Top Down (19 page)

She extended her right hand, which I took in mine. “Congratulations, Jack,” she said with that great smile. But I knew she was probably thinking that I’d quit way too late to completely rule out lung cancer turning up down the road. At least she didn’t say it.

Marti went on to give me a full bubble top family update, which made me very happy. She said it had taken more than
five years, but Martin Van Walters had come back almost completely to life. For several years before retiring, he worked successfully as a consultant to corporations on personal security for CEOs and other executives. He died peacefully in his sleep of a heart attack three years before at age seventy-nine. He was buried in that same Kinderhook cemetery with Martin “O.K.” Van Buren. Rosemary Walters, she said, had been completely alcohol-free since Reynolds got her involved in Alcoholics Anonymous. As a widow, she still attended AA meetings regularly at her retirement village condo in Delaware, a short train ride from Marti in Philadelphia.

“I always felt your mother got lost in the shuffle of everything that was happening to your dad,” I said. “I wasn’t sure anybody was paying much attention to her and her problems.”

“You were absolutely right,” Marti said. “Reynolds said victims usually come in pairs. Nobody gets sick like Dad did all by himself.”

Marti and I talked about some other things, including the dwindling state of play on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.

“There’s been no deathbed confession from an Oswald helper yet, as far as I know,” I said.

“There’s still time before we hit the full fifty-year mark,” Marti said. “There could still be one out there.”

I told her I didn’t think so. Whatever the various conspiracy theorists continued to put out, there was no credible evidence to refute the theory that Oswald acted alone. Yes, one man really did fire three rifle shots out a Dallas window in a
few seconds and change the course of history—forever. For me, the fragility of what we all come to think of as order and normality has been the permanent lesson of the Kennedy assassination. Since that awful day we’ve known we are always only three shots away from chaos.

Marti also brought up the Iraq war, which was in full military and political momentum. I told her what I had been saying about it on television and in op-ed newspaper pieces, but she seemed already aware of my “reasoned antiwar” position, as she called it. Her get-the-troops-out-of-there views were much stronger than mine.

“Can I assume you were for McCain—with the military connection?” she asked, smiling her Marti smile. “I was out canvassing for Obama most weekends all over Pennsylvania.”

I grinned but said not a word, having decided as a matter of my own personal policy to let all of that lie. I, too, was for Obama, but not publicly. From having been a reporter and then a career military officer, I had a natural resistance to declaring political preferences. My punditing also led me to keep the lid on my politics. Being labeled a Republican or Democratic general was not good for my business. I wanted to be seen as a nonpartisan evenhanded basher/defender of war decisions and the people who make and execute them.

“When you were a marine in Vietnam, did you think about dying?” Boom. All of a sudden, there she was again, the straightforward, in-your-face girl from forty years ago. Yes, Marti was still very much Marti.

“No, not at all,” I said, ready to quickly end this line of
conversation. Marines are taught from their first recruit depot formation that there’s nothing more useless than a dead marine or one who constantly thinks and talks about being one.

“So you enjoyed it? Being a marine?” she asked.

What was I supposed to say? “Sure, except being transferred from one post or country to another all the time.” And then, without really thinking, “That kind of life would not have fit in with that of a college English professor.”

“Ah! So you
did
do some what-if thinking about me!” She said it with a pleasure that gave me pleasure.

“You got me,” I said with a grin. “Now, how about you?”

She looked right at me and said: “My only what-if regret is that I did not end up going to bed with you at Kinderhook.” I felt some warmth spread to my face—and elsewhere.

Marti went on.

“Despite all my talk about the openness of the sixties, I was still very slowly finding my way from virginity,” she continued with a huge smile. She was clearly loving this. “I figured I could justify doing it with you because I owed you so much. And because you were so much older—and a marine—you could teach me more about what I needed to know about sex.”

“Semper Fi,” I said with a laugh. A real one.

“What if we had slept together at Kinderhook?”

