American Quartet (20 page)

Traffic on the streets of Washington was light; the last inaugural stragglers were headed homeward. They had ushered in another presidency.

“Quite a night.” Bruce drove with one hand on her thigh. She wanted to push it aside, but her will failed her. The sense of surrender was too powerful to resist. She finished her tumbler of Scotch and tossed the glass onto the back seat.

“You were wonderful,” he said. “An unsung heroine. Really, Fi, you helped us through a bad time. I’m so damned proud of you.” He gripped her thigh harder, but she did not respond; the alcohol was taking hold. “I’ll make it up to you somehow, darling. And you can be sure Remington won’t forget it. More than anything you saved his ass. If that ever leaked out, his place would be
verboten
.” He was silent for a long time, although his hand continued to stroke her. His possession. “You are quite a lady.” He turned toward her. “And I think it’s about time we got married.” She remained silent.

“It’s time,” he insisted. “We’ve got lots to do.” She heard his words, felt the pressure of his hand, caressing now, sensing her predictable response. Oddly, her mind was racing, as if the alcohol had stimulated rather than dulled it. Something was nagging at the back of her consciousness, something inchoate, half-formed. She groped for it.

At the intersection of Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, she looked past his profile to the White House, partially obscured by the deserted reviewing stand.

“First night,” Bruce whispered. His eyes glistened, caught momentarily in the glare of a street lamp. “Must be fantastic. I’ll bet they’re in the sack now. Doing it. What a moment!”

“You’d give anything to be there now.”

“God, yes. The bedroom’s up there,” he pointed. The car picked up speed as it moved past the antique-spired Post Office Building. In the distance, the Capitol dome was a mound of white light, like a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

“It looks so clean,” she said.

“Beautiful.”

Reaching out, he took her hand and put it where she could feel the hardness. She did not remove it. The connection was mysterious, abstract and incomprehensible. The idea seemed to cleave her in two. Can the genders ever really know each other? Perhaps being alone in a male world had alienated, denatured her. She felt suddenly besieged, frightened, helpless.

In her apartment, he embraced her against the door, then led her to the couch. She knew her body was opening, magnetized by the urgent force of his masculinity while her mind continued to explore its reasons, investigating, as if that other part of her were outside of herself watching, trying to understand. She felt engulfed by some animalistic, evolutionary force that defied resistance, forcing its possession on her. Some special knowledge seemed to be reaching out to her beyond time, impaled now on a force of maleness that transcended categories. He could have been a horse, or a dog, or a lion. It didn’t matter. The masculine imperative was pressing, driven, and even in the powerful whirlpool of her pleasure, she knew that a force inside of her was demanding to tame it, capture its essence. All men, it seemed, were victims of its inner compulsions, with women doomed to be the anvil on which the force was hammered out. Yet she was certain that the anvil would always out-endure the hammer.

The insight softened her and she let him linger in the embrace, until natural fatigue made him uncouple. Leading him into the bedroom, she undressed him like a child and lay down naked beside him, her back and buttocks nestled against his warmth.

Unable to sleep, she continued to explore the thing that was nagging at her.

It gnawed away, and she tried not to lose the thread. Something Remington had said. She was certain that a spear of inner light would uncover the source of her mystification. Something simple. She played a game of hot and cold with herself, determined to find its cause. She grew drowsy. Her eyes closed. She entered a world of half-dream, half-reality. An image of the golden President intruded. She saw how he had looked then, on that day, when she, a teenager, had been glued to the TV set along with her family, an electronic wake. They even took their meals in front of the set. A whole generation had absorbed the images. How had they been changed by them? Remington’s voice superimposed itself.

“Amazing how the will of the assassin continues to play out its power.”

The words arranged themselves in counterpoint to the remembered fuzzy images of the tube, filtered through more than seventeen years, a vision that could not, would not die, until her whole generation was wiped away by time. Then she found what she had been searching for. It came in a gush, accompanied by a hissing sound, like a cold wind leaking through the hairline crack of a wall.

“Someday, I suppose you’ll find your assassin.”

He had not said killer.

Before she slept, she made sure the words were engraved in her mind.

WHEN
she left the Martin Luther King Library, the sharp winter sun burned her eyes, already sore from hours of reading. She had crawled out of the warm bed at first light. Bruce was sprawled beside her, his mouth open, gulping air in a deep sleep. The events of the last evening had faded in her mind, larded over with this new excitement. She had slept fitfully, then at the crack of dawn had wakened with a start, as if fearful that further sleep would diminish the memory that needed to stick in her mind.

She reached for the handiest clothes that she could find, a jogging suit that hung on a hook in her closet and a pair of sneakers. In the bathroom, she looked at her reflection with bloodshot eyes, splashed cold water on her face and brushed her hair in quick strokes. On her desk she found a spiral notebook, mostly blank pages. Fearful of waking Bruce, of having to explain herself or plunge into a postmortem of last night’s events, she silently closed the apartment door and arrived at the library ten minutes before it opened.

Shivering in the cold morning, she bought a container of coffee and gulped it down. It burned her throat, but she was determined to get it down. She wanted to be at the library the minute it opened.

