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| Black Jack |
I had been playing basketball and decided, possibly for the second time in my first year as a student at Western Connecticut State College, to take a shower. Most often I showered at Mrs. Gallagher’s, about three city blocks from the college, where I had been boarding with a roommate, Edward Kennedy, a red-headed Irish pool shark.
Mrs. Gallagher was our sometimes eccentric landlady whose features
suggested she was a stunner as a young lady. She liked Kennedy’s red hair. And
he, who could easily wind people around his pinky, joined Mrs. Gallagher for rum
toddy once a week before bedtime.
The sky, as I remember it, was overcast, the weather around
38 degrees. The November wind was rasping, but gentle. Girls were bent over a
red convertible, its top down, weeping over the blare of a radio.
“What’s happened?” I asked as I passed them.
“Someone killed Kennedy,” one of the girls said.
Almost whispering to myself, I muttered, “Who would want to
kill Ed Kennedy?’
President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963,
only a couple of days before Thanksgiving. Four of us, two close friends and a
student I did not know well, left the day after the assassination for Washington
DC to pay our respects to the President. We thumbed our way to DC, bearing a
large handwritten sign: “Washington DC – Kennedy funeral.”
We made the trek in three rides, astounding I thought at the
time, but then our sign was an emotional passport. The assassination had scrambled
everyone’s brains and hearts. And on this day, the wounded heart of the nation
lay open, dissolving all the usual political oppositional chatter.
Our last chauffeurs were two young men, both taciturn southerners
who were in need of gas money to make their way home.
“We don’t have much, but we can give you what we can spare.”
We gave the two ten dollars and were let off late at night
at Union Station, a short walk from the Capitol. All four of us fell asleep on the hard
benches.
Early in the morning, I felt the soft tap of a baton on the
sole of my shoe, and a gentle voice peeled the sleep from my eyes.
“Time to get up boys and be about your business,” the police
officer said.
Even early in the morning, the streets were lined, number
crunchers later said, with upwards of a million people, some having waited patiently
– silently – for ten hours and more.
The silence suited me. During my four years in Danbury,
unable to shake off a sometimes debilitating shyness, I had found comfort in
the well-stocked library of Danbury State College, renamed during my time there
Western Connecticut State University, researching Islandic Sagas, and writing from
time to time for Conatus, the
University’s literary magazine – nothing political. The political writing came
much later, during the early 1980’s.
My literary professor asked me on my return from DC whether
I had planned to write anything about the Kennedy assassination. I declined
with a sharp “No.”
He would never have understood my reasoning, if one could
call it reasoning.
I did not want to shatter the muffled silence – holy, in its
own way – that touched everything during the ensuing days and weeks that followed.
I just could not join in the general chatter, which I felt was, in some sense,
obscene, because much of it was self-glorifying nonsence.
My mother, I recalled, had voted for Kennedy after the
Kennedy-Nixon debates in September 1960. My father, who was one of a handful of
Republicans in Windsor Locks, a Democrat Party bastion, was astonished by this,
and asked her at the supper table, where delicate matters were discussed, “Why
on earth did you vote for a Democrat?”
“I found Nixon’s eyes shifty,” she said.
This revelation was followed by a muffled silence.
I married my wife Andree during my last year at Danbury. On
a visit to her house in Fairfield, I found a framed picture of Kennedy near the
family organ adorned by palms, blessed during Palm Sunday, fresh and smelling
like the incensed drenched church in which we were married.
That day in Washington, we stood silent as horses’ hooves
beat a tattoo on DC streets. First came the coffin borne by white horses,
wintery plums of breath streaming from the horses’ wide nostrils, these
followed by Black Jack, a rider-less horse, boots strapped backwards covering
its stirrups, then the crowd. All was shrouded in a holy silence in which, if one was paying close attention, one might hear the voice of
Blaise Pascal saying, “In the end, they throw a little dirt on you, and
everyone walks away. But there is One who will not walk away.”
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