On Green Dolphin Street (19 page)

She read the paper, lighting a cigarette, trying to prolong the pleasure of being there, as she looked for Frank’s byline. She liked it, she would have been happy never to have any other breakfast than that provided in the wooden booths divided by their low partitions with patterned panes of brown and crimson glass at head height, with Sadie hovering at her elbow with a coffee refill, Mike the bearded cook in his crumpled hat beneath a sign that read: “Special. Don’t Cook Tonite. Whole Roast Chicken. Plus One Pound Kasha Varnishkes. Plus 1lb Potato Salad or Coleslaw.” She liked it all as though her life depended on it.

After breakfast she returned to her hotel room and settled down to write in the exercise book till about noon, when she would take the subway downtown to Sheridan Square. Frank had passed on a piece of advice he had received from a woman friend: she should smooth the back of her skirt down carefully before she sat down, as the seats in some subway cars had rough rattan surfaces that tore your nylons, “And you know what it’s like when you get a run in one of a new pair.”

Trees, trees, she thought each time she emerged in the Village: trees, and streets with curves and names; yet in this temporary escape from right angles there seemed a decadence, a flexed temptation. She followed a regular course: from Seventh Avenue South down West 11th Street, a peaceful, tree-lined thoroughfare of Italianate row houses with half-basements and pink geraniums in the window boxes. There were one or two plaques on the walls that suggested the street had long been too grand for the bakeries, Mexican craft shops and blue jeans that Frank despised. Then she looped onto Bleecker Street and paused to look at Frank’s apartment building. She gazed up to the top floors, unable to make out which window was his, with its view of the Hudson and the Jersey
shore. She went back a block to West 10th and looked again. There, behind that square of impersonal upper window, that was where her life had changed.

Afterward she took a different route each day, looking for a bar or café where she would feel at home. On this morning she walked for a few blocks down Bleecker, then turned south. Houston was not a street, but a highway of crosstown traffic, and a division, too, a Delaware, below which was Hell’s Hundred Acres, an industrial district of cast-iron buildings, sweatshops, strikes and factory fires. A block or so down she saw a neon café sign and decided to brave Houston to reach it.

Installed at the bar, she took out a magazine and leafed through it as the barman presented the requested Bloody Mary with a casual flourish. She was only the second customer in the place, which had a clean, morning smell and an atmosphere of expectation. Behind the bar an enormous selection of bottles was ranged on a wooden counter, beneath which was a row of brass-handled drawers. An indolent, two-bladed fan rotated in the ceiling, and behind the stool where Mary sat, on the other side of the long, rectangular room, was a row of tables set with red gingham cloths. On the wall above were photographs of prizefighters, many signed to the bar: watchful faces, some African in reluctant origin, some Slav, like Fritzie Zivic, staring with violent monochrome trepidation, fists raised, at their new unconquered homeland. You could almost hear the roar of their endeavor.

Mary was too happy in her surroundings to read the magazine, but flicked through the advertisements, with Frank’s voice in her ear. The men’s clothes all promised something more impressive than pants and coats. “Glen Guard: the trademark of the confident man!” “The Bowler Homburg—the new Hat of Influence,” at Saks. “Strook—for the self-assured look. Some men are born relaxed, some achieve relaxation through Yoga or Zen and some find relaxation thrust upon them via suits of Folkweave Tweed.” The gentleman in the picture had certainly achieved a self-assured air; so much so, Mary noticed, that next to his Folkweave Tweed suit he was clutching a nine-inch upright model of a U.S. Navy Polaris missile.

Every page seemed to have some relevance to her own unusual circumstances. She could send a Western Union candygram, a two-pound box of chocolates with a telegram attached—five dollars plus the cost of the words—to Eugene, Oregon. But to whom would she address it?

Her small anguish at the thought of Charlie staggering once more across the tarmac to the waiting plane was replaced by a shameful idea: she could volunteer to accompany him. And if he was going to be close to Senator Kennedy for a time, then inevitably she would come across others who …

The bar was slowly filling with workers from the factories, regular customers known by name to the barman, also with one or two office clerks in suits and neckties who had ventured down from the Village into the cast-iron neighborhood. Mary felt she should vacate her stool for these people whose claim was superior to her own, but she was enjoying being there and ordered a sandwich to justify her presence.