The card file on the Kennedy assassination was extensive and shuffling through it quickly, she found the file numbers of the
Report of the Warren Commission
, and soon had a dog-eared hardcover copy. The binding was broken and some of the pages were loose; it had been read over and over. Her hands shook as she turned the pages in a frenzy. Time passed. Her concentration was intense and before she realized it, her notes had filled nearly half of her spiral notebook.

“My God.” The words became a periodic exclamation in the large quiet reading room. Each time she said them, the librarian lifted her head and frowned, until Fiona mimed an apology. Vaguely familiar names filtered back in memory, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Officer Tippet. The latter name was barely a memory, an inconsequential footnote. It shamed her not to have remembered.

One would think, she reflected, that such a traumatic national event, so heavily covered at the time, would have lingered in the mind with every detail intact, a permanent matrix. It was true that she was only fourteen at the time, but like everybody within eyeshot of a television set, she had been glued to it, thrilled and repelled by its repetitive horrors. What she realized now was that she remembered little. Not even the date and year, only that it seemed to have happened before her eyes, in her parents’ living room, with her father’s curses, like a Greek chorus, in her memory.

From the extent of the card file and the dates of the various books, the event had taken on a life of its own, and even the most recent Congressional exercise seemed somehow outside the mainstream of national life. Time, indeed, marched on. The flames of passion had cooled although the mass of reading matter attested to a hard-core group of aficionados, like birdwatchers being turned on by a newly sighted species.

With mounting excitement, she filled her notebook, then extrapolated a list of especially pertinent data. She felt the thrill of Columbus seeing land for the first time, of Edison discovering the perfect filament, of Einstein balancing the equation that proved his theory. Nothing like this had ever happened in her life. It was the ultimate insight.

She was suddenly grateful to Remington for having kept his obsession alive, proving that for some the world had stopped spinning at the moment of the bullet’s impact. Like the poor woman last night who had made a half-hearted attempt to join the golden President. It saddened her when she discovered that she could not even remember the woman’s name. Like Officer Tippet. Footnotes!

She finished the Warren report just as the slanting rays of the sun began to throw lengthening shadows across the polished tables. A stomach growl reminded her that she hadn’t eaten all day and when she stood up her joints ached. Smiling, she returned the book to the librarian’s desk.

“A term paper?”

She nodded, but the reflex was a kind of warning. She had no doubt about the enormity of what she had uncovered. The question was, how was she going to disseminate it? But even before that, she would have to confirm what was barely a theory. Her mind raced through possibilities, but all she had were unproved coincidences. The notebook in her hand suddenly felt heavy; her fingers were trembling.

Outside, she breathed deeply, but the cold air only made her light-headed; she couldn’t think through the muddle. Perhaps the best course of action was to take it right to the eggplant, confront him with her theory, throw it on his desk as a kind of personal vindication. That was what the old Fiona might have done. But this new Fiona, having passed through the events of last night, knew better. The new Fiona lived in the real world, the last vestige of naiveté and idealism squeezed out of her. This was her territory now and she had to protect it. She owed it to herself, to her sex. She had to keep them from taking it away from her. The glory boys.

She felt like a fly, too fearful to alight in any one place. But no place seemed secure. Except one. Dr. Benton, for inexplicable reasons of his own, had answered one call. He was there when she needed him, although she could only make out the vaguest outlines of his motives, something to do with his dead wife. Had she the right to do it to him a second time? Out of sheer panic she began to run.

The rush hour had started in earnest. The bureaucrats were heading home, like a giant wave, the headlights of their cars probing the darkness. The city was a giant brain with millions of electronic circuits administering an unwieldly government, each, like herself, a breathing, living entity with its own motives and aspirations. As she ran, moving inexorably in the direction of Dr. Benton’s house, she contemplated how confronting the world’s vastness and indifference could stunt the emotional growth of a man like Lee Harvey Oswald. What secret conflagrations had maddened him, exploding his anger at that precise moment when the leader of the country would come into view? Her compassion annoyed her, inhibiting her perspective. It was, she told herself with brutal candor, her fatal flaw. Understanding the killer was different from feeling his pain. It was better, she knew, to excise all emotion.

By the time she reached Benton’s house, she was sweating through her jogging clothes. Thankfully, the lights were on and as she bounded onto his porch she could see him alone at his dining table, a book propped in front of him, eating his supper.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, after he let her in.

“The woman?” he asked. She could see his brief flash of terror.

“Something else.” She realized that her condition and dress must have startled him. She followed him inside. The place smelled of fish, and she noted two small fried trout on his plate, one of them carefully dissected, its bones neatly placed near a baked potato.

“I’ve got some soup left.”

He started toward the kitchen. “And you’d better get out of those clothes. You’ll catch pneumonia. There’s a robe hanging on a hook in the bathroom.”

Quickly she dried herself, put on his robe and returned to the table. She was ravenous and slurped the soup with four slices of bread. Between bites of his fish he watched her. She could detect an undercurrent of anxiety. She had placed the notebook on the table beside her. She pushed the bowl away and opened it.

