Lucky Bastard (2 page)

The woman guffawed. Now she knew everything about us that she needed to know. She lost interest and turned back to her friends.

Arthur was sorely in need of reassurance. I poured him the last of the beer. “My dear comrade,” I said, using a word I seldom speak even in a whisper, “tell me about this Jack Adams.”

2
“First of all,” Arthur said, “Jack is that rara avis among Ivy League radicals, a birthright member of the proletariat.”

I said, “Meaning what?”

“He's poor. Working-class. Alone. No family, no connections, no influence. No future.”

“So far, so good,” I said. “Go on.”

“He's an Ohio boy,” Arthur said. “Alone in the world.”

Jack Adams came from a long line of Ohio steelworkers. His forebears and their friends had been killed in fiery accidents in the mill or died of diseases caused by the superheated air they breathed. They had won World War II with prodigies of productivity and then been thrown onto the streets when the capitalists discovered they could buy steel cheaper from the defeated Japanese. Jack was an orphan, raised by his maternal grandparents in Tannery Falls, Ohio. He remembered the old days before the mills closed, the horizon glowing in the night from the blast furnaces, the smell of scorched air coming in the open windows of their little house, and the soft coal dust clinging to the wallpaper as it clung to the lining of the workers' lungs. His grandfather had lost his job like all the others, then died of drink. Jack was a child of the welfare system—social workers had bought his clothes, he had bought groceries with food stamps, the postman had delivered the monthly check with which his grandmother paid the endless mortgage on a house that had no market value. He had eaten free lunches at school, received free medical care. These details of lower-class life—the idea of losing everything, of having no recourse, of being glued to a certain fate, of being at the mercy of bureaucrats—fascinated Arthur, the son of a plastic surgeon, grandson of a banker. For at least four generations his family had lost nothing, had never considered it possible to do so.

In high school, Jack had been an honor student. His teachers loved him for his charming smile, for his eagerness to learn, and for his evident desire to grow up to be just like them. They had pushed him toward college, giving him better marks and better recommendations than perhaps he deserved. After making a high score on the standard college exams—Jack had an aptitude for aptitude tests, an aspect, no doubt, of his larger talent for giving answers that pleased his betters—he had been accepted at Columbia University with full financial aid. He was just as much of a success at Columbia as he had been at Tannery Falls High School, and for the same reasons. He paid rapt attention in class, he memorized, he regurgitated lectures without lapse or mistake. He was the best political science student Arthur had ever had—nimble in class, a good writer.

“There's more,” Arthur said. “Jack is popular, very political—but a backstage person, not an up-front guy. He doesn't march with the troops. I think demonstrations scare him, actually—”

“Scare him?” I said.

“The unpredictability of the crowd, the idea of being arrested and handcuffed and dragged into the paddy wagon—”

“But it's all a game. Who has ever been injured at one of these things?”

“Lots of people,” Arthur said. “That's beside the point. He's not a marcher, he's a thinker. He's close to the leaders of the movement. They listen to him. Most of the victories they get credit for are his ideas—defenestrating deans from first-floor windows, the defense of Harlem against callous capitalist exploitation by the university. A lot of the slogans. He's the invisible man of the Movement.”

Arthur showed me a snapshot. Jack was quite presentable. An American boy. Curly hair, doughy young face, a brilliant smile: large square flashing teeth, eyes swimming with sincerity.

I said, “I am interested in his timidity.”

“That may not be the right word for it,” Arthur said. “Jack may not march on the Pentagon, but he's put his body on the line in other ways.” He showed me another picture of Jack. In this one he was barely recognizable—an unsmiling near skeleton with unshaven cheeks. “This was taken on the last day of a forty-day water-only fast,” Arthur said. “He lost seventy pounds.”

“Why?”

“To beat the draft,” Arthur replied. “An act of conscience. He refused to serve in an unjust war.”

I said, “You mean he's a coward?”

Arthur flinched. This was not a word much used in the circles in which he traveled. He said, “Isn't everyone a coward in one way or another?”

“No. And cowards are always dangerous.”

“Surely,” Arthur said, “the truth is more complicated than that.”