The barman brought another drink, which she sipped, feeling not so much a weakening effect of alcohol as a slight intensifying of the moment. She flicked the page and read the words “Hold That Tiger with an Easybaby Car Belt” over a picture of a cross little boy standing on the backseat of a car. His face reminded her of Richard’s when he was two or three, and from her purse she surreptitiously slipped the wallet with two photographs and gorged her hungry gaze on them beneath the cover of the mahogany bar rail.

“Club sandwich, ma’am.”

Mary looked up with stinging eyes. “Thank you.”

After lunch she went back to the hotel and wrote a long letter to each of the children, describing the wonderful city of New York. Then she wrote to Duncan Trench, explaining that she planned to be out of town so much in the near future that she would regrettably be unable to help him with his request.

There was no flight number for the press plane, no check-in; you walked across the airfield apron, left your bag beneath the open hold if you
wanted it stowed, then climbed aboard, found a seat and, when the attendant had shut the cabin door, you took off. There were seat belts, but no one wore them because they prevented you from turning around and sharing drinks and notes with the reporters in the row behind.

There was a murmur of anticipation as the small aircraft reached the steepest angle of its climb. The curtain at the front parted, Senator Kennedy emerged and sat down on a wooden tray; he joined his hands around his feet and tobogganed down the aisle into the restraining arms of his junior press secretary at the rear of the plane.

The senator passed within a foot of Frank Renzo as he rushed by; Frank saw the straight hairline, the close-shaved skin of his young face, the narrow eyes opened to their widest extent in alarm and triumph as he defied the advice of his back doctor to deliver what the boys on the plane had been asking for. Forgive me my sins, his wild gaze seemed to say, forget my reckless love of women, overlook my wealth and East Coast homes, because at heart I am like you.

Frank noticed the stitching in his clothes, his manicured hands and the easy manner that came from years of parties in Hyannis Port and Martha’s Vineyard, of dating debutantes and making furtive love also to their mothers; of yacht clubs and dinner parties, cigars and tennis; of Harvard and oak-paneled rooms and charge accounts on which you bought shirts by the dozen. Frank found they raised in him an instinctive distrust—a reaction he could no more control than the reflex of a struck knee.

“Frank,” said the
Sun
’s reporter, a man called Potter whom Frank had met on previous assignments and admired for his hardheadedness, “you’re going to love Jack. The guy’s got class.”

“
Jack?
When did you start calling the enemy by his first name?”

Potter laughed. “You’ll see.”

Frank looked at Potter skeptically. Was this the man whose angry rectitude had chilled Senator McCarthy, who had in public told Chiang Kai-shek’s adjutant that he was a liar?

Everyone around the candidate seemed dizzy with uncritical affection.
“If you’re new on the senator’s campaign,” the press secretary told Frank, “you need to look out for the jumpers.” As Kennedy’s car drove slowly down a prepared route, a number of women in the crowd would jump up and down on the spot: schoolgirls in bobby socks, mothers with babies in their arms, ladies in suits and high heels—age seemed not to be a factor in their excitability. Those who held hands as they jumped were known as double-leapers, those who hugged themselves in glee if Kennedy caught their eye were “clutchers.” Most dramatic were the “runners,” women who attempted to break the police line, reach the motorcade and steal a kiss from the candidate.

The senator, Frank noticed, seemed at best indifferent to the response he prompted and often perturbed by it. His speech, which varied little from day to day, was a sober account of Republican failings in office and a reasonable list of improved policy expectations at home and abroad under his presidency. There was nothing demagogic in his style, yet something in his presence seemed to excite, so that the steady paragraphs beat the air as though uttered with full oratorical intent. The logical conclusion of his argument was often lost before the end, to the speaker’s evident exasperation, in the clamor of hysterical applause.

