But Chester Pratt settled for neither of those things. Two or three weeks later Wilder was waiting in Dr. Brink’s outer office, flipping through a copy of Newsweek, when he came across this item on the “Periscope” page:
Justice Department
After months of searching, the Attorney General has found a new speechwriter. He is 37-year-old novelist Chester Pratt (Burn All Your Cities), who was recommended for the job by Harvard critic T. J. Whitehead, a Kennedy intimate.
“I know,” Pamela said that night. “Jerry told me. Jerry said Pratt says he’ll be the only man in the New Frontier who’s in it for the money.”
That was the first of several nights when she failed to respond to the urgency of his lovemaking – ”I’m sorry, John, I guess I can’t tonight” – and the following week she called him at the office to say she wasn’t feeling well; she was coming down with the flu or something; she would call again as soon as she was better.
He could taste the end of the affair like bile as he went about his business routine and endured his time at home, and he tortured himself with wondering where he’d gone wrong. It now seemed clear that things had never been quite the same since his breakdown at Marlowe – and was that so surprising, after all? How could any healthy girl be expected to care for a mentally unbalanced man?
On two or three nights he really did go to AA meetings; other nights he drifted from bar to bar, or sat with Janice and did his level best to hold up his end of the endless conversation about their son. One night Tommy was so expansive at the dinner table, telling the plot of a television comedy he’d liked and interrupting himself with laughter, that Janice was heartened.
“… Oh, I am beginning to see daylight in all this, aren’t you?”
But the next night she was in darkness again: the first report card from summer school had come in, and Tommy was still failing the same two subjects.
When Pamela was well again her voice on the phone was more polite than eager, but even so the knowledge that he would see her tonight was bracing; it helped him sit quietly through a dinner with the Borgs.
“… Maybe you could have a talk with him, Paul,” Janice said the minute Tommy’s door was shut for the night.
“Why me?”
“Because he loves and admires you so; he’s always thought of you as a kind of uncle, ever since he was tiny.”
“Well, that’s nice to hear, Janice, but I think you’re exaggerating. In any case I don’t see much value in ‘having a talk’; I agree with John there. Seems to me you’re doing all you can; the only thing now is to wait and hope for the best.”
“Paul’s wonderful with children,” Natalie Borg said. “I’ve always said he would’ve made a wonderful father, if only …”
There was nothing she relished more than a chance to talk about her youthful hysterectomy; and Wilder sat through it all sipping coffee and congratulating himself on his patience.
“If you people will excuse me,” he said at last, “I have a meeting to attend.”
All the way uptown he tried to decide what song he would sing tonight. He’d used up “You’re the Top” and “I Get a Kick Out of You” and some of the other standards; besides, they weren’t so effective because Pamela knew all the words. Only when he was in the elevator did the perfect song occur to him: an old and little-known Al Jolson number called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” He almost giggled to himself, picturing the way he’d deliver it in the terry-cloth robe.
“There’s something we have to discuss,” she said, and from the way she said it he knew it wouldn’t be a discussion at all. She had something to tell him – something he wouldn’t like – and he had better shut up and sit down and listen. He did, nursing his whiskey as if it were the last drink in the world, while she walked around and around the room in her working clothes with her arms folded across her chest. “I’m moving,” she said. “I’m quitting the job and I’m giving up the apartment and I’m leaving New York, probably for good. It does mean the end of things between you and me, and I’m sorry, but we always knew it couldn’t go on forever, didn’t we?”
“Yeah,” he said, surprised that his voice was low and calm. “Yeah, I guess we always did know that.” He wanted to spring to his feet in fury and say “Who’s the man?” or to go down on his knees and throw his arms around her thighs and beg her to stay, but he did neither of those things because it seemed important to play the scene her way. And one small, irrational part of his mind suggested that if he did this well, if he was “civilized” and kept his emotions under control, she’d be so impressed that she might still change her mind. He took a careful sip of whiskey before he spoke again. “Where you going?”
“To Washington.” She was sitting down now, tapping the ash from her cigarette, and she was clearly so relieved to have the worst of it over that she told a little too much. “I have a friend there who thinks I might qualify for a job in the Justice Department, and it’s too good an opportunity to—”
“Wait a second. It’s Chester Pratt.”
“What if it is?”
The hell with being civilized; the hell with everything. He was on his feet and bearing down on her in a jealous rage. “How long have you been sleeping with that bastard? Huh? I asked you a simple question: how long?”
“John, I don’t see any point in losing your temper. There’s really—”
“How long, God damn it. Answer me!”
“It’s not a question that deserves an answer.”
And suddenly he passed from anger to an agony of selfabasement and pleading: “Oh, baby, don’t go.” He touched her shoulder with one hand. “Please don’t go. I need you; I need you….” He had done both the things he’d sworn not to do – he had shouted and he’d begged – and there was nothing left.
“I knew this would be difficult,” she said, “but you can’t bring back something that’s over. We had some good times together, but it’s – well, it’s over, that’s all.”
