass filled to the brim with bubbly milk.

“Hi, sugar.”

“Hi.” With that nice look kids get when they’re partially off somewhere in their minds.

“Hey,” I said. “You awake?”

“I cooked you pancakes and eggs didn’t I.”

“Oh, yeah,” I quickly figured out the sitch. “I’m the one who’s not awake.”

I took a tricky little bite of waffles and strawberries.

“Mmmff,” I drooled. “Tasth jus lith waffleth ‘n’ strawbearth.”

Cat punched me in the side. Misnomer:
love tap.

She lay in my lap and looked upside down into the new beard. Her little-owl eyeglasses were being held together with a Band-Aid.

“Mom’s mad,” she said.

“Mmm hmmm. Where’s Janie Bug at?”

Not too long after the question was raised, our five-year-old appeared in the hall leading to the kitchen. She had a piece of rye toast stuck in her face.

“Right here,” she managed.

“It’s beautiful outside,” she continued after a bite.

“How do you know that, Buggers?”

“How do I know that, Daddy? I just took Mister Jack for a walk. He went to the bathroom in Mrs. Mills’ packajunk again.

“By the way.” She pushed her way onto the couch. “The paperboy threw the
Tennessean
at me on Tuesday.”

It goes like that at my house. More often than not, I like it very much. In fact, I’m still amazed that I have children.

That’s one of the reasons I wound up in Poland County, Kentucky, writing all this down.

Nan came downstairs before nine and I could tell she wasn’t that mad. Not at me anyway.

She’d brushed out her long farmgirl’s hair, put on the smallest tic of makeup, put on an Indian blouse of hers I like very much.

Nan is a tall, klutzy lady who happens to make as much sense as anybody I’ve bumped into yet on this planet. We were married when we were both sophomores at the University of Kentucky, and I haven’t regretted it yet.

“I had a funny dream, Ochs,” she said; she was sitting with Cat and Janie on the couch. “You and James Horn were riding on a raft on a river. Somewhere in the South it looked like. I was there … I watched you both through kudzu on the shore. You were talking quietly about something. Something sad and important it looked like. Individual words were carrying on the river, but I couldn’t make out the sentences. Then both of you floated out of sight,” she said.

After the kids’ breakfast, Nan admitted she was glad I was doing the story, though. She’d done volunteer work for Horn once and she’d liked him quite well. Besides that was the fact that Horn’s daughter, Keesha, was a best friend of Cat’s in school.

The four of us spent all day Saturday at a clambake out in Cumberland, Tennessee.

Lewis Rosten and his graduate school girlfriend were there, and spirits and hopes were high as Mr. Jack Daniels could bring them.

Lewis and I spent part of the day under a shade tree, figuring out how a possible lead story might go. Even that couldn’t bring us down though.

Before the sun set Moses Reed showed up in his big, shiny Country Squire. For the first time since I’d come to the
Citizen-Reporter
in 1966,1 thought we were a family.

On Sunday morning I took a long, solitary walk over to Nashville’s Centennial Park. Once there I tried to draft a story that could work with what I’d gotten from Ben Toy up to then.

It turned out to be a hearsay story. Very exciting, but with the danger of no follow-up.

The lead read:

A NEW YORK MAN SAID TO BE CONNECTED WITH A HIGH-PRICED GUNMAN CLAIMS THAT MAYOR JIMMIE HORN WAS NOT SHOT BY BERT POOLE HERE LAST THURSDAY.

I thought the
Citizen
might run something like that, but I hoped we could open up with a story we wouldn’t have to back off of later.

Lewis Rosten stopped by at the house while I was packing up to go back North that night. He seemed as restless about the story as I was. He kept referring to it as “a mystery story.”

Rosten told me that the editor-in-chief of the
Nashville Tennessean
had called Reed that afternoon. He’d wanted to know why we were sending reporters around to every hotel and motel in central Tennessee.

“That’s all we need,” I said. “To get scooped on this.”

Rosten didn’t want to discuss the possibility. He waved it away like a nauseous man being presented with dessert.

“We checked out every single hotel. Every motel,” he said. “We’ve shown his photograph everywhere a man can sleep in a twenty-five-mile radius.”

“Yeah … and?”

“Goose egg.”

PART II

The End of the Funniest Man in America

West Hampton, July 17

That Monday in West Hampton I could smell northern winters.

The rusty white thermometer on Bowditch’s front porch said 67.

I had a feeling that the St. Louis Cardinals were going to get into the World Series; that Ali was going to beat George Foreman. It was all in the air.

It was July 17th and this was to be my last visit with Toy. Our subject was the whereabouts of the southern contact man, Harley John Wynn.

We set up my Sony cassette recorder on a redwood table out in the exercise yard. Its learner traveling case made it look official and important. Historical.

The two of us sat on hardwood deck chairs. Our respective sport shirts off, facing into a lukewarm ball of off-yellow sun.

The sun was just on the verge of overcoming the morning’s chill.

Ronald Asher slumped up against a dwarf oak at the center of the yard, growing disenchanted with news reporting I could see. It wasn’t exactly as Hunter Thompson had anti-romanticized it in
Rolling Stone.

A slight breeze turned oak leaves, lifted the blond hair on Toy’s forehead, softly bristled my beard.

Ben Toy leaned back and closed his eyes. He was king of the hospital.

After a minute watching five or six contented-looking mental patients sunbathing around the yard, I closed my eyes too.

This was privilege, I was thinking. This was interviewing Elizabeth Taylor over breakfast in a flowery Puerto Vallarta courtyard.

“Tom Berryman never did know it.” Toy alternately sucked in the morning air and sniffled. “But on and off for about six months I’d been seeing this wiggy Jewish lady … this shrink in New York.”

I opened my eyes and saw that Toy was looking at me too. “Why didn’t Berryman know?” I asked.

“Because he would have had a shit fit. He wanted me around because I was dependable. He didn’t have to worry when I was handling details for him. I was backup.

“So I had to be very careful about this lady. It was all on the sly. All my visits. It was all about me getting depressed. No big shit anyway.

“I went to see her the Wednesday after we’d met Harley Wynn in Massachusetts. I was feeling like a dishrag again. She usually gave me some pills. Valiums. Stelazines.

“This was the day the walls came tumbling down on my head … I remember how it was real sunny. Nice out. I wouldn’t have believed it was going to turn into such a shit day …”

New York City, June 14

Toy’s doctor was a Park Avenue psychiatrist, a seventy-year-old woman who preferred being called Reva to Doctor Baumwell.

She saw all her patients at a luxury apartment in a prewar building on the corner of East 74th Street. She always wore dark dresses and red high-heeled shoes for her appointments.

In his six months with Reva Baumwell, Ben Toy had never once spoken about Thomas Berryman.

For her part, Reva talked of little else except rebuilding Toy’s personality. This was “getting as common as face-lifting” she said in an unguarded moment. She also forewarned him that this rebuilding process would probably involve a crisis for him. She was continually asking him if he was about ready for a little crisis, a little pesonality change for the better.

Sometimes, Toy considered the psychiatrist certifiable herself. But she dispensed tranquilizers like vitamin pills, and Ben Toy believed in Valium, in Stelazine and Thorazine. They had a proven track record. They worked for him.

When he left Reva Baumwell’s apartment building that day he had a prescription for twenty milligrams of Stelazine in the pocket of his peach nik-nik shirt. Basically, he was feeling pretty good about life.