Three Days Before the Shooting ... (9 page)

I was familiar with this rumor and had found no substantiation for it, except for the hardly related fact that the Senator
was
famous for wearing a spectacular black cashmere overcoat of balmoral cut that was lined full length with sable.

Next came the rumor that the Senator, a wealthy bachelor, had kept for a time a beautiful Jewish mistress whom he showered with expensive jewelry, furs, works of art (he was alleged to have given her one of the finest Picas-sos), but I dismissed this as untrue when the narrator, a columnist known as a notorious liar, claimed that this fair lady was kept locked in a luxurious establishment in Georgetown which was staffed with mute Oriental servants and guarded by three vicious dogs—a Doberman pinscher, a German shepherd, and a Weimaraner.

“Sonsabitches would let you enter,” the columnist said, “but God help anyone who tried to leave without the Senator’s permission.”

“What happened to the mistress?”

“Damn if I know,” the columnist said. “But I understand that one night she got the dogs to turn on Sunraider, and he got rid of the whole shooting gallery. He was jealous as hell of that woman.”

Then came the hair-raising and eye-stretching story that cast the Senator as villain in the destruction of a highly skilled diplomat’s career. For reasons
of his own—about which the gossipmonger relating it was unclear—Sunraider was said to have persuaded a pious Pullman porter to accuse the diplomat of having approached him, the porter, with some odd deviationary sexual proposition while returning in his Pullman car via San Francisco from Casablanca. The porter, said to be an extraordinarily homely black man, was described as a high deacon of his church, a Shriner, a Prince Hall Mason, an Elk of the I.B.P.O.E. species, an Alpha Phi Alpha, a lifetime member in good standing of the United Sons of Georgia—all highly respected Negro fraternal organizations. Thus, with these charges coming from such quarters, the diplomat’s goose was cooked. The executive branch simply could not withstand the anticipated outcry.

Which makes us once again aware that anyone can do just about anything in this country—throw it off track, strip its gears—if only he knows where to throw a fistful of mud or where to stand to speak out of turn. In this democracy, of course, all things are possible. But why on earth should a Pullman porter, at that time privy by the very nature of his employment to all manner of peccadilloes of the great, be allowed to affect the destiny of a diplomat? Even so, I don’t believe that the Senator could be that malicious or irresponsible. And besides, the official records show that the diplomat in question left the service simply because he wished to retire. Objectively, the dwindling of his family fortune, one of the official reasons given, not to mention the increasing complexity of the world situation, what with so many of the old orders changing, was reason enough for his voluntary departure.

We had begun to sweat now, both from the press of bodies and the frenzy of gossip. It had become a lying contest. When, I wondered, would the security people be done and allow us to go and seek out the facts behind the shooting? I wanted to consult a policeman, but there was no space in which to move, and I wanted especially to move now that a rumor was being repeated which I consider of such unique nastiness that I was distressed to hear it again. It has to do with an incident in which the Senator is said to have gone to an ultra-extreme of unconventional conduct, and although it distressed me and I deliberately refused to listen, the details came alive in my mind with the vividness of a disturbing dream.

Besides the Senator, two other people were involved, a highly respected Justice of the Supreme Court (now deceased) and a young man of twenty or so, all of whom moved like phantoms through my mind.

The scene was an elevator in a government building, and I could see it all with startling clarity: the small automatic metal cage, garlanded with abstract laurel wreaths of antiqued bronze, with the Senator the first to enter, wearing a superbly tailored suit and broad-brimmed planter’s panama. He presses the button for the lobby. It moves, drops a floor, stops. The distinguished old Justice steps slowly in, lost in some profound judicial abstraction, his eyes looking straight through the Senator. The car falls, stops again.
The young man enters with noncommittal countenance; then, looking up, he recognizes—doubtlessly with delight—the two important figures of Congress and Court. He moves uneasily aside, his eyes alight; it’s as though he has encountered two kings at a crossroad. The car moves again, seeming now to glide on frictionless air.

The young man steals a glance at his fellow-passengers. There’s a clean smell of oil, metal, topped by a whiff of wintergreen. The Justice stands stiffly, he’s lost in thought, his eyes pale behind his glasses.

The Senator smiles.

