Truth Like the Sun (27 page)

Minutes later she was back on her phone, waiting for Steele to answer, pacing outside her car, light-headed from the sweltering evening and the sense that the career-changing story she’d been training and hoping for might have just fallen into her hands. Maybe she’d even take Elias with her to Columbia to accept the award. He was old enough to appreciate it now. But this mother-son daydream crashed right before Steele picked up, when it occurred to her that this story was far too convenient and full of holes to possibly be true.

She was giving Steele the jurors’ names and telling him about Rudy Costello and the other alleged murder when she noticed Elias coughing inside the car.

Steele wanted spellings, dates and other specifics she didn’t have, pushing hard in his heightened state, but her mind was suddenly distracted by the image she had of Elias chewing something in Carmichael’s room. What was it? She hung up and opened the passenger door, where Elias had the seat reclined and his mouth wide open, sliding his tongue around.

“What’d you eat, sweetheart?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, though his tongue was already swollen enough to slur his words. “Cashews.”

Which were no doubt processed in a factory, Helen knew, that also handled peanuts. In a flash, she saw that Elias already had taken the EpiPen out of her purse and had set it next to his leg, patiently waiting for her to get off the phone.

She told him he’d be just fine, removed the cap, rolled his shorts higher and pressed the needle into his slender thigh.

H
E DREAMED
about him again, almost the same dream, yet more detailed this time. The two of them were strolling the fairgrounds, soaking up everything like lifelong pals. Strangely, their gestures were synchronized and they were exactly the same size, smiling eye-to-eye in identical bright narrow ties and pin-striped single-breasted Savile Row suits. Moseying toward the fountain, they discussed books and cities and the threats facing the nation.

Though, of course, it won’t be like that at all, which is made excruciatingly clear by the detailed itinerary in the
P-I
this morning:

President Kennedy’s airplane will touch down at Boeing Field at 7:35 Saturday night. A brief ceremony of welcome is being arranged. A band will play. State, county and city officials will form a reception line
.

Mr. Kennedy’s motorcade will head directly for the Olympic Hotel, where he will spend the night in the presidential suite on the eleventh floor. He will attend mass the following morning at St. James Cathedral
.

A motorcade will take him to the fairgrounds at 11 o’clock Sunday
.

Mr. Kennedy will step out and walk to the plaza. The combined 21st Army and Fort Lewis bands will play while the President inspects the various state flags and shakes hands with World’s Fair commissioners
.

Roger reads that part twice. Yes. After all this, that is what he gets—an anonymous spot in the handshake line!

The President will re-enter his limousine for the short drive to
the front steps of the Science Pavilion, where he will make an address from a platform erected there. The World’s Fair band will play
.

Afterward, the President’s tight schedule calls for him to leave the fairgrounds in time to board his airplane at 2 o’clock. He will not attend the closing ceremonies, which will commence at 5 o’clock sharp
.

This entire shebang will culminate, then, in a brief motorcade, a quick handshake and a rushed speech before he gets the hell out of Dodge. Still, John Fitzgerald Kennedy will be here. He’ll stick out his smooth presidential palm and offer that winsome smile, while Roger watches him work crowds, adjust microphones and go from cordial to eloquent:
“ ‘Let there be light.’ What more can be said today regarding all the dark and tangled problems we face than ‘Let there be light.’ ”
And who knows, maybe the fair will turn his head and he’ll sense the magic and, in a glance, see the man whom Roger hopes he’ll become.

Though probably not.

There’ll be no time for JFK to indulge the possibility of a new friend. But he’ll get to say something to him, though, won’t he? The moment will be so brief he’ll have to pick the precise words. He won’t ask for anything, and he won’t flatter. He’ll
give
him something. Yes! Not some cheap souvenir, though, a notion or an idea. But what?

Roger snapped out of it and started rooting for smaller victories: that the weather holds, that the newspapers aren’t milking the graft scandal, that the city leaves a favorable impression. And if it becomes a new favorite of the president’s, he’ll come back, won’t he?