“The Pringle killing. The sniper job from an upper floor of the Library of Congress. Do you remember?”

“That’s the cause of all this excitement?” She could tell he was relieved. “No complications with the woman?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.” It was an evasion. She hadn’t checked. He put down his knife and fork and studied her.

“Are you all right?”

“Very much so. Do you remember Pringle?”

He was thoughtful for a moment. “All my files are in the office.” He put on his glasses, got up and looked at a calendar over his kitchen telephone, rubbing his chin.

“Pringle? The sniper?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said, turning and looking at her over his glasses. “Extensive brain damage. Yes. It was a Saturday. I remember. They called me at home. There were two cases that day. The policeman. Officer Temple.” He looked at his calendar again. “November twenty-second.”

“Right. Does that day mean anything?”

“Saturday. Just another day,” he sighed, hinting at his loneliness.

“That’s all it means?”

He struggled to remember, his eyes narrowing. Finally he shrugged in defeat.

“John F. Kennedy,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” he nodded. “Nineteen sixty-two.”

“Sixty-three.”

His eyes focused on her. She knew she had his attention.

“The killer left three cartridges on the site. I could swear they were made by the Western Cartridge Company. And the rifle. I stake my life on it, it was a Mannlicher-Carcano, Italian Army. The cartridges, without my checking, would be 6.5 M, American made.” Her words tumbled out. “There was also a bullet that pierced his neck. Right?”

“Yes. I remember that. But it was all in the report.”

“I never saw the report,” she said.

He straightened in his chair, turning slightly, as if cocking an ear. She didn’t wait for a response. “I’ll even tell you the exact time the shots were fired. Pringle at twelve-thirty
P.M.
Temple at one-fifteen
P.M.
”

“I remember. It was quite a day. I had just finished lunch.”

“Temple took four bullets directly in the heart? Just like Tippet.” She patted the notebook. “It’s all in here.”

“You mean the two killings are related? The weapons were different. One was a revolver, if I’m not mistaken.”

“A thirty-eight. Oswald had gone back to his boarding house to get it.”

“Incredible.”

“Texas Book Depository, remember? Library of Congress. Books.”

He stood up and paced the room. She turned a page in her notebook.

“I’ll bet he signed A.J. Hiddel in the security man’s book when he walked into the Library of Congress. That was the alias Oswald used when he bought the rifle from a mail order house. There’s more. Much more. But these will do for starters.”

“You sure it’s not just unrelated coincidences?”

“I’m hoping you will confirm that it isn’t. If I start poking around . . . He’s down on me as it is. And I won’t confront him with this unless I’m dead sure. Even then, I’m going to have to think about it.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“He has a way of brushing things under the rug.”

“But why? You could make him a hero.”

“A thousand reasons. It’s an open case. It’s coincidental and speculative. It can stir things up and leave him in the exhaust fumes. There’s such a thing as being too big. He can look stupid by not picking up the similarities earlier. Or he could overreact for fear that I’d go to the press. I could go, of course, but that would blow my career . . . if there’s any career to begin with, considering how they treat women. Not to mention the color of my skin.”

She didn’t give him time to react. “Then there’s other possibilities. Speculation about the Kennedy assassination is endless. The government has spent millions tracking down every theory that’s been advanced. People have made fortunes on the speculation. It’s an industry in itself. There’s the other gun theory. Maybe this is the other gun. There’s the Russian agent theory; that the man who shot the President was not Oswald at all. Then there’s what Big Jim Garrison of New Orleans, remember him, tried to prove years ago. In short, Dr. Benton, any way you look at it . . . it’s too hot to handle.” What it boiled down to was that she believed the eggplant would be frightened by its magnitude.

“How did you get on to it?”

She hesitated. Dr. Benton sat composed, serious, concerned.

“Last night.” She wanted to explain it without alarming him. She plunged on.

“That woman. She was one of Kennedy’s mistresses. And our host, Thaddeus Remington. He was a friend of Kennedy, an old loyalist. His assassination affected both of them, probably thousands of others.” Including Bruce as well, she thought, and now herself. “To them, he became more than a memory. An obsession. Everything they do seems to relate to that one traumatic moment.”

“You knew that? About the woman?”

She studied her hands, ashamed to face him.

“I’m sorry. It could have been a real mess. Far more than you bargained for. I probably abused your kindness. I’m doing it again right now.”

“You’re certainly having an impact on what I thought would be a tranquil late middle age.”

“At least, you’ve got that far,” she said. He leaned over and patted her shoulder.

“She would have been proud of me,” he murmured, his eyes drifting to the picture of his wife. “She used to rebuke me for being afraid to take chances. She took them, but it ate her up alive. Maybe I see something of her in you. Maybe that’s it.”

“I had to tell someone,” Fiona said, pressing his hand. His flesh felt warm, restful, soothing. “We’re an odd couple.”

“Not so odd,” he said softly.

“I’m still hungry,” she said. He went into the kitchen, battered up some eggs and poured them into the frying pan.

“So what’s your theory?” he asked.