“You can’t be a saint without martyrdom.”
“Is that all it is? I think there’s more to it than that. Martin Luther King was a saint even before he was shot.”
“More people knew it afterward.”
“But look at Kennedy. Either Kennedy. I remember when I heard about Dallas. What I was doing, everything. I remember it so completely.”
“Everybody does.”
“I was like eleven years old. My father hated Kennedy. He had all those jokes about Jackie being a nymphomaniac and the Pope moving into the White House. But after Dallas it was as if he’d never had an unkind thought about the man. He even bought this terrible oil painting of Kennedy and Jackie and the two children, it looked as though it had been painted by numbers, and he wanted to hang it in the living room. My mother wouldn’t stand for it. They actually had a fight about it, if you can believe it.
“And then when it happened to Bobby. That was something I really felt happening in myself. We were all for McCarthy. My friends and I, I mean. My father was busy being a Republican again, he would say things like Bobby wasn’t anything like the man his brother was. Completely forgetting how he’d felt about his brother in the beginning. But a lot of kids I knew were in the New Hampshire campaign for McCarthy, and we all had it down that Bobby was this vicious calculating opportunist with no principles. And then he died, and it was amazing the way we all went through the identical changes. All of a sudden he was really something, he was a man who could have saved the country. He dug the new politics and he identified with blacks and poor people and at the same time he got across to working people the way McCarthy never could. And we looked at each other and wondered why the fuck it took a bullet to teach us that.”
“And it’s like that with Drury?”
“Uh-huh. You can’t help thinking that he might have been somebody, that he might have done something.”
“Death supplies time and distance, Jocelyn. It improves most people.”
“I keep hating myself for what I said to you. For thinking he wasn’t important. Maybe he wasn’t, maybe I was right then, and this is just death improving him. I really don’t know. But I wish—”
“You have nothing to blame yourself for. You didn’t aim the gun, you didn’t pull the trigger.”
“I know.”
“None of the words you spoke to me, none of the thoughts you had, had the slightest thing to do with anything that happened in Maine.”
“Oh, I know that.”
Seven
In New York he stayed at a Times Square hotel under his own name. Each morning he breakfasted at a coffee shop on the corner and read The New York Times. Now and then an item would prompt him to nod or to shake his head. Occasionally he would smile.
Several times he went to the microfilm room of the New York Public Library. He liked to go there around noon when the steps outside the building were thick with young people eating lunch out of paper bags and listening to transistor radios. The strip of earth between the sidewalk and the library front was densely planted with tulips and grape hyacinths, the latter just starting to show gray death in their rich blue color. Someone had spray-painted Free the Panthers on one of the lions guarding the entrance.
He would sit for hours at a little desk running selected back issues of the Times through a large viewer. There were two attendants, a starched and virginal young woman given to white blouses and dark skirts and a loose limbed boy with abundant curls. Both performed the same quick silent service, bringing him box after box of microfilm cartridges. They were remarkably obliging.
He was constantly amazed that all of this should be made available to him. That he could walk in unannounced, offer no explanation, pay no fee, and not merely make use of the library’s resources but be so well served in the process, One day, descending the steps, passing between the stone lions, he wondered what use would be made of the building after the movement had consolidated its position.
Emil Karnofsky lived in a large Edwardian apartment building on Central Park West in The Seventies. There were three door men working eight-hour shifts around the clock. When a doorman broke for a meal or to use the lavatory, one of the porters relieved him. All guests were announced by the doorman, and no one was admitted lo the building until the doorman received the tenant’s permission over the intercom system. Two television sets in the lobby monitored the two passenger elevators. The freight elevator was operated by a porter.
Parking was permitted on one side of Central Pink West on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, on the other side on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Accordingly, several tenants had provided one of the doormen with keys to their cars and had arranged that he move their cars as the regulations dictated. This occupied the doorman for almost an hour each morning, during which time a porter took over his duties.
The building was several stories taller than either of the structures adjoining it.
Karnvofsky’s apartment was on the tenth floor. He had occupied it without interruption since before the war and remained there after the departure of his children and the death, five years ago, of his wife. A Negro named William Tompkins lived in the apartment and served us Karnofsky’s chauffeur, valet, and body guard. A woman — Dorn did not learn her name — came three times a week to clean the apartment.
Karnofsky was a diabetic, The disease had manifested itself in his late fifties and was controlled with diet and insulin. He had suffered a mild coronary thrombosis in 1957 and had made a complete recover. He had since given up whiskey and cigars, although he occasionally drank a small cognac before retiring. This he rarely did before two in the morning, spending late hours reading on a wide range of subjects, including the political history of Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, a topic on which he was an acknowledged authority. He was an early riser, he had been notoriously faithful to his wife during her lifetime and had remained celibate since her death. Every Sunday he was visited by all or some of his grandchildren.
William Tompkins had been with Karnofsky for almost twelve years. For the past fifteen months he had been having an affair with a woman who lived on West 85th Street near Riverside Drive. The woman was married but separated from her husband. She had two small children. Tompkins visited her only during the day, at an hour when Karnofsky was in his office in the Kent-Walker building and the woman’s children were at school. On Tuesday nights he played bridge in Greenwich Village, returning around midnight before his employer was ready to retire. Every Thursday night he visited his widowed mother in Astoria, leaving in time to have dinner with her and returning around 11 o’clock.
None of this was particularly hard for Dorn to learn.
At various times while he was in New York, Dorn read the following items in the Times while ruling breakfast:
“Calling for ‘a spirit of unity and trust In a time of grave division,’ the President repeated his appeal for a suspension of political extremism as a memorial to J. Lowell Drury. ‘He was a man who knew full well the folly of implacable extremism,’ he said of the late senator, ‘and if we are to honor his memory...’”
“... sharply criticized Vice President Henry M. Theodore’s recent diatribe on campus dissent and demanded that the White House immediately repudiate the Vice President’s rhetoric...”
“... said that ‘Even a man like Drury would be safe in Louisiana. We do things different down here.’ He added cryptically, ‘I wouldn’t be the first person to say something about chickens coming home to roost.’ Pressed for further elucidation, he remarked that ‘People in this part of the country know what I’m talking about, and the rest of them...’”