The young man looks swiftly from face to face, and then away. The great men stand remote. He feels an obvious glow—perhaps like that which a toddler who has just reached the delightful, goose-stepping stage of walking displays when he struts about swinging his little arms in the familiar manner which a highly emphatic friend of mine calls “feeling good in his growing shoes”—he’s delighted heel and toe, head and sole. Great vistas of possibility spring wide before him. Bodiless voices whisper down encouragement from the clouds, the laurel leaves. He stands in a deep, dark gorge, looking up at two distant mountain peaks, one shining white in the sun, the other brooding blue in the icy shadow. Strands of patriotic music murmur in his ears. And before his inner eyes a marvelous eagle plummets screaming into the gorge to brush his face with the tips of wide, majestic wings; then up and away it swiftly climbs to cleave the high rare air. His heart pounds, he trembles, for he has been caressed by history and mystery. And then the elevator seems to do a barrel roll!

He sees the Senator, still smiling, leaning forward as though to greet the Justice—then
zzzzzzspat!
and his heart and mind would deny the evidence of his own dear eyes. But there it is, the lenses of the old jurist’s pince-nez are flooded blind, the eyes obscured! And now the boy’s ears ache of anguished decibels unboomed, of shrieks unshrieked. His shoes inflate, his trousers sag, he’s in a spin, and a stench of doom has shrunk the intimate air. And through it all not a word is spoken. Floors flash past, flickering breathlessly as in a dream. His mind reels backwards in desperate reversal of the scene, but he can’t cast out his ravaged eye. The Senator looms, still smiling in calm unrufflement. And yet there, too, the startled Justice, the man of lofty vision also stands, dripping as with two suddenly acquired cataracts!

The car revolves, the air expires, the young man’s mind is now a snarl of strings, a ruptured kite in turbulent air, a rampaging stagecoach with the driver shot dead from the seat and there the random-flying, slapping of the reins in nerveless hands and the shotgun rider dead drunk back in Dead-wood; a stampede of walleyed stallions; a panicked regiment in headlong flight dragging its tattered flag, stone-deaf to the rallying cry of shrilling bugles. His brain pops, swirls, becomes a pot of boiling spaghettini!

Now the elevator seems itself disinclined to plunge to its Chthonian
Nadir in such outrage. The boy’s mind boils, but still the pause, the smile, the blotted eyes, both burning like a branding iron. He looks from giant to giant but still the frozen silence. He waits for the action to complete itself, for his head to clear, but only the dropping of the car.

It’s awful. I ache even to think of it, and how they survived I’ll never know. Doubtless the old jurist was saved from a stroke or heart attack only by his intense dedicated concentration on the law. As for the Senator, I would have imagined that the mere impulse toward such an act would have brought on general paralysis. Even now the very idea leaves my mouth a desert. In other words, I’m left quite spitless. So that here, let’s face it, I’m one with the young man. For both the Senator and the Justice were men of enormous capacity. They lived with fire and with ice, with sun and with lightning, with huge worlds of power, guilt, and aspiration. No wonder that the terrible impact of the gratuitous insult was sustained not by them, but by the young man, that eager innocent caught unaware between titans.

The rumor holds that the boy was simply unhinged. He was running even before the elevator reached the lobby, running frenziedly in that tight place, and hammering the unyielding doors with his fists. And when the doors slid open upon the stately, high gold-leafed and becolumned lobby, he plunged through the crowd assembled there to ascend, knocking them about like ninepins, as he dashed for the street, jabbering like a madman.

One man, annoyed by being so rudely pushed about, rushed out after the boy and saw him start into the stream of passing cars, screaming now, then whirling suddenly as though aware of the danger and running back onto the sidewalk, where he bumped into a blind man who happened, as fate would have it, to be tapping his way along. This seemed to enrage, to further unhinge the boy—those sightless eyes, that halting, three-legged locomotion—because, seizing the blind man’s lapels, he pushed him away at arm’s length, staring for a moment into that bewildered face, the two leaning there, poised in silent interrogation, the blind man with one foot upraised. And it was as though something in the man’s unseeing eyes threw the boy into a higher pitch of madness.