He’s pacing the grounds, worrying with his feet, when he misses the call from the White House explaining that Kennedy won’t be making the trip at all due to an upper respiratory infection. Essentially a curt note from his mother:
Jack has a bad cold and won’t be at school today
.

Roger phones East, desperately hoping the message was somehow garbled, that they’d simply wanted to warn him that he might not be able to attend. Yet all he gets are more jolts of dismissive brevity. People are killing themselves to get to this fair, he wants to shout, like Hindus to bathe in the Ganges or Muslims to crawl to Mecca!
But the president can’t make it because of a head cold? When he calls the senator’s office to express his bafflement, he’s told that LBJ has the same goddamn sniffles and won’t be traveling either.

He hangs up, wondering why Kennedy’s really ducking the fair.

HE’S AS SLEEP-DEPRIVED
on the final day as he had been on the first. It all feels like so much more than the end of a fair. People keep asking, What’s next? Will the dreamers extend the monorail, build a stadium or another floating bridge? Regardless, this party ends today, and the city will return to its isolation and its escalating scandal with the Needle hovering awkwardly above it all, marking and dating this fair until some generation won’t connect the two. That is, of course, if there is a future.

Today butts up against all that and more as everything spirals toward sunset. He lets the requests and complaints and goodwill overflow.
What’s next?
The question keeps coming, as if he’s got dozens of worldly spectacles up his sleeves. He cancels appointments, continues ducking calls and spends hours patiently making the rounds, shaking the hands of fair workers, forgetting to eat. He takes his time bidding farewell to the Belgians, French, Germans, Italians and Dutch as the grounds jam with a last-call euphoria and the biggest crowd yet. He’s saying good-bye in the Spanish Village to a familiar worker named Hector when something in the man’s gratitude starts Roger sobbing. Hector’s tiny wife leans forward and embraces him. More people line up to shake his hand and leave him with questions that come down to
What’s next?
But it’s got a different tenor now, as if they also sense that the real world is strung together by delicate threads.

He notices exhibits he’s forgotten about, such as a box the size of a small car,
brought to you by Behlen Mfg. Co.
, holding a million silver dollars, and another with Ford’s six-wheel rear-entry vehicle. He returns to the office to change into a fresh shirt and then joins the stadium’s capacity crowd of thirteen thousand people paying to witness the finale while tens of thousands more listen from outside in the gauzy light.

Jackie Souder’s band marches out, playing all the same songs one
last time, followed by a police drill team and high-school marching bands. He’s suddenly furious all over again about Kennedy not showing. The stage is a yuckfest, but there’s an emotional undercurrent now with people hugging, the senator and the governor already looking choked up. Roger had reserved seats for Linda and his mother, but can’t spot them from here. He watches Teddy, tall and handsome, grinning behind his cigarette and absorbing praise in the fading daylight. And he sees Meredith Stein, formidable as ever, gliding up to engage the governor, who jackknifes with laughter at something she says. When her eyes find Roger’s, he looks away before she blows him a kiss.

The senator sneaks up beside him now. “You gotta bring this thing home,” he says, his eyes scanning the crowd as if counting heads. “Take it where it needs to go. Play on all this emotion here.” He finally looks at Roger. “Has anybody in the U.S. attorney’s office,” he asks, barely loud enough to be heard, “been of any help?”

Roger hesitates. “You bet, sir.”

The senator studies him.

“Thanks a lot,” Roger adds.

“Well, good. Sure is a mess, though.”

He nods.

“Greed,” the senator says, leaning closer. “It’s our curse, isn’t it?”

Our
curse?

Roger notices Malcolm Turner sitting on the stage next to the mayor. Who invited him? Right then the fireworks begin, accompanied by bagpipes and applause. The subsequent speeches weave platitudes, yet for once sound genuine—the politicians and Teddy all offering something different. It isn’t JFK standing up there but it’s oddly intimate, and the crowd roars. And it’s more than just local pride, right? This fair forced itself into the American psyche and introduced this city to the world.

Roger doesn’t say any of this, though, when it’s his turn. Shutting his eyes, he lets the applause roll through him, the governor on one side, the mayor on the other, both men waving aimlessly, people cheering, nostalgic already, as if they know they’ll never again enjoy such lavish fanfare, snapping pictures to prove they were here.

