WLT (52 page)

“ ‘We Americans worry about the big things, like the future of civilization, and the French don't. They figure they can't do anything about it, so they concentrate on having a very good life today. They want the next loaf of bread to be the best, the wine to be good, the conversation good. They love good things: a perfect fish stew is a joy to them, but so is a fresh pear, or an old book. They fashion a civilized life out of what's at hand. Civilization doesn't come easy for an American. For one thing, we want to tear it all down and start over all the time. We're fatally ambitious people. And we work far too much. This is the American tragedy today: we work harder than our pioneer ancestors did and see less return for our labor and have to work even harder to stay even. Somehow, a hundred years after the slaves were freed, the American corporation has managed to bring it all back. The bottom line has become everything, the unions that spoke up for the employees are broken, corporate life is in a vicious frenzy, work is everything, and the victim is the American family and the American child. Family life in America, compared to Europe, is starved and frantic and laced with injury and bitterness. We're pushing, pushing, pushing to make our kids happy and we don't have time to show them how to live. In France, I see grownups enjoying their life, and children watching and learning, and in America, I see parents too exhausted from work to do much with their kids except give them expensive toys and sit and study them and feel guilty. That wasn't so true thirty years ago, and you could change it by introducing a National Vacation Law, like they have in Europe: five paid weeks a year, for everybody, even the unemployed, as a tribute to the family.'

“But White said he went to France, not for the culture but for the freedom.

“ ‘A face like mine is a pain in the ass to haul around the United States. After a thousand people have told you that television hasn't been the same since you left, you are ready to either ship out or buy a new face. When I strolled down the Rue Saint-Honoré and into the Place Vendôme one afternoon and realized that nobody had the faintest idea who I was and didn't care, I felt like breaking into a song and dance, but nobody ever wrote a song about that feeling. It's like a paraplegic who goes to a paraplegic convention and,
voilà,
becomes a man among men, suddenly free of the obligation of receiving other people's pity.' The Whites sublet an apartment and a year later they bought it. ‘We both feel tremendously lucky and full of health,' he said. ‘And my wife is dancing again.' ”

The rest was about Maria. Shell shoved the magazine back in his briefcase. He was a little dazed by the traffic, the boredom—two days and no sight of the bastard—and he was also stunned by what he was thinking. He climbed out of the car and crossed the street and looked at the used-book stalls along the stone wall beside Central Park. He picked through the stacks.

The timely death of a famous man can mean
a million dollars
to his lucky biographer, Shell thought. The famous man conks out in his relative prime, while his name is fresh and his admirers and the people who hate him are still in their prime book-purchasing years, and the biographer, who has gotten the Life in order, wakes up one morning, picks up the newspaper, and sees he has won the jackpot. He pens the final chapter, and the book is in the stores two months after the body is in the ground. But the violent death of a famous man can mean vastly more, mucho millions, depending on movie deals, television rights, so on. It could mean
three million dollars.
Maybe more. If Frank White were to put a shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger, Shell was all ready to go to press. He had months of work locked up, ready to go. If White killed himself, it would multiply the value of the book fifty times, a hundred times, who knows?

This is only a wild idea, he thought to himself. This is not a plan.
But
—he could offer White a ride—pretend to be a young TV reporter and corner the man on the street and fawn over him (“I know all about your life, I've read everything you ever wrote or said, you are—there's no other way to say this—you are my hero”) and then: “Mr. White, I'm going to ask you a fantastic favor. I have my car
right here
. I'd like you to hop in and point out to me where you walked when you left the Palladium Theater that night in—what was it? 1953? when Roy Cohn had threatened your sponsor, Sport-Tex, and they told you to cool it and you took that long walk about 2 a.m. and finally decided to take a stand? I would like to know where that took place. It's the only thing I want to know. Then I'll bring you right back here or wherever you want to go.”

The old fart'd be flattered out of his pants. He'd make a little flutter of modesty but he'd climb in and start gassing about the McCarthy era and Shell'd drive down Fifth Avenue and then hang a left into a side street and then suddenly clap the chloroform to Frank White's nose and shove him down on the floor and hold him until he went limp and haul him to the Brooklyn Bridge and throw him over. Then he'd go back to New Hampshire and write the last chapter.

“Sunk in a deep depression since his impulsive move to Paris, White came to New York for psychiatric treatment. Much as he talked up France and its superior civilization, White was miserable there. He missed the limelight. Once adored by millions as a fount of wisdom, now he was alone, barely able to converse with the newsboy, unable to explain to a plumber that the toilet leaked. Dejected, he and Maria took the $200/day suite at the Sherry Netherland, the same gilded suite where they had shacked up so often in the. past, but the memories only aroused Frank's black guilt for what he had done to those who had helped him. Eating a $30 room-service breakfast, he was haunted by visions of (name), the first woman he loved, the one who stood by him in poverty and anonymity, who lived in squalor in (town) while he was ensconced in a red drawing room in a fourth-floor suite in a gracious hotel overlooking Central Park.

“A few days after their arrival, Frank was unable to leave the suite, unable to talk on the phone or eat a sandwich or look in a mirror without weeping. He lay in a bed for three weeks, too infirm to hold a book or a copy of the
Times
and thus, the man
TV Guide
once called ‘The Father of Anchors' was forced to pass the time watching television. He was struck by its unspeakable shallowness and brutality. After a few days, he saw that his life had been wasted and that his so-called talent had been a depraved and vicious one. He tried twice to hang himself with a leather belt, and to throw himself from the window, and to drop an electrical fan into the bathwater, but Maria intervened. Finally he gathered up all his willpower, and he forced himself to appear to improve. He made himself accompany her to dinners and movies. He made himself laugh and carry on conversations. Inside, his guts were busted, but he kept dancing, kept smiling, kept shaking hands, until finally she relaxed her guard, and that night he took a cab to the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. The legendary abutments and harp-like suspension cables immortalized by the poet Hart Crane were wreathed in fog, as he walked to the midpoint, tied his Medicare card to his left ankle for identification, gave $200 from his wallet to a passing tramp and climbed up the rigging and over to the edge. Perhaps he paused a moment, looking down at the roiled waters, and thought of the day, etc. Perhaps he remembered (fill in details)———Did he perhaps feel a twinge of regret for the people he had hurt and the damage he had caused? (Etc.) If so, it lasted only a few seconds, and then his body hurtled down in the darkness. According to the coroner, he died immediately on impact from a broken neck.”