Suddenly he screamed, “No, No, NO!” in a rising pitch of despair and cryptic denial. Whereupon he released the man, turned, and started off—only to whirl back and, running forward, seize the man’s white cane and struck him repeatedly, beating him to the walk, and when the blind man tried to escape on all fours, he was knocked flat and stomped upon. It was a swift, outrageous, savagely unrestrained assault, which ended only when three men leaped from a passing car, tackled the youth, and held him until the police arrived.

It was just too shocking, and all the more so because this boy was no hoodlum. He was from a good family and far above the average in intellect and
ambition. He is said to have won several highly coveted scholarships and prizes and, when only ten, was the undefeated winner of a nationwide contest in which a series of especially difficult puzzles designed by a group of metaphysicists were presented for solution. And yet, these accomplishments notwithstanding, he would have killed a blind man, no doubt about it. Now the youth is vegetating in an institution and of no aid whatsoever in reconstructing exactly what happened in the elevator. His hair fell out long ago, and now he sits for hours staring blankly at the ceiling, where he managed somehow to draw one blankly staring eye.

Compounding the mystery, the police were said to have located Senator Sunraider at his office shortly after the disturbance, but he was cold sober and denied any knowledge of the incident. As for the Justice, clothed in the austere dignity of his high office and regarding any direct linkage between the Court and politicians distasteful as a matter of principle, he refused to discuss the matter. So the incident, which haunts my mind with threatening significance, has retained its dream-like mystery. What awful terrors rage in the young man’s shattered mind? What chaos actually erupted there? What deep depths of forbearance lie within the Justice’s dark ceremonial robes? What secret tensions boil beneath that crusty dignity? And who, as I say, knows the Senator? One thing only is certain: Truth is extremely difficult to come by, here in the Capitol.

When I allowed myself to listen again, Morris Moskowitz, a book reviewer, was explaining that it was later determined that, while unquestionably brilliant, the young man had had a long history of personality instability, and that a week before the incident, on a night of the full moon, his mother had been startled into wakefulness by a presence in her bedroom and, springing up in terror, had found him standing beside her bed, weeping, in a state of stark nakedness.

“Gentlemen,” Moskowitz said, “I don’t know what happened on that elevator, but if I know my Freud at all, this indicates beyond question that there was a screw loose there somewhere!”

“Maybe the young fellow simply couldn’t stand being in a tight place with such powerful men,” Sweeney said. “Maybe he was suffering from claustrophobia.”

“It’s possible,” Moskowitz said. “But we don’t want to overlook the powerful side effects which such accidental encounters can have. They can be pretty mysterious, pretty fateful. For instance, I recall hearing that years ago the late J. P. Morgan saw a woman bearing a babe in arms during the opening of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and was moved to present her, right there on the spot, with a life membership for the child. But what happens? Before the child was old enough to make use of the membership he
went stone-blind! I tell you, these things are mysterious! Fate gets into the act, various obscure lines of causation come together. Private destinies brew public awe!”

“Yes,” the fat man said. “But now since you’ve mentioned accidents and mysteries, how about those other crazy things that the Senator has done? Like the thing at the National Gallery?”

And this led to one of the wildest rumors of all.

The occasion was all white tie and evening gown, all high style in a setting of great, transcendent art. With the ladies beautiful in their silks and satins, their diamonds and pearls, their mink and sable, with countless tiaras sparkling away like the stars. A scene of culture and power, an elegant scene of elegance; with the gentlemen handsome in their tails, their sashes, their beribboned medals, their diverse emblems of rank and status. It was, in a sense, a gathering of eagles and cooing doves. The rumor goes that, in such an august setting, mind you, the Senator noticed the courtly and quite prickly chairman of an important senatorial committee (a tiny old man and a Southerner, by the way), doddering past, his shirtfront gleaming. His wife, a famous Charleston belle still quite beautiful despite the frost of age, leaned gracefully on his arm, while in his free left hand he held a glass of bourbon. It was then, it was said, that the Senator broke off a conversation with the curator of a famous Boston museum and a certain political commentator and, moving abruptly forward as in a trance, seized this very severe, irascible old man—this living symbol of a gracious and formal way of life—and spilled his bourbon as he pinned his arms to his sides in a kind of genial bear hug, then, raising him up like some outraged puppet, some demented Punch, clear off the floor, began whirling him so swiftly that their coattails were set flying, creating a whirling totem pole.