“What if we did?” I asked.

“Would it have led to anything more?”

“Who knows?”

“What if it did and, because of that, you didn’t go back in
the marines?” Marti persisted, her face still in full impish mode.

That did it. She had hit the nerve that mattered the most to me. “I’d have figured out a way to be with you in Philadelphia, probably as the executive editor—or, better still, an outspoken left-wing columnist—with
The Philadelphia Inquirer
,” I said. It was a phony hold-the-line answer.

“You’d have done that just for me?”

“What if you had decided to give up the idea of advanced degrees and become a military wife? How would you have been as a white-gloves hostess at receptions on marine bases?”

“What if you had been killed in Vietnam?”

There we were again. I ducked. “What if you jumped in bed with an American literature professor while I was overseas fighting for my country?”

“I would never have done that to you!” she said with some force. And I believed her. It probably didn’t make sense, but I did.

Then she moved on to where my mind had spent countless hours over the last forty years.

“What if you’d ignored off-the-record and published my dad’s story in the paper then—in 1968?” Marti asked.

Finally, here we were.

“You would have hated me for the rest of our lives,” I declared.

“True. Oh, how true that is. You might have died from a Finnish sniper rifle shot by me on a street corner in Washington—instead of from the Vietcong or whoever in Vietnam.”

“I didn’t die in Vietnam, please remember.”

“But you might have …”

Marti abruptly looked away from me. She was thinking of something—something new and important. I had not seen her in forty years, but I knew that look. I had seen it at Union Station, in Philadelphia, and, of course, in Kinderhook.

She came right at me. “Why did you suddenly decide to go back into the marines? You never mentioned even thinking about the marines again to me.”

I shrugged.

“I thought for sure that you were going to break our off-the-record agreement and do our story,” she pressed.

Now it was my turn to look away.

I was having a great time with Marti. That was all I was trying to think about. She was as charming and quick-witted as I had remembered her.

“Did you win the Medal of Honor?” she asked me, finally, when she realized I wasn’t going to explain myself to her.

“No, no,” I said, and then my ego and pride could not resist adding, “But I did pick up a Silver Star, one or two Bronze Stars, and a couple of Purple Hearts.”

“So you were wounded?”

“A few times. But I didn’t die, as you’ve noticed. The hits were nothing serious. Everything healed.”

And, before I knew it, our lunch together passed the two-hour mark.

I realized that, with all our happy and serious talk, neither of us asked for or volunteered any information about our respective immediate families.

She didn’t ask me about Jan, my wife of thirty-five years, and how we met on a blind date at a Marine Corps birthday ball in San Diego, or about our children or grandchildren. Her husband, the physics professor, and their two children never came up, either. I realized that I had absolutely no desire to know a single thing about that part of her life.

The fact is that for two hours neither of us strayed much from our original roles from forty years before. We remained at Kinderhook, mostly in that cold tiny room on the third floor.

And damned if I couldn’t feel that Marti, always and ever the smart kid, could sense something still to come. Of course, she would be wondering why else I would suddenly call her after all these years …

“I take it you’ve got something on your mind, Jack, besides renewing an old acquaintance and playing a game of what-if with me.” By God, she was reading my mind! “I’ll bet money it’s about writing a book—am I right?”

I shook my head in wonder—in admiration, in affection.

“You want to tell our story, don’t you? You want me to finally release you from the off-the-record deal?”

She had it—of course. With her, it had always been of course.

“You got it,” I said. “That would be great.”

She reached down for a black canvas briefcase she had brought with her, something I had barely noticed when she arrived. She set it on her lap, unzipped it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers that looked to be at least two inches thick. There were also at least half a dozen bound diaries.

“Be my guest, Jack. I took notes about everything that happened to me, particularly beginning November twenty-second, 1963, including after Dad came back to Kinderhook from Singapore. Use them in any way you wish. All I ask is that you return them when you’re finished. Keep them in the case—easier to carry.”