Was it really? I did not press the point. Arthur was a Freudian as well as a Marxist-Leninist. He did not wish to admit, ever, that things are what they seem. In his system of thought, the truth was always hidden, but discoverable by the enlightened, using approved methods of thought.

I said, “A question: What exactly is so special about this fellow?”

Arthur hesitated. “This will sound strange, coming from a good Marxist-Leninist like myself who believes so deeply in historical inevitability,” he said at last. “But the answer is, Jack is lucky. In fact, he's the luckiest bastard I've ever met.”

“Be serious.”

Arthur said, “Dmitri, believe me, I've never been more serious in my life. He has a gift. Jack's a born politician. He's marginal in many other ways—IQ of 119, just like JFK—”

“Wait,” I said. “How do you know what Kennedy's IQ was?”

Arthur blinked. “I taught at Choate for a year. That was Kennedy's school. It's in the files. The point is, it's a highly significant coincidence in Jack's mind.”

“You told him about this coincidence?”

“Yes.”

“An IQ of 119 says he is neither smart nor stupid. Surely he was not glad to know this.”

“The coincidence made up for it. I mean, look where Kennedy ended up.”

“Kennedy's father was not a steelworker.”

“In Jack's opinion, neither was his, but we'll get to that,” Arthur said.

“The fact remains, his is not an impressive score.”

“You're right,” Arthur conceded. “Jack's general intelligence is only a little better than average—not good enough, in theory, to get him into Columbia, even though he did well on the SATs. But I would like to suggest to you that this lack of a first-class mind is actually an advantage.”

I said, “That you must explain to me.”

“It makes him
seem
average to others when in fact he is not average at all,” Arthur replied. “As I've said, he's extremely personable. People tend to think he's getting by on charm. They made the same mistake about Kennedy.”

“In his case, money played a role.”

“Okay, but for most of his life—right up to the day he died, if truth be told—his detractors thought they were smarter than him. Same thing with Jack Adams. That gives him a fantastic advantage. In the one respect that matters, political smarts, Jack is a brilliant, maybe even a unique, natural talent.”

“How can you say this about a boy of twenty-one?”

Arthur was enjoying himself now. His IQ was much higher than 119, and he loved to show it.

“Trust me,” he said. “Politics comes to him straight from the unconscious, in the same way that operas and symphonies came to Mozart. Whole concepts of how to use power just pop into his head, ready for orchestration. He doesn't even have to
think
about it. And he's never wrong. He's extraordinary in class, in his papers, in action. And unlike Mozart he has no Salieri. Jack doesn't have an enemy in the world. He's such a big dumb shit with such a dazzling smile that he excites no jealousy, no hostility. It doesn't matter what he does. It's uncanny. People will forgive him anything.”

I interrupted. “What is there to forgive?”

“His sex drive,” Arthur said. “He's mad for pussy. Tries to screw every female he meets, including the wives and girlfriends of his best friends.”

“Does he succeed?”

“More often than not. It's puzzling in a way. The girls say he has absolutely no finesse—comes right at them, puts it in their hand. They say yes anyway. My wife says it's the way he smells.”

“She's one of his conquests?”

“He made a pass,” he replied. “Myra turned him down.”

“Ah. But she noticed the way he smelled?”

Arthur smiled. He was not offended by my questions; he and his wife were people of their time and class—sexual revolutionaries who slept with whomever they wished. He reached into the little schoolboy knapsack he carried instead of a briefcase and handed over a thick brown envelope. Inside the envelope was Jack Adams's dossier, as compiled by Arthur's network of informants—at least one hundred pages of photocopied official records, together with neatly typed contact reports on Jack's background, behavior, apparent beliefs, and circle of friends. The contact reports—accounts of conversations with Jack—had been provided by student activists organized by Arthur to keep an eye on fellow radicals. These junior Chekists, all students of Arthur's, regarded themselves as a secret counterintelligence force whose work was necessary to protect the Movement from penetration by agents of the FBI, CIA, and other mostly nonexistent colonialist-imperialist enemies.

