The Unwitting (22 page)

My mother suggested that she move in with us. She would take care of Abby while I worked. You never took care of me, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I simply thanked her and told her there wasn’t room for the three of us in the apartment.

People told me time would heal the wound. Even as they said it, I knew time was not the panacea it was cracked up to be, but I didn’t suspect it was a thief. Instead of making life without Charlie easier, it found new ways to rob me of him.

After the first shock of his death wore off, I sought solace in the past. One day, I took the subway up to 116th Street. The students—few of the boys wore ties and jackets these days and many of the girls wore pants, which we never would have done—should have made me feel old, but instead I found myself wandering the campus in my twenty-year-old skin, vibrating like a tuning fork with the memory of our young besotted selves. I came across a photo of a greenhouse in a magazine, and for days afterward I lived in a dream of that glassed-in bedroom in the old fifth-floor walk-up, where we kissed and pawed and slammed our bodies together as snow swirled, and rain whispered, and planes streaked through the night like slow shooting stars on their way to an airport that was still called Idlewild,
because JFK, like Charlie, was still alive. One night a plane fell into the Hudson, only it wasn’t a plane, it really was a shooting star, or am I misremembering this? Sometimes Charlie felt so far away that I feared I was making up the whole story of us.

Little by little, he began to fade. No, not fade, atrophy. There were still moments, usually when I was not trying to think about him, that I caught a glimpse of him, as if out of the corner of my eye. But when I turned to follow it, he disappeared. Even the photographs on my desk and dresser, in Abby’s room and on end tables no longer brought him back. I’d pick one up and stare at it hard, but Charlie refused to return the look.

I had his letters from the editor bound in a private edition. I did it mostly for Abby and me, but I gave copies to his parents, Elliot, Sonia, and a few other friends. I even sent one to Frank Tucker. I doubt he opened it, but he did write me a letter thanking me and reminiscing about some good times he’d had with Charlie. I was grateful for that. He had given me fresh memories, even if they were borrowed.

A few days later, he called and suggested we have dinner. I would not have minded so much if his voice hadn’t sounded as viscous as an oil slick. The approach was typical of Frank, but these days I was getting similar reactions from other men. At first, I didn’t notice the change. In those days I noticed little but Charlie’s absence. But gradually I began to realize that just as my status had changed from wife to widow—how I hated that word, with the round
o
opened into a keen of mourning—so other people’s perceptions of me had altered. Wives viewed me with gimlet eyes. Men saw me as an unexploited resource.

Around the time that Frank Tucker wrote and called, I got a condolence letter from Woody. I stood at my desk reading it. The sentiments were formal, proper, sincere-sounding, but the paper reeked so strongly of guilt—mine, not his—that it might have been perfumed. I dropped it in the wastebasket. Like scented stationery, it
continued to foul the room. I carried the wastebasket down the hall to the incinerator and dumped it, but when I got back to my study, the odor still clung.

IN MID-JANUARY, THE
police arrested a suspect in Charlie’s murder. He was a negro, he was barely literate, his vision was severely impaired and uncorrected because he could not afford glasses, and he had been in half a dozen foster homes by the time he was twelve. He was everything I would have wanted to save, under other circumstances. That did not mean I was vindictive. I simply did not care. Nothing they did to Randall White would bring Charlie back. Locking him up would prevent future crimes against others, but I did not care about others. Randall White had mugged my social conscience along with Charlie.

The police, however, were jubilant. “We got the guy,” the detective told me when he broke the news. “Open-and-shut.”

“How can you be sure?”

“He had your husband’s wallet.”

Suddenly I did care. This man had shot Charlie, then walked around for weeks afterward with his wallet.

“Your husband’s driver’s license was still in it. That’s how dumb the kid is.”

“Did it have anything else?” I wanted to know how much of Charlie’s life his murderer had stolen.

“No money, that’s for sure. The kid probably shot himself up with whatever was there in twenty-four hours. Some other cards and papers, and a picture of you and I guess your daughter.”

I had always been opposed to capital punishment, but Randall White deserved the electric chair.

“He denied it for a while,” the detective went on, “but I knew he was lying. You can always tell when a nigger is lying. His knee begins to go up and down, like he’s jiving to it.”

To this day, I am ashamed that I said nothing to that, especially in view of what happened later.

“Anyway, the guy confessed. Finally. So it’s an open-and-shut,” he repeated.

EIGHT MONTHS LATER
Randall White went on trial. I did not go to the courtroom. I could not bear to sit through detailed accounts of the last violent moments of Charlie’s life. I did not want to hear lawyers bickering over the details of his death.

The trial was brief, the jurors’ deliberations speedy. They found Randall White guilty in a matter of hours. I understood their hurry. They, and the entire nation, had another murder on their minds. The Warren Commission report was due out any day.

Sometimes I think I ought to start a club for wives, husbands, and children of the other people who died on November 22, 1963, not only for the relatives of celebrities like Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis, whose deaths on that day were barely noticed, but for all of us whose grief was crushed into insignificance by the steamroller of national mourning.