“As this fair recedes into our memories,” Roger begins, “let it unleash a new crop of bold dreams and grand realities for this city and beyond.” He pauses, telling himself to slow down, yet hears himself shouting, “And please join me in hoping that by creating this world community, which we have felt and relished here for six inspiring months, we have hastened our journey toward a day of peace and universal understanding!”

That sounds desperate and farfetched but he believes it when the stadium thrums with affirmation. “And in the hope of arriving at that glorious day intact and enlightened, we entrust our future to the youth of today!”

He knew what was coming, but seeing it is something else, as hundreds of children run hand in hand beneath the spotlights and the gunfire salutes as various bands unleash Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
. Finally, the opera star Patrice Munsel steps up beside Roger, dressed in white, her smile visible from every seat, and starts into “Auld Lang Syne,” the crowd clumsily joining her until the air thunders with song.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot …

His face trembling, Roger looks around and realizes almost everyone is crying too. A spotlight swings across him before mercifully going dark. After a collective gasp and prolonged silence, the crowd files out into the night.

Roger floats offstage, dazed and sleepless, shuffling anonymously out of the stadium amid the horde of strangers returning to the grim humdrum of daily life. All he wants to do now is enjoy a highball with Teddy, then go home for a very long sleep before finally confronting the unfathomable imminence of his own wedding.

“Mr. Morgan?”

He doesn’t immediately register the words.

“Couple questions, Mr. Morgan?”

He finally focuses on a short young man with bushy sideburns.

“I’m with
The Daily
,” he says. “Any last thoughts on the fair?”

“We just pulled off the biggest gamble this city ever took,” Roger says, instantly regretting the phrase. “Every goal we ever dreamed of was more than realized.” He sees the kid isn’t jotting anything down. “What paper did you say you were with?”

“
The Daily
. Doing a story on the freeway too, by the way. You an investor in that apartment project on Roanoke, sir?”

“The Daily?”
He feels the earth tilting. “The student newspaper?”

“That’s right, sir. Are you in on those apartments?” This kid looks so nervous he could pop.

Roger worries he might faint. “Nobody’s ever called me an investor before.” He tries to laugh, but nothing comes out. “I’m … I don’t …,” Roger says, not sure what to say now. “No bankers or investors in my family.” He smiles, yet already feels like everything’s crashing down. “Where’d you hear that, anyway?”

“Malcolm Turner.”

“Really? Well, you’d think he’d know, but why’s this of interest?”

“Have you been subpoenaed by the grand jury yet, Mr. Morgan?” A strap slides over the kid’s shoulder and suddenly there’s a camera in his hands. “Mind if I take a quick picture, sir?”

Roger smiles just in time for the
snap
.

B
ILL STEELE
was waiting in his restored steel-blue 1963 Chevelle, reading documents beneath the dashboard light, when she parked her rental car in front of her apartment, got out and carried Elias inside, asleep on her chest, his head slung over her shoulder as if his neck were broken. Steele trailed several paces behind, with his briefcases gripped in one arm, her overflowing satchel cradled in the other.

She strained her back lowering Elias into his rarely used big-boy bed and tugged his pants off, hoping he wouldn’t wake up crabby, hungry or both. Mercifully, he rolled onto his side beneath the Buzz Lightyear comforter. Hearing the reassuring give-and-take of his breath, she flipped off the light and tiptoed out in time to catch Steele surveying her college-girl squalor—a black bra atop a mound of unfolded laundry and piles of worn journalism texts, as if she’d been cramming for finals. Moseying toward the kitchen, he smirked at the Orwell quote taped to the refrigerator door:
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act
.

She hadn’t envisioned this inspection when she agreed to meet here, before stranding her car in Spokane a couple hours ago—as the editors had insisted—and ducking into a queasily small twin-prop commuter jet. She’d almost dozed off driving home from the airport and felt bone-weary now. Stalling, she pondered how best to persuade him to postpone this debriefing until the morning. But it was obvious he couldn’t wait, already beet-faced and whispering questions about Roger Morgan and Malcolm Turner as if her apartment were bugged.