I put on my glasses and began to read. John Fitzgerald Adams—since birth called Jack and nothing but Jack—was the only child of a young woman named Betty Herzog. Betty herself had been an adored only child, pretty, smart, and lively. And—this is important—virtuous. In 1939, she was the Tannery Falls High School homecoming queen. This was the highest tribute to beauty an American village could pay, and in the period in question it could never have been bestowed on a girl who was not perceived to be a virgin. After high school, she became a registered nurse, and as soon as she was qualified, joined the U.S. Navy as an ensign. She was posted to a naval hospital in San Francisco. This was in 1943.

In her letters to her mother Betty seemed happy in her new life. She was promoted to lieutenant junior grade; her picture was in the Tannery Falls
Evening Journal.
Then, mysteriously, early in 1944, long before the war ended, she came home, discharged by the navy. A month later she married Homer Adams, a man ten years older than herself, a man too old for military service, a salesman of Hudson automobiles. On September 17, 1944, not quite six months after the wedding, Betty gave birth to Jack, a ten-pound baby.

It was Betty who insisted on naming the child John Fitzgerald, even though she had no relatives who bore either name. She gave no explanation. Her husband was angered and hurt. He wanted the boy to be named Homer, Jr., but Betty would not budge. “We'll call him Jack,” she said. She corrected everyone who tried to call the child anything else—Jackie or Johnny or even John. “His name is Jack,” she would say firmly. Jack remembered this vividly.

Betty and Homer Adams died five years later when a car driven by Homer, who was drunk at the time, crashed into a stone abutment at 70 mph. There were no skid marks at the scene. From his grandmother, Jack learned that Betty and Homer had had a terrible argument on the night of the accident—an argument so terrible that Betty had dropped Jack off at her parents' house, waking them at midnight. “Lock the doors, call the police if you have to, but don't let him touch my boy!” Betty had cried before running out into the night. This was the last time her mother saw her alive.

At his parents' funeral, five-year-old Jack had suffered a textbook trauma. The undertaker had done his best to put the smashed-up bodies back together. But to the terrified little boy, dangled over the open coffin by his weeping grandmother (“Kiss Mommy goodbye, Jack!”), the corpses, waxen and cold, looked like the stitched-together monsters in Frankenstein movies. Ever after, when Jack pictured death, his own or anyone else's, he pictured his parents in the funeral home.

Or so he told the people to whom he related this story—usually girls he was trying to seduce. Needless to say, Jack could not have seen very many Boris Karloff movies at the age of five, but he was never one to let facts stand in the way of a telling image. According to the reports, his voice broke as he summoned up the Frankenstein illustration; he covered his face with his hands and shuddered at the memory. Usually he was between the girl's legs moments later. Few objected afterward. Many reports mentioned that Jack was a single-minded, driving lover of amazing endurance. He bestowed orgasms on even the most disinterested partners.

“He does sex like in a dream, like he's in another state of consciousness,” wrote one of his conquests. “Like he's on another planet. Like the woman is not there, or is somebody else. He just keeps going. And going. And going. Then he stops, gets up, and acts like nothing happened. This is weird but very sexy.” The author of this report, who wrote on the basis of personal experience, was a psychology major. She thought that Jack's single-minded, blind copulations were an unconscious attempt to reenact his own conception over and over again. “Like he's trying to bring himself to life,” she wrote.

Arthur watched me as I read. He saw that I was interested. He knew exactly where I was in the file, and what was coming next. I turned a page and came upon a brief report written by Arthur himself.

He said, “Heads up, Dmitri. The next part is the heart of the matter.”

Indeed it was. As a teenager during the Kennedy presidency, Jack had discovered, hidden in the lining of his mother's naval uniform, several blurred photographs. One showed Betty in that same blue uniform, with her bright curly head on the shoulder of a scrawny young navy officer; other shots showed them together on a beach, or grinning at the camera from a convertible coupe. In one of these photographs, Betty, her young body obviously nude beneath the sheet that she held coquettishly beneath her chin, sat up in a rumpled hotel bed. In yet another, slim and naked, a truly lovely girl, she looked straight at the man behind the camera with the radiant smile of a woman in love. About that, there could be no doubt.