Fifteen

I
HAD RAGED AGAINST
the national mourning. Now I found a shameful comfort in the national disillusion. The exposés, confessions, and revisionist books about the late President were still several years in the future, but the gossip, jokes, and innuendo began almost immediately. There had been speculation while he was in office—witness Frank Tucker’s comment about a gentlemen’s agreement not to sully the presidential image. But now the gentlemen who had been party to the agreement, and some of the ladies, were beginning to talk.

“I heard it from a girl who roomed with a girl who slept with him when she was a White House intern,” an editor I knew swore.

“A guy I ran into last week was at one of the White House pool orgies,” a reporter insisted.

Tucker said the President had slipped away from the inaugural ball to tryst briefly with a Hollywood star.

The man for whom the entire country had gone into mourning was not what he had seemed. Even those of us who considered ourselves more worldly about these matters—no public figure is what he seems; no one is what he seems—were shocked. The disparity between the myth and the reality was too great. The doting father watching his mischievous children cavort in the Oval Office, the adoring husband who introduced himself as the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris, the idealistic lad with the promissory
note of a smile was a world-class philanderer. One line in particular was going around. I must have heard it in half a dozen iterations, and every time the teller of the story insisted he’d heard it directly from someone to whom the late President had said it. It was to the effect that if he didn’t have sex with a strange/different/new girl at least once/twice/three times a day, he got a head-/stomach-/backache. Maybe he really had delivered the line in a variety of ways to dozens of different listeners. Maybe those buttoned-up dour-looking men sitting around the Oval Office in newspaper photographs weren’t fretting about Khrushchev or Castro or a nuclear holocaust, but salivating over the President’s salacious boasts. Certainly that was what the men who repeated the stories were doing. Women tended to speculate about whether the First Lady had known. Once again Frank Tucker stepped in as the voice of authority. He said that when Jackie returned to the White House from a trip, she always had someone call ahead to make sure no stray girls were left littering the premises.

Some were heartbroken and insisted the stories couldn’t be true. Others were enraged and suddenly saw weakness, deceit, and bungling where before they’d found strength, competence, and vision. Different people react differently to betrayal. I felt strangely vindicated. The man whose death had overshadowed Charlie’s was being cut down to size.

DISILLUSION WAS THE
national mood. A year after Charlie died,
The Nation
ran an article suggesting that the CIA was funding an Anglo-American literary and cultural journal called
Encounter
. The charge wasn’t exactly news. For some time, people had whispered that the Agency was behind the magazine, though the editors denied it. Charlie and I used to joke about how slavishly it toed the government’s foreign policy line. Once he had come home from a conference in London with a story that substantiated the rumors. He’d had lunch at a club in Pall Mall with two editors from
Encounter
. The
younger editor was late, and on his arrival announced that he’d changed taxis three times on the way to the club to make sure he wasn’t being followed. The senior editor had laughed at the melodrama and said for Christ’s sake, they were editors, not secret agents. Then he remembered that Charlie was not one of them, pulled a straight face, and changed the subject.

I was glad the word was finally out. It was time the world got wise. I only wished Charlie were here to know that his suspicions had been well founded. I only wished Charlie were here.

Sixteen

“I
DON
’
T WANT TO
upset you,” Elliot began.

I swiveled my desk chair to face the single tall window. It was a bright March afternoon, and the wind was knocking the clouds around like bowling pins.

“Then don’t start a conversation that way.”

“It’s about Randall White.”

Six months earlier, Randall White had been sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. He could do no more damage to Abby and me. Nonetheless, I felt fear spread its raptor wings in my chest.

“What about Randall White?” I forced myself to ask.

“A reporter who covered the case for the
World-Telegram and Sun
has been trying to get it reopened. He says he’s found evidence that proves White didn’t do it.”

“He was caught with Charlie’s wallet.”

After the trial, the police had returned the wallet. It lay now in the top drawer of Charlie’s dresser, greasy and torn around the edges. I couldn’t look at it, but I couldn’t throw it away.

“And he confessed,” I added.

“He says he found the wallet in a trash can and the police beat the confession out of him.”

The detective’s comment about being able to tell when a negro was lying came back to me.

“What’s the new evidence?”

“White was picked up by the Philadelphia police that morning. For burglary. They let him go, but not until late that afternoon.”

“Why didn’t he say that at the time?”

“Apparently he did, but it didn’t fit the detectives’ story so they decided he was lying.”

“Didn’t they check with the Philadelphia police?”

“And risk losing the only suspect they had?”

The injustice would never stop unspooling. I swiveled back to my desk and sat staring at the photograph of Charlie pushing Abby in the swing. She was sailing through the sun-shot afternoon, and his grin was a slice of blinding white hope in the grainy photo. Now the world was paying us back for our willful innocence.

THIS TIME THE
jury deliberated for two days. I could not understand what they found to argue about. They had the police blotter from Philadelphia. In the end, they found Randall White not guilty. The detectives were never charged with any wrongdoing, nor did they ever admit any. Randall White received no compensation for his imprisonment.