“If you weren’t so much younger than me I’d grab you and hug you,” I joked.

“You had your chance and passed on that, Jack.” She laughed.

I thanked her for the material and the cooperation seven or eight times in different ways, including putting a hand on hers across the table. It was a gesture of gratitude and I assumed she took it that way. We were not about to jump in bed for a nooner—no matter old memories from a cold room, right?

“Got a title for the book?” she asked, getting ready to leave.

“No, no. I’ve got to put it all together and write the damn thing first. Then find a publisher, which might not be that easy. Our big bubble top story might not seem as fascinating now as it would have forty years ago.”

Marti said: “How about
The Great Lindenwald Shooting
for a title?”

“That could work, we’ll see,” I said, writing it down on a notebook that I pulled out of a pocket. A carryover from my reporting days. Old habits die hard.

“Shootout at the O.K. Mansion?”

I laughed—but didn’t write it down.

“Top
Down
?” she said. “That’s
it
!”

I said, “Okay, but it might sound to some people like something to do with a women’s brassiere.”

“General, you have a young marine’s mind, you dirty old marine,” Marti said.

We both laughed, stood, and said good-bye with a good hug.

And then she sat right back down. “Jack, there’s something here that doesn’t quite add up.”

I sat down, too.

“You’re right about doing a book now about us—Dad and all the rest. That story may, in fact, already be gone forever. So?”

“So? What do you mean, ‘so’?”

“So … well, I don’t know.” It was clear to me that she was thinking about something else.

She sighed and was back on her feet. Whatever else was in her mind had not yet come into full focus.

“It was great to see you again,” Marti said.

“Same here.” And I meant that so very much. This had been a treat for me in every way.

We parted for a second time in forty years but with no second big hug.

But before I could get the check from the waiter she was back. She was crying huge tears. She raised her hands and arms toward me and embraced me with a force of affection that nearly knocked me over.

“I just figured it out, Jack,” she said looking up at me, her
voice quiet and soft. “You ran away to the marines to avoid running our story in the paper. If you had stayed a reporter you would have done it, you would have had to do it. You would have wiggled out of that off-the-record stuff. You risked your life in Vietnam to keep yourself from doing something really, really awful that would have made you feel guilty and would have made me hate you for life.”

And then she was really gone. This time for good.

Smart Marti was right—almost. I also had figured that if I was going to war anyway, I might as well do it the old-fashioned way—with the marines. But now that Marti had laid out what had really happened so directly and out loud, I could no longer fool myself. Yes, I ran away. And I had been swatting away at it for the last forty years.

I signed the restaurant check, which was pretty hefty. Each of us had had two courses and two glasses of a good Chardonnay. Marti had an espresso and I had coffee afterward.

And I thought:
Who knows where I might be right now if I had decided as a journalist to live with my guilt and Marti’s hate and, in 1968, told the full story of former Secret Service agent Martin Van Walters?
And what if later I had written a few novels, hanging in there on the Hemingway model? Would I really have ended up in Paris? With whom? Who knows, who knows? What if, what if?

I picked up Marti’s briefcase and walked out onto the sidewalk into the Philadelphia sunshine. It was a great day, perfect for walking.

Top Down
is fiction, but there are some autobiographical elements that deserve mention.

I was, in fact, working as a reporter on the afternoon newspaper in Dallas (
The Dallas Times Herald
, now no more) on November 22, 1963. My assignment was Love Field, and I did have a bubble top experience with a Secret Service agent similar to the one I described. That was the rough seed for this novel, but the details, as well as Martin Van Walters, his family, and their story, were completely made up. So were almost all of the Secret Service agents and other characters. The only real people were mostly Warren Commission officials and those involved in the investigation.

Also, for the record, I did serve for three years as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps during that time of peace between the Korean and Vietnam wars. But unlike my fictional character Jack Gilmore, I did not return to active duty and go to Vietnam, win medals, or become a general.