All that mattered now was to get out of here before she asked him to leave, and he managed it in a kind of stupor that might have passed for dignity. “Okay,” he said, moving for the door, and he stood with one hand on the knob for ten beats of his heart, giving her every chance to call him back, before he said “So long” and let himself out.
Then he was in the Irish bar with the tall picture of President Kennedy on the wall (and maybe Bobby was shorter, but it couldn’t be denied that there was something very tall about all the Kennedys and all their men, and all their women). He was drinking double bourbons and staring into the mirror at his Alan Ladd haircut and his painfully familiar Mickey Rooney face, wondering how it would be possible to go on living.
Chapter Seven
He had no one to confide in but Brink.
“There’s been a big change, doctor. I’ve lost my girl. She’s gone to live with Bobby Kennedy’s speechwriter.”
“Well, that’s upsetting, of course,” the doctor said, writing quickly in his file folder. “Still, if nothing else it means your life is a good deal less complicated now, right? Look on the bright side.”
There wasn’t much to see on the bright side.
He was glad when Tommy labored through summer school with passing marks and rejoined his class in the seventh grade, and when his talk at dinner seemed to indicate that he did have friends, but he couldn’t share in Janice’s sense of triumph. If Tommy was a stranger to them now it was only the beginning: he was sure to grow more and more inscrutable as he moved into adolescence. Thirteen, fifteen, seventeen – they wouldn’t be able to relax until he was twenty-one and getting out of college, and by then he’d be a man with little if any allegiance to home.
It was clear now that Julian would probably never finish the picture – when he tried to call him once the operator said his number was no longer in service – but it wasn’t hard to put the whole thing out of his mind. It seemed preposterous that he had ever entertained the idea of producing a mo
vie; with Pamela gone there was no longer any point in it, and he let it all drift away.
Early in the fall he had an affair with a girl who worked for one of his accounts, but she didn’t please him because she wasn’t at all like Pamela. She laughed all the time and talked through her laughter; her skin was rough and there were wrinkles in the backs of her thighs. She diverted him for three or four nights on Varick Street; after that he stopped calling her up.
He did very well at his job – before the end of the year he brought two new European car advertisers into the magazine; his earnings were almost twice those of any other salesman, and George Taylor called him “indispensable” – but it gave him no pleasure.
Not even talking politics could rouse him. Paul Borg spent at least one October evening insisting that Kennedy’s handling of the crisis over the Cuban missile sites had been “masterly” – that when the Russian ships turned back it had “signified the end of the Cold War, for all history to see” – and Wilder didn’t argue with him except to ask once, in a small voice that was quickly overruled by both their wives, what Borg thought might have happened if the ships hadn’t turned back.
Then a month or two later Borg held forth at some length on his newfound admiration for the President’s brother Bobby: he had “grown” as Attorney General and developed into a responsible leader in his own right. He would almost certainly emerge as a hero in the Civil Rights Movement – ”Have you read some of his recent speeches?” – and there was every indication that in six years he would be a worthy successor to the Presidency.
“Oh, I think so too,” Janice said. “Isn’t it marvelous to think we’re all in such good hands? And aren’t they a beautiful family? All of them?”
If they would excuse him, Wilder said, he had a meeting to attend.
He did go to a few meetings – not only the one on West Houston but others uptown. Once he thought he spotted his old sponsor Bill Costello in the audience and approached him afterwards in the crowd around the coffee urns, but it was another white-haired man who turned out to be a gloomy Polish engineer.
On Christmas Eve he sat in the living room with Janice while she wrapped and tied the last few presents to be tucked under the spindly tree. Their Christmas trees seemed to get smaller and more apologetic-looking every year, but they always smelled the same – a green, pungent smell that took him back to early childhood. He was about to say Why didn’t we get a bigger tree? but that might spoil the gentle, innocent mood of the evening. Instead he strolled along her bookshelves until he came to Burn All Your Cities and pulled it out. “This any good?” he asked.
“Oh, it got good reviews,” she said, looking up from where she sat on the carpet and wiping a strand of hair away from her eyes, “but I thought it was a little – overwrought. Why?”
“No reason. I met him once, is all. The author.”
“Oh? Where?”
“At an AA meeting. Apparently he had a drinking problem at one time.”
“Did he give a talk?”
“No; I was just introduced to him.”
“Well, you might enjoy it, John; I don’t want to spoil it for you.”
It touched him that she seemed to feel he might “enjoy” reading a whole book. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll bother with it. Didn’t much like his looks, as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t, then. You’ve always had a sure instinct about people. That’s probably one reason you’re so good at your work.”
“Oh, I don’t know. In the kind of work I do almost anybody could make a living.”
“Why do you always say that? I think what you do must be very difficult, and you do it extremely well.” She got to her feet and turned off” all the other lights in the room, letting the colored lights of the tree bathe everything in a soft pinkish glow. Then she sat curled up on the sofa and said “How does it look?”