Shell thought this passage, like a dream, in one smooth flash. And he remembered the line from William Safire —he had clipped it out of the
Times
and taped it to his refrigerator—“The inconceivable becomes the inevitable: that's leadership.” The line referred to Bush's war, but it was so
true
, it applied here, too. One man can take things into his own hands. The unthinkable becomes unavoidable.

He had worked hard on Frank White. He had earned some property rights there and now he owed it to himself to kill him. He crossed 59th Street and looked at the Corvettes in the showroom window. Where could he obtain chloroform? Perhaps from a pet store. Tell them he had an old mutt he had to put away. They'd stock chloroform or something like it, and a bottle big enough to kill a big dog would be sure to knock out Frank White for an hour. He didn't think chloroform could be traced in the blood. Maybe they wouldn't even perform an autopsy, especially if there was a suicide note. Which would be a nice touch for the book.

All this brilliance was making him hungry. The hot-dog wagon was right there, ten feet away; he got an Italian sausage on pita bread, onions, peppers, tomato, hot sauce, the works, two bucks, and ate it as he crossed Fifth Avenue.

He could get Frank White to write his own suicide note in the form of an autograph.

Simple. It'd go like this.
Before
the business about Roy Cohn, he'd say, “Mr. White, my mom is your biggest fan and I wonder if you'd write a note to her. She always loved your sign-off on the News Tonight. Could you write:
Dear Mother, Good night and good luck. Frank White?
Gosh thanks. She's going to be thrilled.”

Or maybe in the car, parked on the side street, prior to the chloroform.

White's mother had killed herself in 1956. She was living alone in a rooming house in Duluth, and one warm spring day she came down to the harbor and jumped off the Lift Bridge. She had to wait for an hour for an ore boat to come steaming in off Lake Superior and the Lift Bridge to lift—in its normal down position, it was too low to permit suicide—and then she waited too long to jump, and jumped onto the upper deck of the boat as it passed beneath, a fall of twenty feet. She landed without a scratch. The crew had been at sea for more than a month and Mrs. White, though despondent, was attractive to them. They took her out for an evening on the town, carousing, dancing, moving from bar to bar along Superior Avenue, and after she had downed a snootful of gin rickeys, she dropped dead on the barroom floor. A leap from the Brooklyn Bridge would be, in a sense, the son's attempt to finish what the mother had set out to do—a sort of bridge between them (though one needn't lay that on too heavily)—the last chapter could be entitled “Mother and Son Reunion” and the famous sign-off seen nightly on national television could be seen now as White's lifelong suicide note, his secret pact with his mother, his covenant with death—Shell crossed 59th, eating the last inch of the sausage, thinking he might need another one.
This had been the theme of the book all the way and he had never recognized it before
. Suicide. It was written all over White's life. How had he missed it? The steadiness of the man, what was it but the certainty of one who has Already Made Up His Mind—that Olympian baritone voice, so reassuring to millions, was the voice of a man who knew his own end. He had risen to the heights to please the mother and now he would fall from the heights and rejoin her.

It was all there. A book that would earn him three million dollars
and
would be admired, really admired, held up on the front page of the
Times Book Review
as a work that blazes a new trail in the misty thickets of biography —
perhaps the best book on an American life since Henry
Adams
—he looked up at Sherman, blazing gold on his pedestal, the Sherry Netherland beyond—

According to witnesses, he never saw the yellow truck. It clipped him on the right side and flung him thirty feet through the air and he landed hard against a lamppost. Witnesses standing across the street heard bones snap when he hit. He lay on the sidewalk for ten minutes, bleeding from his mouth, his ears, his body crumpled like a pile of used clothing, and then an ambulance took him to Lenox Hill Hospital. He had broken his right arm, a collarbone, eleven ribs, his pelvis, his right leg, and crunched two vertebrae, but the cruelest injury, they found, after they had screwed his bones together, was to his brain. When they reduced the Demerol and he was fully awake, the patient had no memory at all and very little intellectual function. The brain CT scan and magnetic resonance imaging showed no lesions, no hematoma. Weeks passed, the patient seemed comfortable and in no distress, but he could not speak, though he was able, gradually, to learn a few words again:
Hello. Water. Toilet. Food. Pill. Thank you,
though he could not distinguish between
Yes
and
No.

When he was brought in, he appeared to be about fifty, white, well-nourished, well-kept, and from his clothing, the corduroy jacket, blue button-down shirt, pre-faded jeans, Hush Puppies, the police assumed he was an academic. His billfold, if he had one, had disappeared before the ambulance arrived. Two detectives roamed along 59th Street for an afternoon and part of the next day, inquiring at hotels about missing guests, showing a photo of the man to bartenders and carriage drivers. The doorman at the Sherry Netherland said, “It's about time you guys show up.” He had seen two young men hotwire a green Rambler-on Fifth Avenue! in the middle of the afternoon!—and he had called 911 and here it was a day later before the cops arrive. They gave him a number to call for auto theft—911 was only for emergencies, they explained.