Frank was exhausted by his induction to the job. Pierre Salinger and the other press secretaries had viewed him with distaste after the removal of Webster Cordell, believing Frank would naturally overcorrect his predecessor’s uncritical fondness for Kennedy. He was not invited to informal briefings in hotel rooms; he was the last to be told of any changes in a prepared speech. He therefore relied on the kindness of colleagues, rapid shorthand and what he hoped would be the superior powers of his own observation. None of this endeared the candidate to him, but he allowed neither his treatment by the press aides nor his instinctive recoil from Kennedy’s gracious manner to influence what he wrote. He watched and listened ravenously, put down what he saw and heard, checked it three times over and took it to Western Union.

—

Coming and going in the hotel lobby, Mary lingered as she passed the desk, looked the clerk in the eye and gave him an extended greeting, so he would be reminded of the telephone call for her that he had taken earlier and would produce from the pigeonhole behind him a message of transfixing love.

Late one afternoon, he did stop her on her way in and handed over the piece of folded paper she had so fiercely imagined. She read it as she crossed the lobby. “Will be returning evening 20th. Two days, then Augusta.” She paused at the elevator, turned and walked back to the desk.

“This message. Can you tell me who it’s from?”

The clerk took it from her hand and looked at it. “Let me check.” He went into the glass-fronted office behind the desk where Mary could see him questioning the obese female telephonist.

He returned and handed her back the piece of paper. “I guess it’s from your husband, ma’am.”

“Yes … Yes, I guess it is. Thank you.”

Up in her room, Mary sat on the bed and clutched herself. This was the pain of death and nothing she tried could make it stop.

I am a woman of some standing, she told herself through the hands she had raised to her face: a mother, a person others are entitled to look to with some confidence for rational behavior and good example. I cannot therefore allow this to happen to me.

She went to the bathroom, steadied herself against the basin and splashed water in her face. She looked into her eyes, the dark brown irises, and tried to see shame or sense.

When she had calmed herself, she called room service for some tea and searched her purse for change with which to tip the bellboy. After he had been and gone, leaving behind the wheeled wagon with the tea things, she turned on the television, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed.

The host of a New York early evening program was interviewing a number of famous people who were in town that night; through the fuzzy monochrome of the screen, presumably receiving insufficient signal from
a cloud-piercing roof antenna, a man in a bow tie was speaking to the camera: “Later in the program we’ll be talking with Lucille Ball, who’s staying at the Plaza, but right here in the studio we have a whiff of
Gun-smoke
, yes it’s Marshal Matt Dillon himself, Mr. James Arness …”

The telephone rang.

An hour later, Mary was sitting on the subway—her flannel skirt carefully smoothed before she risked the snagging seat—heading down to the Village. The street numbers in the bare, tiled stations counted her rapidly down to zero. She tried not to hurry as she went through the turnstile but to keep some dignity; the fact that Frank had called to say he was back in New York did not mean to say she had to lose all sense of her own freedom of action.

As the elevator rose in Frank’s building, she tried to organize her thoughts. He was waiting at the open door of his apartment down the corridor, and she had just enough presence of mind to keep herself from running.

When she had extracted herself from his arms, Mary felt disappointed. Nothing had been solved by his absence or return and they took the same wary positions on either side of the room.

“You look exhausted,” she said.

“I haven’t been to bed for three days. I had a lot of catching up to do out there. I haven’t even had time to shower since I got back. You were too quick for me.”

“You can go and have a shower now if you like. Shall I make some tea or something?”

“Sure. There’s some in that cupboard there.”

Embarrassed by the thought of having been “too quick” for him, Mary found a small pleasure in marshaling cups and a pot, moving among Frank’s possessions, using them as her own. She saw him emerge, damp-haired, from the bathroom in a dark green robe and go into the bedroom next door, but ten minutes later there was no sign of him and the tea was growing cold.

Mary went cautiously to the door of the bedroom and knocked, the cup of tea in her hand. There was no answer, so she pushed the door open a little and peered round. Frank was lying on the bed asleep, still in his robe. Mary smiled as she crossed the room and set down the cup on a table by the bed, next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes. She touched Frank’s arm and shook it lightly, but he did not stir.