“Fine,” he said, and sat beside her. “It really looks fine, Janice.” After a pause, feeling as shy as a boy, he said “You always do everything right at Christmastime.”
“Shall I get some Christmas music on the radio?”
“No, don’t bother. Let’s just – sit here a while.”
And almost before he knew it they were in each other’s arms. Gasping and moaning, they were all over each other like a couple of crazed adolescents.
“…Oh John,” she said as he helped her into the bedroom, “it’s been so long.”
“No it hasn’t; it just seems that way.”
“That’s what I mean. So long since we really – since we both really – oh, John …”
He thought of Pamela only fleetingly as they rolled and locked; then he put her out of his mind. All that was over. This was probably where he belonged.
Janice called it “our second honeymoon,” which made him wince when she wasn’t looking, and it lasted through the winter and well into the spring. Finding he could make love to her out of something other than a sense of duty was a pleasure in itself, and there were other pleasures: she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence, and many little things in her behavior seemed to suggest a renewal of self-esteem – almost a new serenity.
Then it was summer again, and he was nearly thirty-nine years old. When they went up to “the country” there were not one but three or four girls on the raft whose sweet young flesh was a daily torment, and on the kitchen shelves of the bungalow there wasn’t even so much as a bottle of cooking sherry.
“Think I’ll run into town for a meeting tonight,” he announced while she was snapping string beans for dinner.
“Well,” she said, “all right, but you’ve already been to three this week. You really think it’s necessary?”
“Sometimes,” he said, “you have to trust my judgment in these things.”
Once in town he made straight for the bar at the Biltmore, where he drank until past midnight; then he went over to the downstairs bar of the Commodore – the place from which Paul Borg had taken him to Bellevue – and drank until closing time. When he crept unsteadily up into the hotel for a room he knew his voice wouldn’t sound right if he called her, so he saved his lie until morning: he’d had trouble with the car; the mechanic had wanted to keep it overnight; he hadn’t called earlier for fear of waking her. And she apparently believed him, though it often seemed, looking back later, that the end of the second honeymoon could be dated from that night.
Nothing happened all fall until late in November, when he and George Taylor were strolling back from lunch and found a crowd blocking the sidewalk in front of a television store. Several women were crying and one or two of the men looked ready to cry too, and it wasn’t long before they learned that the President had been shot in the head. The cameras were panning over the shocked, grieving crowds in Dallas, and then they cut to Walter Cronkite soberly repeating the news.
“Guess I’d better get home, George.”
“Right. I’m cutting out too.”
And by the time he got home Kennedy was dead.
“It’s one of the most frightful things in history,” Janice said to the television set. Her eyes were red and blinking; she used one hand to wipe them with Kleenex and kept the other arm around Tommy, who’d been sent home early from school. “Oh, he was such a great man; and he was so young. He’d only just begun his career….” Soon she would call Paul Borg, if she hadn’t already, for confirmation in her mourning.
“… shock that has shaken the nation and the entire Western world,” Walter Cronkite was saying.
And through it all Wilder sat numb, saying very little, wondering what was the matter with him.
Later in the afternoon there were scenes of the Dallas police hustling a suspect named Oswald into jail – all you could see of him was that he was scrawny and wore a T-shirt – and of a righteous cop holding up a scope-sighted rifle to the cameras. Only then did Wilder realize what he felt, and it sent him into the kitchen for a secret nip of the whiskey Janice
kept for guests. He felt sympathy for the assassin and he felt he understood the motives. Kennedy had been too young, too rich, too handsome and too lucky; he had embodied elegance and wit and finesse. His murderer had spoken for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance, and John Wilder understood those forces all too well. He almost felt he’d pulled the trigger himself, and he was grateful to be here, trembling and safe in his own kitchen, two thousand miles away.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, rejoining his wife and son. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing.”
Everything changed in February.
He was sitting in the office, wondering whether to go out for a drink and kill the rest of the day – an indispensable man could afford to do things like that – when his phone rang and it was Pamela.
“My God,” he said. “Where are you?”
She sounded shy, as if she hadn’t been sure whether to call him or not. “I’m staying at the Plaza. I was wondering if you’d like to meet me here for a drink this afternoon.”
She had changed a little – that was the first thing he noticed when he found her in the cocktail lounge. Her eyes and mouth were different – older, more “sophisticated” – and her very way of sitting in a chair and talking had taken on a new authority, but instead of dwelling on these things he concentrated on something he’d noticed long ago: that the tip of her nose bobbed slightly with each pronunciation of p, b or m. She was, she said, “finished” with Washington, and that seemed to imply that she was finished with Chester Pratt too.
“… I mean it was pretty exciting, being in Justice,” she said. “I worked in the Public Information office – I was right across the hall from the Attorney General – and I’ll probably never have a more interesting job in my life. The trouble was mostly Chefs drinking – he really is a terrible soak, and he probably never would’ve been hired if Bob had known.”